20 ms·

The First Small Modular Nuclear Reactor Was Just Approved by US Regulators

228 points by cheinyeanlim 4y ago

ksec 4y ago
>This is then used to drive a turbine that generates electricity. We could have Nuclear Fusion but we will still using turbine to generate electricity. :P >these smaller reactors are actually likely to produce more radioactive waste than conventional plants. >nuclear power expert M.V. Ramana also points out that the cost of renewable energy like wind and solar is already lower than that of nuclear, and continuing to fall rapidly. Why are we repeating these same questions when we already have an answer? Edit: Solar and Wind aren't constant, and nuclear waste is a solved problem. >SMRs could cost more than bigger nuclear plants, he adds, because they don’t have the same economy of scale. I thought the whole point of SMRs were economy of scale? >Tellingly, some utilities have already backed out of NuScale’s first project over cost concerns. Anyone could chime in here? Was it because NuScale is too expensive? I was expecting SMRs, once approved could be built much more quickly. I was thinking in terms of 3 years with perfect project planning. But right now even the earliest ( and likely optimistic ) first SMRs site is 2030. Why does it take so long?
- treeman79 4y ago
  Fusion is probably 50-100 years away at best. It’s just to difficult
  - anovikov 4y ago
    It's also not necessary and is probably already outdated and won't be funded if was achieved today. See fusion this way: it's like a coal power plant with infinite free coal (because the rest of it is the same - turbines, water treatment, condensers, generators, power transformation and transmission - and thermonuclear reactor will for sure never be cheaper than a coal-fired steam boiler). Which means, electricity cost will be same as of a coal plant minus the price of coal. Which will already be above cost of most renewable sources and, once electrolyzers for green hydrogen will start coming online, remembering that barely 15% of renewable electricity will need to be passed through them (rest can simply be balanced by different renewables), will still be sort of competitive. And we don't have fusion yet, while renewables will keep getting cheaper.
    - eightysixfour 4y ago
      There are non-turbine fusion options, like Helion.
      - pfdietz 4y ago
        And such options are, IMO, likely to be necessary if fusion is to be competitive.
    - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
      Coal plants are comprehensively more expensive than solar/wind, as are current design nuclear plants, perhaps that's because of coal prices. The other aspects of fusion get swept under the rug: high speed neutrons from sustained fusion energy production will degrade the equipment, so you build this HUGE EXPENSIVE facility and it will have a shelf life, and be somewhat radioactive, in ... well, I don't know the timeline, but I'll assume decades. Even without that, fusion costs even with "free" fuel (I mean, it will probably be deuterium and separation will cost some money) will probably be quite high for operation, maintenance, to say nothing of the massive installation cost. I think it is still worth the current investment in research though, it's not like I want the book closed on fusion power. But I wouldn't count on it getting us out of the global warming hole we are in.
      - bryanlarsen 4y ago
        Coal is more expensive than solar even if the price of coal at the mine is 0.
        anovikov 4y ago
        That was exactly my point. And fusion can't probably be cheaper than "coal plant on free coal" for the reasons i have explained. So nah, it's not going to happen. Too late.
        bryanlarsen 4y ago
- BobbyJo 4y ago
  There is a strong possibility that even fusion reactors will use turbines. They are a very efficient way of converting heat into electricity.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    I argue the opposite, a steam turbine maxes out at about 37% efficiency. The inefficiency and massive capital costs of of steam turbines is a major reason why natural gas is so much cheaper than coal or fission -- natgas uses a combined cycle turbine rather than a steam turbine.
    - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
      I believe modern heat --> electric conversion systems use the turbine and several other additional heat --> electricity recapture systems to approach 50-60% efficiency at large scales so they can beat the Carnot Limit of just the turbine engine. https://www.powermag.com/efficiency-improvements-mark-advances-in-gas-turbines/ https://www.powermag.com/efficiency-improvements-mark-advanc... That claims 64% for a gas turbine. LFTR presentations said they could use the brayton cycle I think due to high temps, I'd imagine a fusion would also have the temps to enable brayton cycle and several other tricks to achieve good efficiency. Remember, what matters at scale is cost cost cost. Turbines might not be sexy, but if they are cheap, then that is what you use.
      - aordano 4y ago
        For anyone curious, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankine_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankine_cycle
      - bryanlarsen 4y ago
        > Remember, what matters at scale is cost cost cost. Turbines might not be sexy, but if they are cheap, then that is what you use. Exactly. Turbines (along with the accompanying water treatment, condensers, generators, power transformation) aren't cheap. A 600MW coal plant costs $2B.
    - 4y ago
- danuker 4y ago
  > Why are we repeating these same questions when we already have an answer? What are the questions? Are renewables the answer? Only hydro can store energy cheaply. And solar and wind are not available constantly.
  - ksec 4y ago
    >What are the questions? Are renewables the answer? That was the question partly laid out in the article. Suggesting we dont need Nuclear because we already have solar and wind.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    > Only hydro can store energy cheaply. Please stop this nonsense. There is no law of physics or even any strong practical reason to think your assertion is correct.
- dsr_ 4y ago
  Nobody has managed to build even an experimental fusion reactor that produces more power than is necessary to start each reaction cycle... unless you count bombs. Assuming we did, to get away from mechanical turbines and generators as the heat->motion->electricity step would require a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_generator -- which have had more success but still face serious material issues. As for "why does it take so long?" -- the first of anything takes longer. And the US has terrible problems in building anything new or big.
  - he0001 4y ago
    >And the US has terrible problems in building anything new or big. What are the reasons for this do you think?
