Next generation nuclear reactor to be built in Wyoming | Hacker News Reader

Next generation nuclear reactor to be built in Wyoming

reuters.com

74 pointsyincrash26 comments

Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27374840

Terrapower finally gets a shot to create a demonstration reactor for wasteless nuclear power. I only hope the slated 7 year build time doesn't get delayed.

This is much less expensive than the recently built nuclear power plant in Belarus, the total cost of which was $11bln for a 2GW plant.

Let's see how competitive that will turn out to be in 7 years when it's finished.

500MW peak delivery is not _that_ small. But it still puts the cost at planned 2 $/W, whereas solar apparently ranges between 0.82 and 1.2 $/W. It will require quite some political willpower to get this through.

How much is solar energy storage for winter months and rainy/cloudy summers though.

That’s something that proponents of solar and wind power always happen to “forget” when they make these comparisons.

Solar has a capacity factor of around 10% in Europe (don’t know for the US), so it effectively only generates 10% of its maximum generation output every year.

But solar is not able to produce more energy on a demand spike. And batteries are expensive, so if you store it the price goes up.

Nuclear is not an alternative but a reinforcement.

If I understand it correctly, nuclear power has inherent latency issues that mean it can't respond to demand-spikes within seconds or minutes, but needs about an hour or so? Hence why stored-energy plants a still a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...

But you don't necessarily need an instant response, at least not always. Some months ago we had very bad weather with almost no wind during days and we had to buy energy from France. It wasn't cheap at all but we had to do it because solar, wind and hydro couldn't supply enough. Nuclear from France did though.

> If I understand it correctly, nuclear power has inherent latency issues that mean it can't respond to demand-spikes within seconds or minutes, but needs about an hour or so?

No, nuclear plants can regulate within minutes and it’s done in Germany.

Source in German: https://www.ktg.org/ktg-wAssets/docs/fg-bet-rph-lastfolgebet...

Fluctuations on the second scale are compensated by the large turbine wheels of the power generators of large plants such as nuclear and coal.

Also, normal demand doesn’t change so fast anyways. The fluctuations comes from wind and solar plants.

"Nuclear power" is a broad term, although it's mostly used to mean light water reactors.

Some of the newer designs (eg. salt reactors) can actually respond to load changes pretty quickly, on the order of tens of seconds if my understanding is right.

I am currently building a 12.2 kWp solar plant and it costs about $2/W including battery storage. Not counting government subsidies, my plant will break even after 9 years of operation, while this nuclear reactor will likely not even been built yet.

My site is less than ideal: mid-western Germany, 20% shaded. just image the bang-for-buck you get if you plop a slightly larger array into a place that actually has a lot of sun year round.

Yes, solar produces way less reliable energy, but I'd note that the reactor in question also relies on some storage to provide its 500MW peak capacity. It's average peak capacity is rated at 345MW and it will go down for maintenance and refueling (I guess), which will reduce its average production further. Meanwhile solar is basically maintenance free for 20+ years.

I get that this type of reactor is interesting as a research project. But given the build times, the bureaucratic hurdles and the quality, cost effectiveness and diversity of renewable alternatives, why bother?

> I get that this type of reactor is interesting as a research project. But given the build times, the bureaucratic hurdles and the quality, cost effectiveness and diversity of renewable alternatives, why bother?

Why bother? Because volatile renewable energy is not efficient at redid greenhouse gas emissions.

Compare France and Germany.

Germany: 50% renewables, 300 million tons of CO2 per year in the energy sector

France: 70% nuclear, 50 million tons of CO2 per year in the energy sector

Go to electricitymap.org or ourworldindata.org if you want more detailed data.

The real problem here is that France has achieved this by steadfastly defending its nuclear for generations. Remember how Chernobyl's radioactive clouds stopped and turned around at the French border? Keeping the momentum is not that hard for the French government now.

Germany has been anti-nuclear for that time. No wonder when at least a section of the society believed that the US is planning to plant a nuclear minefield in their country. That's how you end up with Greens that would prefer coal over nuclear.

