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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 footpr

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.
  - photochemsyn 4y ago
    What do you think about the reliability of the global supply chain for uranium ore and fuel rod production? Canada has some high-grade ore but the United States and Europe don't seem to have much at all.
    - inglor_cz 4y ago
      Canada is fine with me. Finer than China. You can also stockpile rods easier than, say, gas. They don't take up as much space, given how energy dense they are. Having a three year strategic reserve is thinkable, not so much with other means of electricity production.
      - photochemsyn 4y ago
        The strategic reserve of sunlight and wind isn't susceptible to disruption due to war or economic collapse. It does take some work to collect that energy, i.e. a domestic PV and turbine and battery manufacturing capacity, but these are not consumables like oil, gas, coal or uranium - they're durable goods that should last for years to decades, and which can be recycled.
        inglor_cz 4y ago
        Manufacturing of PVs and batteries on a large enough scale (and that means much larger, at least volume- and weight-wise, than a fleet of SMRs) needs enormous amounts of minerals that are produced in either unstable or potentially hostile regions. The sheer energy density of uranium cannot really be downplayed here.
        Retric 4y ago
        PV’s require minimal rare materials because the part that makes power is only ~1/5000th of a meter thick. It works out to around 80 gigawatt hours per cubic meter and most of that material is silicon. By comparison a nuclear powerplant goes through around 240 kg of uranium to generate that much power. The casing on the other hand can be made from an extremely wide range of materials. And of course long term you can recycle PV panels because they arn’t consuming the material.
- shukantpal 4y ago
  Are you including the cost of battery storage in solar & wind power generation for 24 / 7 power output? Otherwise Nuclear power is of higher quality since it can be sustained virtually at any time unlike solar & wind
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    French nuclear power is unavailable more often due to maintenance or lack of cooling water than British wind is. British wind often generates less power than it can, but it very rarely drops to zero.
    - chelical 4y ago
      Capacity factor is generally better for nuclear than any other energy source. > British wind often generates less power than it can, but it very rarely drops to zero. Sorry, I didn't realize French nuclear reactors weren't generating any energy at the moment.
      - bryanlarsen 4y ago
        Over half of French reactors are down. https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/07/28/frances-nuclear-plants-are-going-down-for-repairs https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/07/28/frances-nuclear-...
        phtrivier 4y ago
        Let's note that part of them are down now for planned maintenance that had to be delayed because of the pandemic. Hopefully, this is not going to be a recurring event. Water temperature is also a problem, but, again, is something that is going to resolve itself "at some point". Finally, others are closed for potentially recurring corrosion issues, and _that_ is the really problematic stuff since most of our reactors were built around the same time. I don't exactly understand why everyone is tiptoing around the fact that we're going to have electricity shutdowns this winter in Europe, when the gas that's supposed to full peaked plants is going to be missing. Sadly there is not much we can do to prevent it, at the moment, and at least a good old blackout and a few shortages at gas stations might make some people take energy issues seriously.
- anton96 4y ago
  For your renewable vs nuclear cost, is the cost advantage that obvious? When price is comparison is done, does it account for lifespan difference, a nuclear reactor last 60 year vs 20 for wind and solar. That can already triple price of the renewable. Does it account, that you should build extra capacity of many time what you need because not all the same regions have the same wind and sun exposition at the same time? You can look how oversize is the installed capacity of Germany [1] compared to France. Also, I'm not sure for the US but the EU got its solar panel production wiped out by the heavily subsided Chinese industry. So the rather lower apparent cost of solar by might be partially driven by the Chinese attempt to pump money in to gain market share. [1] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    Solar panels can last 50 years. The main reason they don't is that they improve so much every decade that the opportunity cost of doubling power output per square meter makes it worth replacing them. So you're left with 2 theses: 1: solar panels will stop improving, so you should amortize over 50 years. 2: solar panels will keep improving, so cost / kWh will be less than a 50 year amortization.
- Dig1t 4y ago
