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Texas is indeed a weird place to start deploying small nuclear reactors: electricity is quite cheap, as there is abundant wind and solar. I would have thought t
by krasin 3y ago
Texas is indeed a weird place to start deploying small nuclear reactors: electricity is quite cheap, as there is abundant wind and solar. I would have thought that isolated Alaska settlements would be much better, especially, if SMRs also provided heated water, not just electricity.
And then, when SMRs are hitting the economy of scale, then maybe they can compete in Texas or California.
Edit: Alaska is actually doing something about it: https://gov.alaska.gov/microreactor-regulations-put-alaskan-communities-at-forefront-of-energy-innovation/ https://gov.alaska.gov/microreactor-regulations-put-alaskan-...
- pfdietz 3y agoAnd Texas has abundant natural gas that is at historically low prices. If CO2 emission is a concern, they could deploy Allam cycle turbines at a small increment in capital cost. Alaska is a bad place for this because the largest grid there, the Railbelt Grid, has an average power flow of only 600 MW. One cannot integrate a 300 MW (for example) power plant onto such a grid. Sufficiently small microreactors would be even more expensive, per MW.