Britain to start approval process for Rolls-Royce mini nuclear reactor | Hacker News Reader

Britain to start approval process for Rolls-Royce mini nuclear reactor

reuters.com

452 pointsleephillips302 comments

"Britain last year backed a $546 million funding round at the company to develop the country's first small modular nuclear reactor (SMR), part of its drive to reach net zero carbon emissions and promote new technology with export potential."

Cool. Although I foresee exporting this technology will be difficult as far as fuel and waste supply chain goes. Having the possibility of multiple new, smaller countries receive nuclear power makes moving fuel and waste across multiple borders more difficult. Also, protecting the technology so it doesn't fall into the wrong hands becomes more difficult as well (assuming these things can enrich uranium).

"Each mini plant can power around one million homes...".

This is where I did a spit take. I was really underestimating the capacity for these "mini" reactors. Being able to power so many homes (and being more centralized than I thought) means these reactors would still require huge infrastructure investment in order to spread the power.

> This is where I did a spit take. I was really underestimating the capacity for these "mini" reactors.

Yeah, "mini" seems like it would be an order of magnitude less than the existing nuclear reactors. But the 470 MW mini reactor is just on the low side of current operational reactors which are in the 400 - 1200 MW range:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...

More specs:

Land footprint: ~2 football pitches [1]

Cost: ~2.4 billion USD [2]

1:https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactor...

2:https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Rolls-Royce-secu....

The second article says "The target cost for each station is GBP1.8 billion (USD2.4 billion) by the time five have been built, with further savings possible."

This indicates that cost per station could be significantly higher before 5 of them have been built. It's reasonable to believe that doggedly continuing to build more of them will bring costs down eventually, but if early units have high costs (or worse, if build progress falls behind schedule) then it could be difficult to maintain support for building more of them.

I imagine given that the whole point of these small units is batch manufacturing that several would be ordered together.

Also that building multiple facilities at once will streamline regulations and building codes.

What killed the large nuclear reactors was the need for so many "one-off" design changes to accommodate safety regulations, which would vary by site. This means that economies of scale are lost when compared to gas power stations, because every nuclear reactor was essentially unique.

There were plenty of repeated design that started during the 1960s and 70s. Accordingly, costs were considerably lower, often in the range 1 to 2 billion USD per GW.

After this period, costs to build nuclear power plants skyrocketed. When the reasons behind these escalating costs were studied in depth, it was found to be due to the fact that plants lack standardization across the board, leading to ballooning engineering and labor costs as designs are reworked in site-specific ways:

> Overall, a common theme emerging from this analysis is the lack of anticipation in engineering models of the cost-increasing contributions of soft technology external to standard reactor hardware, in response to changing regulations and other factors such as variable project-specific conditions. Prospective modeling shows the potentially transformative effect of rethinking engineering design to adapt to these factors, for example through reduced commodity usage and the automation of some construction processes.

https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30458-X?_r...

I could imagine they already have contracts in place, even at a higher price tag. It's Rolls-Royce after all, also, they mention they have some MoUs in place.

(This is not based on any facts, it's just a moonshot) If they manage to drive cost down to 1/10th of that, while actually delivering and showing their design is safe (which I think it is), this could be a global energy game changer.

The world's total energy consumption from "dirty" sources is ~140,000TWh, one of these SMRs could plausibly produce 3TWh/year, so about ~45k would be needed to match our current energy demands. The world is not going to switch to 100% of these, obviously, but nonetheless their market is HUGE (trillions!).

at £120(current price is £240) per mwhr that's still £430 million a year income. With a 60 year lifespan, naively 5-8 years to profitability.

The main risk to nuclear plant building is overuns of the reactor and problems with commissioning. If all your doing is hooking up pipes to heat exchangers then that simplifies significantly the building of a plant.

> at £120(current price is £240)

£120/MWh is a rather terrible price. That's basically Hinkley Point C level rate, which is something many grid operators would never accept. So much for "export potential"?

You're damn right its shit.

Hinkley was bollocks because the strike price was that high. If we don't agree to stupid strike prices (ie £60 per mwh) then its not a disaster. Even at £60 profitability is inside 12 years.

Unless we start building generation capacity, then the wholesale price will go up as time goes on. Or as new renewable come on line, we'll get even more price fluctuations.

it doesn't take many of these to even out pricing.

If the strike price wasnt that high it never would have been financed.

Because of the way that the finance was structured. from my understanding it was because the government didn't want to shoulder any risk (or reward) from this.

Someone has to subsidize nuclear or it never gets built. In the UK ended up being ratepayers.

In a way it's better that the costs arent disguised.

A high price, but it's for non-intermittent, geographically independent carbon-free generation. Nothing else offers that capability. Hydro and geothermal are great, but not geographically independent. Renewables are cheaper, but are intermittent and still geographically dependent. To fairly compare them to nuclear you have to take in the cost of storage, which is immense unless you are lucky to have an alpine lake next door.

I think you may have to recheck those facts.

All power sources are intermittent, and nuclear is no exception. Nuclear power plants go offline unexpectedly all the time. Every energy grid needs a mix of sources to deal with intermittent production, preferably ones that are controllable and can follow loads.

Nuclear power is not quick to follow loads. This makes it good for base load, somewhat able to do load following, and unable to handle peak loads. Currently peak loads are handled using fossil fuel plants. Even if a country embraces nuclear power wholesale they will still have to invest in storage as well if they want a green energy grid, to be able to fully handle peaks. Hydro (dam) storage is not what is being looked at in most places because of cost and climate impact (concrete), the current plans involve a mix of batteries and hydrogen.

And finally, current nuclear power depends on uranium, and many countries have to import that, so it’s not quite geographically independent. There are approaches for nuclear power technologies that reduce the need for uranium, but all attempts to build those and run them at reasonable cost have failed.

No, nuclear plants go offline very rarely. The have the highest capacity factor of any source [1]. And more importantly, this downtime is scheduled. Where's your source for your claim that "nuclear power plants go offline unexpectedly all the time"?

Nuclear power can be modulated by more aggressively cooling reactors. France has been able to operate a grid over 70% nuclear (over 80% at its peak) without issue, so these concerns about nuclear's inability to match shifting loads are demonstrably false.

Nuclear plants are geographically independent. Sure, uranium has to be shipped. But that's the point: uranium fuel can be shipped. Rivers and valleys cannot be put in shipping containers and moved to where they're needed. Geothermal vents cannot either.

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/183680/us-average-capaci...

> France has been able to operate a grid over 70% nuclear (over 80% at its peak) without issue, so these concerns about nuclear's inability to match shifting loads are demonstrably false.

France is a perfect example that things can go south with nuclear, too. They operate 56 reactors, of which 17 (!) went unexpectedly offline last winter. Some had deferred maintenance due to the pandemic, others showed micro-fractures in pipes forcing other similar designed plants to go offline as well [1]. Not to mention their EPR projects that have been plagued by cost and time overruns that put Germany's infamous BER airport to shame.

To make it worse, France always is proud of their nuclear technology and its supposed "green energy" mix... but the reality is, the nuclear plants are too slow to follow the demands of electric heating and so France imports a shitload of energy from Germany and the UK every winter [2]. To put it blunt: The German CO2 budget is suffering and we can't get rid of our coal stinkers because France can't be arsed to set up a resilient grid on their own.

> Sure, uranium has to be shipped. But that's the point: uranium fuel can be shipped.

And every time uranium fuel is shipped, you have massive protests from civilians, incurring a lot of side effects - acts of sabotage, blockades, expenses for police and judiciary system. Additionally, Russia is currently used as a dumping ground for French nuclear waste [3] and supplies 26% of the EU's consumption of enriched uranium [4].

tl;dr: France should STFU about their nuclear plants. Nuclear is a dead end unless "fusion is always 50 years in the future" becomes obsolete in the future, the only thing that will help us scraping by regarding CO2 emissions and keep us independent from Russian imperialism, Arabic oil sheiks and a potentially-going-bonkers-again USA is going big on solar and wind.

[1]: https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/atomkraft-was-is...

[2]: https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/frankreich-fuerchtet-sich-vor...

[3]: https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/umstrittene-tran...

[4]: https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/ukraine-krieg-eu-...

Your sources seem to be saying the opposite of what you're claiming. For instance the second one, through google translate, says:

> France's Energy Minister Eric Besson criticized Germany's exit from nuclear power. He is convinced that this will lead to Germany importing more electricity from France in the near future. As a result, the Grande Nation has to face the problem of a possible power shortage.

This is actually saying German imports from France will potentially cause an energy shortage, exacerbated by Germany's exit from nuclear generation. I'm not sure how this helps the point you're trying to make.

For all the talk of France's failures, it's carbon intensity of electricity is far smaller than Germany's [1]. This is the actual measuring stick of success: how much carbon is released for each watt-hour of electricity? France is way below Germany on this.

> And every time uranium fuel is shipped, you have massive protests from civilians, incurring a lot of side effects - acts of sabotage, blockades, expenses for police and judiciary system.

So if people protest solar and wind we should just cancel those projects, too? This seems like a non-sensical objection.

And lastly, it's strange to call nuclear a "dead" energy source when it's still generating more than wind and solar combined [2].

1. https://www.eea.europa.eu/ims/greenhouse-gas-emission-intens...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#Methods...

> This is actually saying German imports from France will potentially cause an energy shortage, exacerbated by Germany's exit from nuclear generation

Actually, both countries import and export energy from each other, we're importing from France outside the winter when we have shortfalls with renewables because our grid can't shift enough energy from North to South. The difference is that unlike France we don't go and pat ourselves on our shoulder for being oh so carbon friendly. That French claim to grandeur can only be made because everyone ignores that it depends on Germans and Brits.

> This is the actual measuring stick of success: how much carbon is released for each watt-hour of electricity? France is way below Germany on this.

Yeah, because we have a lot of old coal stinkers that drive up our g/kWh emission average - and because the followup emissions of nuclear plants (from construction and teardown of the plant as well as the operation of the nuclear waste storage and the mining, refining and transport of the fuel) have been underestimated [1]. The old figure used to be ~66 g/kWh whereas the actual upper bound is 180 g/kWh which is even more than natural gas (~117 kWh).

The elephant in the room is followup costs though - nuclear power has a lot of these, from insurance in the disaster case to the teardown and storage of the waste. If these costs that are currently effectively offloaded to the taxpayer would be accounted for, nuclear power would be at 90 ct/kWh, and that's the optimistic case.

> And lastly, it's strange to call nuclear a "dead" energy source when it's still generating more than wind and solar combined.

It's a technological dead end for short-term woes. The most modern EPR reactor design takes a decade to build apiece, and every other design no matter which base technology has been vaporware to date. Even if we were to commence construction for a dozen plants now, they would only become available in the 2030s!

We need solar and wind now, and actually smart grids where big consumers like heating systems and providers like electric cars can be coordinated centrally.

[1]: https://www.dw.com/de/faktencheck-ist-atomenergie-klimafreun...

Thanks for putting time to write these comments, but I think your arguments and the source [1] you linked above are straw men.

Nobody claims that nuclear is a carbon free source of electricity generation. The IPCC[2] itself is calculating a carbon equivalent cost of 10 gC-eq/kWh, which is similar to renewables. This includes the complete chain from uranium mining to waste disposal. Eventually these will be electrified and CO2-free like everything else, which is not an argument for or against nuclear.

Furthermore, you are right in criticizing France for letting its nuclear infrastructure fall into disrepair due to recklessness and mismanagement. This should be fixed but is not inherent in the technology. Nuclear is expensive if done right.

