The First Small Modular Nuclear Reactor Was Just Approved by US Regulators
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This is a win for clean energy. End of story.
Smaller reactors have maintenance and footprint wins that are hard to appreciate. I think this is one of a few key turning points that are coming up that will help us transition to a better carbon future.
But if not, at least now we have more options which means more competition and more innovation.
Low carbon energy generation is basically happening with or without nuclear. At this point, we're past the point where people need to study the cost of wind or solar. They have proven much cheaper than anything else and they are being mass deployed all over the world as a result of that.
Nuclear, not so much. A few deployments here and there. Usually at prices that are way over budget and years late as well. Maybe smaller nuclear plants will change that. They have a lot to prove. I wouldn't bet the future on that. It's a wild card at best.
Meanwhile, the future is now. Lots of countries are going carbon neutral in the next decade or so and mostly without the help of nuclear power. No need to wait for small reactors to work or not. If they do somehow work at a price point that isn't prohibitively expensive, great! But not a problem if this is just the next chapter in nuclear power's long history of being too costly and complicated to be practical.
Until 2022, a lot of Europeans counted on cheap Russian gas.
If any kind of cold war breaks out with China, will solar panels be as available as they are today?
Ceteris paribus, I would always keep at least some energy generating capability "at home", without the need to rely on potentially hostile powers or unstable regions. Even if it looked uneconomical at the very moment.
You can also stockpile rods easier than, say, gas. They don't take up as much space, given how energy dense they are.
Having a three year strategic reserve is thinkable, not so much with other means of electricity production.
The casing on the other hand can be made from an extremely wide range of materials. And of course long term you can recycle PV panels because they arn’t consuming the material.
Well, one cubic meter of uranium is ~19000 kg, so not sure what your point was.
If ~99.5% of the 1 cubic meter is silicon then, the rare bits assuming uranium density are ~95kg which is less than 240kg of uranium.
Known reserves or uranium may provide for the current reactor fleet at best for the upcoming 200 years.
Therefore a sustained growth of installed nuclear capacity will lead us to exploit mines at always lowering ore grades => more emissions.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2051332
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222817608_Life_cycl...
Have you accounted for the recycling of uranium? Only a minuscule amount of the energy in fission material goes to generate power and what is left can be recycled over and over again until it is fully "spent".
In term of mining, look at all the material needed to construct and maintain a nuclear powerplant. A significant portion of why nuclear is so expensive is all the stuff needed to build and maintain one.
Already installed solar obviously has zero dependency on China. In the steady state you need to replace around 3% per year to keep up with panel degradation, but a dependable solar grid has significant excess production so you have wiggle room to build up domestic manufacturing. And you can ramp up alternatives like wind.
Nuclear has more significant systemic risks, which are less obvious. Over half of Frances’s Nuclear powerplants are currently offline for deferred maintenance. If they where nearly as dependent on Nuclear as often reported they would be having real trouble right now.
> Over half of Frances’s Nuclear powerplants are currently offline for deferred maintenance
There is more. Nuclear power requires continual availability of skilled technicians and engineers, replacement parts that need advanced manufacturing, water and other material, access to road and infrastructure.
And a stable socioeconomical and political and legal system. And military defense.
For some developed countries it can already difficult to provide all these things with 100% reliability. Today, before the bigger impact of climate change.
And what about the remaining 50% of human population? Do you see South American, African and middle-eastern countries being able to run nuclear plants?
And they do, what about plutonium and nuclear proliferation?
They recently had one suffer a large scale military attack and are of course managing the aftermath of Chernobyl.
The fact that an aggressor chose Ukrainian nuclear plant as a target and impromptu military dump isn't Ukrainian fault either. This could have happened to Finland or Sweden, too, in case of a Soviet/Russian attack. (Neither country was under NATO's protective umbrella.)
And the actual point here was about Latin America. Ukraine was just an example. Is it really so implausible to think that, for example, Brazil and Argentina could not safely operate nuclear plants?
If the history of nuclear incidents should tell us anything it’s the importantance of understanding failure modes. To use a Brazil example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident
Massive complex infrastructure projects in poor countries often fail to finish or suffer from substandard construction etc.
Attacking hydroelectric dams during war is a major war crime for a big and deadly reason.
Operation Chastise cost 53 RAF killed, 3 captured, and the loss of 8 aircraft. Net result 2 hydroelectric dams destroyed, several damaged, and ~1,600 civilian casualties. And it was only that successful do to high water levels at the dams in question.
Those technical issues of bomber planes are long gone, but the vulnerability of damns are just as they were 80 years ago. A bunker buster would go through the concrete as a knife through butter, and the targeting would be done with laser precision. The navigation and execution would today be done by computers.
A cruise missile and a lancaster has very little in shared technology, and depending on definition isn't even in the same category. The construction of a 1940 hydroelectric damn and a hydroelectric damn in 2022 is basically indistinguishable. Concrete holding up water is concrete holding up water.
If look at the actual dams from WWII you notice they all got damaged about half way up and only blew out a section of the dam. This is because thickness increases dramatically with depth and bombs only have so much energy. They needed the pressure of a dam at near maximum capacity to work, which is why several other dams services just fine.
But even if we went with the same 80 year old designs of bombs as in world war 2, the biggest challenges with Operation Chastise has been solved today by the user of precision-guided munition, drones and cruise missiles. The pilots of Operation Chastise had a major challenge flying so low, with such a heavy payload, with a very narrow target window, using technology that was neither precise nor easy to use. They could also not avoid flak from anti-air, and the explosion from the bomb was a major threat to the plane forcing the pilot to balance their own and crewmen life with that of the mission. Misty weather also prevented one plane from even find their target. It was a very risky mission.
There are three basic angles of attack, from the front, top, and water. Anything that comes in from the front or top and then detonates has a large hole to let energy back out without damaging the structure. The same issue also applies to a water entry with current perpetrators as these things are designed for high speed impacts which creates a large void behind the bomb.
