4 ms·

The future of nuclear energy in a carbon-constrained world (2018)

acidburnNSA 3y ago
A classic MIT report series. Of note is where it says they think cost performance is basically unrelated to specific core design. So all these thorium, molten salt, liquid metal, organic, blah blah reactors coming back, while cool, are not necessarily aligned with the key problems in nuclear, which are currently construction project management related. I'd love to see some more startups focusing on the real problems in nuclear (project delivery, standardized QA procedures, standardized licensing document templates, analysis checklists, inspection techniques, data management, etc. ) rather than more and more and more somewhat goofy re-hashes of 1950s prototypes. Maybe should have [2018] in the title?
- cplusplusfellow 3y ago
  > are not necessarily aligned with the key problems in nuclear, which are currently construction project management related I think the hope is that with passive cooling and passive anti-meltdown characteristics, the complexity of the constriction can be reduced. And that has exponential returns for cost structure.
  - acidburnNSA 3y ago
    All the passive cooling/passive anti-meltdown reactors of the past struggled operationally because to get there you have to use somewhat exotic coolants with low vapor pressures at high temperatures. Liquid metals, organic fluids, molten salts, etc. all have serious operational challenges and were largely phased out because of them. Water coolant took off after out-performing them. So it's not so easy.
    - cplusplusfellow 3y ago
      Are you familiar with all the newer generation technologies that haven’t been phased out and are under development?
      - acidburnNSA 3y ago
        Yes, I'm a nuclear engineer in this area. I'm quite familiar with what's going on in it.
0wis 3y ago
Nice to see such an extensive work by such a recognized scientific body. It gives hope in a future more sustainable world and I think we need it. To be fair, the timing is great, nuclear energy is strongly coming back after having been « out of fashion » for 20+ years.
more_corn 3y ago
I love how y'all keep trying to make nuclear happen. Then it turns out to cost too many billions and too many decades with too many shitty failure modes and we enter another quiet cycle of aggressive forgetting.
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  Powering a city of a million on a square mile 24/7 with no particulate or carbon emissions and 2+ years of fuel on site is just too darn enticing!
  - grecy 3y ago
    Don't forget it costs $30B and takes 20+ years to build!
    - acidburnNSA 3y ago
      If you look at the absolute worst case of all time, sure! But why do that? Take a look at how the Koreans are doing building the 4 big APR-1400s in UAE, or how China is pounding out Hualong Ones, and Russia has fully serialized VVER production. Heck, Japan could build ABWRs in 36 months back in the 90s.
      - grecy 3y ago
        Absolutely, just have to throw out OSHA, take land from people that own it without due process and ignore everything the EPA says. ... in all seriousness, it would be a lot more useful to compare what a developed country has been able to achieve.. even more useful is the country you're talking about. oh look - here you go: https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/how-much-does-it-cost-to-build-a https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/how-much-does-it-cost-t... http://euanmearns.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-nuclear-power-plant/ http://euanmearns.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-nucle...
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
civilized 3y ago
According to widespread chatter on HN and similar forums, nuclear will soon be irrelevant because renewables are becoming so cheap. I assume this is a much more thoughtful analysis; it would be nice to know, briefly, why this team does not expect this future, since nuclear has its own serious political problems.
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  Intermittency and transmission at scale are likely to be exceedingly expensive and impacted by NIMBYism as wind and solar continue to scale towards world scale. Nuclear runs 24/7 and requires a lot fewer wires (since the plants are centralized) and so fits well into those downsides. Of course nuclear has downsides too, obviously, but there's plenty of reason to believe that, if nuclear people can start delivering projects on time and budget, that there's room for a massive expansion of carbon-free 24/7 nuclear power.
  - pstuart 3y ago
    Having safe and approved SMRs that could be dropped into every existing coal power plant would be wonderful.
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  It has a dose of realism: > Despite this promise, the prospects for the expansion of nuclear energy remain decidedly dim in many parts of the world. The fundamental problem is cost. Other generation technologies have become cheaper in recent decades, while new nuclear plants have only become costlier. I think this is realistic. Current cost of nuclear is unacceptably high. It's simply not competitive. It's a non-starter for commercial use. It can't be done without vast amounts of state support. This might be a fixable problem. But it's going to require something more than just doing more of the same. And that's going to take a lot of time. This decade looks like it's mostly lost already. We maybe get a handful of new reactors online by the end of it. But if it's not under construction already, forget about it. And they'll likely be of the "oops we did it again" variety in terms time and cost budgets. It's not going to make a huge difference either way. People have been talking about small reactors for ages. But those have yet to come online in meaningful numbers and are likely going to take a lot of time before they are being mass produced. We might be in the 2040s by the time that starts having any real impact. If ever. Meanwhile, renewables are coming online by the tens/hundreds of GW per year right now. Increasing every year. And yes there are some challenges with seasonal fluctuations in power output and weather related variations. All solvable with more renewables and storage. The bottom line is that mass production and deployment are working really well in that space. The reality in the next few years is that there are more nuclear reactors heading for end of life than new ones are being built in many countries. Some of those might get an (expensive) overhaul and life extension. But not all of them. I'm not against good solutions in this space. But it has to be at a more competitive cost. An order of magnitude at least.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
