9 ms·

What drives this madness on small modular nuclear reactors?

54 points by jdkee 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
vlovich123 3y ago
I’m liberal, I agree with the right that nuclear power is the only path to replace nuclear, I agree with the left that climate change is a major problem and that nuclear power has risks. I disagree with the right heavily about the security risks of nuclear. They feel extremely overblown. But the track record of renewables is that they fail to offset fossil fuels in any meaningful way. We take it as an accomplishment when a single random day in a country is 100% renewable. Meanwhile France is nearly 100% fossil free energy every single day of the year. And when Germany cut back on nuclear, renewables fail to absorb that and fossil fuel use went up. So our choice is to focus on political problems and fix those but they feel intractable so people focus on the positives of renewables and because it’s “easier” (no messy / scary political issues) but ignore the fundamental technical difficulties of using renewables to replace fossil fuels. Yeah sure, nuclear has lots of problems and risks. Most of the cost issues are self-imposed. Cleanup costs fail to be factored in for political reasons but at the same time it’s not trillions of dollars per plant and we also do have enough research to know there’s reasonable paths that we’ll get to of building reactors that can’t melt down. re security concerns, take for example North Korea which has been nearly globally embargoed but yet still has built successful nuclear weapons. They struggle with ICBMs because that’s what it would take. By comparison, Iran has been subjected to all kinds of targeted military and covert action to sabotage their nuclear program. By all accounts those actions have kind of been successful in the sense that experts agree it’s going to take Iran longer to create those weapons, but it’s a question of if not when. That’s why I’m so frustrated by critics of Obama’s Iran deal. The 0 tolerance approach is not going to work and the Obama deal had the best concessions from Iran that we’re going to get - it’s not going to be better when Iran actually has nuclear weapons. And Iranians have AFAIK been very honest players in terms of at least trying to stick to the Iran nuclear deal even after Trump blew it up. The primary problem there is that Iran is a geopolitical enemy of Israel which complicates things a lot (a stronger Iran that a nuclear deal allowed for is a problem for other security issues in the region). But notice how none of those issues have anything to do with enrichment capabilities of civilian nuclear reactors. And generating fissile material is not the bottleneck for building those weapons. So it’s all silly FUD-driven BS we pick up from movies and imagining things than actual problems on the ground.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  > But the track record of renewables is that they fail to offset fossil fuels in any meaningful way. Renewables have been well over half of new power generation capacity for the last couple of years. But it'll take many years before the relative changes look significant in absolute numbers.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    But you get how big of a failure that is for climate change right? Like we’ve been doing this for some 20 years now and renewables still don’t have any real answer for storage which is what would be needed to meaningfully increase that absolute number further. And you need way more than half of new power generation capacity to actually meaningfully shift the mix. It needs to be above 100% because we have a fuckton of already existing power generation capacity and all that power generation is a problem because it needs replacement and we can’t wait for plants to simply age out and get replaced with new installations. We’re waaay past that point. And again, you can’t get there because of storage and storage is an intractable technical problem where “just throw batteries at it” is a flippant answer. We grow battery energy density very slowly. It’s expected to double by 2030 and triply by 2040. But our energy demands grow very quickly & we’re talking about a world where most people don’t actually have as cheap easy access to energy as we take for granted in the West. We also are talking about using a significant chunk of that capacity and using it to replace existing cars (which don’t get me wrong - you 100% need batteries for cars because it’s the only way to connect renewables to automotive). Then you’ve got shipping which everyone ignores and I don’t see a path forward there except to have nuclear reactors on commercial ships going all over the place (but that would 100% require molten salt or other reactors that can’t melt down).
    - bryanlarsen 3y ago
      In absolute terms we've accomplished very little in 20 years. But 2023 is way ahead of 2003 in three significant ways. 1) EV's have a TCO lower than gasoline vehicles. 2) Renewable power generation is cheaper than fossil power generation. 3) Heat pumps are cheaper than fossil heating In 2003 nobody ever thought that we would ever get to this stage. Everybody assumed that we'd need massive subsidies to switch to carbon free sources. They were hopeful that once we got to mass scale rollout that the prices would be competitive but getting below parity was seen as completely unrealistic.
vasco 3y ago
> Many of the individuals or groups would deny vociferously that the motivations and logical fallacies that I’m going to attribute to them are accurate, even as they would feel a frisson of cognitive dissonance that tells them something is not quite right. In most cases, these people and groups believe that they are correct and that their positions are rational and carefully thought through A sad realization in life is realizing regardless of how right one can be, the ones who are wrong many times fall into this, moreover sometimes as groups, reinforcing each other. A sadder thing is realizing you suffer from it too.
