Westinghouse announces a new small modular nuclear reactor | Hacker News Reader

Westinghouse announces a new small modular nuclear reactor

cnbc.com

161 pointsakeck143 comments

Westinghouse went bankrupt in 2017 [0] after major project mismanagement [1] that precipitated in federal felony indictments for its executives [2]. I think this is relevant background exposition that's missing from the CNBC writeup.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13987046 ("Westinghouse Files for Bankruptcy, in Blow to Nuclear Power", 388 comments)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal

[2] https://www.justice.gov/usao-sc/pr/top-westinghouse-nuclear-...

Yep. Too little, too late.

All of which occurred under the management of Toshiba, no? And Westinghouse is now owned by Cameco, as a more vertically-integrated uranium & nuclear company

Those problems came at a bad time for Toshiba as the Japanese government would not be interested in supporting a national champion in nuclear immediately after the Fukushima accident.

The Japanese are back on the nuclear horse, which is great because it remains the best horse we have. [1]

[1] https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-business-japan-cli...

There is no such thing as the best horse. It all depends on what goals you have and what conditions (geographical, economical, geopolitical,...) you are operating on, based off of that you can compare different energy sources to find the best one that fits that purpose.

Not small, modular, or new. But certainly a decent reactor. They clearly want something to slot in against the GE BWRX-300. But they would probably be better served by going all-in on their eVinci reactor, which is small, modular, and new

https://www.westinghousenuclear.com/energy-systems/evinci-mi...

Fascinating that any superficially for-profit entity would want to compete against something that has never earned one single dollar from revenue production. I find the whole industry quite unusual. It is possible that there are engineers who started at GE (or Hitachi) decades ago working on the simplified BWR, worked on it their whole careers, and retired without anyone ever building one.

There were people that worked on flight their whole lives without an airplane ever being built.

That's the way it goes sometimes.

Fusion energy will be a reality at some point.

Tons of people worked their entire lives on it and retired and died without seeing a reactor built.

Interesting acceleration of technology.

It's been possible for decades for people to build/buy and fly their own planes. Nowadays it's possible for an individual to put up a satellite or get a chip made. I wonder if in the future kids will achieve fusion.

I realize this isn't what you meant, but fusion is readily achievable, and has been done by children: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Wilson. It's energy positive fusion that's hard.

In a similar vein, cold fusion's also possible, it's just not energy-positive, and not a power source. But the mere mention of those two words together means no one read the rest of that sentence.

Sorry, it looks like your comment might have gotten cut off, was there more after "similar vein"? :-)

Who worked on flight their whole lives without ever building a plane, 50 years after the airplane had been demonstrated? Even in fusion, people are usually building machines. It seems to me the "paper reactor" situation in fission is rather unique. The only precedent I can think of is perhaps the abandonment of shipbuilding in Ming China.

Friends worked at NASA with people who went their entire careers without ever having a project build any hardware...

It's a shame your comment was downvoted, jeffbee. I thought it was insightful and I upvoted it. There has indeed been tremendous loss of knowledge with two (and counting) generations of engineers working on this technology and retiring with their work mostly lost to time, both at our national labs and in the private sector.

Lots and lots of Venture Capital coming to this direction will sway management quite fast.

What would security requirements for a real-life installation be like? The concept photo shows a plain-Jane barbed wire.

300 MW is still pretty big, isn't it? Why don't they build nuclear reactors that can be made on a factory assembly line, shipped on the back of truck, and installed right where it's needed in a town?

I assume the reactors in a nuclear sub are sort of like what I'm talking about.

> Why don't they build nuclear reactors that can be made on a factory assembly line,

Rolls Royce is proposing just that: https://www.rolls-royce-smr.com/why-rolls-royce-smr

Westinghouse has made nuclear submarine reactors.

The UK small modular reactor project is being run by Rolls-Royce who make the equivalent submarine reactors.

Both SMR projects seem to be about 10x the power output of a submarine reactor. I'm guessing they have to use a very different level of fuel enrichment than is in subs.

This is also being done. Micro-reactors are generally sub-20MWe and are intended to be portable. The biggest name is micro-reactors is probably Project PELE[1]. PELE is a DoD project to develop a trailer mounted micro-reactors for remote deployment.

PELE will be tested at the Idaho National Lab[2] (DoE's primary nuclear energy research lab). Speaking of INL, they are also building the MARVEL[3] reactor. MARVEL is another test reactor of the micro-reactor type. MARVEL is being funded by DOE-NE (if I recall) and is designed to be be a 100kW.

[1] https://www.cto.mil/pele_eis/ [2] https://gain.inl.gov/GAINEPRINEI_MicroreactorProgramVirtualW... [3] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/new-marvel-project-aims-s...

Aren't micro reactors meant to be like one-use batteries? That's the info I got from listening to the Omega Tau podcast about this.

One use of 2-3 years. You have two of them working at the same time and when it’s time to refuel you have a new one waiting and old gets shipped back to factory for refueling.

The expensive part of nuclear power plants is all the electricity generation part (turbines/generators/piping/transformers/etc) that is pretty much the same as for coal power plants. You don’t swap out any of that.

What are the chances the old one will be left on the site because it's not financially viable to ship it back and recycle it?

They are the size of a shipping container, not prohibitively expensive to move. The customers buying these things have no ability to recycle/refuel or dispose of the spent fuel. I presume any purchase agreement comes with a commitment to deal with it at end of life.

I guess if the supplier goes out of business, you might have trouble, but I'd expect these companies are putting things in place for that eventuality e.g. insurance.

