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U.S. Senate passes bill to support advanced nuclear energy deployment

178 points by beefman 2y ago

beefman 2y ago
"A version of the bill had already passed in the House of Representatives and it will now go to President Joe Biden for a signature to become law. It passed the Senate 88-2 votes."
kragen 2y ago
it sounds like a reasonable enough measure, but even in its devil-may-care heyday, nuclear energy never undercut coal's pricing by much. now that solar energy is far cheaper than coal ever was, this seems like they're trying to fight last century's war: a bayonet charge into a machine gun nest basically a nuclear power plant is a coal power plant which replaces a coal fire with the nuclear island. you can describe it most charitably as a coal power plant where the fuel is free and doesn't make carbon dioxide or pollute the air. the problem is that coal power plants would already be too expensive to compete with solar on a pure capex basis, even if the coal and other operational expenses were free maybe if someone finds a way to make commercial nuclear power that doesn't involve driving an electromechanical generator with a steam turbine, nuclear could win. and obviously undersea and in parts of alaska nuclear is a better option (i wrote a comment earlier tonight on the recent history of solar energy costs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40723188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40723188 and its parent has a link to an excellent slide deck by fraunhofer ise https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/publications/studies/Photovoltaics-Report.pdf https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p... providing a lot more detail)
- Jensson 2y ago
  You do realize solar isn't viable in norther parts, due to peak demand being during cold winters and just less sun in general? Solar is great in the south where peak demand is during the warm sunny summers.
  - standardUser 2y ago
    Some like a transmission issue, not an electricity generation issue.
    - autoexecbat 2y ago
      Some transmission issues are solved by local generation
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - Jensson 2y ago
      How would transmission solve the massive electricity demand during cold winter nights? Even in more southern areas generation during winter is lower, then pay the massive loss of transmitting that so far north and it is no longer viable.
      - kragen 2y ago
        hvdc transmission doesn't have massive losses from transmitting long distances, so you could literally transmit power from the tropics or even the other hemisphere. but overprovisioning solar locally is probably cheaper
        wait_a_minute 2y ago
        Are there hvdc transmission lines already spanning those kinds of distances? How much raw material and upkeep does that require? If over-provisioning solar, how much more surface area would be needed to have the solar? Seems like the additional costs would pile up to get to current energy needs being met by just solar.
        kragen 2y ago
        you'll probably be interested in reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current. it says typical losses are 3.5% per 1000km, and typical voltages are 100–800 kilovolts, but china built a 12-gigawatt 1100-kilovolt link over 3300km in 02019 unfortunately i don't have a good handle on how efficient that link is. the numbers above suggest it would be about 89% efficient, but those are for lower-voltage systems in general you expect the resistive losses in the cables, at a given diameter and power, to scale with the inverse square of the voltage, so an 1100-kilovolt link should have 47% less resistive losses than an 800-kilovolt link at the same power level running over the same cables. however, corona-discharge losses increase at higher voltages rather than decreasing, and i don't know which one is dominant. so i don't know if that link is closer to 89% efficient or closer to 95% efficient the distance from the north or south pole to the equator is of course 10000 km, but people don't build very near the poles. for example, from svalbard to algiers is 4700 km. so, yeah, there are hvdc transmission lines already spanning those kinds of distances, but not quite that far yet transmission lines require utterly insignificant quantities of raw material, but where they cut through forested terrain, they do require upkeep. in the meeting of a tree and a megavolt, neither one comes out unscathed for some calculations on how much you need to over-provision solar, see my earlier comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40724349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40724349 considering a counterfactual where somehow norway had to use solar. 6.1 average kilowatts per norwegian at a capacity factor of 6% works out to 102 kilowatts peak per norwegian. if you're using low-cost 16%-efficient solar panels (as i assumed you would in my cost estimate, even though mostly people spring for the more efficient 'mainstream' ones) that would require 635 kilowatts of sunlight per norwegian, which is 635 square meters per norwegian (we rate solar panels on the assumption that sunlight is 1000 watts per square meter). 635 square meters is 25 meters square, .000635 square kilometers per norwegian. multiplying that by 5.5 million norwegians gives you the truly immense area of 3500 square kilometers of solar panels but wait! that's not all! you can't just lay the panels out flat on the ground and expect them to get a 6% capacity factor. you have to angle them toward the equator and spread them out so they don't shade each other. oslo is at 60° north, so your panels need to be angled at 60° from the horizontal, toward the south. maybe a bit more if you want to increase power production in winter, say 69°. so you have to space them out by 1/cos 69° ≈ 2.8. so actually you need 9800 square kilometers for your €340 billion of solar panels. how much space will you have left? a lot, it turns out. norway is 385000 square kilometers, so this is still just 2.5% of the country so norway, despite being the #2 highest user of energy per capita in the world after canada, and having cities that are literally inside the arctic circle, could switch to all solar. it's totally feasible. fortunately they have plenty of hydropower and wind so they don't need to
- roenxi 2y ago
  If we're aspiring to 1970s standards then sure. Nuclear power isn't about achieving the lofty heights of the 1970s. I'm just going to wave the famous article by Crawford on the economics of nuclear around: https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop [0] What you can see there is a very impressive learning curve that was well on the way to very cheap electricity. Then it suddenly and sharply inverts in a shape that defies common sense. Then no-one else really builds any. "Supporting nuclear" isn't supposed to mean splitting the atom at any cost. The point is if we would just stop regulating the industry into oblivion and let costs drop then it'd be a perfectly competitive form of power. We have this lobby that goes in, wrecks the economics of nuclear then uses the wreck they created as justification for why we can't build any more. And in some senses that is fair because if they had the power to destroy past nuclear projects they can do it again. But lets not pretend that these costs are fundamental to nuclear. Keeping a weather eye on China, if they do their usual trick and start learning how to build nuclear cheaply they could leapfrog everyone else on energy tech in another industry. On the one hand that'd be fantastic to the point where I'd love it. On the other it is so frustrating to be relying on nominal communists to push the state of the art forward on energy technology after listening to my western compatriots whinge about exactly that topic for decades while blocking the obvious solutions. We could have built the future in the west, we never had to have a do-it-in-China policy. [0] If you read the article, he's paraphrasing some book by someone called Devanney. I'm going to gamble on nobody reading the article so I can get that wrong without being corrected.
