US regulators will certify first small nuclear reactor design
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
At the time, Robert Muldoon was Prime Minister of New Zealand and was pursuing "think big" projects for NZ including a planned nuclear power station. As one of the "GE Three" [2], Bridenbaugh blew the whistle that the quoted price tag of the power plant did not include necessary safety precautions which he eloquently explained would cost at least an order of magnitude more (greater than the GDP of NZ). Of course the whole idea made no sense in a country blessed with hydro and geothermal resources. In the end the project was abandoned for total cost of ownership budget reasons rather than nuclear issues.
I wonder what has changed since then?
[0] https://www.times.org/nuclear-power-back/2018/3/8/the-long-t...
> In addition, they're structured in a way to allow passive safety, where no operator actions are necessary to shut the reactor down if problems occur.
If you go past some amount, you start requiring active cooling to stop it from increasing faster and faster in temperature and reacting more violently - this may happen in traditional power plants. If instead you limit the reactor to a much smaller amount of fuel, it starts losing more heat to air than it produces from radioactivity, and this problem goes away.
Of course, the problem is then to obtain that heating while the reactor is operational, but I understand the solutions are known.
This is similar to why fusion reactors are not a risk of becoming nuclear weapons: the system requires external power input just to keep the reaction going. So, in the event of a problem, you'll lose the reaction, instead of it running away uncontrollably.
Of course, there are other risks. For example, a fusion plant may suffer a breach of the reaction chamber, and all that energy will violently explode, releasing radioactive tritium and bits of radioactivated materials from the reactor structure around. I would guess MMRs have similar bad-but-not-catastophic failure modes.
What matters more imo is reliability and energy security and in those respects nuclear makes me a lot more confident than renewables such as solar or wind.
With oil and gas, the hidden cost was climate change. Although global climate change was imagined as early as 1896 by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius [1], it was not publicly acknowledged by the "7 Sisters" [2] until April 2014 [3]. We think we know what oil and gas costs with what we pay at the pump, but those costs usually miss the $500 billion in direct subsidies [4], the military costs of protecting those interests and of course the costs of neutralizing climate change.
With nuclear, the hidden cost is both long-term storage of waste and the cost of nuclear accidents. The merchants of nuclear power plants do not list those costs on the sale price. Again we get the sticker shock once it is too big to fail. I still have not met anyone who is prepared to have nuclear waste stored in their "neighborhood" for the next thousands of years. So it accumulates on-site, where there was no real planned long-term storage accommodation.
I'm not arguing for or against one form of energy. Rather I am arguing for more transparency in our presentation of the costs.
[1] https://www.livescience.com/humans-first-warned-about-climat...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sisters_(oil_companies)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont...
Actually they do. The US has been collecting money from nuclear plants for disposal for literally 50 years.
In fact, they have an absurd amount of money since this money has been collecting interest. It it political deadlock and systematic incompetence that prevents the solving of this problem.
And in addition, long term storage is an incredibly dumb solution for most of this 'waste' and is a fundamentally flawed policy that again, is simply systematic incompetence.
> I still have not met anyone who is prepared to have nuclear waste stored in their "neighborhood"
Disagree, put it in my garden. I don't care. You can leave it there for the next 100 years. Seriously, its not hard to store, it just stands there and does nothing and is 100% harmless unless you come up with some plot of Armageddon style logic.
> So it accumulates on-site, where there was no real planned long-term storage accommodation.
Its accumulates on-site because of systematic incompetence in the federal government.
> and the cost of nuclear accidents
The likely hood of such accidents is incredibly small, even if you assume 100 years of nuclear power for 100% of the population the chance of really series accidents is very low. And even lower if we consider next generation nuclear.
Secondly, regarding waste, I share your view, and I think there’s an additional travesty that we’ve had breeder reactor technology for decades. That can significantly shorten the volume and half life of waste while also producing new nuclear fuel. Non proliferation concerns are cited for why it’s not used, but I don’t see why America can’t operate them within its own borders.
Yes, its insane to suggest the US in its own boarders can't handle it. They do a lot of things much more dangerous in every way to build nukes.
The US is, instead, handing back all the money that was collected to the remaining nuke operators.
Not, notably, to the ratepayers it was collected from.
This is fallout from a court case where nuke operators argued that disposal was flimflam, so the money was collected fraudulently. The court agreed, and ordered the money returned. Not to those it came from, but just to whoever was still operating.
Its truly sad that these resources were not used to actually develop the advanced reactors and technologies needed to solved the problem.
https://flarecord.com/stories/511480139-appeals-court-rules-...
""" NextEra is still not entitled to a refund because federal law requires the DoE, not NextEra, to actually dispose of the spent nuclear fuel. """
With waste with a half-life of 10,000 years for example, each 2 atoms will on average emit one particle or photon in that time. Many generations of people could eat or drink those atoms safely. You could live your life next to a pile of it, and get very little radiation over your lifetime from long half-life radioactive atoms.
The long term storage of this waste is a concern, for sure. But it is a concern for the far future, and we can delay addressing it for decades with impunity (which we have been doing, actually). But we are facing a climate emergency that must be addressed right now. Nuclear waste is the least of our worries at the moment.
There's an extra Avogadro factor of around 23 orders of magnitude when going between atoms and grams, so those atoms really add up -- if they are highly pure and concentrated, at least.
Solar and wind should also be transparent in the fact they require fossil fuels to fill in gaps in production. Thus, they do not represent a solution to climate change but merely delay it. Thus the cost of solar and wind includes the cost of climate disaster.
Synthetic methane requires hydrogen as an input, so all of the above applies to it, too. It also requires as source of carbon dioxide. Extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is not viable, which leaves either scavenging CO2 byproducts from industrial processes and biofuels. Both of those are not in sufficient availability to produce synthetic methane at grid scale.
We already have excess renewable generation in several energy markets. And it's been the case for years, but the promised energy storage revolution has not come to pass.
We're also not going to run out of industrial processes that produce large amounts of carbon dioxide, at least as long as we still build things out of concrete, so if for some reason hydrogen is too hard to transport or store, we can pay the extra price of turning it into methane and use all the infrastructure that we already have for natural gas. We can even recapture most of the carbon when we burn the methane again.
Not to mention, this requires huge over-production, which is a problem in areas with already high land usage, such as Europe. It is probably much less of a problem in the USA, so maybe there the calculations are different.
So if 70% is insufficient to demonstrate feasibility, then solar and wind are even worse off.
I just love reactionary conservative nuclear logic.
"Let's just use fusion for all our energy needs. We don't need fission, nor do we need wind and solar. Just because it hasn't been done now, doesn't mean it'll never happen. If you don't support this you're just an anti-fusion conservative reactionary!"
The worst case for renewables would be that costs stop declining. Stack the deck just right and nuclear might end up a bit cheaper. But this is just a financial risk, not a risk of the planet. And if one is looking at financial risks, one must also look at the risk of cost overruns in nuclear. Unlike with renewables, which typically come in within 10% of the contracted cost, nuclear plants are famously subject to enormous cost overruns. Factors of 2, 3, or even more.
Pretending that the promises of nuclear will absolutely come true, but that renewables haven't absolutely demonstrated their cost declines will continue, is a blatant double standard and not how one does proper analysis. That's why utilities and financiers have walked away from new nuclear, especially in markets where they're not allowed to foist overruns off on the ratepayers.
We have lots of experience with hydroelectricity. So we can just build more dams, it's all just a question of cost right? With more money we can just build more dams until we reach 100% hydroelectric generation right? This is the kind of logic you're using.
Possibility and feasibility are two different things. Lithium ion batteries exist, but we'll never deploy a day's worth of battery storage. The scale just isn't there. No amount of money thrown at the problem is going to make it possible.
Sure things like hydroelectricity and electrolysis exist, but they have significant barriers to feasibility. The likely path for an attempt at solar and wind grid is to build a bunch of solar and wind, try to build storage, fail, and keep using fossil fuels. Nobody, and I mean nobody has ever built grid scale storage for more than an hour's worth of electricity use (let alone total energy use). Energy storage remains an unsolved problem, and it's not just a question of cost. There's no telling if it can be done even with unlimited financial resources.
By comparison we just need to build 4 nuclear plants for every existing one in the US. No massive 10,000x increase in storage capacity required. No reliance on technology that's never been deployed at scale.
Nuclear has got to have the worse scalability story of any hyped technology ever. Very monolithic system with tight integration between components. Hazardous materials. Complex science and engineering that needs lots of different highly trained people. Exotic materials. High temperatures. Enabling works with quantities in the millions of square metres. Processes that are difficult to model. Endless secrecy for national security. Very strong buildings. Harsh design margins. Sites in remote areas with absolutely no night life.
We should be optimistic about nuclear. But also apply optimism to other technologies and industries. If the petro-chemical industry want to make hydrogen work they will succeed. So will the battery industry and solar. If nuclear can scale than so can they.
But my wider point is that we need to be more consistent in how we apply scepticism and optimism to different technologies. In some dimensions that gives a benefit to nuclear and in others the benefit is with renewables or storage.
Would this cost money? Yes. But it would likely cost less than a grid based on nuclear power plants. The key insight is that hydrogen can feed combined cycle power plants, which cost a factor of 10 less than a nuclear power plant of the same power output. So, one could (if necessary) back up the entire grid with CC plants at a fraction of the cost of powering the same grid with nukes. If desired, one could use simple cycle power plants, which (while less efficient) are even cheaper by another factor of about 2, or 20x cheaper than the nukes.
Those gas plants may be cheaper build, but if the electrolyzed hydrogen is expensive the total operating cost is higher since the fuel is too expensive. If you're using single cycle gas plants you'll need even more of this hydrogen, and thus driving up costs. Are you really just comparing cost of construction and ignoring the cost of electrolyzed hydrogen fuel? And remember this is on top of the solar and wind that needs to power this electeolysis in the first place.
Also again, to convert hydrogen to methane you need a large source of carbon dioxide.
A summary of this comment is, "it's cheaper if we just ignore all the technical challenges of synthetic methane."
Nobody claimed electrolysis is cheaper than using natural gas. Nobody even claimed that electrolysis is cheaper than batteries at small scales. The claim is that electrolysis is proven technology that is a lot simpler to scale that lithium batteries.
> The claim is that electrolysis is proven technology that is a lot simpler to scale that lithium batteries.
And my point is that this is false. Electrolysis is not proven technology at scale, almost all hydrogen is produced through steam reformation. No, it does not scale better than lithium ion batteries. If we try to build it at scale it'll make solar and wind more expensive than nuclear power.
It's also worth noting that France is producing less than half the greenhouse gases of Germany, despite having significantly less renewables, because it has a serious nuclear infrastructure.
No source of energy is a silver bullet for climate change. Wind and solar aren't. And neither is the nuclear industry. There just isn't a serious plan for scaling up quickly enough. The supply chain and expertise just doesn't exist and will take years. And moaning about mistakes in the past is irrelevant to the present.
Long term storage is actually trivial, just requires actually storing it.
Counterintuitively, best way is glassing it and dumping it on the abyssal plane in the sea.
This controls the temperature and acts as a radiation shield and there's more a hundred times more life on the surface than in the abyss. Also, no humans who get prissy about 1 in 100 chances of cancer than animals don't fare about. The ocean's also big enough that a your case corroding and some material being dissolved and spreading in the water is irrelevant (unless all your nuclear waste you ever dump manages to escape and spread throughout the ocean rather than just sit in a sullen pile you'll be under EPA limits).
That's how you make Godzilla!
You say as if it's a done deal. Hanford is 14 years behind schedule on this, and now it looks as if it will off-gas toxic chemicals. Original budget was $4B and now is $17B.
The chemical they're using easily ignites and turns into hydrogen cyanide.
https://crosscut.com/environment/2022/04/hanford-report-reve...
Each dollar spent on a nuke is exactly that dollar not spent on renewables, instead. But it takes with it another dollar spent on coal while waiting for construction to complete.
The amount spent just on coal and coal plant operation during those ten long years is enough, by itself, to build enough renewables to displace the nuke. The cost of building the nuke itself is enough to build several times enough to displace the nuke, beyond.
And the renewables would come on immediately, displacing carbon immediately.
Without radically increasing build-out of renewables, we will fail to avert climate catastrophe. The exact mode of civilization collapse in that case is debatable, but global thermonuclear war punctuates many.
Batteries have been falling in price by 27%/year recently, and PV by nearly that much, so it's a bold position to assert this will suddenly stop.
Now, is it possible that a new type of battery will appear and take over the market by 2030? Yes. Will there be enough of them to compete with the stabilizing power of a nuclear power plant? Maybe. Will there be enough nuclear + storage so that the best use of that storage will be to shut down the nuclear plant? Absolutely not.
Basically, we need massive amounts of new electrical power (so we can transition transportation to electrical), and we need to shut down all fossil fuel power generation yesterday. Since we can't have enough storage yet for an exclusively green grid, nuclear shouldn't be competing with green energy in this discussion. Our choices are not "all green by 2030 VS green by 2030 + nuclear", they are "green + coal/gas by 2030 vs green + nuclear + less coal/gas". If we're instead talking about 2100, or 2200, then yeah, well probably be able to shut down nuclear as well.
The best use of a nuclear power plant is not to build it at all. Having not built it, the storage built instead at a tiny fraction of the cost will certainly be more than enough to replace it.