politician 3y ago
The report recommends: > 1. An increased focus on using proven project/ construction management practices to increase the probability of success in the execution and delivery of new nuclear power plants. > 2. A shift away from primarily field construction of cumbersome, highly site-dependent plants to more serial manufacturing of standardized plants. > 3. A shift toward reactor designs that incorporate inherent and passive safety features. > 4. Decarbonization policies should create a level playing field that allows all low-carbon generation technologies to compete on their merits. > 5. Governments should establish reactor sites where companies can deploy prototype reactors for testing and operation oriented to regulatory licensing. > 6. Governments should establish funding programs around prototype testing and commercial deployment of advanced reactor designs using four levers: (a) funding to share regulatory licensing costs, (b) funding to share research and development costs, (c) funding for the achievement of specific technical milestones, and (d) funding for production credits to reward successful demonstration of new designs.
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  In the ~5 years since that report was written, have these steps been taken anywhere? Maybe in China?
redundance 3y ago
[dead]
pfdietz 3y ago
This report is repeating a line of BS I've seen before from MIT. They say renewables + batteries for the entire grid becomes very expensive without a "firming source". They then say nuclear is a firming source. They then at least imply, if not outright say, that nuclear is needed to supplement a renewable grid. (See page 10 of the full report.) But this is bullshit. There are other firming sources that would work better than nuclear. In particular, green hydrogen, produced by electrolysis, would be a great firming source. It would be much better than nuclear for this, since a simple cycle combustion turbine power plant has just 1/20th the capital cost of today's nuclear power plants (combined cycle, just 1/10th the cost.) For a low capacity factor firming source, minimizing capital cost is all important.
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  Green hydrogen is not a "source" at all. It's an energy storage mechanism that would have to be powered by additional green capacity. There is a legitimate concern that expanding wind/solar will run into increasing costs, NIMBY, and transmission issues at extremely large scale. Nuclear may help there by virtue of it being highly concentrated and 24/7.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Your quibble there does absolutely nothing to refute my argument, so why did you make it? Of course green hydrogen is storage. So what? It acts as a way to produce the firming that is needed to deal with long wavelength intermittency. Your concern mongering there seems entirely vacuous. If anything, wind/solar have seen aggressive experience effects that reduce costs at larger scale, not increase them.
    - acidburnNSA 3y ago
      The point is that if you just look at cost of hydrogen equipment, you're missing the cost of the equipment that has to charge it as well. Have you read Komanoff's hypothesis that any given energy technology's cost scales to first order with sector size? It's quite an argument. He used it to explain unrelated cost escalations in nuclear and coal. It says that the bigger a sector is, the more people are impacted, and the more regulations and other externalities come in. For wind and solar, you can imagine land use leading to more NIMBY and transmission costs, and increasing costs of dealing with high intermittency (e.g. 2-week long wind droughts across 4 huge states that regularly occur in January).
nimbius 3y ago
The biggest red flag for me in nuclear is the complete lack of a closed ecosystem and if you bring it up youre immediately down voted here. We do not recycle waste, our plans for the waste are temporary at best, and no company has proposed a solution thats part of the build out of any new reactor. Were just supposed to assume it'll be fine.
- digdugdirk 3y ago
  Waste recycling is absolutely done. If you're referring to "we" as "USA", then correct. But it's not a technical issue. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel#:~:text=The%20United%20States%20does%20not,%2C%20such%20as%20France%2C%20do https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-....
- Yoric 3y ago
  I could be wrong, but I believe that France recycles nuclear waste.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    They've admitted it costs more to do so than not doing so, and the benefits (in thermal reactors) are limited. The value of separated Pu in MOX fuel is actually negative (it's cheaper to use freshly enriched uranium), and MOX fuel cannot be recycled again in thermal reactors due to build up of undesirable Pu isotopes. France has terminated their fast reactor program, which had been the actual intended use for separated plutonium.
    - Yoric 3y ago
      Interesting. Are you talking of monetary cost or energy/raw material cost? If it's the former, that might be very dependent on market conditions.
      - pfdietz 3y ago
        Monetary. Uranium would have to be greatly more expensive to justify reprocessing for MOX for thermal reactors (or for fuel for fast reactors, for that matter).
