6 ms·

Exciting to see this - so many advantages to pebble bed nuclear reactors including inherent safety (no risk of meltdown), use of helium coolant, ease of waste r

• pstuart 3y ago
  If this helps China ween itself from coal faster then it's a huge win for the entire planet. I know there's a lot of hate for nuclear (much of it understandable), but if we hadn't fucked it up in the 70's then climate change would not be a thing right now. Yes, renewables and energy storage are good things too but the modern world is built on cheap energy and the more the merrier. Side note: I became enamored with LFTR when it started getting promoted back in the day and I still think that too would be worth tackling.
  • Krasnol 3y ago
    > Yes, renewables and energy storage are good things too but the modern world is built on cheap energy and the more the merrier. Yes, this is also why China invests more into renewables than in nuclear: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/06/renewables-in-china-trend-upward-while-nuclear-trends-flat/ https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/06/renewables-in-china-tre...
  • melling 3y ago
    China installed more renewable energy in 2023 than the United States has installed in its entire history.
    • pstuart 3y ago
      Yes, and that's great. But coal is still king and the enemy of coal is our friend: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-source-and-country?stackMode=absolute&country=~CHN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou... It shouldn't be an either or equation. It should be yes, and.
      • melling 3y ago
        Yes, globally we are using more coal now than ever. And fossil fuel usage is still increasing. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/world-oil-gas-coal-demand-peak-by-2030-iea-says-2023-10-24/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/world-oil-gas-coal-d...
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    • jansan 3y ago
      You know, if parts of your country are as south as the Sahara desert, it just makes a lot of sense to install solar. Just like solar makes a lot more sense in the US than in Germany, which is more to the north than all parts of the US except Alaska and the most northern parts of WA/MT/ND/MN.
      • pstuart 3y ago
        I am as pro-solar as can be, and am thrilled by the decreased costs and increased installation. I think every building where possible should have solar on it. Carports, agrivoltaics, etc. It's a no-brainer in addressing climate change, reducing energy costs, and more self-sufficiency. But not all the world has such solar profiles and there are also (addressable) issues with solar (storage, grid integration). This isn't a "pick one" problem. It's about feeding an energy hungry planet without cooking it, and every non carbon source should be embraced.
        • jiggawatts 3y ago
          The problem with this logic is that solar + storage is still cheaper than nuclear.
          • jupp0r 3y ago
            I don't think that's generally true, especially if you build nuclear as cost effectively as China does.
            • matthewdgreen 3y ago
              China is building vastly more solar and wind than they are solar. And nuclear construction has slowed down noticeably as wind+PV has accelerated in the past few years.
              • defrost 3y ago
                The International Energy Agency (IEA) World Energy Outlook 2023 report outlines China has having an extensive expansion of both nuclear and renewables driving a decrease in China's coal use mid this decade. It also asserts that China is behind 30% of all new nuclear power builds (under construction). https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/uncertainty-is-key-ieas-hopes-chinas-energy-transition-russell-2023-10-24/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/uncertainty-is-key-i... https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2023/executive-summary https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2023/execut... (D/L full 355 page PDF) https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/42b23c45-78bc-4482-b0f9-eb826ae2da3d/WorldEnergyOutlook2023.pdf https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/42b23c45-78bc-4482-...
    • osigurdson 3y ago
      It is also building more coal plants than anyone else. https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-six-times-more-new-coal-plants-than-other-countries-report-fin https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...
  • gtvwill 3y ago
    Human health cost of global warming isn't exactly cheap. Delayed costs are still costs. It's just my generation and my kids who have to pay while my parents generation reaped the rewards and profits up front. I, like many of my peers feel like we are being grifted by the boomer generation.
    • The_Colonel 3y ago
      You're also reaping the advantages produced by the boomer generation in technology, medicine etc. to which they themselves did not have access (or had, but much later in life). In any case, it's disappointing to see how people are so quick to jump at any opportunity to stereotype and hate a group of people, this time not identified by their skin, but their date of birth...
      • gtvwill 3y ago
        [flagged]
      • screye 3y ago
        That bit is obvious. The next generation benefits from the innovations of the previous generation. But boomers knew about global warming, and refused to do even the bare minimum to help curb it. (More highways, gas guzzlers galore, effectively ban nuclear, anti sustainable urban development) Even the one positive assertion comes with asterisks. The boomers oversaw a lengthy defunding of federal programs while wealth kept accumulating at the very top of this nation. So the resulting economic benefits haven't been all that useful to the rest of America. Ofc, no individual bears the sin of an entire era. But we need to recognize the inherent selfishness of that era nevertheless.
  • fastball 3y ago
    Honestly the hate for nuclear isn't understandable at all. It has killed very few people, expense isn't a reason for hate, and everything else has pretty much been a win (land usage minimal, minimal byproducts, etc).
    • jiggawatts 3y ago
      Fusion power research in the EU is going to cost something like 100B euro for ITER + DEMO. No useful amount of power production is planned for decades. Meanwhile, that money could have purchased solar + wind that would provide something like a third or even half of Europe’s electricity needs! That’s not even factoring in ongoing cost reductions over those same decades. Fission has the same problem: it’s expensive power in the distant future versus cheap power available now.
      • jliptzin 3y ago
        Are we foregoing solar+wind in Europe because that money was diverted to fusion research or is it due to other reasons?
        • einpoklum 3y ago
          Indeed, that's a false dilemma. I could just as well have argued that the money has gone to bailing out banks, or to funding the war in Ukraine, or whatever. Not to mention that money itself is a social construct; it is created by banks and/or the state. If a (sovereign) state wants to, it can print money. Of course this has risks, and sometimes results in currency devaluation (not as frequently as some believe), but it's another way in which one can't claim that "country C invested this much money in A instead of investing in B".
