9 ms·

I, for one, want Gen IV small-modular nuclear reactors built. They solve all our climate change-related challenges AND they eat the waste of older generation r

I, for one, want Gen IV small-modular nuclear reactors built. They solve all our climate change-related challenges AND they eat the waste of older generation reactors. I fail to see why we're not investing in more nuclear over solar and wind (whose components are not usually recycled)

cyberax 3y ago
Small modular reactors have almost nothing but disadvantages compared to the good old large-scale PWRs. The ONLY advantage of SMRs is that they are easier to build because only a handful of companies in the _world_ possess technology to build reactor vessels for large-scale PWRs. And none of them are in the US.
- pstuart 3y ago
  We have yet to see, as they've yet to truly enter the market. So far, the record's not been good for large plants -- they tend to go way over budget and schedule. Case in point: Vogtle.
  - Animats 3y ago
    NuScale's price has already gone 60%-70% over budget, and they haven't even built anything yet.[1] [1] https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Are-Small-Scale-Modular-Reactors-Becoming-Too-Expensive.html https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Are-Sm...
    - pstuart 3y ago
      The factors cited were inflation and higher interest rates, which are going to be universally applicable. Cost overruns at Vogtle and others had inflation as a partial factor but the bigger issues, per the DOE: "Work began with incomplete designs and managers repeatedly failed to realistically schedule tasks. Experienced workers were in short supply and defective work often had to be redone. Workers quit for other jobs and the COVID-19 pandemic led to high absenteeism." So a pass on Covid impact but the rest is the result of building a huge bespoke power plant. SMRs change all of that to units of mass production. I'm sure there's still issues to solve there but if nuclear has a future competing against low cost renewables then that SMRs seem to be the only way forward.
  - fodkodrasz 3y ago
    That is mostly because there are no more large scale nuclear investments, lot of knowhow has been lost, everything is custom built now on every level of implementation (which SMRs promise to solve), and because people care about the initial investments, not for the TCO. Oh, and politically motivated NIH red-tape for getting some votes on the cost of whole society.
    - cinntaile 3y ago
      Nuclear benefits from stable output, but the world we're in doesn't require stable output so the economics become difficult.
      - fodkodrasz 3y ago
        This is not true.
        cinntaile 3y ago
        You really refuted my argument there.
        fodkodrasz 3y ago
        I'm simply tired of wasting time on renewable-energy-battery-storage fan service. We need stable power output.
        cinntaile 3y ago
        I don't get it, I didn't mention any of that? You're refusing to answer due to an imaginary reason you yourself came up with... Alright then.
        kwhitefoot 3y ago
        You didn't make an argument, you merely stated something that the respondent disputes. There is a very stable base load in most countries that can be well provided with nuclear. This is especially the case when there are good interconnections between neighbouring countries.
  - cyberax 3y ago
    Rosatom is exporting nuclear power plants within budget and (mostly) on time. It's simply a question of expertise and experience. The US and Europe have ignored nuclear power for so long, that most expertise was lost long ago. And each new nuclear power plant becomes a unique snowflake.
    - cinntaile 3y ago
      Nobody in the western world is going to buy Russian power plants any time soon.
      - cyberax 3y ago
        Of course. Russia needs to be isolated. I'm just saying that it's _possible_ to construct reactors within reasonable timeframes. Russia and China can do that, so can other countries.
- asynchronous 3y ago
  Since they’re small they can be placed far closer to urban hubs and other places that suck electricity. The last design plans I saw one could fit within a single city block, buried under ground with only 1 story exposed.
  - cyberax 3y ago
    > The last design plans I saw one could fit within a single city block, buried under ground with only 1 story exposed. This is a completely unrealistic plan, designed to lure investors. An SMR meltdown will produce enough radioactive contamination to make a small city unlivable, at least for a while. So you'll need a full containment building. You'll need emergency generators, coolant pumps, etc. Then you have a question of security, an easily accessible reactor will provide a great target for terrorism. So you'll need a perimeter around it with armed guards. Then there's a question of control. A working reactor requires at least two trained nuclear engineers on duty at all times. So each reactor will likely need around 15 highly specialized engineers. That will have to live within a commuting distance. Sounds bad already. But that's not all. There's also a question of inspections, something like the NRC can be reasonably expected to regulate several hundred reactors. They are not prepared to inspect many thousands of reactors. And the last thing I personally want is a "self-regulating" nuclear industry. Any _realistic_ SMR power plant will look just like a regular large nuclear plant, except that it'll have multiple reactor units instead of just one large reactor.
    - kwhitefoot 3y ago
      There are designs for modular reactors that are inherently safe. Using subcritical reactors and a particle beam. See Aker Solutions: https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featureaker-s-ads-uses-thorium https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featureaker-s-ads-uses-... Haven't seen any news from them recently though.