Building any nukes means, for each, building several times less new renewable generating capacity than could otherwise be.
(The "synthetic baseload" comparison is favorable to nuclear, as dealing with variable demand can only help renewables as it already requires storage, and that storage can serve double duty in the variable demand case. Similarly dispatchable demand and transmission between countries also only helps renewables.)
It's difficult to get nuclear to compete with wind+solar+batteries+hydrogen in the 2030 cost scenarios. Nuclear does least worse in places like Poland then.
There are many alternatives to batteries, for longer term storage. Tanked anhydrous liquified ammonia may be common, particularly for smaller and more isolated utility districts, in part because tankage can be topped up from imports if it runs low.
Underground or sea-floor compressed air are practical, as is buoyancy, in many places. Many more places can use pumped hydro than have an existing dam, or watershed; either up a hill or down to an underground cavity.
The method used will be whatever is cheapest in the place and time constructed. Cost for most methods is falling fast.
Building a nuke is by far the most expensive baseline alternative, provided it can even be approved and built on a useful schedule.
Nant de Drance has 900MW of storage, and took 14 years to build. Each of the last generation reactors in Hanul generate 950+MW of power, and took 5 years to build. The first newer generation reactor is 1340MW, and (assuming it keeps its schedule) has taken 10 years to build. They've done the first tests so they have some chance of connecting to the grid this year, but let's be pessimistic and say that it will take another 4 years - matching the construction time for Nant de Drance.
That's still ~50% more power, and it is actually generating it: for Nant de Drance to help, it also needs >900MW of actual renewable power generation plants to be built and operated.
There is little economy of scale, in pumped hydro. California stores a much larger amount of energy in numerous reservoirs all over the Sierra Nevada range.
NZ has a very green power grid but it's not perfect and suffers from reliability issues dependent on snowfall to fill the hydro lakes. Nuclear would have and still could provide a lot more security in that area.
I'm hoping NZ sees the light and accepts small nuclear as a decent method of going to 100% green sources (currently it's 85%)
https://www.ans.org/news/article-1913/first-steps-into-a-new...
If they did go ahead without safety measures, and had an incident, the plant would likely be shut down, and then you have the domino effect that Fukishima had (e.g., Germany shutting down all their plants). Nuclear can be viable when both proper safety can be ensured economically, and when that surety can be shared by its voting population
Three Mile Island had two close calls. The first was the reactor was only 30-60 minutes from going into complete meltdown. The second was potentially using a faulty crane to remove the lid of the reactor vessel. Either one of those would have made large areas of dense urban area unlivable.
So I ask again: just what horrible public-relevant accident is supposed to have nearly happened here? I can't imagine anything that would have caused anything catastrophic. The lid falling back onto the reactor vessel wouldn't be that.
Quick googling shows wildly different numbers, but the lowest study in top results says 1 million per year from coal alone.
All global warming + pollution is way higher. One study estimated 1 in 5 deaths. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00139...
> South Australia is at the vanguard of the global energy transition, having transformed its energy system from 1% to over 60% renewable energy in just over 15 years.
> By 2025/2026, the Australian Energy Market Operator forecasts this could rise to approximately 85%.
> South Australia’s aspiration is to achieve 100% net renewables by 2030. In 2021, South Australia met 100% of its operational demand from renewable resources on 180 days (49%).
https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/industry/modern-energy/le...
> South Australia’s aspiration is to achieve 100% net renewables by 2030
That link you sent is bleak. They just now are hitting the point where renewable generation causes excess energy during peak solar hours sometimes. They have no concrete plans to store at the scale required to actually get through the troughs. They are just now beginning to kick the tires on storage projects which is where much of the southwestern US was a decade ago.
Like, I just don't understand your negativity. Projecting to reach 85% renewable penetration in ~3 years and it is a bleak outlook? You're looking for a magic finger snap and it is 100% tomorrow?
Without massive storage, yes. The 60% it picked up is the easy part of the demand that follows the renewable production. The last 40% is 95%+ of the difficult work.
The difference here is making a rocket that gets to space vs one that achieves orbit. They seem similar but they aren’t even in the same league.
>Like, I just don't understand your negativity.
It’s not negativity, it’s what has happened in every country that is a decade or more ahead of Australia here. Australia is not magic, it has nighttimes and slow winds like every other place on the planet. This problem has plagued everyone at the head of the technology curve here and there still isn’t a solution. What do you think Australia will do differently?
Not to say there isn't a lesson to be learned, obviously, but to say the plant couldn't deal with an outage is ingenuous at minimum.
For example some natural disaster, which across ubiquitously deployed nuclear would occur every day somewhere on earth.
Sure, and they thought of them, which is why they had generators as well as batteries.
Did you mean "disingenuous"? "Ingenuous" means lacking in guile or craftiness. "Disingenuous" means having the intent to deceive, and is used much more often.
If what you say took place, along with the solar and wind power advances that happened, we'd at least be looking at a lot longer warming runway than we are today.
Fewer than 50 people have died from nuclear power in its entire history, meanwhile an estimated 8.7 million people die each year from fossil fuels [0].
[0] https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-are-the-ef...
The environmental lobby does not exist, but pressure from NatGas producers to "orient" the Greens towards fear of NP did & does.
However the idea that climate change is political capital for them is ludicrous: clearly their activism totally failed...
does the renewable industry magically not have the same politico-economic incentives to lobby politicians like every other industry?
No, it’s just that the roots of the green movement are mixed with the nuclear disarmament movement, and the rejection of nuclear unfortunately got carried on to civilian power plants :(
fossil fuel lobby though... they have billions of reasons to lobby against nuclear, to the point that they may give eco-terrorists money to do their work for them. can't say this happened, but see Germany - it's the least effort rational explanation.
How about the oil and gas lobby?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...
It's situations where the emotional terror of acute risks forces you to default to a behavior that has less tractable, long term, systemic risks. Mitigating the acute risks is too expensive, so instead, you accept being the frog boiled alive because long term risks are harder to quantify and more nebulously terrifying. You're terrified of a nuclear meltdown, so instead you subject global civilization to decades of unnecessary fossil fuel burning. A nuclear meltdown that kills hundreds or thousands is terrifying, but coal burning that quietly kills millions from air pollution is silent.
Other examples...
* When you're terrified of Covid, so you suspend most of your activities and spend two years mostly staying home, gaining 50 pounds and decimating your fitness which drastically increases your risk of cardiovascular disease and overall significantly increasing your likelihood of dying young far in excess of the acute risk that Covid actually posed to your demographic.
* When we're so scared as a society of the Covid death spike that we stunt the social and educational development of children by years, which is potentially unrecoverable.
* When a small group of religious radicals kill 3000 people in a fantastical way, so you set yourself on a trillion dollar war to lose thousands more of your young people to combat deaths and directly and indirectly kill hundreds of thousands of poor foreigners, coming away not practically any safer than the basic changes to airline security policies would have done for a fraction of the dollar and human life costs.
One could argue that certain features of covid make it riskier with regard to long-term effects, but that is not a proposition that is well developed in the public conversation, especially by proponents of the zoonosis hypothesis. The lab origin hypothesis with its accompanying assumptions of serial passage and direct gene modification would in my eyes strengthen the case that covid's long-term effects were less likely to conform to historical data on other viral infections, though interestingly the intersection of those who find the lab origin more convincing with those who have serious concerns about long-term harms is a pretty small set.
Yes. The distinguishing factor there is that most new strains do not kill millions of people within the first year or two of discovery. Compare, for example, the H1N1 variant that caused the 2009 flu pandemic, which killed "only" around 300,000 people (based on best excess death estimates).
> One could argue that certain features of covid make it riskier with regard to long-term effects, but that is not a proposition that is well developed in the public conversation, especially by proponents of the zoonosis hypothesis.
This has long been an established part of the messaging: we're more or less confident that short term effects to young, otherwise healthy individuals are minor. The guidance has still been to avoid infection, because we're not confident that mild short term guarantee or protect against serious long term effects. Chickenpox (and subsequently shingles) exemplify this.
I understand the intuition that a non-zoonotic origin would lend credence to the possibility of long term risks, but I don't think the epidemiology actually supports the intuition: my understanding is that viruses that jump the species gap tend to have higher variability in terms of their harm to the new species.
It's kind of fair enough to be afraid with a chances of meltdown projected at 1/3704 reactor years:
https://lemielleux.com/what-are-the-chances-of-a-nuclear-pow...
Those odds are why not a single insurance company will insure a nuclear reactor for more than 0.3% the cost of a nuclear disaster.
Speaking of fallacies, your argument squarely falls under the false dilemma fallacy. Nuclear is not the only form of green energy. In fact it is by far the most expensive one as well as the only one that imparts a small chance of catastrophe.
It isnt needed to provide reliable power either. Wind, solar, pumped storage, batteries and demand shaping can, together, do it cheaper:
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3539703-no-mi...
https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-530000-potent...
That is for existing reactors. The point of new designs is to do better:
"The likelihood of core damage due to NuScale reactor equipment failures while at full power conditions is 1 event per module every ~3 Billion Years."
https://www.nuscalepower.com/benefits/safety-features/emerge...
Otherwise it's all talk. Manufacturers will always claim on that their product is 99.9% safe.
The closest realistic measure is how much financial liability their insurer is willing to shoulder and at what cost.
Which is still capped at 0.03% of 1 fukushima in the US because the government thinks pushing it any higher would spook them.
that trillion estimate, one of the lower ones by the way, is a cost figure without the associated profits and revenue. As horrible as it is and was, the 'military industrial complex', as a whole, profited incredibly -- this 'trickled down', a phrase I hate to use , all across the United States in the form of jobs from market players and call-for-bids across the nation to fill in niche topics (like airport security, for example) that were otherwise un-worked beforehand.
Another aside : the proof that airport security has changed anything for the better is scant at best, and corrupt at worst.
tl;dr : if you think any of the wars in the middle east were fought for the sake of 'American Safety', whatever that might be, then you're just not paying enough attention.
We’re talking about the guy who managed to tank the worlds healthiest budget
https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2012/07/23/super...
What you end up with after spending that trillion is a bit different though.
That's an article of conservative dogma dating from the Reagan and Bush eras, and it's pretty-much discredited now. For most major capital expenditure programmes, the majority of the money trickling down stops trickling once it reaches shareholders and executives.
This sounds a lot like "we should ignore warnings about pollution because the cost of moving away from fossil fuels would be too expensive," actually.
Picking such an open-ended thing like this really undermines your point here. You want people's Covid-prompted behaviors (exaggerated into stuff like "two years mostly staying home, gaining 50 pounds") to be compared to "fear of nuclear meltdown." But you can't substantiate those long-term risks in anything like the same way we can those of burning coal at this point. Is Covid more "potentially unrecoverable" for kids and young adults than themselves or family members being drafted for a world war and dying en masse? Than school shootings that we tolerate for vague "protect our liberty" talk?
Sure, I think it's reasonable to expect people to provide sources to support ideas when possible, but it's a little unreasonable to expect people to do extensive first-party research to support their opinions.
I think there's value in the discussion either way. Most of the time I don't think we're going to change people's minds with this sort of discussion, but I do enjoy seeing what people's positions are on these sorts of topics, and find that I learn things from it.
Good thing nuclear doesn't produce hazardous waste we need to store safely for thousands of years. That would be a pretty horrible, long term risk.
But OTOH who gives a fsck about generations to come, storing the waste safely while I'm still alive should be doable.
As in literally dig a hole the size of an Olympic swimming pool, store literally all the nuclear waste that has ever been produced (maybe you’ll need a few pools, I haven’t checked), and spend a few million a year maintaining it for the next century or so.
This example (that I suspect you shoe-horned in to rant) undermines, but also fully demonstrates, your entire point because you've just casually and conveniently ignored the reduced risk _to society as a whole_. I.e., those actually vulnerable from getting sick in the first instance, but further still overwhelming the health and welfare services to the detriment of *everybody*.
But also reeks of FY;GM.
I was all for various covid measures, did all the vaccines, didn't travel, practiced social distancing meticulously... to no avail, we caught it 3x by now, all the times through our small kids. At this point its milder/similar than common cold for us, unlike those being hit for the first time.
Looking back, many governments around the world applied ridiculously strict restrictions, which just highlighted how badly incompetent in the best headless chicken form they are in SHTF scenarios. You couldn't travel more than 1km from your home (ie France), you couldn't be out after 6/7/8 pm even if you just want to go for a stroll or run in the forest, alone (which I do a lot). Things like these were completely needless and heavily infringed on common folks basic rights, not even going into the topic of fucking up population physical health massively down the road. Not surprisingly population's overall mental health decreased significantly too.
Forcing education of kids from home is seen as failure of even greater proportions. Not only was the system utterly unprepared in first months, but this form just doesn't work as well as direct physical contact. Kids missing tons of societal development that will never work well in digital form. We should have just put extra care into protecting vulnerable and otherwise move on with our lives. If I would be an old fart and somebody would give me choice of fucking up my grandkids lives for some potential extra safety for me, I would choose my grandkids anytime, everytime.
When we could have handled it ie like Sweden (from what I've heard), without any significant basic rights restrictions, and with resulting covid numbers very much the same. Next winter will show how missing 2 cold/flu seasons will bode for us, I suspect mortality stats will jump through the roof (within these diseases number ranges of course). Diabetes, cardiovascular and mental issues are already up.