  - kragen 2y ago
    it would be a perfectly competitive form of power by 01970s standards, but naval nuclear reactors, chinese nuclear reactors, and russian nuclear reactors are not regulated into oblivion and have not had their economics wrecked by lobbying. nevertheless, they remain more expensive and less economical than even fossil-fuel plants in both warships and china. conceivably capitalism could solve that problem (us defense contractors and chinese power plant builders are pretty tightly state-linked rather than free-market actors) but we don't have strong reasons for believing so crawford here talks optimistically about building nuclear plants for 250¢ per (nameplate) watt. europe and india are already building solar farms for 60¢ per (peak, nameplate) watt, a cost that is dropping dramatically year by year. he does plot some plants being built that cheaply in the 01960s in the us, in inflation-adjusted 02010 dollars, but for some reason he doesn't comment on that, and he doesn't find anyone able to do anything like that in recent years; the 'building cheaply' he cites in south korea and india is 190¢–250¢ per watt. this suggests that perhaps either the inflation adjustment or the original cost figures are incorrect solar does of course have a lower capacity factor than nuclear, but there are numerous countries where it's 30% or better, so 60¢ per peak watt is still less than 200¢ per long-term average watt. also 60¢ today is 41¢ in the 02010 dollars crawford is using: https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=60&year1=202405&year2=201005 https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=60&year1=20240... i sympathize with crawford's leanings but even the most generous reading of his claims doesn't support the contention that nuclear can be built cheaply enough to compete with solar
- FredPret 2y ago
  Solar panels are getting cheaper by the day. Solar power is not. Because between the panel and the lightbulb lies a battery.
  - jaggederest 2y ago
    Do you think batteries are getting more expensive over time?
    - XorNot 2y ago
      I think the assumption they would get cheaper given a massive change in their adoption patterns is unfounded. We know that lithium prices have gone up from the rise in EVs, and this has in part driven Tesla to switch to LiFePO4's rather then Li-Ion packs in some of their cars. Same effect with coltan. (although lithium is declining currently because EV sales in China have slowed). What would be the effect of the demand for terawatt-hour levels of batteries? Even if lithium is replaced with sodium in the application, the manufacturing capacity isn't there and won't be for quite some time - and the higher-value applications will get first take (i.e. EVs). Even if the lithium demand was saturated battery wise, at the steady state point the cost can then simply stabilize around the refurbisment/recycling cost of lithium/sodium/whatever from batteries. Sigmoidal adoption curves look exponential at the start, linear in the middle,and then become asymptotically flat.
      - kragen 2y ago
        > although lithium is declining currently because EV sales in China have slowed have they? 'one in three' of all new vehicle registrations in china were electric last year https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2024/trends-in-electric-cars https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2024/trends-in... or 37% https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/ev-registrations-in-china-nearly-double-from-2023/ https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/ev-registrations... and the absolute number seems to be doubling this year, though they only expect a 45% market share these figures do include both hybrids and pure battery models, though in general the 'experience curve' says that things get exponentially cheaper as you produce exponentially more of them
- jaggederest 2y ago
  Yeah solar is inevitably going to dominate the grid mix over the next couple decades. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424 Even if you discount by capacity factor it's the #1 new energy source being installed in the US, and similar or better anywhere with enough sun. I've done some armchair analysis that says that solar plus battery is cheaper than basically any other kind of new plant, obviously the biggest gains come first in peaking and adaptive load, but once you factor in fuel costs it even beats out natural gas now I think.
- Turing_Machine 2y ago
  >now that solar energy is far cheaper than coal ever was I'm sorry, this is simply not true. Usually such claims are the result of ignoring two basic facts: First, solar is only online 50% of the time, at most (in most regions, considerably less than 50%). That means that you need at a minimum twice the nameplate capacity for a solar plant than for a coal one. Second, being offline half the time means that you also need sufficient (very expensive!) storage capacity to cover the half the time that the solar plant is not working at all. In other words, to replace a 2GW conventional plant you're going to need at least 4GW worth of solar cells, plus 24 megawatt-hours of storage. If you have a source for reliable figures that take these factors into account, and still show solar being "far cheaper", please provide it. Edit: oh, and no woo-woo battery or solar cell technology that's not currently in mass production. Your statement was that it's "far cheaper" right now, not using future fantasy batteries or solar cells that may (or may not) be on the market in the future.
  - klipklop 2y ago
    You nailed it. What do you do when you have cloud cover for two weeks in a row? It’s not unheard of when some areas have 200+ days of at least some cloud coverage. Nuclear is essential to avoid using coal and not having regional rolling blackouts due to weather. Solar alone is not realistic anytime soon in all regions of the US.
    - toenail 2y ago
      > You nailed it. What do you do when you have cloud cover for two weeks in a row? Never mind the volcanic winter that seems to happen every few thousand years.
    - bryanlarsen 2y ago
      Nuclear is a horrible complement to cheap intermittent renewables. Running it as a peaker multiples your costs and running it as base loads means selling power for negative prices when the sun is shining. Solar/wind plus batteries for short term storage and pumped hydro for long term storage is the cheapest way to get zero carbon energy. Pumped hydro is more expensive than fossil peakera so build out of that hasn't happened yet.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  I’ll never get behind solar as anything but supplemental or “roof top solar” until we have grid scale batteries that can power more than a few hours. I’m talking about days, because weather events happen. which is what we need to call it “a replacement” unless you live in an area like Hawaii or San Diego that has nice weather year round.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > untik we have grid scale batteries that can power more than a few hours In the West we are doing this with gas. We are deploying trillions of dollars into new gas infrastructure with 15+ year payback periods and 40+ year lifetimes. We don’t need to wait for batteries. The peaker power and minor storage is already here.