You make a good point in that it takes a long time to build and certify new nuclear power plants. This is one more reason why we need to start building them now rather when we realize that we are still burning too much coal, gas and oil in 2030.

This is arguably a price we must pay for getting low-carbon base load electricity generation.

[1] https://www.dw.com/de/faktencheck-ist-atomenergie-klimafreun...

[2] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ar4-wg3-chap... Page 269

> This includes the complete chain from uranium mining to waste disposal.

Yes, but that's just the CO2 emissions and completely ignores the financial cost of tearing down the plants and maintain the waste site. The teardown for a nuclear site can easily reach dozens of billions of dollars, and the forever costs (literal translation of the German word Ewigkeitskosten) even more. Many countries have some sort of trust fund, but these are nowhere near enough to cover the costs (which is conveniently ignored by politicians because if they would do something about it, nuclear power would not be cost-efficient any more).

> You make a good point in that it takes a long time to build and certify new nuclear power plants. This is one more reason why we need to start building them now rather when we realize that we are still burning too much coal, gas and oil in 2030.

Why build nuclear plants at all and load our children with the debt of having to take care of even more nuclear waste than we already have? I mean, in the US you have enough deserts to bury that stuff until the sun explodes, and if some accident happens it will stay contained... but Europe is too geologically unstable and most importantly way too densely settled and Russia isn't a destination either, geopolitical tensions aside the permafrost is thawing and just dumping stuff into the Arctic Ocean should be out of the question.

Also, nuclear plants need nuclear fuel, which is difficult to mine, creates a lot of toxic waste and most importantly nearly three quarters of the world's production originate from one or another kind of dictatorship, kingdoms and other barely functioning governments [1]. What use is it to discontinue oil and gas from Russia and OPEC if all it does is tying us to the next bunch of dictators?

The base night load can be handled by geothermal, wind and water (dams, tidal energy) - the most important thing is to create solid trans-European power lines that can handle shifting energy all around the continent. For the daily peak load, add solar to the mix.

[1]: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/uranium-p...

The reason why it still is a good idea to do this is climate change. The cost of not doing anything is much greater than the cost of building new nuclear plants. There are no technical problems with storing waste - it's entirely political. The technically most suitable storage sites in Germany were dismissed for state politics reasons. Instead they chose a technically unsuitable site - Gorleben - which then turned out to be surprisingly unsuitable.

That actually seems reasonable for the cost of a power station.

The problem recently is that privatized energy operators have a hard time securing financing in the orders of tens of billions. Wind, solar and gas may have higher per-unit costs but you can actually build one for under a billion dollars, and in the case of rooftop solar we are talking tens of thousands of dollars, and it is a lot easier to secure loans of that size. Tens of billions of dollars is basically reserved for the bond markets and state actors.

There's also the lifecycle cost of the fuel and the power station itself to account for. This is higher for nuclear than for solar/wind.

I would expect lifecycle costs to be largely underestimated for solar.

Regulations are way more relaxed to dispose panels in comparison to nuclear waste, for obvious reasons. Nonetheless, panel disposal is still expensive, we're just leaving the bill for future generations, just like with nuclear, unfortunately...

A PV module has a weight of about 0.05 kg/W. If it costs $0.20/W, that's $4000/tonne. The disposal cost of waste in a landfill in the US is about $60/tonne. So, even with no recycling at all, the cost of landfilling old PV modules is not a significant part of the cost of PV here. And much of the cost of PV installations (the steel mountings and earth anchors, the aluminum frames of the modules, the glass covers) is highly recyclable.

Is this $60 disposal sustainable?

I mean, if we're concerned about using a renewable energy source, shouldn't we be concerned that its materials are also renewable?

How much does it cost to renew that $4000/kg solar panel so that it can continue to be used?

I bet renewing will cost more than $4000/kg. If that's true, we're taking a 50-75% discount on the expense of future generations, as I said. Solar is more expensive than we are lead to think it is. This should be accounted in decision and policy making.

Just my person opinion.

Of course it's sustainable. The notion that landfilling somehow isn't sustainable is based mostly on silly aesthetics.

About the only concern with sustainability in PV is silver for contact wires, but that can be substituted for. It's being used now because it's marginally cheaper.

To clarify: not the landfill in itself, but the materials are finite. If we don't reuse them, we'll run out of them eventually. Future generations will have to dig through our landfills to recycle them. And that will be quite expensive. That's the future bill I'm mostly concerned about.

So, exactly which material for PV were you concerned about?

This also goes against your original expression about lifecycle cost. Later shortage of some critical material doesn't affect the lifecycle cost of PV built now.

The cheapest PV panels today are cadmium-telluride, with 8g/m^2 of cadmium. That will be valuable reclaimed. Anyway you don't want it in your landfill.

My main worry about the cadmium is whether a house fire makes your neighborhood a superfund site.

Tens of thousands for solar doesn't include the cost of the factory producing the panels though, which has to come from similar, though not nearly as large, capital investments.

right, but the cost of the factory is pretty much amortized over all the units.

that's the problem with nuclear; unless something like this reactor shows up and doesn't change that the costs are always associated with one plant. private companies just cannot afford to put all their eggs in one big, unreliable basket. (state ownership also doesn't necessarily change things, Areva has not done so hot after its nationalization)

They spent 100 billion pounds on lateral flow tests alone. I enjoyed the free test kits as much as everyone else, but think of the infrastructure that could have paid for.

I thought it was £50bn and was the total allocated budget of NHS Test & Trace to include PCR testing and contract tracing, as well as LFT distribution etc. It has not been spent yet and with the current rolling back of testing the final cost should (hopefully) be well under that figure.

I still agree it's a gargantuan sum that could have been spent in many other important areas, but pandemic response is important too.

That seems to be an okayish price for the power generated. Wind power costs about $1.5 per W installed and has a capacity factor of around 1/3, this costs around $5/W. So this reactor costs about as much to build as wind power. For wind of course you ignore storage costs, and for nuclear you ignore fuel and waste disposal related costs. I'm not sure that costing around as much as wind power will be a sufficiently strong argument to sway public opinion on the construction of nuclear power plants.

For comparison, the Hickley Point plant current being built in the UK spans approximately 380 football fields and will cost $30B.

These are massive industrial complexes + giant cooling towers. This single-building reactor does look “mini” compared to that. It also seems to be more cost-effective, 12 of them would generate almost double the 3GW of that one plant.

That’s not even midi in my book.

Really, they top out at 1200MW and not 1210MW?! Come on now

EPRs are 1750 MWe (4950 MWth).

Are these going to produce 470MW?!

A 1MW wind turbine costs ~$4M and is competitive with oil/gas.

At $2.4Bn - anything above 400+ megawatts sounds like a great deal - since you don't have to worry about the wind blowing or the sun shining.

If these can produce 470MW at that price - what has been the hold up?!

1) People are skittish on Nuclear because of the perceived danger.

2) We still can't solve the waste problem, the best we have is putting it underground in Finland.

I disagree with these opinions, since the waste is minuscule for the amount of power generated. (1 cubic centimeter of uranium per million homes per day or so) and coal is killing more than nuclear ever will.. but, hey ho.

Coal is a bit of a red herring in the UK as we don’t burn much of it anymore.

To be fair, even oil and gas are orders of magnitude more dangerous than nuclear per unit energy

The French seem to have solved the waste problem.

And either way, at least it's less urgent than the climate one

Could you please elaborate or provide some further reading for the French solution?

96% is recycled the remaining 4% is sealed in lead, sealed in concrete and placed in a bunker. IIRC 200m^3 per year is generated meaning 50 years of Frances energy production could 1/10th of an average American football stadium

Do you have a good source for this? People tend not to believe me when I try to tell them about nuclear waste reprocessing/recycling.

The problem here is that the difficulty of storing spent fuel isn't so much a function of its mass, it's a function of its heat production. The latter is what limits how much waste you can put into a geological repository. Separating out the 238U (which will still have to be handled carefully unless it is extremely clean of shorter lived isotopes) will not reduce the heat production of the remaining waste significantly.

The French have admitted their reprocessing doesn't save money vs. just disposing of spent fuel directly.

We should place them on old offshore oil drilling rigs, so that they're not near people if things go wrong.

Wind power costs less than $1.5M/MW currently. Your price must be a bit older.

Right. It's comparable in power to Fukushima Unit 1.

Is there any good info about this? Why is it smaller? Do they claim it doesn't need a containment vessel? NuScale and some others have tried that.

RR has a brochure, which is all about "creates jobs", not how it works.

> Britain last year backed a $546 million funding round

That buys jobs not products. Its still vapourware - barely a drawing on a piece of paper. 5 years to approve gives plenty of time to turn an idea into an actual design.

In the Netherlands they had plans for neighbourhood level nuclear-based power plant

> $546 million funding round

This is where nuclear just loses me. The first number I pulled up on Google says that this is what you would pay to build, site and install 400 MW of wind capacity. The reactor when eventually built (at much greater cost, of course) is only going to produce 470 MW. You'd need to get a second reactor installed just to break even for one round of R & D funding. It just doesn't work.

I'm all for nuclear power in principle. I'm broadly opposed to tearing down existing capacity. But I'm absolutely horrified at the degree to which people want to throw money at this boondoggle. There is low hanging fruit all over the renewables market. Can we please pick it first before chasing radioactive unicorns?

> 400 MW of wind capacity

Isn't that 400 MW when it's windy vs 470 MW all day long?

Is that a peak or sustained 400 MW of wind power?

> You'd need to get a second reactor installed just to break even for one round of R & D funding. It just doesn't work.

They aren’t planning to make one or two, they want to make dozens of them.

> 400 MW of wind capacity

these 400MW are not the same as the ones provided by nuclear. that’s the difference.

Wind costs a lot more when you add in the storage tech required to power your citizens homes on non-windy days.

Surely the costs can be reduced once the mini nuclear reactor technology is used more widely?

All I read about are nuclear reactors getting more and more expensive to where they aren’t even feasible when they are completed. Why would these escape that?

> Among the surprising findings in the study, which covered 50 years of U.S. nuclear power plant construction data, was that, contrary to expectations, building subsequent plants based on an existing design actually costs more, not less, than building the initial plant.

>Why would these escape that?

Because they're smaller and faster to build.

The regulations changed a loonoverleg that time period as the tech evolved, so old designed needed expensive modifications and recertifications to meet new standards which would often get released during construction.

Being able to build modular reactors in a factory would change that.

As it stands wind and solar can’t power 100% due to them being unavailable at times. Not to mention the insane amount of land and storage capacity required. Nuclear is ideally suited for the last 30% or so that’ll continue to be some form of steady state power generation required to augment renewables.

Nuclear is horrible for the last 30%, since that last part is highly intermittent (if it weren't renewables could easily address some of it.)

Nuclear either addresses just about all the demand, or none. There's not much middle ground.

How much area do you have to cover with turbines to get 400MW? This may be a figure of interest to, say, a small island nation.

> a small island nation.

That is to say, an island with extensive scope for offshore wind.

The real question for a well-populated island nation is how much area do you have to write off if a nuclear reactor suffers from a major accident (or attack)?

For reference, the Fukushima exclusion zone was 311.5 square miles, and Chernobyl's was 1,600 square miles.

https://www.britannica.com/story/nuclear-exclusion-zones

I kind of wonder if Putin's rationale for starting a fire at that Ukraine plant was "let's show them nuclear power can be risky... if some bad guy starts firing at it".