And one more point I haven't seen much mentioned - society as a whole completely fucked up its approach to healthcare workers. Yes there were evening claps for few months. While a nice gesture, they won't fix the burnout many had. So anywhere I look, health systems have much less medical personnel, mainly nurses simply left their jobs. The situation ie in France is so bad some big cities have to close emergencies through the weekend (!!!). Some emergency doctors left too. There is no quick fix for this. An example - I've recently spent 4 hours to get 1 blood test done (something taking 15 mins before) - and that is already optimized for timing and location since my wife is a doctor.
This period won't be judged nicely by our descendants.
In the end, US casualties only being ~1 million was actually a positive outcome, things could have been a lot worse even if exactly the same people got sick but they did so even slightly faster. Worse suffering 5+ times as many casualties in 2020 would not have prevented the variants which would happily reinfect people.
There wasn’t any great options, but many of them where far worse.
1) Healthcare is too important for light touch regulation =>
2) Big political fight over regulation =>
3) Competition in healthcare largely disappears =>
4) Oh no something went wrong, now we have to adjust what human rights are available based on how prepared the government is for a rather predictable crisis (COVID wasn't/isn't even the bad-case for a highly contagious respiratory disease).
There are people seriously trying to argue that walking more than single-digit kilometres from a body's home depends on what the government's hospital policy was 5 years ago. In complete seriousness, this is crazy. I thought we'd agreed that basic rights were a thing but it turns out large segments of the population and bureaucrats seriously don't believe that.
And exactly what we got to show for this is questionable. Border controls are the only government tool that I have faith in after that pandemic. Even the vaccine we only managed because people agreed that the usual safety procedures would take to long and that we could skip them because the economic damage caused by fearful people was too great. The governments of the world caused a lot of problems these last few years.
Mary Mallon was forcibly quarantined, let go resulting in 2 additional deaths, and then permanently quarantined in the US because she was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever in the early 1900’s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon The most common versions historically was locking people in their homes or isolating a community from the outside.
As to your complaint, walking outside does carry the risk of infecting others as people demonstrably have gotten COVID from walking past each other. It’s a low risk which why it was generally acceptable, but officials where balancing even this vs more people dying.
If you look at agency budgets you’d think our money would’ve bought a better plan.
The US for example encouraged but didn’t mandate the general public get vaccinated. It’s easy to say that’s the wrong choice, but people would have seriously objected.
I don’t know about the situation in the USA where everything seemed very political and what was done was far less stringent than in my own country but here in France it was pretty obvious that most of the measures were taken haphazardly mostly to placate an ageing population. It was very funny. The media kept blaming the young socialising for cases when it was painfully obvious that most contaminations came from schools.
That parahraph seems to contradict itself. By locking down we slowed down transmission, until treatments and vaccines were available. That is why the effects were so mild for you vs the people who caught it in the earlier waves. How was it to 'no avail', when you state the benefit right afterwards?
The reason we have annual flu shots is because influenza mutates so readily, so it's not like most people have a highly developed immunity to whatever common influenza strain is going around anyway. And fun fact (truly, it's awesome), at least one strain of influenza appears to have gone extinct. It seems possible that your prediction is completely backwards, and that our scattershot headless chicken COVID mitigation policies have managed to permanently improve flu season.
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/03/1003020235/certain-strains-of...
It really, really, isn't.
Hospitals the world over were completely and wholly overwhelmed with patients sick with COVID-19. Lockdowns reduced transmissions, hospitalisations dropped.
That's it. That's all that needs understanding.
Sometimes you have to put on your adult pants, realize you live in a society and not n million individual states of nature, and give up a bit of individual freedom, temporarily, for the safety of the whole.
Because I didn't need to, and no one required me to? Because I didn't believe having to wear a mask, get a vaccine and not being able to eat out at a restaurant was an intolerable violation of my rights, given the alternative?
The alternative being the increased chance of getting COVID and the increased chance of spreading it to others. Not the permanent state of pharmaco-military-industrial complex imposed tyranny the anti-maskers kept insisting we would all inevitably descend into because "when governments take away your rights they never give them back voluntarily." Nope, here I am, not in a globalist labor camp, with all the rights and freedoms I had prior to the pandemic.
Obviously the balance between liberty and safety leads to anarchy on one extreme and authoritarianism on the other, but the question of whether governments can justifiably take temporary measures which interfere with individual liberties in order to mitigate a pandemic outbreak isn't an open one.
And once it sank, we can add few other easily bannable cases (random examples - sugar, no exercise) which will put the number of saved lives in few millions, per every year.
Yet suddenly all those internet warriors who feel righteous and know by heart what needs to be done for society and by society are quiet about these. Nobody is arguing government should force people to exercise, yet school showed us how easily it can be done. It would save more lives than any covid measure ever taken, it will measurably improve people's lives, its quality and happiness, and no adverse effect apart from US HFCS industry.
Where do you draw the line? Certainly elsewhere than I do. But I am not showing that line down your throat and forcing you to live by it, do I. Can you please righteous people like you let people like me take a walk in the forest, alone? Is it really that hard to understand?
This is typical internet discussion for 21st century - few people are very vocal, and they give the impression their voice is consensus. Yet reality is a bit more complex.
This isn't an objective argument.
> Because I didn't need to... Because I didn't believe...
I agree with all the things you mentioned here. However, you failed to mention a myriad of things the government imposed that were, at best, worthless and, at worst, counter-productive. Did you agree with closing beaches/parks? Closing outdoor gatherings is and was known to be anti-science at the time. It had the nice side effect of having people gather indoors because people are social and you won't stop them from gathering.
> The alternative being the increased chance of getting COVID and the increased chance of spreading it to others
Would you be on board with the sealing in of doors as happened in China or is that too much imposition on your freedom? Would you agree with the travel restrictions placed on people in Australia? Both of those instances achieve your goal of reducing your chance of getting and spreading COVID.
There is an entire population of people who have different, subjective, opinions. You're going to have a bad time if you think yours is the _one true opinion_ and fail to tolerate any descent.
You and I seem to be of similar minds in what restrictions are reasonable (and I tolerate a bit more or less because I know I'm not objectively correct). The difference between us is that when some people think the line should be drawn elsewhere, I don't derisively refer to them like this:
> Not the permanent state of pharmaco-military-industrial complex imposed tyranny the anti-maskers kept insisting we would all inevitably descend into because "when governments take away your rights they never give them back voluntarily." Nope, here I am, not in a globalist labor camp, with all the rights and freedoms I had prior to the pandemic.
> but the question of whether governments can justifiably take temporary measures which interfere with individual liberties in order to mitigate a pandemic outbreak isn't an open one.
And (nearly) nobody thinks it is because that's the easy question. The hard question is always how much and you've done a masterful job of acting like people who have a different answer to the hard question instead have a different answer to the easy question thereby making your disdain of them justified.
"Cowardice"? From an old version of the Wikipedia article, "Fear and excessive self-concern lead one to not do things of benefit to oneself and one's group" [0]
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/7/5/heres-why-we-re...
Why replace one type of antiscience/antiintelectualism (anti nuclear people) with another (antivax)?
People aren't black and white in their beliefs, despite what the political duopoly would like you to believe.
It's funny because I was actually able to lose 50 pounds by establishing an exercise routine at home.
I understand your argument but it doesn't work for COVID: if anything lockdowns gives people more time to exercise instead of commuting via car.
So each module is a little smaller than the reactor of the 1960's era submarine I served on and is based on the same pressurized water technology. I was a "nuke" so had to go in the reactor compartment several times. As far as I can remember, the reactor was about 10 feet in diameter. We went in the shipyard for refueling after the lifetime of the rods, which was 15 years. I could never understand why we didn't build these for civilian use (cost I figured) but now we will. Cool.
https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/news/2022/22-...
I'm abstractly aware that nuclear technology is reliable, but your anecdote somehow makes it more relatable. You've piqued my curiosity :)
https://www.twi-global.com/technical-knowledge/job-knowledge...
That sounds absolutely terrifying. How did you guys end up fixing it?
>In the shipyard we had an incident where the neutron detector pegged high but it was determined to be caused by TIG welding.
Neat! :)
I never understood the argument nuclear power is so "dangerous". The US navy has fielded nuclear reactors in warzones since 1954 and no Chernobyl. Almost the entire fleet is nuclear-powered, including all aircraft carriers, subs, and battleships.
Whether this is true, it shows that the obsolescence of battleships (since aircraft carriers came on line) was recognized well before WWII.
We did get five of the eight battleships back (although some were basically cored out like a rotten tooth and rebuilt almost from scratch.) Two ships were left there (Utah and Arizona). Oklahoma was raised mostly to free up its slot in the harbor, but sank in 1947 while being towed to San Francisco Bay to be scrapped.
The BB's role in the Pacific War was as AA platforms and for shore bombardment.
But if you include "amphibious assault ships" like the Wasp class, which can carry a lot of helicopters and STOVL airplanes like the F-35B and Harrier, then US Navy still has a lot of conventional powered carriers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_cruisers_of_th...
Really? I wouldn't be surprised to hear someone call a frigate a cruiser or a littoral combat ship a destroyer or an amphibious assault ship a carrier but everyone knows battleships are the biggest big-gun ships out there.
I try not to judge, I'm probably equally wrong without knowing it about things as far outside my area of interest.
I would also not be surprised if there were many people who'd never heard the terms "destroyer" or "cruiser".
I thought they were obsolete.
Incidentally, VLS allows for much faster deployment of missiles, and doesn't require deck space for different launchers for different missiles, and a ship with a modern VLS have a huge rate-of-fire advantage on older rail launcher equipped ships.
* Cost of procurement.
* Role of the ship: why have an expensive ship that turns into a radioactive reef in a role when one of its missions is to "take a bullet" for a carrier?
* No competition. The Soviets were gone.
Imagine a world where economies of scale bring nuclear power down to the cost of fuel and maintenance. EVs would be a no brainer Natural gas would be obsolete. Nuclear desalination would completely solve the water crisis in the US West. I’m confident that with advances in material science we would figure out how to build safe nuclear aircraft and nuclear rockets, ushering in a new space age. Really the possibilities are incredible. It would be the equivalent of humanity going from horse and buggy to using fossil fuels, but another order of magnitude.
In fact if we take Germany as a counter-example, when they stopped building nuclear power plants due to popular demand, they significantly increased renewable energy to a point where they are currently replacing coal power at a greater rate then France, despite Germany actively shutting down nuclear plants that still had years of life left.
This shows that Nuclear power might actually be a hindrance towards an electrified future, as governments have historically put to much faith in it, which was ultimately unwarranted, instead of investing in renewables.
EDIT: I feel like people are focusing on the wrong point here. I was apparently—and unintentionally—disingenuous by touting Germany’s success in replacing coal power with renewables, as compared to France. However, my main point still stands, that investing in nuclear well into the 1990s did not bring costs and delays of new plants down.
If we (US) hadn't stopped building nuclear in the 80s and had instead merely key up the pace, our grid wouldn't be 20% nuclear like it is today, it would be 100% nuclear.
Instead, we made the choice to pump 20 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere while we waited for solar and wind to become viable. I'm glad they finally are -- they just broke into double digits, in a few years they will pass the nuclear buildout we stopped in the 80s -- but that was one helluva waiting cost.
It's not as though Germany could have 'decided' in the 1970s to have 2022 technology. Sure, increased investment at the time may have sped up the development of renewables, but it still wouldn't be fast. Science doesn't quite work that way.
But here we are, instead. Thank Reagan. And Bush. And Bush, again.
US spent $5T trashing Iraq and Afghanistan. That would have paid for completely switching over to renewables, several time over.
Reagan took the solar panels off the White House for a reason, so his buddy James Watt could kill off any alternatives to fossil energy. That regime lasted until the 90s and by then any memory of the oil crises in the 70s was long gone.
The panels installed on the White House were not photovoltaic solar panels - they were solar water heater panels. (After they damaged the roof, they weren't replaced after the repairs were done.) It wouldn't have been possible to run the economy on solar water heater panels.
I’m not the biggest fan of arguing about alternate history, but this thread originally spun out after an ancestor poster claimed we would have a rosy present if only we had invested more in nuclear energy. I claim I find way more wishful then claiming the same about renewables.
On the other we have a technology that still doesn't exist in the 2020s and would also need to be build out.
Cockroach archeologists will be puzzled why we chose to go extinct.
You keep saying this, but I'm not sure where it's coming from. Reading upthread, my interpretation is that we are specifically talking about the technology that exists today, in 2022.
I think it's entirely reasonable that, if investments into renewables were made in the 70s and 80s at a level comparable to investments in fossil fuels or nuclear, we would have seen, in the 90s, renewables technology comparable to what we have today. No, it wouldn't be the same technology, but I could see efficiency numbers being similar, though perhaps at a bit higher cost.
This seems to be implying that basically all the research was done between the 2000's and now, and that scientists had been twiddling their thumbs between 1970 and 2000. Actually, scientific advances between 1970 and 2000 were critical to enable the renewables boom that we experienced since 2000.
Could it have gone faster if more funds had been made available? Maybe. But claiming that we "lost" 30 years in research on that topic simply shows ignorance about the way research works.
> US spent $5T trashing Iraq and Afghanistan. That would have paid for completely switching over to renewables, several time over.
Yeah, and if the Romans hadn't spent so much time fighting with their neighbours, we would all be eating free lunches now.
