Advanced nuclear technology just got a big green light from Congress | Hacker News Reader

Advanced nuclear technology just got a big green light from Congress

technologyreview.com

48 pointsrbanffy58 comments

I'm all for this. We desperately need carbon-free sources of energy, and even though there are challenges associated with nuclear it really is a powerful technology and I think the risks are generally worth it. Even better if the partnerships formed here can produce reactors that remove or reduce some of the negatives.

And before anyone even says it, I strongly support work into solar, wind, and other non-carbon sources as well. I believe it should be all hands on deck to solve climate change and I see no problem with supporting all of these technologies.

Glad to hear it.

One issue in the advanced nuclear industry is that a lot of people (there are ~50 individual advanced nuclear efforts in the USA [1]) are competing to have the best nuclear technology without collaborating all that much, even though such collaboration may be necessary for the industry to overcome its challenges (i.e. survive in an era of cheap natural gas and popular/successful intermittent renewables). It's important for nuclear to survive because intermittent renewables in the 50-75% of total energy range can benefit a lot from some low-carbon baseload (or, even better, just low-carbon dispatchable energy), and it will be much easier to decarbonize with a successful nuclear fleet.

In advanced nuclear, you need test facilities to perform multi-year material and fuel tests, physics modeling software to be validated against experimental facilities that no longer exist, and a big-ticket hardware supply chain that's ramped up to "N-stamp" quality assurance programs. All of this is hard.

Secrecy in the nuclear industry dates back to the Manhattan Project and the naval nuclear stuff, but it's holding it back now. I've been dreaming about much more work in open-source reactor design software, open-source reactor hardware, and other ways to share facilities, supply chains, etc. The hard part is finding business cases when the industry is still mostly run by old-school engineering managers.

[1] https://www.thirdway.org/infographic/the-advanced-nuclear-in...

Fusion on the grid in 15 years? Excuse me if I don’t hold my breath.

The article doesn’t say anything about fusion. If it’s part of the research, I don’t think it’s the main focus.

Hmm, you're right. The linked article didn't mention fusion.

That website is such a mess though that I wound up on the main page unintentionally, and there was an article: MIT researchers say nuclear fusion will feed the grid “in 15 years”

I didn't realize they were separate.

Whatever your position, this reads like a barely touched industry press release.

"Nuclear power is one of the few sources of clean energy that can reliably provide always-on power (unlike solar or wind)"

Ignoring renewable paired with storage when comparing capability with future reactor designs seems dishonest.

Nuclear also needs to be paired with storage. It generates electricity at a constant rate. Typically it overproduces at night and underproduces during the day. Thus, storage is used to absorb the overproduction at night and augment underproduction during the day.

Granted, this kind of research may find the kind of quick-on, quick-off generation that's needed when there's a lot of renewable power in the mix.

Solar power underproduces at night and makes more in the day.

Not needing storage is a real advantage. I see nothing "dishonest" about pointing that out.

It's an advantage if you assume the current grid is a great setup and shouldn't be changed. With the increasing frequency of severe weather events taking down the grid in areas, the decentralized storage that a more renewables-focused grid would probably require would probably be a good thing to have.

No, not needing storage is an advantage under any conceivable scenario. Storage of any kind is bulky, expensive, and dangerous.

Distributed battery storage is getting cheaper than upgrading the interconnects right now though. Never mind the generation, it is getting cheaper than the wire.

Is it any more dangerous or complicated than diesel fuel, generators, and keeping pumps and a fuel supply around?

As long as you solve the waste issue. If you can't solve nuclear waste, cheap batteries, solar, and wind will beat you every time.

And you better be able to deliver for under 8 cents/kwh, which is where battery backed renewables are currently at (and that will continue to fall).

Yes. The waste issue has already been more or less solved.

Whether the cost can be made sufficiently cheap is another question. Inflation adjusted estimates have (somehow) been climbing since 60s when we actually built nuclear plants.

Can you provide a citation for waste being solved? My understanding is that there is no long term storage facility, all waste is being stored in "temporary" facilities on site, and that any reactor capable of reprocessing nuclear waste ("burning it up") has never been operated at commercial scale.

https://www.gao.gov/key_issues/disposal_of_highlevel_nuclear...

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/nucle...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclear-environment-i...

France had been recycling waste for decades.

The US is building the Yucca facility, but politics have held it up. Generally, the nuclear waste problem is political not technical.

And once nuclear waste becomes more than an academic question, the solution will magically appear.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fue...

Unfortunately, without a legitimate method of disposing of nuclear waste today (despite France reprocessing some nuclear waste, they still bury large amounts underground) at the scale we've generated it, I'll continue to oppose nuclear power and advocate for renewables and battery storage.

Nuclear advocates hand wave away the waste concerns as "solvable", yet they're never solved. You can't craft policy in such a way, as it's just yet another example of kicking the can to future generations. If you can prove that recycling facilities are in place and ready to accept waste on day 1 of a new facility coming online, that would be cause to advocate for nuclear.