My first thought when I heard about Russia shelling the nuke plants: "ah, that's a good way to make sure Europe will keep buying Russia gas..."

> The real question for a well-populated island nation is how much area do you have to write off if a nuclear reactor suffers from a major accident (or attack)?

I always roll my eyes at this line of reasoning. First, the number of nuclear incidents of that scope can be counted on one hand, and at least the Fukushima one was a result of poor planning. Second, that analysis never accounts for the externalities incurred by continuing to use fossil fuel Peaker plants, the externalities of etching solar panels and creating batteries, etc. Yes, nuclear power accidents can be very bad if we do a bad job of engineering the plan, and our other forms of energy production have major externalities even if we do a very good job.

It is fair to say that externalities exist for renewables that people don't like - I recall reading that the real reason China dominates rare earth minerals is because refining them has such toxic byproducts no other country wants to do it. See:

https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-wrestles-with-the-toxic...

Still, even that beats the uncontrolled meltdown of a nuclear reactor. It only has to happen once and then there's no going back.

> the number of nuclear incidents of that scope can be counted on one hand,

Yes, and people are proposing greatly increasing the number of reactors.

> and at least the Fukushima one was a result of poor planning.

So you're saying we just need to make sure that no one makes any mistakes in the design, planning, and operation of the plants? Or is Japanese society exceptionally bad at organising things and understanding technology?

> Yes, nuclear power accidents can be very bad if we do a bad job of engineering the plan, and our other forms of energy production have major externalities even if we do a very good job.

On the contrary: renewable power stations can fail catastrophically and almost no one would notice (except for the blackout), whereas a nuclear power station can "succeed" and still take 100 years and hundreds of billions of dollars to clean up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Decommissioning

I don't see it as an either/or. I'm fully onboard with deploying solar and wind, but I don't think renewables are sufficient to meet our energy demands today, nor will it come close to meeting the needs of a civilization with spacefaring ambitions. I don't quite get the rest of your points - any human organization can ignore risks out of ego or greed, as TEPCO did with Fukushima. It's definitely on those with power to set up a system that rewards good behavior. There are plenty of examples in the mining, gas, and chemistry industries of malfeasance as well as functional regulation. It's not reasonable to compare a first generation, 60 year old nuclear power station to recently deployed renewables. Renewables aren't the totally-green panacea that the ads make them out to be, there is plenty of waste involved, and I'm certain there will be a few environmental disasters related to solar that come to light in the future.

> I don't think renewables are sufficient to meet our energy demands today, nor will it come close to meeting the needs of a civilization with spacefaring ambitions.

Nuclear isn't sufficient to meet our energy demands today either (although I accept that if we had invested billions into building such power stations 20 years ago, we could now be in a much better position in terms of the climate). In fact, nuclear's share of global electricity production has been decreasing since 1996, and is now down to about 10 percent.[0]

As for spacefaring, I think it will be a long time before the limits of renewables become relevant there, by which point we might have solved fusion anyway. Bear in mind that developed countries reached peak energy usage (per person) years ago, so we might be able to power new industries just by keeping production constant.

> It's definitely on those with power to set up a system that rewards good behavior. There are plenty of examples in the mining, gas, and chemistry industries of malfeasance as well as functional regulation. ... I'm certain there will be a few environmental disasters related to solar that come to light in the future.

It still seems like you're saying "Nuclear is fine as long as nothing goes wrong" and "Solar is bad, because I can imagine that unspecified disasters have happened which the Illuminati have hidden all the evidence for". Sorry if that's an unfair exaggeration; I'm just trying to make clear that you can't hope away the very real problems of nuclear, and you can't hope into existence any non-real problems of solar.

Nevertheless, I accept your point that in some countries it could be more prudent to keep investing in new nuclear power stations rather than grid-level storage and over-provisioning of wind turbines, for example. To weigh up the risks of nuclear against uncertain future energy storage systems, though, we need real numbers. We have the numbers for how much land was evacuated because of Fukushima, and how many centuries and hundreds of billions of dollars it will take to clean up Sellafield, which may not give a complete picture of those risks, but they are more helpful than assertions about "plenty of waste" and "I'm certain there will be a few".

[0] https://www.dw.com/en/world-nuclear-industry-status-report-c...

> Bear in mind that developed countries reached peak energy usage (per person) years ago, so we might be able to power new industries just by keeping production constant.

Ok, so that covers 10-20% of the population or so. Seems like we're going to need more power for the other 80% as they modernize.

> It still seems like you're saying "Nuclear is fine as long as nothing goes wrong" and "Solar is bad, because I can imagine that unspecified disasters have happened which the Illuminati have hidden all the evidence for". Sorry if that's an unfair exaggeration; I'm just trying to make clear that you can't hope away the very real problems of nuclear, and you can't hope into existence any non-real problems of solar.

No, what I said is that Nuclear is fine as long as nothing goes wrong, exactly the same as every other power source, including Solar. We shouldn't just Nuclear to a stricter standard than any of the others, so what's the issue with being realistic about the downsides of solar?

> To weigh up the risks of nuclear against uncertain future energy storage systems, though, we need real numbers. We have the numbers for how much land was evacuated because of Fukushima, and how many centuries and hundreds of billions of dollars it will take to clean up Sellafield, which may not give a complete picture of those risks, but they are more helpful than assertions about "plenty of waste" and "I'm certain there will be a few".

I get it, you are terrified of a handful of radioactive sites, meanwhile...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites. It's pretty funny for you to say we need real numbers in the same space where you speculate that "we might have solved fusion anyways" as a primary reason to ignore nuclear power. You could certainly run more high energy experiments if you had large, consistent sources of energy :)

Nuclear isn't fine even if nothing goes wrong, because it costs too much.

Maybe you meant "nuclear is fine if we just assume nothing will go wrong so we don't have to bother with containment buildings and the like."

I'll close by pointing out that half or more of the costs you are referring to are driven by hysterical faux-environmentalists and oil lobbyists (the other half is more or less related to poor logistics, which is also fixable, but a different problem). If subjected to the same level of scrutiny and regulation as fossil fuels and renewables, then the costs would come down significantly. That would likely lead to more productions, scale and thus even lower costs.

Nuclear energy was going to be too cheap to meter until the Merchants of Fear got their hands on it.

If nuclear were subject to the same level of scrutiny as ordinary industries we'd have a long stream of nuclear accidents. But these accidents are extremely expensive. Your argument there boils down to a whine that nuclear isn't being allowed to learn via large numbers of meltdowns.

You will also always have regulation and oversight due to proliferation concerns. And without regulations, you're also not going to get a liability cap. Is anyone going to build a reactor if an accident costs more than their company is worth? Fukushima is estimated to cost $700 B. Maybe you're also advocating people not be allowed to sue for damage from nuclear accidents?

Ah now, let's not get ahead of ourselves. 400MW of wind power is actually about 120MW of actual power when you take into account the capacity factor typically 30% in the UK. While it's true that nuclear plants also have a capacity factor due to down time and refueling it's >90%.

You also can't just arbitrarily increase the amount of wind generation and hope the grid copes. There need to be major structural changes to cope with the intermittency of power.

See... this is again the rathole that leads to boondoggle spending. I'm not saying "buy wind only" as all the commenters immediately interpreted. I'm pointing out that this (hypothetical!) reactor is, even now, even in the development stage, already as expensive (plus or minus an order of magnitude) as readily deployed solutions already available in the market.

Be real. It's not going to catch up financially. It will never catch up financially. Nuclear will be what we start deploying only when we're working on the last 20% of capacity and trying to wind down the old fossil fuel generators (which will themselves be increasingly expensive as they become peaker plants).

Nuclear will never appeal to market producers of energy. It's just too expensive. Which is why we need to throw public funds at it instead. And if we're going to throw public funds at the problem, let's start with the low hanging fruit. The UK should be putting that money somewhere else, not here.

> Nuclear will be what we start deploying only when we're working on the last 20% of capacity and trying to wind down the old fossil fuel generators > Nuclear will never appeal to market producers of energy. It's just too expensive.

It seems to me that these two sentences contradict. The first implies that Nuclear will be appealing for 20% of the energy market, which is still a huge market.

If it was appealing, private industry would be investing. What I'm saying is that the only time nuclear makes sense is when you're trying to back-fill the last 20% (or whatever) of capacity that can't easily be born by other renewable sources. That doesn't make that 20% magically profitable, it's a gap that needs to be filled (likely by public investment).

:::Helion's $500m funding round has entered the chat:::

It doesn't make sense for backfilling the last 20%. That last 20% isn't steady, it's highly intermittent demand, something that nuclear is terrible at addressing.

If we can work out a good storage technology (and I am optimistic about this), then I totally agree. If we can't, then nuclear with demand-following load might be the best available option.

Using nuclear for the last 20% makes no sense. Against wind/solar, you either use nuclear for everything, or you use it for nothing. There is no middle ground (well, except maybe in a tightly tuned scenario where solar could just be cheaper for daytime peak reduction, but even that is a bit iffy.)

I’m getting confused. GP is saying 90% of 470MW (nuclear) versus 30% of 400MW (wind) for the same price, and you are saying that’s too expensive?

Or did you leave a number out of your comment and 400MW of wind is only 50M, one-tenth the price.

No, the grant, before any reactor, is equivalent to 400 MW (later adjusted down by capacity factor). The nuclear reactor itself is vastly more expensive ($2.4B after the 5th unit). So each reactor is closer to 1500MW of wind (again if we take 30% then 450MW more in line with the reactor) and that’s optimistic (because early nuke estimates tend to underestimate cost). So the real reason for nuclear is that it provides consistent output and thus has lower requirements on the grid.

It does catch up, of course it does. It takes some time, but there is ROI, and it’s not even that far in time. It’s just that you have to spend more time in debt.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=UC_BCz0pzMw

> It does catch up, of course it does. It takes some time

It's had 70 years!

… goalposts, much? Watch the video, it takes far less than 70 years for a nuclear power plant to go ROI-positive.

Hi, I'm French, I know a thing or two about how valuable the ROI on Nuclear is.

Fair comment, but in the UK we've screwed up nuclear for generations. Our old Magnoz reactors have a century long decommissioning period, and even in the 1960s were more expensive than coal. More modern reactors may differ, but Magnox set up the arguments for anti-nuclear advocates.

More recently, we (stupidly) accepted an abominable price for energy from Hinckley C, and indemnified the operators (including EDF if memory serves) against the cost of decommissioning.

There's evidently a good way to do nuclear, but Britain doesn't do it. We are inept, so our ROI is lower than yours. It is a great shame.

Keep fighting the fight. Your comment is correct despite starting to get grayed out. I always sense shenanigans on nuclear posts on the internet.

Nuclear plant will last for decades.

How long will wind turbines or solar panels last? The batteries for them also need to be factored in

Have people looked at combining gas generation and wind power, would being able to generate gas when there was too much electricity change the capacity factor equation?

We don't have anything near that scale in power-to-gas. And even if we did have, power-to-hydrogen still is at only 60-70% efficency.

What is the efficiency of hydrogen-to-power? Or, the round trip efficiency of using hydrogen as storage?

About 60-70%. Possibly it could be improved with better electrolysis techniques or large-scale facilities. Some Swedish companies are pushing for that solution: https://www.hybritdevelopment.se/en/a-fossil-free-future/ For now it's only for the steel industry but could in theory be used for other parts of the grid too.

