Rolls Royce plans UK class of mini-nuclear plants
bbc.com
bbc.com
The hope is to deploy 880MW of electricity a year, starting in 2030—call it 9GW in the 2030s. Meanwhile we are adding (50GW * ~0.50 capacity factor) ~= 25GW of wind capacity every year. By the time these new systems are planned to deliver their first GW in 2030, we'll have 500GW (nameplate) of wind delivering between 50 and 500GW round the clock, augmented with utility-scale storage that currently runs about $200M/GWh and will be at least 2x cheaper by 2030. [2], [3]
Then there is geothermal, and solar plus li-ion storage (or better), and solar/wind augmented with hydrogen electrolysis. I'm glad we're developing new nuclear power, I really am. But the competitive landscape it faces is daunting.
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/renewable-energy-market-update/t... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/nov/05/victo... [3] https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/victoria-to-buil...
However we don't need to chose as long as we both agree that the grid need to be carbon zero and the cost to the climate from fossil fuels need to be added so that either nuclear or lithium-ion batteries will be guarantied cheaper than continuing running fossil fuels plants when wind/solar are not producing. As long that is true then the market will figure out which one is cheaper, and the consumer can enjoy the cheapest energy grid which do not burn fossil fuels.
https://www.miningnewsnorth.com/page/batteries-create-critic... https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/10/partner-c...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/one-of-the-brains-behind-tesla-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24316056
So wind and solar are intermittent so you have to factor the cost of a stand by power supply (which you need to pay for whether you use it or not), or power storage (which we can't do at scale).
You also rarely hit peak capacity with wind (unless you have a reliably strong and steady wind) so you need to over provision by a larger ratio. Nuclear is about 70% utilisation on average, wind about 20%. Similar story with solar.
Nuclear plants tent to have a very long shelf life, wind not so much (to take into account in the cost comparison)
There is a lot of diversification in the demand, not all machines of a country are switched on at the same time, in fact a small fraction of the machines are consuming electricity at a given time. When you adopt a centralised grid with large sources of power, you benefit from this diversification. When you produce the electricity locally, you need to size it for the max local demand, and you need to do that everywhere. That means you end up installing a lot more capacity than you would need with a centralised network.
And the grid in most developped countries is already designed for a centralised supply, so if you switch to a completely different approach you need to invest in your grid.
It's not enough to compare the cost per W produced.
Build enough of these redox flow plants on the grid, pour in enough excess from all kinds of renewables, and hopefully in 3-7 generations our children won't worry about coal-originated mercury poisoning from eating "too much seafood".
You can’t easily vary the output of a nuclear plant (maybe these will be different, but I doubt it), they take days to weeks to spool up and down. Which makes them only useful for base load.
Ironically pairing them with grid storage would be an enormous help, because then you could use the storage to rapidly respond to demand, while your nuclear plant ramps up and down very slowly.
In short nuclear also isn’t a one size fits all solution for power production, and if it needs to be paired with storage in a carbon free world, it makes you wonder if it’s really worth all the trouble compared to wind and solar.
[1]https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-news-29-2-lo...
[2]https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0957650920932083
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant
“Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope. Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode and so participate in the primary and secondary frequency control.”
It's absolutely not perfect but it's an improvement.
And should a country end up many of these small reactors, nuclear could actually be quite flexible. The reactors could be shut down and started up on schedules such that each morning, some reactors that were shut down are coming online and in the evening, some of the reactors that were online are shutting down.
> augmented with utility-scale storage that currently runs about $200M/GWh and will be at least 2x cheaper by 2030
So storage is a cost, but seems like a relatively small cost, especially if the stated trends continue.
[0]: Just a guesstimate from eyeballing this graph, might be off http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/index.html
Eyeballing the graphs, looks like we need maybe an average of 25GW for the 16 hours of low solar output, for 400GWh. If batteries don't increase in price and the grandparent's prices are right ($200M/GWh, ignoring the prediction of it halving), that's $80Bn of storage. The proposed mininuclear is a bit over £4Bn[0]/GW, so £100Bn to get 25GW.
Seems like storage wins if you don't consider cloudy days (bad for solar), maintenance/operations cost (I assume much lower for batteries+solar than nuclear), or replacement times. (I'm guessing nuclear plants last longer than storage.)
I'm a little surprised how little wind is being used in California. It's worth noting that wind actually picks up slightly when solar drops, but not as severely, judging from the graphs.
[0] I hate that some of our units are £ and some $, but I'm going to pretend they're equal. That unfairly helps nuclear in the calculations.
While they would be considered small at 440MW, they are still full nuclear plants - the novelty seems to be that as much of the structure as possible will be assembled from prefabricated modules constructed off-site.
I can't figure out the economics here. They project $2.7B to construct each 440MW plant. This is presumably an optimistic estimate since they haven't even designed it.