Your point is reasonable as stated for sure. I'd like to add to the conversation that there's a used fuel repository facility in Finland that's under construction now and is very likely to be the first permanent solution for nuclear waste [1]. The geologists I've talked to are very confident that deep geologic storage is a solid technical solution.

I'd also like to point out that the magnitude of nuclear waste is extremely small, due to the unbelievably energy density of nuclear fuel (2 million times more energy per mass than chemical energy). All the waste ever generated in the US fits in a football field a few stories high. It's incredibly small, albeit dangerous stuff. But that means it's even more reasonable to think we can bury it responsibly, without kicking the can.

There's also been good storage of waste in salt deposits down at WIPP [2]. We know that water moves centimeters in there in hundreds of thousands of years, so the radioisotopes will be well contained outside the biosphere until well after they've decayed to harmlessness.

I'd also plead with you to advocate nuclear energy in addition to renewables and battery storage. We need them all. You obviously are aware that batteries and vast fields of solar and wind and hydro have land/waste/cost/and carbon footprints of their own. I beg you to fairly compare those footprints with the footprints of nuclear energy. Nukes and the intermittent renewables must be partners in our major quest to decarbonize.

Future generations will be much happier with us if we stop emitting carbon than if we safely bury tiny amounts of radioactive waste.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant

Agree with all of your points, and spoke with my Illinois legislators when they were considering subsidies to keep at-risk existing commercial nuclear generators operating.

My concern with new generators is that it takes at least a decade to construct one. Can someone build one faster, cheaper, and manage the waste stream? I'm all for it.

If they had pointed that out, it would have been included, and thereby pointed out.

My point is that it was omitted.

And that it seems dishonest to omit it when making a comparison with renewable against reactor designs yet to be tested while battery prices fall through the floor.

"Always on" means "doesn't need storage" pretty much by definition.

It's not really an apples-to-apples comparison anyway.

In general, nuclear lends itself to providing reliable baseload power, whereas storage is most economic when used for peaking or responding to contingencies on the grid.

It's not dishonest.

Electrical storage is a possible add-on to any power source, fossil fuels included.

But it's a significant pro if a source that don't require a s storage solution. If economical, large scale storage were closer to being solved, you might be able to take it for granted. But not yet.

"Clean energy" is a bit of an overstatement, given that any fission reactor, no matter how advanced, will produce radiation out the wazoo. It will also irradiate the containment, leading to nuclear waste both in the construction of the reactor and the burned fuel.

The issue of nuclear waste hasn't been solved. Most countries do not have a proper storage site yet, and people understandably don't want to live anywhere near such a site.

I'd prefer solving that problem first, before creating incentives to produce ever more nuclear waste.

The quantity of nuclear waste is rather small: on the order of an ounce per person per year.

FUD is the bigger problem.

> I'd prefer solving that problem first, before creating incentives to produce ever more nuclear waste.

I think that makes about as much sense as insisting on a better storage solution before we waste any more time looking at these solar or wind things.

It's not FUD when nuclear waste is already leaking in some places. Other stuff is stored in unsafe caves and the like, if not right in the open. You may call it a "small quantity per person", but it is already more than can be stored safely at present. And don't forget about the "little" problem of containing the Tschernobyl reactor. Or the difficulties in even accessing the fuel rods of Fukushima.

The disposal of waste associated with renewable energy is a lot easier. It doesn't irradiate anything, it doesn't kill people, even when disposed of improperly. The comparison is just ridiculous.

A large part of the poor handling of waste, is that developments in the field are severely hampered by politics.

There's a large amount of ignorant good intentions. Ironically, those that pseudo-scientific bandwagons have probably caused more dangerous storage than they prevented through their loud, blind denouncement of nuclear.

I've seen so many posts, even in this thread, asking for examples of one thing or another--and if there are none, then well, aren't they right? But somehow missing the point that maybe such rhetoric and sophistry is the reason why the examples are lacking. How far would solar or wind have come, if facing the immovable wall of entire populations of ignorance?

This is very good news. Nuclear is the energy to go.

My understanding is - via a very respected nuclear R&D person - the only thing holding fusion back is money. Any investment in fission seems misguided and wasteful.

For the last 40 years, fusion has always been one small technical problem away from being solved. Well, 40 years and millions and maybe billions of dollars later, we really are no closer to having solved the fusion puzzle (i.e. containing and sustaining a fusion reaction as to be useful). I personally do not see this being solved before 2100.

Fwiw a couple days after a renown expert said to me (in so many words) "soon...we can so this..." this happened:

https://gizmodo.com/chinese-fusion-test-creates-90-million-f...

We built the bomb.

We put human on the moon.

But we can't do fusion? And it's the one we need most?

To play on Thiel's quote, thank god Twitter doubled their character count. Now that's an amazing advance!!!

This is a conservative estimate:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2018/03/09/mit-says-nuc...

One more, from a couple days ago

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/09/nuclear-...