    - replygirl 4y ago
      brain drain to web development, mostly.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      Baumol's cost disease. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
    - dsr_ 4y ago
      We have more knowledge of the terrible ways things go wrong. A bridge has failure consequences that are predictable: bridge breaks, people on the bridge die, local economy suffers. All of those are understandable by an elementary school student playing with toys and imagining the town around it. The failure consequences of fission plants were not known to include things that had to be discovered years after Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Not to mention -- who knew that exhausting hot non-radioactive water into a river could be bad for it? The failure consequences of Thalidomide were not known for years. The failure consequences of dioxin usage were not known for years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_organic_pollutant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_organic_pollutant Let's also include the US propensity to fall victim to charlatanry: enough of us want to believe so much, we will give lots of money to Juicero, uBeam, and Nigerian Princes. (Hyperloop, cough.) So if you want to do something big, it needs to be well-understood. If you want to do something new, it needs to be proven and well-examined.
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  Turbines are a great, mature technology. The SMR alone is new enough. Imagine writing a piece of software that needs to parse XML. It is probably better just to use an existing library for that, instead of reinventing the wheel.
- _n_b_ 4y ago
  >> Tellingly, some utilities have already backed out of NuScale’s first project over cost concerns. > Anyone could chime in here? Was it because NuScale is too expensive? The NuScale VOYAGR, in particular, is a really big SMR in terms of [plant size]/[megawatt]. The economies of SMR come when you can reduce that footprint by making smaller safety systems or eliminating active safety features (because the plant is small enough not to need them) AND factory-build them with on-site assembly. Other SMR designs seem to have more promising ideas for doing both, but NuScale's is just too big. (There are also micro-reactors that optimize for replacing diesel engines and gas turbines with a very small footprint at the tradeoff of cost.) >I was expecting SMRs, once approved could be built much more quickly. I was thinking in terms of 3 years with perfect project planning. But right now even the earliest ( and likely optimistic ) first SMRs site is 2030. Why does it take so long? There's a lot going between "approved today" and "SMR online": particularly that factory infrastructure needs to come on line and site licensing need to happen, and then the plant needs to get commissioned after it is built (which takes longer for the first). It's very conceivable to me that the Nth SMR could be a ~3ish year project, but longer for the FOAK unit is almost inevitable.
  - ksec 4y ago
    Thank You. I should have read the article more carefully. It does state the reactor "consists of a 76-foot-tall, 15-foot-wide cylindrical containment vessel that houses the reactor". Looks like NuScale's SMR doesn't fit my mental model of SMRs. I was thinking SMRs size that could easily fit within a 40ft container. >particularly that factory infrastructure needs to come on line and site licensing need to happen, and then the plant needs to get commissioned after it is built (which takes longer for the first). Oh Ok. So it is only the "design" that has been approved. ( Again I should have read it carefully ). No wonder why it is taking so long. Thank you for the reply.
    - _n_b_ 4y ago
      > I was thinking SMRs size that could easily fit within a 40ft container. Those would be 'micro-reactors' and as noted tend to be optimised for off-grid applications.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  > >This is then used to drive a turbine that generates electricity. > We could have Nuclear Fusion but we are still using turbine to generate electricity. :P This is actually one of the main points of why the whole talk about "economies of scale" for nuclear just doesn't make much sense. More than 50% of a nuclear plant is essentially the same as any other thermoelectric plant. Despite the many power plants being build we haven't seen a this elusive cost reduction. Construction projects (in contrast to things build in factories) don't lend themselves to economies of scale (in terms of building many). There was an HN submission that analysed the cost of a nuclear plant and showed that there is really not much room for any economies of scale reductions. > >these smaller reactors are actually likely to produce more radioactive waste than conventional plants. > >nuclear power expert M.V. Ramana also points out that the cost of renewable energy like wind and solar is already lower than that of nuclear, and continuing to fall rapidly. > Why are we repeating these same questions when we already have an answer? > >SMRs could cost more than bigger nuclear plants, he adds, because they don’t have the same economy of scale. Yes that's always the weird part of the discussion. There are reasons why nuclear plants are build large, it's cheaper. > I thought the whole point of SMRs were economy of scale? > >Tellingly, some utilities have already backed out of NuScale’s first project over cost concerns. > Anyone could chime in here? Was it because NuScale is too expensive? > I was expecting SMRs, once approved could be built much more quickly. I was thinking in terms of 3 years with perfect project planning. But right now even the earliest ( and likely optimistic ) first SMRs site is 2030. Why does it take so long?
- ciconia 4y ago
  > Why are we repeating these same questions when we already have an answer? The answer is not solar and wind. For solar and wind to replace fossil fuels for electricity generation will require ramping up mining activity by a factor of a few tens from current levels. Not to mention the fact that we still don't know how to produce solar panels and wind turbines without using fossil fuels - for mining, metallurgy and transport. The numbers are just not there. The only possible answer is a significant reduction of energy consumption, but it seems very few people are ready to accept it.
  - allemagne 4y ago
    "Significant reduction of energy consumption" is only a possible answer if you're able and prepared to suppress the lifestyles of billions of people through any means necessary.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  Anutronic fusion could generate electricity without a turbine.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
