3 ms·

> The mid-2020s will be a critical time for the nation’s fleet of reactors. > Many of them have 60-year operating licenses that will expire in the 2030s. Getti

> The mid-2020s will be a critical time for the nation’s fleet of reactors. > Many of them have 60-year operating licenses that will expire in the 2030s. Getting these new fuels to market before then would increase the performance of these reactors and ultimately improve their chances of applying for extended operation with the NRC. Going beyond 60 years is quite breath taking. There are so many components in these massively complex beasts that would need to be inspected and replaced, since this is far far beyond their design life times. For example, at Davis-Bessie there was an acidic leak dripping onto a reactor head for years, resulting in more than 6 inches of corrosion into the reactor head, leaving only 3/8 of an inch to hole back all that pressure. Despite warning signs of lots of rust in the air filters, they didn't find it until that late stage. This was 20 years ago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis–Besse_Nuclear_Power_Station https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis–Besse_Nuclear_Power_St... What sort of other unexpected issues can crop up? We need these nuclear reactors to run as long as possible. And those in the reactor construction industry tell me that there will never be replacements like them. If we do figure out how to build nuclear again, it's going to be small. And that won't scale until at a bare minimum of the late 2030s. So this seems like a good effort, but without some heroic efforts, there will be a period where we go from ~100GW of nuclear in the US to just a handful of GW.

Teknoman117 4y ago
I hope we get off our asses and replace them with either more nuclear sources or renewables (if practical). I am really disheartened by the trend of politicians and environmental orgs shutting down nuclear plants with the public justification being to replace them with renewables and then just building natural gas turbines instead (looking at you California).
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  Any migration into (non-hydro) renewables will bring more water or gas turbines at the short term. At the long term those will be gone, probably replaced by batteries (or just fed with synfuel). But right now they are the other side of the renewables coin.
  - StillBored 4y ago
    "At the long term those will be gone, probably replaced by batteries (or just fed with synfuel)" AFAIK, that is a huge leap of faith, nevermind the overbuild requirements to supply it. Do you have any actual data/estimates to back up that theory? Bonus points for including the energy required to supply transportation needs, and energy growth estimates over say the next couple decades. Because, I've read a crapton of literature on this stuff (and I have a family connection to the TX energy system) and I simply can't see how any of this is going to actually work if 1: The costs don't balloon over carbon sources, 2: The grid maintains a reasonable level of reliability, 3: we can maintain the rare earth mines/production/etc needed to get us even to 100% over the next couple decades without accounting for demand growth. AFAIK: The only workable solution for providing a couple TW's of power realistically in the next decade is Nukes, everything else depends on some "breakthrough" that hasn't happened yet. Edit: If you take hydro out of the picture, the current status of wind/solar is really poor, and its only going to get worse when you have to build 6-8x as many wind turbines or 3-4x as many solar farms just to provide enough average energy to meet todays demands, and with that will come cost multiplication as well. Its easy to build 30% renewable, but every overbuild multiplier is just going to multiply the cost. Then you have to figure out how to store it. edit: edit: Here look at this: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/us-energy-system-factsheet https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/us-ener... That is a projection of where the US will be in 30 years, and nothing really suggests to me that they are wrong. The only thing I think that will change that is a 1970's French like pivot which clears the red tape, and has an explicit goal of building the ~150 reactors in the US needs to remove most of that carbon. And then start handing it out like candy to other countries because we have standardized the design enough, and built enough of them to return it to 1960's levels of cost (aka cheaper than natural gas). My actual bet at this point is the Chinese do it, and replace the US as a worldwide leader in energy production.
