ThorCon: Cheap, reliable, CO2-free electric power
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Ironically, with concentrated solar, going lower tech, even at the expense of efficiency, might decrease costs because the materials would amount to cheap mirrors/collectors and steel pipes. Saul Griffith's classic talk highlighted that there's probably no meaningful manufacturing limit to building concentrated solar with existing industrial infrastructure:
https://longnow.org/seminars/02009/jan/16/climate-change-rec...
A renewable dollar is still better spent today on generating capacity, and will be for several more years, most places. Waiting, you get more storage for your money, and you then already have overcapacity to charge it from.
Until the share of renewables approaches enough to destabilize the power grid, building out renewable generating capacity displaces more carbon from entering the atmosphere, and so is a better use of capital.
At the same time, decreasing load factor of nukes and fossil plants, as they become too expensive to win bids, will drive them offline in favor of much cheaper storage methods as fast as that comes online.
The enormous industrial and export value of synthetic hydrogen and ammonia production, after local tankage is full, make them the compelling choice for long-term storage. Initially, those will be burned in gas turbines as they edge out natural gas, both locally and abroad, but improving fuel cells will finally displace turbines.
About batteries, that's no longer true - lithium, nickel and cobalt prices have exploded in recent months. Furthermore they're impractical ( you need massive space, and then you have a giant fire hazard) and most importantly, needed elsewhere. EV adoption is already stifled by lack of sufficient supply of batteries, and heavy duty vehicles are let to be electrified. Replacing all cars, buses, trucks, etc. ( and apparently trains in the US because they can't be bothered to electrify like normal countries) with EV versions will require a lot of batteries. And of course they have a limited lifecycle, and need to be replaced. And speaking of lifecycle, a nuclear reactor has 2-3 times ( at least) the life of a solar panel or wind turbine.
About hydrogen, green hydrogen in any quantities is only theoretical at the moment.
IMHO the best way forward is to hedge bets and do everything - build nuclear power plants ( and ffs don't close existing ones that can continue to operate to replace them with gas "temporarily" like the dimwits in Belgium are doing), expand renewables, invest in different potential solutions for storage. Fuel cells will probably have a part to play in transportation too, e.g. in aviation. However getting rid of the only low-CO2 baseload power source we have is shortsighted.
Actually, Belgium has decided to keep open the two plants that are easy to continue to operate (easy is relative, they will still require a billion euro in maintenance work). They’re still closing the five that would require extensive multi-year downtime and costly renovation (like pouring new concrete) and replacing them with gas plants, but there’s not any real alternative anyway as they would have to shut down for multiple years so new gas plants are unavoidable.
An interesting fact is that a few years ago there was a constitutional court decision that prevented keeping the plants open on anything less than a five year timeline from the moment of deciding, unless there is a risk of blackouts. The only reason the plants will be able to stay open in 2025 is therefore because of Putin.
Of course there were alternatives. One would have had to anticipate this crisis a few years ago and could have built up renewables or new nuclear plants. Instead somebody made the decision to go with fossil fuels from Russia and here we are.
Just like it's a complete coincidence that the head of the government responsible for shutting down German nuclear power, Gerhard Schröder, now is the chairman of Nord Stream, Gazprom as well as having been nominated to a director position at Rosneft.
A GW-scale electric ammonia synthesis plant is under construction in Norway. Hint, you don't built a GW-scale operation on unproven tech.
We will need hundreds more of them.
Every cent diverted to building nukes from building out renewables brings climate catastrophe nearer.
This isn't even close to true. A lithium-ion battery can store roughly 1 megajoule per liter, which I'm going to use because it makes the math easier. (Other batteries are slightly less dense, but the correction factor is small). Total global energy consumption is around 1 exajoule per day. That's a trillion liters to store a day's worth of energy, or one billion cubic meters. Assuming you can stack batteries ten meters high -- which seems doable -- a battery farm to store a day's worth of energy for the whole world would take up about 100 million square meters, or 100 square kilometers, slightly smaller than San Francisco. That's less than the amount of space currently taken up by solar or wind farms.
Using zinc-bromine or other technologies will take up more space, but as you can see, a small reduction in energy density won't be that big of a deal.
Last figure I saw was 1/4 the cost of Li batteries. (I guess lithium cells have got cheaper since they made that page.)
Congratulations on suggesting the most impractical, stupidly dangerous (mmmmh battery fires), impossible to make, single point of failure. At least it won't be attacked because it only lasts a single day anyways.
Stick to philosophy and let actual engineers build a grid, thank you.
San Francisco does not occupy much of the Earth's surface, or even of the continental US. This battery farm, spread out between all the towns in the US, would not even be noticed.
It lasts for a single day. A project using up pretty much all of Earth's currently usable lithium resources, for a single day of storage. It's worthless.
You are really reaching. It wears badly.
I've seen the investment pitches. Nobody is seriously considering it for a reason, it's a terrible, terrible, idea.
Covering intermittent sources is pretty much 100% public sector's responsibility, everywhere.
And, for resources in place, whether so impractical as lithium batteries, or as practical as pumped hydro, iron-air batteries, banked hydrogen, or transmission lines reaching operating generation elsewhere, the space required is in no way prohibitive.
Which was the point.
It's ultimately inevitable.
Lazard puts the wholesale cost of solar PV plus four hours storage at $165 to $296/MWh:
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
It is generally a mistake to assume people controlling billion-dollar budgets have no idea what they are doing.
Can you point out where in the Lazard report it describes its methodology in a way that makes clear it doesn't reflect the cost of new renewable projects today? And reference a thorough study that shows lower-than-Lazard average costs for solar+storage today, not in some estimated future, and not with cherry-picked projects in ideal locations?
And if that cost includes sufficient collection and storage to get through a windless night, like nuclear can do, that would be nice too.
Storage is not already built out because it is still obviously better to spend the money building out generating capacity, and will be until its share is much larger. In particular, before storage can be useful, you need enough spare generating capacity to top up your storage while also driving customer load.
Negative prices are a very, very temporary phenomenon. Very soon, all surplus generating capacity will be absorbed producing hydrogen and ammonia for sale into an unlimited market.
The levelized cost of solar + storage according to Lazards is even less: $85-158/MWh.
Energy sources that work when they want to will never replace energy sources that work when you tell them to. Lobbying against nuclear is just lobbying for coal and gas.
Porting electricity over HVDC from half a continent away (with several metro areas in-between soaking up supply) just seems impractical when we could have small reactors distributed around in smaller, more resilient grids.
But you are not limited to porting in power from far off, you can draw down local, banked storage. If that runs low, you can bring in liquified ammonia synthesized in the tropics. All of this will be chosen according to what costs least. All of it costs less than the nukes would have set you back.
That being said, there is great potential in batteries becoming much denser and cheaper.
