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Comment by loudthing | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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> 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

> 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.

> 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 :)

"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...

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)

> 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.

> 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?

> $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.

> 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.

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.

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...

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.

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