Developers of small modular reactors hope their time has come

I think the real problem there is carbon capture is very new and often still on the drawing board. But definitely one way to get carbon capture working is to start with whatever we’ve got.

It's not a huge engineering problem. But it is a huge problem, lower the rates when you have excess power and we will have more uses for the energy. But if the rates are low the revenue is low.

(This would not be so significant a problem if the capital costs weren't so high)

I've seen non-photovoltaic solar collectors that heat molten salt and then store it for off-peak use. I wonder if they could be hybridized with small modular MSRs.

>Molten salt reactors in particular are supposed to be able to adjust to demand within a minute or so.

Nobody is making these commercially and the SMR companies out there are making standard pressurized water reactors afaik.

The other capital and operational costs stay the same even if you just discard the production you don't need, so just focusing on fuel costs is not very helpful to determine if it's economical to do that.

Sounds like a case for Bitcoin ASICs if I've ever heard one . . .

> Nuclear fuel is cheap enough that it could be economical to simply [0] discard the unneeded production.

Just run wind turbines backwards, easy!

This is the actual plan for renewables, because they are just cheap period (though their fuel is pretty darn cheap too). Demand response, simply dumping the excess, storing excess as heat etc.

It's not a good idea for nuclear, because even nuclear that runs all the time can't compete on cost with renewables and any deviation from that schedule destroys the economics conpletely.

A small amount that runs all the time is probably a good idea in places far from the equator, but even then the plummeting costs of renewables opens a few other doors, like shipping green hydrogen around.

Can machines for extracting CO2 from the atmosphere have how hard they are running be ramped up and down quickly? Or do they just have a rate they work at, where changing how much one is doing would require changing how much machine there is / which ones are active ?

If they load follow, their cost per joule produced becomes even worse than it already is.

Anyway there will be no need to load follow, because load producing H2 and NH3, and pumping hydro and compressed air, can follow price, instead.

Only in a very limited way. As we move forward, we are quickly reaching the point where for more and more time, renewables can carry the whole grid load alone. Nuclear power plants would have to be switched off in those times. And while they can follow the load over a large part of their power output, they can't be swithed off and on again. So as the transition to renewables progresses, nuclear power plants are less and less a good counterpart. Gas plants however are. They are very quick and switching them off is possible and saves precious fuel. As the transition progresses, they should use less and less fuel as they are used more rareley and the fuel could be switched to renewable sources (bio, power2gas). The pre-war plans of the current German government included extending the gas infrastructure but with a clear ability for new installations to be also able to use H2 as it becomes available.

I assume for the same reasons that oil is not.

Because it produces a kind of pollution that has to be stored permanently. The non-renewable resource is safe places to store the waste for thousands of years.

More importantly it differs from other renewables in its lead-up time. Nuclear plants can take decades to build. There is hope that small modular reactors can fix that problem, but it's not proven yet. And there is the risk of conflict with renewables which are ready right now: "Don't build solar/wind/etc but instead wait indefinitely for this other technology which may not work."

I would welcome successful deployments of SMRs. But I don't expect them soon, and today there remains a lot of opportunities to deploy wind and solar at costs that continue to improve in economies of scale. If SMRs join them as a supplement to reduce greenhouse gases, so much the better, but for the foreseeable future they are not a sole solution.

It uses fuel that exists in a limited amount. We call "renewable" things that plug into natural flows of energy, and not things that require artificial flows.

Because our policies are being construed by environmentalists with a Communist or leftist agenda instead of scientists and pragmatic leaders.

Renewables are much less cost-effective if you take into account the energy storage needed to make them work. And even then they're ineffective because you essentially need 100% backup capacity for an indefinite period of time for when the wind doesn't blow or the sun is obscured by clouds. Current energy storage systems can only provide enough power for two days at the most.

We're being led like Lemmings into the ravine by these environmentalists. It's time we scientists and engineers took charge.

Uranium mines are a finite resource

I didn't say that HN threads were mostly negative about renewables. But the people who comment about nuclear in them are by and large attempting to launder anti-renewable views, and not doing a very good job of it.

I mean it's really not hard to say something positive about nuclear without attacking renewables, or environmentalists or various other basically unrelated issues. But you wouldn't think so from most HN discussions. Feel free to survey the comments here as an example.

Subsidizing nuclear is entirely theoretical for me, unless I’m subsidizing it in other States which I wouldn’t be happy to do if it won’t benefit me directly (not indirectly: directly).

California presently has a flat prohibition on new nuclear construction. I would rather keep my dollars for my own utility bill, unless Nevada would like to play host to a nuclear plant built to serve the Bay Area.