Ideally you want something that lands in exactly the right spot and then slowly sinks to the right depth. And of course no netting to be around the dam to make the mission that much more difficult. Which gets back to my previous point, it’s clearly possible, just technically difficult.
This is hard to read charitably. It seems like a racist remark, not least because there are nuclear power plants in South America, Africa, and the Middle East. Maybe you aren't racist yourself, but you presume nuclear power proponents to be racist? The ends justify the means, so you can play into the racial biases of those you oppose?
I don't like this.
There is nothing racist about suggesting South Africa which is the only Africa country with nuclear power might have better odds than Sudan. Similarly Brazil has safely operated nuclear power plants for decades, but nuclear has faced real logistical issues in South America.
It is the very opposite. I'm stating that the global south is being exploited and denied access to technology (and more).
If anything, it is racist to NOT acknowledge the problems that the global south is facing.
Besides, I clearly wrote "countries" obviously referring to the political entities, not the population.
> Maybe you aren't racist yourself, but you presume nuclear power proponents to be racist?
Now you flipped 180?
> The ends justify the means, so you can play into the racial biases of those you oppose?
What does this even mean?
South American here. We do have a couple of nuclear plants, and they run fine.
Kazakhstan is the main uranium provider of France.
British wind often generates less power than it can, but it very rarely drops to zero.
> British wind often generates less power than it can, but it very rarely drops to zero.
Sorry, I didn't realize French nuclear reactors weren't generating any energy at the moment.
Water temperature is also a problem, but, again, is something that is going to resolve itself "at some point".
Finally, others are closed for potentially recurring corrosion issues, and _that_ is the really problematic stuff since most of our reactors were built around the same time.
I don't exactly understand why everyone is tiptoing around the fact that we're going to have electricity shutdowns this winter in Europe, when the gas that's supposed to full peaked plants is going to be missing.
Sadly there is not much we can do to prevent it, at the moment, and at least a good old blackout and a few shortages at gas stations might make some people take energy issues seriously.
The people could demand a resolution to the politician's issues which are holding five turbines in Montreal that could be installed in a pipeline which supplies gas to parts of Europe. It is almost like some political segments don't want a resolution before winter.
Edit: I had read one was returned, five being repaired, and Germany restarting ten coal plants. https://globalnews.ca/news/9002839/canada-turbines-return-ru...
It is almost like the news is more interested in reporting on ongoing problems than solved ones.
I think the Kremlin is expecting the German electorate to push pressure on their government to ask for a return to the "normal" flow of gas, Ukraine be damned.
That seems like a reasonable bet, but I'm not going to rule surprises out any more.
Solar is corellated around time of day on a large scale and cloud cover on a more localized scale. Lack of wind sometimes happens to fairly large regions; interconnections to farther away wind farms helps though.
Weather extremes outside the design can result in outages for all kinds of plants though, so a relatively geographically small and isolated grid like Texas, that has many plants unprepared for cold will likely have outages at plants of all types during a bad cold snap; a particularly bad heat wave might cause issues as well.
So while grid operators have to be constantly adjusting for solar & wind output variations, they can do so without panic and without customers noticing.
Reactor shutdowns, while rare, are sometimes very unexpected and drop a lot of capacity from the grid very quickly.
Unless you start mass manufacturing them and the identical reactors start failing in identical ways...
Outages at multiple nuclear plants can be correlated. Right now: https://www.theenergymix.com/2022/06/29/corrosion-problem-sh...
Japan has seen a decade-long shutdown of most plants following a single incident.
Another advantage of wind and battery is that they aren’t national security targets in the way nuclear is.
I would hate to weather another large and close wildfire where in addition to the normal grid instability and power issues it's exacerbated by lack of expected car feedback resources because people have evacuated or are standing by to.
Thankfully the cooling issue won't hopefully exist during winter, and given how much political outcry will occur if the grid do collapse, France might actually step up and fix their reactors given enough political pressure.
The comment I responded to argued nuclear is superior in a situation of crisis, and selects as an example a natural disaster. Wanted to point out that this seems to depend rather sensitively on the kind of crisis.
When price is comparison is done, does it account for lifespan difference, a nuclear reactor last 60 year vs 20 for wind and solar. That can already triple price of the renewable.
Does it account, that you should build extra capacity of many time what you need because not all the same regions have the same wind and sun exposition at the same time? You can look how oversize is the installed capacity of Germany [1] compared to France.
Also, I'm not sure for the US but the EU got its solar panel production wiped out by the heavily subsided Chinese industry. So the rather lower apparent cost of solar by might be partially driven by the Chinese attempt to pump money in to gain market share.
So you're left with 2 theses:
1: solar panels will stop improving, so you should amortize over 50 years. 2: solar panels will keep improving, so cost / kWh will be less than a 50 year amortization.
Also, additional nuclear capacity can be used to do things like desalinate ocean water and help alleviate droughts in the future.
Nuclear is "firm" in that its always running. This is a good characteristic. I'm more optimistic about advanced geothermal that has been developed in recent years, using the advances in drilling developed for fracking.
If we can use the waste heat from nuclear for something productive, like desalination, then I think it has a much better chance. But coastal communities will also have access to offshore wind, which has really high capacity factors and will be far far cheaper than nuclear could be.
What makes an array more dispatchable than a single SMR? I don't follow how that could be possible.
Thermally, generally not. But one can design a system so that the steam is not sent to the turbines and so electrical power is not generated.
If you can build one of those economically and deal with the caustic molten salt then you can build a concentrated solar thermal plant with molten salt for storage even more economically with no worries about a nuclear disaster.
I really hope the US can adopt a more aggressive approach to using more fuel, even if that means it may be closer to weapons grade at some point in its cycle. This would eliminate a significant amount of waste leaving catastrophic failure as the only real downside.
I would be very happy with a nuclear+solar future (which is currently my present as well).
Wind and Solar don't have failure modes like that so you don't even have to think about it.
This is why Nuclear tends to get more expensive over time because nobody can accurately calculate the risk of any design decision, so engineers and managers tend to make them more complex over time.