dang 3y ago
Related (though tiny): The Future of Nuclear Energy in a Carbon-Constrained World - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19204087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19204087 - Feb 2019 (1 comment)
- simonebrunozzi 3y ago
  Ah, just one comment!! Thanks for sharing it, nonetheless.
derriz 3y ago
Henry Ford is reputed to have said that if he had asked what people wanted, they would have said faster horses. I feel that nuclear proponents are stuck arguing for "faster horses". For the last 300 years or so, humans have harnessed energy by finding a heat source (initially burning wood, then coal, then oil/gas) and boiling a tank of water to produce steam, the pressure of which can be turned into useful mencanical energy. By adding generator, we electrified the world. Nuclear, whether fission or even fusion may be a "faster horse" - hotter cheaper fuel - but it just replaces the heat source - the rest is still largely steam-age technology. Solar and wind on the other hand bypass generating heat completely and in solar's case, bypass even the mechanical aspect. Furthermore, their cost is determined by the cost of mass manufacture, not the supply of coal or relatively rare radioactive fuels, nor the construction of complex large plant. This is the revolution and this is why all thermal based generation is in a death spiral (although natural gas will survive longer than the rest) while solar and wind generation is growing literally exponentially.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > this is why all thermal based generation is in a death spiral (although natural gas will survive longer than the rest) while solar and wind generation is growing literally exponentially You’re extrapolating the early learning curve to a mature industry. That ignores the law of diminishing returns. Anyone arguing we can monosource our power is missing fundamental aspects of grid management and the state of technology.
- LargeTomato 3y ago
  Your argument is that spinning a dynamo with steam is the equivalent of "faster horses"? That's completely nonsequitor. It's literally so absurd I don't even know where to begin.
  - derriz 3y ago
    I assume it's that I expressed myself poorly. Let me state the analogy directly. Consider the problems as analogous in term of technological advancement: generating electricity and travelling/getting from A to B. The tendency is to look at the current/historical solution and try to think of improvements to it. But this way of thinking is blind to complete disruption in terms of technology. Early 20th century horse travel could have been improved with faster horses. Current thermal generation (heat engine/steam based) could be improved with more efficient/cheaper sources of heat - such as nuclear fission (and fusion). The advent of the cheap automobile, despite limitations compared to horses in some respects, made having faster horses irrelevant. While removing completely the heat-engine component of electricity generation (wind) and even the mechanical component (solar and batteries) and using mass production (factories) and being cheaper has made improvements to thermal generation irrelevant. This conclusion is supported by how the generation mix is changing over the last 10 years or so. More than 80% of new generation and storage capacity added globally in that period has been renewable. Attempting to make thermal competitive is folly at this stage. The technology is in the process of being displaced by a newer simpler cheaper set of technologies.
jmyeet 3y ago
Nuclear is going nowhere when the clean up costs for a single incident could well exceed $1 trillion [1] and the LCOE of nuclear is among the highest of any energy source [2] and those costs are going up [3] while renewable costs are plummetting. SMR makes no sense because power generation favors the largest core you can build. Not a single nuclear plant has been built without significant government subsidy and, unlike renewables (solar in particular), costs haven't gone down as a result. Nuclear advocates talk about capital costs because the story of operational costs is horrendous for nuclear. Nuclear waste (from fuel processing and spent fuel rod disposal) is not a "solved problem". Tech exists to help here but it's horrendously expensive so we don't do it. Waste isn't just stuck in a cave and forgotten about. For a significant period, used rods need active cooling, for example. The nuclear power industry seeks to extract money from government and shift costs to the taxpayer. For example, there's a nuclear industry insurance fund for disasters but one Fukushima incident would bankrupt it about 50-100 times over so who would pick up the tab? And the industry has successfully lobbied Congress to limit liability for nuclear accidents [4]. [1]: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Fukushima-Anniversary/Fukushima-cleanup-costs-swell-with-no-end-in-sight https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Fukushima-Anniversary/Fuku... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source [3]: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/mit-study-lays-bare-why-nuclear-costs-keep-rising https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/mit-study-lays-... [4]: https://www.citizen.org/wp-content/uploads/price_anderson_factsheet.pdf https://www.citizen.org/wp-content/uploads/price_anderson_fa...
credit_guy 3y ago
Interesting quote on page 66: > Finally, the NuScale SMR is a prime example of an LWR system that is quite innovative in its design. It has virtually eliminated the need for active systems to accomplish safety functions, relying instead on a combination of passive systems and the inherent features of its geometry and materials.
- simonebrunozzi 3y ago
  And yet, NuScale just laid off 28% of its workforce. [0] [0]: https://www.reuters.com/business/nuscale-power-lay-off-28-labor-force-save-costs-2024-01-08/ https://www.reuters.com/business/nuscale-power-lay-off-28-la...

