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Illinois Senate approves plan to allow new nuclear reactors
- mtillman 3y agoExcellent news! Clinton should be receiving a second on the site as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Power_Station
- Krasnol 3y agoMeanwhile, in Utah: > NuScale Power (SMR.N) said on Wednesday it has agreed with a power group in Utah to terminate the company's small modular reactor project, dealing a blow to U.S. ambitions for a wave of nuclear energy to fight climate change and sending NuScale's shares down 20%. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nuscale-power-uamps-agree-terminate-nuclear-project-2023-11-08/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nuscale-power-uamps-...
- Animats 3y agoTheir cost estimates kept going up, and they hadn't even started construction.
- lnsru 3y agoIt can’t go down with probably hundred levels of subcontractors. 80 of them are paid to manage their project plans and couple do actual job. I assume, that the real pay for the job done is a small fraction of the overall cost. Heck the solar panel 6 kW installation on the house near by took few weeks and there were 5 companies involved.
- outside1234 3y agoThis is one of those things where you want a lot of people looking at everything in duplicate because it is six orders of magnitude less expensive than the alternative.
- lnsru 3y agoI doubt anybody is really physically going to construction site more than needed by some obscure standard and checking anything.
- Krasnol 3y agoSo like with everything nuclear?
- bhhaskin 3y agoOnly way it makes sense is to do it all in house like SpaceX. But that is a tall order.
- cyberax 3y agoSMR never made any financial sense. They are far inferior to large-scale PWRs in almost all regards. The SMRs' _only_ advantage was the relative ease of construction. Only a handful of companies in the _world_ can construct reactor vessels for large-scale PWRs, and none of these companies are in the US. SMRs can be constructed domestically.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoRussia has a floating nuclear power stations in the Far East: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov I was surprised they even had that, but they do have nuclear powered ice breakers, so I guess it makes sense.
- cyberax 3y agoAkademic Lomonosov is a prestige project, it wouldn't be economical by itself. It makes sense as a portable power plant for emergencies, or for remote military/mining outposts where economics are different.
- tiahura 3y agoIn the early 80s, the field trips to the station at Cordova included a tour of the control room. I'm guessing times have changed?
- kevinmchugh 3y agoIllinois is the most nuclear state in the union, as well as the home of the first manmade nuclear reactor. I grew up very near the forests where they buried that reactor, and never got any powers from it. A high school friend was named after the Byron, Illinois nuclear plant, which his father had worked on.
- vidanay 3y agoI lived in Hickory Hills for a while as a kid. We'd ride our bikes all the way out to Red Gate on a Saturday morning. No super powers here either.
- andrewstuart 3y agoHave you run a Geiger counter over yourself and your possessions?
- kunwon1 3y agoMy father was a welding foreman on the Byron plant. He always took great pride in that. Later in life he was a lineman, he liked to point out the huge transmission towers that he built as we drove past them
- toomuchtodo 3y agoMy grandfather did sheet metal work at Zion. Was also proud of his work (kept the press he used in his garage after he retired). Was a different time I suppose.
- HankB99 3y agoWe were camping at Illinois Beach SP. When we turned in, the plant was humming. In the morning it was silent. I wonder if we were there when it shut down for good.
- sophacles 3y agoMy uncle was a welder on that project. I wonder if they worked together? (He was a pipefitter and welded big pipes - interesting challenges there between unusual materials and the sheer size of the pipes).
- bfrog 3y agoGreat, because we could really use some modern nuclear power plants here. We do not have the natural resources to provide power base with wind/solar alone and in all likelihood even with large storage banks it would be very hard to compete with what amounts to an atomic battery in nuclear fuel rods.
- mschuster91 3y ago> We do not have the natural resources to provide power base with wind/solar alone Well, that's what you have a national grid for. China for example has links that go way more than 2.000km - that's more than enough distance to transfer power in times of low wind or whatever around.
- dsauerbrun 3y agoI'm not an electrical engineer but it sounds implausible for power to be transferred that far without losing a bunch of it in the process, unless you have massive cables.
- jeffbee 3y agoHVDC loses 3% in 1000 km, depending on the value of "HV".
- bb88 3y agoMaybe take some EE courses then? They're not that hard... From EE101: P=V * I. But power transmission losses are I^2 * R. So one way to transmit large amounts of power with low losses is to, well, turn the voltage up and use a lower current. And with lower current, you can use smaller cables. And in fact, that's what we do. That's why your power lines to your house are thousands of volts and the transformer hanging on the pole will convert it into 220V (but with higher current to run your hair dryer, say).
- SECProto 3y ago> I'm not an electrical engineer but it sounds implausible for power to be transferred that far without losing a bunch of it in the process, unless you have massive cables. Read up about Hydro Quebec. They generate gigawatts in Northern Quebec and export large amounts to New England. HVDC is pretty efficient. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydro-Qu%C3%A9bec's_electricity_transmission_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydro-Qu%C3%A9bec's_electricit...
