China leads the quest for small modular nuclear reactors–will the world follow? | Hacker News Reader

China leads the quest for small modular nuclear reactors–will the world follow?

spectrum.ieee.org

31 pointspseudolus41 comments

The key to industry acceptance is standardization of approved parts so that modular reactors can scale. Constant design changes and one off reactors will lead to more accidents.

The US needs to finalize waste processing/storage. Congress' inability to do this has held the industry back. There are 70 reactor sites with waste stored in the parking lot, about a 1/3 of them no longer have active reactors.

Forced obsolescence. One of the advantages is to get everyone using the same design and then set mandatory retirement dates to get folks to move to newer standards. Our constant extending nuclear reactors beyond their planned life span just creates unnecessary risk.

Prof. David Ruzic argues that storing waste near to the reactor makes the most sense. Around the reactor is a safe zone, the amount of space required is tiny (70 years of nuclear US production fits in one garage box), and the waste is easily available if the waste ever becomes valuable due to new technologies. See https://youtu.be/KnxksKmJa6U for more info.

He also argues that worrying about the small amounts of nuclear waste is probably not the best idea if you compare it to the waste produced by other energy sources.

  The generation of electricity from a typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear power station, which would supply the needs of more than a million people, produces only three cubic metres of vitrified high-level waste per year.

High level waste makes around 3% of radioactive waste in a typical power plant.

https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-is-nuclear...

> 70 years of nuclear US production fits in one garage box

2000 tonnes of spent fuel is generated each year and that doesn't fit in a garage box.

That's 2000 tonnes of spent fuel. Of which 3% is high level waste (which will increase with modular reactors, granted).

That's ~30m3. That doesn't sound like a big garage box actually. If you have 1m free space around a car in your garage box that would fit all the high level waste.

The low level waste would still easily fit in 1 floor of a parking garage. And we only ever need 100 such floors, plus 1 parking garage floor that needs to be safe for 100k years.

For powering the entire US, that doesn't sound like much space. Especially since hopefully we'll only need 99% it for 100 years when we get better options like fusion.

The US doesn't reprocess spent fuel, so that's 2000 tonnes of spent fuel per year or half the volume of an olympic pool each year. [0]

Reprocessing fuel isn't very economical, digging for uranium ore makes a lot more sense.

[0] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...

The claim about the garage box was incorrect, still the amount of spent fuel is not high. Half an olympic pool per year shared among 70 reactors over a period of less than 70 years means each reactors stores about half an olympic pool. A nuclear power plant is fairly big, so half an olympic pool is a tiny bit of real estate inside it. It can easily go up by a factor of 10 and nobody would notice.

I agree that it's not that much when you consider the amount of energy that is generated from that fuel.

Since we're talking about storing waste near the reactor, I believe what's meant is one garage box per reactor.

Yucca mountain has been in the works for decades, but I guess the political momentum just isn't there.

Definitely sad to see an inability to compromise cause such long-lasting problems.

To be honest, I think we should keep the spent fuel handy. Right now it's just a nuisance, but when we develop fast neutron reactors, we'll be able to burn U-238, and more than 90% of the spent fuel is U-238. We won't do this tomorrow, but if the SMR's get the nuclear industry going again, we might have fast reactors in 2 or 3 decades. At which point, having one hundred thousand tons of fuel around won't hurt.

I think countries now need to do whatever they can, right now.

No "quests". If it's Nuclear, build proven nuclear plants in the quickest amount of time possible and than faff around with micro-reactors or whatever.

We're out of time to mess around.

But, but...

https://duckduckgo.com/q=Tennesse+Valley+Authority+SMR

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/US-BWR-to-receiv...

I don't understand what these links are supposed to say in relation to the statement it's replying to. Can you clarify?

At least some parts of the country called USA are trying to do so with SMRs, but seem to be almost stuck in regulations, nonetheless moving slowly forward.

Furthermore they seem to be upgrading older reactors, and getting them new, supposedly better and safer fuel(from Framatome).

I wondered why I can't seem to recall reading anything about them and that.

https://thebulletin.org/premium/2021-07/can-small-modular-re...

That image! It's evocative of cold war propaganda, but most of that that included family in the context of nuclear was in some fallout shelter.

Whoever created that for NuScale did great work.

My understanding is that China doesn’t have oil / natural gas of its own and much of the country is not suitable for wind/ solar such that this is an expected direction.

Talking with people in the US energy sector, there seems to be a lot of interest in nuclear but the perennial issue of marketing.

China has quite a bit of oil. It's the 7th largest producer of oil in the world. The problem is that it's also the 2nd largest consumer and imports more than it produces.

Ordinal stats aren’t too helpful here. For better reference they produce less than half of what Russia produces and less than a third of what the US produces.

https://www.worldometers.info/oil/oil-production-by-country/

They consume about 3x what they produce

https://www.worldometers.info/oil/oil-consumption-by-country...

Half of Russian production or 30% of Chinese consumption is a massive amount of oil!

Indeed. But 33% of what they need is not nearly enough.

No, but they're ramping up oil production at a tremendous rate, are the biggest EV market in the world and have a shrinking population. That 33% number is going to increase quite quickly.

Doubtful. Those statements aren’t false, but they won’t hold up to the fact that the Chinese demand for oil is growing too.

Depends on time period. Chinese demand will definitely go up in 2023 due to lockdown easing. But I think it'll go down in 2024 and subsequent years.

It’s been rising for the past decade including throughout the lockdowns

How can part of the country not be suitable for solar? Does the sun not shine there?

China has solid solar potential [1].

[1] https://seas.harvard.edu/news/2021/10/chinas-solar-powered-f...

Too many people take wherever they hear on YouTube as gospel

PV power in China has got several issues, lack of sun is not one of them

Don't leave us hanging, what are the issues?

My understanding, as a non-expert: the best place for both on-shore wind and solar power generation is in the West of the country (particularly in Xinjiang), but most of the power demand is in the East.

China is addressing this by building long-distance, ultra-high-voltage connections between the West and East of the country. This article (from 2017, but it gives you an idea of the problem) has a good map: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/01/16/china-po....

A lot of people listen to Zeihan and take him seriously

the thing that worries me about this approach is that you pepper your suburbs with these things, and terrorism or large scale war could make these really juicy and hard to defend targets that would make the immediate areas "dirty" with unusable land for centuries or longer.

>”hard to defend targets that would make the immediate areas "dirty" with unusable land for centuries or longer.”

The smaller scale of the reactors limits how bad the fallout would be, both in terms of how violent any meltdown could be and how much material could be dispersed. You certainly wouldn’t have a Chernobyl or Fukushima situation. Cleanup would be expensive but it would not be unusable for centuries.

From what I can tell small module reactors are not actually planned to be installed individually and dispersed around a city. All the plans suggest placing something like 6-10 together in a dedicated facility just like a conventional power plant. It would certainly have good security.

>really juicy and hard to defend targets

IMO the opposite, if anything small modular reactors can be more easily hardened and distributed to reduce vunerability. Relative to PRC underground infra abilities, I can see thousands of these buried reactors + with wide spread electrification to make for probably the most securitized energy infra.

Large scale peer warfare where adversaries have global strike capabilities means countries can't rely on geographic distance for defense anymore. It will be back to old school geologic depth. Especially with respect to US, where energy autonomy increasingly =/= energy security. Fortress America becomes another Saudi Arabia where essentially extraction infra becomes vunerable/indefensible once advanced rocketry can hit large stationary targets on CONUS. In the meantime, there's already reports of people messing with US energy infra state side with drones and bullets.

that is not the case

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