Which is the environment that prevents us from getting nuclear where we need it. In short term solar is way more promising on all accounts. Nuclear requires the project to survive a couple election cycles. Good luck with that.

I get your point. But with regards to climate change, the goal has to be to reduce CO2 emissions substantially within the next ten years. Even if the entire German population would become great advocates for nuclear energy overnight (which it won't), there is simply no way that a massive expansion of nuclear energy production would be possible within the next decade.

Median construction times for nuclear reactors is around 8 years. https://www.statista.com/statistics/712841/median-constructi... Not sure if this includes planning times (probably not entirely) and I doubt that the reactor would deliver maximum power immediately.

Smaller scale renewable projects can be (and are) realized in a fraction of the time. They are proven technologies that continue to become cheaper. And of course there are gigantic potentials in terms of simply using less energy. The German (or any) government could simply mandate that all existing building stock would have to reduce their energy consumption by X% over the next ten years. The technologies for that exist, are used every day and the only limit on their deployment is the required capital, to which governments have pretty much unlimited access.

Why bother? A europe wide 'cold, calm, grey' would mean no power generated.

I feel the german prejudice of nuclear power is fueling your view point, a very detrimental view I might add when as a nation this is continuing the burning lignite coal. Continuing this over closing german nuclear power stations should be counted as an environmental catastrophe but is bizarrely given a pass.

Yeah, but how often is the entirety of Europe "cold, calm, grey"? Europe's power markets are pretty integrated. Just recently a new power line was inaugurated that gives Norwegian hydropower better access to continental Europe. Combine this with batteries, other storage technologies, offshore wind, natural/biogas plants and those nuclear plants that can safely be operated and all white papers and studies I have read say that we can shut down lignite coal pretty quickly and at prices that are competitive to a nuclear scenario.

Pakistan claimed great numbers too before their park was built but when it came to IRL implementation of solar it turned out way more expensive and was supposed to be 1000MWp and after almost a decade is still only 90MWp, it was also way more expensive to operate compared to alternatives because it was build near sand dunes and cleaning them constantly jacked the prices up:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaid-e-Azam_Solar_Park?oldfor...

(And this is without the whole battery debate with Nuclear)

I wouldn't be surprised at the Natrium reactor price doubling or tripling by the time it's done based on every major infrastructure project in Europe and the US in recent decades.

I'd much rather compare completed projects.

I can't speak for the plant in Pakistan, I know nothing about this. But in the case of Germany, these types of calculations are pretty conservative and have been proven to be so over more than two decades.

I completely agree that construction costs of bigger projects are generally hard to predict, which in my book is another argument for a more decentralized approach.

Solar/wind is generally not suitable to provide of base loads at this time. Nuclear power has provided base loads for decades. Power companies charge each other a lot more for base load than variable loads. With that in mind, renewables can't generally be compared to nuclear - they're in a different class from one another.

Solar has a capacity factor of just 10% while nuclear is above 90%. This means that a solar farm cannot replace a nuclear reactor. Solar needs a backup plant, nuclear doesn’t. So you’re comparing apples and oranges.

Plus, this is an experimental reactor and naturally has a lower power output.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/department-energy-pi... an older article that talks about the TerraPower reactor mentioned in the article, they say that it has to run on 20% enriched Uranium, wouldn't that have the potential to create problems with nuclear proliferation?

interesting that only one company seems to be working on a thorium cycle reactor https://flibe-energy.com/ . Why don't they invest more into this direction, instead?

“Natrium”=sodium, and it’s salt cooled. This is genius branding. Makes it sound like the nuclear reactor runs on organic oats.

The Union of Concerned Scientists report linked from the article makes it sound like a disaster:

https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/advanced-isnt-always-better

But it also comes off as one-sided. I know there are a lot of nuclear power fans on this forum. Does anyone have some good links presenting the other side of the argument, that these reactors are safe and/or necessary?

Sodium is extremely corrosive and was a nightmare on the French Superphénix fast breeder reactor, that ended up cancelled.

No one managed to successfully build a sodium fast reactor so far. We'll see how they do but I'm sceptical.

My layman opinion is that the money would have been better invested in some of the new molten salt designs.

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