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?
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.
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