There's reports around about what actually drove the price drops in renewable, and while research plays it's part, market support and scale are big factors, we definately squandered multiple opportunities to nip climate change in the bud.
I shudder to think what failure looks like to you.
Operating the wind farms is much cheaper than operating the nukes and mining the extra coal would have been. That opex savings goes to more capex wind generation capacity, further reducing costs by each GW displaced.
So, yes, success. Not being off coal already is not failure. Replacing an entire country's energy infrastructure takes time, no matter what.
Looks at France
Sure.
France uses 20x less coal than Germany to begin with (https://www.worldometers.info/coal/coal-consumption-by-count...) so I'm not sure about the comparison of reducing consumption
Also, during the recent conflict with Russia, Germany is turning coal plants back online and France is not.
Domestic coal consumption figures are meaningless.
That's wrong. France is a net exporter of power, by over 50%. So even on aggregate it is a net benefit to the world since 90% of the power generated is CO2 free.
That sounds a less impressive when you rephrase it as saying they went from 15x more coal use than france to 9x as much. Percentage wise the decrease seems similar in the last few years.
source: https://www.iea.org/countries/france https://www.iea.org/countries/germany
Despite that, the public opinion soured so bad, that it is the detractors that had to bring disaster to nuclear reactors. Protestors fired rocket-propelled grenades at a plant[0]. It did not cause any nuclear danger.
On the other hand, the costs grew because the standards for risk grew to tremendous levels that are way, way above those applied for the coal and gas industries, or wind and solar for that matter.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix#Rocket_attack
The wiki article you linked says the plant was unfinished. This would indicate the attack was a protest against the construction of the plant, not an attempt to induce a nuclear meltdown. You are perhaps unintentionally twisting the facts.
Historically the countries that invested in nuclear and hydro have been most successful in lowering the carbon intensity of their energy sector. Looking at the data, Germany does not appear to be nearly as successful as France. In 2021 France's electricity averaged 68 gCO2/kWh, and Germany averaged 364 gCO2/kWh.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/low-carbon-share-energy?t...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
Germany is like 40% coal, and France is maybe 5%. It's easier to reduce at a faster rate when your use is still massive.
> In fact if we take Germany as a counter-example, when they stopped building nuclear power plants due to popular demand, they significantly increased renewable energy to a point where they are currently replacing coal power at a greater rate then France, despite Germany actively shutting down nuclear plants that still had years of life left.
Rarely have I seen reality mistreated so blatantly.
France has barely used coal in the last 4 decades, and so it seems to be enough to claim that, by slowly reducing their coal use, Germany does much better.
That reminds me of the popular definition of chutzpah: the person that asks for mercy after murdering his parents, since, afterall, he's now an orphan.
> However, my main point still stands, that investing in nuclear well into the 1990s did not bring costs and delays of new plants down.
Your main point is wrong. [1] shows that each model has experienced faster build time as new units were built. What is true is that new, more advanced designs can take more time to build than older, less advanced designs.
[1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_r%C3%A9acteurs_nucl%...
CP0: first reactor 6.5y, last reactor 5y
CP1: first reactor 6y, last reactor 5y
CP2: first reactor 5y, last reactor 6y
P4 : first reactor 7y, last reactor 6y
P'4: first reactor 7y, last reactor 6.5y
N4 : first reactor 12y, last reactor 7.5y
> it conveniently excludes
Honestly, I suspect you're just namedroping here. But let's adress the point: Olkiluoto and Flamanville are the first 2 reactors of their generation, I'm not sure what you want to compare them to in terms of build time. My guess is that Hinkley point will get built much faster, and that we may see further improvements if more are built.
Absolutely true. It proved expensive even at large scale and with full support of the state. I don't trust promises or hypotheticals of cheap nuclear power, at all.
But here's the thing: France succeeded with decarbonizing their electricity production. It's a pretty notable success. Yes, it was (and remains) expensive and yes those plants are now failing often, remaining expensive ober their whole lifetime. But it worked and France could afford it.
I'd argue many other countries could afford it as well. The German electricity mix is a lot dirtier by comparison.
failing plants due to their age and maintenance resulting in less nuclear power in the long run say otherwise
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_by_country#Germ...
Economies of scale were applied from the inception of commercial nuclear power, yet the promise of electricity too cheap to meter has never materialized. Quite the opposite. In fact, nuclear has always been the most expensive method of generating electricity, and the anti-nukes don't enter into it. Even if every individual on the planet was pro-nuke, it would still be too expensive. If it was otherwise, nothing whatsoever could prevent investors from coming out of the woodwork to fulfill your dream of nuclear power plants everywhere. Make nuclear energy economical and you can have all the nuclear power plants you want, as well as being absurdly wealthy. But when you fail, try to avoid blaming anything other than nuclear energy itself.
https://energypost.eu/how-profitable-is-an-investment-in-nuc...
And France, with many Nuclear plants, has recently had issues keeping the plants up. Many of the most problematic plants are newer ones.
https://www.ans.org/news/article-3939/frances-energy-woes-wo...
The reality is economies of scale have kicked in for solar and wind energy in a way they never can for nuclear. We are at the point where it makes sense, at times, to overprovision renewals to ensure enough supply.
The issue with renewables is storage, of course. But that problem looks to be more solvable than cost effective nuclear, a problem which we have not solved in over 50 years. One can say if we were only smarter we could make nuclear more cost effective, which is probably true. But we built a nuclear power plant where a tsunami occurred in the past, only to find it occurred again, so we aren't that smart. The issue with nuclear is everything has to be right for it to be cost effective and safe, and nuclear is too complex for humans to consistently do this.
Safe nuclear power that is also cost effective is not a problem we have solved.
My vote is to rapidly install renewables while we have the natural gas backstop, and give the storage startups a few years to make it happen. Energy Dome, Hydrostor, and Form Energy all look promising.
And if new nuclear turns out to be less expensive than expected, great.
Many more than that.
That said, I am not super bullish on nuclear, and agree with your position. Solar and wind are just getting too cheap for nuclear to get the investment needed to catch-up. If we see someone crack the code on cheap storage of electiciy, solar and wind will runaway with the prize. Not coincidentally, storage is has vastly more investment of money and brains on looking for ways to scale vs nuclear.
*Safety concerns with nuclear will make iterative design difficult to pull off!
So do oil and coal [0]:
> Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $5.9 trillion in 2020 or about 6.8 percent of GDP, and are expected to rise to 7.4 percent of GDP in 2025
[0]: https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2021/09/23/Sti...
It’s really hard to invest billions of capital dollars that won’t produce any return for a decade while you can realize immediate return on solar with costs that drop every year.
Accountants are the worst enemy of nuclear, not activists.
The short version is, you need to have enough generations of reactor building to allow later projects to benefit from previous learnings. Because of various outside effects (this is a euphemism for the anti-nuke lobby) that type of iterative improvement and workforce skilling didn’t happen in other countries.
The same will be true of fusion. Set a target level of service and make electric generation a government service. The government is better at capital projects anyway and if energy were a taxpayer funded service it would transform society in many ways.
Comparative costs to other OECD countries for similar infrastructure - there really isn't one, as the US is way out of line in terms of cost and quality.
My family member communicated with counterparts in other countries, impressed with what they were doing. When asked what the research was that they based their projects on, they all said it was the US funded research (which the US doesn't take advantage of).
I’m sure the interstate highway system is the best the 1950s has to offer.
- Alaskan Way Viaduct
- Tappan Zee bridge replacement
- Billions in highway projects.
https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/mario-cuomo-bridge-s...
I mean, these people basically gain popularity when government is shown to be inefficient, but at the same time, they're the ones tasked with running the government.
It doesn't work because nuclear is the only power where all the externalities are accounted for. The average coal plant kills more people with radiation released from burning coal every year than all nuclear accidents combined.
But because it's nicely diffuse no one cares.
https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-wastes-coal-fired-po...
The link you provided indicates the level of radiation is negligible, so I'm not sure what your point is.
Amazing.
When people said we'd be using renewables I somehow didn't think dinosaur farts would be the largest slice of the pie.
Even in France, which has a very supportive population, and is usually heralded as a nuclear success story, saw increasing costs rather than decreasing costs as they build more of the same reactor model.
Construction productivity doesn't increase like manufacturing productivity does. Nuclear's failures are, as far as I can tell, entirely the responsibility of those tasked with building it. And it's quite possible that nuclear only makes sense at a certain level of economic development, with the right level of technology, but not too much technological development such that manufacturing has completely eclipsed construction.
Go to any investor that would build nuclear, and they won't cite public opposition as the reason not to build, they will cite the construction risk.
And that's why this SMR design is being tried rather than large reactors.
I'd be curious to learn where you got your data for this, because I have never been able to find such data. Best I could get was average cost of a plant in a "pallier".
What I can provide is building duration, which definitely goes down as more of the same model are built, but there's no guarantee that building duration and cost are equal here.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
There's another paper somewhere in my bookmarks that shows this for reactors of the same model built in the US, and maybe also France, but I'm having trouble locating it right now...
As with any single publication, it can't be taken as the revealed truth, but it's the best I have at hand.
Edit: how could I have forgotten about the infamous Loveringe, Yip, Nordgard paper! This is impressive because it does the analysis across many countries, and finds a few with cost decreases, but a dominant trend towards more expensive construction:
https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0301421516300106?...
My personal, untested, hypothesis is that these variations have mostly to do with the general cost of labor in a country, and in particular their level of economic advancement, which establishes a floor on the value of an hour of a person's labor. Specifically, my guess is that construction is only feasible for nuclear when a country is in a magic sweet spot where labor is cheap, and technological advancement is moderate, like 1950s-70s US level. But not so advanced that labor has gotten so expensive that skilled labor like welders have more productive uses of their time.
If my theory is correct, future costs for South Korea should rise from where they were before stopping their program (in a flurry of corruption scandals, I would note. Nobody brings up South Korea as an example of successful construction anymore, instead having to resort to suggesting Rosatom should embark on a massive building spree across the globe.)
Just wonder if we're pricing in those externalities from coal, like hundreds of thousands of deaths per year due to air pollution and the fact that it is completely fucking up the atmosphere, leading to a global catastrophe. Because...we're not.
Some of the costs/risks with nuclear are a bit black swannish though which complicates matters.
Energy efficiency, pollution controls and carbon taxes are the real magical tech we've not exploited.
Because cheaper in the long run means more expensive right now, which is a vulnerable political soft spot that psycopaths can easily exploit.
Do you have any actual numbers at hand?
"...is cheaper..." is a bit vague.
This uses real weather data for various countries and optimize solar + wind + batteries + hydrogen to provide a constant output at minimum cost. The results are interesting. You can tweak the cost assumptions.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclearpower-waste-id...
'Former President Jimmy Carter halted reprocessing in 1977, citing proliferation concerns.'
it doesn't matter they were USSR. might as well have been PG&E. soviet people and usa people were both just people and still are.
Truly glad we prevented a few assholes corporations from making a mess of things. I get grossed out just thinking about the clean air and normal climate.
1 https://www.perkinelmer.com/au/product/cesium-137-calibratio...
I'm absolutely certain of it. In regards to nuclear rocketry, it wasn't even the anti-nuclear crowd that killed one of the most promising technologies but they certainly guaranteed it would die in the dustbins of JPL's archive.
NASA and the United Aircraft Corporation came up with a reactor design called the nuclear lightbulb [1] that used tens of kilograms of uranium instead of thousands by heating uranium hexaflouride [^1] to a plasma and using an irrotational vortex [^2] of neon gas to compress it until it became a self sustaining [^3] black body radiator [^4]. They were just about to test the reactor with real fuel when it was canceled (during Nixon's administration as part of the Mars program) but they managed to experimentally identify the remaining production challenges like the computational power needed to keep the core stable and the material science necessary to separate the vortex from the fluid economically. There has been so much progress in fields that address those challenges that many of the problems are considered solved and the remainder are surmountable engineering problems.
I really hope with this renewed interest in nuclear someone eventually revives the design and tries to bring it to its conclusion. Just based off of the declassified publications from the 60s and early 70s [2][3][4][5] it is obvious how much potential this design had: it's safe [^5], useful for rocketry and terrestrial power generation, and self breeding by nature of its design [^6]. Who knows where we could be in space exploration and the battle against climate change had the design been fully explored.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb
[2] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19730018850
[3] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19730018851
[4] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19710010820
[5] and many more in the JPL archives! Search for "gas core reactor"
[^1] UF6 is the most common intermediate in the enrichment process and depleted UF6 is how most of our nuclear waste is stored... and this reactor is a perfect breeding reactor for the waste (see [^5]). All of the infrastructure for dealing with the materials have existed since the Manhattan project.
[^2] the opposite of a rotational vortex like a tornado, which have calm centers. In an irrotational vortex the particles in the center have the highest velocity and in the reactor it acts like a centrifuge, forcing the uraninum to the center and compressing it to tens or hundreds of atmospheres. This part was tested experimentally.
[^3] the energy of the plasma and compression from the vortex increase the neutron cross section to the point where the nuclear reaction becomes self heating with only 20kg of fuel. They stopped just short of testing the full cycle but this is the same concept behind nuclear weapons, which use precise explosives to compress nuclear fuel until it reaches criticality, except the vortex can't generate the kind of pressures necessary for a nuclear explosion.