mdorazio 3y ago
So many nuclear proponents, including a large number of people here on HN, make the mistake of looking at relative costs and capabilities of power generation sources from 10 or even 5 years ago and then forming positions based on that. As the article points out, this is just straight-up bad thinking. Any new nuclear project is realistically going to take a minimum of 6 years to reach commercial production, compared to about 2 for a large-scale renewable + storage project. So any honest evaluation needs to look at the trends and project them out to 2030, and then form a conclusion about which is the better choice. In most (not all) cases, renewable + storage wins easily.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  > In most (not all) cases, renewable + storage wins easily. We don't live in a free market. As the article notes, coal towns - among other places - seem to be excited by SMNR. I can easily see politicians earmarking billions for old coal plants to become SMNRs even if it doesn't make sense financially, and putting windmills or solar or whatever would be more economical, create more jobs, etc. Where there's a political will, there's a way. Economics only matter so much. Think of the amount of value that can be created in a private company by the government overpaying a bit for electricity for SMNRs to be built. When you're looking at that amount of wealth, someone is going to buy the right politicians. This is how the system works. Not what actually makes physical sense.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    Let's see and wait if these SMRs ever materialize in any number that matters.
- bobim 3y ago
  Any comparison is nevertheless flawed as we are not paying for the 100 000 years long problem that nuclear creates. We act here in the same way we are doing with fossil energy: we live the good life now and let generations to come pay our bill. Nuclear is the only way we can continue to sustain our growth-based society, no wonder billionaires are backing it up. Instead we should face our responsibility and stop creating problems for our kids. Walk, don’t eat meat, be happy with what we have.
paulsutter 3y ago
Fusion will be practical long before the problems of fission are solved. Obviously photovoltaic is amazing and batteries are on a beautiful cost curve to help us with storage and there's alway pumped water, etc But fusion will take us to the stars, and depending on how small it can be, may help in lots of other applications
- jemmyw 3y ago
  Fission will be practical (now) long before the problems of fusion are solved (maybe never).
- whatshisface 3y ago
  Fusion has fission's biggest problem, which is the creation of large amounts of low-grade nuclear waste in the form of activated, radiation weakened reactor parts.
  - avalys 3y ago
    That doesn’t seem to be fission’s biggest problem.
  - gary_0 3y ago
    Some of the more whackadoodle fusion plant designs (which nonetheless have millions in funding and early prototypes built) get around this by doing the fusion in a blanket of liquid metal, or by using aneutronic fusion (which requires ridiculously high temperatures), or by using the neutron activation to breed more fuel.
  - willis936 3y ago
    That isn't remotely close to fusion's biggest challenge. If you can generate 1 GWe for 30 years and deal with a small warehouse of low level waste for a few decades that is a nothingburger. The biggest challenges to fusion is making a reactor quickly, cheaply, and with reasonable uptime / maintenance.
    - webnrrd2k 3y ago
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
There is a small, but influential component of the "oh my gerdz, carbon bad!" crowd that hate nuclear. They're careful not to argue on the merits, as they'd be exposed as the ridiculous supervillains that they are. They don't want humanity to have absurd amounts of energy. They believe in an ascetic philosophy where, should there be any humans still around at all, they should be suffering with whatever the minimum amount of energy is that they can get away with. They don't want you to be able to drive anywhere. Small little walkable cities, that no one can hope to escape from.
- SturgeonsLaw 3y ago
  Sure, but these people are a fringe group, and largely a caricature. Most people just want to be able to live a comfortable life and not damage the planet we live on in the process. I guarantee you that if limitless, clean, cheap energy became the norm then the vast, vast majority of the world (and probably even these ascetics) would make use of it, and it would be beneficial for humanity. Also - in the absence of such an energy source, minimising usage of polluting energy is a good move.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    > Sure, but these people are a fringe group, a I see little evidence that they are a disavowed fringe group. I see alot of evidence that they're at the top, in control, and at least clever enough to dodge questions about their position on nuclear. That is, when they're not outright lying about it. It's not a new development, this was evident since at least the early 1990s. > I guarantee you that if limitless, clean, cheap energy became the norm then the vast, vast majority of the world But that's irrelevant. You speak as if "if this technology magically falls into our laps". Technology does not do that. It requires effort and money and time, and these people have done what they can to worm their way into positions where they're in charge of doling out those things. There's another comment whining about how it would take at least "6" years to get moving with nuclear. This, to them, is an argument against. To me, it's an argument for even more hurry. If things take awhile to get moving, you don't put them off even longer. Most people are so ignorant of all of this, that they exert absolutely no influence in one direction or the other. What they want will matter little in the end.