Then you have high running and security costs and subsequent decommissioning costs. You need security infrastructure for storage and transport of fuel and waste.
And I guess it's envisioned it will take a least 10 years to get the first one operational given they've just started on design work?
In contrast, you can build 2GW of on-shore wind capacity for that money and have it delivering electricity in a year or less. The plant will require almost no personal at all to run, and maintenance can be done one or two part-time engineers. Operating costs are effectively zero.
Sure, depending on location 10% of the time you'll dip below 1/3 operating capacity but that will still exceed the output from one of these plants. Even if the peak 2GW cannot be utilised efficiently immediately, advancements in storage and increases in BEV sales will make the excess valuable.
I think there little future role for fusion for electricity generation - it's just too complex and expensive. The collapse in price for wind/solar in the last decade have changed all the numbers. Prices are so cheap that you can basically over-provision wind/solar by a factor of 3 to minimise effect of fluctuations. Add in cheap efficient combined-cycle gas peaker plants to provide smoothing in production and you can get to 80% carbon-free relatively easily and economically.
Same here, this makes no sense from an economic perspective.
The article quote was even worse: they think that after they have built a few, they think they will be able to build them at roughly $2.7B a pop. How much will the first few cost?
Who pays for the handling and storage of the nuclear waste? That's never included in the cost estimates for nuclear plants, mini or not.
How much grid-scale battery would $2.7B buy today? Looks like a Tesla megapack is ~$300/kWh with all the batteries and electronics included (https://cleantechnica.com/2020/10/05/tesla-megapack-powerpac...). $2.7B would pay for ~9GWh of grid-scale storage, or about 20 hours of output from a 440MW plant. Of course you would still need to add the generation piece - solar or wind is cheapest today.
I'm going to guess that in 10 years, when those mini-plants may finally be a reality, the combination of grid-scale batteries with solar/wind or wave generation will be so much cheaper that there will be no market for mini-nuclear plants.
Wind farms in the UK have to be disabled for periods during the Winter, which is hardly ideal, even if such downtime is a few hours at a time.
Especially if you consider the economic possibilities of periods of nearly free electricity - e.g. fleets of electric cars/storage heaters/aluminium shelters demand shifting to take advantage.
We need to establish the regulatory and user interface standards around this ideally before we start manufacturing tens of millions of EVS each month.
It might make sense to also unbundle electricity for consumers, charging the live wholesale rate and indicating the pricing via apps, alerts, or indicators on the meter itself.
[1] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/10/12/solar-plus-storage-re... ("Solar-plus-storage replaces coal plant in New Mexico, makes carbon-capture retrofit moot")
[2] https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-o... (PDF, slide 3, center of page)
The New Mexico example was only to demonstrate that renewables and storage paired are cheaper than coal and nuclear, today.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/europe-giant-wind-far...
Check out South Australia as well on those OpenNEM links below; they’re also close to meeting all of their electrical demand with renewables and battery storage (should be there in another year or two, rooftop solar uptake rate has blown away everyone’s expectations, to the point where the grid operator nervously expects there to be occasions where they might see zero grid demand [3]).
A rapid transition to exclusively renewables doesn’t mean a loss in grid reliability, simply a different grid configuration, occasional curtailment of renewables, and storage (hydro where available, battery everywhere else).
[1] https://opennem.org.au/energy/tas1/?range=7d&interval=30m
[2] https://opennem.org.au/facilities/tas1/
[3] https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australia-the-first-big-gr...
And these are not small reactors, and there's nothing "mini" about them. They're comparable in power output to the first generation of UK reactors which operated from the 50s/60s to the 90s/00s.
On the other hand All construction jobs are not permanent - they finish building the project and have to move on to the next one, if it is the factory for the power plants, the power plant itself, the next power plant, or something else.
18 million pounds is a lot of money, but it’s a pittance compared to what tech companies are raising from VCs. In relation to the size of tech companies and the size of investments in them, 6000 jobs and the kick start to an industry for 18 million pounds seems like a bargain to me.
Not to deviate from the main discussion, I believe you meant fission instead of fusion.
Fusion energy is still being researched and will (hopefully) play its role in our carbon free future (... also hopefully not too far into the future).
This seems like a verbose rehash of an older comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25058145) that has already been refuted.
You’re not accounting for the real life costs like paying consumers to take excess energy when demand is lower than fluctuating supply, or replacing renewable infrastructure as often as every other decade (nuclear reactors may be able to last centuries, and their “waste” is recyclable).
Nuclear's sole remaining argument is that the cost of intermittency of renewables is too high. But if that argument has any remaining validity, it requires that the rapidly decline of the cost of renewables and storage soon and suddenly runs into a brick wall.
Renewables and storage right now could handle the grid. So the downside, if we go with them and the decline suddenly stops, is that costs are higher than we wanted them to be. But that's it -- they can still do the job. If the economic risk for nuclear is higher than that, it's still worth going with renewables. At best, it might make sense to do some token nuclear projects to keep the industry from dying completely. You can view SMR efforts, or even Chinese reactor building, in that light.