A 60-70% round trip efficiency would be very impressive for round trip efficiency of electricity to hydrogen and back. Its in the same ballpark as pumped storage. I can only assume it's assuming using fuel cells which are 90% efficient for the conversion to electricity. I'm not convinced these have really been deployed at that scale before, the biggest fuel cells I'm aware of are used in non-nuclear submarines where cost is not a priority.

That efficiency could be good enough if you can buy the energy cheap and sell high.

The problem is, the only place where you can make that worth the while is by building out solar in Northern Africa. Unfortunately, the countries in that region are a combination of failed states, governed by dictators, under threat of war or terrorism or pissed off after hundreds of years of Western colonial powers coming in, taking natural resources and leaving no meaningful income and perspectives to the locals.

There's no easy solution for a single one of these problems, much less for all of them.

Also knowing the usual imperialist power games played there even if we would with huge cost stabilise the area, an other power coming in destabilizing it again is quite a big risk...

No it could work in other places. You buy 1 unit of energy for £50 per unit. And then sell at £150 per unit, or £90 for your remaining 0.6 units. The profit is from the price difference. You make money from arbitrage. And this is the kind of price difference you would expect in a grid with lots of intermittent sources. And the cheaper the source commodity becomes the less efficiency really matters.

This is essentially the principle of a virtual powerplant - household tariffs like Octopus Agile (price fluctuations every 30 minutes) with a home battery make it possible to do this at quite a small (eg household) scale. A bigger operator could find bigger returns if they could make it work.

I think there's something to be said for storing excess energy like this - it beats paying into fossil fuel economies.

It's difficult to do these kinds of arbitrage deals with energy, at least electric energy - it's simply incredibly expensive and requires a lot of upfront cash to build out serious storage, whereas it's easy to store and ship oil - in a pinch, you can just buy an old tanker truck for a couple thousand dollars. Not to mention that in order to build such a project you would need a lot of transmission capacity in the grid so that you could e.g. have a battery in Bavaria buy up surplus power from the North Sea wind farms.

The one area where the principle works currently is ultra-short storage times like Tesla did in Australia... but that's not much of actual energy being stored, the service Tesla provides here is smoothing out demand - it has 194 MWh @ 150 MW, so barely one and a quarter hours of runtime at full load, with the complete grid having something like 60 GW peak capacity [1].

Another idea that is being floated is to repurpose old electric vehicle batteries or electric vehicles themselves as decentralized storage. That is a very charming idea, but again it requires large upfront investment for the batteries as well as for expanding the grid to keep up with the demand... and there are no standards yet for all the "smartness" needed for such a system to work, many chargers and electric vehicles are not capable of running in reverse, and many people are skeptic of putting a difficult to extinguish fire risk into their basement.

And yet another idea for arbitrage comes from the consumption side - basically have large consumers with storage such as a heating or warm-water system enabled for remote control so that oversupply spikes can be mitigated. But again, the current grids lack the "smartless".

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/984457/australia-install...

Technically it is exactly the same as a generator, you sell power at a particular price. From the grid perspective it is exactly the same. The fact that you also consume energy is coincidental. And it can work well with existing grid systems by turning on as frequency drops or you get signals from a control room. It uses the same kind of approach as a peaker plant (the tanker truck filled with diesel and a generator).

I'm not currently aware of any wind turbines in the UK being powered down due to lack of demand, so the 30% capacity factor is exclusively due to lack of supply, i.e. no wind to turn the turbines.

It's definitely worth looking at with another 3x wind capacity or so.

We should probably be building more pumped water storage now in anticipation of wind cracking 100% of demand.

There's coire glas being built already but we'll need more, and it takes about 2x as long to build as a wind farm does.

The latest ~15 MW off-shore monsters are up to capacity factors of 60-64% now.

https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/offshore-wind...

https://www.vestas.com/en/products/offshore/V236-15MW

I... put politely, don't understand how manufacturers can make that claim, it depends on exogenous factors. That said, you're right, the newest turbines are impressive structures and more consistent at their job.

Also that said, andy_ppp is right, or will be soon. If you want to make a dent in our fossil fuel needs on a cold windless day, you'll have giant globs of excess energy on warm windy days, that is simply orders of magnitude more than any practically-costed battery can store. At that point, who cares if electrolysis is only 30% efficient?

Your margins care, since those are a factor of installation cost, marginal cost and energy lost due to round trip efficiency.

That 70% loss defines the lowest possible price difference between buy cheap power and sell expensive. Therefore any other smart consumer or storage has that margin to work against, to compete you out of the market. This is why batteries can work, in some cases. But it is a pure inefficiency that will find a minimum equilibrium.

For your understanding, capacity factor is one of the parameters which is under the control of the turbine designer. If you connect up a huge 200m turbine to a little 3kw generator you can get a practically 100% capacity factor but obviously it's not an optimal strategy given the costs.

Wind farm theoretical maximum is not equivalent to sustained continual power generation.

These SMRs have a 60 year lifespan[1]. The lifespan of a wind turbine is optimistically 25 years for offshore (I don't know whether your stat refers to off/onshore wind.)

[1] https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/net-zero/decarbonisin...

Even if the SMR itself were to have a 60 year lifespan, you'll find that the steam turbines attached to it are not really better than the wind turbines. Comparing an SMR with a complete wind turbine is like comparing apples and apple trees.

Meaning: "our ROI figures assume we don't face any seriously improved competitors for six decades."

We don't have storage because batteries are super expensive and are not clean. The good part is that we can work on more then one problem at a time, like we can install solar panels on homes, install wind turbines on windy areas and we could also build safe and cheap nuclear power station to fill the rest.

Britain has around 1.4GW of battery storage installed and around 20GW in planning. They are easy to install and mass producible.

Batteries are rapidly falling in price, as are electrolysers. When nuclear plants are justified based on four or even six decades lifespans, it's a very dubious bet to think that storage won't be much cheaper long before that lifespan is over.

Say I afford some solar panels, should I investigate/review batteries for home use? Or maybe I should wait a few years , maybe prices half and safety increases?

I personally would wait.

BTW, solar panels may be bought by the pallet-load for 1/4 what (e.g.) Home Depot charges.

Any roofer can install brackets for them, reliably, and electricians nowadays know how to wire up a system from commodity parts. So there is no need to pay 4x to a solar specialist.

But, yes, battery prices are falling fast. Right now the best way to buy a battery is to buy a used Nissan Leaf and a box to connect it to your house.

> infrastructure investment in order to spread the power.

What infrastructure do you have in mind? Are you thinking of places without an existing power grid?

> Being able to power so many homes (and being more centralized than I thought) means these reactors would still require huge infrastructure investment in order to spread the power.

would it? they'd plug directly into the super-grid, presumably in locations that are currently undergoing decommissioning

and then you could slowly replace CCGTs with them

after that point if you need more energy you'd have to upgrade the grid

Ideally, it would be nice to drop it in as a replacement for an existing plant. However, it may be that the grid cannot sustain the existing plant being shut down without new capacity already in place and there's the more problematic issue of location. There's plenty of gas peaker plants in locations where people would not accept a nuclear plant, such as in the middle of cities.

> However, it may be that the grid cannot sustain the existing plant being shut down without new capacity already in place

it already handles this whenever a station trips

I think the grid is far more resilient than you give it credit for

> There's plenty of gas peaker plants in locations where people would not accept a nuclear plant, such as in the middle of cities.

the UK will shortly have a dozen former nuclear power station sites ready for a couple of new reactors

it's not an immediate problem for this project

(did you know there used to be not one but two nuclear reactors right in the middle of London? one in a 17th century building)

We're not talking about a plant being down for a few hours, it'd be a few months for the existing plant to be decommissioned and the new plant to be installed, assuming the existing footprint does not allow the two plants to exist side by side

But yes, many existing nuclear sites may be an ideal location if available.

The grid is designed to deal with the loss of a power station like this. In fact it does all the time as generators go offline for maintenance etc.

Also, the land requirements for this are really modest. Our legacy power station sites are pretty big. The old coal stations needed a lot of space for coal. The nuclear sites tend to be built in rural areas surrounded by countryside. There are also quite a few that were built on massive WWII airfields and have huge areas. Finding land will not be a problem.

My guess is that the biggest issue will be finding a site with suitable geology (for the hole) and access for heavy/wide vehicles.

> these reactors would still require huge infrastructure investment in order to spread the power.

Nah, I've done it in Factorio, a single wire can handle the full output of multiple reactors.

Pretty sure there's several mods that make that not-true anymore :)

> difficult as far as fuel and waste supply chain goes

Sellafield was one of the biggest waste processors around, taking fuel from all around the world. So I don't see if being that big of a problem. well not impossible, there are reasonably well established processes for this.

"This is where I did a spit take."

That's understandable. 470 MW is not "small." It's over 50% of the size of conventional PWRs. Also 470 MW is probably not sufficient for "one million homes." It might be sufficient for one million small efficiency apartments, assuming they are well built, equipped with modern appliances and not over occupied. But a conventional detached residential structure is 1 KW+. That's without charging any electric vehicles.

Marketing exaggerations aside, good to see at least some innovation in nuclear design. The design anticipates factory built reactor vessels, which is a fundamental improvement.

Not in the UK. While there's peaks, we don't average 24kwh/day, that would be enormous. Even looking at detached houses, it's less than half of that.

This is an excellent summary from 2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37M7ffjro3I -- what's notable is how much gas (as in ethane, propane, and butane) is used in place of coal.

Plus a great deal of UK housing is semi-detached or terraced housing. European home energy usage is about a third of the USA's on average per person.

> It might be sufficient for one million small efficiency apartments, assuming they are well built, equipped with modern appliances and not over occupied

So I live in a small, not especially energy-efficient Victorian-era London apartment with my partner, without fancy appliances. The boiler is gas-powered but the cooker is electric. And last month we averaged about 6-7 KwH/day, and this was working from home 90% of the time.

Maybe in the US. Here in Uruguay it would definitely power a million homes. I suspect it'll power a million homes in Europe as well (most are "energy-efficient apartments").

According to an article, an US citizen consumes twice as much electricity as a German, 3 times a Spaniard and 7 times a Uruguayan...

https://www.elobservador.com.uy/nota/-cuanta-energia-electri...

> This is where I did a spit take. I was really underestimating the capacity for these "mini" reactors. Being able to power so many homes (and being more centralized than I thought) means these reactors would still require huge infrastructure investment in order to spread the power.

This is not only untrue, it is the opposite of true. Centralized power sources mean you can build generation facility close to places with energy demand (usually population centers).

People keep touting decentralized grids as some sort of advantage over centralized grids. It's the complete opposite. A decentralized grid needs more transmission infrastructure to connect large areas often far away from where energy is actually consumed. Renewable projects are often blocked because transmission infrastructure can't support them, e.g. [1].

1. https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...

> This is not only untrue, it is the opposite of true. Centralized power sources mean you can build generation facility close to places with energy demand (usually population centers). People keep touting decentralized grids as some sort of advantage over centralized grids. It's the complete opposite. A decentralized grid needs more transmission infrastructure to connect large areas often far away from where energy is actually consumed. Renewable projects are often blocked because transmission infrastructure can't support them.

This all seems backwards. Decentralized power generation means building the power sources where there is energy demand. Centralized power generation means building them somewhere and needing to use the grid to send the power everywhere else. Centralized power generation usually means large power plants generating power for entire cities, usually built a long way from those cities due to economics, logistics or pollution concern. Decentralized power generation usually means solar or wind farms built near enough to the population centers that residents protest against the perceived eyesore. Decentralized power generation in some cases means no grid at all in the cases dealing with remote locations (often served with diesel generators, the traditional decentralized power generation tech). Renewables change this somewhat, as you do need a grid connecting it all to deal with intermittent power generation, but it is the same capacity as needed to transmit the same power from some centralized power source 250km away.