Living and human civilization are high energy activities, and becoming higher energy over time. Just the number of electronics I employ in my day-to-day life has made electricity alone more central to my life than it maybe was 20 years ago even.

So plants and energy transmission lines and such are going to be built, especially as more battery-electric vehicles become available in more model lines and at more varied price points for people to buy. If I had a personal preference, I would prefer that electricity to be coming from nuclear and solar plants, but I’m not willing to condemn the poor to raise prices and make those the only options. What gets built will be what makes sense according to the knowledge and expertise of people who build plants, i.e. what is economical in the context of the market which is just trillions of accumulative transactions happening across society made by people; and we’ll make decisions about where to import/export energy from in geopolitical and military contexts where those decisions rightfully belong which can and does inform markets.

The harder we make it to build nuclear though, the less likely nuclear will be chosen. In California for example there is a flat prohibition on new construction, so we’re going to keep building gas-fired plants alongside whatever renewables because that is what we have chosen to do, until we make a different choice.

I think "estimated" is a recent addition they show, when the input data sources fail. Which unfortunately they do quite often. But then, I am not paying for the service, so who am I to complain? :)

When values are non-estimated, they are about 2 hours behind in the free version.

Could also be called "fraudulent" data

It seems the technical problems are resolved and currently the data is no longer "estimated". 3% of the consumption comes from wind, and 17% from solar, which isn't to bad. While the UK certainly isn't the optimal place for solar power, it shows that it can deliver a large contribution. Especially as there is still so much roof area to use that it should be a no-brainer.

CSP plants have never gotten beyond the prototype phase because no one has figured out how to make them economically viable. One near me in California just shut down because maintenance costs were skyrocketing.

Batteries, in their current form, have all sorts of issues that haven't made them economically viable either. Liquid electrolytes (liquid batteries) do show promise for grid level storage, and I am pleased to see lots of activity around them but we are still probably 5-10 years away from anything worth scaling up around.

Hot water is fine for extreme micro uses - individual buildings - but again not even remotely viable for something at scale, let alone replacing base load generation for the grid.

Base load is the real nut to crack - and so far solar is no where near being anything but a nice supplement for base load.

The only good battery technology we have today - LiIon - relies on metal of which there just isn't enough on Earth for anywhere close to the required capacity.

Indeed, costs for storage are falling even faster now than solar or wind ever did. Solar thermal, already cheaper than nukes, is far from the best.

Yet we do manage to wire the internet accross oceans and continents.

"(b) is that actually technically feasible"

It is, see the Desertec initiative.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec

It would be just a huge investment, which is why it did not get very far, so far.

Also there is indeed the political factor. North africa is not so stable, but of course willing for investment.

But even with solar in southern europe alone, you would get quite far, combined with wind and hydro. And if you have excess in summer, you could store that in various ways for the winter.

In other words, I believe we do need huge investments into the grid now, connecting europes south and north. And then companys can build more of all kinds of solar and wind farms.

It's easy to count somebody who fell off a roof. Statistical deaths from cancers are much easier to sweep under the carpet and most pro nuclear propaganda death counts I've seen do precisely that.

Are you saying more people have died from falling while installing/servicing solar than have died due to Chernobyl and Fukushima?

Can you cite sources for your claims?

I am personally doubtful of your comments around deaths being more frequent. Statistics around the specific cause of death would also be appreciated.

>Actual deaths from solar power are higher than actual deaths from nuclear energy, per GW delivered. Solar death is mostly from falling from high places, but so what? Death is death.

This is not a serious argument. Large scale solar farms are hardly more than 6 feet off the ground and would essentially eliminate this risk. I expect the number of deaths and decrease in quality of life attributable to fossil fuels is far far higher to speak nothing of Climate risks in general.

It reminds me of non-developers with ideas for apps/software.

As if the idea of getting all our energy from the Sun is an original thought.

How do we accomplish this?

"I don't know, I am just the idea man. You do all the engineering for my idea and we will split the profit 50/50!"

You're right: ~170PW is the correct number.

https://news.mit.edu/2011/energy-scale-part3-1026

I’m not an expert in this field at all, but from the bit of research I did to try to verify these numbers, the estimates presented here about solar longevity and long-distance transmission seem unrealistically pessimistic.

Losses for 800kV HVDC systems are typically documented at ~3.5%/1000km or ~5%/2000km[0], and state-of-the-art 1.1MV systems have losses of ~1.5%/1000km[1][2]. Lower voltage systems have higher losses but I’m not sure why a lower-voltage system or AC system would be used in a project like this.