[Citation required]
Grid-scale battery systems have fallen more than 70% since 2015.
> nuclear would be quite competitively priced
Nuclear is one of the most expensive and keeps getting more expensive; it's not competing against natural gas. It's competing against wind and solar, the two cheapest forms of generation. Solar is dropping ~10% per year...
Then why are there checks notes 0 deployments ? Battery costs are exploding currently due to the hikes in prices of lithium, nickel and cobalt. Battery demand outstrips supply by far, and batteries are needed elsewhere.
> It's competing against wind and solar, the two cheapest forms of generation.
They're complimentary, not competition. Solar+wind alone
Grid-scale batteries are still tiny. Lithium batteries will not solve the grid problem anytime soon. Lithium (and co) will be strained to the max already.
Every other technology has barley been deployed at all. And there is already a whole litter of energy storage startups that have died.
> Nuclear is one of the most expensive and keeps getting more expensive
In order to get more expensive we would actually have to build plant.
But literally any series engineering analysis of modern GenIV plants show gigantic potential of cost improvement. And if we could actually build them in series production there is another order of magnitude of potential cost improvement.
There is little need, thus far, for storage, so little has been built. Right now, generating capacity is a better place to spend the money. Next year, the same storage will be much cheaper.
By the time any nuke started could be finished, even if it would have been competitive today, it would not when finished. So, it would be abandoned before completion. They would not return any of the money spent.
We have squirmed in the grip of petroleum and coal megacorps for decades, and will finally be free of them.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
That overlaps with Lazard's range for conventional nuclear. And there are lots of reasons to think molten salt reactors in general would be significantly cheaper. Thorcon thinks it can get their cost down to $30/MWh.
Lazard is the source that most renewables advocates point me to, to prove how uncompetitive nuclear is. If your counterargument is that future costs will be lower than today's costs, then I think it's fair to also consider the costs Thorcon and others estimate for molten salt reactors.
Personally I think deferring electric vehicle charging and feeding power back into the grid could help a lot here and make this make economic sense, but that doesn't give you enough energy storage to go 100% solar and wind. Right now intermittent power sources are being subsidized heavily with being able to lean on cheap natural gas. Nuclear doesn't depend on any resources that would be strained even if relying on Nuclear power for 100% of demand. Nuclear is also power dense and other than NIMBY concerns is easier to site closer to where the energy is needed than large scale wind farms. Before you say "rooftop solar!" I'll admit, a PV panel is great for being able to scale down to tiny amounts of power instead of just "hundreds of MWe". That still doesn't address the fact that massive swaths of the globe do not get enough sunlight during the winter months to make 100% solar every week of the year worth it. You could currently overproduce enough in the summer to be net zero, but that doesn't change the fact that you're still relying on massive overproduction in sunnier climates and transporting energy large distances or fossil fuels to make up the difference. No chance energy storage bridges the gaps for seasonal changes instead of just a few days.
Renewables true costs are just unknown.
Ammonia electro-synthesis and air liquification are both mature tech, and just need to be built out. Hydrogen, similarly. Tankage for all of these is cheap, and power can be released via existing gas furnaces. Building out takes time.
Chemical storage has the massive advantage that it may be shipped from the tropics to anywhere it is needed, anytime it is needed, just like oil and LNG is today. That is where the majority of energy will be banked, because there is always demand for the same chemicals as industrial feedstock, so an always ready market to sell excess production into.
Batteries are the most expensive storage. You won't make much progress understanding power by thinking only about batteries. But anyway batteries are not dependent on lithium; iron-air batteries are cheap and iron is plentiful.
Nukes have no place in this future. Their power costs way too much to win a bid, almost all the time, but they need to win all the time to service their crushing debt load. And, it takes many years before any power at all comes out. So, they will predictably default on their debts; and thus not be built at all.
Consider West Virginia. (Just for example.) The Senator from there, buoyed by local public opinion, has been an obstacle to climate policy. A look at the state's economy will quickly debunk the idea that coal mining revenues alone drive this opposition.
Instead, West Virginia, like other places where opposition to reform holds fast, has a large manufacturing sector predicated on the ready availability of cheap electricity. Herein lies the real dependence on coal. The mountainous topography makes the widespread deployment of solar panels infeasible, and the cloudy weather and high latitude aren't helping. Wind faces a similar issue. There are no deserts nearby.
Nuclear power is attractive not only because it can support a transition to renewable energy[1], but because it can also be deployed readily to mitigate the economic fallout of carbon emissions reduction. And if the last ten years of political upheaval haven't demonstrated the importance of paying attention to the downsides when championing a policy that works well on average, well, I don't know what will.
1: http://large.stanford.edu/publications/coal/references/docs/...
Reservoirs and pasture are places where siting solar is easy, and provides side benefits of higher operating efficiency and higher agricultural yield.
Resistance to renewables is nowhere technical, and always political. Disinformation is one political tool.
Reservoirs are deep, pastures are not relevant everywhere. Both approaches are essentially theoretical at this point due to the increased cost of construction vs. dedicated solar farms.
>nowhere technical, and always political.
You're forgetting "pragmatic". Lots of things are technically possible but not economically practical, at least not when you need them to be. Nuclear prevents disruption in the short-term; it is not necessary in the very-long-term, but the markets can remain irrational longer than you or I can remain solvent.
>Disinformation is one political tool.
I know, you replied with it. I studied a bunch of dry economic data to write the gp comment. It's not disinfo to know where money comes from.
It costs no more to site solar in pasture than in desert. It can be cheaper; you don't need to buy the land if it remains equally useful for its current use, and may be nearer market, so not need long distance transmission. Furthermore, lower operating temperature improves efficiency, and shade improves grass yield and lowers water demand.
That biggest current projects are in desert is a sign of market immaturity.
Are you suggesting floating solar panels? Surely you jest?
>It costs no more to site solar in pasture than in desert. It can be cheaper; you don't need to buy the land if it remains equally useful for its current use
You have to stop using it during construction. That's a cost. Nobody is actively using the desert. But more relevant to the original point, there are no areas of large, flat pasture in Appalachia.
You don't need flat ground for solar. A south-facing slope is strictly better.
You are really reaching for objections now: It is universal practice to rotate herds between pastures. You would build in a pasture that livestock are not in this week. You might even build in winter when they are inside.
Solar is dependent on the time of day (as the sister comments pointed out) and also on weather. Plus, you need to get the energy from the desert to wherever it's needed - this is non-trivial for densely populated areas far from the equator. You also need to maintain the solar panels; sand can be quite bad for their efficiency. Lastly, the areas that do have the space and solar power might be politically unstable, which makes the massive investments needed to get this going quite risky.
Real engineering has a good video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o
Which is why utilities are focusing on energy storage and grid improvements like upgrading transmission lines to HVDC to make it more practical to 'ship' excess wind/solar to regions that need it.