The unique features of a NuScale plant allow its modules to respond to meet the power generation demand in the evenings by increasing from 20% to 100% power in 96 minutes
I'm clearly in left field when it comes to concerns about nuclear, in that I mostly am worried about wasted effort and capital on a tech that I do not foresee being able to keep up, rather than concerns about "safety" or belief that it is in anyway necessary for decarbonization. So I appreciate seeing some new information that make me more hopeful that SMRs will succeed.
Nuclear power plants are generally used for base load for economic reasons: they are really expensive to build and have close to fixed hourly costs to operate, compared to say natural gas plants which are cheap to build and have operating costs proportional to the amount of gas they burn. Consequently we only build nuclear where we expect it can be utilized pretty much all the time, and we don't optimize nuclear plants for quick scaling up and down.
As I said in my original post, cost is the key driver here and nuclear has a lot to prove.
Spreading production at continental scale has a major beneficial impact, and such a huge grid is highly beneficial to any type of source (even nuclear).
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...
A lot of these calculations are based on straight line production cost against average power output. They often omit one of the most valuable aspects of nuclear: grid stability. Redundancy is expensive but EXTREMELY important. I see few papers accurately imputing this cost when they conclude that we should all switch to renewables immediately. Here in Europe we can have swings in wind power production in excess of 50% in the span of a day. This is ENORMOUS volatility, and requires some kind of stable power production to offset the slow wind days.
Grids need to be diversified. Solar, wind, tide, geothermal, hydro, and definitely nuclear. If not nuclear, we are stuck with coal and LNG for the foreseeable future.
Ideally there would be competition for end user low costs as well as investment costs. Electricity should be cheaper than tap water.
If the costs are so settled, why are countries like China still installing more thermal plants than solar or wind?
You think they would favor the cheaper proven options?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_ore
Each installed gigawatt of nuclear reactor power, regardless of whether this is twenty 50MW reactors or a single 1000MW reactor, requires on the order of 200 tons of uranium fuel rods per year to operate. By comparison, a 1GW bituminous coal plant burns on the order of 2,750,000 tons of coal per year to achieve the same kind of baseload power output.
However, coal requires no further processing once mined. To get those 200 tons of fuel rods, it can take a varying amount of uranium ore, and the majority of that ore is not high-grade, it's down around 0.1% U3O8 more often than not (there are a few high-grade deposits). So you might have to mine 200,000 tons of ore, extract the uranium in the form of yellowcake, convert that to uranium hexaflouride gas for enrichment from ~0.7% to (apparently) 4.95% for the NuScale design, and then convert the gas to solid uranium oxide and package it in a fuel rod. This is a pretty intensive industrial process just to make the required fuel and is neither cheap nor all that clean.
Enrichment level & NuScale plant design parameters: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1034/ML103470495.pdf
If you are in a location with plenty of sunlight and wind, I don't see how this could possibly by less expensive than some kind of integrated wind turbine/solar PV/solar thermal linked-to-storage grid of the same capacity.
In terms of greenhouse gas emmissions, it's very clean. That's the whole point of bothering with green energy.
"If you are in a location with plenty of sunlight and wind, I don't see how this could possibly by less expensive than some kind of integrated wind turbine/solar PV/solar thermal linked-to-storage grid of the same capacity."
Unsurprising - things that exist are generally more expensive than things that don't. I'm not sure how you can even assess the cost of storing the power from those sources to compare them.
Until a realistic method of storing that energy is created (if it ever is), nuclear as well as waste-incineration and hydroelectric are superior by virtue of being viable.
For #1, it doesn’t seem like that statement is true:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sci...
For #2, I’m interested in an energy cost comparison, including the cost of ongoing maintenance, too. Solar and wind seem like an obvious investment in our future.
I don’t know about the quality of “nuclearasia.com,” but I found an interesting anecdote that more directly answered the question “how much raw ore converts to a how much fuel rod?” The answer is that
* 2.5 tons of uranium ore = 1kg fuel
* 1kg uranium fuel = same energy output as 100 tons of coal
* 2.5 tons of uranium ore = same energy output as 100 tons of coal
> Even if you take a relatively poor ore (with a uranium content of 0.2%), it turns out that to produce 1 kg of enriched uranium fuel you need approximately 2.5 tonnes of uranium ore. If we recall that one kilogram of enriched uranium contains the energy “equivalent" of 100 tonnes of coal, it turns out that to produce the same amount of energy you would need 40 times less ore compared to the same amount of coal. Another advantage is that coal has to be delivered to the station in “bulk” but there is no need to ship uranium ore far from the place of extraction. Uranium and uranium fuel take much less space than coal, and this means a dramatic reduction in transportation costs.
https://www.nuclearasia.com/knowledge-centre/much-uranium-or...
What I’d like to know is the overall cost (mining, processing, transportation, handling/disposal, and maintenance) in terms of $/energy. I would think that individual energy plants could provide this information.
We can estimate this for nuclear pretty easily. From the UxC cost calculator[1], we can see the various components that go into getting mined ore, converting it, and enriching it. At today's prices, let's call it $2000/kgU. We need to add fabrication, transportation, and carrying costs to that. Let's call fabrication $250/kgU[2] and throw on another $50 for transport and misc costs, giving us $2500/kgU for finished fuel. Assuming we burn our fuel to a an average discharge burn of 50 GWd/MTU and the plant is operating at about 34% electrical efficiency, that works out to 0.6 cents/kWh for nuclear fuel.
On to disposal, in the US utilities were previously charged 0.1 cents/kWh for disposal; utilities haven't been charged this fee since 2014 due to a disposal route not being available[3], although DOE retains responsibility for disposing of civilian nuclear waste.
On top of that you have the plant's O&M costs, which are probably another 0.8-1.0 cents or so/kWh.
[1] https://www.uxc.com/p/tools/FuelCalculator.aspx [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S173857331... [3] https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-603.pdf
Producing a design has never been a challenge for nuclear power, that's the easy part. The hard part has been building the designs.