> Decentralized power generation means building the power sources where there is energy demand. Centralized power generation means building them somewhere and needing to use the grid to send the power everywhere else.

You've got this backwards. Most energy demand is centralized in population centers. Thus, it's easiest to centralize power production next to those centers of energy demand. Centralized power production means generating the energy close to the locations with large energy demand. Decentralized production means generating that power across a large area and transporting it to the population centers with large energy demand.

The problem is that wind and solar have to be distributed because they're depending on using large amounts of land, as well as having the right weather. If you're delivering power to a city you can pick and choose where you build a gas or nuclear plant. You can't choose where the wind blows or which parts of the country get the most sunlight.

The largest power plant in Australia, Loy Yang, and a few others, are all located about 190km from Melbourne (pop 4.9 million). The power plants were built there not because they are close to a population center, but because that is where the coal mines are and because it is far enough away from the population centers for pollution to not be a problem. Similarly Gas plants get built near the ports, to minimize transport costs. Compare this with rooftop solar, which has very high uptake across all of Australia, including the regions like Melbourne in the darker southern latitudes. Or the wind farms, which are able to be built all over the place with no need to be stuck near some resource like coal. Turns out that wind is everywhere, and by spreading generation out you get more consistency of generation. You can build wind as close to population centers as the population allows, and people are literally building solar on their own roofs.

Cherry picking one specific plant does little to address the fundamental differences between geographically dependent and independent sources of energy. If you look at a map of gas or nuclear plants you'll see them located right next to population centers more often than not. Centralized energy production matching the centralized energy demand.

By comparison wind has to be built out in windy areas, which are often far away. Wind blows in many places, but it's only economical to build wind turbines where it blows particularly strong. Similarly with solar power [1]. Rooftop solar is a trivial amount of energy. Realistic projections of a mostly solar grid have us transporting huge amounts of energy thousands of miles from sunny arid places to urban centers where that energy is in demand.

1. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/World-solar-potential_fi...

> By comparison wind has to be built out in windy areas, which are often far away.

That's not what people mean when they say "decentralised power generation". They are thinking of power generated where it is used. That doesn't mean the nuclear power plant or coal at a safe 50km away you are alluding to. Only one thing can do it - solar, producing power 10 metres from where it is used. Right now solar doesn't work either because you need storage. The only storage that works for domestic solar is batteries and they are too expensive right now.

It's likely batteries will always be too expensive for bulk grid storage. But retail customers pay about 3 times the grid price. If batteries half in price solar + storage become price competitive with grid generation. We don't have decentralised generation now, but if that happens it will pop up like weeds everywhere.

As it happens, I have a house battery. And as it happens, it flooded here last week, cutting mains power. We were the only house in the street for a while with the lights on. Our 5kWh battery and 7kW solar system surprised me. Normal activities were curtailed, obviously. But even when it was pissing down rain in the middle of a downpour causing a once in 50 year flood, with the solar working at 15% capacity it was still enough to drive everything bar heating and aircon. Turns out the bulk of our electricity consumption can but turned off with only minor inconvenience.

We are paying $100/mo for electricity now. If I installed another 10kWh of battery, that would drop close to $0, and I could sell power too. Which made me look up current battery prices. To my surprise, a 10kWh battery only costs $5,000. You do the math - the age or truly decentralised generation isn't too far away.

Mind you, having nuclear as a backup would be nice. Up till now it's been far, far too expensive. No one in their right mind would fund a new conventional nuclear plant, which is why no one has been building them. This is the first proposal I've seen in a while that came in at what might be a workable price. I wish it luck, but they haven't built the first one yet, and history generally isn't kind to the producers of cost estimates for the first off the block large engineering efforts.

You perhaps dont see the export potential for these mini reactors?

The UK gave the world the industrial revolution, and the pollution, so this will be its answer to help clean up the planet.

There is enough surveillance on the planet now to track and predict virtually everyone's next move when coupled with US tech firms, so what would remote villages in the Amazon think if they can get online and connected with the rest of the world, or parts of Africa getting reliable electricity?

Electric cars's are still in the infancy, but battery tech is always improving and if the planet is to decarbonise then nuclear is the way to go.

We havent even started mining Helium13 from the moon (massive amount on the moon little on Earth), but that has virtually no radioactive waste.

Who wouldnt want decent electricity at Everest Base camp's?

The US Embassy in London is supposed to have its own mini nuclear reactor which uses the Thames for cooling and generates enough to power local residence in the event of a power outage. Its probably like what you find on a nuclear powered submarine, which is what I would imagine these Rolls Royce mini reactors will be like or could be like.

Having many small reactors all over the place has been done, and yes poses the problems when people who don't know what they even are find them and try to scrap them https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0931jtk/the-nuclear-lighthou...

Current reactors can be 1600 MW. This is more like the seventies and eighties reactors at 400-500 MW. Which is great! Maybe it's not a coincidence that a lot of nuclear energy was built back then, which we are benefiting from, to this day.

Finland has the famous Olkiluoto 3 EPR project that is being ramped up currently. There is a next reactor project in Hanhikivi that is in very early phases. But it was to have been supplies by Rosatom, a mostly Russian consortium. Pressure vessel manufacturing in Ukraine etc. So that project is frozen now. It has been suggested that perhaps multiple SMR units could replace it. Infrastructure has been planned and permits for the large part already exist.

AFAIK the initial plan is to place them in locations that had nuclear plants already (many being decommissioned)

One advantage of this is the power distribution infrastructure from there is already in place (plus UK has a national power distribution grid anyway)

Yeah, the reactor vessels are usually pretty small. Usually it's the containment, generation, and cooling facilities that take up the most space even on traditional plants. Nuclear is nuts with energy densities almost a million times greater than chemical fuels. https://xkcd.com/1162/

With a lot of these SMR designs, they don't transport fuel or waste separate from the reactor. It is generally sealed within the reactor itself before delivery and then the entire reactor is transported intact for disposal or remanufacturing years later. They typically fit on the back of large trucks, trains, or barges.

Manufacturing enriched fuel from these designs would not be cost effective. Technology for enriching weapons grade nuclear fuel is widespread and tightly monitored. A group with one of these reactors would be hard pressed to do anything other than generate heat with it or make dirty bombs (Hospitals would be a better target for this.) Also the dang thing is pretty hard to run off with compared to smaller casks or rods of waste.

Edit: Almost certainly they are referring to an entire plant with more than a few SMRs when they say a million homes.

These moves should probably be considered in context of the UK's collapsed/collapsing ability to produce energy [0]. These stats are a bit laggy, but it looks like they're being choked out of any sort of industrial relevance to anything.

It is hard for me to imagine how that doesn't translate into a crisis of living standards. Either they're directly losing the ability to secure people comfortable lives, or they are losing the ability to export valuable products and becoming more vulnerable to foreign pressure. They literally can't have goods and services without energy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom#O... - the table here is a jaw dropper, looks like they are deindustrialising.

The U.K. is primarily a services based economy, I think it is conceivable that the economy can grow whilst energy consumption decreases if you’re seeing a transition from manufacturing and heavy industry to commercial and services.

And in a wartime era in a world that is de-globalizing, how does that strategy play out for a country?

Rolling blackouts.

How would going nuclear help compete against renewable-powered industry in much sunnier places than the UK?

Europe's industrial growth was based on fossil fuels. In a post fossil age, it's not a great place for industry.

Service economies tend to grow out of and get strength from related industrial activities. They can go on for quite a while once those industrial activities are gone from a certain era, but after a while the countries and regions that took over those industrial activities grow to want in on a piece of the services action too.

I think one of the biggest mistakes the West made in thinking about globalization are the beliefs that: 1. You could completely decouple the service and industrial economies and it would gone on working forever. 2. In doing so, the developing countries that took over those industries would be happing eating the scrapes of Western nations and never have an ambition to enter into related service activities.

It's no coincidence that the country with the largest economy in Europe happens to have a vibrant manufacturing base. And in the U.S., while it plays a much smaller role and employs significantly fewer people than in the past, the manufacturing base is still quite large.

Did anyone in the west actually think that? I thought it was just I'll/we'll get rich outsourcing this to the east, and who cares about the impact long term or to others.

In the 1990's this was an extremely common view, at least in the U.S. Teachers, parents, politicians, and practically anyone else in a position of authority all routinely told us that sending all the manufacturing to the east was going to enable us all to become designers, lawyers, writers, etc. This was "The Future", and everyone in America was going to go to college and become a knowledge worker.

Any time someone would raise concerns about potential negative impacts, they would either be told that they were living in the past, or that the answer was education. This was a staple of the economic and domestic policy of both the Clinton and G.W. Bush administrations.

It seems laughable now, but man, at the time, most of us bought that crap hook, line and sinker.

Which is a big mistake. There is a reason why Germany is the export powerhouse it is.

Household energy usage has decreased a lot, especially with the push for more efficient household appliances, lighting and better insulation.

During this time some power-hungry industry has closed, and we shuttered basically all of our coal power plants.

It's worth noting that the UK has now started developing very large scale off shore wind systems. You are right though - there has been massive deindustrialization and especially a shift from processing of raw material into intermediate forms. For example steel manufacturing in the UK is only for specialist products.

Offshore wind has been growing quickly for 20 years. Deindustrialisation started in the 80s. None of this is new, really.

Well, nothing is new under the sun!

There has been an inflection on off shore wind since 2018; approximately double the amount came on stream then vs any previous year and this has been sustained.

You could swap UK with Sweden and your comment would be just as relevant. Ok, it's a bit of harsh when applied to us, I'm not sure if we are choked out, but the energy crisis is real and high-energy industries are halting and forced to stop their expansion or even shrink their operations.

Another aspect is that energy and gas went from being affordable to a luxury, that's right, a growing chunk of swedes will have to cut back on their use of electricity (how would that even work). The prices on electricity have gone up 400% in ONE year, gas prices have gone up about 200%. Wages have halted since forever if you account for inflation.

I'm realizing the terrifying pace of this just now when writing it out, it's just unfolding in front of our eyes, we are in for one hell of a ride..

"that's right, a growing chunk of swedes will have to cut back on their use of electricity"

This is really something that would have been unthinkable a mere 5 years ago. Sweden, one of the richest nations of Earth, having to be careful about electricity prices.

I disagree with your tone.

Fossil fuel generation is collapsing. The early 2000s were when carbon credit trading started to become a thing and emissions taxes were more significant. By 2004 it was cheaper to import (eg) French Nuclear energy than have to offset the emissions of coal and gas. And in that respect, the scheme did exactly what it was designed to do. Renewable generation is climbing rapidly (and diversifying) even without the old solar FIT subsidies.

We still need more supply, and storage, to tank the unit price (so we can dump gas!) but I don't think gross energy generation or export is a fair metric. Especially if you're weighing my comfort solely on the price-per-unit, and not (eg) my grandchildren having air to breathe.

The UK is definitely deindustrialising, it has been doing so for 40 years, and it ha indeed led to large declines in living standards, mostly to do with the concomittant neoliberal economic policy including it's current incarnation, "austerity", as well as brexit, large-scale corruption, attacks on the welfare system, and the like.

I'm interested in the "modular" aspect here. It's not so clear what this means, but my must hopeful take is:

- core technology can be switched (pop in a thorium core when it's available, leaving all the cooling, turbines and electrical as is)

- better maintenance, swap out parts with short downtimes

- interoperability, add a cooling system from another manufacturer like TeraPower or even a Chinese or Russian firm (after this war nonsense ends). If we're going to counter climate change with nuclear it must be a global effort.