      - cyberax 3y ago
        They are not "inherently safe". Reactors that produce power (in large quantities) are dangerous because fission products are radioactive, and they produce energy even after the chain reaction stops. So once cooling is lost, these fission products can melt through the reactor vessel and escape the confinement. Also, accelerator-driven reactors are just bonkers. They make no freaking sense for power generation. They are being investigated because they can produce very energetic neutrons, in quantities that are large enough to transmute some long-lived nuclear waste.
rgmerk 3y ago
This has almost nothing to do with the topic at hand, which was a commentary on the value of a functioning market for electricity (I hesitate to call it a "free" market because any electricity market ends up having a lot of rules). I personally think Gen IV nuclear reactors have stuff-all chance of competing in such a market, but if somebody believes otherwise and wants to put up the dollars to try, all power to them.
- fragmede 3y ago
  I wouldn't say that a technology which would dump a ton of supply, affecting, if not disrupting the market, has "almost nothing to do with the topic at hand". it's unfortunately a bit of a fantasy and years out from being possible due to a natural disaster setting the industry back by yet another a decade but it's totally relevant for a threaded forum.
  - rgmerk 3y ago
    SMRs are going to have relatively high capital costs and (hopefully) low but non-zero operating costs. They will probably have similar ramping characteristics to coal. As such, they will probably operate like coal - generating most of the time when able to and get their lunch eaten by zero-marginal-cost solar in the middle of the day. One thing SMRs will absolutely not be used for is as peakers, which is where market design matters is most important for keeping the lights on at an affordable cost.
    - mythhabit 3y ago
      Both France and Germany have nuclear plants with load following capabilities to the tune of 5% change per minute. That is 50-100MW change every minute for a single powerplant. It might not be peak-peak, but it is certainly going to handle the vast majority of all electricity generation with very small delay.
      - rgmerk 3y ago
        Sure, I get that you can ramp nuclear plants, technically, but it’s highly unlikely to be economically attractive to build new ones with the intention of ramping them a lot. If SMRs are built, I’d expect many of them to be accompanied by batteries (either co-located or elsewhere on the grid) to be used as an alternative to ramping.
ok_dad 3y ago
It’s money. Look at the cost of nuclear, the real cost with mining, development, construction, maintenance, and decommissioning. It’s way more than the market can bear, and it won’t get any cheaper. You also need a guaranteed pipeline of nuclear operators and an iron clad corporate safety culture to ensure there aren’t any mistakes ever. I love nuclear tech, but it’s just not feasible today compared to other tech.
bee_rider 3y ago
Invest in both, I don’t think nuclear is the future but wouldn’t mind being wrong. To pay for it, raise taxes on fossil fuels.
- baq 3y ago
  It doesn’t look like we have any alternatives in the next three decades until fusion is viable :wink:
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    Yea it always seems like there’s some technology right around the corner that’s a better plan than the renewables we could be installing right now. Might as well use petrochemicals for another couple quarters!
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  Invest proportional to the risk. Nuclear is a very risky investment. But it might pay off. The financial risk level is why it is so dependent on state subsidies and tax payer money. Without that, nuclear operators would be going bankrupt and no sane investor would risk their money on it. The risks include lengthy delays, cost overruns, policy issues, safety related cost, and much more. Some of those things might be fixable. But there are no guarantees. And without prices for nuclear energy coming down substantially, the resulting technology is not viable in the market. It might happen but it's not looking like that would happen before there's a few more tw more renewable capacity online in the next few decades. Solar, wind, and other renewables are very popular investments right now. There are very clear learning effects visible when implementing them resulting on year on year cost reductions. These investments have a very reliable ROI. A very predictable and quick implementation. And they are easy to scale. That's why so much new capacity is coming online vs. the absolutely pitiful amounts of nuclear being added to the grid. The price gap is basically an order of magnitude and growing. You get about 10x more capacity in renewables for the same money. The realized capacity gap also is much larger for the same reason.
RandomLensman 3y ago
Nuclear so far is very expensive and hasn't shown a great price trajectory. It remains unclear if new designs would realize better price points if they were to become reality.
stephen_g 3y ago
Part of the reason is because they none have actually been built yet, and there would take even longer to perfect them. You could say that that is a reason for that is under-investment, but you can't say things like "they solve all our climate change-related challenges" about something that doesn't exit yet...
anjel 3y ago
They make nifty hard targets in military conflicts as a certain dictator who likes invading sovereign countries recently innovated.