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      Nice graph that of renewables production on your link. It's always interesting when you get one of those predictions of "yep, it's have grown exponentially since the beginning, but an inflection will start right now and we will only have the low-growth half of the logistic function at the future". I suggest your source has a bad model. Anyway, you are talking about costs of renewables production compared with gas. There's nothing to discuss on that anymore, renewables are cheaper when they can produce, their costs are falling, and fossil fuel costs are predicted to slowly raise forever. The only costs with any space to compare and discuss nowadays are about storage, not production.
- epistasis 4y ago
  I don't think your assessment is correct on any of the particulars. Building lots of renewables and storage is eminently practical. It's happening every day, getting cheaper every day, and is scaling unbelievably fast. Constructing new nuclear, however, is not practical or economical. And it's not because of politicians or environmentalists. It's because Westinghouse, utilities, and contractors can't do it. And it's exactly the same story in France, with undeniably friendly politics and regulation. There's an important deeper issue here about advanced economies. Construction productivity, when compared to the massive increase in manufacturing productivity, is pretty much constant. So we can either apply our finite and limited construction capacity to building more factories, and exponentially increasing our productivity, or we can apply it to constructing nuclear plants, and get only linear gains in energy out of our construction efforts. The one way around that is SMRs, maybe, but they far less proven tech than lithium ion batteries, which are far more proven and practical. Technologically, we have progressed beyond the big nuclear reactors from half a century ago. They are a monument to the age, like the intricate woodwork on Victorian houses, but never to be created again by advanced economies. The economies that are able to build nuclear are those that are about at the stage of the US in the 70s and 80s: China and Russia. Maaaaaybe South Korea. But the value of their labor force per hour may soon advance beyond the point where it makes sense for them to continue to build nuclear. The future of energy is manufactured: wind, solar, and battery storage.
PaulHoule 4y ago
Some countries are in the habit. The Russians are building VVERs (their name for the LWR) in many countries, they just signed a deal to build 4 in Egypt. For that matter the Russians have a fast breeder running too, they are not so scared of Sodium fires they just put them out. (Which is what The DoE in the US says they did when they ran SFRs.) China is also building LWRs at a high rate. Two AP1000s are in the final stages of commissioning now in Georgia, a similar project was abandoned in South Carolina. Those projects were delayed because they were waiting for the first AP1000 to be completed in Zhejiang, China which was waiting for a Chinese factory to make parts. There are no forges in the US large enough to make LWR parts but they do have them in China, Japan, Russia and France and these are planned in Czecha, India and the UK. Some reactor types like the HTGR are lower power density than the LWR but others, particularly fast reactors, are higher density and could be physically smaller for the same power output. Back when people thought fast reactors were inevitable they believed the capital cost of fast reactors would be inevitably higher than the LWR but now some people think a sodium cooled fast reactor could be cheaper if it was coupled to a gas turbine power set which is a fraction the size of a steam turbine never mind the size and cost of associated heat exchangers. Moltex particularly believes they can build a (salt cooled and salt fueled) reactor for much less than an LWR.
cosmotic 4y ago
Oh my, quite the rabbit hole of corruption surrounding that plant.