[^4] the NASA/UAC design heats the UF6 till it radiates most of its energy away as UV. Classical steam turbines or hydrogen gas seeded with tungsten nanoparticles (in the case of a rocket engine) allow the system to extract power.
[^5] since it's an active design, tons of power is required to pump the vortex and keep the core in a fissile regime. If any part of the system fails, the core loses pressure and becomes a really expensive gas canister until the chamber is cleaned up and the core restarted. With a plasma window separating the core from a vacuum, the entire system can be designed to depressurize safetly.
[^6] anything injected into the core gets bombarded by neutrons and the vortex system constantly wicks away small amounts of the core. The system forms a closed loop that recycles unused fuel via centrifuge and it can also separate out transmuted waste [*]. The NASA/UAC team tested this with a neutron gun to simulate fission in the core.
[*] we could have had honest-to-god alchemy!
despite lower standards, they've had no incidents
https://www.google.com/search?q=air+force+lost+hydrogen+bomb...
> The DOE later found water intruding into at least 14 single-shell tanks and that one of them had been leaking about 640 US gallons (2,400 l; 530 imp gal) per year into the ground since about 2010. In 2012, the DOE also discovered a leak from a double-shell tank caused by construction flaws and corrosion in the tank's bottom, and that 12 other double-shell tanks had similar construction flaws. ... Intermittent discoveries of undocumented contamination have slowed the pace and raised the cost of cleanup.
> In 2007, the Hanford site represented 60% of high-level radioactive waste by volume managed by the US Department of Energy[7] and 7–9% of all nuclear waste in the United States (the DOE manages 15% of nuclear waste in the US, with the remaining 85% being commercial spent nuclear fuel). Hanford is currently the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States and is the focus of the nation's largest environmental cleanup.
I collected a list of publicly known ones in response to someone claiming the same previously here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28376137
The Bikini Atoll in the Marshall islands is one of the most polluted places in the pacific ocean. The US military conducted nuclear testing around there and simply swept the pollution in one place. There are dozens of reports of cancer from both former military personnel an nearby local population. And concerns are rising with elevated sea level that pollution will be leaking at greater pace then currently.
These are just two examples of the US military neglecting safety concerns with their nuclear technology. There is no single spectacular event like the Chernobyl disaster. But rather decades of neglect and disregard to public safety which polluted many areas leaving potentially an overall damage on par—and potentially greater—then the Chernobyl disaster.
But that is despite the point. Their safety record with nuclear is horrendous. Full of examples of neglect and pollution. I’m not an expert in the nuclear history of the US military, but I wouldn’t be surprised that many of their smaller reactors have similar stories as Hanford. It is just not as spectacular—and therefor not as much in the public consciousness—as Chernobyl.
And yet we're still cleaning it up :)
> In 2007, the Hanford site represented 60% of high-level radioactive waste by volume managed by the US Department of Energy and 7–9% of all nuclear waste in the United States (the DOE manages 15% of nuclear waste in the US, with the remaining 85% being commercial spent nuclear fuel). Hanford is currently the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States and is the focus of the nation's largest environmental cleanup.
Your supposition that reactor accidents smaller than Chernobyl might be hidden from the public doesn't seem well grounded either; we know the US Army fucked up the operation of the SL-1 reactor, resulting in 3 deaths. Here's a big list of nuclear fuckups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid... Some of those severe, some minor. I don't see much reason to believe that substantial naval reactor incidents have been omitted from that list. Such accidents are hard to hide from long, particularly if it means a bunch of sailors got irradiated or a ship had to be taken out of service for decontamination / repair. The incidents on that list bracket the sort of mystery accident you're supposing; it lists accidents much less severe and much more severe.
I supposed no such thing. You don’t need an accident to leave a mess (as evidenced by our current climate crisis). You just need to be negligent of the environment and surrounding population center. The US military (including the Navy) has a terrible track record when it comes to environmental issues around its military bases around the world. My supposition is that they are simply equally inconsiderate with their nuclear logistics as they are with their other operations. And Bikini Atoll is my ground for thinking so.
Oil companies paid to form that opinion in the public.
>no Chernobyl
Chernobyl was the result of a HIGHLY unauthorized, and stupid experiment... phenomenally stupid. So many red flags were driven past at high speed.
The reality is to cause the issue, the operators had to drive the reactor well into a dangerous and hard to control regime which it would not get into under any normal operation circumstance.
So while yes, it shouldn't have been physically possible to do it, even with that design it took substantial, deliberate malfeasance to get that result (you can also only get that result with that design - a meltdown is not normally an explosion).
One of the things making this possible is 90+ percent enrichment of U235 in the fuel. That's weapons grade and won't fly in a civilian reactor. I haven't read NuScale's application in great detail but I'd be surprised if they used anything above 5 percent.
material specific energy w*h/kg
----------- ----------------------
uranium 22,394,000,000
...
diesel fuel 12,666The Chernobyl absolute exclusion zone is quite literally 1000 square miles. Nuclear advocates try to treat Chernobyl (and Fukushima and [insert nuclear disaster here]) as an irrelevant outlier rather than what it is: tangible evidence of the impact of inevitable human failure.
A plant has to be well-maintained and competently run. Waste products have to be safely stored and transported. As soon as you add corporations to the mix, you've now created a profit motive to neglect safety and maintenance because the risk of disaster is low but the failure modes are incredibly large. Humans have shown themselves to consistently be incredibly bad at managing low-probability high-impact failures.
> The US navy has fielded nuclear reactors in warzones since 1954 and no Chernobyl.
Military use of nuclear reactors is quite limited, being largely limited to a handful of submarines and aircraft carriers using highly enriched fuel. It's not done out of economic merit either. Having a nuclear missile submarine that can stay deployed for months can literally be done no other way.
All that has very little to do with commercial power generation.
Coal power kills 1000x as many people per unit as nuclear. Natural gas kills 40x as many. Solar kills 4x as many. Humans have shown themselves to consistently be incredibly bad at comparing chronic and acute risks at scale. 1: https://www.engineering.com/DesignSoftware/DesignSoftwareArt...
I dispute this number. Are you considering roof mounted residential solar? Most solar in a solar-powered world will be on the ground.
>Most solar in a solar-powered world will be on the ground.
It is probably more accurate to say that most solar in a solar-powered world should be on the ground. The reality is that roof-top solar is the most expensive form of power in the world and yet it continues to be heavily subsidized. These subsidies are in the form of direct tax breaks and usually higher electricity prices paid by those who can't install it. A dollar wasted on roof-top solar would be MUCH better spent on solar panels installed on the ground by the utility.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
This is a poor metric to use. The official death count from Chernobyl was 31. It may be as high as 50. There are probably more deaths attributable through long-term effects, etc but you start getting into subjective modeling to figure out a number for that.
It's almost 40 years later and the absolute exclusion zone is still 1,000 square miles. Treating this as only 31 (or 50) deaths grossly under-represents the magnitude of the disaster.
The comment I was replying to was arguing nuclear power caused the least deaths and I was explaining how that's a bad metric because it doesn't capture the impact and damage of the absolute exclusion zone.
So if the actual death count is 27,000 instead of 31 or 50 that's actually much worse, which further undermines that commenter's argument.
1: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...
I would add:There are none so blind as those who will not see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and...
Very long list. Impossible to clean many up in any sort of human scale.
When are we outlawing hydroelectric dams? Accidents with those have killed far far more people.
1. Using deaths as a metric;
2. Focusing on operational cost of a nuclear power plant rather than total cost (ie including capital cost). The total cost is borne out in the relatively high cost of nuclear power to users. If that point is even acknowledged, let alone conceded, it's just dismissed as the fault of government regulation or that scale will somehow magically solve the problem; and
3. Writing off disasters as irrelevant outliers because they're inconvenient to the argument. Less than 700 nuclear power plants have been built and we've had multiple huge disasters.
So are deaths a bad metric? And by "deaths" here I mean any form of the metric (eg absolute, per-kWh generated, etc). Because deaths doesn't capture the negative externalities and consequences of nuclear power. Chernobyl killed less than 100 directly. Who knows how many contracted various cancers in a wide area. But 1,000 suqare miles of land remains uninhabitable nearly four decades later with no real end in sight.
Deaths as a metric doesn't capture that, which is precisely why pro-nuclear advocates focus on it. Nuclear power has its own propaganda just like the oil and gas industry does.
The way to account for the cost of deaths is by the "statical value of a human life", a finite quantity that is considered what would be reasonable to spend to avoid one death. The NRC uses a figure of $9 million when evaluating reactor safety systems.
Using that figure, deaths in normal operation contribute negligibly to the cost of energy from nuclear or renewables (but not for coal; there deaths contribute greatly to the real cost.) Because of this, if nuclear stans are focusing on deaths, what they're doing is implying that the $9 M figure is much too low. And that would imply that the NRC is not imposing enough safety systems on nuclear plants. I doubt this last point is one they'd be happy with.
So if you’re that worried about it, find the least populated place in western Kansas or Nevada or Maine and build the biggest plant you can. Worst case scenario it turns into Chernobyl and you fence it off and call it a day.
Alternatively, we can keep using slave labor in China to build solar panels fabricated with toxic compounds obtained via strip mining that require natural gas and coal power plants to actually function on hot days.
Either you care about climate change or you just hate nuclear power. Discussions like these are great at revealing where folks stand on the issue when push comes to shove.
A serious question I don't have an answer to: is Chernobyl the worst-case scenario? Is there a way for there to be an even worse disaster? I do not know.
Though really we can walk and chew bubble gum. Build reactors and more renewables. I can't put a nuclear reactor on the roof of my home after all! I just really feel like this trope that anti-nuclear sentiment is why we don't have nuclear reactors everywhere has always felt weird when we're talking about market-based economies. Maybe it's just that unworkable in general! Why else would we not build these supposed money printers?
A counter question to yours: How many Chinese slave laborers would you tolerate before you'd accept another Chernobyl style disaster as a tradeoff? When you talk about substituting solar power for nuclear power, that's exactly the tradeoff you're making.
According to a google search:
> American-made solar panels generally cost from $0.50 to $0.80 per watt (W) – about $0.10 to $0.30 more per watt than imported panels. The highest quality, ‘premium’ American panels may even come in around $1.00/W.
I would be more than happy to pay that premium (though really I would like to see working conditions improve across the globe). I do not live in the US so my calculus is perhaps different from yours.
I have heard statements about labor being huge factors of solar panel installation, but google is saying 15%.
And I would like to restate that I think we can walk and chew bubble gum here. The problems with nuclear being more expensive are real, maybe resolvable, but cannot simply be handwaved away in our current economic models. But hey, if we can get a good mix going on I'm all for it. It's not an either/or!
And hey, if we had a full planned economy, there would be a lot of things that we could do differently that would also have great effects.
Every nuke, ever, has been massively subsidized.
NuScale has been and is still being massively subsidized by the USDoE. It would be wholly uncompetitive with renewables if not so propped up.
Given the longstanding cozy relationship between the NRC, the DOE and industry it's hard to feel confident in this approval being sufficiently stringent, e.g. on worst-case scenarios, waste disposal and the like.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/19/us-depleted-ur...
If Nuscale can hit their LCOE goal of $65/mWh by 2030, they will still be 2-3x the LCOE of Solar+storage today [1] (which will only get cheaper).
In the long term both technologies will play an important role, but the zero carbon technology we can deploy at scale today is the technology we need today.
1. https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
However, I am optimistic about storage, particularly since zinc-bromine seems poised to break into the market, with excellent resource availability. Zinc production is about 13 Mt/yr [1], and the battery offers about 67 Wh/kg, with ~1/3 the weight in zinc, so 200 Wh/(kg Zn), so potential production is over 1 TWh/year before running into availability problems. There are also about half a billion tonnes of bromine in the Dead Sea alone [2]. (Since this is my third Zn-Br post, I'll add that I don't currently have investments in them, but I'm considering it.)
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc#Production
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromine#Occurrence_and_product...
The overwhelming bulk of utility scale storage will not be in batteries. They cost too much per kWh stored. Bulk storage will be in media where incremental kWh are cheapest. Think tankage.
One side of this comparison has cost estimates, the other one is vaporware. You need a certain generation capacity for hydrogen (or whatever) measured in watts, not watt-hours; these plants require maintenance and operation costs likely much higher than batteries. With battery costs approaching $100/kWh, many TWh of storage are attainable.
I'm assuming that nuclear will be a significant part of the energy supply, so I would not expect it to be necessary to, for example, store six months' worth of energy for the winter.
Cheap storage will displace them.
Furthermore, it is not feasible to power individual personal vehicles or homes with nuclear reactors, so using nuclear for the grid frees up those resources that can be used for other stuff, for that stuff.
Case in point, the currently ongoing global supply shortage.
When an NFT sells for more than a small power plant and a celebrity dog walker can be paid more than a nuclear engineer I don’t have a lot of faith in that premise.
This may mean Europe ends up deindustrializing vs. sun-soaked places closer to the equator. I suppose King Leopold wouldn't have liked that.
There surely will be a new equilibrium including newer power generation means, however many sunny places are far from water and other industrial inputs - moving steel mills to New Mexico is not quite a slam dunk in terms of transportation.
Solar and wind coexist synergetically with existing uses, so renewables do not need any dedicated land at all. There is enough existing reservoir area to float solar on, alone, for many times the world's conceivable power needs.
Solar farms are built in deserts only because idiot investors want them there. They are fantastically less efficient there, and degrade in the heat.
