Way, way overdue! China has taken all of our research from the 50's and has been charging ahead. Very sad that politics and ignorance has severely kneecapped our nuclear industry :(
The most obnoxious thing about the energy literature is that it frequently reads like a stopped clock. People still compare the cost of nuclear energy to the cost of coal, but it's no accident that the US stopped building coal plants at the same time it stopped building nuclear plants because it stopped both for the same reason... The capital cost of a gas turbine generator (even in a hybrid cycle including a steam turbine) is dramatically smaller than the steam turbines used in coal and nuclear plants.
Since molten salt reactors run a lot hotter than LWRs they could drive
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-cycle_gas_turbine
but it's a technology that is not very well developed. If nuclear energy is going to compete with natural gas, however, they need to ditch the steam turbine.
Is the closed cycle gas turbine also using a superior cycle like the Brayton? Oh it's in the third sentence, CTRL-F failed me.
These super-high efficiency gas turbines are not 'pure' gas turbines, but so-called combined cycle plants. Basically you first have a 'normal' gas turbine driving a generator (which, by itself, maybe gives you ~45% efficiency), but then you take the host exhaust of that gas turbine and use that to drive a secondary steam cycle driving another generator.
I'm not sure such a thing is doable in a closed Brayton cycle, at least I haven't read anything about anything like that.
An interesting thing with closed cycle Brayton is that instead of air you can use another fluid as the working fluid. Supercritical CO2, for instance, has some nice properties leading to extremely compact machinery. Of course there's an uphill battle in commercializing this technology; if you use air (or nitrogen) you can just adapt one of the many existing gas turbine cores with $zillions of R&D and decades of experience behind them.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/westinghouse-tos...
[1] https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2022-07-18/ge-...
I don't really think the population matters. The problem is that after the NRC was replaced AEC was replaced, regulation became totally technology depended. Doing anything other then PWR was essentially impossible.
The DoD is only now undertaking efforts to change this, but its turning a large ship.
The "population" tends to not believe claims about certain accidents being impossible if they keep happening. The safety of nuclear power is a fantasy. No, the track record is not enough. Given the enormous potential for catastrophe and the timespans for nuclear power project, questioning assumptions like "nobody is going to shoot rockets and shells around the plant" is entirely valid.
Bayesian reasoning would require you to argue about priors. You want to take priors from the past. Fine and dandy, when trying to predict the weather or even where the stock market is going. But when talking about how likely it is that something blows up and contaminates a huge area, maybe there are higher standards. And philosophizing about the average is all nice and well, until you happen to live near the site of an accident. And in Ukraine the assumption "nobody is going to shoot around a nuclear plant", which most assurance of nuclear safety depend upon, doesn't hold anymore.
Nuclear power isn't that cheap. Certainly not without subsidies and once you price in all the externalities.
Nuclear will be cheap when the industry grows and reactor designs are standardized.
It's really simply the superior technology any way you look at it and the "nuclear is too expensive" is just a tired and arguably false argument against it. I'm so sick and tired of people saying that it's too expensive to save the planet..
"Drawing board" is the operational term. Nuclear power is always late and it's always more expensive than promised. Why is the nuclear power industry subsidized so much everywhere when it's actually a good investment? Have government agencies suddenly become good at investing or are they just charities for corporate interests?
I'm not even saying it's "too expensive", by the way. I'm not totally against nuclear power, I do see the benefits. It has its place, probably. But I know about fat tail distributions and the unpredictability of the future. You really don't want anybody shooting rockets and artillery shells around a nuclear facility a few hundred miles near you. Today that's Ukraine and much of eastern Europe, who says that in the next fourty or fifty years, the lifespan of a typical plant, that's not you either? In Mossul ISIS hunted around for nuclear material to build a dirty bomb, luckily they didn't find the stuff that actually was there. Who says your country will not have a rogue militia like that in the next fifty years?
And then the nuclear industry is unwieldy. It requires a large and expensive specialized infrastructure. Which can be amortized eventually, yes. But much of that investment is upfront and the recuperation is dependent on a lot of things going exactly right for a very long time. Also it requires a huge labor force that has to be trained for this specific task and then can hardly do anything else. France has the problem of a shortage. In short: It's hard and expensive to get into nuclear technology and it's even harder to get out of it.
And in order to solve the climate crisis using nuclear power there are two major problems: First, it's already too late, because nuclear power is so slow. Secondly, you'd need to nuclearize much of the world, including countries with questionable regulatory regimes to say the least. This makes all the problems we see now a lot worse...