I think, though, that renewables and storage will continue to get cheaper. For storage, in particular, I think the trends are very clear. There are many different storage technologies vying in the marketplace -- for example, hundreds or thousands of battery chemistries, or more with organics -- and increasing economic incentive to make them work and install them. Zero or even negative grid pricing is becoming common in more and more places. Trillions of dollars are available to those who win at this.
That seems to contradict the thread I linked to above.
> the rapidly [sic] decline of the cost of renewables and storage soon and suddenly runs into a brick wall
That doesn’t seem too unlikely given how tiny the combined storage capacity of all the batteries ever made, and all that could be made with all the raw lithium that can mined on Earth, would be compared to modern energy needs.
That thread was wrong, then. The cost of PV, utility scale, is about $1/W(dc). Nuclear is an order of magnitude more expensive, per watt. PV has lower capacity factor, but it's still cheaper per kWh.
Where are you getting that?
Utility scale PV costs roughly $1/W(dc).
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/8/9/20767886...
However, to this day, the Rolls-Royce trademarks (name and logo) are owned by Rolls-Royce Plc, and had been licensed to Rolls-Royce Motors. The change of ownership meant that those trademarks had to be renegotiated, and it ended up with BMW getting the rights to those. Ultimately, the old Rolls-Royce Motors is what is now VW's Bentley division (Bentley having been the "entry level" marquee!), whereas BMW's modern Rolls-Royce company has no such heritage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Motor_Cars#History has a bunch of history of the current VW/BMW split.
[0] = https://newatlas.com/energy/rolls-royce-plans-mini-nuclear-r...
It's closer to $86/MWh in 2020. [1]
[1] https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-o... (PDF, slide 3, center of page)
The publication you linked projects a 44% cost reduction until 2025, though. Given UK's listed offshore LCoE of $125 in 2018, that would be $70/MWh for the UK. The trend looks linear, but if we conservatively assume it only falls at half the rate after 2025, it will be at $51/MWh once the first Rolls-Royce plants come online in ten years.
At least if we want to go zero emissions and save the planet, that is.
Emissions reduction has almost nothing to do with technology advancement. If this were really a priority we’d get rid of low density zoning in cities and let the market reduce power usage for us.
Money is plentiful, we need to stop hiding the fact that switching will cost us some money. Who cares, if we have a livable planet.
I argue that it's time for some politicians with a back bone and start enforcing laws and charging carbon taxes.
Those taxes will help (a lot) to pay for the myriad of green tech we need.
And 'zero emissions' is a common way of calling energy producers that release no CO2.
Of course, we don't do that anymore, because it's stupid: nuclear waste is too valuable to just dispose of it like that.
That is a horrible turn of phrase for nuclear power. In the real world, having very few nuclear mistakes from which to learn is a good thing. I'm all for nuclear power, but it doesn't help the cause for the BBC to imply that building more plants will allow for more learning from more mistakes.
A better wording: The economies of scale will allow lessons learned during construction of early units to be quickly integrated during production of subsequent units.
The reason small reactors are in fashion is that (like renewables) they decrease the risk for investors, not the population at large.
Maybe if we had taken this kind of approach 30 years ago, there’d have been a decent possibility of it working out, but it seems too late now.
They’re also $2.7B (might be £). These are not anything like a “different place in economics and politics”.
And they cost a linear increment of what one grand plant would cost. Around 10%. Making them definitely a 'different place in economics and politics'.
This is all clear from the article. Just being contrary isn't adding to the conversation. How about discussing the potential to build scalable plants, with room to grow as demand grows? Things like that, which should guide the future of nuclear.
Given that a large portion of this almost always ends up funded by a government, though, I wish the UK government would spend efficiently instead of on megaprojects. Emissions could be so much lower right now.
Is anyone aware of age-based polling on this issue?
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/248048/years-three-mile-island-...
I've actually been pretty critical of them for years because of this stance they have.
And before anyone comments about Chernobyl, my view is all energy production comes with risks. You have to weigh those up against global climate change IMHO.
But completely unsurprising. Greenpeace pivoted from an anti-military nuclear to an anti-civilian nuclear stance to try and remain relevant, they've been a negative force in the world ever since.
They've been raising awareness about AGW while actively fighting one of the best tools to mitigate it for more than 30 years.
See, for example, the UK government's otherwise incomprehensible willingness to pay extraordinary sums for new nuclear capacity such as Hinkley C[1]:
"it is difficult fully to comprehend the persistent intensity of official UK attachments to nuclear power, without also considering aims to maintain nuclear submarine capabilities". [2]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c...
[2] https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=2016-...
But I think it's true for Russia, maintaining full nuclear cycle does help with supporting its military nuclear capabilities. Thus the substantial political support which the industry gets there. For example the floating plant [0] is based on reactors used in icebreakers, which in turn have roots in submarine reactors.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power...