> small modular reactors (SMRs) are designed to be small enough to build in a factory before being shipped
The AP1000, was supposed to address construction problems by being able to ship in large parts already constructed. But that failed so miserably that SMRs-long ignored because they weren't thought to be economically efficient-became the last ditch effort to build nuclear. And the AP1000 failed because of all the on-site mismanagement of things as simple as concrete pours.
SMRs are unproven in at least two regards: 1) ability to manufacture in a factory economically, and 2) ability to construct all the on-site infrastructure for the SMR to generate the electricity.
There are never certainties in anything except in hindsight. Most people with expertise who have reviewed SMR designs (and there are many) believe there's a high probability of the central manufacturing concept being able to work. Factories are a very well known concept at this point.
I'm a little confused by this, as all existing reactor designs required both the reactor and their infrastructure to be built on-site. I'm not sure why you think it would be an open question to just do the infrastructure.
"NuScale completed the first NRC review of an advanced reactor application, and overall the NuScale DCA review was a success. Staff completed review of the first small modular reactor design in 41 months following docketing of the application. The review was thorough; it involved over a quarter million review hours, about two million pages of documentation made available for review or audit, and about 100 gigabytes of test data." [1]
1/4 of a million review hours!
IIRC, NuScale said they spent about $500 million on getting it approved.
This was the first modular design ever approved. This is really good news and the fact that none of the climate change bills fund the quick ramping up of testing and building this design means that people don't really want quick action on reducing CO2.
I suspect there is some malaise and misallocation of resources where we could benefit from very strict regulations where it really matters.
Reminds me of the story of 3D printers where Stratasys had 80 patents expiring between 2005-2010 and as soon as that happened, 3D printers were all the rage. Sometimes, it’s not the fundamental physics, engineering or manufacturing issues; but purely artificial boundaries created by, in this case, IP regulation (patents).
"While successful, the level of effort for reviewing the NuScale DCA may not be repeatable for future reviews. Significant resources were expended on issues with little bearing on the safety of the design, matters well beyond the purview of reasonable assurance of adequate protection. Several issues were left unresolved by Staff, which could have been avoided were the recommendations here in place. During the course of review, NuScale identified several overarching problems with the review process and review criteria that could yield significant efficiencies in the review of future applications, without impacting the effectiveness of NRC’s review."
Refering to you 3D printer history, most technologies don't take off till the first round of patents expire. I think one reason tech makes such great strides during war time is that all war related patents are ignored or cross licensed to everyone else.
Quite a lot, I think. My dad spent his career in the nuclear industry. I don't know exactly how much interaction he had with the NRC, but he did spend several years working in the relicensing group, so I assume it was a lot. The impression I got from my conversations with him was that there was very much an adversarial relationship -- not collaborative.
Grain of salt, n=1, etc.
I spent some time looking at the NRC safety approval of the NuScale design [1]. You look at all those documents published there and realize that they are all necessary. You pick one randomly and open it at a random page, and you don't find superfluous things.
Now, when you have a review that takes millions of man-hours of effort, you'll find cases of irrelevant inquiries. I suspect however that most of these inquires were irrelevant only in hindsight, not because the NRC supervisors were incompetent.
[1] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/smr/nuscale/ser-op...
NuScale still had some major challenges, one of the reason they had to pay so much is that they wanted 1 control room to control multiple nuclear reactors. That was partly paid for be the government as it will help others as well.
If you wanted to do anything other then PWR, you basically have to give them a huge amount of money and a design (couple 100M invested to get there) and then they will take a long time (on your cost) and then potentially develop a regulatory framework and then tell you what your design needs to add. So in practice you are gone be down billions and decades before you get something like a molten salt reactor threw approval.
That is why virtually all (at least non DoD) next generation reactors go to Canada to go threw initial deployment. Its hopped that once Canada approves an GenIV reactor other places might be easier to get threw. And thankfully the US is actually looking to Canada and they are considering cross licenses.
Especially because you can't really draw a line at that point, as you'll also have to include the production impact of tools and materials which you needed to produce your product. Suddenly, basically everything that happened since industrialization is part of the equation.
If it takes 20 years to build a nuclear plant, then we'll have the batteries before that nuclear plant is finished.
Ok, sure maybe it's smaller than a PWR behemoth. It's still solid fuel rod crap.
If you have solid fuel rods, you have meltdown danger, you can't use up all the fissile material, there's no breeding, extraction of fission products. It's under a lot of pressure, so besides meltdown you have other dangers. Solid fuel rods can only use the very tiny percentage of uranium that is naturally fissile.
This is simply not a good design for a nuclear reactor. The LFTR design has meltdown proof operation, no pressurized water, near 100% use of fuel, can burn/breed old solid fuel waste, can breed more fuel from plentiful thorium, and can scale down to closet-sized reactors.
Pebble bed also shares some of these aspects, and I assume there are other new generation designs with advantages.
But this is just more of the same bad design reactors. Oh great, it got spitshined and scaled down and passed approvals.
What nuclear needs to be relevant is to tackle meltdown danger and nuclear waste. LFTR addresses both and any future reactor needs to address both. Perhaps LFTR could be a "waste processor" if LFTR isn't economical enough, while other meltdown proof designs do more economical generation in a sort of large scale web.
But the LFTR features are what we need in next gen nuclear: meltdown proof, full fuel use / vast waste reduction, scalable.
Oak Ridge National Lab had a molten salt reactor that was closet-sized that they were working on. So it existed. Were all materials issues solved for a high temperature molten salt with all those neutrons flying around from breeding? No.
China is (somewhat thankfully, why does fucking CHINA have to represent the major economic funding for solar, wind, batteries, and nuclear solutions to global warming?) bringing an MSR/LFTR online at utility scale in a couple years.
But the point is I don't see nuclear being a viable solution unless it alleviates the Fukushima risk (unexpected meltdown) and the nuclear waste NIMBY issues. Scalability is necessary for economic viability.
Fukushima showed the flawed thinking that underpins "old nuclear": well, we have fixed the risks for everyday conditions ... that is, we put the minimum amount of required thought into safety from a political but not a fundamental design aspect.