It still gets dark for about a third of the day.
Pushing water uphill is relatively cheap and ~80% efficient. We can build more 2x nuclear power station equivalent "batteries" like fengning fairly easily.
Hydro is failing worldwide. Look it up before responding please, thanks.
There is absolutely no need for deserts, or for single-use solar farms anywhere. Solar coexists with roofs, parking lots, reservoirs and canals, and pasture, improving each.
It's long past time to try to protect the world's energy anti-vaxxers.
Misinformation: spreading false information while believing the false information.
We should be mindful how we use these terms. I believe that the parent to your comment fully believes what they are saying. If you wish to act in good faith just provide a few sources or comments to counter their claims and move on. Consider the context in which they are speaking (the op mentions building in deserts and sending electricity elsewhere, hence the counter). But do not attack them and call them a bad actor until benefit of the doubt is removed. We can't have a functioning community unless we operate under good faith conditions, even to bad actors.
https://www.mediadefence.org/ereader/publications/introducto...
One, I'm not responding to you. Do you know how the internet works?
If I reply to someone else's comment, it's not to you. I'm actually on your side, it turns out. Take your hands off your hips. I'm pro-nuclear. Solar has never worked, and it never will. Germany dumped $1.7 trillion into Energiewende, and failed. Their carbon went up, their power went down, their prices went up, and they drove industry to higher carbon grids. All it did was make the situation worse.
Now take a look at my comment. Who am I actually responding to? What were they saying?
Was it you? Was it pro solar? No?
Then why are you here demanding that I spend my time proving you wrong?
.
Two, "Feel free to show me in what way my comment was false"
Can you please get this out of your body for the rest of your life? You sound like a crank.
It's ANTIVAXXERS who say this "feel free to show me" stuff. Like what, you thought I was on the internet just waiting for your permission?
Do you realize how you sound? "Hey, I'm right until you prove me wrong?"
That's ridiculous. Even though you're right, your ostentatious delivery of an entitled nonsensical position is /still/ setting you back.
I'm on your side, and you've still left me feeling like your position is not defended by any skill or knowledge. If someone who doubted nuclear interacted with you, it seems almost certain that your lack of ability to display your own position, combined with your attempt to make it someone else's responsibility, would actually backfire and cause them to support nuclear less.
This will never do any good. You will never convince anyone this way. You sound confused. This isn't a fight, and you aren't a fighter. You shouldn't be attempting to defeat people this way, and you haven't risen to the standard you're attempting to demand from strangers, when the actual responsibility is yours, not theirs.
Every time you demand someone else prove you wrong, you have immediately and automatically lost.
If you say "2+2 is 4, prove me wrong," everyone watching you thinks you're wearing a Charlie Kirk mask, and arithmetic will try to rewrite itself to distance itself from you.
Please don't sit here like "do work for me because I permit it and deign it good, to amuse me and make me very happy for being wrong."
The amateur nuclear fanboy community really needs to stop taking discussion tips from Youtube flat earth channels. This is not how competence works.
On your first point, you said
> The person you're reacting to was correct.
So I took "you" to be the parent (godelski) who was responding (=reacting) to ncmncm, who accused me of spreading disinformation. You then continued with
> They're reacting to someone who is spreading information they well know to be false.
I took this "they" to reference ncmncm, who is responding (reacting) to my original comment - which then means that you would've said that I'm spreading misinformation.
Given this new information, the "they" probably referenced "godelski", too - which is the source of our misunderstanding.
To you second point, you're right that this was probably not the best strategic response. That being said, my original comment provided arguments and a (hopefully) valid source, while the responses accused me of spreading knowingly wrong information (well, technically only one did, but as outlined in point 1, I was unaware of that at the time of writing the comment). Proving that I knew what I said was wrong is a pretty high bar, so I decided to ask for only points that were wrong in my original comments.
The comment was a bit salty, I agree, but in the context that I made a good argument (IMO) and the only response was "false" without even a hint to a specific fault, I didn't really see a more reasonable way to respond - but I should've pointed this out more clearly. It was definitely not my intention to make someone work for free to debunk my baseless claims.
And, to end things, just a minor nitpick - I'm actually not a nuclear fanboy at all, I was just responding honestly why desert solar was not an option, since it was something I've looked at before.
Nuclear can mostly be built near the centers of demand and reduce the need for elaborate new transmission.
But there is absolutely no need to site solar in deserts. It can be local, anywhere, coexisting neatly with other land use.
Also in the video: A single 700MW line from from morocco to spain cost 150M. Though I suspect thats a more expensive than overhead lines.
The funny thing happened, solar panels got close to the same cost as a curved mirror.
France did it in 70/80 with technology not more advanced then what is available in the 60s.
They have not only proven that nuclear can do it, but also that nuclear scales amazingly well. There really is no technical question what so ever.
Any nation that wants to have a green grid could go to South Korea for example and if you tell them that you would like 20 or even 100 reactors and you are willing to pay, they would build you those reactors. Within 10 years you could likely finish 3-4 reactors a year.
Nuclear economics analysis shows that if you actually have a real industry with lots of people experienced in such plants, they become much, much cheaper and far more predictable on timeline.
Instead in the West every other nations has some unique plant design that they are only building once and its a totally new industrial project supported by an industry that barley exist anymore and had to shoestring since the 80s.
And we are no longer in the 70s, so unlike France with some small amount of effort we could actually avoid using 60s technology. Doing, and building modern plants (see Terrestrial Energy, Moltex Energy, ThorCon) would not only solve the Green energy problem. We could also eat up nuclear fuel waste and (hopefully) nuclear weapons material (as was done in the US with Soviet nukes). We could also produce far more medical isotopes and nuclear batteries for space exploration (and other uses).
We could also then use such plants to produce hydrogen (for chemical and industrial processes). Using highly efficient nuclear heat is a far better plan then electrolysis with renewables.
These modern plants would as be so much smaller that they could be produced in a factory that could likely produce 100s such reactors in a year, just like we can with airplanes or rockets. You transport them to the a prepared location and drop them into a big nuclear concrete reinforced hole and put a bit steel lid on top.
Nuclear is the lowest in land use, lowest in total resources mined, lowest in disruption to the environment and can be built pretty close to where people actually live, so its the lowest in required energy transmission as well. If you use modern nuclear its also doesn't use require water cooling anymore.
So, nuclear, even if you use shitty old nuclear would work and is proven to work. Using modern nuclear would improve on that 10-100x.
The only thing that prevented this from happening in the 70/80s is that coal was cheaper and the nuclear scare made politicians not interested in pushing it anyway. Today its totally clear that coal killed 100-1000x more people and we are actually willing to invest into clean energy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
But the emerging economics of solar/wind prevent any non-subsidized nuclear from being viable.