By "military nuclear" what is meant is mostly "nuclear arsenal". Hence the peace part of Greenpeace.
We have better, anyway. The combination of wind, power, burning things that have grown in our lifetime and time-shifting power usage seems to be good enough AFAICT.
By the latter I mean that a lot of big power users don't really need to run all the time. A company like BMW needs a lot of electricity to produce a car, but the factories are built with capacity to spare (building extra capacity while building is cheaper than adding if a car sells well) and most the power-hungry bits can be shut down for a while if the power grid really needs it. Unless a car model is really, really popular and the factory runs at full capacity, but in the case competing factories don't.
There is no energy grid anywhere in the world t1hat has ever run only on intermittent power sources.
As for the hypothetical BMW factory, what are the workers meant to do while the power is low?
You have to be honest that cost of such setup would be significantly higher because you need huge amount of storage, or large overcapacity, or both.
Lastly, zero people died from radiation at Fukushima - the tsunami killed 15,000. Why is anyone surprised that a natural disaster can damage a building? Do we have tsunamis in UK and Germany?
The story is completely overblown.
Current and projected cost of storage is relatively high, the most cost efficient storage is hydro and compressed air, they are not showing any kind of fast decrease in cost.
Maybe there is potential in energy grids that span continents and have large over-capacity - then you dont need much storage.
I am assuming we are talking about imminent future, in 50 years maybe math is different, but thats too late for climate change.
Nuclear power has always been a government funded energy source so unless government policy changes and UK orders 50-100 of these power plants by 2050 then nuclear power is not going to make any difference. Convincing all governments on the planet to invest into nuclear power is extremely unlikely. Without the introduction of a CO2 tax nuclear power will always look bad vs coal and coal will always look bad vs renewables and from what I can tell the vast majority of people don't want a CO2 tax even though it would be the best solution for climate change.
"Nothing can ever happen for the first time."
This is false, and lower the credibility of the people that keep repeating this fake mantra again and again.
Official statistics says the only fatalities were from physical injuries, stuff like collapsing walls, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
So interestingly, one of the reasons why the steam engine took off in working factories was because you didn't have to rely on the intermittent nature of water or wind power.
They're wrong - the cow died regardless, because of high-profit steak, and the submarines are funded regardless of whether we also get carbon-free power from it - but it's a valid argument.
But yes, in northern latitudes - in winter we run fossil fuels, which create literally millions of tonnes of gaseous waste for ever tonne of solid nuclear waste, or we freeze and die.
If you respond but what about [green magic], congratulations, you've not done the sums for winter in cold countries, and I'm not wasting time arguing with you. Go do them.
If the beef by-products are being sold by cow farmers for a profit, that makes slaughtering a cow more profitable for farmers. It could mean that more cows are farmed, the price of beef goes down, and therefore the demand goes up. It's only if beef by-products are relatively worthless that your argument is justified, and from a quick search that doesn't seem to be true at all - byproducts are worth 10-15% of the carcass [1].
Similarly, if commissioning new nuclear submarines is cheaper because the SMR research has already been done, then defence procurers can make a stronger case to buy more of them as opposed to other military technologies.
[1] https://www.farmprogress.com/story-beef-byproducts-buoy-catt...
it's still a silly position. pretty much any research in physics/engineering enables the military to create more efficient ways of killing people. should we stall all technological progress to starve the military?
At most one could argue that if this civilian reactor project succeeds beyond the wildest dreams, they could use that knowledge to design indigenous submarine reactors rather than relying on the Americans. If so, one hopes they could, as the French have already done, switch to low enriched fuel and reduce proliferation risk.
I also strongly agree with the other reply’s point - reducing the amount of money made in raising a cow or increasing the cost of building a nuclear submarine has an attritive impact on both. Those strategies work, potentially better than any other strategy!
Exactly this. Nuclear is held to an absurd different standard to all other forms of energy generation.
If we consider damage to wildlife: fossil fuels, in particular oil, kills millions of birds and fish. Nuclear? Zero as makes no difference. If anything, nature is thriving around Chernobyl. Wind farms routinely kill birds, and no outcry, but cover the birds in a bit of oil, and it's front page.
Deaths mining uranium again, practically zero since such little is needed, vs the thousands of deaths mining coal, or drilling for oil.
Deaths through breathing in pollution? Fossil fuel plants have and are killing millions of people, and quite literally, the planet.
I believe Chernobyl + Fukushima accidents combined have directly killed less than 100 people. Greenpeace would have you believe that millions will die from cancer, but that's strongly disputed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...
Quarter-million people killed, 7 million houses destroyed. Thats enough to wipe a small coutry, like Czech Republic, off the map.
Horrible dam failures don't do that, though of course there's a massive human cost for infrastructure failures like that. There's nothing like the "this is not a place of honor" warnings (for regions contaminated with nuclear waste) for dam failures, e.g.
