U.S. moves toward supplying Romania with a new style of nuclear plant | Hacker News Reader

U.S. moves toward supplying Romania with a new style of nuclear plant

nytimes.com

33 pointsrbanffy39 comments

The put-upon Romanian people will be saddled with super-expensive nukes.

For the rest of the decade, instead of building out low-cost renewables that get cheaper every year, they will pay for the nukes and for all the coal-fired power they are not displacing because they are just waiting for the nukes to get done.

In the end, they will get much less power for their money. More likely the project will be cancelled, uncompleted, as power is bought more cheaply from the European grid than it would cost to operate the nukes.

The Romanian people will get not a penny back after the cancellation.

One point is that you can't replace an entire grid with renewables due to their intermittent nature. They're also building out renewables so perhaps the nuclear generators are intended to offset some of their reliance on coal/gas on-demand generators?

This is always said, but never true.

After you have built out enough renewables for day load and to charge storage, you build out storage. Not batteries, those are super expensive. Stuff that is super-cheap, instead. There are lots of choices. But you don't need to choose immediately. Prices are plummeting at different rates, and nobody knows which will be cheapest by then.

Can you cite what this super cheap storage is? My understanding is that li-on is the only existing option, however won't work at scale due to cost, longevity, etc.

I wouldn't call pumped-storage Hydro[1] super-cheap but it is the default and less expensive than trying to scale lithium. There are also cheaper battery chemistries than lithium when weight doesn't matter.

[1]: https://www.energy.gov/eere/water/pumped-storage-hydropower

Li-ion is the most expensive storage.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31485229

Energy storage, chemical methods aside, is freshman-level physics: pump against pressure, lift something heavy, draw down against buoyancy -- E = fx, E = mgh -- using processes already used at industrial scale in billions of cases. The only open question is what exact scheme will end up cheapest. But you don't need to know that to start building. You might switch over to building something cheaper, later, but anything already built still works.

(But NB: Energy Vault is the Theranos of storage. Steer clear!)

The Black Sea is deep, making underwater methods attractive. Romania also has high mountains, making conventional pumped hydro also practical. The reservoir for pumped hydro need not encompass a watershed, unlike regular hydro, so can be minimally disruptive, environmentally.

> but never true

Ehhhh, sorta? Wind power can be useful as a base load generator if you over provision by a large amount. But the problem is that during the summer months you will get ridiculously high generation and then in winter it drops like a rock. What's worse is that solar follows this same trend.

Typically pricing per kwh is averaging across the year. But during the winter you will have terrible shortfalls. So you need to double or even triple that price because you will have to double or triple the wind turbines and solar panels to achieve the same stable load.

Unfortunately, power storage for months worth of power is even more expensive than just over provisioning. Batteries are great for grid stability, but not for long term energy storage.

You can get a good idea of what renewables look like over the year here: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=16851

So unless we want to keep running natural gas in the winter, or we want to pay 3x as much for renewables, geothermal and nuclear would make a lot of sense when paired with renewables.

You build out a few days or weeks of storage, and also transmission lines. Where it looks like your storage is going to run dry, you order a shipment of ammonia to burn, synthesized at any solar farm in the tropics, or a wind farm anywhere.

The appealing quality of synthetic fuel like ammonia is that there is always an eager market for as much as you can produce, so once your local tankage is full, excess power produces reliable revenue. Your synthesizers are idle only when you are drawing down banked energy, and not necessarily even then if you have plenty.

Synthetic fuels produced from atmospheric carbon and cheap solar energy make sense. I'm cautiously optimistic about Prometheus Fuels.

https://prometheusfuels.com/

Synthetic hydrocarbons will always cost more than synthetic ammonia and synthetic hydrogen. Of the two, ammonia is more practical to transport.

Synthetic hydrocarbons will be used for a long time where those others can't be made to work, such as old cars and chainsaws, and air transport until LH2 fleets and infrastructure are built out; or are used too rarely to merit upgrading, like back-up generators.

I guess we'll see which ones pan out. I'm hoping for both as long as we stop dumping carbon into the atmosphere. Although I'm not so sure about the cost. Prometheus is looking at pretty inexpensive prices per gallon.

They are only one of many. Each has an angle.

It is hard to know which are like Energy Vault, just there to scam investors, and which are onto something. I bet Terraform Industries is, at least, on the level. Whether they have the sauce to compete is a whole other question, but it will be a seller's market for a long time. That means whoever does it cheapest gets most profit.

Probably whoever manufactures equipment cheapest wins, even if their thing is not the cheapest/most efficient to use.

We Romanians will wait to see energy at German prices and pay billions upon billions to buy batteries to store the energy. And btw wind, is really damaging to the birds in the area

The bird thing may be not very significant.