  - cman1444 2y ago
    Couldn't this also be stated as solar being the bread and butter, while other sources are the supplement for when the sun isn't shining?
- out_of_protocol 2y ago
  The issue with solar (and wind) is unstable generation profile, and need to overprivision a lot to compensate for worst-case scenario, e.g. cloudy windless December (you can't have batteries this big). Usually the way to do it is solar/wind + natural gas plants, which usually shut off
  - kragen 2y ago
    agreed! you can afford hours of batteries but not days or weeks. after looking for quite a while i found this nrel report on utility-scale battery storage system cost: https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2023/utility-scale_battery_storage https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2023/utility-scale_battery_... in theory, flow batteries and fuel cells could allow you to afford days or weeks of batteries, but the incentive to invest in those isn't there until the renewable transition is a lot further along. aluminum-air batteries are sort of like fuel cells that burn aluminum, which you could stockpile a lot of, and i think they could potentially be cheaper per watt than gas turbines. and iron-air batteries are another similar variant which can in fact be recharged my intuition is that gas turbines have a much higher power density than steam turbines because the temperature difference is greater and you don't need an external boiler. but i don't know if that works out to a lower cost per peak watt. do you have any idea?
    - audunw 2y ago
      Many industrial countries already have lots of gas power plants. If they don’t actually need to run that often and don’t need that much fuel, just run them on hydrogen or biogas instead. Near zero investments to be made. Just somewhat larger operational costs per MWh delivered. If you collocate some industry that needs hydrogen (necessary for green steel and fertilisers for instance) then making and storing the hydrogen on-site should be fairly cost efficient. Running hydrogen in gas turbines has been demonstrated already btw.
      - kragen 2y ago
        right now only about a third of the 18 terawatts or so of world marketed energy consumption is electrical. to electrify the rest of the existing economy, we need to triple electrical generation capacity. since some of that new capacity will be intermittent sources like solar and wind (probably almost all of it) we also need to expand peaker plant or battery capacity, probably a lot, in order to supply essential uses that aren't amenable to demand response; the alternative is blackouts and deindustrialization if your peaker plants are gas turbines, running them less drives up their capex per megawatt hour delivered, so i'm interested in how much that capex is i agree that hydrogen is a plausible form of storage and can certainly be used for gas turbines
trynumber9 2y ago
>Non-proliferation groups including the Union of Concerned Scientists have warned against measures that ease licensing for high-tech nuclear reactors, including those using highly enriched uranium, arguing that safety should remain the priority. And the next generation reactors are 'passively' safe, in that a lack of coolant flow leads to shutdown of reaction unlike current reactors.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  Do you have any sources on SMRs that are passively safe? I haven’t seen one be declared as successful and viable yet and ready to start being produced in “numbers”.
  - trynumber9 2y ago
    The reactor in the article, Natrium, is a small sodium-cooled fast reactor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-cooled_fast_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-cooled_fast_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(reactor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(reactor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_II#Passive_safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I... https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2113/ML21139A048.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2113/ML21139A048.pdf
- bruce511 2y ago
  I'm very happy with the safety of nuclear reactors. I'm somewhat more sceptical of human nature, and the greed factor, when it comes to the proper disposal of nuclear waste. I get there are regs for that too - but our track-record for following regulations when it comes to waste disposal generally has not filled me with confidence. Costs incurred after the profit has been earned, (aka "cleaning up") are too easily avoided with a simple bankruptcy- and too easily corners are cut to just "make it go away". IMO cleaning-up costs should be paid for first, not last. Ie the govt should assume they'll be stuck with the cleaning bill, and should extract that during production.
- noqc 2y ago
  Safety, for non-proliferationists, does not refer to meltdown risk. Safety refers preventing the large scale enrichment of uranium.
brigadier132 2y ago
It just seems so obvious that the government should work towards making energy practically free. It would lower the cost of everything.
- hanniabu 2y ago
  Then it should fund fusion
  - seventytwo 2y ago
    It does.
    - rqtwteye 2y ago
      With way more money. ITER's budget is so far 22 billion. I would think development could be accelerated if they put more money into it. And I would argue that 22 billion for fusion research has the potential of doing way more for world peace than spending the same amount on defense.
- rqtwteye 2y ago
  So far nuclear hasn't been a path to practically free nergy.
  - brigadier132 2y ago
    Isn't that largely because of the regulatory burden?
    - BenFranklin100 2y ago
      Yes. And the fact we don’t build nuclear at scale. All projects have been essentially one-offs, built and managed by inexperienced teams working on custom designs. If we build the same type of plant hundreds of times by experienced teams, the cost per unit will plummet.
    - 2y ago
BenFranklin100 2y ago
I had not been following this story. Unexpected but very welcome news. The combination of climate change and accelerating energy demands makes this very timely.
photochemsyn 2y ago
This is probably the primary project related to this at present in the US, a liquid-metal cooled design coupled to a molten salt storage system (also used in solar thermal systems, mirror-field collectors): https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/06/natrium-soduim-cooled-fast-reactor-starts-construction.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/06/natrium-soduim-cooled-... The bill itself requires some reports from the DOE to Congress. Any guesses on how big this number will be? > "Not later than January 1, 2026, and biennially thereafter, the Secretary of Energy shall submit to Congress a report that describes... the projected lifecycle costs to store, manage, transport, and dispose of the projected inventory of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste in the United States, including spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste expected to be generated from existing reactors through 2050." The Chinese have introduced pebble-bed reactors with helium and graphite, and they're apparently capable of going into cool shutdown under a complete loss-of-power incident without melting down, and can produce high-temperature steam for industrial processes as well as electricity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTR-PM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTR-PM https://www.modernpowersystems.com/news/chinas-htr-pm-reactors-achieve-full-power-11406071/ https://www.modernpowersystems.com/news/chinas-htr-pm-reacto...