Waste TRANSPORT falls into this. Are we pretending that this isn't the transport of nuclear dirty bomb material? That's the fundamental issue. Sure it can be safe when it gets there, but the security of the waste in transport and the other dangers is just too high. I mean, a deer crossing the road could cause a crash and spill. Tire blowouts. etc.
And there are just too many examples of corporations not giving a shit about truly dealing with environmental/waste/pollution procedures. Look at the fracking industry, they likely poisoned a great deal of water tables and other widespread effects, but didn't care in the least. They could get away with it.
For waste storage, we can have some regulatory rubberstamp that "it is compliant" but all we need is some spill or something similar and you have nuclear waste in the water table. Great.
Power generation and nuclear generation companies are full of conservative and environmental-hostile people. I don't know why this is, but it is, and it is another big issue with "old nuclear". I suspect it is a combination of the military origin of nuclear technology, regulatory fatigue, and the contempt of the Greenpeace antinuke types. But it is a fundamental organizational and culture problem of the nuclear industry. These organizations are hostile to the safety regulations and environmental concerns to the point that they will do the absolute minimum or backburner the risk mitigations.
So that's why I view the LFTR's near-100% fuel use as a critical aspect of a next gen nuclear approach. It eliminates the problem of waste, and instead changes it to an efficiency challenge. There is no waste issue to deal with so it won't be down-prioritized on contemptuously viewed. No NIMBY issues on transport and storage.
This viewpoint is not corroborated by any of the design and development summaries I've seen.
How are you proposing that someone could even open a cask with nefarious purposes and build a bomb without receiving a fatal dose of radiation? Dirty bombs basically aren’t a thing anyway. They would require a lot of material since the heavy and dangerous isotopes wouldn’t hang in the air for long or go very far. To get all of that in the air you need a very large bomb. Essentially your looking T something like a truck bomb that would be hot enough to cook the driver. Totally impractical.
What's behind this sentiment?
The Chinese system of government is demonstrating itself capable of funding and following through on long-term, large-scale public infrastructure in a way the American system currently struggles to match. Westerners could perhaps ask why this is the case, study the differences, and take some notes from the Chinese in this and some other areas. That doesn't mean sacrificing desirable characteristics of the western system, and it doesn't mean Chinese governance doesn't have its own problems. It means we can all learn from one another in pursuit of improvement. Is this a controversial position?
Also this one does seem to have a good failsafe even though it has those risks.
https://gain.inl.gov/SiteAssets/MoltenSaltReactor/Module2-Ov...
Solid fuel rods are always at risk of meltdown because once the solid fuel starts chain reacting out of control, you can't separate the fuel apart and stop the chain reaction. You're basically praying the moderators will slow it down.
I believe pebble bed relies on small chunks of solid uranium, and if there is a meltdown risk, you separate the pebbles apart and like LFTR liquid safety pools and plugs, that kills the neutron economy and reactions stop.
If the MSR vessel leaked from corrosion, it would likely fall into the safety pool and simply lose criticality.
Anyway, I'm not advocating for LFTR to the exclusion of all other things. Just that solid fuel issues: lots of waste, meltdown danger, are just not palatable when there are designs and approaches that eliminate them.
I don't care if it's "the only way that currently works", that is the "old guard" of nuclear protecting their current economic interests, not producing a nuclear design that is ACTUALLY next generation that will have relevance in a power generation ecosystem that will be dominated by solar, wind, and storage.
Nuclear is already not price competitive. New nuclear projects will come online in 5-10 years in best case, and that's 5-10 years of wind/solar hitting economies of scale and research improvement (which are improving at 5-20% geometric improvements year on year), and battery storage is seeing high density LFP and sodium ion designs come into production.
I simply view this approval as a rehash of old crappy design from the entrenched nuclear economic interests. Even with this rehash, it won't be remotely price competitive.
Here's the thing with scalability and waste: If you scale it down, it's in a LOT more places, and then if you hae substantial waste generation, that is a LOT LOT LOT more transport issues and concerns with dirty bomb nuclear, crashes, accidents in transport.
So that's why near-100% fuel use of LFTR is so important with scalability. Nuclear dismisses the NIMBYism, but the concerns over waste transport are real.
Yes, "solid fuel rod crap" same as used in every other production nuclear power plant? This SMR sounds like it might actually get built.
One of the biggest issue that SMRs try to solve is the inability of (western) nations to build nuclear plants - which itself has myriad causes, but a big one is the difficulty in building any massive facility without cost and schedule overruns
Our first change should be that nuclear plants have to pay enough insurance to cover their full liability. Better to tax fossil than just hand out huge nuclear subsidies that risk safety. Let them both account for their risk and externalities individually.
The Price Anderson Nuclear Indemnities Act was supposed to be temporary while the insurance industry for things stabilized:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nucle...
> The act was intended to be temporary, and to expire in August 1967 as it was assumed that once the companies had demonstrated a record of safe operation they would be able to obtain insurance in the private market.
There are some similar liability caps on oil spills and dam failures that should also be removed.
This is incorrect. Looking at the list[1], only 2 remaining reactors in Canada were built before the NPT was complete, and they're both scheduled to shut down in 2024. So essentially the entire Canadian nuke fleet was built after. Same thing for France. And Germany.
For the US, also same - only a few that started construction before the 1968 signing remain working. Most operational plants started construction in the 1969-1976 range.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
Was the NRC out to make life hard for new nuclear power plant construction? Some claim that, but I chose to believe that they were just doing their job. As more corner cases were discovered in the operation of the existing power plants, the regulations had to be upgraded to deal with them.
This process will continue, that's for sure. But fewer corner cases will be discovered for PWRs than for new technologies. For the reason that in the US the experience with PWR is at least two orders of magnitude higher than with any other nuclear technology.
Still, it took Nuscale 6 years to get their approval, 2 million man-hours and half a billion dollars. Whatever estimate they have for the time their first reactor goes online (2030 currently), it might be delayed because of new regulatory changes. But at least they have a proven design. If someone is trying a new design, the chance of delays increases one hundred times.