  Nuclear absolutely has to be part of that carbon neutral equation. Solar and wind are awesome, but they are not “dispatchable”. i.e. they turn off sometimes when the wind stops blowing or the sun isn’t shining. Without tons of batteries, natural gas and coal etc are always going to be used to fill the gaps. Nuclear is the perfect choice to replace those dispatchable sources. Also, additional nuclear capacity can be used to do things like desalinate ocean water and help alleviate droughts in the future.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    Traditionally, nuclear is not dispatchable either, it's baseload, and in particular these SMRs are not dispatchable. There are a few variable output reactors in France, but they are very expensive. Molten salt reactors could perhaps have a thermal storage component, but... Nuclear is "firm" in that its always running. This is a good characteristic. I'm more optimistic about advanced geothermal that has been developed in recent years, using the advances in drilling developed for fracking. If we can use the waste heat from nuclear for something productive, like desalination, then I think it has a much better chance. But coastal communities will also have access to offshore wind, which has really high capacity factors and will be far far cheaper than nuclear could be.
    - politician 4y ago
      An array of SMRs is dispatchable even though a single SMR is not. It’s a scheduling problem.
      - epistasis 4y ago
        Oh really, what's the ramp rate of this design? I haven't heard anybody claim that ability for SMRs. What makes an array more dispatchable than a single SMR? I don't follow how that could be possible.
        njarboe 4y ago
        Elsewhere in the thread, credit_guy quotes 20% to 100% in 96 minutes[1]. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32370392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32370392
- Gareth321 4y ago
  > 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. A lot of these calculations are based on straight line production cost against average power output. They often omit one of the most valuable aspects of nuclear: grid stability. Redundancy is expensive but EXTREMELY important. I see few papers accurately imputing this cost when they conclude that we should all switch to renewables immediately. Here in Europe we can have swings in wind power production in excess of 50% in the span of a day. This is ENORMOUS volatility, and requires some kind of stable power production to offset the slow wind days. Grids need to be diversified. Solar, wind, tide, geothermal, hydro, and definitely nuclear. If not nuclear, we are stuck with coal and LNG for the foreseeable future.
  - oezi 4y ago
    This will just mean that even more renewables will be built up the point where it is economically feasible to store such energy in batteries, heat, hydrogen, synfuels etc. Yes, many of these processes are inefficient, but if you consider wind already being the cheapest mode of electricity generation then after another 50% price decline due to progress in technology we might have electricity for lots of inefficient storage mechanisms.
    - Gareth321 4y ago
      Storage is of course the way to overcome grid volatility but so far there are few economical options. As I mentioned, few studies have been conducted on this volatility component and cost, but my understanding is that current storage options are uneconomical relative to nuclear, and especially relative to coal and LNG. Hydro storage is ~70% efficient but it's obviously only feasible in mountainous regions. It's actually cheaper to significantly overshoot renewable capacity to compensate for slow days, but if we're now building 2-3x peak capacity then the cost equation shifts considerably.
- yrgulation 4y ago
  > The competition is for cost Ideally there would be competition for end user low costs as well as investment costs. Electricity should be cheaper than tap water.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  >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. If the costs are so settled, why are countries like China still installing more thermal plants than solar or wind? You think they would favor the cheaper proven options?
  - oezi 4y ago
    Is China installing more thermal than renewables? I thought it was roughly balanced between fossils and hydro+wind+solar.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      I think you are right if you add it all up.
- Ycombigatorz 4y ago
photochemsyn 4y ago
If you look up the average quality of uranium ores globally, there's a bit of a problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_ore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_ore Each installed gigawatt of nuclear reactor power, regardless of whether this is twenty 50MW reactors or a single 1000MW reactor, requires on the order of 200 tons of uranium fuel rods per year to operate. By comparison, a 1GW bituminous coal plant burns on the order of 2,750,000 tons of coal per year to achieve the same kind of baseload power output. However, coal requires no further processing once mined. To get those 200 tons of fuel rods, it can take a varying amount of uranium ore, and the majority of that ore is not high-grade, it's down around 0.1% U3O8 more often than not (there are a few high-grade deposits). So you might have to mine 200,000 tons of ore, extract the uranium in the form of yellowcake, convert that to uranium hexaflouride gas for enrichment from ~0.7% to (apparently) 4.95% for the NuScale design, and then convert the gas to solid uranium oxide and package it in a fuel rod. This is a pretty intensive industrial process just to make the required fuel and is neither cheap nor all that clean. Enrichment level & NuScale plant design parameters: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1034/ML103470495.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1034/ML103470495.pdf If you are in a location with plenty of sunlight and wind, I don't see how this could possibly by less expensive than some kind of integrated wind turbine/solar PV/solar thermal linked-to-storage grid of the same capacity.
- paul_funyun 4y ago