jmyeet 2y ago
It doesn't matter. Nuclear power generation is going nowhere because it's not economical and likely never will be. Modular reactors make no sense because larger reactors are more efficient. Nuclera plants ultimately just boil water and turn a turbine to generate power, just like any coal palnt. Coal plants burn coal to generate heat. A nuclear plant simply has a nuclear pile that generates heat. The failure modes are prohibitive. Just one incident (Fukushima) has a likely clean up cost of roughly $1 trillion [1] and will take decades, if not more than a century. Nearly 40 years later the absolutely exclusion zone for Chernobyl is still 1000 square miles. Chernobyl is hand waved away as "poor Soviet construction and management". Fukushima is hand waved away too. Massive failures are hand waved away by talking in terms of deaths. And, of course, fusion is a pipe dream. [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...
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  Has worked out just fine for France. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
  - natmaka 2y ago
    The real cost (including public money) of it is mind-boggling, and a serious accident cannot be ruled out. If uranium becomes difficult to import France will badly suffer. Then problems induced by real decommission costs and waste long-term management will hit.
    - insane_dreamer 2y ago
      And yet, electricity prices in France are lower than other large European countries: https://www.energycouncil.com.au/news/international-electricity-price-comparisons/ https://www.energycouncil.com.au/news/international-electric... It has 58 nuclear power plants without any serious accidents in the past 50+ years. That's a pretty good record. People always bring up Fukushima, but what killed ~20,000 people was the tsunami, not the reactor meltdown. The 2004 tsunami killed > 200,000 people. It hasn't stopped people worldwide from living near the coast.
natmaka 2y ago
In the 1940's Fermi already saw it as the future. Then many projects, in numerous nations, progressed towards the most promising path (a sodium-cooled 'fast' breeder) architecture and sailed OK... in the lab. Then, since the 1960's, many (some huge) projects aimed at obtaining an industrial ready-to-decline reactor. In vain, and most projects are now abandoned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Notable_reactors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Notable_reacto...
hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
I worked for a consultancy of ex-GE NE folks in the 90's. This is too little, too late. Renewables are so much cheaper and profitable to deploy, and PES and battery including v2g are ripe to backfill transient slack. Getting insurance and NRC licensing are blockers for any new nuclear project making it virtually impossible to build any new plant and this doesn't even consider local NIMBY or permanent waste storage concerns. Duke Energy can barely get 1 project off the ground. Consequently, the idea of new nuclear plants is a pipe dream that is only getting more distant. The economics aren't there, and there's no rational reason to religiously fetishize one type of power generation technology when others are cheaper, safer, and faster to deploy.
- q1w2 2y ago
  Renewables cannot store sufficient capacity to make up for their variable output. A cloudy/windless 2 week period in December, would require far more battery capacity than is possible - even with future tech. Nuclear is the only solution that is carbon free. Solar and wind are great for non-critical/non-time-sensitive power consumption. Remember that they are only cheaper than Nuclear if you exclude storage and include the insane Russia-inspired regulatory blocks we impose on Nuclear.
  - audunw 2y ago
    These claims get thrown around all the time yet I’ve seen more studies that point toward balancing renewable being possible than not, and all-in-all cheaper than our existing energy infrastructure even with today’s technology. Once the transition is complete that is. Any transition we do whether it’s nuclear or not will be quite expensive to start with. Hell, most of the world already have what we need for those super rare long dunkelflaute: gas power plants. They’re already there, no investments needed. They can spin up fast, they’re great for load balancing. If they only run a couple of times a year then the fuel costs become negligible. Just co-locate it with all the new hydrogen-hungry green industry we need to make steel and fertilisers carbon neutral. Set aside some of the hydrogen produced for those dunkelflaute. It’s probably a good idea to have a decent amount of buffer anyway. Nucleus is absolutely not carbon free. It’s low carbon for sure. But at the very least it needs a huge amount of concrete which is far from zero carbon. Concrete is also problematic these days for other reasons. Nuclear is not good or economic for load balancing. They’re thermal power plants. They’re not naturally suited for ramping up and down quickly. And they need to run at near 24/7 to be economical. One of the first pumped hydro plants was actually built to help balance nuclear. The world will run on mostly renewables. It’s incredibly naive to think anything else is remotely realistic at this point. Nuclear is a bad pairing for renewables, and there are actually plenty of good alternatives for load balancing if you care to look. So nuclear will most likely get squeezed out. Not to mention that the transition always from fossil fuels will come with a lot of load balancing capabilities. Hydrogen, as mentioned, and huge fleets of BEVs as well. Then there’s the looming threat of advanced geothermal. I honestly think that field will go ballistic at some point in the near future: when the oil/gas sectors sees the writing on the wall a significant portion of the talent in that field will take a hard look at geothermal. If Quaise works out it’s truly game over (well, technically it’s still nuclear: supposedly a big portion of the cores heat is from nuclear reactions.. so it’s a reactor we don’t have to fuel, maintain or decommission) I like nuclear fission actually. It’s a super cool technology. I don’t fear it, or its waste. But I just can’t see how it makes sense in the coming decades.
chickenbig 2y ago
There is a good Decouple Podcast for background on how the US got to the point where it had outsourced its enrichment and had insufficient centrifuge capacity of its own. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrQVGbNk2dE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrQVGbNk2dE The whole saga is politics (the US can build bigger/better; the US can help secure the world by soaking up Russian supply; the US can do it without relying on Uernco). I think the concept of a "minimum SWU/enriched uranium price" is appealing ... at least for Urenco.