Sorry i meant all those countries are planning to invest billions of euros into building new reactors now that the EU has deemed nuclear power green. You are talking like other power generation like wind, solar etc is not subsidized ? Hope is the unique to nuclear? Nuclear is subsidized and tightly controlled/regulated for obvious reasons and honestly imho all energy infrastructure should be tightly tied to government as is the case in most of Europe.
Even if Russia was too hot the nuclear power plant in Ukraine with a cruise missile the damage and contamination would be fairly local and I'd imagine hitting a coal or gas power plant with a cruise missile would be just as bad. Besides that hitting a nuclear power plant with cruise missile would be considered firing a nuke and don't think Russia is ready to do that yet. Taking about dirty bombs is just plain stupid, why the hell would you through all that trouble when there's much much cheaper and simpler ways to do damage?
Yes it requires some new infrastructure but in many cases you can switch coal, gas and oil plants almost 1:1 with nuclear. What's wrong with having lots of highly educated people working with supplying the world with energy ? And how is it different from solar, wind etc? France has problems because they still have a huge anti nuclear movement making it very hard to invest properly in maintenance and new plants, besides that France's shortage is because Germany suddenly requires allot more electricity because of stupid investments.
It's never too late.. sure we can also build what is the fastest solution but nuclear is the best bet long term.
Most of your arguments are entire bullshit and I really don't have the time to waste. No, if one of the nuclear plants in Ukraine blows up, the effects are not "very local" and I suspect the locals do care. So should you when a nuclear plant near where you live goes online. Also the biggest nuclear plant in Europe is hurting Ukraine's defense just by sitting there and doing its job perfectly: The Russians discovered that they can shoot artillery from there without anyone shooting back. Nuclear plants are defensive weak points under any circumstance.
A dirty bomb is a viable terror weapon. You can spread radioactive material quite far with an amount of explosives that wouldn't be able to cause near as much death and terror. Good deal, especially when you got the Plutonium and what not for free...
People like you are lying through your teeth by saying the only alternative to nuclear is fossil fuels. I don't even know anyone who believes this.
And no, we can't wait for nuclear power. A world full of nuclear power plants is unsafe. Maybe in Norway or Finland with the most honest and least corrupt governments (at presents) and no immediate threats from the outside it seems safe. But really, betting on nuclear power means betting on a perfect world during the next few decades at least.
You just continue to profess to a profound ignorance on how radiation exposure work, what happened and is happening right now in Tschernobyl and Fukushima, and make hand wavy arguments "Such accidents are never going to happen and aren't actually that bad, for real this time, pinky promise with cherry on top".
You know who cares about dirty bombs? Every intelligence agency and counter terrorism unit in the world. So far it hasn't happened, but if nuclear power is scaled up, this stuff will be way more accessible. A lot like the gun violence problem in the US, but I guess the denialism around those topics is similar.
I personally care most about the closest nuclear facilities, not so much those in China. And in reality, neither Tschernobyl nor Fukushima have been cleaned up yet and continue to be a problem to be felt financially at the very least. I know quite a bit about it, but some people apparently think it's only bad if you die instantly... But it certainly makes some weak arguments easier, doesn't it? Who cares about people losing decades of their life...
Particle physics dominated US research grants for several decades with some results to show for it. Now that the focus has shifted elsewhere (e.g. material science) and another country is leading in nuclear research, we will be able to observe their results and act accordingly (just like China did in the 50s). Why is it so important which government is facilitating which research?
For better or worse, the world doesn't work such that everyone who reads a research paper is on an equal footing to industrialize/commercialize the technology. The ones who got their hands dirty are far ahead. Thus governments do something called 'industrial policy' (a somewhat dirty word in the West these days, to our detriment I think) where they try to build 'value chains' (or whatever you wanna call it) where they spend money on pure research, applied research, early stage spinoffs, etc. to kickstart an industry around a particular technology.
For an example, consider how decades-long investment by the US government into electronic warfare and military electronics kickstarted Silicon Valley.
So China is gearing up to be a dominant player in the global nuclear power market. So does that matter? In a way it's better somebody does it than nobody and we continue burning fossils, but being one of these hopeless romantics who think things like democracy and human rights are incredibly important I'd rather see 'our team' on the field as well. Energy extortion isn't pretty, see Europe and Russia at the moment.