A classic MIT report series. Of note is where it says they think cost performance is basically unrelated to specific core design. So all these thorium, molten salt, liquid metal, organic, blah blah reactors coming back, while cool, are not necessarily aligned with the key problems in nuclear, which are currently construction project management related. I'd love to see some more startups focusing on the real problems in nuclear (project delivery, standardized QA procedures, standardized licensing document templates, analysis checklists, inspection techniques, data management, etc. ) rather than more and more and more somewhat goofy re-hashes of 1950s prototypes. Maybe should have [2018] in the title?

cplusplusfellow 3y ago
> are not necessarily aligned with the key problems in nuclear, which are currently construction project management related I think the hope is that with passive cooling and passive anti-meltdown characteristics, the complexity of the constriction can be reduced. And that has exponential returns for cost structure.
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  All the passive cooling/passive anti-meltdown reactors of the past struggled operationally because to get there you have to use somewhat exotic coolants with low vapor pressures at high temperatures. Liquid metals, organic fluids, molten salts, etc. all have serious operational challenges and were largely phased out because of them. Water coolant took off after out-performing them. So it's not so easy.
  - cplusplusfellow 3y ago
    Are you familiar with all the newer generation technologies that haven’t been phased out and are under development?
    - acidburnNSA 3y ago
      Yes, I'm a nuclear engineer in this area. I'm quite familiar with what's going on in it.