I can’t find any information about increased losses in submarine cables at all; where is that information from, and what is the mechanism that causes that added loss?

For solar panels, as far as I can tell, capacity loss occurs at a rate of ~0.3-1% per year depending upon the type of panel, with a median of 0.5%[3]. More modern panels have lower losses than older panels, presumably due to manufacturing improvements. So, after 10 years, you’re talking about something that will produce—on average—5% less power than it did when it was brand new. That’s not something that is broken and needs to be replaced the way you seem to be suggesting.

[0] https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29232512

[2] http://en.people.cn/n3/2018/0622/c90000-9474097.html

[3] https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/51664.pdf

Northern Europe tends to have a few weeks in the winter where both wind and solar are problematic for a few weeks on end. Southern Europe is fine around that time and off shore wind is fine too.

That's why interconnecting grids is so important. We can have Norwegian hydro and Moroccan solar picking up the slack. Plugin all those nice new EVs with vehicle to grid capability built in (Ford, Kia, and a few other manufacturers produce these already) and we're talking a few GWH of standby battery capacity ready to balance the grids as well.

That 5% base load is what we need to secure long term. But given that we essentially have that right now, there's no urgency for that. Maybe it's 10%.

Before anyone asks, I'm basing my numbers on what Michael Liebreich cited in his podcast a while back. Interesting person. He's a british conservative with a technical and economic background. Not your usually hippy environmentalist. Founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance; generally seems to be extremely solid on his numbers. The economics in this area are quite fascinating. If you have better numbers and sources, please share. Base load without numbers is just people waffling.

> Every winter I see the same post about how little energy solar panels are producing today and why this means we need more nuclear plants.

The low-wind periods last December had a peak of 1.2 GW solar.

Combined wind and solar right now are producing only very slightly more than a tech that has had zero real investment in thirty years. I wouldn't brag about that.

Conversion has losses, true. For electricity to gas and back the losses are around 50%. That's perfectly fine for a technology you need for maybe a couple of weeks per year. The real question is how expensive the equipment is. Power is essentially free for renewables, all costs are depreciation of equipment.

And as I said above, people _have_ implemented it already. There are dozens of MW of hydrolyzers installed in Germany alone.

Well, true. But since reactors run nowhere nears engineering limits, they need "build, explode, iterate" R&D about as much as they need testing at 5g, or in vacuum. (Yes, I know that destructive testing of many reactor components & sub-systems is quite reasonable.)

Westinghouse are big into the concept and have been for a few decades - obviously anti-nuclear sentiment tends to hold it back, though the economics are tricky.

Minimal. You're talking about highly trained, licensed nuclear power engineers.

That's a community in the US that can safely be estimated as 70% prior US Navy nuclear reactor techs and officers.

Considering how many thousands of minimally-protected water treatment plants there are, and how much publicity a serious sabotage job would get, and how extremely few reports there are of sabotage actually happening...

Zero: small scale reactor designs like pebble bed reactors are designed as "set and forget" - they're intrinsically safe, and only need to be accessed when they need refueling.

A model of deployment was that if you were setting up a town, you'd basically go dig a pit and lower one of these into it, pave over the top (or I suppose actually install some very heavy doors) and then build the town radially outwards from the reactor. The unit itself would be hermetically sealed - no employees, no systems to maintain. If it malfunctions or fails, then the idea is you drive out, pickup the container and drop a new one in.

I'm not saying anything good about Russian invasion or their (lack of) careful approach, merely that no nuclear disaster struck so far, despite a hot and indiscriminate war in place, including literally around nuclear plants.

Containment buildings do. Small reactors - even a cluster - wouldn't be worth slamming an airplane into; not going to damage them.

More baseless fear of the invisible nuclear boogyman.

The tons and tons of concrete that shield the reactor core would, though. You would be better off slamming a plane into a dam - much easier to crack, much less chance of containing the disaster it if you do manage to crack it.

As seen previously: there are more attractive targets, like skyscrapers.

I have seen a some of analysis that suggested that as long as you are working with PWR you are not gone do a huge amount better economically.

It might be a little better, but we have to break free of water cooled reactor. It makes simply no sense as a design point. The only reason we have it is because it made sense for nuclear submarines.

So it's pretty much like Uranium then. It's not rare, but we outsource its mining to autocratic regimes, because they're willing to produce it cheaply (while destroying their environment).