178 points by beefman 2y ago

"A version of the bill had already passed in the House of Representatives and it will now go to President Joe Biden for a signature to become law. It passed the Senate 88-2 votes."

kragen 2y ago

it sounds like a reasonable enough measure, but even in its devil-may-care heyday, nuclear energy never undercut coal's pricing by much. now that solar energy is far cheaper than coal ever was, this seems like they're trying to fight last century's war: a bayonet charge into a machine gun nest basically a nuclear power plant is a coal power plant which replaces a coal fire with the nuclear island. you can describe it most charitably as a coal power plant where the fuel is free and doesn't make carbon dioxide or pollute the air. the problem is that coal power plants would already be too expensive to compete with solar on a pure capex basis, even if the coal and other operational expenses were free maybe if someone finds a way to make commercial nuclear power that doesn't involve driving an electromechanical generator with a steam turbine, nuclear could win. and obviously undersea and in parts of alaska nuclear is a better option (i wrote a comment earlier tonight on the recent history of solar energy costs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40723188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40723188 and its parent has a link to an excellent slide deck by fraunhofer ise https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/publications/studies/Photovoltaics-Report.pdf https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p... providing a lot more detail)

Jensson 2y ago
You do realize solar isn't viable in norther parts, due to peak demand being during cold winters and just less sun in general? Solar is great in the south where peak demand is during the warm sunny summers.
- standardUser 2y ago
  Some like a transmission issue, not an electricity generation issue.
  - autoexecbat 2y ago
    Some transmission issues are solved by local generation
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - Jensson 2y ago
    How would transmission solve the massive electricity demand during cold winter nights? Even in more southern areas generation during winter is lower, then pay the massive loss of transmitting that so far north and it is no longer viable.
    - kragen 2y ago
      hvdc transmission doesn't have massive losses from transmitting long distances, so you could literally transmit power from the tropics or even the other hemisphere. but overprovisioning solar locally is probably cheaper
      - wait_a_minute 2y ago
        Are there hvdc transmission lines already spanning those kinds of distances? How much raw material and upkeep does that require? If over-provisioning solar, how much more surface area would be needed to have the solar? Seems like the additional costs would pile up to get to current energy needs being met by just solar.
        kragen 2y ago
        you'll probably be interested in reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current. it says typical losses are 3.5% per 1000km, and typical voltages are 100–800 kilovolts, but china built a 12-gigawatt 1100-kilovolt link over 3300km in 02019 unfortunately i don't have a good handle on how efficient that link is. the numbers above suggest it would be about 89% efficient, but those are for lower-voltage systems in general you expect the resistive losses in the cables, at a given diameter and power, to scale with the inverse square of the voltage, so an 1100-kilovolt link should have 47% less resistive losses than an 800-kilovolt link at the same power level running over the same cables. however, corona-discharge losses increase at higher voltages rather than decreasing, and i don't know which one is dominant. so i don't know if that link is closer to 89% efficient or closer to 95% efficient the distance from the north or south pole to the equator is of course 10000 km, but people don't build very near the poles. for example, from svalbard to algiers is 4700 km. so, yeah, there are hvdc transmission lines already spanning those kinds of distances, but not quite that far yet transmission lines require utterly insignificant quantities of raw material, but where they cut through forested terrain, they do require upkeep. in the meeting of a tree and a megavolt, neither one comes out unscathed for some calculations on how much you need to over-provision solar, see my earlier comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40724349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40724349 considering a counterfactual where somehow norway had to use solar. 6.1 average kilowatts per norwegian at a capacity factor of 6% works out to 102 kilowatts peak per norwegian. if you're using low-cost 16%-efficient solar panels (as i assumed you would in my cost estimate, even though mostly people spring for the more efficient 'mainstream' ones) that would require 635 kilowatts of sunlight per norwegian, which is 635 square meters per norwegian (we rate solar panels on the assumption that sunlight is 1000 watts per square meter). 635 square meters is 25 meters square, .000635 square kilometers per norwegian. multiplying that by 5.5 million norwegians gives you the truly immense area of 3500 square kilometers of solar panels but wait! that's not all! you can't just lay the panels out flat on the ground and expect them to get a 6% capacity factor. you have to angle them toward the equator and spread them out so they don't shade each other. oslo is at 60° north, so your panels need to be angled at 60° from the horizontal, toward the south. maybe a bit more if you want to increase power production in winter, say 69°. so you have to space them out by 1/cos 69° ≈ 2.8. so actually you need 9800 square kilometers for your €340 billion of solar panels. how much space will you have left? a lot, it turns out. norway is 385000 square kilometers, so this is still just 2.5% of the country so norway, despite being the #2 highest user of energy per capita in the world after canada, and having cities that are literally inside the arctic circle, could switch to all solar. it's totally feasible. fortunately they have plenty of hydropower and wind so they don't need to
roenxi 2y ago
If we're aspiring to 1970s standards then sure. Nuclear power isn't about achieving the lofty heights of the 1970s. I'm just going to wave the famous article by Crawford on the economics of nuclear around: https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop [0] What you can see there is a very impressive learning curve that was well on the way to very cheap electricity. Then it suddenly and sharply inverts in a shape that defies common sense. Then no-one else really builds any. "Supporting nuclear" isn't supposed to mean splitting the atom at any cost. The point is if we would just stop regulating the industry into oblivion and let costs drop then it'd be a perfectly competitive form of power. We have this lobby that goes in, wrecks the economics of nuclear then uses the wreck they created as justification for why we can't build any more. And in some senses that is fair because if they had the power to destroy past nuclear projects they can do it again. But lets not pretend that these costs are fundamental to nuclear. Keeping a weather eye on China, if they do their usual trick and start learning how to build nuclear cheaply they could leapfrog everyone else on energy tech in another industry. On the one hand that'd be fantastic to the point where I'd love it. On the other it is so frustrating to be relying on nominal communists to push the state of the art forward on energy technology after listening to my western compatriots whinge about exactly that topic for decades while blocking the obvious solutions. We could have built the future in the west, we never had to have a do-it-in-China policy. [0] If you read the article, he's paraphrasing some book by someone called Devanney. I'm going to gamble on nobody reading the article so I can get that wrong without being corrected.
- kragen 2y ago
  it would be a perfectly competitive form of power by 01970s standards, but naval nuclear reactors, chinese nuclear reactors, and russian nuclear reactors are not regulated into oblivion and have not had their economics wrecked by lobbying. nevertheless, they remain more expensive and less economical than even fossil-fuel plants in both warships and china. conceivably capitalism could solve that problem (us defense contractors and chinese power plant builders are pretty tightly state-linked rather than free-market actors) but we don't have strong reasons for believing so crawford here talks optimistically about building nuclear plants for 250¢ per (nameplate) watt. europe and india are already building solar farms for 60¢ per (peak, nameplate) watt, a cost that is dropping dramatically year by year. he does plot some plants being built that cheaply in the 01960s in the us, in inflation-adjusted 02010 dollars, but for some reason he doesn't comment on that, and he doesn't find anyone able to do anything like that in recent years; the 'building cheaply' he cites in south korea and india is 190¢–250¢ per watt. this suggests that perhaps either the inflation adjustment or the original cost figures are incorrect solar does of course have a lower capacity factor than nuclear, but there are numerous countries where it's 30% or better, so 60¢ per peak watt is still less than 200¢ per long-term average watt. also 60¢ today is 41¢ in the 02010 dollars crawford is using: https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=60&year1=202405&year2=201005 https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=60&year1=20240... i sympathize with crawford's leanings but even the most generous reading of his claims doesn't support the contention that nuclear can be built cheaply enough to compete with solar
