6 ms·

> But the amount of concrete and steel for sun and wind is striking. This has to do with the low energy density of these two. No, it's not striking at all, and

> But the amount of concrete and steel for sun and wind is striking. This has to do with the low energy density of these two. No, it's not striking at all, and this is just as BS argument as the people arguing that nuclear isn't clean. As far as the energy density, include all the steel and concrete used outside of the reaction chamber, and you will find that nuclear and solar are pretty much on the same order of magnitude, and that's using the numbers from newer reactor designs that have consciously tried to reduce the amount of concrete by a factor of two. But of course, all this is misdirection from the real challenges of nuclear, which is finding somebody who can build it and somebody who is willing to take the financial risk of nuclear, when it looks like a terribles mis allocation of capital, if one's goal is to decarbonize energy.

ggm 4y ago
To me, it's about the shape of the logistic curve from planning, through construction to supply, and it's lifetime. We should start nuclear construction now, but for supply in 8+ years time. And therefore we should start increasing construction of wind, solar, pumped hydro and battery now, to supply lower watts, but useful watts inside the 8 year window. As supply matches demand we can remove coal and gas, and when the nuclear comes on line, increase the pace of their removal and repurpose surplus wind and solar to hydrogen production for ammonia, and hydrogen fuel cells, and domestic gas replacement.
- kuhewa 4y ago
  We should do some of all of that, I agree in large part (along with some diversified storage), the issue as the parent comment pointed out is who is going to stake billions on what looks like it will be a risky and poor ROI with significant construction delays and cost overruns. Would be easier for China
losteric 4y ago
> all this is misdirection from the real challenges of nuclear, which is finding somebody who can build it and somebody who is willing to take the financial risk of nuclear, when it looks like a terribles mis allocation of capital, if one's goal is to decarbonize energy. I have read that there is much more nuance in nuclear pricing. Past projects were bespoke and subject to changing bureaucratic requirements. There are numerous startups working to bring down cost. https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118 https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants#Recent_trends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...
- epistasis 4y ago
  Yes, SMRs are the hope, but it's just a hope. It's the right idea to switch away from construction to manufacturing, but it's unclear how quickly the manufacturing process could scale.
  - adastra22 4y ago
    With the approval of a SMR design, isn’t this no longer just hope?
    - epistasis 4y ago
      For someone like me, who believes the problem is not regulatory approval but the difficulty and cost of the build, I'm no more hopeful than pre-approval. But I have never questioned whether a good design could be conceived and approved. But if someone thinks that construction/manufacturing is easy and the difficult part is regulatory approval, then perhaps this is cause for hope! The renewable industry has been scaling at levels that are fairly hard to imagine, and yet people continually doubt its ability to scale fast enough to meet the challenge of the energy transition. SMRs are unfortunately decades behind and haven't even gotten a single device manufactured. So I think there are serious questions about how quickly SMRs could scale up to a GW/year, or 10GW/year, or the TW/year that we really need.
      - adastra22 4y ago
        This is a design that is meant to be mass produced in an assembly line factory, then shipped to its destination and plugged into the grid. It definitely had the potential for economies of scale in manufacturing.
        epistasis 4y ago
        Maybe? It all depends on execution and costs. And that's where most nuclear firms and proponents have been wearing rose-colored glasses for decades. The preliminary estimates of numbers for cost were not terribly impressive, so I hope that they became wise and are under-promising. But only time will tell.
TheDudeMan 4y ago
> willing to take the financial risk of nuclear There are multiple nuclear (fission) startups in the last decade or so. My understanding is that financial backing is not their problem; outdated regulations are. And fear stokes outdated regulations.
