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I read this analysis of the SMR farm announcement in Canada a few months ago and I found it quite insightful: https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2025/5/11/th

I read this analysis of the SMR farm announcement in Canada a few months ago and I found it quite insightful: https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2025/5/11/the-first-test-for-new-small-modular-reactors-smr https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2025/5/11/the-first-te...

pfdietz 1y ago
"there is no evidence today that SMRs will reduce electricity costs compared to continuing rapid investment in wind and solar."
- mikestorrent 1y ago
  Not with the approach we are showing, but if solar was built like this, it would fail too: remember Solyndra? Treating it as a bespoke construction project instead of as a commodity manufacturing project is the fundamental mistake that continues to result in nuclear costing too much. Fuck's sake, it's just some hot rocks boiling a kettle, we make it out to sound like it's magic but we had the technology for this ~80 years ago. By now we should have the cost of a standard issue nuclear plant down to way cheaper than anything else. Common layout, protocols, processes, software at all of them... could have been complete in 1989, honestly.
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    But solar isn't built like nuclear. Solar involves parallel exploration of device designs at very small scale, installed with massive redundancy and resilience. Many billions of PV cells have been manufactured. The real cost decline driver is manufacturing automation. Nuclear, even SMRs, have orders of magnitude coarser granularity. If you want "hot rocks", it's probably much cheaper to just resistively heat them with cheap solar (you don't even need inverters). This could store energy over many months and, pushed to its cost reduction limits this promises to be the final nail in the coffin for any dreams of a nuclear revival. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45012942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45012942
    - mikestorrent 1y ago
      > Solar involves parallel exploration of device designs at very small scale, installed with massive redundancy and resilience. I am imagining a field of shipping-container sized units, each of which is a small modular reactor. Probably with solar panels on top ;) Still a few orders of magnitude different, but the idea here is that each unit is small enough that it can be manufactured, so that nuclear plant bring-ups don't take 30 years. Most of the cost is because of the tremendous generational effort involved in just a single project; what does it take to reduce the cost of the plants themselves to the point where they can really shine, economically? The goal is to have reliable base load power generation so that we don't have to deal with the massive complexity and carbon footprint of battery plants all over the place to deal with peaky generation technologies like solar. I don't believe that that is a solved problem: using tremendous amounts of rare earth materials for limited-lifespan installations that don't even produce energy is possibly not the best use of our resources, considering it's almost all fossil fuel going into those logistics operations anyway, right? EROEI for a battery plant is going to be hard to achieve.
      - aledalgrande 1y ago
        Your shipping container mention reminded me of The Box, a book that explains how shipping was so erratic, risky, slow, unreliable and incredibly expensive before the standardization into containers. Containers literally changed the world economy. I think you are onto something. But this requires upfront investment, which alas, politicians are not for.
      - pfdietz 1y ago
        NPPs that small are a nonstarter, due to loss of economies of scale. Even SMRs are creeping up in size now to try to recapture the economies of traditional gigawatt power plants.
        mikestorrent 1y ago
        There are two different economies of scale at play here; but if that's the case, I can accept things that are bigger than a train container. Even if we decide that they still have to be just as big as existing reactors, the key thing here is that nobody should start the new wave of nuclear by building a nuclear plant. You have to start it by building factories that produce nuclear plants themselves as a commodity item. Haven't we learned that already in devops? A nuclear reactor today is a big hand-bombed snowflake. I want nukes-as-code.