Again this story. Ok, sure maybe it's smaller than a PWR behemoth. It's still solid fuel rod crap. If you have solid fuel rods, you have meltdown danger, you can't use up all the fissile material, there's no breeding, extraction of fission products. It's under a lot of pressure, so besides meltdown you have other dangers. Solid fuel rods can only use the very tiny percentage of uranium that is naturally fissile. This is simply not a good design for a nuclear reactor. The LFTR design has meltdown proof operation, no pressurized water, near 100% use of fuel, can burn/breed old solid fuel waste, can breed more fuel from plentiful thorium, and can scale down to closet-sized reactors. Pebble bed also shares some of these aspects, and I assume there are other new generation designs with advantages. But this is just more of the same bad design reactors. Oh great, it got spitshined and scaled down and passed approvals. What nuclear needs to be relevant is to tackle meltdown danger and nuclear waste. LFTR addresses both and any future reactor needs to address both. Perhaps LFTR could be a "waste processor" if LFTR isn't economical enough, while other meltdown proof designs do more economical generation in a sort of large scale web.
- atwood22 4y ago
  Are LFTRs actually viable though?
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    That's why I don't want to say "WE NEED TO USE LFTR". But the LFTR features are what we need in next gen nuclear: meltdown proof, full fuel use / vast waste reduction, scalable. Oak Ridge National Lab had a molten salt reactor that was closet-sized that they were working on. So it existed. Were all materials issues solved for a high temperature molten salt with all those neutrons flying around from breeding? No. China is (somewhat thankfully, why does fucking CHINA have to represent the major economic funding for solar, wind, batteries, and nuclear solutions to global warming?) bringing an MSR/LFTR online at utility scale in a couple years. But the point is I don't see nuclear being a viable solution unless it alleviates the Fukushima risk (unexpected meltdown) and the nuclear waste NIMBY issues. Scalability is necessary for economic viability.
jvanderbot 4y ago
Everyone is piling on about better designs or mythical future tech. This is a win for clean energy. End of story. Smaller reactors have maintenance and footprint wins that are hard to appreciate. I think this is one of a few key turning points that are coming up that will help us transition to a better carbon future. But if not, at least now we have more options which means more competition and more innovation.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  The competition is for cost. I don't mind more competition, I think it's great that there are alternatives. However, I don't see nuclear as particularly competitive on that front as it is currently, by far, the most expensive option. The only thing that comes close is natural gas. Which has seen pretty high price hikes of course. Low carbon energy generation is basically happening with or without nuclear. At this point, we're past the point where people need to study the cost of wind or solar. They have proven much cheaper than anything else and they are being mass deployed all over the world as a result of that. Nuclear, not so much. A few deployments here and there. Usually at prices that are way over budget and years late as well. Maybe smaller nuclear plants will change that. They have a lot to prove. I wouldn't bet the future on that. It's a wild card at best. Meanwhile, the future is now. Lots of countries are going carbon neutral in the next decade or so and mostly without the help of nuclear power. No need to wait for small reactors to work or not. If they do somehow work at a price point that isn't prohibitively expensive, great! But not a problem if this is just the next chapter in nuclear power's long history of being too costly and complicated to be practical.
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    Predicting future cost is really, really hard. Future cannot really be extrapolated from the current state of things. Until 2022, a lot of Europeans counted on cheap Russian gas. If any kind of cold war breaks out with China, will solar panels be as available as they are today? Ceteris paribus, I would always keep at least some energy generating capability "at home", without the need to rely on potentially hostile powers or unstable regions. Even if it looked uneconomical at the very moment.
macintux 4y ago
Heavy discussion a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32282632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32282632 (742 comments)
- joak 4y ago
  And another one here 5 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32298994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32298994 It seems to me that the nuclear lobby is particularly active these days. My impression is that the window for nuclear is rapidly closing. The alternative (wind, solar and batteries) is becoming cheaper and cheaper (even Texas is adopting it). Soon nuclear will be completely irrelevant.
  - swarnie 4y ago
    My issue is still with storage. It doesn't matter how "green" your energy production is if storing it requires you to turn an entire continent upside down for the battery minerals.
    - photochemsyn 4y ago
      That's even more of a problem with the uranium ore required to feed into fuel rod production, however. Battery materials like lithium-iron are also quite recyclable. The United States today has close to 100 GW of nuclear power plants installed (almost all built decades ago). Most uranium ore bodies seem to hover around 1.0 - 0.1 % uranium by mass. Each GW appears to require about 200 tons of pure uranium (enriched somewhat from the natural 0.7% U235). Assuming we take an average, that's on the order of (200 tons of ore/ton of fuel) * (20,000 tons of fuel rods per year) = ~4 million tons of ore per year (non recyclable). Batteries seem like the better option.
    - oezi 4y ago
      You don't need to focus only on batteries. You could also generate heat and store that for later use or hydrogen or other synfuels. Once you give consumers price incentives to follow current production, many things are possible (for instance running washing machines when power is cheapest etc.)
grej 4y ago
There is an in depth presentation about the reactor on youtube: https://youtu.be/JhrxFCtCPUo https://youtu.be/JhrxFCtCPUo
Julesman 4y ago
- TheDudeMan 4y ago
  https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Drblessing 4y ago
  > Objectively false Any evidence, bro?
  - deusum 4y ago
    Like Chernobyl?
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      Are you 8 years old?
- timbit42 4y ago