gary_0 3y ago
The article kind of answers its own question in 2 sentences: > But gigawatt scale reactors are easy to turn into bespoke engineering megaprojects. Custom engineering for every site foregoes economies of manufacturing scale. My core impression of the SMR enthusiasm was that it would be really great if we had a few factories pumping out "nuclear energy pods" on an assembly-line, and then those modules could be plopped down anywhere and plugged into the grid. Energy problem solved. The issues with the economic inefficiency of smaller reactors could be solved with a sprinkling of Technology Dust from the Innovation Fairy. How about an equally starry-eyed idea: We build out the grid worldwide, and then just build one giant reactor complex per continent; we get nuclear economy of scale, but we don't ship the reactors to different locations, we ship their energy output instead. As for any problems with economic inefficiency (or the limits of HVDC transmission lines) I again invoke the Innovation Fairy.
- throwawayqqq11 3y ago
  With small scale reactors in large numbers, you also drastically extend the surface area for problems like human errors or accidents, natural catastrophies or even manufactoring errors. I dont thing SMRs are a good idea. Not to mention the waste...
  - gary_0 3y ago
    I can think of even more problems. Off the top of my head: the manufacture of SMR modules would be, by design, centralized into a few large, well-funded entities needing lots of government permits. The probability of corruption, mismanagement, or political bikeshedding would be pretty high. In the worst case, SMRs would just take the various problems large reactor projects have and gather them into one manufacturing choke-point.
skglaofj 3y ago
It’s power of the other kind driving this. Nuclear materials are controllable militarily and therefore nuclear power is controllable, and controlled by the existing geopolitical power structure. “We can supply your energy but we need to also provide a small military base to secure it. And don’t upset us or your lights go off” is very different to abundant and freely available
- dhsofifnsk 3y ago
  Peculiar to see this downvoted. Clearly nuclear inputs and outputs are restricted to Permitted Countries. Renewable energy inputs and hydrogen can be abundant and uncontrollable. The nuclear industries links to militarism are incontestable. Globally freely abundant energy cannot be solved unless you remove restrictions on nuclear inputs and outputs. If you retain control over them, maintain control over energy. This logic isn’t discussed either due to a lack of understanding geopolitics, or wilfully ignoring the power and control implicit in nuclear power most likely due to a preference for being part of that power structure
  - Turing_Machine 3y ago
    > Peculiar to see this downvoted. Solar cells are "controllable" too. They're just controlled by China.
    - ehfoeirjrjs 3y ago
      There will be limited domestic support to invade someone over the manufacture of solar panels. The sun isn’t getting blocked by anyone either. Your point reinforces the parent — geopolitical control is the reason for nuclear investment due to an inability to compete on manufacturing. We rarely see the broader picture being discussed as the science and engineering is thought to dominate, but the problem is more geopolitical than people want to acknowledge. We will solve clean energy if and only if we don’t lose control
    - audunw 3y ago
      It wouldn’t be hard to replace China for solar cells. Especially if the west starts to shift investments and manpower away from fossil fuels.
gumby 3y ago
I think people get distracted by small, modular nukes we do have on spacecraft and the ones used in the navy for aircraft carriers and subs. Those specialized applications get to ignore issues that are very important to terrestrial civilian application. For example certain kinds of maintenance is handled more frequently than is economically viable in non-military environments, while other kinds of maintenance (& refueling perhaps?) are not required as the entire device is disposed of at the end of life. Also they are surrounded at all times by extremely armed guards :-). This is the same kind of overfitting you see from tech enthusiasts who, say, look at a CPU with a high clock speed and assume X and Y, not realizing all the other aspects that go into the design of a full system. Or wild zomg claims about so-called AI.
viraptor 3y ago
For a post about how small reactors don't make sense economically, there's a lot of narrative and opinion and basically no useful numbers. You can spin any story/justification for your idea about reactors, but if the you can't base it on data, what's the point?
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  It's not about why they don't make sense, though it briefly reviews that and yes "economically" is a good one word summary of why they don't make sense. The article is about why they remain popular despite not making sense.
upsidesinclude 3y ago
This whole argument hinges on believing the opinion of the writer, who tries to assure you that he is very informed and you don't need any data to get in the way of the message. While he may or may not be accurate in his assessment at this time, he manages to gloss over any number of historical factors that have brought us to this junction. Continuing to invest in nuclear is a good idea. There is money to do so and yes, the military provides much of that. And they control an immense amount of fissile material. Wouldn't it be great if there was a future where that material, which has been mined at great cost, refined at immense cost and handled at astounding cost could be used to benefit the populace that have afforded it? The huge arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world only has one way to make its exit. I'd rather we continued to work on an alternative.