  "is neither cheap nor all that clean." In terms of greenhouse gas emmissions, it's very clean. That's the whole point of bothering with green energy. "If you are in a location with plenty of sunlight and wind, I don't see how this could possibly by less expensive than some kind of integrated wind turbine/solar PV/solar thermal linked-to-storage grid of the same capacity." Unsurprising - things that exist are generally more expensive than things that don't. I'm not sure how you can even assess the cost of storing the power from those sources to compare them. Until a realistic method of storing that energy is created (if it ever is), nuclear as well as waste-incineration and hydroelectric are superior by virtue of being viable.
- aesh2Xa1 4y ago
  You bring up two advantages of nuclear’s competitors: 1. coal requires no processing after mining 2. solar and wind are less expensive For #1, it doesn’t seem like that statement is true: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/coal-processing https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sci... For #2, I’m interested in an energy cost comparison, including the cost of ongoing maintenance, too. Solar and wind seem like an obvious investment in our future. I don’t know about the quality of “nuclearasia.com,” but I found an interesting anecdote that more directly answered the question “how much raw ore converts to a how much fuel rod?” The answer is that * 2.5 tons of uranium ore = 1kg fuel * 1kg uranium fuel = same energy output as 100 tons of coal * 2.5 tons of uranium ore = same energy output as 100 tons of coal > Even if you take a relatively poor ore (with a uranium content of 0.2%), it turns out that to produce 1 kg of enriched uranium fuel you need approximately 2.5 tonnes of uranium ore. If we recall that one kilogram of enriched uranium contains the energy “equivalent" of 100 tonnes of coal, it turns out that to produce the same amount of energy you would need 40 times less ore compared to the same amount of coal. Another advantage is that coal has to be delivered to the station in “bulk” but there is no need to ship uranium ore far from the place of extraction. Uranium and uranium fuel take much less space than coal, and this means a dramatic reduction in transportation costs. https://www.nuclearasia.com/knowledge-centre/much-uranium-ore-required-produce-one-kilogram-nuclear-fuel/?format=pdf https://www.nuclearasia.com/knowledge-centre/much-uranium-or... What I’d like to know is the overall cost (mining, processing, transportation, handling/disposal, and maintenance) in terms of $/energy. I would think that individual energy plants could provide this information.
epistasis 4y ago
It will be a win when it's on the grid and running. Producing a design has never been a challenge for nuclear power, that's the easy part. The hard part has been building the designs.
- linkdink 4y ago
  That's exactly the problem this modular type is supposed to address. > small modular reactors (SMRs) are designed to be small enough to build in a factory before being shipped
  - epistasis 4y ago
    Right, but that's why we it won't be a win until it's generating. We don't know that this manufacturing method will work out better than prior attempts. The AP1000, was supposed to address construction problems by being able to ship in large parts already constructed. But that failed so miserably that SMRs-long ignored because they weren't thought to be economically efficient-became the last ditch effort to build nuclear. And the AP1000 failed because of all the on-site mismanagement of things as simple as concrete pours. SMRs are unproven in at least two regards: 1) ability to manufacture in a factory economically, and 2) ability to construct all the on-site infrastructure for the SMR to generate the electricity.
    - Accujack 4y ago
      >We don't know that this manufacturing method will work out better than prior attempts. There are never certainties in anything except in hindsight. Most people with expertise who have reviewed SMR designs (and there are many) believe there's a high probability of the central manufacturing concept being able to work. Factories are a very well known concept at this point.
      - pfdietz 4y ago
        Renewable builds typically come in within 10% of the contracted cost. You get certainty by installing things in very large quantities, with rapid cycle time.
411111111111111 4y ago
Isn't it a little disingenuous to call this clean energy? It might be carbon free energy, but doesn't clean imply that it's not stressing the environment altogether?
- kspacewalk2 4y ago
  The process of manufacturing solar panels stresses the environment plenty, are we eliminating solar power from the clean list too?
  - 411111111111111 4y ago
    The term clean loses its meaning if you include the production phase. There is no way to produce any product of any form without impacting the environment in some form. Especially because you can't really draw a line at that point, as you'll also have to include the production impact of tools and materials which you needed to produce your product. Suddenly, basically everything that happened since industrialization is part of the equation.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  The world is warming rapidly, we don't have time to piddle around waiting on a 100x improvement in storage tech to make grid scale 100% reliable solar/wind/tidal. There is with nuclear, and we know we can do it. I know to which basket my eggs are going.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    Making the grid reliable world-wide requires approximately 50 TWh in batteries, approximately the same amount as to electrify every car. If it takes 20 years to build a nuclear plant, then we'll have the batteries before that nuclear plant is finished.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
seems to me like the biggest gain is redundancy? repairability? I hope they're cheaper per kwhr produced.