  Don't make perfect the enemy of good. A bit of radioactive waste is the least of our worries relative to global warming from CO2 and not all nuclear produces waste that lasts thousands of years. Some newer nuclear plants cannot melt down and have no risk of killing people by radiation. Right now we don't have sufficient means to produce excess or store solar power for nighttimes or wind for windless times. Nuclear can make up the difference when solar and/or wind are insufficient. It's the best interim solution we have. Without nuclear, temperatures will become much higher than if we build more nuclear.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  Compared to coal and fossil fuel damage to the planet? it's trivial
jmyeet 4y ago
I highly encourage you to look at this factsheet I only just found today [1]. Some highlights: > - Levelized cost of energy (LCOE) includes the lifetime costs of building, operating, maintaining, and fueling a power plant. Estimated LCOE for plants built in the near future are: combined cycle natural gas: 3.71 ¢/kWh; advanced nuclear: 6.31 ¢/kWh; and biomass: 8.92 ¢/kWh and > - Spent fuel is placed in a storage pool of circulating cooled water to absorb heat and block the high radioactivity of fission products > - Many U.S. spent fuel pools are reaching capacity, necessitating the use of dry cask storage. This point is often overlooked. Nuclear waste generates heat. It needs to be actively cooled, possibly for a decade or longer, until it can be stored in dry storage. There's transportation risk there (for tens of thousands of tons per year at current rates) and facilities that need to be maintained to do that. Plus adding water increases the risk of site contamination. Also consider: > - ... Managing nuclear waste requires very long-term planning. U.S. EPA was required to set radiation exposure limits in permanent waste storage facilities over an unprecedented timeframe—one million years > - The U.S. has no permanent storage site. TIL: > - The U.S. Price-Anderson Act limits the liability of nuclear plant owners if a radioactive release occurs to $450 million for individual plants and $13.5 billion across all plants. WHY? This is the big problem with nuclear: failure modes have incredibly high cost but relatively low likelihood. Companies have limited liability so they get to pocket the profits for under-maintaining plants and move the costs to the government. In addition to being a bad idea this presents a falsely cheap picture of the true costs of nuclear power. In this same vein: > - The Nuclear Waste Policy Act required the U.S. federal government to begin taking control of spent nuclear fuel in 1998. Another cost shifted to the government. EDIT: over the years I've learned that the more rabid one side of an argument is, the more likely they are to simply downvote anything they disagree with, regardless of the merit. This, sadly, is my experience with nuclear on HN (which isn't plagued with downvote-as-disagreement like, say, Reddit is). It's not a reason to be anti-nuclear but it sure makes it hard to be swayed by pro-nuclear arguments. [1]: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/nuclear-energy-factsheet https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/nuclear...
- gautamcgoel 4y ago
  I don't necessarily agree with this comment, but I do agree that it's sad this is getting downvotes. The comment is thoughtful and I learned something from it. I support building more reactors but I don't support reflexively shouting down commenters which take the opposite stance.
VBprogrammer 4y ago
Can someone correct me if I'm wrong but I remember one of the reasons the RMBK reactor is so large was because there are efficiency gains with a large reactor (among other reasons you lose fast neutrons at a higher rate in a smaller volume right?). How do these small modular reactors get around this?
- thehappypm 4y ago
  With nuclear, efficiency really doesn’t matter that much. It’s not the cost of the fuel that matters almost at all, it’s the cost of the reactor itself. The cost of the fuel and the efficiency of using that fuel is really a secondary cost compared to building the reactor in the first place, and operating the reactor with people
  - coding123 4y ago
    The insurance required is a big one: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/nuclear-insurance.html https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n...
    - Krasnol 4y ago
      > Claims resulting from nuclear accidents are covered under Price-Anderson; for that reason, all U.S. property and liability insurance policies exclude nuclear accidents. Claims can include any incident (including those caused by theft or sabotage) in transporting nuclear fuel to a reactor site, storing nuclear fuel or waste at a site; during operation of a reactor, including the discharge of radioactive effluent; and transporting irradiated nuclear fuel and nuclear waste from the reactor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear... > The Act establishes a no fault insurance-type system in which the first approximately $15 billion (as of 2021) is industry-funded as described in the Act. Any claims above the $12.6 billion would be covered by a Congressional mandate to retroactively increase nuclear utility liability or would be covered by the federal government. Interesting.
- 4y ago
Ericson2314 4y ago
Will they be allowed to export these? I am really hopefully developing countries can get them. Much less infra needed than renewables with storage.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
downvotetruth 4y ago
Only now that nuclear reactors do not make economic sense inside Saturn's orbit.
jbverschoor 4y ago
I guess we have to thank yet another was for getting progress and things approved
Julesman 4y ago
Let me try again, since I was snotty and got flagged. This is not a kosher industry. It reaches its influence into the academic realm and has an epic PR budget. It can take advantage of the obscurity of the tech to promote talking points that seem quite reasonable, but generally mask a desire by energy suppliers to maintain the current means of distribution. And a good part of that PR budget certain goes into negative marketing against wind and solar, specifically because they are disruptive to the distribution model. Profit. There's no conspiracy theory in profit. We know that's what industries want. And historically, industries are not invested in public safety to the extent that it cuts into profits. So then, why does anyone TRUST the nuclear industry. And even if we do, why would we EVER trust governments to regulate that technology, given that history of absolutely clear about the likelihood of self-regulation? All I see is billions spent to keep power generation out of our homes. Wind and solar are ready to deploy and yet people seem to suggest that tech in development, which might not be ready of commercial application for a decade, are the solution to our problems? I don't see it.