- torginus 1y ago
  This is concern trolling. The key to nuclear economics is speed of construction, and controlling costs, and not caving to safety pearl-clutchers (that is, adding cost and delays for 'safety measures; meant to appease the public, not things deemed necessary by experts and regulators). But the key is speed. If you tie up $20B for 20 years uselessly, there's no way you can make a profit on anything.
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    You're just trying to smear a conclusion you don't like with fatuous insults. The argument that this time, for sure, nuclear will be much cheaper has worn quite thin. Why do you think anyone in power is going to listen that song again? BTW, do you think the dominance of renewables over new nuclear construction in China is due to "pearl clutching" there?
    - torginus 1y ago
      There's no conclusion or root cause in the article. It just suggests that since the Canadians had cost overruns and delays, it's impossible to build reactors on time and budget. Yet China has managed to build those plants exactly around those costs and budgets - I have seen this argument so many time, around high speed rail, where Americans failed at infrastructure and deemed it 'uneconomical', then when China succeeded they smeared them for building probably in 'an evil way' or what. Let me turn your question back at you - if China is doing so well on renewables, why is it that they're still building tens of gigawatts of nuclear capacity with hundreds more planned? Even the linked article admits that 'Solar GWh' is not comparable to nuclear GWh because if you add the wattage of panels together you get a meaninglessly big number. If you are planning around a 24/7 available power source, you need to overbuild solar by 20x I estimate, and the article admits, their calculations do not take storage into account (which you simply would not need if you had an always available power source. China leads on solar panels, equipment and batteries, yet they are the biggest investors into nuclear today, I think that says enough about solar (and wind) not being able to economically substitute for nuclear.
    - torginus 1y ago
      Also a different angle - economics. If you take 20 years to build a reactor, then the interest that investment assuming an 5% YoY, would be ~2.7x the original purchase price. Your yearly profits wont be enough to pay the interest at that point. You are right - by these standards it makes no economic sense to build a nuclear reactor, but the standards only exist because of the positively lethargic Western work moral.
mikestorrent 1y ago
Depressing, but it shows the typical faults of most Canadian projects these days. Massive government spend on a project doomed to fail by economic analysis before it's even online; and no takeaways for the Canadian people to actually get momentum going. If we wanted to do SMRs right, the goal should be to build one or more SMR production factories, here in Canada, where we manufacture N reactors per month, that fit onto train cars, and can be delivered to qualified, secure sites around the world. Instead, we're paying massive cash out to GE Hitachi, and so the end result will never be "the capability of building and deploying SMRs", it will be "4 unprofitable SMRs in a facility and $4.4 billion a unit if we want more of them to lose money on". Obviously this is doomed to fail; the units should cost like $100M max so they have positive ROI within a few years. If the unit will never beat solar in $/megawatt for operating and fueling costs, and won't pay for its own construction cost before its lifetime ends, it should never have been constructed; the entire thing is catabolic, all of the work and carbon that goes into it is an utter waste. Everyone involved should just do something else with their lives if we're going to approach it this way. What's the point? Why do such small-minded people get authority over grand projects?
- tomComb 1y ago
  It’s usually about well connected companies lobbying for free money. It’s the sort of thing that keeps Bell and others afloat and guarantees they never have to get competitive. The gross thing is seeing the public cheer it on.
  - mikestorrent 1y ago
    I'm still half cheering it because at the very least it's still nuclear progress, and will help ensure we still have nuclear energy workers for another generation here. I worry a lot about what's been done to the Atomic Energy Workers in terms of whittling away at our capability to produce good energy workers with tribal wisdom and the Canadian nuclear culture of safety.

