4 ms·
So how small a reactor? And what sort of cost, what sort of setup time, what sort of safety constraints (ie, current reactors are generally water-cooled and nee
by beat 11y ago
So how small a reactor? And what sort of cost, what sort of setup time, what sort of safety constraints (ie, current reactors are generally water-cooled and need access to large bodies of water)? It's possible to trim the cost of reactors from the billions to the millions, maybe, but how many millions?
Certainly, solar with batteries is a lot more expensive - but to my point, startup cost is low. Latency, or bandwidth? The long-term cost/kwh may be higher for solar, but the short-term startup expense will be much lower, unless you can get the factory-built reactors down into the thousands rather than millions of dollars.
If nuclear is cheaper than solar in a decade or two, but costs ten times as much in the short run, there's a tremendous advantage to solar, battery cost or not. Opportunity cost matters tremendously.
- DennisP 11y agoStartup cost for solar is not all that amazingly cheap per watt, and if you include batteries it's probably more than nuclear. UPower's design doesn't require a large body of water: http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/startup-designs-trucksize-nuclear-reactor http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/startup-d... For setup you deliver it with a truck and bury it. Other modular nuclear designs are a bit bigger but still in the range of small natural gas plants, which are competing quite well. If Helion works out then fission and solar will both be mostly obsolete. They'd be 50MW plants, retailing power at four cents per kWh, with no significant safety concerns.
- smil 11y agoWouldn't trust a Silicon Valley startup to care about our properly execute for "safety." This is a pump and dump, making a quick buck.
- beat 11y agoSolar scales MUCH more fine-grained. There isn't a convenient source for 10kw nuclear power, and there probably never will be, but it's easy to build solar at that scale.
- donttrustatoms 11y agoYou're exactly right, and that's what we designed for with UPower. I would have written the exact same thing when we began talking about doing something in nuclear 5 years ago. Too many reactors are designed without the market or financing in mind. We decided on the simplest possible reactor optimized to a size useful to a market in dire need- just MW scale. It has no pumps, no water in the reactor, and builds upon a legacy of data so that there will be minimal fuel and materials qualification, which adds up very quickly in both time and money. Why hasn't it been done before? The key, as you bring up, is in manufacturing, simplicity, a relatively new and hugely growing microgrid market that didn't exist much before, and a business model that doesn't require the customer to buy the unit as opposed to power purchase.
- justonepost 11y agoThe problem with anything nuclear is insurance. The only way reactors got insured was because Uncle Sam underwrote them.
- oska 11y agoIndeed. What insurer could have covered the estimated 137 billion dollar hit [1] from the Fukushima disaster? The Japanese government has had to step in, to the very real financial detriment of its people and their nation. [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-11-07/fukushima-137-billion-cost-has-tepco-seeking-more-aid http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-11-07/fukushima-...
- jedmeyers 11y agoAlso, Chernobyl was one of the reasons Soviet Union collapsed.
- pjc50 11y agoWell, it's cheaper than Greece. (Nuclear reactors have the same "too big to fail" problem as the banking system: the expected value is positive, but the worst-case is a huge open ended liability and toxic asset)