cyberax 3y ago

Small modular reactors have almost nothing but disadvantages compared to the good old large-scale PWRs. The ONLY advantage of SMRs is that they are easier to build because only a handful of companies in the _world_ possess technology to build reactor vessels for large-scale PWRs. And none of them are in the US.

pstuart 3y ago
We have yet to see, as they've yet to truly enter the market. So far, the record's not been good for large plants -- they tend to go way over budget and schedule. Case in point: Vogtle.
- Animats 3y ago
  NuScale's price has already gone 60%-70% over budget, and they haven't even built anything yet.[1] [1] https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Are-Small-Scale-Modular-Reactors-Becoming-Too-Expensive.html https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Are-Sm...
  - pstuart 3y ago
    The factors cited were inflation and higher interest rates, which are going to be universally applicable. Cost overruns at Vogtle and others had inflation as a partial factor but the bigger issues, per the DOE: "Work began with incomplete designs and managers repeatedly failed to realistically schedule tasks. Experienced workers were in short supply and defective work often had to be redone. Workers quit for other jobs and the COVID-19 pandemic led to high absenteeism." So a pass on Covid impact but the rest is the result of building a huge bespoke power plant. SMRs change all of that to units of mass production. I'm sure there's still issues to solve there but if nuclear has a future competing against low cost renewables then that SMRs seem to be the only way forward.
- fodkodrasz 3y ago
  That is mostly because there are no more large scale nuclear investments, lot of knowhow has been lost, everything is custom built now on every level of implementation (which SMRs promise to solve), and because people care about the initial investments, not for the TCO. Oh, and politically motivated NIH red-tape for getting some votes on the cost of whole society.
  - cinntaile 3y ago
    Nuclear benefits from stable output, but the world we're in doesn't require stable output so the economics become difficult.
    - fodkodrasz 3y ago
      This is not true.
      - cinntaile 3y ago
        You really refuted my argument there.
        fodkodrasz 3y ago
        I'm simply tired of wasting time on renewable-energy-battery-storage fan service. We need stable power output.
        cinntaile 3y ago
        I don't get it, I didn't mention any of that? You're refusing to answer due to an imaginary reason you yourself came up with... Alright then.
        kwhitefoot 3y ago
        You didn't make an argument, you merely stated something that the respondent disputes. There is a very stable base load in most countries that can be well provided with nuclear. This is especially the case when there are good interconnections between neighbouring countries.
- cyberax 3y ago
  Rosatom is exporting nuclear power plants within budget and (mostly) on time. It's simply a question of expertise and experience. The US and Europe have ignored nuclear power for so long, that most expertise was lost long ago. And each new nuclear power plant becomes a unique snowflake.
  - cinntaile 3y ago
    Nobody in the western world is going to buy Russian power plants any time soon.
    - cyberax 3y ago
      Of course. Russia needs to be isolated. I'm just saying that it's _possible_ to construct reactors within reasonable timeframes. Russia and China can do that, so can other countries.
asynchronous 3y ago
Since they’re small they can be placed far closer to urban hubs and other places that suck electricity. The last design plans I saw one could fit within a single city block, buried under ground with only 1 story exposed.
- cyberax 3y ago
  > The last design plans I saw one could fit within a single city block, buried under ground with only 1 story exposed. This is a completely unrealistic plan, designed to lure investors. An SMR meltdown will produce enough radioactive contamination to make a small city unlivable, at least for a while. So you'll need a full containment building. You'll need emergency generators, coolant pumps, etc. Then you have a question of security, an easily accessible reactor will provide a great target for terrorism. So you'll need a perimeter around it with armed guards. Then there's a question of control. A working reactor requires at least two trained nuclear engineers on duty at all times. So each reactor will likely need around 15 highly specialized engineers. That will have to live within a commuting distance. Sounds bad already. But that's not all. There's also a question of inspections, something like the NRC can be reasonably expected to regulate several hundred reactors. They are not prepared to inspect many thousands of reactors. And the last thing I personally want is a "self-regulating" nuclear industry. Any _realistic_ SMR power plant will look just like a regular large nuclear plant, except that it'll have multiple reactor units instead of just one large reactor.
  - kwhitefoot 3y ago
    There are designs for modular reactors that are inherently safe. Using subcritical reactors and a particle beam. See Aker Solutions: https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featureaker-s-ads-uses-thorium https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featureaker-s-ads-uses-... Haven't seen any news from them recently though.
    - cyberax 3y ago
      They are not "inherently safe". Reactors that produce power (in large quantities) are dangerous because fission products are radioactive, and they produce energy even after the chain reaction stops. So once cooling is lost, these fission products can melt through the reactor vessel and escape the confinement. Also, accelerator-driven reactors are just bonkers. They make no freaking sense for power generation. They are being investigated because they can produce very energetic neutrons, in quantities that are large enough to transmute some long-lived nuclear waste.