Look at the solar/wind curves for the last decade. Yes, it is unlikely solar and wind will continue such a breakneck pace of improvement, but it doesn't matter. The point is that almost everyone will agree that solar and wind have not reached peak technology and economies of scale, and certainly battery storage has not either with forthcoming sodium ion and other approaches.
No existing nuclear design can compete. Natural gas turbine is being passed by unsubsidized wind/solar right now per LCOE charts. Other/new nuclear designs are (let's be honest) 10 years at a minimum before they come online. What price is being targeted by such a nuclear project?
I believe these new designs should be researched (and liquid fuel thorium research should be allowed too) and so should fusion.
I also believe that existing nuclear should probably be kept around for now for baseload and to keep the nuclear industry viable for the future.
Hopefully in 10-20 years solar/wind will stabilize, and then modular MSR/Thorium reactors can have their day.
I would love to be proven wrong, but essentially any nuclear plant has to look at the current wind/solar price, and target half of that (inflation adjusted) as a target competitive price. It's possible that won't be enough though.
However for emerging economies like India, Indonesia and many others I still think reliable nuclear power close to population centers is a far better plan.
The actual investment required to get a modern MSR style (doesn't have to be thorium) is not actually that much.
I would at least like to see nuclear get an actual shot at it.
But I agree that after nuclear getting the short straw for 40+ years solar/wind are finally getting to the point where they might be an option.
Foisting nukes off on poorer, badly governed countries does people living there no favors.
Nukes are farther from viable than ever before. Subsidizing them has become indefensible.
As for "if we cannot make them reliable and safe, how can you expect them to?" I think we can, and I think they can. There's a ton of detailed information about the ThorCon molten salt reactor designs and why they are safe, how they'd withstand e.g. a Fukushima-style event, etc.
[1] https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
Wind/Solar + battery is a dream power combination for the third world. No reliance on a substandard perpetually underinvested grid, corrupt companies, corrupt/oppressive central governments.
Starlink as well should be a HUGE boon to the third world. Again, buy dish, plug it in, pay money, get internet. I can see remote third world villages with solar/wind/battery + starlinks + a couple 5g towers and BAM, that is a modern power and communications infrastructure that scales from 1 to 1000 people.
Rooftop solar is a sneaky liberating technology from a government/politics standpoint, in the sense it empowers individuals (literally and figuaratively) without the government imposing corruption, and generally speaking has minimal/no impacts on your neighbors and surroundings.
I know MSR / LFTR is designed to avoid weapons-grade isotope chains in its breeding so are somewhat proliferation safe, but it's still a breeder reactor, I'm sure smart nuclear physicists could figure out how to make plutonium in them.
Yeah and then the nuclear advocates build monolithic plants that last 50 years, exactly enough time for all the people involved to retire and not pass on their knowledge.
Humans can do some cool things when we decide to. And scaling solar isn't as easy as it sounds. What's the cost, in energy and fossil fuels, to mine the materials, build and ship not just the panels but also the massive batteries required for solar? Not to mention having to constantly replace them?
That's something I don't really see solar advocates addressing: if we have to burn every last gallon of oil to build our marvelous solar and battery arrays, then the planet is screwed anyway. Nuclear has much higher energy density. The problem is our economic system isn't accounting for energy output vs input...it uses prices, which are incredibly useless in this particular instance because prices do not internalize costs. Price and cost have significantly diverged, so you can't look at "what's cheaper in price" and assume that it's the optimal outcome.
Why not attack from all angles? Build solar, but also crank out as many nuclear reactors as humanly possible.
Weirdly enough, we're already currently annually installing so much solar power (in terms of actual energy output, not just nameplate) that it equates the progress accomplished in the nuclear industry in the past fifteen years or so. In other words, the nuclear industry would have to accelerate by more than an order to magnitude just to catch up with today's solar power growth. But of course solar power growth itself increases by around 30% every year on average... To me that almost sounds like it's scaling nuclear power that isn't as easy as it sounds.
> but also the massive batteries required for solar
Yeah, there's no such thing as "massive batteries required for solar" in a proper high-renewable grid. Simulations show (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2018.07.004) that in a cost-optimal grid mix, pumped hydro is economically preferred over batteries.
Which is a massive battery.
5000 reactors is not actually that much. Think about how many planes we produce.
Imagine 5 Gigafactory each producing 100s reactor cores every year. That not really hard to imagine is it? Those would more likely be 500MW. So you need a few 10000+.
The rest of a nuclear plant without water cooling is none nuclear and building a concrete hole, and a concrete bunker a whole bunch of electronics, pipes and the same turbine used for gas plants.
And we have tons of thorium all over the place for basically free in every country.
Look at fast France managed to make their nuclear, and that was with 60s technology.
"A single shipyard can produce 20 GW’s of ThorConIsle power per year. In terms of resource requirements, one gigawatt of ThorCon power is not a big deal. The scale up rate will not be limited by shipyard capacity, but by the rate at which the turbogenerators can be built."
So let's say 18000 GW (converting 556 exajoules/year and rounding up). Divide by 20 (GW per shipyard per year) to get 900 ThorCon-shipyard-years. If we say two decades to get it done, that's 45 shipyards, which seems doable? There are 285 active shipyards worldwide right now.
But anyway, like you said, we can maybe cut it in half, and not everything has to be powered by nuclear, just enough to replace fossil fuels.
On the other side, many areas of the world are energy poor and impoverished because of that. It would be great if we could use a lot of this energy to improve lives of people living in these areas, so we would probably want to build substantially more.
All these experts must have retired in France. Half their reactors are out of order for planned and unplanned maintenance.
You would expect nuclear to get cheaper over time, but the opposite has happened. SMRs are betting on turning the tide by reducing the manufacturing cost but they will have to deal with larger operation costs so it is not yet clear that this will make economic sense. The bet size is smaller though, so investors will be more likely to give it a try.
> We could also eat up nuclear fuel waste and (hopefully) nuclear weapons material (as was done in the US with Soviet nukes).
You can do this, but does it make economic sense. That is the question and the answer to that right now is no.
The sole reactor currently in building phase (Flamanville-3) is a complete disaster, more than 11 years behind schedule, it will cost at least 19.4 billion € (initial budget: 3.7 billion ).
Because not every location has high solar irradiance[0] nor wind density[1].
I'm not sure why comments (for and against nuclear/renewables) with energy ignore this factor. Wind, hydro, and solar aren't homogeneously distributed around the globe (let alone the US) nor through time. The conversations always devolve into "why do we need nuclear when there's so much sun" vs "baseloads."