Concern trolling about land demand is the low road.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-82042-5
Notes that at 80% penetration, solar will occupy roughly 5% of total land. The paper goes on to study methods of ensuring that this land use change does not drive net carbon increases from vegetation loss etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I posted a response on some of the challenges with marginal economics in renewables and responded to your comment with a peer reviewed and cited journal article on these issues and the relevant data point from this study.
Your response contains an ad-hominem personal attack, and does not contribute to the discussion.
Placing panels everywhere we can is a great idea, however pretending that there is a silver bullet is putting our heads in the sand.
And, constructed reservoirs are not the only still water. California has estimated it can gather 12 GW just from its canals.
Solar may also usefully be sited on active pastureland, which is not in short supply. There, it reduces water demand and offers shelter for livestock. Livestock keeps down weeds.
There is a fair amount of industrial roofing in use, where solar extends its life. Some people have already installed there.
Then why not nuclear too? The world sorely needs options where we can spend some CapEx and solve global warming. I see nothing wrong with a mix of hydro, solar, geothermal, wind, and nuclear. There is no reason not to expect capital efficiencies in larger nuclear build-outs compared to the sporadic reactors we've built for the last ~50 years.
Right now we are seeing coal and natural gas plants getting built because there aren't enough renewable options. As has been the case for the last 50 years while renewables catch up.
Similar bottlenecks occur with pumped hydroelectricity. To build it economically you not only need an alpine lake handy, it also needs to be close to transportation infrastructure. As those sites are developed, we'd turn to more and more remote sites.
Can we apply the same reasoning and conclude that because existing nuclear reactors are inadequate, no possible future nuclear reactors can be adequate?
Why does pumped hydro have to be close to transportation infrastructure, btw? Can one not build roads or rail lines?
> Why does pumped hydro have to be close to transportation infrastructure, btw? Can one not build roads or rail lines?
You can, but the more remote the build site the more expensive it becomes.
Nuclear seawater extraction is already conducted, at a price of about $200 per pound [1]. Raw fuel extraction is a small portion of nuclear's cost (enrichment is a much bigger portion) so this is not a significant cost increase.
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...
To power the world with nuclear would require many more reactors. Current world average primary energy consumption is 18 TW, which is 6000 3 GWth reactors. That's an order of magnitude more than currently are in operation. Add in demand growth from industrializing countries and the uranium would last maybe a decade.
Uranium availability is not an immediate problem if you assume nuclear remains a sideshow on the global energy stage. That's to assume nuclear is neither needed nor particularly useful for addressing global warming. Is that what you're assuming?
> However, seawater concentrations of uranium are controlled by steady-state, or pseudo-equilibrium, chemical reactions between waters and rocks on the Earth, both in the ocean and on land. And those rocks contain 100 trillion tons of uranium. So whenever uranium is extracted from seawater, more is leached from rocks to replace it, to the same concentration. It is impossible for humans to extract enough uranium over the next billion years to lower the overall seawater concentrations of uranium, even if nuclear provided 100% of our energy and our species lasted a billion years
"Current nuclear technology isn't sufficient either. A world powered by nuclear burner reactors runs out of uranium very quickly. Breeder reactors or seawater uranium extraction would be needed, and neither of these are "existing" in the sense you're using for storage" (emphasis added)
So, your comment about seawater there doesn't contradict what I wrote at all.
> And these advances by PNNL and ORNL have reduced the cost by a factor of four in just five years. But it’s still over $200/lb of U3O8, twice as much as it needs to be to replace mining uranium ore.
> Fortunately, the cost of uranium is a small percentage of the cost of nuclear fuel, which is itself a small percentage of the cost of nuclear power. Over the last twenty years, uranium spot prices have varied between $10 and $120/lb of U3O8, mainly from changes in the availability of weapons-grade uranium to blend down to make reactor fuel.
> So as the cost of extracting U from seawater falls to below $100/lb, it will become a commercially viable alternative to mining new uranium ore. But even at $200/lb of U3O8, it doesn’t add more than a small fraction of a cent per kWh to the cost of nuclear power.
This is technology that actually has a demonstrated cost. Moreover it doesn't need to get cheaper at scale since raw extraction is such a small portion of nuclear power's cost. It's not like synthetic methane or hydrogen storage where it's all white papers promising cheap cost, but not actually delivering any storage systems at that cost.
Extracting uranium from seawater on the scale needed to fuel burner reactors requires massive engineering. The estimate I've seen is that fueling one 1 GWe burner reactor takes a seafloor uranium absorption field (suspended in a strong ocean current; if you have to pump the seawater yourself it's already too expensive) of 170 square kilometers. The power/area is already much lower than the time-averaged output from PV.
Extrapolating from the lab bench to 170 sq. kilometers (x 6000 for the number of reactors needed to power a nuclear world) is a far larger stretch than extrapolating renewables and storage to what they would need. Your selective doubt is not being driven by any honest impulse.
All I demand is that people deliver at the specified cost. Not, for example, a prototype with unspecified cost or a pilot program with much higher cost to and promises that it'll get cheaper at scale.
> Extrapolating from the lab bench to 170 sq. kilometers (x 6000 for the number of reactors needed to power a nuclear world) is a far larger stretch than extrapolating renewables and storage to what they would need. Your selective doubt is not being driven by any honest impulse.
I could say the same about you. Nobody is seriously considering pumping seawater to filter uranium. This is a totally bad faith argument.
And you give this estimate of 170 without actually giving a source for it nor specifying details like how far apart the buoys are spaced, or if reprocessing is used (which cuts down fuel use by more than an order of magnitude).
The key principle of bulk energy storage is E = Fx, applied liberally worldwide for centuries. It is taught to every freshman engineering student. Nothing blocks further application of the principle, at any scale.
And as has been pointed out numerous times, no existing alpine lake is needed for hydro storage. And, the site does not need substantial "transportation infrastructure". Dozens of hydro dams, still in use, were built in California's Sierra Nevada mountains in the 1920s via roads a car cannot use.
Hi there, I graduated engineering and am currently applying for professional licensure. I took only one course focused on energy, but I've never heard of E=Fx. Googling it brought up no relevant results. Could you expand on what it is?
If you get a professional engineering license without recalling basic Newtonian physics, that just tells us the licensing process has utterly failed us.
1. https://google.gprivate.com/search.php?search?q=E%20=%20Fx%2...
I may, but I live in a country that doesn't use the word freshman, so I don't know which year physics text that would be.
I assume from context you were meaning to refer to gravitational potential energy, which is generally represented as ∆U=mg∆h (change in gravitational potential energy equals mass times gravity times change in height). The variables you used (E=Fx) would mean energy equals force times (variable). From dimensional analysis the variable would have to be units of length (m), however it clearly only applies in the vertical dimension so it's better to use a specific variable like ∆h
Regardless, energy storage via gravitational potential energy (i.e. pumped storage) has been in use for about a century, and still makes up a rsmall proportion of grid operations. It has very specific requirements that aren't available everywhere. It's not an end-all solution for energy storage.
However a more general formula would be the integral of net force over distance.
Even without local "freshman" classes, you may look it up in any dictionary. Or, just stop pretending.
F may be water pressure, as in pumped hydro (which is growing) using elevated or underground reservoirs, or air pressure, as in CAES underground or underwater compressed air, or buoyancy using sea-floor pulleys and floats. No doubt as a soon-to-be Licensed Professional Engineer you will soon be able to think of other persistent forces.
Springs and flywheels will not be used for bulk utility-scale storage.
Generally, utilities will use what is cheap and reliable at the time they build it. Building storage before you have enough spare renewable capacity to charge it would be a bad misallocation of capital
Anhydrous ammonia will not be the cheapest medium, but has advantages of transportability and fantastic usefulness. Any unused overbuilt capacity will be put to work synthesizing for sale.
This all sounds well and good, however it’s highly unclear that utility scale pumped hydro is viable. To make it work you need to have plentiful water, limited evaporative loss/other losses, and two large basins to store both the charge, and discharge of water.
In the event of drought, these facilities could become impractical. Hydro facilities have their own environmental concerns. Combined with shifting climates and rainfall patterns there are many challenges to be solved. (some of which go away if the hydro storage is in underground ceiled chambers… which also has a cost associated)
Pumped hydro is practical in many, many more places than have hydro generation today, because unlike those, it does not need a watershed. It can use a deep underground cavity where a hill is not forthcoming. Where water is scarce, other methods will be used.
Other applications of Fx include (but are not limited to) compressed air, and buoyancy.
Places that run low on storage resource can import and burn fuel, as they do now, or schedule power from a transmission line, where they have one. Soon, liquified anhydrous ammonia will be cheapest and most practical, but liquified hydrogen may be cheaper and sufficiently practical for bigger utilities. Ammonia has the advantage that it does not need cryogenic treatment. These will be available from numerous tropical sources.
> And as has been pointed out numerous times, no existing alpine lake is needed for hydro storage. And, the site does not need substantial "transportation infrastructure". Dozens of hydro dams, still in use, were built in California's Sierra Nevada mountains in the 1920s via roads a car cannot use.
Such as? How did they get heavy machinery to these dams to build them? All of the dams I can find like the Shasta dam, Orville dam, etc are in fact close to major transportation infrastructure.
Who do you imagine you are fooling?
Source? I'm only aware of pilot programs in Japan and Germany, not commercial operators.
They are not generally made of concrete, not being deep enough to need it. Their high pressure is confined in the penstock well downslope.
I’ve noticed that many solar+storage installations these days are 4-hour storage, so not sufficient for baseload. I think the number would be higher if we were shooting for baseload from our storage.
Yes, but compared to California (and all the other very sunny parts of the US and the world where huge populations live), from an energy consumption perspective, tiny Finland doesn't really matter much. Or put another way, it matters far more to the future of the climate to decarbonize energy production in California than Finland.
That said, companies in Finland have been developing some neat grid scale heat storage batteries lately, so there is an opportunity for them to have a big technological impact that way.
I didn't expect that.
- Assumes solar installation in a sunny climate. It’s an order of magnitude difference in potential solar output between San Diego and NYC.
- Underestimates battery requirements by multiple orders of magnitude. Again, because it has comically inept assumptions.
- We literally cannot deploy solar at scale today. We do not have anywhere near the battery production necessary for utility scale deployment. We would need to double our worldwide battery manufacturing ability, double it again, double it again, and then double it one more time.
- Massive demand for solar and battery, combined with finite production capacity, would lead to dramatic increase in prices.
TLDR the other energy technologies can actually be deployed at estimated prices. Solar cannot be deployed at scale globally. At all. Period.
That’s nowhere near enough to sensibly compare with a nuclear plant.
I'm rooting for NuScale, but so far every attempt at realizing the SMR dream has failed, so I'd caution people about thinking this is a pure slam dunk and it's just some sort of mass stupidity keeping the technology back.
Why does it matter that the US has more nuclear reactors that could potentially become weapons if they already a massive arsenal of nuclear weapons?
"Standard LWR fuel in 17 x 17 configuration, each assembly 2 meters (~ 6 ft.) in length; up to 24-month refueling cycle with fuel enriched at less than 5 percent"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor#List_of_...
Because they use enriched uranium, 30% compared to ~7% in LEU which is used in civilian power plants. It's seen as a proliferation risk. And big reactors are more efficient. The problem is they cost a lot and have always had cost overruns. The reactor vessel has to be comissioned for building and rach one is esentially a prototype build to specs. There were even cases were the reactor vessel was defective and had to be scrapped. Building a larger fleet of smaller reactors in production facility with QA could bring these costs down and enhance safety.
The NuScale design will use >5% LEU with a 24 month refuelling cycle. At least we won't have to shut down an 1000 MWe reactor for refuelling every 2-3 years.
We shall see.
The US now has an equilavent to China's Belt and Road initiative, caled PGII, that it will use to finance infrastructure projects in developing contries. There are plans to build a 6 reactor NuScale plant in Eastern Europe with studies financed through this project.
https://www.state.gov/united-states-takes-next-step-in-suppo...
Is there a single small nuclear reactor of this kind that has ever been successfully dismantled? As far as I know, all small nuclear reactors that have ever been used by any navy are still in storage somewhere [1] until someone figures out how to get rid of them properly. Maybe that's one of the reasons why they aren't common in civilian use.
[1] Well, except for those still in use or on the ground of the ocean somewhere.
While scale is what killed nuclear, the people who initially decided on scale, did so for good reason. You lose a huge amount if you scale down, specially with PWRs.
These small PWRs try to get some of that efficiency back with factory production, but at best it just evens out. The advantage is the added flexibility. So I don't think that putting traditional PWR in a tube is really any kind of series solution to transform our energy system.
However there are good things coming out of this. For example, NuScale went threw a process managing multiple reactors from the same control room. That is the same thing that essentially all GenIV reactors want to do as well. Having managed to get that concept threw the regulator will make it massively easier for anybody that follows.
Its a damn shame that we don't have GenIV reactors since the 80s. We had the technology and every reason to use it. We could be living in a nuclear age right now, and I consider it the largest failure of humanity that we failed to do so. People in 100 years will look back and think we were insane that we did not use the technology we discovered.
Last I heard, the big "solution" was to stick it in sacred Native American mountains in Nevada and New Mexico and let future generations worry about it.
If that's all we can do, people in 100, 200, 300 years may not be thinking what you're thinking they will think.
