White House Accelerates Development of Mini Nuclear Reactors
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
It's reasonably likely that in 10 years we have nuclear energy that is near the cost of other energy sources, which has always been it's blocker.
You will not get nuclear energy that is near the cost of other energy sources in 10 years because they route they chose to achieve it is incorrect.
They can't get the cost of nuclear power down by making reactors smaller, because doing so increases its cost, not reduces.
I can't fathom how anybody with above high school education can come with an idea easily provable wrong in 10 minutes of work on handheld calculator. When you see somebody obviously aware of such mistakes pretending that there aren't, don't assume goodwill.
You need multi-gigawatt reactors to compete with fossil fuel boilers.
There are good reasons industry never came up with portables. The major market for nukes has always been as a long-term feeder for corruption. The longer they take to build, and the bigger they are, the bigger the gravy train. With no prospect of a corruption gravy train, rational economics comes to the fore, and says NO.
The question of cost is the one most closely related to the powerplant size! It's beyond my imagination how anybody in power engineering can babble something like that.
> have a standard decommissioning process.
And yes, you will have 10x*n times the commissionings, and decommissionings, and refuelings, and inspecions, and road closures, and building permits, and nuisance permits, and grid hookups, and turbines, and generators, and transformators, and fuel shipments...
> if you've found something in just 10 minutes with a highschool level education that proves they're all wasting their time and money, I'm sure they'ed love to hear it.
If somebody with highschool level education, and a pocket calculator busts the math of "thousands of experts working on and hundreds of millions of dollars" in a few minutes, then, those are very lousy experts not worth their millions of dollars.
LFTR/MSR's prototype fit in a closet. LFTR breeds its fuel and "burns" almost all of it, none of that solid fuel rod crap where only a small fraction is used and then you have "spent fuel rods". Fuel shipments would be Thorium, not hyper-radioactive dirty bomb materials. No chance of meltdown. No high pressure containers.
As for the pace of research, from what I understand nuclear is WEIRD. The permitting process is controlled by government forces that:
1) don't want you researching it due to proliferation risk 2) are military so if you are permitted want access to weapons grade isotopes 3) are the spent fuel rod lobbyists trying to keep their bacon rolling in 4) NIMBY to the nth power
So everything is almost impossible to get going.
The replaceable shipping container sized LFTR has great potential.
A few hours ago I bought a smartphone for $35. It's an LG smartphone, and while it doesn't hold a candle to the latest iPhone 12 Pro, it will smoke any phone manufactured just 7 years ago. And it's only $35.
Can you imagine that? Some hundreds of millions of transistors, two cameras, some wireless antennas, a GPS chip, an FM receiver, a screen with millions of colored pixels, etc, etc, for only $35. All these things would not have been available in such a small package 20 years ago, and they would have cost thousands of dollars in any size. Now they fit in something that's 100 grams heavy and costs $35.
So, yes, a large reactor costs $20 BN today, a small reactor is probably of the order of $1 BN, but a small reactor allows you to iterate. Once you are able to iterate, there's nothing that stops that cost from going down by a factor of 10 or 100, just like the cost of solar and wind went down.
> But you can't drive the cost down if you can't iterate enough.
> A few hours ago I bought a smartphone for $35.
A low-end price for a smartphone SoC tapeout on the latest node is $100-$150m. Iterate that.
All of what you spoke about, and microelectronics in particular, could've never been done without sisyphean effort to nail hardest engineering problems in one go, because the nature of the problem does not afford "a half-solution."
You absolutely must solve such kind of engineering problems in fullest in one go, or it's not going to work.
A reactor vessel is not like a piece of software you can let crashing for a few beta versions. It either has no holes, and it work, or it does have holes, and it leaks.
Why is history littered with half solution nuclear powerplants then?
If Fukushima or Chernobyl were small modular reactors you could have shut them down and replaced them long before they had failed.
That's something we do in almost every industry, yet nuclear is pardoned despite the high impact of a nuclear disaster.
>You absolutely must solve such kind of engineering problems in fullest in one go, or it's not going to work.
That just means the plants will have critical construction flaws from the start or develop critical flaws over time.
>A reactor vessel is not like a piece of software you can let crashing for a few beta versions. It either has no holes, and it work, or it does have holes, and it leaks.
The nuclear industry is worse. Instead of removing the beta versions they just pretend that they are release ready and keep them around for decades until the inevitable high profile failure.
Solar/wind is already under gas turbine. And it's still dropping 10%+ per year and looking at the necessary economies of scale to replace incumbent coal and gas, has a long way to go.
Your competitive price in ten years is a total unknown, but likely is 1/2 to 1/3 the current price.
Your 10 years is probably just for research. Then installation/production of any substantial number of small reactors is another 10 years.
Another 10 years of price reductions in wind/solar/storage.
I, a LFTR stan, encourage moderate research into these exciting technologies, nuclear just has too much advantage in density of power.
But they won't be in mainstream power fo 30 years.
Also, "hot" take: fusion has the exact same challenges, and chasing the same cost problem.
The amounts are small compared to what has been flushed down the Magnetic- and Inertial-confinement Fusion drains, but galls when the costs of renewables are still in free-fall.
There is no scenario, on this planet, where fission or fusion will be preferred on a rational basis of cost per unit output. If these things were commercially viable, they would already be in service, but they get less viable with each passing day.
This must be the last stop to jump on the nuke gravy train before the tracks start being pulled up behind it to use building wind-turbine towers.
What's the angle here? Colonization of space aka the expanse?
Sure, nuclear is far more efficient at scale from a physics and engineering perspective, but this is probably outweighed by the political costs of spending billions of dollars to relearn how to build nuclear facilities.
If on the other hand we can make container scale reactors and just truck them into places, we can deploy power anywhere with very little political cost.
I like the idea of being able to move the parts of a reactor from the factory to a site for assembly.
But honestly, the idea of a container-scale / portable reactor gives me the heebie jeebies. An operational reactor that can be easily moved is something that will go wrong, someday, somehow.