rgmerk 3y ago

This has almost nothing to do with the topic at hand, which was a commentary on the value of a functioning market for electricity (I hesitate to call it a "free" market because any electricity market ends up having a lot of rules). I personally think Gen IV nuclear reactors have stuff-all chance of competing in such a market, but if somebody believes otherwise and wants to put up the dollars to try, all power to them.

fragmede 3y ago
I wouldn't say that a technology which would dump a ton of supply, affecting, if not disrupting the market, has "almost nothing to do with the topic at hand". it's unfortunately a bit of a fantasy and years out from being possible due to a natural disaster setting the industry back by yet another a decade but it's totally relevant for a threaded forum.
- rgmerk 3y ago
  SMRs are going to have relatively high capital costs and (hopefully) low but non-zero operating costs. They will probably have similar ramping characteristics to coal. As such, they will probably operate like coal - generating most of the time when able to and get their lunch eaten by zero-marginal-cost solar in the middle of the day. One thing SMRs will absolutely not be used for is as peakers, which is where market design matters is most important for keeping the lights on at an affordable cost.
  - mythhabit 3y ago
    Both France and Germany have nuclear plants with load following capabilities to the tune of 5% change per minute. That is 50-100MW change every minute for a single powerplant. It might not be peak-peak, but it is certainly going to handle the vast majority of all electricity generation with very small delay.
    - rgmerk 3y ago
      Sure, I get that you can ramp nuclear plants, technically, but it’s highly unlikely to be economically attractive to build new ones with the intention of ramping them a lot. If SMRs are built, I’d expect many of them to be accompanied by batteries (either co-located or elsewhere on the grid) to be used as an alternative to ramping.

ok_dad 3y ago

It’s money. Look at the cost of nuclear, the real cost with mining, development, construction, maintenance, and decommissioning. It’s way more than the market can bear, and it won’t get any cheaper. You also need a guaranteed pipeline of nuclear operators and an iron clad corporate safety culture to ensure there aren’t any mistakes ever. I love nuclear tech, but it’s just not feasible today compared to other tech.

bee_rider 3y ago

Invest in both, I don’t think nuclear is the future but wouldn’t mind being wrong. To pay for it, raise taxes on fossil fuels.

baq 3y ago
It doesn’t look like we have any alternatives in the next three decades until fusion is viable :wink:
- bee_rider 3y ago
  Yea it always seems like there’s some technology right around the corner that’s a better plan than the renewables we could be installing right now. Might as well use petrochemicals for another couple quarters!
jillesvangurp 3y ago
Invest proportional to the risk. Nuclear is a very risky investment. But it might pay off. The financial risk level is why it is so dependent on state subsidies and tax payer money. Without that, nuclear operators would be going bankrupt and no sane investor would risk their money on it. The risks include lengthy delays, cost overruns, policy issues, safety related cost, and much more. Some of those things might be fixable. But there are no guarantees. And without prices for nuclear energy coming down substantially, the resulting technology is not viable in the market. It might happen but it's not looking like that would happen before there's a few more tw more renewable capacity online in the next few decades. Solar, wind, and other renewables are very popular investments right now. There are very clear learning effects visible when implementing them resulting on year on year cost reductions. These investments have a very reliable ROI. A very predictable and quick implementation. And they are easy to scale. That's why so much new capacity is coming online vs. the absolutely pitiful amounts of nuclear being added to the grid. The price gap is basically an order of magnitude and growing. You get about 10x more capacity in renewables for the same money. The realized capacity gap also is much larger for the same reason.

RandomLensman 3y ago

Nuclear so far is very expensive and hasn't shown a great price trajectory. It remains unclear if new designs would realize better price points if they were to become reality.

stephen_g 3y ago

Part of the reason is because they none have actually been built yet, and there would take even longer to perfect them. You could say that that is a reason for that is under-investment, but you can't say things like "they solve all our climate change-related challenges" about something that doesn't exit yet...

anjel 3y ago

They make nifty hard targets in military conflicts as a certain dictator who likes invading sovereign countries recently innovated.