54 points by jdkee 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

I’m liberal, I agree with the right that nuclear power is the only path to replace nuclear, I agree with the left that climate change is a major problem and that nuclear power has risks. I disagree with the right heavily about the security risks of nuclear. They feel extremely overblown. But the track record of renewables is that they fail to offset fossil fuels in any meaningful way. We take it as an accomplishment when a single random day in a country is 100% renewable. Meanwhile France is nearly 100% fossil free energy every single day of the year. And when Germany cut back on nuclear, renewables fail to absorb that and fossil fuel use went up. So our choice is to focus on political problems and fix those but they feel intractable so people focus on the positives of renewables and because it’s “easier” (no messy / scary political issues) but ignore the fundamental technical difficulties of using renewables to replace fossil fuels. Yeah sure, nuclear has lots of problems and risks. Most of the cost issues are self-imposed. Cleanup costs fail to be factored in for political reasons but at the same time it’s not trillions of dollars per plant and we also do have enough research to know there’s reasonable paths that we’ll get to of building reactors that can’t melt down. re security concerns, take for example North Korea which has been nearly globally embargoed but yet still has built successful nuclear weapons. They struggle with ICBMs because that’s what it would take. By comparison, Iran has been subjected to all kinds of targeted military and covert action to sabotage their nuclear program. By all accounts those actions have kind of been successful in the sense that experts agree it’s going to take Iran longer to create those weapons, but it’s a question of if not when. That’s why I’m so frustrated by critics of Obama’s Iran deal. The 0 tolerance approach is not going to work and the Obama deal had the best concessions from Iran that we’re going to get - it’s not going to be better when Iran actually has nuclear weapons. And Iranians have AFAIK been very honest players in terms of at least trying to stick to the Iran nuclear deal even after Trump blew it up. The primary problem there is that Iran is a geopolitical enemy of Israel which complicates things a lot (a stronger Iran that a nuclear deal allowed for is a problem for other security issues in the region). But notice how none of those issues have anything to do with enrichment capabilities of civilian nuclear reactors. And generating fissile material is not the bottleneck for building those weapons. So it’s all silly FUD-driven BS we pick up from movies and imagining things than actual problems on the ground.