- easier, safer decommissioning. No need to carefully demolish 5 acre concrete bunker sites, just tow away old parts for disposal at a safe place.

Anyone know what "modular" really means in this context?

I think the biggest contributor is shrinking the size of the engineering effort. The cost scaling curve for large infrastructure projects is often not beneficial - the idea is that a (50%) smaller reactor requires substantially smaller containment, on-site development, etc, which should reduce costs by far more than 50%. More parts can be build in a factory rather than on-site, and higher unit volumes can support a learning curve.

None of the above. AFAIK, 'modular' here is shorthand for '(mostly) assembled on site from modules made in factories'. The idea is that if you can transform nuclear build-out from a civil engineering problem into a manufacturing problem you can massively lower costs if/when you reach some level of scale.

That was the same song Westinghouse was singing. It ended catastrophically.

No it didn't.

"Westinghouse Electric Company would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy because of US$9 billion of losses from nuclear reactor construction projects. The projects responsible for this loss are mostly the construction of four AP1000 reactors."

"As of 2019 all four AP1000 reactors in China are operating."

Westinghouse made a large amount of mistakes in their designs, suffered through political climate because of the Fukushima incident and economic hardship because of the ridiculously low gas prices.

How can you reduce that basically to that they tried to mass produce power plants, that was dumb so they failed?

And where's the catastrophe?

China has ditched the AP 1000 technology now. They are building no more of those reactors. So even in China it was a relative failure.

I'll add that there's good reason to think the data from China about nuclear projects being completed on time is invalid. There are cases where at the official start date for construction on some of their plants there was already much visible work that had been completed. Great way to be on schedule, just delay when you say you actually started.

The catastrophe was the financial implosion of Westinghouse and the great damage it did to Toshiba.

I won't dispute that Westinghouse was a failure. They failed at designing a power plant that meets safety criteria for it to be build in the US. Toshiba bet they could do it efficiently, and lost 9 billion on that bet.

None of that has anything to do with Rolls-Royce. There's no reason to assume just because they're trying to solve the same problem that they're going to make the same mistakes and fail as well.

They very well could, and even if they did, your comment would still be useless.

What it has to do with Rolls Royce is that Westinghouse claimed they were going to get cost improvements from modular construction. But they utterly failed at that. The takeaway is that claiming you are going to reduce costs, and actually doing so, are very different things. Talk is cheap, especially without a history to show the words can be relied on.

I think it just means that the whole reactor itself IS a module, can be removed, put on a truck, repaired, upgraded, and replaced as needed. Here is a Wikipedia link that has a picture of one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuScale_Power

Since convection depends on absolute height, reactors relying on convection have a certain minimum height. Roughly speaking. So if you scale a reactor down, at some point it becomes very skinny and that might lead to problems. Anyway, 60 megawatts electricity is not too big in my opinion.

To me modular means being able to buy one or 10 of these off the production line, plug them in and turn them on. A fantastic way of converting coal or gas power plants as they age or otherwise become non-viable, because a big part of the necessary support infrastructure is already there. All it needs is the manufacturing production line to actually exist, and the fuel supply chain and waste management which is unfortunately mostly political and the biggest risk to this sort of project.

France went 100% nuclear power in basically 15 years. I'd love to see the current conflict catalyze action here. Aggressive fission growth is the only way to fast track clean energy independence for most countries.

And France has a lot of trouble right now because they can't sustain it.

what do you mean? i'm curious to learn more about this

A large portion of their plants is offline at any time. For various reasons, some regular maintenance, some not so regular, some safety related. For me the big takeaway is that the reliability and safety on paper is never the complete picture, even before unforeseen accidents or malice eventually do happen.

Another problem was that recruitment and education of nuclear engineers isn't going that well either.

So let's assume 10 of these got deployed, and then one of them develops a problem. No explosion, just something which could evolve into a serious issue if not taken care of within a couple of months.

This would mean that all the 9 other reactors would have to be shut down until the root cause has been fixed, due to regulations.

That is 10 million homes which will require a relatively quick alternative source of energy, for around one year.

Is this a problem? I don't know, that's why I'm asking.

But for some reason this would appear to increase the probability of failures of the overall deployed MW capacity by all these systems together.

reactors share a design at present

has this sort of co-ordinated shutdown ever happened before in the history of the nuclear industry?

because I don't think it has

Yes, of course it has. I'm certainly not an expert, but the plants are operating on a set of risk calculations based on assumptions about their designs. If one of the safety assumptions are challenged, you have to shut the reactors down and address it.

Now, I'm sure you can find instances where this was not done. But if you just vaguely follow nuclear news around the world, nuclear power plants do indeed have correlated shutdowns. The most widely reported one in the past decade probably started with the accident at the Fukushima power plant. But there are many examples of smaller ones.

Sizewell c is 3200mw. So if that goes offline you have effectively 7 RR reactors offline.

This is why design, commissioning and testing of nuclear power plants is so crucial

> due to regulations

[citation needed]: which regulations of which country?

The French nuclear fleet has a problem with cracks, but they've only shut down the affected reactors. https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/France-Cl...

Heck, they kept one of the Chernobyl units online for years after the other one blew up, because they needed the power.

Power grids are designed to have lots of redundancy and tend to have more capacity than is actually needed. It is perfectly normal for large generators to be offline. It might increase prices, but the grid should be designed to cope.

I feel stupid for thinking these would be used to power car engines.

Rolls Royce hasn’t produced cars in years. They sold their brand and factory to BMW. They’re a jet engine manufacturer though.

Along with being one of the big 3 turbine manufacturers, they also do a lot of military and marine stuff. This nuclear tech fits their business as the Vanguard submarines are powered by RR reactors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguard-class_submarine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_PWR

Like in Fallout? One can dream...

Or infinite batteries in A Roadside Picnic

Ford Nucleon

I like it, because the world is not going to reduce its suicidal dependency on fossil fuels with just renewable energy (solar, wind, tidal...). Safe(r) and cheaper nuclear reactors could bridge the gap.

But, I do wish the development of thorium based nuclear reactors would be accelerated, so we can stop with the primarily uranium nuclear reactors that have the capacity of dual use for helping to make nuclear weapons (which the world has enough of). Additionally, thorium is safer.

Nuclear energy isn't scalable in either the long or short term. The renewable energy route is faster than wishing for thorium based technology.

Most countries are just not in a position to scale up their nuclear industry, and extremely reluctant to do so. It is a lot harder to get rid of all that industry when you are done with it, than with any fossil based plants built to bridge the gap. All of that leaves out considerations like a neighbor invading your country and trying to blow up your shit.

Don't call it a nuclear reactor, but sustainable salt energy

Thorium isn't "pie in the sky", it's very doable (https://spectrum.ieee.org/china-closing-in-on-thorium-nuclea...). The issue was that thorium was abandoned by the U.S. and other countries, because uranium nuclear reactors (despite their greater dangers) have dual use, and can be used for creating nuclear weapons. Other countries followed the U.S. example, thus we must live with these greater dangers. If not from nuclear accidents or sabotage (or stray bullets), from unfriendly countries having disguised nuclear weapon production programs.

Plain and simple, we don't need more nuclear weapons or more nuclear armed countries, as we can destroy this planet several times over. Nor do we need more dangerous nuclear waste or fear of catastrophic accidents. Thorium reactors don't lend themselves to nuclear weapons production, and reduces the waste dangers. And it doesn't have to be thorium, but we can as least build them safer and smarter.

Nuclear power can be great for humankind, if we harnessed it more safely, to include using it on our moon, Mars, and beyond. On Earth, thorium is a safer and possible alternative. We need to get over our fossil fuel suicidal addiction, sooner, rather than later. Renewables are great, but its going to take us more time to get where we need to be, so nuclear power can help get us there faster.

Even Thorium based reactors still need decades of development and billions of investments to even start commercialization and eventual scaling up. Without a guarantee of success.

I still haven't seen a canonical bit of (non lobbyist funded) ROI that shows that same dollar investment isn't better spent on alternate means (varies by nation of course but by and large some combo of renewables for most geos seems a better bet, and less of an environmental AND security risk).

You may not have seen it but Rolls-Royce is a company looking to make money building these things. You can assume they have done this research.

Their reasearch: "If we lobby really hard, get someone's political career tied to the success of our project and sink enough public funds into this so backing out is no longer considered an option, we'll make tons of money. p=0.05 btw"

Why wouldn't you lobby to get public funds _and_ do something that can actually sell mass market?

Because one of those is difficult.

Their research includes producing the nuclear power plants on the UK's submarines btw:

https://www.rolls-royce.com/products-and-services/defence/su...

RR deciding to lobby in the UK for business where they have few competitors (versus in renewables where their competitive landscape is considerable and growing by the quarter) doesn't seem like an ROI I buy into, much as Phillip Morris' "scientific research" into the effects of smoking on lung cancer didn't seem altogether self-serving.

I think these projects are less about making money directly. Mostly these projects are only profitable/feasible with the help of lots of government funding. I assume they have secured some of that.

The reason that the British government is interested in subsidizing nuclear is that they want to maintain their nuclear capability and want to stay credible as a nuclear power. That, and the French are also investing. Either way, that makes it interesting for the likes of Rolls Royce to get involved. There's government money to be had. And maybe Rolls Royce stumbles on something useful; like a cost reduction that makes nuclear a bit less expensive. I wouldn't count on that happening quickly though or in any amounts that really matter.

Almost all renewable calculations elide the storage cost.

And that solar is the most expensive way of producing power per kWh and would go nowhere if not subsidized to the moon and back.

Unsubsidized on-shore wind and solar is the by far cheapest sources of energy today. They are down at the marginal cost of existing, paid of, traditional power plants. That is where the current explosion in renewable growth is coming from. It is simply a more efficient use of capital to close down your existing nuclear plant and build new renewables instead.

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

That just isn’t true. Solar is among the cheapest per watt to build [0] and produces very cheap electricity [1] even if you remove subsidies. It isn’t a perfect technology but that is beside the point. Further, every other technology for producing electricity has subsidies: wind (similar tax benes), nuclear (the gov acts as the insurer of last resort in a catastrophe, unpriced externality of waste heat), coal (unpriced externalities for carbon, soot, heavy metals, waste heat), natural gas (unpriced externalities for carbon, waste heat for combined cycle), hydro has all sorts of hard to price externalities and they are usually built with the help of the government (financing, dislocating people, rights of way, building new shipping lanes, etc).

[0] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/assumptions/pdf/table_8.2.p...

[1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....

Well that sure is interesting, it's the exact opposite of what I've read before. Having not read that entire novel, I do have to ask if that's taking the average yearly Wh of a solar panel or what it says on the tin? Because it'll only produce that in Mexico during summer at midday. These costs can't be fixed but likely vary significantly by latitude and weather type.

Anyhow if that's somehow correct and the price is $29.04 for a solar MWh and $121.84 for battery storage, then taking night into account for a 1MW installation you need 2x the solar capacity to make up the night draw during the day and a 12 MWh battery bank, so in total that would be $58.08 for the panels and $1462.08 for storage. Not exactly feasible by itself still. That's simplified of course, as you don't get as much draw at night, but you also have to consider that in winter you'll basically get nothing from the panels, so you may need even more than just 2x.