The truth is that you should be using whichever resource best matches your environment. If you can get away without nuclear, that's totally cool. If you can't, then nuclear is a far better option than coal or gas. That's about it, and I'm tired of pretending it isn't. Pro nuclear is supposed to mean that nuclear tech is on the table. It shouldn't mean "nuclear for everything" or "nuclear everywhere." Just use whatever works in your area and gives you the cheapest and most reliable power (under the constraint of zero operating emissions). Anything else is typically not meaningful discourse unless we're willing to dig way deep into the nuances and everyone involved has a decent amount of expertise on the subject (I'm guessing most of us don't). There's so many constraints that go into power systems (reliability, land usage, access, population density, resource access, diversification, etc) that are never discussed in these forums I just don't think we can meaningfully discuss except at the high abstract level and mostly appeal to experts. Which as far as I'm aware most experts say "nuclear is better than coal and gas. Let's do as much as we can with hydro, wind, and solar, and if that's not enough nuclear is the next best option."
[0] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/solar/where-solar-is-fou...
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/wind/where-wind-power-is...
Again, I'm not sure why were arguing as if it's renewables vs nuclear. You use whatever is best for your area and matches your needs. All I'm arguing is that nuclear can be advantageous in _some_ situations. (If you think nuclear for everything, or even solar for everything, your ideas about energy are very naive).
German energy politics is an entirely different matter. And actually the main complaint about it is: the switch to renewables wasn't done quickly enough. Nuclear always was the smaller part of energy production in Germany, so even if no power plant had been shut down, the question would still stand: where would 80% of the energy come from. Relying on fossil fuels for that is definitely wrong, even more so, if you tie yourself to one very problematic supplier.
And please look into all the huge problems France currently faces about their energy production before cheering for them! The good side is, the largest part of the energy mix is nuclear, so it is low in carbon production. That is the good news. The bad news is, that the energy crisis in central Europe was basically started by several nuclear power plants in France being taken off the grid at the same time as the need for emergency repairs appeared. Electricity in France currently is quite expensive, often more so than in Germany. Long term France has the problem that the nuclear fleet is aging. A lot of reactors are only operating because their life span has been extended. Currently there are no realistic concepts of replacing them, so France needs to hurry to expand their renewables considerably, which so far they haven't been doing.
Isn't that solvable with HVDC links?
I agree with GP at this point it is mostly a budget, political will, manufacturing problem.
> The shipyard estimate supports our estimates that ThorCon power plants can be mass produced by shipyards at costs of $800/kW to $1000/kW
$1000/kW, or $1/W, is roughly the cost of utility-scale solar these days (SEIA reported $0.89/W for Q1 2021)
No, because then you have the Russia situation times ten - namely that a foreign power can cripple your society at will.
Thus, a dollar spent on nukes instead of renewables brings climate catastrophe nearer.
A dollar spent on renewables displaces much more than the same dollar spent on nukes -- this project is going to provide CO2-free power at 3 cents / kWh. It's in the same ballpark, but also, nuclear's main competition is coal and gas, as they all provide baseline power. Solar with storage can do that, but adding storage drives the cost up.
And you cannot spend the same dollar on both -- while this is true, I think the fallacy is that spending a dollar on nuclear power necessarily takes a dollar away from renewables. It's possible that this will sometimes be the case, but it also will clearly be taking a lot of dollars away from coal in places where practically speaking, the choice isn't coal vs renewable, it's coal vs nothing, so if you don't spend the dollar on nuclear, it WILL be spent on coal.
Which is why wasting it in trying to shoehorn solar or wind which are completely unacceptable as baseload power sources is doomed to failure.
If you think batteries[1] are a solution, you should go buy some batteries, and try to take advantage of wholesale energy price arbitrage between daily oversupply (when energy is ~free) and undersupply (when energy is very, very expensive).
You'll quickly discover why nobody has managed to make a profitable business out of it. The economics of battery storage, compressed air storage, etc, etc are horrible.
[1] Pumped hydro is okay, cost-wise. Unfortunately, the capacity isn't there to meet our energy needs.
We can build plenty of pumped hydro before running out of space.
Batteries can fare badly, here, because their cost scales with total storage capacity, though storing or delivering the power is free and round trip efficiency is high. They do well at leveling peaks, where they can respond faster than other media, and the total energy they must deliver is small. (Cf. Australia's Tesla system.)
Others, like pumped hydro, synthetic chemicals, liquified air, and compressed air, can fare better because tankage is cheap, and the pumps, catalyzers, and furnaces cost according to the rate that energy is to be banked or drawn down, not the total stored energy. Storage as an independent business would rely on transmission lines to be able to deliver power to utilities in the whole region and stay busy, and draw on the grid's excess to refill.
Pumped hydro and compressed air have good round-trip efficiency. Chemical systems, much less; that matters surprisingly little.
Transmission lines cost according to maximum power and distance, but are called for only when energy must be moved. Actually moving the energy is free; all the costs are independent of usage.
But a public utility that manages its own storage is not constrained by a storage business model: it builds as much generating capacity and storage as it needs to meet its needs almost all the time, and fills periods that exceed the sum of its momentary generating capacity and storage drawdown rate (until it is empty) buying power from the regional grid at spot price, refilling its storage when it can or price is low.
Capacity needs to be built out, and hasn't been, yet, because it takes time to do, hasn't been needed yet in most places, and its costs are still in free fall. Building out later gets you more for your money, and generating capacity is more immediately useful.
Synthetic chemical storage has the advantage that tankage is both cheap and portable, so you can work the catalyzers at all times except when storage is actually being drawn down, either filling local tankage or filling shippable tanks for sale. The market for it will never saturate.
A wrinkle for many storage media is that the equipment to bank and to draw down energy is not the same, is sized and costs by the power capacity in one direction, and one costs more than the other. For example, the catalyzer to produce hydrogen or ammonia is completely separate from the furnace or fuel cells needed to deliver power. Another wrinkle is that startup time and fixed cost to start up, in either direction, may be very different.
Running a grid with completely independent generation, storage, transmission, and delivery makes bad incentives, so needs regulation. But a public utility district can manage all of this internally, and mostly just sell power to end users and excess to the grid.
Everything works much better when there is plenty extra of intermittent generating capacity, so it is good that is very cheap.
This is very funny. The first nuclear power plant began operation in June 1954. That same year is when Bell Labs created the first commercially viable solar cell (although I doubt it was used to generate power for any grids until long after that).
So this (implied) claim is not just wrong about the age of nuclear power, it even gets the chronology wrong in comparing it to solar.
I'm sure the intent of their statement is salt/SMR/other exotic designs that the NRC has not greenlit (and, I think I'm ok NOT greenlighting designs that don't account for 50 - 80 years of maintenance/operation/risk)
I don't think technology and invention (or discovery for that matter) are synonymous. There has been progress in nuclear technology, even if it's so far non viable.