I love new technology. I am personally rooting for the gas cooled fast reactors (like Xe-100) or for the sodium cooled fast reactors (like Terrapower's Natrium).
But you need to walk before you run.
Uh, massive political pushback from environmentalists starting in the 70s leading to less nuclear and more fossil fuel plants, because somehow they were (and continue to be in parts of the world) much more strongly and rigidly opposed to NPPs than coal and gas power plants.
What killed nuclear in the 1970s was a combination of things. First, NPPs turned out to be more expensive to build than vendors had promised. Second, electricity demand suddenly stopped growing as it had been. Third, PURPA passed, allowing non-utility producers onto the grid (ostensibly for cogeneration, although many were cogeneration in name only.)
To the extent regulation bit nuclear, it was because of NEPA, which affects all industry not just nuclear. The AEC has tried pretend this didn't apply to nuclear but the Calvert Cliffs decision at SCOTUS said otherwise.
2+3 together meant utilities suddenly were in an environment where adding new GW capacity was a hard sell to state regulatory boards, and 1 made it even harder.
Sure, environmentalists complained about nuclear, but don't infer that just because they complained, they caused nuclear to fail. Correlation != causation.
The Swedes decided after TMI to not pursue nuclear power. Austria built a reactor and a referendum prevented it from coming online in 1978, with Austria prohibiting nuclear power the same year outright. Spain stopped construction of new NPPs in the 80s because the Socialists were against it. German Konvoi (3rd gen series PWR) was killed for good after Chernobyl, though I grant you it also suffered higher-than-expected costs due to each state having different legal requirements. The only Konvoi plants that went online did so shortly after Chernobyl, because construction was essentially done at that point. Italy shut down their NPPs after Chernobyl and prohibited construction of new plants in '87. etc.
we already had the ingredients for that, but we cancelled yucca and a bunch of ap1ks
There are a number of First-of-a-Kind SMR and Micro Reactors planned for the U.S., UK, and Canada. The advantage of the three leading lightwater SMRs (NuScale VOYGR, GE Hitachi BWRX-3000, and Rolls Royce SMR) are fast time to market due to the existing supply chain and continuous innovation on well understood technology. The problem is not so much the solid fuel, but the Zirconium clad fuel bundles that produce explosive hydrogen gas during Loss-of-Coolant-Accidents (LOCA). Accident Tolerant Fuels are being deployed now and may be another important innovation that reduces the likelihood of meltdowns but these systems also address the main sources of LOCAs: 1. isolation condenser system (ICS) replace pressure release valves that caused the Three Mile Island accident, and 2. passive coolant circulation systems that don't require external/backup power like the ones that failed during the Fukushima accident.
The problem with this class of lightwater SMR is that they are essentially base load power and the projected Nth-of-a-Kind costs will be competitive with fossil fuels (coal and natural gas) at best but are not cost competitive nor a good complement to intermittent renewables (wind and solar). They are a good slot-in replacement for existing coal fired plants.
There are also a number of Advanced SMRs and Micro Reactors (mobile and campus-size) that have announced First-of-a-Kind builds like the X-Energy Xe-100, TerraPower/GE Hitachi Natrium, ARC-100, Moltex SSR-W, USNC MMR, Xe-Mobile, and Westinghouse eVinci. These designs compete on a much larger landscape of theoretical trade-offs that may leapfrog the lightwater SMRs. I prefer this diverse mix of technologies and applications over a single anointed technology like Liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTRs). YMMV.
It seems to me that the nuclear lobby is particularly active these days. My impression is that the window for nuclear is rapidly closing. The alternative (wind, solar and batteries) is becoming cheaper and cheaper (even Texas is adopting it). Soon nuclear will be completely irrelevant.
It doesn't matter how "green" your energy production is if storing it requires you to turn an entire continent upside down for the battery minerals.
The United States today has close to 100 GW of nuclear power plants installed (almost all built decades ago). Most uranium ore bodies seem to hover around 1.0 - 0.1 % uranium by mass. Each GW appears to require about 200 tons of pure uranium (enriched somewhat from the natural 0.7% U235). Assuming we take an average, that's on the order of (200 tons of ore/ton of fuel) * (20,000 tons of fuel rods per year) = ~4 million tons of ore per year (non recyclable).
Batteries seem like the better option.
And Texas has a lot of sun during moments with peak usage (aircos) - so it you'd have to be an absolute moron not to see the advantages there, but for example in Germany they're going backwards here, they use coal and gas to replace nuclear - in a time where our primary focus should be on producing as little CO2 as possible - which is just another level of stupidity.
I don't know ... call me suspicious ... but having Ukraine and and Russia fighting in amongst a nuclear reactor gives me the willies.
Something previously unthinkable. Until the unthinkable becomes thunk.
You don't know what's around the corner. And those in support of nuclear have such a hard-on about it that they're starting to sound like the crypto cult. I'm not convinced.
Please don't. There are plenty of valid reasons to support more nuclear power, there are plenty of valid reasons to oppose it, but there are no good reasons to go ad hominem.
Ok, apologies ...
The US lost its own companies due to mergers, but there is certainly an industrial complex in, say, France, where Areva was bailed out and restructured by the state, or Japan, where TEPCO enjoyed a close relationship to the government.
https://www.thirdway.org/memo/how-advanced-nuclear-got-on-th...
(The article provides a really interesting window into a real-world lobbying project IMO.)
https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
> The Act establishes a no fault insurance-type system in which the first approximately $15 billion (as of 2021) is industry-funded as described in the Act. Any claims above the $12.6 billion would be covered by a Congressional mandate to retroactively increase nuclear utility liability or would be covered by the federal government.
Interesting.
A larger reactor also gains efficiency on the power generator. Larger turbines are cheaper by power than smaller ones.
Anyway, the one thing that I know is that a really large share of their initial costs comes from the small scale they are built. If smaller reactors work commercially, the costs may become more similar to coal.