And also even taking your argument at face value, I fully believe a handful of 20,000 year dead zones would be superior to global warming at our current rate. The alternative we get now is way more than 20,000 years of wrecked biodiversity almost everywhere.
How is the orange website so full of self-avowed rationalists so incapable of comparing sudden and quick vs slow and steady harm...
Anyway, nuclear power GENERATES heat and electricity, so it increases global temperature, while renewables are CUTTING part of solar energy, so they decrease global temperature.
• https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/2017-s...
• http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=15%20terawatts%2F%28sur...
Do you know why solar panels looks dark, almost black? Because they absorb as much solar as they can. IN real life if you cover surface with panels, albedo would decrease and system as a whole would absorb MORE solar energy. But part of absorbed energy would be converted to electricity and do some work. At the end it all would be heat, so on pure heat basis solar panels would increase temperature
https://www.dw.com/en/in-europe-1-in-8-deaths-linked-to-poll...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_...
Our fear of nuclear power plants is irrational. We should be improving this technology not abandon it.
And, Chernobyl seems to thrive, just without humans.
https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/news/00000154-1bd...
However, just as nobody seriously tried to run a national power grid on PV 30 years ago because it was too expensive, today nuclear is the expensive white elephant of power that can only be justified by other benefits such as weapons and radioisotope medicines.
No one's using the SMR's that are proposed here either. They're hoping to get the first one online in 10 years. A lot of nuclear fans get excited about unproven future tech when it comes to nuclear and then dismiss non-nuclear alternatives for being unproven future tech.
- Renewable are great, but our current political economy just likes them because they don't require coordination and are marginally cheap. But when trying to do a completely renewable economy, those benefits dissipate when we need electricity storage or arbitrage/rationing on a huge scale, and that requires good good old coordination and politics again.
- Regular nuclear power plants are great but the anglo-sphere can't do them for the same reasons they can't do subways.
- Tiny nuclear power plants aren't intrinsically better at all, but perhaps can both have reneweable's ability to accommodate our shitty political economy, and maintain that ability all the way to 100% no fossil fuels for electricity.
There's nothing great here, just a last ditch to throw technological band-aids on social issues.
The unproven bit is the use of factories to make Lego-like peices for the construction.
Ignoring the typical arguments against nuclear, I think a main point from them specifically is that investment in energy is zero-sum, and state resources directed towards nuclear energy are resources not going towards renewable energies. Furthermore, heating and transport make up a large proportion of carbon emissions, and these generally aren't powered by nuclear energy. So nuclear places the focus of energy transformation in the wrong place, and allows governments to believe they are solving the problem when much larger investment in renewables is required.
I'm not qualified enough in the area to agree or disagree with the implicit tradeoffs there, it's just the argument I've heard.
More CO2 is avoided per unit of currency spent with renewables than with building nuclear plants.
If we're taking climate change seriously, we need massive investment in clean electricity generation. There's place for both nuclear and renewables.
Secondly, the goal is to reduce emissions. Increasing renewables (or nuclear for that matter) isn't the goal. What we need is a least-cost zero-carbon grid. If that happens to be 0% nuclear, fine. Just as fine as if that happens to be 100% nuclear. Most likely it'll be a combination (see e.g. work by Jenkins, Caldeira etc.).
> Furthermore, heating and transport make up a large proportion of carbon emissions, and these generally aren't powered by nuclear energy.
They aren't powered by wind or solar either, which are the renewable sources with, so far at least, the best potential. That's why there needs to be, together with a massive push to clean and expand the electric grid, a massive push to electrify transportation and heating.
The potential of nuclear is locked between two well funded lobbies. Nuclear is extremely viable and I'm consistently disappointed with people's inability to recognize and invest in the necessary research for cleaner and safer plants. Or, those who succumb to an illusion that fusion will be ready and commercialized in the near future.
Additionally, you could just not skip the containment dome like the builders of Chernobyl did.
1. Because of the size of the core, it develops uneven reactivity during operation and requires attention to be paid to this.
2. The measures put in place do not entirely eliminate the chance of a power excursion.
3. The cost of a suitable containment building would make RBMK more expensive than an equivalent VVER installation. Also as far as I can tell no such containment building has ever been designed.
4. No international agency or government would allow the construction of a new RBMK. Edit: to be clear, this is not only because of the safety issues, but also because of the nuclear weapon proliferation issues associated with the design.
Overall, the cost savings of a RBMK depend on not having a large containment structure and the RBMK was on its way out as a design by time the Chernobyl accident happened. The large number of RBMKs under construction at the time was largely because of initiatives to increase the installed nuclear capacity in the Soviet Union during the mid 80s, existing RBMK sites would receive additional reactors and all but one of the new sites were to receive VVER reactors.