0wis 3y ago

Nice to see such an extensive work by such a recognized scientific body. It gives hope in a future more sustainable world and I think we need it. To be fair, the timing is great, nuclear energy is strongly coming back after having been « out of fashion » for 20+ years.

more_corn 3y ago

I love how y'all keep trying to make nuclear happen. Then it turns out to cost too many billions and too many decades with too many shitty failure modes and we enter another quiet cycle of aggressive forgetting.

acidburnNSA 3y ago
Powering a city of a million on a square mile 24/7 with no particulate or carbon emissions and 2+ years of fuel on site is just too darn enticing!
- grecy 3y ago
  Don't forget it costs $30B and takes 20+ years to build!
  - acidburnNSA 3y ago
    If you look at the absolute worst case of all time, sure! But why do that? Take a look at how the Koreans are doing building the 4 big APR-1400s in UAE, or how China is pounding out Hualong Ones, and Russia has fully serialized VVER production. Heck, Japan could build ABWRs in 36 months back in the 90s.
    - grecy 3y ago
      Absolutely, just have to throw out OSHA, take land from people that own it without due process and ignore everything the EPA says. ... in all seriousness, it would be a lot more useful to compare what a developed country has been able to achieve.. even more useful is the country you're talking about. oh look - here you go: https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/how-much-does-it-cost-to-build-a https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/how-much-does-it-cost-t... http://euanmearns.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-nuclear-power-plant/ http://euanmearns.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-nucle...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

civilized 3y ago

According to widespread chatter on HN and similar forums, nuclear will soon be irrelevant because renewables are becoming so cheap. I assume this is a much more thoughtful analysis; it would be nice to know, briefly, why this team does not expect this future, since nuclear has its own serious political problems.

acidburnNSA 3y ago
Intermittency and transmission at scale are likely to be exceedingly expensive and impacted by NIMBYism as wind and solar continue to scale towards world scale. Nuclear runs 24/7 and requires a lot fewer wires (since the plants are centralized) and so fits well into those downsides. Of course nuclear has downsides too, obviously, but there's plenty of reason to believe that, if nuclear people can start delivering projects on time and budget, that there's room for a massive expansion of carbon-free 24/7 nuclear power.
- pstuart 3y ago
  Having safe and approved SMRs that could be dropped into every existing coal power plant would be wonderful.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
It has a dose of realism: > Despite this promise, the prospects for the expansion of nuclear energy remain decidedly dim in many parts of the world. The fundamental problem is cost. Other generation technologies have become cheaper in recent decades, while new nuclear plants have only become costlier. I think this is realistic. Current cost of nuclear is unacceptably high. It's simply not competitive. It's a non-starter for commercial use. It can't be done without vast amounts of state support. This might be a fixable problem. But it's going to require something more than just doing more of the same. And that's going to take a lot of time. This decade looks like it's mostly lost already. We maybe get a handful of new reactors online by the end of it. But if it's not under construction already, forget about it. And they'll likely be of the "oops we did it again" variety in terms time and cost budgets. It's not going to make a huge difference either way. People have been talking about small reactors for ages. But those have yet to come online in meaningful numbers and are likely going to take a lot of time before they are being mass produced. We might be in the 2040s by the time that starts having any real impact. If ever. Meanwhile, renewables are coming online by the tens/hundreds of GW per year right now. Increasing every year. And yes there are some challenges with seasonal fluctuations in power output and weather related variations. All solvable with more renewables and storage. The bottom line is that mass production and deployment are working really well in that space. The reality in the next few years is that there are more nuclear reactors heading for end of life than new ones are being built in many countries. Some of those might get an (expensive) overhaul and life extension. But not all of them. I'm not against good solutions in this space. But it has to be at a more competitive cost. An order of magnitude at least.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

politician 3y ago

The report recommends: > 1. An increased focus on using proven project/ construction management practices to increase the probability of success in the execution and delivery of new nuclear power plants. > 2. A shift away from primarily field construction of cumbersome, highly site-dependent plants to more serial manufacturing of standardized plants. > 3. A shift toward reactor designs that incorporate inherent and passive safety features. > 4. Decarbonization policies should create a level playing field that allows all low-carbon generation technologies to compete on their merits. > 5. Governments should establish reactor sites where companies can deploy prototype reactors for testing and operation oriented to regulatory licensing. > 6. Governments should establish funding programs around prototype testing and commercial deployment of advanced reactor designs using four levers: (a) funding to share regulatory licensing costs, (b) funding to share research and development costs, (c) funding for the achievement of specific technical milestones, and (d) funding for production credits to reward successful demonstration of new designs.