pfdietz 1y ago

"there is no evidence today that SMRs will reduce electricity costs compared to continuing rapid investment in wind and solar."

mikestorrent 1y ago
Not with the approach we are showing, but if solar was built like this, it would fail too: remember Solyndra? Treating it as a bespoke construction project instead of as a commodity manufacturing project is the fundamental mistake that continues to result in nuclear costing too much. Fuck's sake, it's just some hot rocks boiling a kettle, we make it out to sound like it's magic but we had the technology for this ~80 years ago. By now we should have the cost of a standard issue nuclear plant down to way cheaper than anything else. Common layout, protocols, processes, software at all of them... could have been complete in 1989, honestly.
- pfdietz 1y ago
  But solar isn't built like nuclear. Solar involves parallel exploration of device designs at very small scale, installed with massive redundancy and resilience. Many billions of PV cells have been manufactured. The real cost decline driver is manufacturing automation. Nuclear, even SMRs, have orders of magnitude coarser granularity. If you want "hot rocks", it's probably much cheaper to just resistively heat them with cheap solar (you don't even need inverters). This could store energy over many months and, pushed to its cost reduction limits this promises to be the final nail in the coffin for any dreams of a nuclear revival. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45012942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45012942
  - mikestorrent 1y ago
    > Solar involves parallel exploration of device designs at very small scale, installed with massive redundancy and resilience. I am imagining a field of shipping-container sized units, each of which is a small modular reactor. Probably with solar panels on top ;) Still a few orders of magnitude different, but the idea here is that each unit is small enough that it can be manufactured, so that nuclear plant bring-ups don't take 30 years. Most of the cost is because of the tremendous generational effort involved in just a single project; what does it take to reduce the cost of the plants themselves to the point where they can really shine, economically? The goal is to have reliable base load power generation so that we don't have to deal with the massive complexity and carbon footprint of battery plants all over the place to deal with peaky generation technologies like solar. I don't believe that that is a solved problem: using tremendous amounts of rare earth materials for limited-lifespan installations that don't even produce energy is possibly not the best use of our resources, considering it's almost all fossil fuel going into those logistics operations anyway, right? EROEI for a battery plant is going to be hard to achieve.
    - aledalgrande 1y ago
      Your shipping container mention reminded me of The Box, a book that explains how shipping was so erratic, risky, slow, unreliable and incredibly expensive before the standardization into containers. Containers literally changed the world economy. I think you are onto something. But this requires upfront investment, which alas, politicians are not for.
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      NPPs that small are a nonstarter, due to loss of economies of scale. Even SMRs are creeping up in size now to try to recapture the economies of traditional gigawatt power plants.
      - mikestorrent 1y ago
        There are two different economies of scale at play here; but if that's the case, I can accept things that are bigger than a train container. Even if we decide that they still have to be just as big as existing reactors, the key thing here is that nobody should start the new wave of nuclear by building a nuclear plant. You have to start it by building factories that produce nuclear plants themselves as a commodity item. Haven't we learned that already in devops? A nuclear reactor today is a big hand-bombed snowflake. I want nukes-as-code.
torginus 1y ago
This is concern trolling. The key to nuclear economics is speed of construction, and controlling costs, and not caving to safety pearl-clutchers (that is, adding cost and delays for 'safety measures; meant to appease the public, not things deemed necessary by experts and regulators). But the key is speed. If you tie up $20B for 20 years uselessly, there's no way you can make a profit on anything.
- pfdietz 1y ago
  You're just trying to smear a conclusion you don't like with fatuous insults. The argument that this time, for sure, nuclear will be much cheaper has worn quite thin. Why do you think anyone in power is going to listen that song again? BTW, do you think the dominance of renewables over new nuclear construction in China is due to "pearl clutching" there?
  - torginus 1y ago
    There's no conclusion or root cause in the article. It just suggests that since the Canadians had cost overruns and delays, it's impossible to build reactors on time and budget. Yet China has managed to build those plants exactly around those costs and budgets - I have seen this argument so many time, around high speed rail, where Americans failed at infrastructure and deemed it 'uneconomical', then when China succeeded they smeared them for building probably in 'an evil way' or what. Let me turn your question back at you - if China is doing so well on renewables, why is it that they're still building tens of gigawatts of nuclear capacity with hundreds more planned? Even the linked article admits that 'Solar GWh' is not comparable to nuclear GWh because if you add the wattage of panels together you get a meaninglessly big number. If you are planning around a 24/7 available power source, you need to overbuild solar by 20x I estimate, and the article admits, their calculations do not take storage into account (which you simply would not need if you had an always available power source. China leads on solar panels, equipment and batteries, yet they are the biggest investors into nuclear today, I think that says enough about solar (and wind) not being able to economically substitute for nuclear.
  - torginus 1y ago
    Also a different angle - economics. If you take 20 years to build a reactor, then the interest that investment assuming an 5% YoY, would be ~2.7x the original purchase price. Your yearly profits wont be enough to pay the interest at that point. You are right - by these standards it makes no economic sense to build a nuclear reactor, but the standards only exist because of the positively lethargic Western work moral.

mikestorrent 1y ago

Depressing, but it shows the typical faults of most Canadian projects these days. Massive government spend on a project doomed to fail by economic analysis before it's even online; and no takeaways for the Canadian people to actually get momentum going. If we wanted to do SMRs right, the goal should be to build one or more SMR production factories, here in Canada, where we manufacture N reactors per month, that fit onto train cars, and can be delivered to qualified, secure sites around the world. Instead, we're paying massive cash out to GE Hitachi, and so the end result will never be "the capability of building and deploying SMRs", it will be "4 unprofitable SMRs in a facility and $4.4 billion a unit if we want more of them to lose money on". Obviously this is doomed to fail; the units should cost like $100M max so they have positive ROI within a few years. If the unit will never beat solar in $/megawatt for operating and fueling costs, and won't pay for its own construction cost before its lifetime ends, it should never have been constructed; the entire thing is catabolic, all of the work and carbon that goes into it is an utter waste. Everyone involved should just do something else with their lives if we're going to approach it this way. What's the point? Why do such small-minded people get authority over grand projects?

tomComb 1y ago
It’s usually about well connected companies lobbying for free money. It’s the sort of thing that keeps Bell and others afloat and guarantees they never have to get competitive. The gross thing is seeing the public cheer it on.
- mikestorrent 1y ago
  I'm still half cheering it because at the very least it's still nuclear progress, and will help ensure we still have nuclear energy workers for another generation here. I worry a lot about what's been done to the Atomic Energy Workers in terms of whittling away at our capability to produce good energy workers with tribal wisdom and the Canadian nuclear culture of safety.