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Norway has had two small experimental nuclear reactors since the 50s or so, and they're getting decommissioned. Turns out that's expensive. Very expensive. Curr
by magicalhippo 1y ago
Norway has had two small experimental nuclear reactors since the 50s or so, and they're getting decommissioned. Turns out that's expensive. Very expensive. Current estimates have ballooned to 56 billion NOK ($5.6b).
So what does SMR decommissioning look like?
At least this project has skipped the huge NIMBY issue by putting them on ships. And if anything goes wrong I'm sure nobody would mind glow-in-the-dark sushi...
- FridayoLeary 1y agoWhat makes is it so expensive?
- _aavaa_ 1y agoSmall reactors miss out economies of scale that large reactors get access to. Halving the size of a pipe doesn’t halve the cost.
- magicalhippo 1y agoIn the case of our experimental reactors, a large part as I understand it is that they were fooling around in the 60s. Thus a lot of "meh just put it over there" scenarios and such, without much consideration of the consequences. Another point is that Norway has no way to process the leftover materials, and currently nowhere to store the processed materials. So we need to ship the highly radioactive stuff abroad, and build a storage facility for when it's processed.
- PaulHoule 1y agoDecommissioning isn’t usually as bad as building reactors — it’s not unusual for decommissioning projects to come in under budget and early.