- Building hectares upon hectares of solar panels in one of the most hostile regions in the world - Maintaining them because the sand is horribly damaging, and replacing them regularly - ignore the fact that, in the Sahara, there's multiple wars going on over there and that it would be a prime location for a terrorist attack - Somehow, also build the infrastructure to transfer that energy through the desert without losing it all as heat. Remember, you've got multiple GW coming out of here. A single 800kV line will not be enough - have backup power lines in case your inaccessible and hard to repair line breaks.
Man, life as a solar zealot sounds easy, all you have to do is ignore physics and reality.
I suspect the OP was in the US. Desert would then be something like Nevada - definitely a shortage of wars, and Sagebrush scrub (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_scrub) is probably less destructive than the Saraha's sands...
Some places don't have deserts. Or even large unpopulated areas. Definitely not large unfarmed areas.
But even if we assume it was a meaningful thing to aim for, concentrated solar power isn't as cost effective as solar pv, wind and batteries to provide the same thing.
This is basically true of all non-pv solar power. In the past really basic solar heaters have made a lot of sense in many places. As the costs of PV and batteries have plummeted they no longer make sense.
When you need electricity, PV gives you that, if you want heat then PV plus heat pump gives you that and cooling at the same time.
Even basic things like designing houses for solar gain can be substituted for just slapping cheap PV on the roof now.
I'm fairly sure the Saul Griffith of 2022 would agree with that, no matter what the 2009 Saul thought. PV wind and battery price drops have surprised even the smart people paying attention to this area, like him.
And here he is, saying "electrify everything":
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-09-07/climate-chang...
This is certainly the case in the UK where the Government is rushing headlong into the Next Shiny (nuclear) Thing. In the meantime they inexplicably scrapped the Swansea Bay Tidal Power project! http://www.tidallagoonpower.com/projects/swansea-bay/
Every attempt to do this in human history has failed, bar none.
There is a reason they build an LNG plant next to every solar plant they build.
I was especially encouraged to see that they didn't advocate the complete dismantling of nuclear, only focusing efforts on improving proven light water reactor designs.
That tells you all you need to know. The people who make money off selling electricity are buying wind and solar.
Attention is focused on grid infrastructure improvements like HVDC, and battery storage systems. Battery systems are even being deployed privately; for example, it's a lot easier to locate an EV DC fast charging station if it sucks down a continuous ~20kW to charge its own power reservoir, than if it needs 300-400kW to directly charge two EVs at full speed.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
I think more likely one of the companies working in Canada will get there first. Canada is the only international regulator of high standing who has a real strong program of trying to get such reactors actually certified.
The US has woken up out of their deep, deep slumber in the last 5 years but the DoE changing policy is basically like watching a glacier. They have done some good things and hopeful they continue to cooperate with Canada.
One of the biggest things holding back nuclear is that each country has a totally unique regulatory framework. And no market (except maybe the US) is large enough to justify the investment.
This is also a problem in other spaces but getting your electronics certified is a lot cheaper then spending potentially 100s of millions on a certification process.
To make nuclear commercial really happen international regulatory agency should exist or the nuclear regulator should cross license each other.
ThorCon gets around that by working with a company that almost doesn't (or didn't) have a regulatory agency or a regulatory framework and they are building them together. The government is building the regulator, the company the product.
I wish them the very, very best. If they are successful it could do more then almost any other project. Its far more important then getting a little bit more wind energy into Germany. Indonesia is one of the biggest countries in the world and coal is their only viable option right now.
Edit: This is great video to understand what ThorCon is actually doing:
Unfortunately, its safety model flows through "and then allow nations to create their own standards."
Ceding standards / regulation to an international-level organization for advanced reactors that meet some criteria (e.g. proliferation-resistant, under a certain power, fail-safe, minimal worst-case scenario) would do wonders for low-carbon energy transitioning.
Imagine a micro-reactor that's deployable in any member country, because it's already been vetted and certified.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Energy_...
The US literally hard coded PWR reactor standards into the regulatory framework. Doing anything else is essentially impossible outside a few niches. That is why a number of companies re-located to Canada.
In the US you basically need to give them a design (100+ million investment), lots of money (nobody knows how much) and an unspecified amount of time (great to tell an investor) and then they will tell you what you need to do so they would consider licensing the design. And then you would actually have to go threw that licensing process.
And people are wondering why there are no GenIV designs.
You can't even do a prove of concept reactor for less money to prove the design. SpaceX basically does that with NASA, they show tests rather then doing more paperwork. You can do a university style research reactor but that really not enough to prototype a serious commercial reactor. To do a prototype you would have to go threw the full process above, that is why most reactor companies go from design directly to product.
The Western world should have been a nuclear society since the 80s.
Its just mind-blowing that such a statement can be made on a site called 'Hacker News'.
Lets promote fear of technology and use regulation from preventing new technology to replace deadly dirty coal for decades and decades. What an amazing plan anti-nuclear people have been pushing for the last 50 years.
I live near Indian Point, recently shuttered for leaks. I expect to be made to pay for dismantling it. I am glad I won't need to pay for several more.
Money spent on nukes could have been spent bringing renewable costs down. We could have had solar and wind decades earlier. Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House. Ronald Reagan stripped them off. And here we are.
I believe that if we had strict but sensible regulation around nuclear power, it would have long ago driven coal and natural gas power out of business, putting us in a way better position to deal with climate change. Even with Light Water Reactors -- but if we had sensible regulation, we'd have long ago developed much better designs and refined them, driving the price down even more. I've seen a graph that shows how nuclear was getting cheaper all the time, when suddenly the trend reversed and it started getting more expensive.
Here's the kind of insanity that results from our current nuclear regs in the USA:
"A forklift at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory moved a small spent fuel cask from the storage pool to the hot cell. The cask had not been properly drained and some pool water was dribbled onto the blacktop along the way. Despite the fact that some characters had taken a midnight swim in such a pool in the days when I used to visit there and were none the worse for it, storage pool water is defined as a hazardous contaminant. It was deemed necessary therefore to dig up the entire path of the forklift, creating a trench two feet wide by a half mile long that was dubbed Toomer’s Creek, after the unfortunate worker whose job it was to ensure that the cask was fully drained.
The Bannock Paving Company was hired to repave the entire road. Bannock used slag from the local phosphate plants as aggregate in the blacktop, which had proved to be highly satisfactory in many of the roads in the Pocatello, Idaho area. After the job was complete, it was learned that the aggregate was naturally high in thorium, and was more radioactive that the material that had been dug up, marked with the dreaded radiation symbol, and hauled away for expensive, long-term burial."[1]
I'll totally admit that if we had never made any investment into nuclear, it's possible that renewables might have had more R&D and investment earlier. But it's also possible that we might have just become more reliant on fossil fuels.