Like the green hydroelectric power is killing all the fish and destroying the rivers? Still happens almost everywhere. Priorities.

There are better choices.

Does anybody have some insight into the performance and safety of this type of design?

Romanian media is mostly silent on the topic. When it does happen to come up, the conversation seems to get stuck either at "the Americans are finally coming to save us" or "the globalist elites are experimenting on us". Neither position is helpful or informative.

No one can answer really because it is new. In theory it's perfect, like all nuclear reactors. In practice, who knows, like all nuclear reactors. It will come down to people's ability to manage every complex systems, to politics and economics over the next 50ish years and to luck...

Even in theory looks questionable to say the least. And no, no nuclear reactor is perfect. That's why they (some of them at least) have safety mechanisms.

There is no safety. This reactor does not exist. Not even a POC. I fear this will be another Bechtel story.

> I fear this will be another Bechtel story.

My fear as well. But what are we (Romanians) paying for this time? We're already in NATO and the EU...

>The hope is to have it operating by the end of the decade.

Wow the building time even for this new style,modular nuclear plant is still takes that long time?

Just curious, why an American company builds a nuclear plant in a foreign country with US government 'subsidising' them, do not build it in US soils?

The 'advertise' with 3-5 year per SMR, but it seems that's not reality. Otherwise, we would be plonking down a lot more more of them in parallel I would think.

because the NRC does not permit the development of new nuclear power plants

US will not subsidise them.

Why are they putting it in a region that has Earthquakes?

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

Because it's where it's needed. Because of geography Romania has off shore wind, rooftop solar and nuclear as low carbon energy sources, (Hydro has 30% of the market and new dams are v difficult due to environmental concerns) All of these are needed, and small scale nuclear is a lot less susceptible to meltdown events due to loss of cooling. Earthquake resistant structures have been built for 50 years, so this is not a showstopper.

> small scale nuclear is a lot less susceptible to meltdown events due to loss of cooling

Even your processor is "susceptible to meltdown events due to loss of cooling". It has some protection, of course, unless this reactor which does not exist even on paper.

This is a problem that nuclear advocates have to address; power is needed in imperfect locations.

We can (and do) build reactors to withstand these types of events. Objectively, the number of human casualties from nuclear plant disasters is comparatively very low, not even considering advances in safety technology.

https://earthquaketrack.com/p/japan/fukushima/biggest

One of them did it though.

Yes, but no:

> In the late 1990s, three additional backup diesel generators for Units 2 and 4 were placed in new buildings located higher on the hillside, to comply with new regulatory requirements. All six units were given access to these diesel generators, but the switching stations that sent power from these backup generators to the reactors' cooling systems for Units 1 through 5 were still located in the poorly protected turbine buildings. Meanwhile, the switching station for Unit 6 was protected inside the only GE Mark II reactor building and continued to function.[54] All three of the generators added in the late 1990s were fully operational after the tsunami. If the switching stations had been moved to the interior of the reactor buildings or to other flood-proof locations, power would have been provided by these generators to the reactors' cooling systems and thus the catastrophe would have been averted.[54]

Earthquake didn't did it, tsunami what flooded the generators which weren't moved/protected as ordered so (ie banal corruption) is what did it.

And the purposed location is far enough from the coast.

You missed my point. Despite all the planning surrounding the earthquakes in Japan, one of them still did damage in an unexpected way. For every nuclear catastrophe, you can easily say that if something was done differently, it would have been averted. Well, it wasn't.

Except it was pretty expected, but someone decided not to bother with it. For me there is a big difference between something could be done to prevent an unexpected event and something should had been done to prevent an expected event but haven't been.

Fukushima Daini, which is on the same coast, with the same operating environment and was hit with the same wave - was shut down successfully.

EDIT: this is just an example what the earthquakes are not a big problem for a nuclear power stations.

Because you need to put it somewhere on this planet, not on some ideal parallel world planet. There are various potential hazards pretty much everywhere.

The NRC has looked at all these and they have given their approval

  https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/smr/nuscale/ser-open-items.html

It's thousands of pages, covering all things you can imagine, and many, many things you can't. It's their job.

They have looked into earthquakes, what dangers they pose, what mitigands the design has against them, and in the end they decided the design is safe.

But if you want the actual details, you can go to section 19.1.4.8.1 Seismic Risk Evaluation in this document:

  https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2020/ML20205L410.pdf

Because a) it might never be built, b) it might not work, and c) nobody gives a ... so long as it stays away from american soil.

Every nuclear plants in Japan survived from a lot of earthquakes, but failed for tsunami.

Poland also has an interest in small nuclear plant modules, mostly from US and UK. I guess the advantage is that these can be produced on a larger scale and then installed on the spot, instead of having to design a nuclear plant from scratch every time one is to be created.

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