- howmayiannoyyou 3y agoIllinois and other former industrial states badly need this having lost much of their manufacturing base to southern states, Mexico, etc. The exodus has been accompanied by migration from these states, elsewhere. Anything that creates an economic incentive for good paying manufacturing jobs to return to these states - even if its a decade away - needs to happen.
- bell-cot 3y ago> Anything that creates an economic incentive for good paying manufacturing jobs to return to these states... The article talks a lot about carbon-free electricity by 2045, but I see nothing about where the SMR's might be manufactured. Between the Mississippi River and St. Lawrence Seaway - SMR's could easily be brought in from ~anywhere on earth.
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- toomuchtodo 3y agoStellantis is opening the Belvidere plant back up as part of their contact with the UAW. Rivian builds in Normal.
- chasil 3y agoI live in Illinois, and we have the exact same GE design that was used in Fukushima on the banks of the Mississippi. Anything that we build in the future must be walk-away safe, a Gen4 reactor or better. There can't be any question of exploding cooling ponds or other surprises with (design) flaws in safety systems. This obviously rules out diesel generators in the basement. Over the years, there have been nagging stories of drones that overfly reactors. We have no idea who is collecting this data or what they want with it. We have to reach much higher safety standards than the elderly fleet of reactors that remains with us. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2020/09/07/dozens-more-drone-incursions-over-us-nuclear-power-plants-revealed/?sh=6d09c6846296 https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2020/09/07/dozens...
- vidanay 3y agoWith one major difference...the Mississippi River isn't subject to the same seismic (New Madrid notwithstanding) and tsunami events.
- lucb1e 3y agoI would indeed be curious about the risk as estimated by Japan and Illinois about their respective reactors before and after the Fukushima disaster, before forming an opinion on whether this is actually a problem. As you say, there's likely fundamental differences not obvious from the provided rhetoric...
- chasil 3y agoHowever, I don't know what these drones are doing. 36 hours. That's all it takes.
- methodical 3y agoThis. Having ongoing concerns from a once-in-a-lifetime perfect storm of an event such as Fukushima in application to a facility that is not vulnerable to nearly any of the series of worst-case scenario events is simply doomerism. This is exactly the kind of mindset that has prevented the US as a country from developing nuclear power in any substantial fashion for the last 50 or so years. In that timeframe, it's not unlikely to assume we could have a much more substantial amount of our energy produced by nuclear power; if not completely deprecating coal power plants. At the moment, barring magical energy sources that haven't been proven in any meaningful sense, nuclear technology has shown itself to have the fewest long-term consequences and the highest efficiency. However, it is unfortunately also the easiest to point to a few events in history and easily make the layman cast doubt on its safety. It's worth pointing out that the most significant nuclear accident in history took place in the USSR (which wasn't particularly notorious for its safety protocols), on a reactor that had several known design flaws that were ignored, and the only other major accident representing a one in a thousand years perfect-storm that overcame several redundancies. This concern about "drones" in relation to nuclear power plants is borderline paranoia. Are you concerned about drones dropping bombs or somehow disabling safety systems on a nuclear reactor? Every single nuclear power in the world has nuclear power plants, so they're all equally susceptible to the same attack in the same way that they're all equally capable of responding to said attack- mutually assured destruction as it goes.
- HDThoreaun 3y agoNuclear energy is so economically inefficient that the biggest political scandal in Illinois this decade is about the nuclear company bribing political leaders for subsidies. Their former CEO is going to jail over it. The long time political boss was finally indicted over it. Hard to comprehend how blatant bribes have to be in this state to be prosecuted. I'd love to see expanded nuclear, but if that requires corruption it's a tough pill for me.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoTheir economic inefficiency are mostly due to high capital costs needed to build a plant and high insurance costs. Renewables provide much greater bang for buck now, although you need to build them in the right locations that Illinois may lack (and getting transmission in from the great plains might not be viable?). Maybe China will finally deliver some cheap reactors to work with, although I assume they are running into the same problems that we did (and corruption is a bit problematic with nuclear power plants).
- jeffbee 3y agoIllinois already has tons of wind and just-offshore wind in the Great Lakes has a LCOE of $60/MWh which is less than half the claimed cost of new nuclear and roughly 10x less than the actual cost of recent nuclear.
- JeremyNT 3y agoI not infrequently drive between Chicago and Nashville and I'm struck by how many turbines I pass if I take a route that goes through Indiana. For whatever reason I see far fewer on the route that stays in Illinois, which isn't very far to the west. I wonder why this might be? Just a quirk of where the highways run? Interestingly Illinois actually doesn't have a very large coastline. Would it be sufficient for off shore wind? I guess it is convenient that Chicago is right on the lake, and the city must represent a huge percentage of Illinois power consumption.
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