3 ms·
There are economies of scale, in the sense that (very roughly) material costs are a rounding error and scaling up the reactor doesn't make the design more compl
by mastax 3y ago
There are economies of scale, in the sense that (very roughly) material costs are a rounding error and scaling up the reactor doesn't make the design more complex it just makes the parts larger. The Gen III+ reactor designs all went big as a cost-efficiency measure, not that it worked out particularly well. The major caveats being that very large pressure vessels required specialized forges to be constructed and that very large concrete pours are more difficult than simply large ones.
The "build the reactor in a factory" idea could still hold some merit, though there's not much reason to make it smaller once it's small enough to fit on a barge or a wide-load trailer. I'm not sure that making even smaller reactors than that to make more of them for economies of scale makes sense. It's hard to imagine that 2x 150MW reactors could ever be cheaper than 1x 300MW reactor. The economies of scale efficiency benefits tend to be very sub-linear.
- icegreentea2 3y agoYes. We could basically say that there are two different markets for small nuclear, which will probably settle at different levels. The first is just stepping back a bit from the GW scale plants to try to reap some economies of scale in terms of making the projects and processes less bespoke, even though the raw amount of material consumed might be higher. The other would be uh... I guess "niche" applications? This is where scaling down even more (sub 50MWe?) happens. This could be some DoD related stuff, or trying to power remote communities (which aren't already grid connected). I'm sure there might be a handful of interesting industrial applications (I know the Tar Sands in Canada is interested in SMRs to power their steam extraction processes).
- DarkNova6 3y agoBut the time to get your roi is likely to go down significantly. Which means overall costs could still go down and you can gradually add more capacity. But I suppose the biggest advantage is easier access to funding. Do you really want to invest 8 billion for an all or nothing project?