This is not a kosher industry. It reaches its influence into the academic realm and has an epic PR budget. It can take advantage of the obscurity of the tech to promote talking points that seem quite reasonable, but generally mask a desire by energy suppliers to maintain the current means of distribution.
And a good part of that PR budget certain goes into negative marketing against wind and solar, specifically because they are disruptive to the distribution model. Profit. There's no conspiracy theory in profit. We know that's what industries want. And historically, industries are not invested in public safety to the extent that it cuts into profits.
So then, why does anyone TRUST the nuclear industry. And even if we do, why would we EVER trust governments to regulate that technology, given that history of absolutely clear about the likelihood of self-regulation?
All I see is billions spent to keep power generation out of our homes. Wind and solar are ready to deploy and yet people seem to suggest that tech in development, which might not be ready of commercial application for a decade, are the solution to our problems?
I don't see it.
> - Levelized cost of energy (LCOE) includes the lifetime costs of building, operating, maintaining, and fueling a power plant. Estimated LCOE for plants built in the near future are: combined cycle natural gas: 3.71 ¢/kWh; advanced nuclear: 6.31 ¢/kWh; and biomass: 8.92 ¢/kWh
and
> - Spent fuel is placed in a storage pool of circulating cooled water to absorb heat and block the high radioactivity of fission products
> - Many U.S. spent fuel pools are reaching capacity, necessitating the use of dry cask storage.
This point is often overlooked. Nuclear waste generates heat. It needs to be actively cooled, possibly for a decade or longer, until it can be stored in dry storage. There's transportation risk there (for tens of thousands of tons per year at current rates) and facilities that need to be maintained to do that. Plus adding water increases the risk of site contamination.
Also consider:
> - ... Managing nuclear waste requires very long-term planning. U.S. EPA was required to set radiation exposure limits in permanent waste storage facilities over an unprecedented timeframe—one million years
> - The U.S. has no permanent storage site.
TIL:
> - The U.S. Price-Anderson Act limits the liability of nuclear plant owners if a radioactive release occurs to $450 million for individual plants and $13.5 billion across all plants.
WHY?
This is the big problem with nuclear: failure modes have incredibly high cost but relatively low likelihood. Companies have limited liability so they get to pocket the profits for under-maintaining plants and move the costs to the government.
In addition to being a bad idea this presents a falsely cheap picture of the true costs of nuclear power.
In this same vein:
> - The Nuclear Waste Policy Act required the U.S. federal government to begin taking control of spent nuclear fuel in 1998.
Another cost shifted to the government.
EDIT: over the years I've learned that the more rabid one side of an argument is, the more likely they are to simply downvote anything they disagree with, regardless of the merit. This, sadly, is my experience with nuclear on HN (which isn't plagued with downvote-as-disagreement like, say, Reddit is). It's not a reason to be anti-nuclear but it sure makes it hard to be swayed by pro-nuclear arguments.
[1]: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/nuclear...
Imagine if we had a solar article that started with:
>While promising the new solar cell tech does nothing to address the ever increasing number of deaths associated with roof top solar, which has surpassed Chernobyl as of 2015.
You'd call that article a coal industry hit job. Yet this is exactly what the OP's article does.
It's written in clear text about this responsibility shifting in the comment, but you continue to do that responsibility shifting.
I'm affected by Chornobyl, my parents are affected by Choronobyl, my brothers are affected by Chornobyl, my children are affected by Chornobyl, while we have zero profit from nuclear energy, and nobody asked our consent when the nuclear station was constructed. Moreover, our then government (Moscow) tried to hide all facts about tragedy, while our current government postponing research about cancer induced by Chornobyl radioactive pollution, so people like you can continue to claim that only few people killed by Chornobyl while thousands die every year due to increased levels of cancer.
Until people become honest that solar without batteries is impossible and we don't have the technology to store a days worth of energy then any comparison is misleading at best and a disaster at worst. Germany is looking at a winter where people may well freeze to death if Putin decides they should.
Nuclear might sound bad when you know all the details about it. Renewables are just propaganda until their downsides are aired just as publicly.
We don't live in a world where we get everything we want. Nuclear accidents are the only way we can have a first world life style with current technology without killing billions in 30 years from climate change. The longer we keep lying about this the more people will die.
We could have Nuclear Fusion but we will still using turbine to generate electricity. :P
>these smaller reactors are actually likely to produce more radioactive waste than conventional plants.
>nuclear power expert M.V. Ramana also points out that the cost of renewable energy like wind and solar is already lower than that of nuclear, and continuing to fall rapidly.
Why are we repeating these same questions when we already have an answer? Edit: Solar and Wind aren't constant, and nuclear waste is a solved problem.
>SMRs could cost more than bigger nuclear plants, he adds, because they don’t have the same economy of scale.
I thought the whole point of SMRs were economy of scale?
>Tellingly, some utilities have already backed out of NuScale’s first project over cost concerns.
Anyone could chime in here? Was it because NuScale is too expensive?
I was expecting SMRs, once approved could be built much more quickly. I was thinking in terms of 3 years with perfect project planning. But right now even the earliest ( and likely optimistic ) first SMRs site is 2030. Why does it take so long?
See fusion this way: it's like a coal power plant with infinite free coal (because the rest of it is the same - turbines, water treatment, condensers, generators, power transformation and transmission - and thermonuclear reactor will for sure never be cheaper than a coal-fired steam boiler). Which means, electricity cost will be same as of a coal plant minus the price of coal. Which will already be above cost of most renewable sources and, once electrolyzers for green hydrogen will start coming online, remembering that barely 15% of renewable electricity will need to be passed through them (rest can simply be balanced by different renewables), will still be sort of competitive.
And we don't have fusion yet, while renewables will keep getting cheaper.
The other aspects of fusion get swept under the rug: high speed neutrons from sustained fusion energy production will degrade the equipment, so you build this HUGE EXPENSIVE facility and it will have a shelf life, and be somewhat radioactive, in ... well, I don't know the timeline, but I'll assume decades.