bryanlarsen 3y ago
> But the track record of renewables is that they fail to offset fossil fuels in any meaningful way. Renewables have been well over half of new power generation capacity for the last couple of years. But it'll take many years before the relative changes look significant in absolute numbers.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  But you get how big of a failure that is for climate change right? Like we’ve been doing this for some 20 years now and renewables still don’t have any real answer for storage which is what would be needed to meaningfully increase that absolute number further. And you need way more than half of new power generation capacity to actually meaningfully shift the mix. It needs to be above 100% because we have a fuckton of already existing power generation capacity and all that power generation is a problem because it needs replacement and we can’t wait for plants to simply age out and get replaced with new installations. We’re waaay past that point. And again, you can’t get there because of storage and storage is an intractable technical problem where “just throw batteries at it” is a flippant answer. We grow battery energy density very slowly. It’s expected to double by 2030 and triply by 2040. But our energy demands grow very quickly & we’re talking about a world where most people don’t actually have as cheap easy access to energy as we take for granted in the West. We also are talking about using a significant chunk of that capacity and using it to replace existing cars (which don’t get me wrong - you 100% need batteries for cars because it’s the only way to connect renewables to automotive). Then you’ve got shipping which everyone ignores and I don’t see a path forward there except to have nuclear reactors on commercial ships going all over the place (but that would 100% require molten salt or other reactors that can’t melt down).
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    In absolute terms we've accomplished very little in 20 years. But 2023 is way ahead of 2003 in three significant ways. 1) EV's have a TCO lower than gasoline vehicles. 2) Renewable power generation is cheaper than fossil power generation. 3) Heat pumps are cheaper than fossil heating In 2003 nobody ever thought that we would ever get to this stage. Everybody assumed that we'd need massive subsidies to switch to carbon free sources. They were hopeful that once we got to mass scale rollout that the prices would be competitive but getting below parity was seen as completely unrealistic.

vasco 3y ago

> Many of the individuals or groups would deny vociferously that the motivations and logical fallacies that I’m going to attribute to them are accurate, even as they would feel a frisson of cognitive dissonance that tells them something is not quite right. In most cases, these people and groups believe that they are correct and that their positions are rational and carefully thought through A sad realization in life is realizing regardless of how right one can be, the ones who are wrong many times fall into this, moreover sometimes as groups, reinforcing each other. A sadder thing is realizing you suffer from it too.

mdorazio 3y ago

So many nuclear proponents, including a large number of people here on HN, make the mistake of looking at relative costs and capabilities of power generation sources from 10 or even 5 years ago and then forming positions based on that. As the article points out, this is just straight-up bad thinking. Any new nuclear project is realistically going to take a minimum of 6 years to reach commercial production, compared to about 2 for a large-scale renewable + storage project. So any honest evaluation needs to look at the trends and project them out to 2030, and then form a conclusion about which is the better choice. In most (not all) cases, renewable + storage wins easily.

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
> In most (not all) cases, renewable + storage wins easily. We don't live in a free market. As the article notes, coal towns - among other places - seem to be excited by SMNR. I can easily see politicians earmarking billions for old coal plants to become SMNRs even if it doesn't make sense financially, and putting windmills or solar or whatever would be more economical, create more jobs, etc. Where there's a political will, there's a way. Economics only matter so much. Think of the amount of value that can be created in a private company by the government overpaying a bit for electricity for SMNRs to be built. When you're looking at that amount of wealth, someone is going to buy the right politicians. This is how the system works. Not what actually makes physical sense.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  Let's see and wait if these SMRs ever materialize in any number that matters.
bobim 3y ago
Any comparison is nevertheless flawed as we are not paying for the 100 000 years long problem that nuclear creates. We act here in the same way we are doing with fossil energy: we live the good life now and let generations to come pay our bill. Nuclear is the only way we can continue to sustain our growth-based society, no wonder billionaires are backing it up. Instead we should face our responsibility and stop creating problems for our kids. Walk, don’t eat meat, be happy with what we have.