228 points by cheinyeanlim 4y ago

ksec 4y ago

>This is then used to drive a turbine that generates electricity. We could have Nuclear Fusion but we will still using turbine to generate electricity. :P >these smaller reactors are actually likely to produce more radioactive waste than conventional plants. >nuclear power expert M.V. Ramana also points out that the cost of renewable energy like wind and solar is already lower than that of nuclear, and continuing to fall rapidly. Why are we repeating these same questions when we already have an answer? Edit: Solar and Wind aren't constant, and nuclear waste is a solved problem. >SMRs could cost more than bigger nuclear plants, he adds, because they don’t have the same economy of scale. I thought the whole point of SMRs were economy of scale? >Tellingly, some utilities have already backed out of NuScale’s first project over cost concerns. Anyone could chime in here? Was it because NuScale is too expensive? I was expecting SMRs, once approved could be built much more quickly. I was thinking in terms of 3 years with perfect project planning. But right now even the earliest ( and likely optimistic ) first SMRs site is 2030. Why does it take so long?

treeman79 4y ago
Fusion is probably 50-100 years away at best. It’s just to difficult
- anovikov 4y ago
  It's also not necessary and is probably already outdated and won't be funded if was achieved today. See fusion this way: it's like a coal power plant with infinite free coal (because the rest of it is the same - turbines, water treatment, condensers, generators, power transformation and transmission - and thermonuclear reactor will for sure never be cheaper than a coal-fired steam boiler). Which means, electricity cost will be same as of a coal plant minus the price of coal. Which will already be above cost of most renewable sources and, once electrolyzers for green hydrogen will start coming online, remembering that barely 15% of renewable electricity will need to be passed through them (rest can simply be balanced by different renewables), will still be sort of competitive. And we don't have fusion yet, while renewables will keep getting cheaper.
  - eightysixfour 4y ago
    There are non-turbine fusion options, like Helion.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      And such options are, IMO, likely to be necessary if fusion is to be competitive.
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    Coal plants are comprehensively more expensive than solar/wind, as are current design nuclear plants, perhaps that's because of coal prices. The other aspects of fusion get swept under the rug: high speed neutrons from sustained fusion energy production will degrade the equipment, so you build this HUGE EXPENSIVE facility and it will have a shelf life, and be somewhat radioactive, in ... well, I don't know the timeline, but I'll assume decades. Even without that, fusion costs even with "free" fuel (I mean, it will probably be deuterium and separation will cost some money) will probably be quite high for operation, maintenance, to say nothing of the massive installation cost. I think it is still worth the current investment in research though, it's not like I want the book closed on fusion power. But I wouldn't count on it getting us out of the global warming hole we are in.
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      Coal is more expensive than solar even if the price of coal at the mine is 0.
      - anovikov 4y ago
        That was exactly my point. And fusion can't probably be cheaper than "coal plant on free coal" for the reasons i have explained. So nah, it's not going to happen. Too late.
        bryanlarsen 4y ago
BobbyJo 4y ago
There is a strong possibility that even fusion reactors will use turbines. They are a very efficient way of converting heat into electricity.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  I argue the opposite, a steam turbine maxes out at about 37% efficiency. The inefficiency and massive capital costs of of steam turbines is a major reason why natural gas is so much cheaper than coal or fission -- natgas uses a combined cycle turbine rather than a steam turbine.
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    I believe modern heat --> electric conversion systems use the turbine and several other additional heat --> electricity recapture systems to approach 50-60% efficiency at large scales so they can beat the Carnot Limit of just the turbine engine. https://www.powermag.com/efficiency-improvements-mark-advances-in-gas-turbines/ https://www.powermag.com/efficiency-improvements-mark-advanc... That claims 64% for a gas turbine. LFTR presentations said they could use the brayton cycle I think due to high temps, I'd imagine a fusion would also have the temps to enable brayton cycle and several other tricks to achieve good efficiency. Remember, what matters at scale is cost cost cost. Turbines might not be sexy, but if they are cheap, then that is what you use.
    - aordano 4y ago
      For anyone curious, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankine_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankine_cycle
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      > Remember, what matters at scale is cost cost cost. Turbines might not be sexy, but if they are cheap, then that is what you use. Exactly. Turbines (along with the accompanying water treatment, condensers, generators, power transformation) aren't cheap. A 600MW coal plant costs $2B.
  - 4y ago
danuker 4y ago
> Why are we repeating these same questions when we already have an answer? What are the questions? Are renewables the answer? Only hydro can store energy cheaply. And solar and wind are not available constantly.
- ksec 4y ago
  >What are the questions? Are renewables the answer? That was the question partly laid out in the article. Suggesting we dont need Nuclear because we already have solar and wind.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  > Only hydro can store energy cheaply. Please stop this nonsense. There is no law of physics or even any strong practical reason to think your assertion is correct.
dsr_ 4y ago
Nobody has managed to build even an experimental fusion reactor that produces more power than is necessary to start each reaction cycle... unless you count bombs. Assuming we did, to get away from mechanical turbines and generators as the heat->motion->electricity step would require a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_generator -- which have had more success but still face serious material issues. As for "why does it take so long?" -- the first of anything takes longer. And the US has terrible problems in building anything new or big.
- he0001 4y ago