> And that solar is the most expensive way of producing power per kWh

This is utter bollocks. Solar is amazingly cheap today, per kWh produced. In the best places, it's around $0.013/kWh. Nuclear can't even meet that if you totally discount all capital and financing costs.

Isn't that with subsidies etc? It averages 7.5 cents per kwh 'fully loaded' including equipment, installation and expected maintenance.

No, it's not with subsidies. Are you quoting RESIDENTIAL solar there? I was talking about utility-scale solar, which is the relevant thing to compare against nuclear.

> In the best places

With all due respect, that's a pretty bullshit metric. Most of the world's population does not live where solar works best, so you'll get only fractional output and much higher price to performance.

Your response is without merit. Yes, most people don't live in places with the best solar resource. But the cost of solar I gave there is so cheap (like, a factor of 10 cheaper than new nuclear) that one could be 2-3x more expensive than that and still not be the most expensive source of electricity per kWh.

Imagine I have a load that varies between 10kW +\- 50% and an intermittent generator that outputs 1kW at maximum and sometimes zero. I don’t have any need for storage so why would I have to calculate any storage cost? This is basically the situation the US grid is in as a whole today. If you want higher renewable usage with fewer fossil backups then you may need to price storage but that isn’t where we are today.

Storage is far easier though if the input power is cheap. Cost per MW is strongly correlated with cost per MWh.

dollar cost is not as important as the time it takes to get to first watt, since the only reasonable alternative to fission base load generators is fusion... if you can build these in 12 months instead of 12 years, you'll find yourself unable to meet demand.

Everyone keeps talking about fusion, am I out of the loop or something? It’s not a proven tech, why is it being brought up?

It's a meme technology. It's well-known for its well-known-ness.

Look, the end goal is "too cheap to meter", whether it is public transit or electricity generation. And that is not profitable.

The goal is to make something smaller enough that one can make it enough times to make the production process more efficient. Then they export them to every fucking country and make money one off. And then no more global warming world peace or whatever.

Considering nuclear is by far the most expensive source of energy that seems like dream based on unicorns and fuzzy warm feelings. In reality, nuclear is as dead as coal due to the steam based thermodynamic cycle.

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

Your link show the opposite of what you claim. According to the main graph. Nuclear generation is not more expensive than other sources.

Also the costs at the output of the generator is one thing, but what counts is actually the cost of the useful power used. And renewables puts a lot of extra cost on the grid.

You mean this graph?

https://www.lazard.com/media/451885/grphx_lcoe-07.png

The right side has one magical word in the title: "marginal".

New built renewables have a lower cost than your paid off traditional plants. In other words, to get a more efficient capital allocation you would close your existing nuclear plant and build new renewables. That is where we are today.

In the same fashion nuclear puts a lot of cost on the grid since you need to plan for the largest producer cutting out at any time. That can be phased out with renewables.

Battery storage is also starting catch on due to lowered costs. For 2022 10 GW is planned to be added to the US grid.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=51518

My problem with this is that the costs of doing storage for 100% are a lot more hypothetical than the costs of doing 100% Nuclear. If something addresses that problem head on, fine. But most stuff seems to just do optomistic extrapolations from today's current storage experiments.

Why hypothetical? The famously least regulated grid of all is heading straight into battery based storage without a subsidy in sight. Nothing hypothetical about it.

> "Battery storage. In the next two years, power plant developers and operators expect to add 10 GW of battery storage capacity; more than 60% of this capacity will be paired with solar facilities. In 2021, 3.1 GW of battery storage capacity was added in the United States, a 200% increase. Declining costs for battery storage applications, along with favorable economics when deployed with renewable energy (predominantly wind and solar PV), have driven the expansion of battery storage."

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=51518

Why all GW and no GWh? Units suspicious.

It's amusing that a silicon-valley web site has such rampant conservatism about extrapolating cost declines in highly modular technologies manufactured by the millions.

Well I am quite bullish on small reactors bringing the cost of nuclear down.

Assume we get good at both. Surely society with the energy output of nuclear is going to be much richer than one that is clearing its farms and forests for solar? (Wind is at least better on that front I suppose.)

One one hand, there is unit costs, on the other hand, there is the efficiency of big infra. Trains are better than cars, for example, no matter how efficient the production of cars gets. I don't actually want small nuclear reactors, I just want small reactors to iron out the production process, overcome the regulatory hurdles, and generally dispell the FUD.

Once that is gone, we should just crank out bigger and bigger prefab PPs, until no more global warming or fusion or whatever.

Why are you bullish about cost decline in nuclear? We've heard that song and dance before. Nuclear, unlike renewables, doesn't have a sustained and demonstrated tendency to get cheaper. If anything, the opposite has happened.

I think the problems with nuclear are fairly artificial:

- Very hard regulations

- Each nuclear power plant was so good, that there wasn't enough economic pressure to stop special-snowflaking them, simply because they were built only one at a time.

It's a lot like NASA rockets getting more and more expensive, because no one wants to crank out single-use rockets. Reusable rockets is the analog to smaller nuclear reactors, which allows one to refine the production process through repetition without loosing tons of money.

To be fair, I do expect storage and solar panels to get cheaper and cheaper too. But the energy density challenges for storage are still really hard! With "electrify everything", we will need a hell of a lot of electricity. Solar and storage feels like energy austerity regardless of the price because the shear physical challenges of what's needed.

And then there are the grid coordination issues. America seems too decrepit to run such a fancy grid, I do not trust it to pull that off at scale without a huge culture shift. Decentralization here is more problems, not fewer.

Simply put, I am bullish on everything getting cheaper but am bearish on solar and storage getting better. Nuclear is already good enough! Just need to get rid of the price bullshitary.

Sure, there are other options. But they each have their downsides:

* Natural gas supplemented by renewables like solar and wind is cheaper, but it's still emitting carbon (plus fostering dependency on natural gas exporters like Russia).

* Hydroelectricity and geothermal are excellent carbon-free and controllable energy sources. But they are geographically dependent. If you don't have a river flowing through a dam-able valley, or access to a seismic fault line you're not going to be building any of these.

* Renewables plus storage can hypothetically delivery cheaper power. But storage at anywhere near the required capacities remain hypothetical. The few solutions that do seem to deliver good storage costs are geographically limited, like hydroelectric reservoirs.

Nuclear remains the only non-intermittent, geographically independent source of carbon-free energy.

Hydro isn't carbon free. It takes a lot of cement to build a hydro dam. Even earth damns need to have their central and powerhouse structures made of cement.

Hydro emits less carbon per unit of electricity than solar [1]. And drastically less than the renewables + natural gas mix that's used in practice to accommodate renewables' intermittency.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...

Although it can be highly disruptive to the local environment. So can most power generation plants, but usually indirectly.

In a 100% renewable economy, where is the carbon emission coming from in PV? PV doesn't make carbon atoms out of nothing. Also, that chart is ROOFTOP solar. Rooftop solar is not what would be used to power a renewable-powered society; it's more of a con to game current utility rate structures.

Hydro will always have a problem with methane emissions.

The reason storage for renewables is still hypothetical has to do with the fact that the storage has not really been required yet because people are still willing to burn stuff.

Also, when you offer nuclear as an option, you need to remember that nuclear can't do the job without storage either - unless you're willing to pay out of your nose for something that sits idle most of the time.

Also, in your incomplete list, you're missing biomass, biogas, thermal-electric storage, thermal storage (in the UK, a lot of the energy required could be stored and used as heat) and grid interconnections.

Thermal and thermal-electric are still not widely deployed. But biomass and biogas are.

> Also, when you offer nuclear as an option, you need to remember that nuclear can't do the job without storage either - unless you're willing to pay out of your nose for something that sits idle most of the time.

The disparity between peak electricity consumption and minimum electricity consumption is not so great as most people make it out to be [1], and base load still accounts for the majority of electricity demand.

Furthermore, nuclear plants can module their electrical output by more aggressively cooling the reactor. Your claim that nuclear requires storage is demonstrably false: France operates a grid over 70% nuclear (over 80% at its peak) without energy storage.

> biomass, biogas, thermal-electric storage, thermal storage

What do you mean by biomass and biogas? Burning wood and capturing methane from landfills has been done, but not on a relevant scale.

Thermal and thermal electric storage remain in the prototyping stage. If they prove to be cheap and scalable then great. But that's still in the world of hypotheticals, it may or may not pan out.

1. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915

Are the various "small" nuclear reactor projects seen as a way to tide over the gap until fusion (which has a similar number of startups and organisations working on it) takes over? Or a bet that fusion won't be feasible in the end? Or are they seen as filling different gaps and co-existing longer term?

I think small reactors are proven to be feasible now, and can be producing energy in short term.

Fusion is a longer-term bet – it's probably coming, but there's no certainty on the timeline.

Even if fusion is feasible, it will not solve the problems people keep hoping it will.

1. Proliferation. A thorium reactor already has no proliferation risks

2. Costs. LOL. At least 2000 years to recoup the R&D, and then OpEx still exists

3. Fuel availability. Thorium. Reactor.

4. Waste. Where do you think all those neutrons will go? The container. which will slowly become radioactive as you transmute it thus... IT will also become brittle and need replacement. It is ... nuclear waste. Radioactive and in need of storage. Also: a thorium reactor can use existing nuclear waste to for a while it'll REDUCE amount of waste we have to deal with

The one and only thing fusion does have going for it: at least IN THEORY it might be possible to do on a space ship by collecting interstellar gas. Not much heavy isotopes there but plenty oh H and some He

Thorium reactors still have proliferation risks. See this explanation written by physicist and HN commenter acidburnNSA:

https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html#myth3

There's already a reactor that can do this (CANDU reactor), and has been operational for decades, no research required. That there is little new investment in building them tells me that no one really cares about reducing the amount of nuclear waste, and that it's all very political.

Yep. Ontario's power reactors can (and have!) run on plain uranium, partially depleted uranium "waste" from American power reactors, and my favourite: a mix of depleted uranium and ex-Soviet warhead plutonium [1]. A thorium breeding cycle is also possible, in theory with CANDU and it's actually being done with India's heavy water pressurized reactors using thorium, which are an indirect derivative.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/russian-plutonium-one-step-cl...

Fusion isn't proven yet, so government can't really plan for it. Even if it does arrive, nobody knows when that might be. It could easily be in 100 years for all we know. Small nuclear reactors are seen as a way to get the benefits of fission at lower cost.

There's not really that level of central planning going on here (and IMO that's a good thing).

Neither? Fusion is not feasible right now, and we need power now. It doesn’t really matter whether fusion eventually becomes viable. Fission is fine for the long term; fusion would also be fine, if it eventually worked.

Metaculus indicates that the first fusion plant may not be online until the 2040s[1]. We shouldn't be not building lower carbon energy infrastructure now with the idea that fusion will save us.

[1] https://www.metaculus.com/questions/363/will-a-fusion-based-...

I think all of these projects are coming together primarily to replace the existing nuclear plants. As the older plants reach the end of their operational life, there's still a desire for fission power; building a new plant with the old designs doesn't work for a lot of reasons, so hopefully new designs that take into account 40-60 years of operational, construction, and regulatory experience will make it possible to fill the void. I'm sure all the teams are also hoping to broaden the market for fission power too; if they can show the ability to build reactors in reasonable timelines and with reasonable budgets and operability, it could happen. If not, these are likely to be the last generation of fission plants (aside from naval applications)

It's always been a problem that the current way we do reactors involves lots of one-off designs, with gigantic powerplants that require too much red tape to get finished in a reasonable time frame.