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.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  What do you think about the reliability of the global supply chain for uranium ore and fuel rod production? Canada has some high-grade ore but the United States and Europe don't seem to have much at all.
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    Canada is fine with me. Finer than China. You can also stockpile rods easier than, say, gas. They don't take up as much space, given how energy dense they are. Having a three year strategic reserve is thinkable, not so much with other means of electricity production.
    - photochemsyn 4y ago
      The strategic reserve of sunlight and wind isn't susceptible to disruption due to war or economic collapse. It does take some work to collect that energy, i.e. a domestic PV and turbine and battery manufacturing capacity, but these are not consumables like oil, gas, coal or uranium - they're durable goods that should last for years to decades, and which can be recycled.
      - inglor_cz 4y ago
        Manufacturing of PVs and batteries on a large enough scale (and that means much larger, at least volume- and weight-wise, than a fleet of SMRs) needs enormous amounts of minerals that are produced in either unstable or potentially hostile regions. The sheer energy density of uranium cannot really be downplayed here.
        Retric 4y ago
        PV’s require minimal rare materials because the part that makes power is only ~1/5000th of a meter thick. It works out to around 80 gigawatt hours per cubic meter and most of that material is silicon. By comparison a nuclear powerplant goes through around 240 kg of uranium to generate that much power. The casing on the other hand can be made from an extremely wide range of materials. And of course long term you can recycle PV panels because they arn’t consuming the material.
shukantpal 4y ago
Are you including the cost of battery storage in solar & wind power generation for 24 / 7 power output? Otherwise Nuclear power is of higher quality since it can be sustained virtually at any time unlike solar & wind
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  French nuclear power is unavailable more often due to maintenance or lack of cooling water than British wind is. British wind often generates less power than it can, but it very rarely drops to zero.
  - chelical 4y ago
    Capacity factor is generally better for nuclear than any other energy source. > British wind often generates less power than it can, but it very rarely drops to zero. Sorry, I didn't realize French nuclear reactors weren't generating any energy at the moment.
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      Over half of French reactors are down. https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/07/28/frances-nuclear-plants-are-going-down-for-repairs https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/07/28/frances-nuclear-...
      - phtrivier 4y ago
        Let's note that part of them are down now for planned maintenance that had to be delayed because of the pandemic. Hopefully, this is not going to be a recurring event. Water temperature is also a problem, but, again, is something that is going to resolve itself "at some point". Finally, others are closed for potentially recurring corrosion issues, and _that_ is the really problematic stuff since most of our reactors were built around the same time. I don't exactly understand why everyone is tiptoing around the fact that we're going to have electricity shutdowns this winter in Europe, when the gas that's supposed to full peaked plants is going to be missing. Sadly there is not much we can do to prevent it, at the moment, and at least a good old blackout and a few shortages at gas stations might make some people take energy issues seriously.
anton96 4y ago
For your renewable vs nuclear cost, is the cost advantage that obvious? When price is comparison is done, does it account for lifespan difference, a nuclear reactor last 60 year vs 20 for wind and solar. That can already triple price of the renewable. Does it account, that you should build extra capacity of many time what you need because not all the same regions have the same wind and sun exposition at the same time? You can look how oversize is the installed capacity of Germany [1] compared to France. Also, I'm not sure for the US but the EU got its solar panel production wiped out by the heavily subsided Chinese industry. So the rather lower apparent cost of solar by might be partially driven by the Chinese attempt to pump money in to gain market share. [1] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  Solar panels can last 50 years. The main reason they don't is that they improve so much every decade that the opportunity cost of doubling power output per square meter makes it worth replacing them. So you're left with 2 theses: 1: solar panels will stop improving, so you should amortize over 50 years. 2: solar panels will keep improving, so cost / kWh will be less than a 50 year amortization.
Dig1t 4y ago
Nuclear absolutely has to be part of that carbon neutral equation. Solar and wind are awesome, but they are not “dispatchable”. i.e. they turn off sometimes when the wind stops blowing or the sun isn’t shining. Without tons of batteries, natural gas and coal etc are always going to be used to fill the gaps. Nuclear is the perfect choice to replace those dispatchable sources. Also, additional nuclear capacity can be used to do things like desalinate ocean water and help alleviate droughts in the future.
- epistasis 4y ago
  Traditionally, nuclear is not dispatchable either, it's baseload, and in particular these SMRs are not dispatchable. There are a few variable output reactors in France, but they are very expensive. Molten salt reactors could perhaps have a thermal storage component, but... Nuclear is "firm" in that its always running. This is a good characteristic. I'm more optimistic about advanced geothermal that has been developed in recent years, using the advances in drilling developed for fracking. If we can use the waste heat from nuclear for something productive, like desalination, then I think it has a much better chance. But coastal communities will also have access to offshore wind, which has really high capacity factors and will be far far cheaper than nuclear could be.
  - politician 4y ago
    An array of SMRs is dispatchable even though a single SMR is not. It’s a scheduling problem.
    - epistasis 4y ago
      Oh really, what's the ramp rate of this design? I haven't heard anybody claim that ability for SMRs. What makes an array more dispatchable than a single SMR? I don't follow how that could be possible.
      - njarboe 4y ago
        Elsewhere in the thread, credit_guy quotes 20% to 100% in 96 minutes[1]. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32370392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32370392
Gareth321 4y ago
> 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. A lot of these calculations are based on straight line production cost against average power output. They often omit one of the most valuable aspects of nuclear: grid stability. Redundancy is expensive but EXTREMELY important. I see few papers accurately imputing this cost when they conclude that we should all switch to renewables immediately. Here in Europe we can have swings in wind power production in excess of 50% in the span of a day. This is ENORMOUS volatility, and requires some kind of stable power production to offset the slow wind days. Grids need to be diversified. Solar, wind, tide, geothermal, hydro, and definitely nuclear. If not nuclear, we are stuck with coal and LNG for the foreseeable future.
- oezi 4y ago
  This will just mean that even more renewables will be built up the point where it is economically feasible to store such energy in batteries, heat, hydrogen, synfuels etc. Yes, many of these processes are inefficient, but if you consider wind already being the cheapest mode of electricity generation then after another 50% price decline due to progress in technology we might have electricity for lots of inefficient storage mechanisms.
  - Gareth321 4y ago
    Storage is of course the way to overcome grid volatility but so far there are few economical options. As I mentioned, few studies have been conducted on this volatility component and cost, but my understanding is that current storage options are uneconomical relative to nuclear, and especially relative to coal and LNG. Hydro storage is ~70% efficient but it's obviously only feasible in mountainous regions. It's actually cheaper to significantly overshoot renewable capacity to compensate for slow days, but if we're now building 2-3x peak capacity then the cost equation shifts considerably.
yrgulation 4y ago
> The competition is for cost Ideally there would be competition for end user low costs as well as investment costs. Electricity should be cheaper than tap water.
s1artibartfast 4y ago
>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. If the costs are so settled, why are countries like China still installing more thermal plants than solar or wind? You think they would favor the cheaper proven options?
- oezi 4y ago
  Is China installing more thermal than renewables? I thought it was roughly balanced between fossils and hydro+wind+solar.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    I think you are right if you add it all up.
Ycombigatorz 4y ago