paulsutter 3y ago

Fusion will be practical long before the problems of fission are solved. Obviously photovoltaic is amazing and batteries are on a beautiful cost curve to help us with storage and there's alway pumped water, etc But fusion will take us to the stars, and depending on how small it can be, may help in lots of other applications

jemmyw 3y ago
Fission will be practical (now) long before the problems of fusion are solved (maybe never).
whatshisface 3y ago
Fusion has fission's biggest problem, which is the creation of large amounts of low-grade nuclear waste in the form of activated, radiation weakened reactor parts.
- avalys 3y ago
  That doesn’t seem to be fission’s biggest problem.
- gary_0 3y ago
  Some of the more whackadoodle fusion plant designs (which nonetheless have millions in funding and early prototypes built) get around this by doing the fusion in a blanket of liquid metal, or by using aneutronic fusion (which requires ridiculously high temperatures), or by using the neutron activation to breed more fuel.
- willis936 3y ago
  That isn't remotely close to fusion's biggest challenge. If you can generate 1 GWe for 30 years and deal with a small warehouse of low level waste for a few decades that is a nothingburger. The biggest challenges to fusion is making a reactor quickly, cheaply, and with reasonable uptime / maintenance.
  - webnrrd2k 3y ago

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

There is a small, but influential component of the "oh my gerdz, carbon bad!" crowd that hate nuclear. They're careful not to argue on the merits, as they'd be exposed as the ridiculous supervillains that they are. They don't want humanity to have absurd amounts of energy. They believe in an ascetic philosophy where, should there be any humans still around at all, they should be suffering with whatever the minimum amount of energy is that they can get away with. They don't want you to be able to drive anywhere. Small little walkable cities, that no one can hope to escape from.

SturgeonsLaw 3y ago
Sure, but these people are a fringe group, and largely a caricature. Most people just want to be able to live a comfortable life and not damage the planet we live on in the process. I guarantee you that if limitless, clean, cheap energy became the norm then the vast, vast majority of the world (and probably even these ascetics) would make use of it, and it would be beneficial for humanity. Also - in the absence of such an energy source, minimising usage of polluting energy is a good move.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  > Sure, but these people are a fringe group, a I see little evidence that they are a disavowed fringe group. I see alot of evidence that they're at the top, in control, and at least clever enough to dodge questions about their position on nuclear. That is, when they're not outright lying about it. It's not a new development, this was evident since at least the early 1990s. > I guarantee you that if limitless, clean, cheap energy became the norm then the vast, vast majority of the world But that's irrelevant. You speak as if "if this technology magically falls into our laps". Technology does not do that. It requires effort and money and time, and these people have done what they can to worm their way into positions where they're in charge of doling out those things. There's another comment whining about how it would take at least "6" years to get moving with nuclear. This, to them, is an argument against. To me, it's an argument for even more hurry. If things take awhile to get moving, you don't put them off even longer. Most people are so ignorant of all of this, that they exert absolutely no influence in one direction or the other. What they want will matter little in the end.

gary_0 3y ago

The article kind of answers its own question in 2 sentences: > But gigawatt scale reactors are easy to turn into bespoke engineering megaprojects. Custom engineering for every site foregoes economies of manufacturing scale. My core impression of the SMR enthusiasm was that it would be really great if we had a few factories pumping out "nuclear energy pods" on an assembly-line, and then those modules could be plopped down anywhere and plugged into the grid. Energy problem solved. The issues with the economic inefficiency of smaller reactors could be solved with a sprinkling of Technology Dust from the Innovation Fairy. How about an equally starry-eyed idea: We build out the grid worldwide, and then just build one giant reactor complex per continent; we get nuclear economy of scale, but we don't ship the reactors to different locations, we ship their energy output instead. As for any problems with economic inefficiency (or the limits of HVDC transmission lines) I again invoke the Innovation Fairy.