  >And the US has terrible problems in building anything new or big. What are the reasons for this do you think?
  - replygirl 4y ago
    brain drain to web development, mostly.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    Baumol's cost disease. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
  - dsr_ 4y ago
    We have more knowledge of the terrible ways things go wrong. A bridge has failure consequences that are predictable: bridge breaks, people on the bridge die, local economy suffers. All of those are understandable by an elementary school student playing with toys and imagining the town around it. The failure consequences of fission plants were not known to include things that had to be discovered years after Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Not to mention -- who knew that exhausting hot non-radioactive water into a river could be bad for it? The failure consequences of Thalidomide were not known for years. The failure consequences of dioxin usage were not known for years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_organic_pollutant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_organic_pollutant Let's also include the US propensity to fall victim to charlatanry: enough of us want to believe so much, we will give lots of money to Juicero, uBeam, and Nigerian Princes. (Hyperloop, cough.) So if you want to do something big, it needs to be well-understood. If you want to do something new, it needs to be proven and well-examined.
inglor_cz 4y ago
Turbines are a great, mature technology. The SMR alone is new enough. Imagine writing a piece of software that needs to parse XML. It is probably better just to use an existing library for that, instead of reinventing the wheel.
_n_b_ 4y ago
>> Tellingly, some utilities have already backed out of NuScale’s first project over cost concerns. > Anyone could chime in here? Was it because NuScale is too expensive? The NuScale VOYAGR, in particular, is a really big SMR in terms of [plant size]/[megawatt]. The economies of SMR come when you can reduce that footprint by making smaller safety systems or eliminating active safety features (because the plant is small enough not to need them) AND factory-build them with on-site assembly. Other SMR designs seem to have more promising ideas for doing both, but NuScale's is just too big. (There are also micro-reactors that optimize for replacing diesel engines and gas turbines with a very small footprint at the tradeoff of cost.) >I was expecting SMRs, once approved could be built much more quickly. I was thinking in terms of 3 years with perfect project planning. But right now even the earliest ( and likely optimistic ) first SMRs site is 2030. Why does it take so long? There's a lot going between "approved today" and "SMR online": particularly that factory infrastructure needs to come on line and site licensing need to happen, and then the plant needs to get commissioned after it is built (which takes longer for the first). It's very conceivable to me that the Nth SMR could be a ~3ish year project, but longer for the FOAK unit is almost inevitable.
- ksec 4y ago
  Thank You. I should have read the article more carefully. It does state the reactor "consists of a 76-foot-tall, 15-foot-wide cylindrical containment vessel that houses the reactor". Looks like NuScale's SMR doesn't fit my mental model of SMRs. I was thinking SMRs size that could easily fit within a 40ft container. >particularly that factory infrastructure needs to come on line and site licensing need to happen, and then the plant needs to get commissioned after it is built (which takes longer for the first). Oh Ok. So it is only the "design" that has been approved. ( Again I should have read it carefully ). No wonder why it is taking so long. Thank you for the reply.
  - _n_b_ 4y ago
    > I was thinking SMRs size that could easily fit within a 40ft container. Those would be 'micro-reactors' and as noted tend to be optimised for off-grid applications.
cycomanic 4y ago
> >This is then used to drive a turbine that generates electricity. > We could have Nuclear Fusion but we are still using turbine to generate electricity. :P This is actually one of the main points of why the whole talk about "economies of scale" for nuclear just doesn't make much sense. More than 50% of a nuclear plant is essentially the same as any other thermoelectric plant. Despite the many power plants being build we haven't seen a this elusive cost reduction. Construction projects (in contrast to things build in factories) don't lend themselves to economies of scale (in terms of building many). There was an HN submission that analysed the cost of a nuclear plant and showed that there is really not much room for any economies of scale reductions. > >these smaller reactors are actually likely to produce more radioactive waste than conventional plants. > >nuclear power expert M.V. Ramana also points out that the cost of renewable energy like wind and solar is already lower than that of nuclear, and continuing to fall rapidly. > Why are we repeating these same questions when we already have an answer? > >SMRs could cost more than bigger nuclear plants, he adds, because they don’t have the same economy of scale. Yes that's always the weird part of the discussion. There are reasons why nuclear plants are build large, it's cheaper. > I thought the whole point of SMRs were economy of scale? > >Tellingly, some utilities have already backed out of NuScale’s first project over cost concerns. > Anyone could chime in here? Was it because NuScale is too expensive? > I was expecting SMRs, once approved could be built much more quickly. I was thinking in terms of 3 years with perfect project planning. But right now even the earliest ( and likely optimistic ) first SMRs site is 2030. Why does it take so long?
ciconia 4y ago
> Why are we repeating these same questions when we already have an answer? The answer is not solar and wind. For solar and wind to replace fossil fuels for electricity generation will require ramping up mining activity by a factor of a few tens from current levels. Not to mention the fact that we still don't know how to produce solar panels and wind turbines without using fossil fuels - for mining, metallurgy and transport. The numbers are just not there. The only possible answer is a significant reduction of energy consumption, but it seems very few people are ready to accept it.
- allemagne 4y ago
  "Significant reduction of energy consumption" is only a possible answer if you're able and prepared to suppress the lifestyles of billions of people through any means necessary.
panick21_ 4y ago
Anutronic fusion could generate electricity without a turbine.
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AtlasBarfed 4y ago