We collectively know a lot of thing, but as soon as you leave the opportunity to a human an accident will happen sooner or later. We know not to start heavy machinery while there is a maintenance technician inside it, but it still happens.
This is why we have safety lockout systems, to avoid an accident even if we know better.
It would take a very specific kind of war or natural disaster to pull out the control rods from a nuclear reactor, methinks.
Solar PV and wind turbines are already the cheapest and greenest source of energy and are set to decrease in price more as they ramp up.
They're already causing the closure of existing coal and nuclear plants for purely economic reasons.
It sometimes feels like people with oddly strong opinions on nuclear power are posting from some alternate dimension where the only alternative is coal.
Nuclear is cool tech, so are vertical wind turbines and wave powered generators and concentrated solar molten salt generators. But they're all more expensive than PV and turbines.
You either need to specify an an energy storage solution on a scale large enough to handle when there is no sun, or expect us poor folks in the Nordics (for instance) to just migrate to the south. :)
In order of desirability.
1: A mix of renewables. Not solar or wind or hydro or geothermal, but a good mix.
2: A large grid. The sun is always shining and the wind is always blowing somewhere.
3: Over-provisioning. Size your installations for cloudy days and winds at 2km/h. Solar&wind are an order of magnitude cheaper than nuclear, so 1.5X - 3X over-provisioning is still a lot cheaper.
4: Indirect storage. If you're overprovisioned, then you will have lots of excess power, even more power than you can store in your batteries. (See 5). So use that power to hit several goals at once. For example, if you use it to produce methane, you can use that methane for carbon storage, use it to power peaker plants (see 6) or sell it for profit.
5: batteries
6: peaker plants. If 99.9% of your power is handled through 1-5, the emissions from the remaining 0.1% are negligible and can be offset with #4.
No wind or sun? What are we talking about here, an apocalypse? I know you're exagerating, but sun AND wind tend to balance each other out. If there's a freak occurence where there's "none" of either for several days.. well running some gas power plants once in a while is a drop in the bucket when it comes to CO2, and at such a small scale you could probably create the fuel renewably (biogas or synthetic gas from electricity+H2+CO2). I think finding a way to reuse the gas power plants we have already built in a CO2-neutral way will be a big key to solving the climate crisis quickly enough.
> You either need to specify an an energy storage solution on a scale large enough to handle when there is no sun,
And/or just integrate the continent with more HVDC lines. Germanys main problem now is getting power from the windy north to the industrial south. But if they manage to construct some HVDC lines they should be able to get pretty close to 100% renewable. They could restart the nuclear industry too, but I don't see how that's an easier problem than building HVDC lines.
Getting more off-shore wind should also help, since the wind is more stable there.
And why just "AN" energy storage solutions? There are dozens of different ones being constructed commercially right now, and they each have their strong sides. Li-ion is better for fast frequency regulation, flow batteries for medium term storage, and pumped hydro, and possibly compressed or liquified air for long term.
> or expect us poor folks in the Nordics (for instance) to just migrate to the south. :)
If you mean the Scandinavian region, there's already two solutions that are working great: exchanging power with Norway (where you got tons of hydropower to smooth out long term energy fluctuations) and trash burning power plants (which also supplies heat to nearby homes and businesses). We don't need to move south, we just need everyone in the south to send us all their trash for us to burn during the winter ;) If we can move more plastics over to bioplastics, then it could even end up being renewable. Yeah, we should recycle/reuse as much as possible, but there will always be a huge stream of material that's just too mixed up or recycled too many times.
And finally there's deep hydrothermal. It has most of the benefits of nuclear, at possibly a similar cost if we scale it up. The great thing is we can re-use a LOT of expertise from the oil and gas sector, which I think will be important for scaling it up quick and to gain political support from worker in that field.
I'm not against nuclear, we should definitely use the expertise we already have to keep developing and building reactors. But I'm not convinced about a large scale global bet on it, and I don't think it's as essential to solving the climate crisis as some would have us believe.
Renewables should be encouraged but they are not a panacea and I doubt that they are enough as things stand. In addition, most renewables sources have their own downsides so it's not all positives.
For always needed power we can just over provision and for variable power we can just turn it off if it's a particularly calm night. A surprisingly large amount of electricity use can be adjusted by a few hours. For example see how car charging locations are now adding batteries to allow them to avoid high demand charges by time shifting loads.
In the UK solar is not that great because of the gloomy winters (when heating demand is at its peak, and the UK wants to also move away from gas central heating...).
Best bets, IMO are tides and offshore wind. But wind can also be quite variable.
If you add all of this up "just over provision" becomes unrealistic. There needs to be extensive storage capacity but I don't think we're quite there yet. Certainly batteries do not seem a very environmentally friendly option. Even this may bot solve the problem.
All in all I think renewables can minimise the need for nuclear power but cannot replace it, at least for now.
When most vehicles are electric are need to be charged at night, I'm not sure PV and turbines will cut it.