FredPret 2y ago
Solar panels are getting cheaper by the day. Solar power is not. Because between the panel and the lightbulb lies a battery.
- jaggederest 2y ago
  Do you think batteries are getting more expensive over time?
  - XorNot 2y ago
    I think the assumption they would get cheaper given a massive change in their adoption patterns is unfounded. We know that lithium prices have gone up from the rise in EVs, and this has in part driven Tesla to switch to LiFePO4's rather then Li-Ion packs in some of their cars. Same effect with coltan. (although lithium is declining currently because EV sales in China have slowed). What would be the effect of the demand for terawatt-hour levels of batteries? Even if lithium is replaced with sodium in the application, the manufacturing capacity isn't there and won't be for quite some time - and the higher-value applications will get first take (i.e. EVs). Even if the lithium demand was saturated battery wise, at the steady state point the cost can then simply stabilize around the refurbisment/recycling cost of lithium/sodium/whatever from batteries. Sigmoidal adoption curves look exponential at the start, linear in the middle,and then become asymptotically flat.
    - kragen 2y ago
      > although lithium is declining currently because EV sales in China have slowed have they? 'one in three' of all new vehicle registrations in china were electric last year https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2024/trends-in-electric-cars https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2024/trends-in... or 37% https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/ev-registrations-in-china-nearly-double-from-2023/ https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/ev-registrations... and the absolute number seems to be doubling this year, though they only expect a 45% market share these figures do include both hybrids and pure battery models, though in general the 'experience curve' says that things get exponentially cheaper as you produce exponentially more of them
jaggederest 2y ago
Yeah solar is inevitably going to dominate the grid mix over the next couple decades. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424 Even if you discount by capacity factor it's the #1 new energy source being installed in the US, and similar or better anywhere with enough sun. I've done some armchair analysis that says that solar plus battery is cheaper than basically any other kind of new plant, obviously the biggest gains come first in peaking and adaptive load, but once you factor in fuel costs it even beats out natural gas now I think.
Turing_Machine 2y ago
>now that solar energy is far cheaper than coal ever was I'm sorry, this is simply not true. Usually such claims are the result of ignoring two basic facts: First, solar is only online 50% of the time, at most (in most regions, considerably less than 50%). That means that you need at a minimum twice the nameplate capacity for a solar plant than for a coal one. Second, being offline half the time means that you also need sufficient (very expensive!) storage capacity to cover the half the time that the solar plant is not working at all. In other words, to replace a 2GW conventional plant you're going to need at least 4GW worth of solar cells, plus 24 megawatt-hours of storage. If you have a source for reliable figures that take these factors into account, and still show solar being "far cheaper", please provide it. Edit: oh, and no woo-woo battery or solar cell technology that's not currently in mass production. Your statement was that it's "far cheaper" right now, not using future fantasy batteries or solar cells that may (or may not) be on the market in the future.
- klipklop 2y ago
  You nailed it. What do you do when you have cloud cover for two weeks in a row? It’s not unheard of when some areas have 200+ days of at least some cloud coverage. Nuclear is essential to avoid using coal and not having regional rolling blackouts due to weather. Solar alone is not realistic anytime soon in all regions of the US.
  - toenail 2y ago
    > You nailed it. What do you do when you have cloud cover for two weeks in a row? Never mind the volcanic winter that seems to happen every few thousand years.
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    Nuclear is a horrible complement to cheap intermittent renewables. Running it as a peaker multiples your costs and running it as base loads means selling power for negative prices when the sun is shining. Solar/wind plus batteries for short term storage and pumped hydro for long term storage is the cheapest way to get zero carbon energy. Pumped hydro is more expensive than fossil peakera so build out of that hasn't happened yet.
EasyMark 2y ago
I’ll never get behind solar as anything but supplemental or “roof top solar” until we have grid scale batteries that can power more than a few hours. I’m talking about days, because weather events happen. which is what we need to call it “a replacement” unless you live in an area like Hawaii or San Diego that has nice weather year round.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > untik we have grid scale batteries that can power more than a few hours In the West we are doing this with gas. We are deploying trillions of dollars into new gas infrastructure with 15+ year payback periods and 40+ year lifetimes. We don’t need to wait for batteries. The peaker power and minor storage is already here.
- cman1444 2y ago
  Couldn't this also be stated as solar being the bread and butter, while other sources are the supplement for when the sun isn't shining?
out_of_protocol 2y ago
The issue with solar (and wind) is unstable generation profile, and need to overprivision a lot to compensate for worst-case scenario, e.g. cloudy windless December (you can't have batteries this big). Usually the way to do it is solar/wind + natural gas plants, which usually shut off
- kragen 2y ago
  agreed! you can afford hours of batteries but not days or weeks. after looking for quite a while i found this nrel report on utility-scale battery storage system cost: https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2023/utility-scale_battery_storage https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2023/utility-scale_battery_... in theory, flow batteries and fuel cells could allow you to afford days or weeks of batteries, but the incentive to invest in those isn't there until the renewable transition is a lot further along. aluminum-air batteries are sort of like fuel cells that burn aluminum, which you could stockpile a lot of, and i think they could potentially be cheaper per watt than gas turbines. and iron-air batteries are another similar variant which can in fact be recharged my intuition is that gas turbines have a much higher power density than steam turbines because the temperature difference is greater and you don't need an external boiler. but i don't know if that works out to a lower cost per peak watt. do you have any idea?
  - audunw 2y ago
    Many industrial countries already have lots of gas power plants. If they don’t actually need to run that often and don’t need that much fuel, just run them on hydrogen or biogas instead. Near zero investments to be made. Just somewhat larger operational costs per MWh delivered. If you collocate some industry that needs hydrogen (necessary for green steel and fertilisers for instance) then making and storing the hydrogen on-site should be fairly cost efficient. Running hydrogen in gas turbines has been demonstrated already btw.
    - kragen 2y ago
      right now only about a third of the 18 terawatts or so of world marketed energy consumption is electrical. to electrify the rest of the existing economy, we need to triple electrical generation capacity. since some of that new capacity will be intermittent sources like solar and wind (probably almost all of it) we also need to expand peaker plant or battery capacity, probably a lot, in order to supply essential uses that aren't amenable to demand response; the alternative is blackouts and deindustrialization if your peaker plants are gas turbines, running them less drives up their capex per megawatt hour delivered, so i'm interested in how much that capex is i agree that hydrogen is a plausible form of storage and can certainly be used for gas turbines