Again this story. Ok, sure maybe it's smaller than a PWR behemoth. It's still solid fuel rod crap. If you have solid fuel rods, you have meltdown danger, you can't use up all the fissile material, there's no breeding, extraction of fission products. It's under a lot of pressure, so besides meltdown you have other dangers. Solid fuel rods can only use the very tiny percentage of uranium that is naturally fissile. This is simply not a good design for a nuclear reactor. The LFTR design has meltdown proof operation, no pressurized water, near 100% use of fuel, can burn/breed old solid fuel waste, can breed more fuel from plentiful thorium, and can scale down to closet-sized reactors. Pebble bed also shares some of these aspects, and I assume there are other new generation designs with advantages. But this is just more of the same bad design reactors. Oh great, it got spitshined and scaled down and passed approvals. What nuclear needs to be relevant is to tackle meltdown danger and nuclear waste. LFTR addresses both and any future reactor needs to address both. Perhaps LFTR could be a "waste processor" if LFTR isn't economical enough, while other meltdown proof designs do more economical generation in a sort of large scale web.

atwood22 4y ago
Are LFTRs actually viable though?
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  That's why I don't want to say "WE NEED TO USE LFTR". But the LFTR features are what we need in next gen nuclear: meltdown proof, full fuel use / vast waste reduction, scalable. Oak Ridge National Lab had a molten salt reactor that was closet-sized that they were working on. So it existed. Were all materials issues solved for a high temperature molten salt with all those neutrons flying around from breeding? No. China is (somewhat thankfully, why does fucking CHINA have to represent the major economic funding for solar, wind, batteries, and nuclear solutions to global warming?) bringing an MSR/LFTR online at utility scale in a couple years. But the point is I don't see nuclear being a viable solution unless it alleviates the Fukushima risk (unexpected meltdown) and the nuclear waste NIMBY issues. Scalability is necessary for economic viability.

jvanderbot 4y ago

Everyone is piling on about better designs or mythical future tech. This is a win for clean energy. End of story. Smaller reactors have maintenance and footprint wins that are hard to appreciate. I think this is one of a few key turning points that are coming up that will help us transition to a better carbon future. But if not, at least now we have more options which means more competition and more innovation.

jillesvangurp 4y ago
The competition is for cost. I don't mind more competition, I think it's great that there are alternatives. However, I don't see nuclear as particularly competitive on that front as it is currently, by far, the most expensive option. The only thing that comes close is natural gas. Which has seen pretty high price hikes of course. Low carbon energy generation is basically happening with or without nuclear. At this point, we're past the point where people need to study the cost of wind or solar. They have proven much cheaper than anything else and they are being mass deployed all over the world as a result of that. Nuclear, not so much. A few deployments here and there. Usually at prices that are way over budget and years late as well. Maybe smaller nuclear plants will change that. They have a lot to prove. I wouldn't bet the future on that. It's a wild card at best. Meanwhile, the future is now. Lots of countries are going carbon neutral in the next decade or so and mostly without the help of nuclear power. No need to wait for small reactors to work or not. If they do somehow work at a price point that isn't prohibitively expensive, great! But not a problem if this is just the next chapter in nuclear power's long history of being too costly and complicated to be practical.
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  Predicting future cost is really, really hard. Future cannot really be extrapolated from the current state of things. Until 2022, a lot of Europeans counted on cheap Russian gas. If any kind of cold war breaks out with China, will solar panels be as available as they are today? Ceteris paribus, I would always keep at least some energy generating capability "at home", without the need to rely on potentially hostile powers or unstable regions. Even if it looked uneconomical at the very moment.

macintux 4y ago

Heavy discussion a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32282632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32282632 (742 comments)

joak 4y ago
And another one here 5 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32298994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32298994 It seems to me that the nuclear lobby is particularly active these days. My impression is that the window for nuclear is rapidly closing. The alternative (wind, solar and batteries) is becoming cheaper and cheaper (even Texas is adopting it). Soon nuclear will be completely irrelevant.
- swarnie 4y ago
  My issue is still with storage. It doesn't matter how "green" your energy production is if storing it requires you to turn an entire continent upside down for the battery minerals.
  - photochemsyn 4y ago
    That's even more of a problem with the uranium ore required to feed into fuel rod production, however. Battery materials like lithium-iron are also quite recyclable. The United States today has close to 100 GW of nuclear power plants installed (almost all built decades ago). Most uranium ore bodies seem to hover around 1.0 - 0.1 % uranium by mass. Each GW appears to require about 200 tons of pure uranium (enriched somewhat from the natural 0.7% U235). Assuming we take an average, that's on the order of (200 tons of ore/ton of fuel) * (20,000 tons of fuel rods per year) = ~4 million tons of ore per year (non recyclable). Batteries seem like the better option.
  - oezi 4y ago
    You don't need to focus only on batteries. You could also generate heat and store that for later use or hydrogen or other synfuels. Once you give consumers price incentives to follow current production, many things are possible (for instance running washing machines when power is cheapest etc.)

grej 4y ago

There is an in depth presentation about the reactor on youtube: https://youtu.be/JhrxFCtCPUo https://youtu.be/JhrxFCtCPUo