Even without that, fusion costs even with "free" fuel (I mean, it will probably be deuterium and separation will cost some money) will probably be quite high for operation, maintenance, to say nothing of the massive installation cost.
I think it is still worth the current investment in research though, it's not like I want the book closed on fusion power. But I wouldn't count on it getting us out of the global warming hole we are in.
The inefficiency and massive capital costs of of steam turbines is a major reason why natural gas is so much cheaper than coal or fission -- natgas uses a combined cycle turbine rather than a steam turbine.
This is also the case of helion energy fusion solution. Aneutronic fusion with direct energy conversion. No heat in the cycle.
The issue with these thermal power solutions is the waste heat. It means you need water nearby to cool down your reactor. Side effect: thermal pollution, raising the temp of rivers and/or coastals water is detrimental to ecosystems. Plus: how do you deal with droughts?
This makes fission quite attractive in colder climates.
https://www.powermag.com/district-heating-supply-from-nuclea...
https://www.powermag.com/efficiency-improvements-mark-advanc...
That claims 64% for a gas turbine.
LFTR presentations said they could use the brayton cycle I think due to high temps, I'd imagine a fusion would also have the temps to enable brayton cycle and several other tricks to achieve good efficiency.
Remember, what matters at scale is cost cost cost. Turbines might not be sexy, but if they are cheap, then that is what you use.
Exactly. Turbines (along with the accompanying water treatment, condensers, generators, power transformation) aren't cheap. A 600MW coal plant costs $2B.
What are the questions? Are renewables the answer?
Only hydro can store energy cheaply. And solar and wind are not available constantly.
That was the question partly laid out in the article. Suggesting we dont need Nuclear because we already have solar and wind.
Please stop this nonsense. There is no law of physics or even any strong practical reason to think your assertion is correct.
Assuming we did, to get away from mechanical turbines and generators as the heat->motion->electricity step would require a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_generator -- which have had more success but still face serious material issues.
As for "why does it take so long?" -- the first of anything takes longer. And the US has terrible problems in building anything new or big.
What are the reasons for this do you think?
A bridge has failure consequences that are predictable: bridge breaks, people on the bridge die, local economy suffers. All of those are understandable by an elementary school student playing with toys and imagining the town around it.
The failure consequences of fission plants were not known to include things that had to be discovered years after Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Not to mention -- who knew that exhausting hot non-radioactive water into a river could be bad for it?
The failure consequences of Thalidomide were not known for years. The failure consequences of dioxin usage were not known for years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_organic_pollutant
Let's also include the US propensity to fall victim to charlatanry: enough of us want to believe so much, we will give lots of money to Juicero, uBeam, and Nigerian Princes. (Hyperloop, cough.)
So if you want to do something big, it needs to be well-understood. If you want to do something new, it needs to be proven and well-examined.
Imagine writing a piece of software that needs to parse XML. It is probably better just to use an existing library for that, instead of reinventing the wheel.
The NuScale VOYAGR, in particular, is a really big SMR in terms of [plant size]/[megawatt]. The economies of SMR come when you can reduce that footprint by making smaller safety systems or eliminating active safety features (because the plant is small enough not to need them) AND factory-build them with on-site assembly. Other SMR designs seem to have more promising ideas for doing both, but NuScale's is just too big. (There are also micro-reactors that optimize for replacing diesel engines and gas turbines with a very small footprint at the tradeoff of cost.)
>I was expecting SMRs, once approved could be built much more quickly. I was thinking in terms of 3 years with perfect project planning. But right now even the earliest ( and likely optimistic ) first SMRs site is 2030. Why does it take so long?
There's a lot going between "approved today" and "SMR online": particularly that factory infrastructure needs to come on line and site licensing need to happen, and then the plant needs to get commissioned after it is built (which takes longer for the first). It's very conceivable to me that the Nth SMR could be a ~3ish year project, but longer for the FOAK unit is almost inevitable.
>particularly that factory infrastructure needs to come on line and site licensing need to happen, and then the plant needs to get commissioned after it is built (which takes longer for the first).
Oh Ok. So it is only the "design" that has been approved. ( Again I should have read it carefully ). No wonder why it is taking so long.
Thank you for the reply.
Those would be 'micro-reactors' and as noted tend to be optimised for off-grid applications.
> We could have Nuclear Fusion but we are still using turbine to generate electricity. :P
This is actually one of the main points of why the whole talk about "economies of scale" for nuclear just doesn't make much sense. More than 50% of a nuclear plant is essentially the same as any other thermoelectric plant. Despite the many power plants being build we haven't seen a this elusive cost reduction. Construction projects (in contrast to things build in factories) don't lend themselves to economies of scale (in terms of building many).
There was an HN submission that analysed the cost of a nuclear plant and showed that there is really not much room for any economies of scale reductions.
> >these smaller reactors are actually likely to produce more radioactive waste than conventional plants.
> >nuclear power expert M.V. Ramana also points out that the cost of renewable energy like wind and solar is already lower than that of nuclear, and continuing to fall rapidly.
> Why are we repeating these same questions when we already have an answer?
> >SMRs could cost more than bigger nuclear plants, he adds, because they don’t have the same economy of scale.
Yes that's always the weird part of the discussion. There are reasons why nuclear plants are build large, it's cheaper.
> I thought the whole point of SMRs were economy of scale?
> >Tellingly, some utilities have already backed out of NuScale’s first project over cost concerns.
> Anyone could chime in here? Was it because NuScale is too expensive?
> I was expecting SMRs, once approved could be built much more quickly. I was thinking in terms of 3 years with perfect project planning. But right now even the earliest ( and likely optimistic ) first SMRs site is 2030. Why does it take so long?
The answer is not solar and wind. For solar and wind to replace fossil fuels for electricity generation will require ramping up mining activity by a factor of a few tens from current levels. Not to mention the fact that we still don't know how to produce solar panels and wind turbines without using fossil fuels - for mining, metallurgy and transport. The numbers are just not there.
The only possible answer is a significant reduction of energy consumption, but it seems very few people are ready to accept it.