trynumber9 2y ago

>Non-proliferation groups including the Union of Concerned Scientists have warned against measures that ease licensing for high-tech nuclear reactors, including those using highly enriched uranium, arguing that safety should remain the priority. And the next generation reactors are 'passively' safe, in that a lack of coolant flow leads to shutdown of reaction unlike current reactors.

EasyMark 2y ago
Do you have any sources on SMRs that are passively safe? I haven’t seen one be declared as successful and viable yet and ready to start being produced in “numbers”.
- trynumber9 2y ago
  The reactor in the article, Natrium, is a small sodium-cooled fast reactor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-cooled_fast_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-cooled_fast_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(reactor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(reactor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_II#Passive_safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I... https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2113/ML21139A048.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2113/ML21139A048.pdf
bruce511 2y ago
I'm very happy with the safety of nuclear reactors. I'm somewhat more sceptical of human nature, and the greed factor, when it comes to the proper disposal of nuclear waste. I get there are regs for that too - but our track-record for following regulations when it comes to waste disposal generally has not filled me with confidence. Costs incurred after the profit has been earned, (aka "cleaning up") are too easily avoided with a simple bankruptcy- and too easily corners are cut to just "make it go away". IMO cleaning-up costs should be paid for first, not last. Ie the govt should assume they'll be stuck with the cleaning bill, and should extract that during production.
noqc 2y ago
Safety, for non-proliferationists, does not refer to meltdown risk. Safety refers preventing the large scale enrichment of uranium.

brigadier132 2y ago

It just seems so obvious that the government should work towards making energy practically free. It would lower the cost of everything.

hanniabu 2y ago
Then it should fund fusion
- seventytwo 2y ago
  It does.
  - rqtwteye 2y ago
    With way more money. ITER's budget is so far 22 billion. I would think development could be accelerated if they put more money into it. And I would argue that 22 billion for fusion research has the potential of doing way more for world peace than spending the same amount on defense.
rqtwteye 2y ago
So far nuclear hasn't been a path to practically free nergy.
- brigadier132 2y ago
  Isn't that largely because of the regulatory burden?
  - BenFranklin100 2y ago
    Yes. And the fact we don’t build nuclear at scale. All projects have been essentially one-offs, built and managed by inexperienced teams working on custom designs. If we build the same type of plant hundreds of times by experienced teams, the cost per unit will plummet.
  - 2y ago

BenFranklin100 2y ago

I had not been following this story. Unexpected but very welcome news. The combination of climate change and accelerating energy demands makes this very timely.

photochemsyn 2y ago

This is probably the primary project related to this at present in the US, a liquid-metal cooled design coupled to a molten salt storage system (also used in solar thermal systems, mirror-field collectors): https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/06/natrium-soduim-cooled-fast-reactor-starts-construction.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/06/natrium-soduim-cooled-... The bill itself requires some reports from the DOE to Congress. Any guesses on how big this number will be? > "Not later than January 1, 2026, and biennially thereafter, the Secretary of Energy shall submit to Congress a report that describes... the projected lifecycle costs to store, manage, transport, and dispose of the projected inventory of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste in the United States, including spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste expected to be generated from existing reactors through 2050." The Chinese have introduced pebble-bed reactors with helium and graphite, and they're apparently capable of going into cool shutdown under a complete loss-of-power incident without melting down, and can produce high-temperature steam for industrial processes as well as electricity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTR-PM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTR-PM https://www.modernpowersystems.com/news/chinas-htr-pm-reactors-achieve-full-power-11406071/ https://www.modernpowersystems.com/news/chinas-htr-pm-reacto...