matthewdgreen 3y ago
In the ~5 years since that report was written, have these steps been taken anywhere? Maybe in China?

redundance 3y ago

[dead]

pfdietz 3y ago

This report is repeating a line of BS I've seen before from MIT. They say renewables + batteries for the entire grid becomes very expensive without a "firming source". They then say nuclear is a firming source. They then at least imply, if not outright say, that nuclear is needed to supplement a renewable grid. (See page 10 of the full report.) But this is bullshit. There are other firming sources that would work better than nuclear. In particular, green hydrogen, produced by electrolysis, would be a great firming source. It would be much better than nuclear for this, since a simple cycle combustion turbine power plant has just 1/20th the capital cost of today's nuclear power plants (combined cycle, just 1/10th the cost.) For a low capacity factor firming source, minimizing capital cost is all important.

acidburnNSA 3y ago
Green hydrogen is not a "source" at all. It's an energy storage mechanism that would have to be powered by additional green capacity. There is a legitimate concern that expanding wind/solar will run into increasing costs, NIMBY, and transmission issues at extremely large scale. Nuclear may help there by virtue of it being highly concentrated and 24/7.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Your quibble there does absolutely nothing to refute my argument, so why did you make it? Of course green hydrogen is storage. So what? It acts as a way to produce the firming that is needed to deal with long wavelength intermittency. Your concern mongering there seems entirely vacuous. If anything, wind/solar have seen aggressive experience effects that reduce costs at larger scale, not increase them.
  - acidburnNSA 3y ago
    The point is that if you just look at cost of hydrogen equipment, you're missing the cost of the equipment that has to charge it as well. Have you read Komanoff's hypothesis that any given energy technology's cost scales to first order with sector size? It's quite an argument. He used it to explain unrelated cost escalations in nuclear and coal. It says that the bigger a sector is, the more people are impacted, and the more regulations and other externalities come in. For wind and solar, you can imagine land use leading to more NIMBY and transmission costs, and increasing costs of dealing with high intermittency (e.g. 2-week long wind droughts across 4 huge states that regularly occur in January).

nimbius 3y ago

The biggest red flag for me in nuclear is the complete lack of a closed ecosystem and if you bring it up youre immediately down voted here. We do not recycle waste, our plans for the waste are temporary at best, and no company has proposed a solution thats part of the build out of any new reactor. Were just supposed to assume it'll be fine.

digdugdirk 3y ago
Waste recycling is absolutely done. If you're referring to "we" as "USA", then correct. But it's not a technical issue. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel#:~:text=The%20United%20States%20does%20not,%2C%20such%20as%20France%2C%20do https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-....
Yoric 3y ago
I could be wrong, but I believe that France recycles nuclear waste.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  They've admitted it costs more to do so than not doing so, and the benefits (in thermal reactors) are limited. The value of separated Pu in MOX fuel is actually negative (it's cheaper to use freshly enriched uranium), and MOX fuel cannot be recycled again in thermal reactors due to build up of undesirable Pu isotopes. France has terminated their fast reactor program, which had been the actual intended use for separated plutonium.
  - Yoric 3y ago
    Interesting. Are you talking of monetary cost or energy/raw material cost? If it's the former, that might be very dependent on market conditions.
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      Monetary. Uranium would have to be greatly more expensive to justify reprocessing for MOX for thermal reactors (or for fuel for fast reactors, for that matter).

dang 3y ago

Related (though tiny): The Future of Nuclear Energy in a Carbon-Constrained World - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19204087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19204087 - Feb 2019 (1 comment)

simonebrunozzi 3y ago
Ah, just one comment!! Thanks for sharing it, nonetheless.