photochemsyn 4y ago

If you look up the average quality of uranium ores globally, there's a bit of a problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_ore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_ore Each installed gigawatt of nuclear reactor power, regardless of whether this is twenty 50MW reactors or a single 1000MW reactor, requires on the order of 200 tons of uranium fuel rods per year to operate. By comparison, a 1GW bituminous coal plant burns on the order of 2,750,000 tons of coal per year to achieve the same kind of baseload power output. However, coal requires no further processing once mined. To get those 200 tons of fuel rods, it can take a varying amount of uranium ore, and the majority of that ore is not high-grade, it's down around 0.1% U3O8 more often than not (there are a few high-grade deposits). So you might have to mine 200,000 tons of ore, extract the uranium in the form of yellowcake, convert that to uranium hexaflouride gas for enrichment from ~0.7% to (apparently) 4.95% for the NuScale design, and then convert the gas to solid uranium oxide and package it in a fuel rod. This is a pretty intensive industrial process just to make the required fuel and is neither cheap nor all that clean. Enrichment level & NuScale plant design parameters: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1034/ML103470495.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1034/ML103470495.pdf If you are in a location with plenty of sunlight and wind, I don't see how this could possibly by less expensive than some kind of integrated wind turbine/solar PV/solar thermal linked-to-storage grid of the same capacity.