Julesman 4y ago

TheDudeMan 4y ago
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
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Drblessing 4y ago
> Objectively false Any evidence, bro?
- deusum 4y ago
  Like Chernobyl?
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    Are you 8 years old?
timbit42 4y ago
Don't make perfect the enemy of good. A bit of radioactive waste is the least of our worries relative to global warming from CO2 and not all nuclear produces waste that lasts thousands of years. Some newer nuclear plants cannot melt down and have no risk of killing people by radiation. Right now we don't have sufficient means to produce excess or store solar power for nighttimes or wind for windless times. Nuclear can make up the difference when solar and/or wind are insufficient. It's the best interim solution we have. Without nuclear, temperatures will become much higher than if we build more nuclear.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
Compared to coal and fossil fuel damage to the planet? it's trivial

jmyeet 4y ago

I highly encourage you to look at this factsheet I only just found today [1]. Some highlights: > - Levelized cost of energy (LCOE) includes the lifetime costs of building, operating, maintaining, and fueling a power plant. Estimated LCOE for plants built in the near future are: combined cycle natural gas: 3.71 ¢/kWh; advanced nuclear: 6.31 ¢/kWh; and biomass: 8.92 ¢/kWh and > - Spent fuel is placed in a storage pool of circulating cooled water to absorb heat and block the high radioactivity of fission products > - Many U.S. spent fuel pools are reaching capacity, necessitating the use of dry cask storage. This point is often overlooked. Nuclear waste generates heat. It needs to be actively cooled, possibly for a decade or longer, until it can be stored in dry storage. There's transportation risk there (for tens of thousands of tons per year at current rates) and facilities that need to be maintained to do that. Plus adding water increases the risk of site contamination. Also consider: > - ... Managing nuclear waste requires very long-term planning. U.S. EPA was required to set radiation exposure limits in permanent waste storage facilities over an unprecedented timeframe—one million years > - The U.S. has no permanent storage site. TIL: > - The U.S. Price-Anderson Act limits the liability of nuclear plant owners if a radioactive release occurs to $450 million for individual plants and $13.5 billion across all plants. WHY? This is the big problem with nuclear: failure modes have incredibly high cost but relatively low likelihood. Companies have limited liability so they get to pocket the profits for under-maintaining plants and move the costs to the government. In addition to being a bad idea this presents a falsely cheap picture of the true costs of nuclear power. In this same vein: > - The Nuclear Waste Policy Act required the U.S. federal government to begin taking control of spent nuclear fuel in 1998. Another cost shifted to the government. EDIT: over the years I've learned that the more rabid one side of an argument is, the more likely they are to simply downvote anything they disagree with, regardless of the merit. This, sadly, is my experience with nuclear on HN (which isn't plagued with downvote-as-disagreement like, say, Reddit is). It's not a reason to be anti-nuclear but it sure makes it hard to be swayed by pro-nuclear arguments. [1]: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/nuclear-energy-factsheet https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/nuclear...

gautamcgoel 4y ago
I don't necessarily agree with this comment, but I do agree that it's sad this is getting downvotes. The comment is thoughtful and I learned something from it. I support building more reactors but I don't support reflexively shouting down commenters which take the opposite stance.

VBprogrammer 4y ago

Can someone correct me if I'm wrong but I remember one of the reasons the RMBK reactor is so large was because there are efficiency gains with a large reactor (among other reasons you lose fast neutrons at a higher rate in a smaller volume right?). How do these small modular reactors get around this?

thehappypm 4y ago
With nuclear, efficiency really doesn’t matter that much. It’s not the cost of the fuel that matters almost at all, it’s the cost of the reactor itself. The cost of the fuel and the efficiency of using that fuel is really a secondary cost compared to building the reactor in the first place, and operating the reactor with people
- coding123 4y ago
  The insurance required is a big one: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/nuclear-insurance.html https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n...
  - Krasnol 4y ago
    > Claims resulting from nuclear accidents are covered under Price-Anderson; for that reason, all U.S. property and liability insurance policies exclude nuclear accidents. Claims can include any incident (including those caused by theft or sabotage) in transporting nuclear fuel to a reactor site, storing nuclear fuel or waste at a site; during operation of a reactor, including the discharge of radioactive effluent; and transporting irradiated nuclear fuel and nuclear waste from the reactor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear... > The Act establishes a no fault insurance-type system in which the first approximately $15 billion (as of 2021) is industry-funded as described in the Act. Any claims above the $12.6 billion would be covered by a Congressional mandate to retroactively increase nuclear utility liability or would be covered by the federal government. Interesting.
4y ago

Ericson2314 4y ago

Will they be allowed to export these? I am really hopefully developing countries can get them. Much less infra needed than renewables with storage.

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downvotetruth 4y ago

Only now that nuclear reactors do not make economic sense inside Saturn's orbit.

jbverschoor 4y ago

I guess we have to thank yet another was for getting progress and things approved

Julesman 4y ago

Let me try again, since I was snotty and got flagged. This is not a kosher industry. It reaches its influence into the academic realm and has an epic PR budget. It can take advantage of the obscurity of the tech to promote talking points that seem quite reasonable, but generally mask a desire by energy suppliers to maintain the current means of distribution. And a good part of that PR budget certain goes into negative marketing against wind and solar, specifically because they are disruptive to the distribution model. Profit. There's no conspiracy theory in profit. We know that's what industries want. And historically, industries are not invested in public safety to the extent that it cuts into profits. So then, why does anyone TRUST the nuclear industry. And even if we do, why would we EVER trust governments to regulate that technology, given that history of absolutely clear about the likelihood of self-regulation? All I see is billions spent to keep power generation out of our homes. Wind and solar are ready to deploy and yet people seem to suggest that tech in development, which might not be ready of commercial application for a decade, are the solution to our problems? I don't see it.