Still no reason to give up hope.

There's reason to think there's a bit more to it than just money. As the small plasmas people the startups (General Fusion, Tri-Alpha, Helion) are working with now scale up there tend to be strange and difficult plasma instabilities that have a long history of rearing their heads. For instance, magnetic mirrors had the leakage out the ends which was fixed with a modification but that led to a show-stopping instability at practical powers. And the really big ITER-style things have scalability problems just from the sheer amount of superconducting magnets and materials they need.

Money = resources.

Resources + time = solve problems

Haha, ok granted. But by that reasoning, can't all problems be solved with more money, at which point there's no point discussing other ways to solve problems? That seems to reduce the argument to be less interesting in my mind.

Technically correct, if the ball of money is large enough.

Specially, any ball larger than 0.05 solar mass will start a self sustaining fusion reaction.

I think that'll depend on the materials. Maybe money is harder to fuse than Hydrogen.

Money is naturally denser, so that helps.

And I'm guessing the trace water content would provide sufficient hydrogen.

> Nuclear power is one of the few sources of clean energy

well clean if you forget about the waste in the aftermath..

Solar is only clean if you forget about the waste from manufacturing and end-of-life panels. Nothing is perfect. Nuclear is pretty good.

To compare the waste of solar panel production with the highly radio active, highly toxic waste a nuclear reactor leaves behind, is like saying an Elefant's poop doesn't matter because a mouse poops too.

Nuclear produces far less waste, so I think your analogy is backwards.

That waste is nasty, but the quantity is really small.

If you look at the pollution produced by the various kinds of energy plants, nuclear looks kinda miraculous.

Coal plants spew quite a bit of radiation into the environment: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

We have been spending millions looking into new technology to keep various pollutants from escaping the powerplant sites. In the case of nuclear, the pollutants stay onsite by default. So yes, nuclear could be argued to be extremely clean relative to other forms of electrical energy generation.

There is very little water in modern reactors, especially if we reprocess the spent rods. There is much more radioactive waste in Coal fly ash.

The technology to process the spent rods is far from being commercialized and widely available. So far, "spent rods" are accumulating all over the world, mostly in temporary storage. Some in unsuitable long term storage.

We can talk about acceptable nuclear waste production as soon as this changes...

We can talk about acceptable nuclear waste production right now. Reprocessing on one level has been commercialized for a long time [1]. Furthermore, geologic storage in a repository is ready to go and under construction [2]. Nuclear waste is a technically solved problem. You can get all your energy for your entire life (transportation, electricity, heat, everything) and the waste from conventional nukes would fit in 1.5 soda cans. Nasty stuff but easy to store safety. Nuclear reactors are probably the only energy source that can track the entirety of the toxic waste because the energy density is 2 million times the 2nd best.

Compared to fossil fuels, nuclear energy is a major life-saver, having already offset 1.8 million deaths that would have occurred had the nuclear fleet not been operational [3]. As far as I'm aware, zero or close to zero people have ever even been injured from stored commercial nuclear waste. Right? So why can't we talk about it now while hundreds of thousands are dying early right now from upper respiratory disease from fossil emissions?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COGEMA_La_Hague_site

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

[3] https://cen.acs.org/articles/91/web/2013/04/Nuclear-Power-Pr...

In reality, spent fuel rods are piling up next to the reactors they were spent in. At best they are moved to mid-term storage location, at worst the long term storage is failing.

So, yes, there is some reprocessing going on. But it's obviously not even remotely on the scale which is needed to solve the issue.

I don't trust the current administration to not screw up regulation and oversight over such "advanced nuclear technology". Come to think of it, I don't even trust them to not screw up an NDA to a porn star...

The current administration will be gone in a few years, and will be a lame-duck administration by November, so it's they're not really going to have a long-term impact on it.

America needs to replace all it's coal and gas plants immediately with non-carbon energy, as well as replacing all gasoline/diesel vehicles with electric ones. This should happen sooner rather than later. Electric car tech is completely ready to go, and all cars can be electric by the next model cycle, which normally takes about 6-8 years of development time.

And then we have to be able to remove the released carbon from the atmosphere once we convert to non-carbon energy, which is another project...

> The current administration will be gone in a few years, and will be a lame-duck administration by November, so it's they're not really going to have a long-term impact on it.

What do you think has changed since November 2016 that would cause this to be the case?

Not totally sure what they meant by that but in fairness the Trump administration has had a tremendously high turnover and there's a great deal of important positions left open in the government because the Trump administration either hasn't appointed anyone for the job or Congress didn't confirm that appointment.

They might also be implying that we'll be saluting president Pence after the Mueller investigation is over.

Maybe something happened on November 8th, 2016?

I wonder what that could be...

I Truly wish your predictions are accurate but they belie the fact that these guys got elected in the first place.

Everyone thought Obama was toast in 2012. Why do you presume Trump will go away in 2020?

This administration has yet to make their biggest move.

What would that move be?

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