paul_funyun 4y ago
"is neither cheap nor all that clean." In terms of greenhouse gas emmissions, it's very clean. That's the whole point of bothering with green energy. "If you are in a location with plenty of sunlight and wind, I don't see how this could possibly by less expensive than some kind of integrated wind turbine/solar PV/solar thermal linked-to-storage grid of the same capacity." Unsurprising - things that exist are generally more expensive than things that don't. I'm not sure how you can even assess the cost of storing the power from those sources to compare them. Until a realistic method of storing that energy is created (if it ever is), nuclear as well as waste-incineration and hydroelectric are superior by virtue of being viable.
aesh2Xa1 4y ago
You bring up two advantages of nuclear’s competitors: 1. coal requires no processing after mining 2. solar and wind are less expensive For #1, it doesn’t seem like that statement is true: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/coal-processing https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sci... For #2, I’m interested in an energy cost comparison, including the cost of ongoing maintenance, too. Solar and wind seem like an obvious investment in our future. I don’t know about the quality of “nuclearasia.com,” but I found an interesting anecdote that more directly answered the question “how much raw ore converts to a how much fuel rod?” The answer is that * 2.5 tons of uranium ore = 1kg fuel * 1kg uranium fuel = same energy output as 100 tons of coal * 2.5 tons of uranium ore = same energy output as 100 tons of coal > Even if you take a relatively poor ore (with a uranium content of 0.2%), it turns out that to produce 1 kg of enriched uranium fuel you need approximately 2.5 tonnes of uranium ore. If we recall that one kilogram of enriched uranium contains the energy “equivalent" of 100 tonnes of coal, it turns out that to produce the same amount of energy you would need 40 times less ore compared to the same amount of coal. Another advantage is that coal has to be delivered to the station in “bulk” but there is no need to ship uranium ore far from the place of extraction. Uranium and uranium fuel take much less space than coal, and this means a dramatic reduction in transportation costs. https://www.nuclearasia.com/knowledge-centre/much-uranium-ore-required-produce-one-kilogram-nuclear-fuel/?format=pdf https://www.nuclearasia.com/knowledge-centre/much-uranium-or... What I’d like to know is the overall cost (mining, processing, transportation, handling/disposal, and maintenance) in terms of $/energy. I would think that individual energy plants could provide this information.

epistasis 4y ago

It will be a win when it's on the grid and running. Producing a design has never been a challenge for nuclear power, that's the easy part. The hard part has been building the designs.

linkdink 4y ago
That's exactly the problem this modular type is supposed to address. > small modular reactors (SMRs) are designed to be small enough to build in a factory before being shipped
- epistasis 4y ago
  Right, but that's why we it won't be a win until it's generating. We don't know that this manufacturing method will work out better than prior attempts. The AP1000, was supposed to address construction problems by being able to ship in large parts already constructed. But that failed so miserably that SMRs-long ignored because they weren't thought to be economically efficient-became the last ditch effort to build nuclear. And the AP1000 failed because of all the on-site mismanagement of things as simple as concrete pours. SMRs are unproven in at least two regards: 1) ability to manufacture in a factory economically, and 2) ability to construct all the on-site infrastructure for the SMR to generate the electricity.
  - Accujack 4y ago
    >We don't know that this manufacturing method will work out better than prior attempts. There are never certainties in anything except in hindsight. Most people with expertise who have reviewed SMR designs (and there are many) believe there's a high probability of the central manufacturing concept being able to work. Factories are a very well known concept at this point.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      Renewable builds typically come in within 10% of the contracted cost. You get certainty by installing things in very large quantities, with rapid cycle time.

411111111111111 4y ago

Isn't it a little disingenuous to call this clean energy? It might be carbon free energy, but doesn't clean imply that it's not stressing the environment altogether?

kspacewalk2 4y ago
The process of manufacturing solar panels stresses the environment plenty, are we eliminating solar power from the clean list too?
- 411111111111111 4y ago
  The term clean loses its meaning if you include the production phase. There is no way to produce any product of any form without impacting the environment in some form. Especially because you can't really draw a line at that point, as you'll also have to include the production impact of tools and materials which you needed to produce your product. Suddenly, basically everything that happened since industrialization is part of the equation.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
The world is warming rapidly, we don't have time to piddle around waiting on a 100x improvement in storage tech to make grid scale 100% reliable solar/wind/tidal. There is with nuclear, and we know we can do it. I know to which basket my eggs are going.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  Making the grid reliable world-wide requires approximately 50 TWh in batteries, approximately the same amount as to electrify every car. If it takes 20 years to build a nuclear plant, then we'll have the batteries before that nuclear plant is finished.

stjohnswarts 4y ago

seems to me like the biggest gain is redundancy? repairability? I hope they're cheaper per kwhr produced.