derriz 3y ago

Henry Ford is reputed to have said that if he had asked what people wanted, they would have said faster horses. I feel that nuclear proponents are stuck arguing for "faster horses". For the last 300 years or so, humans have harnessed energy by finding a heat source (initially burning wood, then coal, then oil/gas) and boiling a tank of water to produce steam, the pressure of which can be turned into useful mencanical energy. By adding generator, we electrified the world. Nuclear, whether fission or even fusion may be a "faster horse" - hotter cheaper fuel - but it just replaces the heat source - the rest is still largely steam-age technology. Solar and wind on the other hand bypass generating heat completely and in solar's case, bypass even the mechanical aspect. Furthermore, their cost is determined by the cost of mass manufacture, not the supply of coal or relatively rare radioactive fuels, nor the construction of complex large plant. This is the revolution and this is why all thermal based generation is in a death spiral (although natural gas will survive longer than the rest) while solar and wind generation is growing literally exponentially.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> this is why all thermal based generation is in a death spiral (although natural gas will survive longer than the rest) while solar and wind generation is growing literally exponentially You’re extrapolating the early learning curve to a mature industry. That ignores the law of diminishing returns. Anyone arguing we can monosource our power is missing fundamental aspects of grid management and the state of technology.
LargeTomato 3y ago
Your argument is that spinning a dynamo with steam is the equivalent of "faster horses"? That's completely nonsequitor. It's literally so absurd I don't even know where to begin.
- derriz 3y ago
  I assume it's that I expressed myself poorly. Let me state the analogy directly. Consider the problems as analogous in term of technological advancement: generating electricity and travelling/getting from A to B. The tendency is to look at the current/historical solution and try to think of improvements to it. But this way of thinking is blind to complete disruption in terms of technology. Early 20th century horse travel could have been improved with faster horses. Current thermal generation (heat engine/steam based) could be improved with more efficient/cheaper sources of heat - such as nuclear fission (and fusion). The advent of the cheap automobile, despite limitations compared to horses in some respects, made having faster horses irrelevant. While removing completely the heat-engine component of electricity generation (wind) and even the mechanical component (solar and batteries) and using mass production (factories) and being cheaper has made improvements to thermal generation irrelevant. This conclusion is supported by how the generation mix is changing over the last 10 years or so. More than 80% of new generation and storage capacity added globally in that period has been renewable. Attempting to make thermal competitive is folly at this stage. The technology is in the process of being displaced by a newer simpler cheaper set of technologies.

jmyeet 3y ago

Nuclear is going nowhere when the clean up costs for a single incident could well exceed $1 trillion [1] and the LCOE of nuclear is among the highest of any energy source [2] and those costs are going up [3] while renewable costs are plummetting. SMR makes no sense because power generation favors the largest core you can build. Not a single nuclear plant has been built without significant government subsidy and, unlike renewables (solar in particular), costs haven't gone down as a result. Nuclear advocates talk about capital costs because the story of operational costs is horrendous for nuclear. Nuclear waste (from fuel processing and spent fuel rod disposal) is not a "solved problem". Tech exists to help here but it's horrendously expensive so we don't do it. Waste isn't just stuck in a cave and forgotten about. For a significant period, used rods need active cooling, for example. The nuclear power industry seeks to extract money from government and shift costs to the taxpayer. For example, there's a nuclear industry insurance fund for disasters but one Fukushima incident would bankrupt it about 50-100 times over so who would pick up the tab? And the industry has successfully lobbied Congress to limit liability for nuclear accidents [4]. [1]: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Fukushima-Anniversary/Fukushima-cleanup-costs-swell-with-no-end-in-sight https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Fukushima-Anniversary/Fuku... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source [3]: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/mit-study-lays-bare-why-nuclear-costs-keep-rising https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/mit-study-lays-... [4]: https://www.citizen.org/wp-content/uploads/price_anderson_factsheet.pdf https://www.citizen.org/wp-content/uploads/price_anderson_fa...

credit_guy 3y ago

Interesting quote on page 66: > Finally, the NuScale SMR is a prime example of an LWR system that is quite innovative in its design. It has virtually eliminated the need for active systems to accomplish safety functions, relying instead on a combination of passive systems and the inherent features of its geometry and materials.

simonebrunozzi 3y ago
And yet, NuScale just laid off 28% of its workforce. [0] [0]: https://www.reuters.com/business/nuscale-power-lay-off-28-labor-force-save-costs-2024-01-08/ https://www.reuters.com/business/nuscale-power-lay-off-28-la...