Also, the term rare-earth metal is really unfortunate. About half of them have no practical industrial use. The other half is neither rare, nor particularly expensive

The three most important rare earth elements are lanthanum, neodymium and praseodymium. The first two are about as "rare" as copper or nickel. Praseodymium is less abundant, about the rate of lithium or lead. Neodymium costs around $50 per kilo. About 3 kilos is necessary in an electric car. One container full of neodymium ingots is enough for 30,000 electric cars. It's not a geopolitical ace up the sleeve it's made out to be

If Australia were to refine the uranium for export you wouldn't need anything special in the ways of shipping other than good containment and careful handling. If you replaced all power generation with nuclear that alone would drastically reduce the amount of shipping necessary for oil, gas and coal to a point where you would hardly need to be concerned about it. There's even a relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1162/

> We need solutions now, and we already have them in mass production: solar panels, wind power generation and battery storage.

This is the one thing I like about Tesla and SpaceX: they solve problems with today's tech.

When I imagined reusable spacecraft, I was dreaming about anti-gravity drives, which just furthered my believe of it being impossible. SpaceX did it on a kerosene rocket, same physics that the Saturn V used decades ago.

We don't need to wait for some Sci-Fi physics to solve this issue. We can go really far with we already have today.

> we already have them in mass production: solar panels, wind power generation and battery storage.

I always hear that abstract argument but do we have the math right on this?

What would it take to provide enough power in the US with only those solutions (+ hydro and other non nuclear non fossil fuel solutions)?

Do we have an idea of the amount of material and pollution that would be generated by building (and then recycling) all those panels and batteries?

I would like to live in a world where we don't need nuclear but I am not convinced we can realistically do without (assuming the same standard of living).

This isnt really true. And even if it were, the main reason is limited financing.

Look at Canada, their program is advancing reactors. They are targeting before 2030.

if governemnt actually cared and invested the way they did in renwables these reactors would exist already.

The tech was proven in the 60/70, its just investment that is needed. But reactor companies have a really hard time with that.

But wasn't it "best researched" because of the potential for military use, and all the military R&D money?

China is charging ahead with Thorium - maybe after they embarrass the rest of the world people will get more rational and less emotional about nuclear?

Not holding my breath....

I believe we're getting to the point where, if we regress below the level of viable industry capable of running any of our high-tech energy sources (whether it's oil, coal, nuclear or any of the renewables), then we aren't getting it back ever - nor will any future civilisation, because without huge geological shifts all the sources will be beyond reach of primitive tech...

I used to think that 15,000 years from now Scientologists would be fighting with Mormons to break into Yucca Mountain and extract plutonium for nuclear weapons.

(The undesirable for weapons Pu240 isotope has a half life of about 6,000 years in contrast to the 24,000 year half life of the desirable Pu239 isotope.)

Now I don’t think the Scientologists will be around that long.

What we label as spend fuel (or even more maddening, waste!) is still viable fuel we should be burning in newer, better designs. NOT burying it in the desert.

The problem with spent fuel isn't the need to bury it. The problem is politics and myopia (on rampant display in this thread!) are winning the day instead of logic and reason.

It's coming close though, Onkalo in Finland is still on track for 2023/2024

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

https://www.science.org/content/article/finland-built-tomb-s...

That we are still arguing about burying viable fuel, instead of burning it in more modern and safer designs is what really boggles my mind.

"Here's a nice loaf of bread. Let's bury it in a mountain!"

Utter madness.

>I think it is a matter of scale

Or in other words, economic viability :)

You understand that given current geopolitics that a Russian Nuke company is a complete non option for most of the world right?

Ultimately Manhattan Project "prove" the usability of Uranium->Plutonium path and simultaneously made inroads for power generation using Uranium (or Uranium-Thorium mixes). So why experiment with untested version if the tested one is more versatile?

Im not an expert here, but from what I have read - every one of those programs are not getting funding because of a larger disinterest in nuclear power per se.

Im fact US, China, Russia, etc have all a thorium reactor in some stage of late stage development.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor

I was talking more from the perspective of how easy the tech was to get working and what were the outputs. Thorium actually fell out of favour by 1960s because it was seen as adding more complexity for little gain. Was it good long term thinking? I think we both disagree.

However what I was responding to is more the perception that Uranium was used due to being usable for bombs, when the reality is that Pu-239 (from Uranium) cycle "won" over U-233 (from Thorium) mostly for reasons of it being easier to start the reaction. Normal Uranium reactor tends to produce too much Pu-240 which is undesirable in weapons, so special modified designs and operations had to be introduced all the way back in Manhattan Project.