jmyeet 2y ago

It doesn't matter. Nuclear power generation is going nowhere because it's not economical and likely never will be. Modular reactors make no sense because larger reactors are more efficient. Nuclera plants ultimately just boil water and turn a turbine to generate power, just like any coal palnt. Coal plants burn coal to generate heat. A nuclear plant simply has a nuclear pile that generates heat. The failure modes are prohibitive. Just one incident (Fukushima) has a likely clean up cost of roughly $1 trillion [1] and will take decades, if not more than a century. Nearly 40 years later the absolutely exclusion zone for Chernobyl is still 1000 square miles. Chernobyl is hand waved away as "poor Soviet construction and management". Fukushima is hand waved away too. Massive failures are hand waved away by talking in terms of deaths. And, of course, fusion is a pipe dream. [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...

insane_dreamer 2y ago
Has worked out just fine for France. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
- natmaka 2y ago
  The real cost (including public money) of it is mind-boggling, and a serious accident cannot be ruled out. If uranium becomes difficult to import France will badly suffer. Then problems induced by real decommission costs and waste long-term management will hit.
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    And yet, electricity prices in France are lower than other large European countries: https://www.energycouncil.com.au/news/international-electricity-price-comparisons/ https://www.energycouncil.com.au/news/international-electric... It has 58 nuclear power plants without any serious accidents in the past 50+ years. That's a pretty good record. People always bring up Fukushima, but what killed ~20,000 people was the tsunami, not the reactor meltdown. The 2004 tsunami killed > 200,000 people. It hasn't stopped people worldwide from living near the coast.

natmaka 2y ago

In the 1940's Fermi already saw it as the future. Then many projects, in numerous nations, progressed towards the most promising path (a sodium-cooled 'fast' breeder) architecture and sailed OK... in the lab. Then, since the 1960's, many (some huge) projects aimed at obtaining an industrial ready-to-decline reactor. In vain, and most projects are now abandoned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Notable_reactors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Notable_reacto...

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago

I worked for a consultancy of ex-GE NE folks in the 90's. This is too little, too late. Renewables are so much cheaper and profitable to deploy, and PES and battery including v2g are ripe to backfill transient slack. Getting insurance and NRC licensing are blockers for any new nuclear project making it virtually impossible to build any new plant and this doesn't even consider local NIMBY or permanent waste storage concerns. Duke Energy can barely get 1 project off the ground. Consequently, the idea of new nuclear plants is a pipe dream that is only getting more distant. The economics aren't there, and there's no rational reason to religiously fetishize one type of power generation technology when others are cheaper, safer, and faster to deploy.

q1w2 2y ago
Renewables cannot store sufficient capacity to make up for their variable output. A cloudy/windless 2 week period in December, would require far more battery capacity than is possible - even with future tech. Nuclear is the only solution that is carbon free. Solar and wind are great for non-critical/non-time-sensitive power consumption. Remember that they are only cheaper than Nuclear if you exclude storage and include the insane Russia-inspired regulatory blocks we impose on Nuclear.
- audunw 2y ago
  These claims get thrown around all the time yet I’ve seen more studies that point toward balancing renewable being possible than not, and all-in-all cheaper than our existing energy infrastructure even with today’s technology. Once the transition is complete that is. Any transition we do whether it’s nuclear or not will be quite expensive to start with. Hell, most of the world already have what we need for those super rare long dunkelflaute: gas power plants. They’re already there, no investments needed. They can spin up fast, they’re great for load balancing. If they only run a couple of times a year then the fuel costs become negligible. Just co-locate it with all the new hydrogen-hungry green industry we need to make steel and fertilisers carbon neutral. Set aside some of the hydrogen produced for those dunkelflaute. It’s probably a good idea to have a decent amount of buffer anyway. Nucleus is absolutely not carbon free. It’s low carbon for sure. But at the very least it needs a huge amount of concrete which is far from zero carbon. Concrete is also problematic these days for other reasons. Nuclear is not good or economic for load balancing. They’re thermal power plants. They’re not naturally suited for ramping up and down quickly. And they need to run at near 24/7 to be economical. One of the first pumped hydro plants was actually built to help balance nuclear. The world will run on mostly renewables. It’s incredibly naive to think anything else is remotely realistic at this point. Nuclear is a bad pairing for renewables, and there are actually plenty of good alternatives for load balancing if you care to look. So nuclear will most likely get squeezed out. Not to mention that the transition always from fossil fuels will come with a lot of load balancing capabilities. Hydrogen, as mentioned, and huge fleets of BEVs as well. Then there’s the looming threat of advanced geothermal. I honestly think that field will go ballistic at some point in the near future: when the oil/gas sectors sees the writing on the wall a significant portion of the talent in that field will take a hard look at geothermal. If Quaise works out it’s truly game over (well, technically it’s still nuclear: supposedly a big portion of the cores heat is from nuclear reactions.. so it’s a reactor we don’t have to fuel, maintain or decommission) I like nuclear fission actually. It’s a super cool technology. I don’t fear it, or its waste. But I just can’t see how it makes sense in the coming decades.

chickenbig 2y ago

There is a good Decouple Podcast for background on how the US got to the point where it had outsourced its enrichment and had insufficient centrifuge capacity of its own. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrQVGbNk2dE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrQVGbNk2dE The whole saga is politics (the US can build bigger/better; the US can help secure the world by soaking up Russian supply; the US can do it without relying on Uernco). I think the concept of a "minimum SWU/enriched uranium price" is appealing ... at least for Urenco.