Now instead of that have a small modular core that is certified to high heaven and can be mass produced. It would cut down maintenance, deployment, construction, everything. I truly think this is a fantastic way towards a net zero future.

None of the above. Smaller nuclear reactor projects are an effort to reduce the capital requirements to get started. There are inherent economies of scale in the physics which promote building larger reactors. Military propulsion reactors are < 1/10 the size of commercial power reactors today, and they are safe enough that we operate them with enlistees. But they are far too expensive for commercial operation.

A Swedish professor Janne Wallenius recently got a government grant of 100 msek for building the same thing. But his smr is lead-cooled and supposedly much safer than a pwr reactor which can overheat. The advantages are supposedly the same as with Rolls-Royce's reactor; low construction-costs due to standardized design. In a recent interview he stated that his design could be ready for mass-production in the mid 2030's.

Too late.

Let's multiply the geographic spread of nuclear waste, multiply and spread thinly the amount of security needed to protect these sites, and fall into a government story after the disaster of Brexit.

A tip for international readers, the UK is currently captured by the worst government in a generation and it is inherently untrustworthy.

Spraying $546m at a "profile-lifting" project is nothing to a government that will waste billions at the behest of Tory donors without a second thought.

I'll classify this under "R&D puff piece that will likely amount to nothing, or a loss", like nearly everything else the current UK government has done.

Well the worst-case is that it "succeeds" in which case we dump a lot of money that could be better spent on seriously addressing climate change. Instead we construct new security hazards to rear their heads during whatever societal disintegration we face as climate change, the rising tide of fascism, economic mismanagement, and the lawless global system of competing blood-thirsty imperial blocs, converge down to a point.

I worry that if humanity survives all this, a thousand years from now, as new civilisations form out of the ashes, what problems they're still going to be left with.

THE FORGOTTEN HISTORY OF SMALL NUCLEAR REACTORS

> The dream of small nuclear reactors did not die with the 1960s. In the 1980s, the nuclear industry was reeling from high cost and schedule overruns in reactor construction that had begun in the previous decade. And so, proponents of nuclear power circled back to the idea of going small.

> A 1983 paper in the journal by analyst Joe Egan offered his vision of small, prefabricated reactors. “A novel, factory-based approach to manufacturing reactors under 400-MWe size may alleviate many of the pragmatic constraints on nuclear business,” he wrote, suggesting that “prefabrication and standardization of major plant components could lower dollar-per-kilowatt capital costs to levels now boasted by 1,000-MW models.” Such factory assembly could further reduce costs, he wrote, by reducing regulation, shortening construction times, and avoiding quality issues with components.

> “The reactors, once assembled on barges (or even railroad cars, in one case), would be floated across oceans, up rivers, or be carted cross-country to operating sites,” Egan added. “There, purchasers would anchor the plants and simply ‘turn the key’ for 200–400 MWe of instant power.”

> This vision never materialized. No turnkey reactors were carted cross-country or floated up rivers. Then, as earlier, they were deemed too expensive. Sadly, the nuclear industry continues to practice selective remembrance and to push ideas that haven’t worked. Once again, we see history repeating itself in today’s claims for small reactors—that the demand will be large, that they will be cheap and quick to construct.

> But nothing in the history of small nuclear reactors suggests that they would be more economical than full-size ones. In fact, the record is pretty clear: Without exception, small reactors cost too much for the little electricity they produced, the result of both their low output and their poor performance. In the end, as an analyst for General Electric pronounced in 1966, “Nuclear power is a big-plant business: it is most competitive in the large plant sizes.” And if large nuclear reactors are not competitive, it is unlikely that small reactors will do any better. Worse, attempts to make them cheaper might end up exacerbating nuclear power’s other problems: production of long-lived radioactive waste, linkage with nuclear weapons, and the occasional catastrophic accident

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc...

I wonder if this is simply a bid to keep a nuclear industry in Britain for the naval reactors and as a planting ground for people going into nuclear weapons research?

The GDA process for for the Chinese-developed reactor planned for the UK [1] took four and a half years [2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradwell_B_nuclear_power_stati...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One

I'm a big fan of this project. Once they actually get going it will be possible to get costs down, as has happened with actual EV and battery production, rather than R&D theory and experiments.

Until it all becomes reality the costings will initially be high and then practical knowledge and economies of scale will bring them down fast.

Obligatory...not the car brand

This is the aerospace/power/transportation rolls royce: https://www.rolls-royce.com/

This is the car brand: https://www.rolls-roycemotorcars.com/en_US/home.html

The car brand is a BMW subsidiary.

More pertinently, it's the brand that produces the nuclear power plants on Britain's submarine fleet:

https://www.rolls-royce.com/products-and-services/defence/su...

RR is the British equivalent of GE.

Or Mitsubishi.

What can possibly go wrong? The conflict in Ukraine just reminded me how really unsafe urban areas can be for nuclear energy. If Ukraine isn't a safe place to build nuclear reactors without somebody trying to blow them up (or doing so accidentally), then no part of Africa and large parts of South America and Asia are neither. And there goes much of the idea of replacing fossil fuels with nuclear energy...

anyone know what is the difference between what Rolls Royce is building and Terrapower ?

It seemed there's widespread criticism of Terrapower's modular nuclear reactor

https://www.dw.com/en/scientists-pour-cold-water-on-bill-gat...

Sodium-cooled reactors do not have much of a track record, and what there is fairly negative.

https://harpers.org/archive/2022/01/spent-fuel-the-risky-res...

$500 M feels like the sweet spot for me actually. It's enough you can actually do something useful, unlike say "fusion never", but it's no so much as to be unauditable. If RR can't produce some goods with that amount (and, institutionally, they have the technical competence), you can ask why.

Who else saw the title and thought that the cars were going to have nuclear reactors for their fuel?

I was thinking about that as well….

Ok so it's not a car, but it does remind me of the ones in "Fallout" and the real life concept car: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon

It will be safe, quick, clean, cheap and efficient. They just need 500bn to build the first part of the first one, 50 years to plan it, a huge liability cover and unlimited cleanup support.

It's unclear to me, exactly how they intend to use these.

Hopefully something good likes this comes out of this war. Wars historically has removed lots of institutional inertia due to humans survival instincts.

Well, seeing fires at the biggest nuclear power plant in Europe, as a European, didn't actually make me think "God I wish we had more of these things everywhere!"

Which models of Rolls-Royce will this be available in? I'd love to be the first on my block with a nuclear-powered Phantom or Dawn!

Sadly, the Ford Nucleon never made it to market.

Imagine the millions of car accidents each year, but every single one has a risk of radioactive meltdown.

So can we assemble one of these on the moon already?

Am I the only one who thought about Mr. Fusion?

Nah it's the other one that needed fuel from Libyans.

https://archive.ph/O5EFA

Thank you Putin for helping us to move away from fossil fuels.

Nuclear power can be considered a fossil fuel, as it relies on non-renewable metals for fusion.

The term "fossil fuel" is not (and never has been) a synonym for "non-renewable".

Nuclear power is non-renewable, but it is not a fossil fuel.

1. A fossil fuel is a hydrocarbon-containing material. The fuel used for nuclear doesn't fit that description.

2. We're talking about fission, not fusion

3. We have enough of these non-renewable metals for a very long time.

Solar power is also non-renewable since the sun will run out in 5 billion years.

Imagine the horrors when the Russians sets these reactors on fire :-O

*why the downvotes? Security is a fatal flaw with nuclear energy.

I know, you're just joking about current events, but still...

It would be nice if we could mention nuclear power projects without instantly brandishing fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

after all, some studies attribute deaths from fossil fuel as high as 1 in 5 premature deaths!

[1] https://www.nrdc.org/stories/fossil-fuel-air-pollution-kills...

I'd be curious to why this isn't an issue as well? I'd be really interested in a cogent description of how this isn't a concern.

Taking out a small reactor from the air or some sort of inside job would be an obvious first target. The excuse would likely be similar to the one used in the current conflict that happened last week - "We just need to take it out to take critical 'infrastructure' offline." I think what makes it less worrisome is that the current aggressor has a lot to lose economically and also wants to occupy the area long term - so they were mostly operating in a safe manner. But if you had a group that had less to lose and had no intent on long term occupation - they could just go the destruction route.

I could also see how it could easily lead to one upsmanship to real nuclear weaponry as it plays out in click heavy media news reporting - "Well they started us down the path by blowing up the nuclear reactor - so we'll need to counter that with some nuclear weapons..."

So the real concern is about escalation in the event of conflict where decisions are made under duress and the public/politicians are not familiar with the details of nuclear energy safety and thus can easily be swayed.

at the point the russians are attacking UK nuclear reactors we're already in a hot nuclear war

The issue that would concern me is more that once these technologies are developed by private companies, the companies will want to recoup the R&D costs by selling the technology oversees.

At that point, the "small reactor" industry will become entrenched enough to have a lobbying arm - who will make sure the license to export include all short term prospects - including ones in less than savory geopolitical issues.

So, I listened to a conversation between a nuclear engineer and a few other engineers and some soldiers the other night on twitter spaces.

The thing the nuclear engineer kept hammering home is that the biggest risk realistically is damage to the equipment, as in it would suck to lose the reactor but no one's going to get hurt if no one's on site.

The type of shelling that was going on, just fundamentally wasn't the kind to cause a serious event.

Worst case scenario, if Russia is actively trying to cause an incident, is they drop a large bomb on it.

This would still be nothing at all like Chernobyl.

Because of the fundamental differences in design, this would be an event on the scale of Three Mile Island.

They didn't even stop using the other reactor at Three Mile Island.

Honestly the biggest thing, even, is that if the Ukranians were to shut down the reactors, the potential for this immediately drops.

Dropping the control rods immediately 'poisons' the material. It takes weeks to get the reactor back to full power.

They didn't stop using the other three reactors at Chernobyl either, at least not right away. They are all in decommissioning now.

I think you could have phrased it more constructively, but your question is valid - does it make sense to build nuclear given we may be entering a period of prolonged warfare?

Most fossil fuel facilities are equally vulnerable to destruction, and a blown up coal or natural gas facility would probably pollute to a similar degree.

Modern nuclear facilities are also designed not to pollute in the event of destruction.

Finally, the pollution from the normal operation of a fossil fuel facility would probably kill similar numbers to the pollution of a destroyed nuclear facility.

Finally I would say that war demands a lot of energy - we should be focusing on expedience at the moment.

and a blown up coal or natural gas facility would probably pollute to a similar degree.

Not even close. Radioactive decay can continue for centuries and is difficult to contain. Burnt fossil fuels are burnt and that's it. No need to build a containment or maintain an exclusion zone.

Did you know that coal ashes is also a bit radioactive? Contrary to the fuel of a nuclear power plant which is very radioactive but well contained, these ashes are just spread in the atmosphere during normal operation.

We, at least I, were not thinking about normal operation. This is about events like the shelling of the largest nuclear plant in Europe. There are others which the Kremlin will attempt to take with force as well. I was unable to purchase iodine tablets as they were out of stock already.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60613438

at the point they're shelling the UK: we're way past a reactor exploding being the #1 problem

I just tried to buy iodine tablets in Prague and they were already sold out, with an unknown restock date. [0]

Nuclear power is a very complex issue. However, from a security point of view, putting dirty bomb ingredients around your country is not a genius move in a less than peaceful world.

[0] Pharmacist told me that my best bet at this point was a supplement product made from seaweed. She stressed it was not medical grade. That might be in stock later in the week.

note: but also, we are advised here on HN to not talk about getting downvoted. You get extra downvotes for that.

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