      • jupp0r 3y ago
        Fusion power research is research. It's not meant to produce electricity but knowledge.
        • jiggawatts 3y ago
  • ViewTrick1002 3y ago
    China is also building enough renewable power than their grid expansion rate leading to a structural decline in CO2 emissions [1]. At the same time the utilization factors of the coal plants reduce each year. This is driven purely by economic factors, for the first time since the discovery of fossil fuels, except the blip where we dammed up pretty much every single river globally to provide hydropower, we have in renewables have found a new cheaper energy source. Renewables are cheap energy. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carbon-emissions-set-for-structural-decline-from-next-year https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carb...
• MostlyStable 3y ago
  How does it's cost to install and operate compare to gen 3/other nuclear tech? Safety is great, but nuclear is already safe enough (in the sense that, installing current and even last gen nuclear saves more lives through fossil fuel displacement than it can plausibly kill even in worst case disaster scenarios). Continuing to make nuclear safer, if it results in higher costs (and therefore reduced installs) is a bad tradeoff and has been for close to 50 years.
  • chasil 3y ago
    It is said that most reactors in the U.S. only use 2% of the available power within the fuel, and the best designs top out at 30%. How is the fuel efficiency for this design? Walk-away safe is a major benefit, and is worth some sacrifice of efficiency.
    • fbdab103 3y ago
      Is the uncaptured power completely gone during processing or does it remain embedded in the "nuclear waste"? It is not hard to imagine a future in which that waste gets mined to be put in a new reactor when the political/economic winds change.
  • einpoklum 3y ago
    With due respect - that's a BS safety argument. Nuclear reactors must meet stringent safety standards, not with hand-wavy "but people die from fossil fuel pollution" rhetoric; and at the same time, fossil-fuel-fired plants must be made to emit a lot less, through filtering and other technological means.
    • MostlyStable 3y ago
      Safety is not a binary, safe/dangerous. How much risk we are willing to accept and what the trade-offs are isn't something that has a correct answer. it's a values question. My comment was assuming that society's apparent risk calculation was evident in how we treat everything other than nuclear. If your argument is that our safety regime on nuclear is correct and everything else is too dangerous and needs to be made safer, well I personally disagree but at least it's consistent and I have no problem with your opinion. It's a difference in values. The real problem I have is people who think that nuclear is a special flower and needs to be held to different standards than everything else. Which is how society is currently acting. And it's killing millions of people every year.
• AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  Nice to see one in operation. Anyone know if they move the LCOE needle? For reference, traditional nuclear is 4-6x as expensive as wind/solar, and wind/solar are still dropping. For baseload the gas turbine still beats the pants off of nuclear. I think nuclear needs to get to 2-3x unsubsidized to be relevant long-term, but that's a long road.
  • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    > For baseload the gas turbine still beats the pants off of nuclear. Not if you price carbon. > For reference, traditional nuclear is 4-6x as expensive as wind/solar, and wind/solar are still dropping. That's cost per MWh generated not accounting for when you need it. Renewables need both short-term storage and long-term storage. If you generate with solar, what do you do at night? You'd need 12 hours of storage. Maybe that's economical in some contexts but it definitely raises the cost. Now what do you do if it's cloudy or still for a week, or a month? 720 hours of storage would be crazy expensive. You could use natural gas plants or similar, but then you have to pay the cost of maintaining natural gas plants and the associated infrastructure that you only use 2% of the time. 1GW nuclear plant vs 1GW (average) of solar + 12GWh of storage + 1GW natural gas plant + rarely used gas pipelines or 720GWh of on-site reserves, which costs more?
    • stubish 3y ago
      > Not if you price carbon. That is just adding an arbitrary cost, so you can get any result you like. You can also put an arbitrary cost on land usage to make nuclear cheaper that wind or solar. Just a government doing its job, putting its thumbs on the scale to get the result we want.
      • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        The result we want is "stop burning carbon" so yeah.
• huytersd 3y ago
  Why is helium coolant good? Because it will just evaporate instead of poisoning waterbodies?
  • petre 3y ago
    It escapes into space and that's the main problem with it. But it doesn't create steam explosions and hydrogen buildup under ionizing radiation (also explosive). My main gripes with pebble bed reactors is not helium, but pebbles cracking, graphite fires and complications with fuel reprocessing. Helium just ads another layer of complications because it's quite scarce and easily lost. Also the installed capacity of this reactor is quite underwhelming. But it's nice that the Chinese have built it and are testing and advancing the technology developed in Germany during the '80s.
  • bogeholm 3y ago
    A couple of points I can think of, 1) the Helium nucleus is exceedingly stable so the coolant won’t get radioactive from neutron activation, 2) the coolant being chemically inactive means you can use run the reactor at higher temperatures, thus achieving higher efficiency if you use the heat to run a heat engine (steam turbine).
  • vipa123 3y ago
    I am not an expert at this, but if I had to guess I would agree with your answer. Helium, even neutron enriched radioactive helium -if there is such a thing-, will evaporate into the air instantly, it will also rise to highest location being lighter than essentially every other atmospheric gas. This make it easy collect, contain, or cleanse, if performed. It will also rise above the atmosphere and get blown away by the solar winds should it escape the building. Additionally, helium is inert so it will not form other chemical compounds that will stay around, or enter the human body. Also because it is inert your body will not generally absorb it, certainly not like it would tritium water. Also comparing to water, helium will not dissolve other chemicals, radioactive or not, into it like water does. One last thing is the cooling potential of liquid helium is immense, being able to absorb massive amounts of heat during evaporation. Assuming they want to use a helium refrigeration cycle. Fingers crossed I got some of this right...