I think we both share a pretty deep concern for climate change, and if it turns out that renewables + storage are the only real solution, I'm totally happy with that. It's just that I think that with nuclear we can get off fossil fuels faster. I may be wrong.
[1] https://radiationeffects.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Rock...
I too am deeply concerned about the climatic future. My main worry is that not halting the temperature and ocean acidification excursions soon enough will trigger global collapse. The radically lower CO2 emission rate after would be cold comfort. I think we need to see serious progress by 2030, i.e. before new nukes could come online.
Synthetic chemical fuels -- hydrogen and ammonia -- are compelling for longer-term storage, despite their currently low round-trip efficiency. These can be synthesized and then shipped where needed, and may be produced continually even after local tankage is full, to be sold on as fuel, industrial feedstock, and fertilizer, generating revenue. Then, there is no downside to massive overbuilding of generating capacity: all capacity generates revenue, up to market saturation.
Places slower to build out renewables will find these new fuels much cheaper than oil and natural gas, and will easily convert to burning them.
Their round-trip efficiency will only ever increase, with continual progress in catalysis, eventually favoring fuel cells over reuse of existing turbines.
Is there any pumped hydro in flat land anywhere deployed on large scale?
> Synthetic chemical fuels -- hydrogen and ammonia -- are compelling for longer-term storage, despite their currently low round-trip efficiency.
Not really.
> Then, there is no downside to massive overbuilding of generating capacity: all capacity generates revenue, up to market saturation.
And then you need lots and lots of electrolysis that will all operate at low utility.
I would be on batteries before I would on hydrogen.
Electrolysers will be idle only when you are drawing down from tanks.
Alternatively you can use liquid metal batteries, they can be placed anywhere and need nothing with very low chance of fire.
Transportability of synthetic liquid storage media will make them attractive even where still more expensive than alternatives. Their cost will continue on down, too.
It surprises most people that low round-trip efficiency in a storage medium doesn't matter much anymore.
Here's the home: https://thorconpower.com/
SUS is the typical Japanese Industrial Standards (JIS) designation for stainless steel grades. It stands for “steel use stainless.”
This all appears to assume some knowledge of power generation or even their approach.
Edit >> sorry! I read the hn linked page, and then I navigated to the design page. I did not also go to “home”. Perhaps the hn link could be for the home page.
Link to design page: https://thorconpower.com/design/
As with any promising new idea for energy production, we'll see what the actual costs are once (if) it enters commercial production. Many concepts that work perfectly in the lab fail to succeed industrially.
The tale goes that DoD was researching both options during the Cold War? and eventually shut down the Thorium research due to the warfare potential of enriched uranium
It's becoming more popular last 10 years or so, with books being written about it and private companies picking up the development of the technology
*edit -- I'm a bit confused about 8-minute. Do you know what kind of storage they use? Seems neat but the website is a bit sparse on details.
ThorCon would have to promise that. We have no way to know if they can deliver on it.
There are different methods and approaches taken by different companies. Moltex Energy is going with a traditional long running reactor core and basically puts bits of stuff into the salt that will corrode instead of the reactor vessel.
Other companies like ThorCon or Terrestrial instead simply accept the corrosion and replace the core containment at a faster cycle.
The expensive part of a nuclear plant in a molten salt reactor is not actually to core vessel because unlike with a PWR its not an gigantic pressure vessel that need to contain water that is ready to burst out. The reactor is working at atmospheric pressure.
So in a PWR you have to deal with pressure, and also corrosion. In a MSR you got ride of the pressure (and thankfully the water).
edit: these are breeder reactors? aren't there still waste and other concerns here?
Worth noting that this is no small thing. Materials science is the limiting factor of all molten salt reactors, and has yet to be solved satisfactorily.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment...
And part of this document[1] says "if it breaks, send it back". The design allows for replacing a faulty "can" entirely rather than trying to repair it.
Steel and aluminum are out, as they are both chemically reactive at those temperatures. Other materials such as nickel alloys or certain ceramics may be possible, but the radioactivity of the fuel tends to embrittle materials over time as atoms in the containing material are converted by exposure to the fuel's neutron emissions.
The affected components include not just the reactor vessel, but also pipes, and in some MSR designs also pumps and heat exchangers. If those are subject to regular replacement, the used components are also low-grade nuclear waste and must be properly contained indefinitely.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
The other main impediment is regulatory: since we've never had commercial reactors of this type we don't have a legal framework to license these types of reactors to be run (and eventually decommissioned) safely.
At least, these are my novice understandings from some skeptical background reading. If someone with actual nuclear industry and/or research experience has a more detailed understanding, feel free to weigh in and correct me.
https://thorconpower.com/design/
This seems realistic since Oak Ridge ran their experimental molten salt reactor for five years (though only equivalent to 1.5 years at full power). They used an nickel alloy called Hastelloy-N, didn't see much corruption or neutron embrittlement, and did later work on improving resistance to embrittlement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment
Its not a breeder, they are going for the simplest possible design as far as I remember and that means its gone a burner.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azzp0i0BnQ8 [video]
A "breeder" can be one of two things:
1) Thorium fuel, slow neutrons. A neutron hits thorium, converts it to U233, then that fissions. Take a ton of thorium, fission all of it, get one gigawatt-year.
2) Uranium fuel, fast neutrons. The fast neutrons can fission U235, U238, plutonium, and other transuranics. Take a ton of uranium, fission all of it, get one gigawatt-year.
Compared to burners, either type of breeder only requires 1% as much fuel, produces 1% as much waste, and the waste is mostly fission products with much shorter half-lives. Encase it in glass and bury it, and it'll be back to the radioactivity of the original ore in about 300 years, with most of the radioactivity going away in the first few decades.
I think a thermal breeder can actually be about 10x more efficient then any uranium fast burner can achieve.
But once you do a fast breeder there is really no point in using Thorium at all. The only reason to use thorium is really thermal breeding.
Also you can have both a thermal and a fast burner I'm pretty sure.
Thorium is a by-product of rare-earth mineral mining. It is still radioactive, and it is also subject to all the regulatory red tape of handling any kind of radioactive material.
Rare-earth mineral mining is extraordinarily destructive to the environment. When you read about rare-earth mineral mining, you should think "strip mining" because that is generally how it's done. China does it because they don't care at all about the environment, they care about cornering the market.
Thorium reactors still include uranium to make them work. It may take eight years to exhaust the fuel, but you still have a pile of spent radioactive material that needs to go somewhere, and no one has solved that problem satisfactorily, which is bigger than the NIMBY issue of where the reactor goes in the first place.
And I'm not sure about the relative environmental impact, but it's important to note that this thorium and uranium mining would be competing with coal mining.
I think the upside tradeoffs for this kind of nuclear power are preferable to going without.
Peppa Porcine-Bacon, CEO of Threelittlepigs, LLC in a prepared statement.