Besides, if we don't tackle the global warming problem, there might not _be_ generations 300 years down the line to judge our actions.
Is your objection due to the sanctity of the mountain or another reason?
Yet instead of advanced technology to the next stage, we spent that money to dig a bit hole.
And even worse, every country spends billions digging holes.
Even a fraction of that money could have been used advanced humanity into the next nuclear age, rather then dumping the output of the last one into a hole.
Sorry, but given that the climate catastrophe is the most pressing concern for humanity, I think that gives more weight that religious superstition over the "sanctity" of a mountain in the middle of the desert miles from any humans.
Securing nuclear waste to decay at the bottom of a mountain is a pretty good solution, the only thing against it really is political nimbyism.
Actually, from what I've read in the local newspapers in the areas affected, the politicians are all for it, so you're making assumptions there.
The people who are against it are the people who actually have to live with the stuff for the next thousand years.
If it's so safe, so stable, so easily rendered harmless, why not bury it in the bedrock beneath Manhattan, or Boston, or Virginia? All places that are far more geologically stable than, for example, Yucca Mountain.
If nobody lives there, nobody has to live with it.
And that doesn't even account for securely transporting the waste across the country. Imagine scaling nuclear to the size of coal. What does waste transport look like then?
Maybe this waste belongs precisely in the back yards of those of us who create it. Then we'd be truly careful.
Electricity generation by source in the US in 2021:
Coal - 21.8%
Nuclear - 18.9%
No you actually don't. Even under the most absurdly bombastic delusional fantasy of nuclear-haters the amount of damage nuclear waste deep in a cave in a desert can do is about a billion times less then climate change.
And even based on the pessimistic assumptions, it would be save for 1000s of years.
Are you seriously gone tell me that we should worry about 1000+ years into the future. If we do not have massive technological decay, the people in the next 1000+ years will have the technology to reprocess the fuel if they feel like it.
And if you do assume massive technological decay then the nuclear fuel is in a cave in a desert that will be essentially uninhabited and will most likely never seriously impact humans.
Even further this whole debate is incredibly dumb since putting into a deep cave is terrible idea anyway. As a human society we can just store it above ground in a save location and in case some danger is identified, we just move it to another location. Moving a few tons of nuclear fuel around ever couple 100 years is really no big deal. And again, if society collapses to a point where this isn't possible, that nuclear fuel is the least thing to worry about.
And even all of that is totally irrelevant, because the real actual solution is to simply ut it into advanced reactors, burn it up to a point where it is only 300 years away from matching natural uranium and you simple put it back into the mine where it came from.
If you do it correctly, we can get every person in the world using US like energy and we can store the complete output of world nuclear waste on a single abandoned Walmark parking lot in Gary Indiana.
If we used basic rationality this would be a non issue. This is a cultural political issue, not really a technical one.
> What does waste transport look like then?
Mhhh well it would be an occasional train going along the train network that would never hurt anybody.
And nuclear isn't that far away from coal level of production.
> Maybe this waste belongs precisely in the back yards of those of us who create it. Then we'd be truly careful.
I'm totally fine with storing all nuclear waste around the Whitehouse if that gets people to stop bringing it up as a problem.
There’s always some sort of catastrophe just looming just over the horizon of the next election. Televangelists have made careers from warning the faithful that their doom is assured — unless you reprint (and contribute.) The climate alarmist crowd has taken pages right out of the tent-revival handbook of the 19th century. Snake oil.
> the North Pole will be ice free by 2013
The tendency is unmissable if you look at the data[1]. People might have been wrong about the exact date at which it would happen, but you should not let the exactitude of the date distract you. It will eventually happen (unless something changes drastically).
And we honestly don't know how the weather will behave on an iceless Earth. Some people speculate that the arctic ice is a sort of heat shield. It makes some sense intuitively: all that white ice reflects a lot of heat back up. Once it is gone... the blue water will absorb and accumulate more heat.
> I also remember the dire predictions of acid rain, the ozone hole, and numerous other proclamations that stirred up the anti-capitalist faithful.
Everyone is starting to feel the change, it's no longer "just words". If you have not started yet you will start feeling it soon.
In my country (Spain), this summer we have had 3 heatwaves in a row, as well as two very unusual clouds of Sahara dust, the first of which reached Finland. I was born in the south of Spain, were's the hottest. When I was little the max summer temp used to be 41 degrees Celsius (105F). Now it's 47C(116F). Max temperatures have increased through the Iberian Peninsula, 41C is "the new normal" in all places except some coastal fortunates and some very northern regions. My options for escaping the summer heat are dwindling.
In the United States my understanding is that the most visible exponent is the extreme drought, in particular the water levels in the Colorado river basin seems worrisome. You might find more information about where you live in [2].
Herbert W. Armstrong predicted that 1936 would be doomsday, and then that 1943 would be doomsday after 1936 came and went, and then that 1972 would be doomsday after 1943 came and went, and then that 1975 would be doomsday after 1972 came and went. How would you rebut that sentence if he said it in 1973 or 1974? Or if Harold Camping, who did basically exactly the same thing, said it? Why wouldn't that rebuttal apply equally to your use of it?
> Some people speculate that the arctic ice is a sort of heat shield. It makes some sense intuitively: all that white ice reflects a lot of heat back up.
But isn't the reason that the ice is at the poles that hardly any of the Sun's heat gets there?
Imagine that without ice the ambient temperature is 5 degrees C. And that the area being ice rather than dark colored rock causes a drop of about 10 degrees C.
So the ambient temperature in the area is under 0. But as it melts for reasons then this cooling effects disappears and now the thing is basically gone forever.
Not commenting too much on the actual theory but you could easily imagine an ecosystem disappearing due to these kinds of changes
I'll agree that was hyperbole, but interestingly this[1] article featured just the other day in the news here, about how a research vessel reached the north pole several days ahead of schedule because there was significantly less ice than expected. The scientists interviewed said conditions had changed drastically over the last 10 years. So maybe add 20 years to Gore's prediction?
[1]: https://www.nrk.no/tromsogfinnmark/forskningsskipet-ff-_kron...
Atmospheric CO2 has gone from about 280 ppm pre-Industrial Revolution to 415 today. Yes, figuring out all the impacts and feedback loops is incredibly difficult, but it requires only a passing understanding of physics to understand how being on track to doubling the primary greenhouse gas in the atmosphere will result in a massively warmer planet.
Nukes are not in competition with them. Nukes are in competition with renewables, where they lose badly.
Renewables + storage + more transmission lines will require construction projects of magnitude much smaller than would be required for enough nukes.
Why would future generations have to worry about something buried deep underground? Just don't drill there.
Solar and Wind require a backup for when there's no wind or it's cloudy. Their current default backup is burning fossil fuels.
Of those, coal plans are particularly salient because they do generate radioactive waste. Continuously. And pour it over the atmosphere. They contribute far more radiation to the environment than nuclear power stations.
> let future generations worry about it.
I think they will appreciate having to worry about that in exchange of not having to deal with not existing because of climate change.
Future people will be fine. Shit we discovered uranium because some guys wandered into a cave and it burned their skin. Locals avoided it afterwards and eventually it was studied by people who knew what radiation was. Any actual storage though would be deep underground, in casks, and behind concrete with lots of warning signs.
Large scale plant construction is hard, takes a long time and the knowhow is disappearing (see recent issues in France with their latest project).
With a miniaturized plant the time to market is quicker, which hopefully will start having a positive effect on peoples opinions sooner when it comes to nuclear power.
It may not be optimal, but it has the potential of changing things for the better.
Smaller plants can be produced faster with lower overhead, because the consistent design reduces risks.
However, if you move to a molten salt reactor (cooled or fueled) you can significantly reduce the scale while still doing a 0.5-1.5GW plant. And you can use CCGT as well. This totally transforms the economics and while it would still a large plant it would be much more comparable to a gas plant in terms of capx. And in terms of opex the fuel should be significantly cheaper, while the labor required should be less in a modern plant.
The PWR real cost are the gigantic heat pumps and the huge required containment system. A molten salt reactor can be air cooled even in the desert of Arizona.
Hopefully in the future we can replace the CCGT with even smaller turbines like Super-critical CO2 turbines.
So I prefer large plants 500MW+ but they need to be molten salt cooled at least. My favorite design (for what is achievable in a reasonable time) is by Moltex Energy, the Static Molten Salt Reactor. Its basically the idea of filling the fuel assemblies with molten salt fuel rather then pellets and to cool you use another molten salt. And with some small amount of repossessing you can use current 'waste' as fuel. I think that design is of a scale and complexity that if some real capital got behind and government were willing to invest in their 'waste' rather then to drop it into a cave it could solve both the 'waste' problem and the grid problem.
So as dumb as it sounds, just making the thing smaller might be enough to soften public opinion
Its really the cooling towers that make it clear what it is and those look absurdly big.
The second big use case would be Europe right now. If small PWR can be produced fast, like say within a year, those could be economical viable. The energy price for next winter is predicted (depending on which gloom and doom you read) to reach around 2x to 20x compared to the record prices of last year. Such prices can make a lot of technology economical viable, and a big factor will then be product availability.
However to think about it in the simplest way.. a cheapo space heater in every room is a crude way to do electric heat, that anyone “can” do.
The average operational cost of a nuclear power in the US is around 2.5 cent to 3.4 cent per kw/h, which is still higher than many other energy sources. The spot price in some locations in Europe is feared to reach $1 per kw/h this winter. Gas furnaces are part of the problem, but society is dependent on electricity for basic function. Voters only accept limited amount of pain before forcing governments to take action and bail people out.
If I were a poor remote county and I wanted to make sure that
1) my residents emergency needs were covered hospital, sanitation, water, emergency heating, etc
2) also had access to cheap power
Having one of these provide the base load for critical infra allows one to shop around for cheap renewable power wherever it may come from.
If the smaller reactors can take advantage of easier fabrication and logistics they might be cheaper, but that is an unknown.
The sensible way to deploy these would be in groups close to existing infrastructure in places that can be easily secured. For example de-commissioned coal plants or nuclear plants. Security also raises the cost of operation of course. Just because it is small physically does not mean the risk is smaller. So, same level of security as with a big nuclear plant. Same level of cost. But less energy. Co-locating allows you to reduce that cost.
Cubic volume increase vs. quadratic surface area increase means larger sizes are more effective.
Here's a simple argument about why that's true:
https://yarchive.net/space/launchers/fuel_tank_scaling_laws....
> Take any plane that slices through the pressure vessel, and consider the problem of trying to prevent the vessel from separating at that plane. The pressure load trying to cause such a separation is proportional to the surface area of the slice. The wall length available to resist it is the outer edge of the slice. The load scales with the square of size, the wall length only linearly... so as the size goes up, the wall thickness must grow as well. Chase it through the math, and wall mass is simply proportional to volume.
It's also a consequence of the virial theorem of mechanics.
Below a certain size you run into code minimums, but nuclear power plants will be well above that size.
If you have some gas stored at 100 psi, you need a wall thickness to withstand 100 psi. If you create a sphere with twice the radius you still need a wall thickness to withstand 100 psi. A bit more than that because the tank also needs to support itself, but that's minor relative to its contents. That's why methane storage tanks are big spheres, to minimize surface area: https://i0.wp.com/tmicoatings.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09...
I'm not sure how applicable rocket motors are to this comparison (maybe you missed that they were talking about rocket motors?). Rocket motors have a big bell and throttle at the end, which is analogous to a big load. And the bigger the rocket combustor the more thrust it needs to support. This is a whole different kind of load, it's not a simple pressure vessel.
In particular:
> The pressure load trying to cause such a separation is proportional to the surface area of the slice.
This is probably taking into account something like greater fuel combustion. Because otherwise it's blatantly wrong. A tank at 100 psi still has 100 psi of pressure whether it's got a volume of 1 cubic meter or 10 cubic meters.
Here's a simple online calculator for wall thickness of pressure vessels. Change the radius of the vessel and watch the wall thickness go up in proportion.
https://www.engineersedge.com/calculators/shell_internal_pre...
However that is not the backbone of your infrastructure. I makes much more sense to start with one large scale design 500MW+ and deploy that as many times as you can and then you can see the places where that is overkill and you develop smaller reactors for those regions.
But in most countries with ~500MW design you can reach 80-90%+ of the population and since the design would be so well known and so mass produced it might make sense to just build more of those rather then some 50MW reactor that might be only be 25% the cost but 10% the production.
It's not just factory production.
There's a lot of savings from just scaling down the design. Currently the pressure vessels for a typical large reactor (the AP1000) are build using forges that weigh (take a moment to appreciate the number) 15 thousand tons [1]. No such forges exist in the US.
Truth is, NuScale plans to source their pressure vessels from one of the existing vessel manufacturers, the South Korean Doosan [2]. However, it is very likely that their vessel can be produced with much smaller forges, and in time more manufacturers will have the capability to build it.
[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
[2] https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/doosan-to-make-pres...
The picture in the article is a NuScale Power Small Modular Power plant[0].
> Each NuScale reactor vessel is expected to be 9 feet (2.7 m) in diameter and 65 feet (20 m) tall, weighing 650 short tons (590 metric tons).
60MW reactor produces 525,600,000 kWh / year.
So a single NuScale reactor could power a garage with 136,483 electric cars.
All I can think of is Snowcrash and multiple sovereigns.