throwawayqqq11 3y ago
With small scale reactors in large numbers, you also drastically extend the surface area for problems like human errors or accidents, natural catastrophies or even manufactoring errors. I dont thing SMRs are a good idea. Not to mention the waste...
- gary_0 3y ago
  I can think of even more problems. Off the top of my head: the manufacture of SMR modules would be, by design, centralized into a few large, well-funded entities needing lots of government permits. The probability of corruption, mismanagement, or political bikeshedding would be pretty high. In the worst case, SMRs would just take the various problems large reactor projects have and gather them into one manufacturing choke-point.

skglaofj 3y ago

It’s power of the other kind driving this. Nuclear materials are controllable militarily and therefore nuclear power is controllable, and controlled by the existing geopolitical power structure. “We can supply your energy but we need to also provide a small military base to secure it. And don’t upset us or your lights go off” is very different to abundant and freely available

dhsofifnsk 3y ago
Peculiar to see this downvoted. Clearly nuclear inputs and outputs are restricted to Permitted Countries. Renewable energy inputs and hydrogen can be abundant and uncontrollable. The nuclear industries links to militarism are incontestable. Globally freely abundant energy cannot be solved unless you remove restrictions on nuclear inputs and outputs. If you retain control over them, maintain control over energy. This logic isn’t discussed either due to a lack of understanding geopolitics, or wilfully ignoring the power and control implicit in nuclear power most likely due to a preference for being part of that power structure
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  > Peculiar to see this downvoted. Solar cells are "controllable" too. They're just controlled by China.
  - ehfoeirjrjs 3y ago
    There will be limited domestic support to invade someone over the manufacture of solar panels. The sun isn’t getting blocked by anyone either. Your point reinforces the parent — geopolitical control is the reason for nuclear investment due to an inability to compete on manufacturing. We rarely see the broader picture being discussed as the science and engineering is thought to dominate, but the problem is more geopolitical than people want to acknowledge. We will solve clean energy if and only if we don’t lose control
  - audunw 3y ago
    It wouldn’t be hard to replace China for solar cells. Especially if the west starts to shift investments and manpower away from fossil fuels.

gumby 3y ago

I think people get distracted by small, modular nukes we do have on spacecraft and the ones used in the navy for aircraft carriers and subs. Those specialized applications get to ignore issues that are very important to terrestrial civilian application. For example certain kinds of maintenance is handled more frequently than is economically viable in non-military environments, while other kinds of maintenance (& refueling perhaps?) are not required as the entire device is disposed of at the end of life. Also they are surrounded at all times by extremely armed guards :-). This is the same kind of overfitting you see from tech enthusiasts who, say, look at a CPU with a high clock speed and assume X and Y, not realizing all the other aspects that go into the design of a full system. Or wild zomg claims about so-called AI.

viraptor 3y ago

For a post about how small reactors don't make sense economically, there's a lot of narrative and opinion and basically no useful numbers. You can spin any story/justification for your idea about reactors, but if the you can't base it on data, what's the point?

ZeroGravitas 3y ago
It's not about why they don't make sense, though it briefly reviews that and yes "economically" is a good one word summary of why they don't make sense. The article is about why they remain popular despite not making sense.

upsidesinclude 3y ago

This whole argument hinges on believing the opinion of the writer, who tries to assure you that he is very informed and you don't need any data to get in the way of the message. While he may or may not be accurate in his assessment at this time, he manages to gloss over any number of historical factors that have brought us to this junction. Continuing to invest in nuclear is a good idea. There is money to do so and yes, the military provides much of that. And they control an immense amount of fissile material. Wouldn't it be great if there was a future where that material, which has been mined at great cost, refined at immense cost and handled at astounding cost could be used to benefit the populace that have afforded it? The huge arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world only has one way to make its exit. I'd rather we continued to work on an alternative.