>> ThorCon is a molten salt fission reactor. Unlike all current nuclear reactors, the fuel is in liquid form. It can be moved around with a pump, and passively drained in the event of a casualty.
Casualty? Huh?
glad industry is catching on even if big govt(s) won't...
It doesn't matter how you spin nukes, they will always end up costing way, way more than renewables + storage. Diverting capital to nukes slows our response to global climatic catastrophe, perhaps enriching a few at the expense of the whole world.
Because of the potential of catastrophic failure. Duh!
That and these people are not counting the discounted cost, over 200,000 years, of storing their long term waste and maintaining the site.
Nuclear power looks cheap if you completely discount the future - and you are unethical enough to make future generations pay for current consumption. (Ditto coal)
And note that when you consider costs of something that you have to make a payment on in perpetuity, we don't calculate that as an infinite cost[1]. To say that we'll have to safeguard this nuclear waste in, say year 100,000 of its lifetime, is a lot less of an ask, simply because we have no idea how advanced human technology will be then, maybe making the problem trivial, or whether humans will be completely gone, etc. I agree it's important to think about future generations and to have a very long term view, but the problem of nuclear waste seems much less urgent than the rapidly mounting costs of climate change. Even if we end up using nuclear for, say, 100 years while we transition to completely sustainable, renewable energy, that would be a win over continuing to use fossil fuels. And I don't think it would even add that much to the existing burden of dealing with nuclear waste. Maybe in 200 years we find a spot and put all the waste there with big warning signs etched in stone, and then the main cost is only one of ensuring that we main translations and records of the danger of the site as language evolves. Dealing with solid waste, however careful you need to be with it, seems much easier than trying to collect gases that have mixed into the atmosphere.
[1] https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/fi...
This is not factually correct. In fact you can burn up the highly radioactive waste to only 200-300 years. But that fact often gets ignore by people trying to prevent all technology development so they can continue to be anti-nuclear.
And even if we stick with that crazy 200k number, there would be many solution. Deep drilling is one that will surely be available in the next 100-200 years as it has applications other then nuclear disposal.
If you have a rocket like Starship and launch it from a oil platform you can launch all the waste into deep space if you really want.
Even if you don't do want to do that, advanced laser technology also has potential reduce that in the future.
Its a problem that is not actually pressing, we can easily store waste without negative consequences for the next couple 100 years. It will hurt absolutely nobody in that time and will use basically no land and almost no resources.
In 100-200 years we will have many more options what do with it then we have now. Or they will just continue to stand around doing nothing.
Lets go to the worst possible scenario, total government collapse and anarchy. Ok, in such a situation people will have 1000x more 1000x bigger problems then a few tons of nuclear 'waste' standing around.
Not to mention that this fuel contains amazing materials that have other applications. Lets call it 'waste' because we are dumb enough not to realize its a resource. Medical isotopes, nuclear batteries and many other amazing materials are in that 'waste'.
> Because of the potential of catastrophic failure. Duh!
Coal and gas infrastructure have lead to far more death in far more catastrophic failures.
And even the worst possible failure you can come up with in the ThorCon design is hard to imagine how it could kill more then a few people.
If you disagree please explain what kind of scenario you imagine where 10000s of people could die.
> Nuclear power looks cheap if you completely discount the future
And by 'future' here you mean your overly vivid imagination?
However, what I usually see are proposals to put all the waste in the same spot, with a concentration as high as possible. This is justified by the fact that the storage site is a special location with unique geographical features.
I agree though that people aren't accounting for the full cost. Japan ran a nuclear reactor that was older than the one in Chernobyl. Now their clean up costs exceed the costs of shutting all nuclear power plants down and replacing them with new designs assuming each reactor will cost $30 billion and there are no learning effects that reduce the cost of additional units.
If you were generous with the learning rate, Japan could have donated a dozen nuclear power plants to other countries on top of rebuilding its entire nuclear power plant fleet.
Prosperous economies require reliable energy when needed, so power generation must be dispatchable on demand. Intermittent wind and solar source generators can temporarily supply low-cost electric power to the grid, but with a capacity factor of about 30%. This has created demand for redundant natural gas turbine generators to provide “back up” power when there is no wind or sun.
I imagine there are a lot of environmental restrictions to keep the river flowing, avoid dewatering habitat for fish and otherwise impacting the ecosystem, and also supplying water to downstream users like farms and cities. Can’t stop the river completely!
And then the need to build storage to capture some of that energy and also peaker plants to cover that.
Given those countries are barley able to but up coal plants right now, and are massively lacking in the power infrastructure to wildly distribute wind/solar power that seems like an incredibly hard plan.
If you can just get 1 working nuclear reactor design (even if its an old PWR) to the point where you can build and run it. Over then next 10-30 years you can just build them as fast as you can next to every large city and provide reliable power.
> aluminium plants retooled to use excess energy.
The problem with that is that if you are an aluminium plant you want to run at high utility. You don't want to continuously! Not turn it on and off 3 times a day. Those kinds of installations are hard enough to run with reliable power.
For the aluminium processing type plants issue, it appears steel plants and other heavy industry here in the Netherlands are investing in their own power/heat storage capabilities. Exactly so that they can operate on their own terms instead of the net having to develop a generic power storing solution.
Indonesia is gigantic has a huge population and will have a massive amount energy needs. If not nuclear this will be coal. And those plants have 50 year lifetime at least.
The reality is that climate change will be decided in India, Indonesia and China more then anywhere else. If they can actually adopt nuclear and be a pro nuclear society they have the potential to have game changing impact.
Indonesia in particular has gigantic amount of people living at the cost. So an approach where you do centralized building and then ship the plants to the population makes a lot of sense. And Indonesia by itself is big enough that its actually worth building such a model. They will need 100s of GWs of reactors if they want to reach Western standards of power consumption.
> investing in their own power/heat storage capabilities
Yes and that costs a lot of money. Europe is also in a Europe wide power net with lots of nuclear, coal and renewables. Doing that in such a system is much more doable then in Indonesia.
Storage and distribution of synthethic liquid fuels such as ammonia will probably be best adapted to Indonesian needs.
And even the basic infrastructure of the grid that is absolutely required for renewables to be even remotely practical doesn't exist.
Wasting gigantic amounts of energy to produce chemical fuel highly inefficiently with low utility plants, and then transporting them around to then burn them up again highly inefficiently is a terrible plan to power a country of 100s of millions of people.
"Waste" is a curious concept applied to something with zero marginal cost. If not used to synthesize fuel, the insolation would have been wasted. Instead, it synthesizes useful fuel, that also fuels the ship taking it where it is needed.
Indonesia will be able to build their own solar farms and synthesizers, and end up exporting their excess in the temperate countries' winter, provided they can escape the grip of the oligarchists.