Teknoman117 4y ago

I hope we get off our asses and replace them with either more nuclear sources or renewables (if practical). I am really disheartened by the trend of politicians and environmental orgs shutting down nuclear plants with the public justification being to replace them with renewables and then just building natural gas turbines instead (looking at you California).

marcosdumay 4y ago
Any migration into (non-hydro) renewables will bring more water or gas turbines at the short term. At the long term those will be gone, probably replaced by batteries (or just fed with synfuel). But right now they are the other side of the renewables coin.
- StillBored 4y ago
  "At the long term those will be gone, probably replaced by batteries (or just fed with synfuel)" AFAIK, that is a huge leap of faith, nevermind the overbuild requirements to supply it. Do you have any actual data/estimates to back up that theory? Bonus points for including the energy required to supply transportation needs, and energy growth estimates over say the next couple decades. Because, I've read a crapton of literature on this stuff (and I have a family connection to the TX energy system) and I simply can't see how any of this is going to actually work if 1: The costs don't balloon over carbon sources, 2: The grid maintains a reasonable level of reliability, 3: we can maintain the rare earth mines/production/etc needed to get us even to 100% over the next couple decades without accounting for demand growth. AFAIK: The only workable solution for providing a couple TW's of power realistically in the next decade is Nukes, everything else depends on some "breakthrough" that hasn't happened yet. Edit: If you take hydro out of the picture, the current status of wind/solar is really poor, and its only going to get worse when you have to build 6-8x as many wind turbines or 3-4x as many solar farms just to provide enough average energy to meet todays demands, and with that will come cost multiplication as well. Its easy to build 30% renewable, but every overbuild multiplier is just going to multiply the cost. Then you have to figure out how to store it. edit: edit: Here look at this: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/us-energy-system-factsheet https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/us-ener... That is a projection of where the US will be in 30 years, and nothing really suggests to me that they are wrong. The only thing I think that will change that is a 1970's French like pivot which clears the red tape, and has an explicit goal of building the ~150 reactors in the US needs to remove most of that carbon. And then start handing it out like candy to other countries because we have standardized the design enough, and built enough of them to return it to 1960's levels of cost (aka cheaper than natural gas). My actual bet at this point is the Chinese do it, and replace the US as a worldwide leader in energy production.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    Nice graph that of renewables production on your link. It's always interesting when you get one of those predictions of "yep, it's have grown exponentially since the beginning, but an inflection will start right now and we will only have the low-growth half of the logistic function at the future". I suggest your source has a bad model. Anyway, you are talking about costs of renewables production compared with gas. There's nothing to discuss on that anymore, renewables are cheaper when they can produce, their costs are falling, and fossil fuel costs are predicted to slowly raise forever. The only costs with any space to compare and discuss nowadays are about storage, not production.
epistasis 4y ago
I don't think your assessment is correct on any of the particulars. Building lots of renewables and storage is eminently practical. It's happening every day, getting cheaper every day, and is scaling unbelievably fast. Constructing new nuclear, however, is not practical or economical. And it's not because of politicians or environmentalists. It's because Westinghouse, utilities, and contractors can't do it. And it's exactly the same story in France, with undeniably friendly politics and regulation. There's an important deeper issue here about advanced economies. Construction productivity, when compared to the massive increase in manufacturing productivity, is pretty much constant. So we can either apply our finite and limited construction capacity to building more factories, and exponentially increasing our productivity, or we can apply it to constructing nuclear plants, and get only linear gains in energy out of our construction efforts. The one way around that is SMRs, maybe, but they far less proven tech than lithium ion batteries, which are far more proven and practical. Technologically, we have progressed beyond the big nuclear reactors from half a century ago. They are a monument to the age, like the intricate woodwork on Victorian houses, but never to be created again by advanced economies. The economies that are able to build nuclear are those that are about at the stage of the US in the 70s and 80s: China and Russia. Maaaaaybe South Korea. But the value of their labor force per hour may soon advance beyond the point where it makes sense for them to continue to build nuclear. The future of energy is manufactured: wind, solar, and battery storage.

PaulHoule 4y ago

Some countries are in the habit. The Russians are building VVERs (their name for the LWR) in many countries, they just signed a deal to build 4 in Egypt. For that matter the Russians have a fast breeder running too, they are not so scared of Sodium fires they just put them out. (Which is what The DoE in the US says they did when they ran SFRs.) China is also building LWRs at a high rate. Two AP1000s are in the final stages of commissioning now in Georgia, a similar project was abandoned in South Carolina. Those projects were delayed because they were waiting for the first AP1000 to be completed in Zhejiang, China which was waiting for a Chinese factory to make parts. There are no forges in the US large enough to make LWR parts but they do have them in China, Japan, Russia and France and these are planned in Czecha, India and the UK. Some reactor types like the HTGR are lower power density than the LWR but others, particularly fast reactors, are higher density and could be physically smaller for the same power output. Back when people thought fast reactors were inevitable they believed the capital cost of fast reactors would be inevitably higher than the LWR but now some people think a sodium cooled fast reactor could be cheaper if it was coupled to a gas turbine power set which is a fraction the size of a steam turbine never mind the size and cost of associated heat exchangers. Moltex particularly believes they can build a (salt cooled and salt fueled) reactor for much less than an LWR.

cosmotic 4y ago

Oh my, quite the rabbit hole of corruption surrounding that plant.