Disclaimer: Wind might be better than nuclear in terms of mining impact. I don't know enough about the supply chain for those materials to make a good estimate and I haven't read any analysis of it. Hydo is obviously the best in terms of mining but it F's up watersheds and river systems for different reasons so it's kind of hard to make a comparison. Geothermal is good too but we can't all live in Iceland.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/18/green-energy-dirty-side...
Edit: evidence for terrible ecological impact of renewals. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17928-5
I think what frustrates me more than anything are the people that just think/say: "well we have amazing scientists so we'll find a solution to the problem when it becomes an issue" - in response to global warming. And more often than not they're the people saying that scientists warning that global warming is going to be a catastrophe that may be impossible to stop are just overreacting.
Green Peace kind of feels like its policy is being set by one of those folks...
If you look at the past ten years of the UK, we've hugely expanded our wind production, shut down and demolished almost all the coal plants, and ... failed to build a nuclear plant.
Renewables are the technology that's ready. Nuclear is the technology that suffers huge time overruns.
The speed argument comes down strongly against new nuclear power plants.
Yes, clearly our problems are due to the misapplication of Greenpeace's weighty, almost unfathomably formidable influence on public policy.
"Greenpeace ... says if the government wants to take a punt on some new technology to tackle climate change it would be better off investing in hydrogen or geothermal power."
(emphasis mine)
Perhaps they consider renewable energy to be existing -- that is, not new -- technology. Here is Greenpeace's renewable energy policy:
To me, Professor MV Ramana in the article raises far more valuable concerns/questions than Greenpeace & he's actually an expert on SMR and nuclear energy policy:
> He says UK SMR's 10-year time-scale for its first plant may prove optimistic. The one constant in the history of the nuclear industry to date is that big new concepts never come in on time and budget, he says.
> He is sceptical[sic] that the factory concept can deliver significant cost savings given the complexity and scale of even a small nuclear plant. Smaller plants will have to meet the same rigorous safety standards as big ones, he points out.
> He says where the concept has been tried elsewhere - in the US and China, for example - there have been long delays and costs have ended up being comparable to large nuclear power stations.
> Finally, he questions whether there will be a market for these plants by the 2030s, when UK SMR says the first will be ready.
> "Ten years from now, the competition will be renewables which are going to be far cheaper with much better storage technology than we have today," says Prof Ramana.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_how_fear_of_...
> No, actually it's not.
Sorry, not sure I follow - which part of my comment were you responding to here?
> To me, Professor MV Ramana in the article raises far more valuable concerns/questions
Yep - there are some fairly blunt conclusions in a recently co-authored publication[1] of theirs regarding SMR prospects for the UK and elsewhere:
"There is every likelihood that, as with the previous nuclear renaissance, SMRs will be still born with few reactors built. This will mean that public money will again have been wasted on nuclear technology, but, as previously, the main cost will be the opportunity costs of the options not pursued and properly funded because resources have been pre-empted by the nuclear sector."
One perspective of many, but worth considering.
[1] - https://sppga.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2018/09/sub2...
Of course they can, and already do in some countries.
> We have data[1].
Or at least a TED talk. Checking it out...
1:26 "From 36% to 31%": Well, it certainly dropped, but it doesn't look from a quick scan as if that trend is continuing after 2010. Looks like it goes up after 2013. And, indeed if I check the source he used, the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, it has figures now up to 2019, which show we're at 37% so the trend has reversed in the right direction. Also, that talk was given in 2016, so why are the figures only up to 2013? I was able to get last year...
Moving on...no, wait, that graph looked a bit weird. That "arrow" was meant to look like a trend line, but it's actually just hovering above two points. What're the rest of the data for, decoration? That's just two cherry picked points! That isn't statistics, it's join-the-dots.
We're less than 2 minutes in and it's not looking good for the "we have data" video.
2:07: "There's just a lot of poor countries that are still using wood and dung and charcoal as their main source of energy": ironically, these are carbon neutral, but at any rate, these are not the countries that have the highest CO2 emissions, so why are we trying to suggest it's their fault?
2:44: "Barely makes up half": not true anymore; renewables have overtaken nuclear and as mentioned, have reduced the usage of fossil fuels already.
2:50: "Let's take a closer look in the United States." - This seems a bit like talking about how to get to the Superbowl and suggesting we take a closer look at the Cleveland Browns. Would it not be a good idea to look at countries who're actually good at renewables?
3:15: "People think of California as a clean energy and climate leader": Heh, no, I think of countries and states with >80% electricity from renewables as leaders. California doesn't qualify.
3:21: "What about Germany?": Ah, lets move on from Cleveland and talk about the Detroit Lions...Why is it that the nuclear fanboys always want to talk about Germany, rather than the other countries in Europe who have far more renewable energy.
3:21: "and there's really not anybody who's going to tell you that they're going to meet their climate commitments in 2020.":
Narrator: "They met their targets."