Micro grids with multiple redundancies make the size perfect for a community project.
https://news.mit.edu/2022/thermal-heat-engine-0413
> Engineers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have designed a heat engine with no moving parts. Their new demonstrations show that it converts heat to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency — a performance better than that of traditional steam turbines.
Small nuclear reactors: tiny NuScale reactor gets safety approval - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24358850 - Sept 2020 (541 comments)
NuScale’s small nuclear reactor is first to get US safety approval - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24345288 - Sept 2020 (5 comments)
Nuclear Commission Approves a Safety Aspect of NuScale Power’s Advanced Reactor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16225386 - Jan 2018 (47 comments)
After having dealt with SONGS not long after Fukushima and seeing first hand the long-term adverse effects of Chernobyl in Europe I became anti-nuclear, but in time I realize that in reality what I was actually anti 20th Century nuclear business model and the corrupt regulatory frame work as most were built haphazardly in locations with immense inherit pitfalls, coupled with poor long-term logistical and waste management planning and ignored continuous warnings to decommission--TEPCO stated that the Fukushima disaster was entirely avoidable.
And that is what I think still needs to addressed, because the regulatory capture of these agencies poses a much bigger issue than these small reactors do, which are seemingly promising solutions to contribute to the World's energy needs.
0: https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactor...
The ability to centralize the production I imagine radically reduces the cost, or at least has the potential to.
With all the energy challenges we face, could the US government subsidize a program like this and make it a silver bullet?
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/smaller-safer-cheape...
[2] https://www.nucnet.org/news/first-customer-has-set-lcoe-targ...
The US govt is massively subsidizing this whole venture, and none of that cost to taxpayers is figured in.
Storage will of course be built too, at overwhelmingly less cost than nukes, and much, much faster. But, first, the generation capacity to charge it up from.
1 Fukushima is too many, no?
The alternative isn't "no Fukushima", the alternative is hundreds of thousands deaths per year by burning coal. It's just not "one huge bang" so people don't realize it, because understanding abstract dangers is hard.
The Fukushima disaster: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_di...
The earthquake: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_...
Zero known fatal injuries out of 20,000 were caused by the reactor.
If I've done the math right, a nominally operative coal plant over Fukishima's 40 year lifetime would have caused 5ish deaths.
Fukishima did cause a few cases of cancer, but so does nominally operative coal.
People can gripe about tail risks from environmental pollution when it's not displacing a worse modal risk. Right now it's unreasonable to. Proliferation risk is concerning; most of the rest is just scale insensitivity.
Nowhere near as much is needed as people think either.
The overwhelming bulk of utility storage will not be batteries, because that is the most expensive alternative. Utility storage will be whatever is cheap and locally practical.
In hawaii they canceled a proposed inter-island power connector because batteries + solar were just cheaper.
Pumped storage is generally a lot more economic and can store a lot more than batteries but it cant be built quite as quickly & is somewhat geographically dependent. It takes 4-5 years to deploy rather than months.
The results will likely surprise you.
Putting a conventional PWR in such a modular system isn't a silver bullet and has you to be proven to actually be cheaper and a game changer.
If you simply want 1.5GW it might be simpler to just put a single PWR there rather then like 5 of them.
I would say real GenIV modular reactors are the silver bullet, this is a step in the right direction.
NuScale says their nuclear power module (NPM) output capacity is 77 MW (gross) [1].
NuScale says their plant designs can combine up to 12 NPMs for 924 MW total output [2].
One megawatt can power 400-1000 homes [3].
[1] https://www.nuscalepower.com/technology/technology-overview
[2] https://www.nuscalepower.com/about-us/faq#T2
[3] https://www.betterhomelab.com/how-many-homes-can-1-mw-power/
https://www.nuscalepower.com/environment/coal-plants
And the grid already has good connections to those sites.
Whether that actually can be done is another question. Many people want traditional nuclear located as far away as possible from populated areas, but with coal they aren't as picky about location.
NuScale's version of nuclear is supposed to be much safer, but who knows if that will put people at ease enough that it can be put wherever is convenient.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/15/climate/coal-plants-renew...
Even France, without the regulatory or public opinion problems, is having difficulty building nuclear, and the construction project at Flamanville is an unmitigated disaster, just exactly the same as the US's recent projects at Vogtle and Summer.
And that's the reason that SMR designs are even being attempted. The design has always been rejected in the past as uneconomical. But with large reactor design proven to uneconomical, and a huge devotion to nuclear among some, SMRs are giving it a go again.
If nuclear worked well, there are always populations that welcome them nearby. Most, but not all, of our current 100GW has supportive neighbors.
But I always find it curious that these lesser problems of public support and regulations get so much more attention than a far more fundamental problem: economic efficiency.
Nukes have only ever been built where the cost was substantially or completely absorbed off-budget, typically by taxpayers.
“An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose (’omnibus reactor’). (7) Very little development is required. It will use mostly off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.
“On the other hand, a practical reactor plant can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated."
> It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated."
Correct. That's why you design once and build multiple ones
How did SpaceX manage to get the costs down?
Re-prioritizing is also important. Safety of course should be the main issue. But I suspect most current designs focus too much on efficiency and max power as well.
How would you "bloat up" a reactor that uses passive convection, submerged in millions of gallons of emergency cooling water?
Light Water Reactors aren't the ideal way to generate nuclear energy, but they're proven technology, and it's hard to imagine a safer LWR design than what NuScale is planning.
https://gain.inl.gov/SiteAssets/MoltenSaltReactor/Module2-Ov... (see slide 23)
Most of a nuke plants' cost is in construction, but that is not because its operating cost is low. It is just insanely expensive to build. Then, its operating cost is high. Each moment it is not producing at 100% rated power, its per-kWh cost increases accordingly. Its operating cost does not decrease proportionally when it operates at below rated maximum power, so the operating cost per kWh is multiplied by the difference. And, operating at below rated capacity, the construction cost is amortized over fewer kWh, again making the per kWh cost greater.
You already well understood all of the above, but evidently hope readers will not.
By comparison gas turbines will always emit carbon dioxide, and there's no realistic plan to run a solar and wind grid without fossil fuel backing. No, there is no realistic plan to store electricity despite your incessant insistence to the contrary.
> The thousands of tons of concrete are produced by cooking limestone with, again, fossil fuel. And the thousands of tons of steel are refined and smelted with, again, fossil fuel.
Both of these can be replaced with thermochemical processes powered by nuclear power.
> Most of a nuke plants' cost is in construction, but that is not because its operating cost is low. It is just insanely expensive to build. Then, its operating cost is high.
Incorrect, nuclear power is quite cheap once the plants are constructed.
Nuclear power operating cost is about commensurate with fossil fuels, which are not competitive. Operating at 50% rated power makes each kWh, marginally, twice as costly. Operating at 50% rated power long term makes each kWh absolutely twice as costly.
At the time when their power cannot be sold at any price sufficient to continue operating, nukes not propped up by tax coercion will be mothballed. Their huge construction cost will end up amortized over only the kWh produced up to that time. So, the finally recognized cost per kWh will balloon to many times over what was promised at construction time.
Isn't this also a barrier to building hydroelectric facilities? They're basically big dams.
Also you believe we'll be able to create massive electrolysis plants to create energy storage for solar and wind? Interesting how you're so confident in massive changes to industrial processes when solar and wind require them, but totally dismissive when other solutions do.
Regardless, metallurgy and cement just need a source of heat and unlike solar and wind which need to convert electricity to heat nuclear plants produce heat directly.
Hydro-power dams are expensive to build, too, but operating cost is extremely low. New ones will not be competitive with wind & solar, but existing dams will remain useful, where not demolished for ecological or fisheries reasons.
There are no technical impediments to electrolysis. It all just needs to be built out. Efficiency is rising very fast.
Doesn't the modularity (multiple 60MW reactors in a single installation) in the NuScale design obviate the "Xenon poisoning" issue, since shutting down one or more reactors doesn't mean halting power generation as it would with a single, larger reactor?
Presumably the reactors can be shut down and powered up independently so addressing the "Xenon poisoning" issue should be just a matter shutting down, then powering up some fraction of the reactors, scheduled to maintain the base load required, no?
Warn us, really.
Any reason for this compared to say any of our neighboring countries?
You can get a feel for this at my favorite simulation site, https://model.energy/
Poland does have lots of salt under it, which bodes well for hydrogen storage in solution-mined caverns.
Because of Poland's unfortunate renewable position, it's understandable that nuclear is still strongly considered there. But that's not really going to help Poland compete globally against countries with better resources. If solar can provide power for $0.013/kWh in UAE, it's tough for Poland's heavy industries to compete with that with more expensive nuclear.
I would clarify that the domestic political discourse in Poland has instead been about discrediting the notion of climate change altogether and pushing to become even more dependent on non-renewable energy sources like coal. Most of our efforts in non-renewables are riding on EU funding, and the view of that is even more cynical.
I want to see modular reactors succeed, but the prospect of more nuclear waste depots with no long term plan in the US comes of to me as brazenly irresponsible.
Waste management is pretty much a solved problem [1][2]
> Some pose catastrophic risks to the communities they are stored in
"catastrophic" would have to be qualified here, and I think you are being hyperbolic, but essentially the only waste sites that have major risks are those from decades ago before we had good solutions. Nuclear is incredibly safe [3]
1. https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1550148385931513856?s=2...
2. https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1552655863751421955?s=2...
Plans to vitrify waste at Hanford are only barely reaching operation, more than a decade behind schedule. The plant won't be able to process all the waste on site when running at capacity until after 2100.
Meanwhile 56 million gallons of high grade waste is slowly seeping into the water table of the Columbia River basin.
My problem is with the lack of success in this area towards competently reducing risk and sequestering waste. It hardly seems like a solved problem when we our concrete implementation of a solution has yet to arrive.
I think it's reasonable to acknowledge the difference between "we have a solution that has been implemented in the real world" and "the solution we have has been implemented everywhere it's needed". Yes, not every country who needs proper waste management has implemented it, but I don't think that means we haven't solved the problem of what to do with waste.
Also while France has La Hague, the Netherlands also has COVRA :)
> Meanwhile it will cost hundreds of billions if not trillions to get it done for the existing waste alone
Yes, we will have to face the consequences of past choices, but I don't think that should preclude us from pushing for more modern implementations.
NuScale is publicly traded. You can buy shares, the ticker is SMR.
The majority owner (about 60%) in NuScale is Fluor Corporation [1], another publicly traded company (FLR). The top 10 Fluor owners are mutual funds, such as BlackRock, Vanguard and Fidelity [2] . If your 401(k) is managed by one of these funds, chances are you own shares in FLR too.
I don't see how Bill Gates is involved in NuScale.
[1] https://newsroom.nuscalepower.com/press-releases/news-detail...
[2] https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?s...
Our governments do have a lot of problems, so the solution is to make not formally a part of the state to get around a lot of bullshit.
This
> The state has the NRC, which can pretty much tell a company like NuScale what they can do and what they can't.
Regulatory agencies can only say "no". They can only "make things happen" by saying no to other options. That is not good enough.
We have a stagnant government and society built around "no" --- NIMBYism and all the clientelist back-scratching that goes with it. That's not good enough.
I want a state that can do things actually make them happen.
I DO not trust anyone other than president Biden to handle such sensitive matters!
Greedy billionaires should have no say in this
"However, the NRC faced the same problems in obtaining accurate information as the state, and was further hampered by being organizationally ill-prepared to deal with emergencies, as it lacked a clear command structure and did not have the authority either to tell the utility what to do or to order an evacuation of the local area."
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
War is an enabler of gate approvals to innovation and development
It seems no one wants to discuss the huge progress made in the design of nuclear reactors over the years.
The idea that a technology which has been in development for 70 years hasn't improved enough to be practical is simply bollocks.
What a colossal failure. This seems more like evidence that the regulatory regime was designed to make nuclear power expensive and controlled by a small number of companies with deep pockets.
I am firmly against a technology with such a unequal downside/upside ratio. It's not that nuclear fission is inherently unsafe, it's just that every reactor needs to be playing it's A game every day.
We need to be lucky every day, mother nature only needs to be lucky once.
Maybe, maybe we can treat these as giant durcell batteries and use them for five years then seal it in concrete on site. But that does not seem to be the play here - so all the recycling and transport and handling just scales up - and it costs to be on your A game. The US military might afford this. but even they will probably want to run down the costs in the next few decades.
Sounds more like a slogan than an argument
I'm very curious what you're basing this opinion on.
That is not necessarily true of modern reactor designs. Reactors can be designed so that neglect by the operators, loss of coolant and other failures result in the reaction passively coasting to a halt.
Which leads me to an idea: a power plant divided into four parts, where each part starts construction on 1/3 the eventual power using the newest designs every decade. They run for 30 years. Then deconstruct and rebuild the last one with the newest design.
This would incentivize a continuous market for new designs over the next century.
What if you start by assuming failure, and then account for that by operating your reactors under millions of gallons of emergency cooling water? That is NuScale's approach.
I assume a straightforward geological study would prevent events like https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/22/man-dies-after...
Dams collapse mainly for this reason, and those, while killing many people and destroying whole cities, do not leave the whole region uninhabitable.
The second half of your sentence is literally arguing that fission is inherently unsafe. Which is it?
You have two choices:
1. Fission is inherently unsafe: then why do the numbers contradict you?
2. Fission is not inherently unsafe: then what's the problem?