*could be the last of its kind built in the US
To quote:
> the industry is betting on advanced nuclear reactors to save the day.
> It’s a bad bet.
The main points:
> The advanced and small modular reactors (SMRs) under development face a raft of economic, regulatory, technological and temporal risks.
and
> The advanced reactor closest to market in the U.S. is being developed by NuScale, which has a nonbinding agreement to build a first-of-its-kind SMR project in Idaho. The company has already raised its projected power cost from $58 per megawatt-hour to $89, even though it’s still years away from even beginning construction.
and
> Advanced reactors such as TerraPower’s Natrium, which are significantly different in design from existing light-water reactors, face an even steeper regulatory climb. And they’ll have to contend with broken or nonexistent supply chains because the more highly concentrated uranium fuels used by most advanced reactors are currently unavailable in large quantities outside of Russia.
Which leads to this summary at the end:
> Regardless of rosy messaging from DOE and the industry, it’s almost certain that Vogtle 3 and 4 are going to be the last big nuclear reactors coming online in the U.S. for a long time.
It's a big bullet point for the hard right party VVD that think this way they can continue business as usual. But it'll come way too late for that. All the hard choices will already have been made by that. I'm sure their buddy's corporations will have some nice pork from it though. Such prestige projects always tend to double their budget at least. And then we have the fuel, waste storage and the cleanup which are usually not even factored into the cost but absorbed by society.
Only time will tell which bets in the energy grid was good and which was bad for the environment. The last bet that many countries did on buying natural gas from Russia ended up being quite bad for Europe.
The bet on buying natural gas was a bad one for the environment for the start obviously, no matter whom we bought it from.
I just don't see it really solving anything at a large scale. Perhaps for some applications like perhaps airplanes but for many others just using batteries would be a much better option.
Batteries are of course a better option for short term storage and probably most vehicles. But there are storage use cases where hydrogen is far superior to batteries, such as very long term energy storage.
Imo it's all culture war populism. Renewable energy and saving the planet is for little girls, nuclear power and driving fossil fuel cars is for real men or something.
A big part of the high cost of the LWR is the cost of the steam turbine and associated heat exchangers (a typical PWR has several of those, each of which is as big as the reactor vessel) These very large systems inflate the balance of system costs such as the size of both the confinement and auxillary buildings.
It's no accident that they stopped building coal burning power plants at the same time they stopped building nuclear plants. Neither one could compete with the low capital cost of gas turbine power plants fueled with methane.
Old literature expected that HTGR power plants with steam turbines might be able to beat the LWR in economics, that fast breeder reactors would be more fuel efficient but have higher capital costs. Today there is some expectation that a fast reactor with a closed cycle gas turbine could undercut the capital cost of an LWR. Now that kind of gas turbine is not a bird in the hand and will take some development, but the potential reward is huge... Such a turbine would almost fit in the employee break room of the turbine house of an LWR.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=30812
The bad news is that coal fired power can be cheaper than gas fired power when gas prices are high. If coal and nuclear alike were dominated by the cost of steam equipment, we should have seen a similar burst of nuclear reactors starting to operate in the US around that time. Nuclear power plants are sadly more expensive to build and operate than coal plants.
The good news is that falling costs for renewables and storage make it very unlikely that the US will build any more coal-fired plants on economic grounds.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2023/01/30/99-...
No there isn't. Check your figures. Breeder reactors literally cost twice as much as light water reactors of comparable power.
If you are working at higher temperatures with printed circuit heat exchangers the whole thing is dramatically smaller.
Make it profitable, and you can have all the breeder reactors you want.
The article is basically anti-nuclear propaganda, with its conclusions based on the same lack of understanding and fear that's always been the problem.
I wouldn't be surprised to see the US extend the life of existing nuclear plants and potentially even build a few more of the old design when push comes to shove. In time climate change will force the government to act, and if the new reactor types aren't ready and the needed breakthroughs in energy storage plus the needed world wide smart grid to enable renewables, there won't be another choice.
Are they expensive because of overbearing safety requirements? Partly, sure. On the flip side, Fukushima has now cost hundreds and hundreds of billions in direct costs. If nuclear power plants didn't have a civil exemption where governments bore the potential liability of damage (which is almost infinite), they would be unbuildable.
And even with all nuclear disasters included, it is still cheap enough to do the job. If it is uninsurable, then government should insure it. Again, still cheaper than anything else.
It seems like PBRs have the most readily fixable problems, but even those are probably decades away from putting power on the grid.
I would bet a number of the venture funded reactors will die of a "liquidity mismatch" with their investors. Some appear to be leaning on developing technologies and patents in anticipation of encountering that problem.
> The first commercial plants are not expected before 2040–2050,[3] although the World Nuclear Association in 2015 suggested that some might enter commercial operation before 2030.[4]
An optimistic 2030 from 8 years ago, with about zero progress to date.
The United States went to the moon in 8 years.
Where does “zero progress” come from?
The same article lists projects.
We’ve all heard of TerraPower, for example?
There's only one 4th generation nuclear reactor actually producing power anywhere that I could find on the list, the HTR-PM in China which was connected to the grid in 2022.
Terrapower is one of many companies that have some funding but nothing produced. To quote the Wikipedia link you posted:
> [in 2022] DOE gave TerraPower cost-share funding through the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP) to test, license and build an advanced reactor within seven years.
Let's see where they are in 7 years...
[1] https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_78743/the-nea-small-modular...
[2] https://www.powermag.com/china-starts-up-first-fourth-genera...
I had a friend who worked in nuclear, and progress was dictated by changes in washington every 4 or sometimes 8 years.
Talk about Gen 4 reactors started around 2000, test reactors and development projects for Gen 4 reactors are going into high gear.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Chinese-molten-s...
It would be nice if these were coming online in the next 10 years but don't think our need for energy suddenly expires in 2030 or that we'll be completely happy with renewables by 2040.