- epistasis 4y ago
  It's one thing to spend a fraction of $1B backing a startup that says it has a new small modular design that will finally turn around the economics, and have a big upside. It's a far far more difficult thing to risk $10B on a reactor that may or may not actually ever complete construction, and has no potential for growth in value. People never seem to cite which regulations they want to change. The NRC allowed the AP1000 at Vogtle and Summer to be constructed under a new regulatory regime at the request of industry, but the industry still seemed to mess up their construction process. And France at Flamanville has also had terrible construction problems despite having different and friendly regulatory processes. My main problem with the nuclear industry is that it continually fails to focus on what would actually deliver nuclear, and just complains about everybody else instead of improving process or becoming accountable for results.
  - MisterMower 4y ago
    To be fair, they have a lot to complain about. You know how they discovered radon gas was a problem in basements? A guy working at a nuclear power plant showed up at work one day and tripped their radiation detectors. There was more radiation in a random guy’s basement than at the entire nuclear plant. Meanwhile, the Chinese are soaking up US subsidy money for producing solar panels using slave labor. They strip mine for toxic rare earth metals to do it, destroying the environment and using coal power to boot. I think their complaints are justified.
credit_guy 4y ago
Here's the real reason nuclear power did not succeed in the US (I can't speak of other countries). It was opposed by the Democrats, and the Republicans, although some in favor of it, decided they don't want to spend whatever political capital they had on this. Now both Democrats and Republicans are pro nuclear power. You may not like it, but nuclear power is having a comeback.
- epistasis 4y ago
  The last time to start nuclear to address climate change was the mid-2000s. And we did start four reactors, with many more planned! However they are all construction failures, and the two at Summer were actually even abandoned half completed, it was so bad. And executives our going to jail for their lies during the construction process. That's what I mean when I say nobody knows how to build it. We will likely never attempt another new 1GW reactor in our lifetimes, because even is some brave EPC firm thinks they could tackle the challenges, getting the money for that is nearly impossible. Oh, did I mention that the only reason the four reactors were attempted at all in the mid-2000s is that the two utilities captured state legislatures and changed the law so that they could charge rate payers whether or not construction completed? Utilities memory of stopping nuclear in the 80s isn't because of protestors, it because of bankruptcy. In any case, the only hope for nuclear is SMRs from new startups. But we can't depend on them because we don't know the costs. Fortunately nuclear is no longer our only hope, and we have other options that we didn't have 20 years ago. Politics has nearly nothing to do with stopping nuclear. It all came down to construction mucking it up.
  - credit_guy 4y ago
    > and we have other options that we didn't have 20 years ago. We do, but those options are not enough. If they were, the Democrats in Washington would not have turned pro-nuclear. They saw the numbers. You can store electricity from day to night, but not from Summer to Winter. Months-long electricity storage will never make economic sense (or at least not in the next 30 years). Nuclear reactor construction is currently a decades-long affair. Can we make it shorter? Here's a little historical tidbit: in WW2, when the Liberty ships started being built, it took the first such ships about 250 days to be built. They took down that number to 150, then to 105, then to 71, then to 30 and then to 10. They even built one in less than 5 days, and that one did survive the war, and kept working until 1963. The secret was to build large components separately, each on its own assembly line, and then to just snap them together as a giant Lego toy. The fact that current nuclear reactors take 20 years to build is not a mathematical proof that any design will take as long. It is entirely possible for SMRs to be build in a matter of months, maybe, just like the Liberty ships, in a matter of days. If the politicians in Washington want to make that happen, then the engineers can make it happen.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