3:36: "Solar and wind provide power about 10 to 20 percent of the time": Genuinely baffled by this one. This guy thinks there's only daylight 20% of the time? He thinks that wind turbines are built in areas that only have wind 20% of the time? Is he a complete idiot?
I think I'll stop here. I've just one more point to add: this guy says he's been travelling and researching this himself, yet his actual graphs came from the BP report I mentioned earlier. Why did the data come from an oil company if they compiled it themselves? I get the feeling that the real push for nuclear is simply a stalling tactic being pushed by fossil fuel interests, because they know that if countries simply rolled out wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, tidal etc today, they couldn't possibly compete and they'd be finished.
What do you reckon?
Did he mention that the delays and costs are attributable to lobbying by... Greenpeace?
Instead it's full of people that get their science from tabloid newspapers and facebook.
I thought they lost their credibility in at least the United States.
That ten year lead time seems to be excessive for announcing at this time unless its more of a trial balloon - looking to gauge public and political reactions before sinking more money into it. Renewable combined with storage solutions cannot guarantee one hundred percent coverage and I doubt they ever will. However a well connected grid with wind and solar spread across the country as a whole can minimize some of the effects of weather.
Unfortunately biomass seems to be looked at similarly as nuclear; just because it could be executed poorly the whole idea is written off..
At present rates of per-capita energy consumption, population, and rates of plant growth, there is either not enough primary productivity, or too large an environmental impact. Humans simply use immense amounts of energy.
Other sources, lower per-capita usage, and/or fewer people, are the options.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/tag/biofuels/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A102639131768...
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2cvap7/the_int...
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wo2hl/boeings...
Whether or not remaining biological systems could survive on just 60% of plant life is a possibility, though the impacts would likely be large. Further growth in human energy consumption would obviously be limited.
I'd come across that independently, Smil also cites it.
At one of 121 locations near our nuclear plants. We are not allowed to recycle the waste so it sits there waiting for transport.
Use less energy?
Using less energy, at least on a scale that actually matters, is just never going to happen.
Sure, we can - and should - be striving towards energy efficiency, but without regressing a hundred years or so as a society a meaningful reduction in energy usage is impossible.
Smaller, safer, mass produced (and low start time) reactors is one way that fission power could make a comeback.
I read this as implying this is a long way off...
And the reliability area is where these could shine. There are situations where modular nuclear is a clear win.
It’s not clear that nuclear is more reliable than any other similar monetary investment. People like to compare “wind that only blows 40% of the time” with nuclear, but you can build three or more farms for the cost of your single nuclear plant, so it’s not that hard to end up ahead. There’s a great comparison of that in one of the top level comments on this post.
Which approach is 'better' for modular reactors? I would imagine that having the steam generator inside the pressure vessel makes it safer (at least in terms of leaks) since the primary/secondary loop never leaves the containment area.
Integrated steam generators might be safer, as you say, as the primary loop never leaves the pressure vessel, and thus less pipe joints etc. that might fail.
OTOH the pressure vessel becomes a lot bigger, which limits how big you can make the entire power plant. Making big pressure vessels if fairly tricky, and there's only a few forges in the world capable of making current large reactor pressure vessels. I think this is one of the reasons why the Nuscale reactor is so small (60 MWe IIRC), which might make it hard to get the economics to work out.
https://www.trade-tariff.service.gov.uk/headings/8401
Tarrif on Nuclear Reactors
The nuclear plants themselves had no issue and could have continued to operate.
Sheesh, I am just clarifying that the plants did not shut because of operational reasons. Nothing controversial I would have thought, just a statement of fact...
Environmental impacts are externalities (i.e. positive or negative effects on others (or something, in the case of nature) who are not directly involved and have no influence over them) and basically all environmental problems are negative externalities. Ignoring externalities is how we got our current environmental problems in first place which is why the argument rubbed me the wrong way.
I simply thought useful to highlight the reason the plants had to shut in order to avoid misunderstandings and because it is always important to understand causes. It was not a technical issue and nuclear plants have no problems functioning in an European heat wave (again...). It is quite obvious why limits are put on how much rivers' water may be warmed but that was not the point.
There is no offense to be taken and I am quite disappointed by the aggressive reactions. This argument is pointless.
The air pollution problems of Poland could be resolved a year after these were built, for example, by connecting them into and expanding existing district heating systems - meaning no one would need to burn coal or trash in ancient home chimneys.
And since it takes a decade to build a nuclear power plant, you could do it all ten times as fast by just spending on existing solutions.
Yes, the concept of "negawatts" which was popularized by the Rocky Mountain Institute, and Amory Lovins in particular in the 1980s, seems to have vanished from the discourse.
Insulate properly and improve efficiency of usage, and suddenly your energy supply problems are a lot smaller--plants, transmission, distribution, raw materials, waste: all of them.
Time to bring back negawatts.