ggm 4y ago

To me, it's about the shape of the logistic curve from planning, through construction to supply, and it's lifetime. We should start nuclear construction now, but for supply in 8+ years time. And therefore we should start increasing construction of wind, solar, pumped hydro and battery now, to supply lower watts, but useful watts inside the 8 year window. As supply matches demand we can remove coal and gas, and when the nuclear comes on line, increase the pace of their removal and repurpose surplus wind and solar to hydrogen production for ammonia, and hydrogen fuel cells, and domestic gas replacement.

kuhewa 4y ago
We should do some of all of that, I agree in large part (along with some diversified storage), the issue as the parent comment pointed out is who is going to stake billions on what looks like it will be a risky and poor ROI with significant construction delays and cost overruns. Would be easier for China

losteric 4y ago

> all this is misdirection from the real challenges of nuclear, which is finding somebody who can build it and somebody who is willing to take the financial risk of nuclear, when it looks like a terribles mis allocation of capital, if one's goal is to decarbonize energy. I have read that there is much more nuance in nuclear pricing. Past projects were bespoke and subject to changing bureaucratic requirements. There are numerous startups working to bring down cost. https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118 https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants#Recent_trends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...

epistasis 4y ago
Yes, SMRs are the hope, but it's just a hope. It's the right idea to switch away from construction to manufacturing, but it's unclear how quickly the manufacturing process could scale.
- adastra22 4y ago
  With the approval of a SMR design, isn’t this no longer just hope?
  - epistasis 4y ago
    For someone like me, who believes the problem is not regulatory approval but the difficulty and cost of the build, I'm no more hopeful than pre-approval. But I have never questioned whether a good design could be conceived and approved. But if someone thinks that construction/manufacturing is easy and the difficult part is regulatory approval, then perhaps this is cause for hope! The renewable industry has been scaling at levels that are fairly hard to imagine, and yet people continually doubt its ability to scale fast enough to meet the challenge of the energy transition. SMRs are unfortunately decades behind and haven't even gotten a single device manufactured. So I think there are serious questions about how quickly SMRs could scale up to a GW/year, or 10GW/year, or the TW/year that we really need.
    - adastra22 4y ago
      This is a design that is meant to be mass produced in an assembly line factory, then shipped to its destination and plugged into the grid. It definitely had the potential for economies of scale in manufacturing.
      - epistasis 4y ago
        Maybe? It all depends on execution and costs. And that's where most nuclear firms and proponents have been wearing rose-colored glasses for decades. The preliminary estimates of numbers for cost were not terribly impressive, so I hope that they became wise and are under-promising. But only time will tell.

TheDudeMan 4y ago

> willing to take the financial risk of nuclear There are multiple nuclear (fission) startups in the last decade or so. My understanding is that financial backing is not their problem; outdated regulations are. And fear stokes outdated regulations.

epistasis 4y ago
It's one thing to spend a fraction of $1B backing a startup that says it has a new small modular design that will finally turn around the economics, and have a big upside. It's a far far more difficult thing to risk $10B on a reactor that may or may not actually ever complete construction, and has no potential for growth in value. People never seem to cite which regulations they want to change. The NRC allowed the AP1000 at Vogtle and Summer to be constructed under a new regulatory regime at the request of industry, but the industry still seemed to mess up their construction process. And France at Flamanville has also had terrible construction problems despite having different and friendly regulatory processes. My main problem with the nuclear industry is that it continually fails to focus on what would actually deliver nuclear, and just complains about everybody else instead of improving process or becoming accountable for results.
- MisterMower 4y ago
  To be fair, they have a lot to complain about. You know how they discovered radon gas was a problem in basements? A guy working at a nuclear power plant showed up at work one day and tripped their radiation detectors. There was more radiation in a random guy’s basement than at the entire nuclear plant. Meanwhile, the Chinese are soaking up US subsidy money for producing solar panels using slave labor. They strip mine for toxic rare earth metals to do it, destroying the environment and using coal power to boot. I think their complaints are justified.

credit_guy 4y ago

Here's the real reason nuclear power did not succeed in the US (I can't speak of other countries). It was opposed by the Democrats, and the Republicans, although some in favor of it, decided they don't want to spend whatever political capital they had on this. Now both Democrats and Republicans are pro nuclear power. You may not like it, but nuclear power is having a comeback.

epistasis 4y ago
The last time to start nuclear to address climate change was the mid-2000s. And we did start four reactors, with many more planned! However they are all construction failures, and the two at Summer were actually even abandoned half completed, it was so bad. And executives our going to jail for their lies during the construction process. That's what I mean when I say nobody knows how to build it. We will likely never attempt another new 1GW reactor in our lifetimes, because even is some brave EPC firm thinks they could tackle the challenges, getting the money for that is nearly impossible. Oh, did I mention that the only reason the four reactors were attempted at all in the mid-2000s is that the two utilities captured state legislatures and changed the law so that they could charge rate payers whether or not construction completed? Utilities memory of stopping nuclear in the 80s isn't because of protestors, it because of bankruptcy. In any case, the only hope for nuclear is SMRs from new startups. But we can't depend on them because we don't know the costs. Fortunately nuclear is no longer our only hope, and we have other options that we didn't have 20 years ago. Politics has nearly nothing to do with stopping nuclear. It all came down to construction mucking it up.
- credit_guy 4y ago
  > and we have other options that we didn't have 20 years ago. We do, but those options are not enough. If they were, the Democrats in Washington would not have turned pro-nuclear. They saw the numbers. You can store electricity from day to night, but not from Summer to Winter. Months-long electricity storage will never make economic sense (or at least not in the next 30 years). Nuclear reactor construction is currently a decades-long affair. Can we make it shorter? Here's a little historical tidbit: in WW2, when the Liberty ships started being built, it took the first such ships about 250 days to be built. They took down that number to 150, then to 105, then to 71, then to 30 and then to 10. They even built one in less than 5 days, and that one did survive the war, and kept working until 1963. The secret was to build large components separately, each on its own assembly line, and then to just snap them together as a giant Lego toy. The fact that current nuclear reactors take 20 years to build is not a mathematical proof that any design will take as long. It is entirely possible for SMRs to be build in a matter of months, maybe, just like the Liberty ships, in a matter of days. If the politicians in Washington want to make that happen, then the engineers can make it happen.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]