They are one-use batteries in the sense that they are sealed and not intended to be refueled at the place of deployment, if ever. They can last for a decade without refueling though, so it may be fine.

The economics just don't work out. Small reactors still end up being enormously expensive, but without the huge power output of large ones. There is a reason why all power plants use gigawatt-scale reactors.

And big ones require government subsidies, tax breaks, and federal insurance since they are uninsurable on their own. Externalities are critical in nuclear and it still doesn't make money for the operators.

If these are modular and come on a truck, does that mean that basically Westinghouse will finance its own inventory, and that for the customer there's just a down payment until it's up and running ? This would change the structure of financing AFAIK.

It's really unfortunate that we fail to price in negative externalities for other energy sources.

Are the externalities for wind and solar, the fastest growing electricity sources, significant when compared to other electricity sources?

No, but the externalities of fossil fuels, the worst energy sources, are very significant. Yet these get subsidized in many countries and Germany is even moving to coal. I'm comparison between nuclear and fossil it definitely matters.

Germany just passed a law to exit coal in 2038. It's called Kohleverstromungsbeendigungsgesetz. [1]

Last month, Germany also closed down the last nuclear power plant [2]

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohleverstromungsbeendigungsge...

[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomausstieg#2023:_Abschaltung...

So how are they going to heat their homes?

They plan to have 10GW of hydrogen electrolyzers by 2030, among other storage investments. Assuming they meet that and build 10GW worth of dispatchable storage annually starting in 2028 they should be able to shut down their current ~40GW of coal and ~40GW of gas by 2038.

Without nuclear that would probably work the same as their current arrangement is working now. Germany and Denmark currently have the most expensive electricity on the EU.

That's one of the reasons why we had to shut down the most expensive and inflexible source of energy.

Nuclear is the most expensive way you can think of to generate power, but the most expensive power plant unfortunately dictates the price on the energy market in the EU ("Merit-Order") [1]

[1] https://www.tengelmann-energie.com/merit-order/

Yet somehow France manages to stay below the EU mean with 70% nuclear in the mix.

The merit order article you have linked is typical lobbist brainwash as to why your country needs to depend on gas when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow.

Simple: Renewables. In 2030, 80% of the generated power should come from renewables [1].

Starting from 2025, each year, 7,8GW of wind and 22GW solar power will be added into the mix.

For reference, the nuclear plants we just shut down produced 4GW in total.

Germany is exporting excess energy each years to France and other neighbours. 2002 was the last year we had to import energy. [2]

[1] https://www.bmwk.de/Redaktion/DE/Dossier/erneuerbare-energie...

[2] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/153533/umfrag...

The externalities for wind and solar is the reserve energy that currently consumer expects governments (in EU) to supply and pay for. It is the most expensive form of externalities in the grid, it is one of the dirtiest, and since the government is paying for it it is also the most subsidized.

This socialization of costs is sadly mostly unknown to the consumer. Governments could try moving the costs closer to the consumer by putting the costs onto the power company, forcing them to either cut off consumer when demand exceed supply or build enough storage to cover periods of suboptimal weather conditions.

There are economies of scale, in the sense that (very roughly) material costs are a rounding error and scaling up the reactor doesn't make the design more complex it just makes the parts larger. The Gen III+ reactor designs all went big as a cost-efficiency measure, not that it worked out particularly well. The major caveats being that very large pressure vessels required specialized forges to be constructed and that very large concrete pours are more difficult than simply large ones.

The "build the reactor in a factory" idea could still hold some merit, though there's not much reason to make it smaller once it's small enough to fit on a barge or a wide-load trailer. I'm not sure that making even smaller reactors than that to make more of them for economies of scale makes sense. It's hard to imagine that 2x 150MW reactors could ever be cheaper than 1x 300MW reactor. The economies of scale efficiency benefits tend to be very sub-linear.

Yes. We could basically say that there are two different markets for small nuclear, which will probably settle at different levels.

The first is just stepping back a bit from the GW scale plants to try to reap some economies of scale in terms of making the projects and processes less bespoke, even though the raw amount of material consumed might be higher.

The other would be uh... I guess "niche" applications? This is where scaling down even more (sub 50MWe?) happens. This could be some DoD related stuff, or trying to power remote communities (which aren't already grid connected). I'm sure there might be a handful of interesting industrial applications (I know the Tar Sands in Canada is interested in SMRs to power their steam extraction processes).

But the time to get your roi is likely to go down significantly. Which means overall costs could still go down and you can gradually add more capacity.

But I suppose the biggest advantage is easier access to funding. Do you really want to invest 8 billion for an all or nothing project?

The Rolls-Royce SMR is pitched as exactly that, based on the submarine plants they already build.

No takers yet as far as I know.

Couldn’t you also suspend them over a deep concrete lined pool of water and just drop them if there are any major problems?

Sure until it boils away all the pool water and melts through the concrete and creates an ecological disaster

Many of the newer reactor designs tout passive control mechanisms as their major selling points. We should be wary of claims of "idiot proof" designs, as we can always seem to be able to find a bigger idiot, but the risk of runaway reactions is far less with these newer designs.

> Why don't they build nuclear reactors that can be made on a factory assembly line, shipped on the back of truck, and installed right where it's needed in a town?

It's very difficult to get a permit.

At some point the pressure vessel gets small enough that you don’t need a supersized hydraulic press to make it

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

GE’s first BWRX300 is expected to be made in Canada which is not on the list of countries with huge presses and might help with manufacturing throughput.

Are you under the impression that nobody has had this idea before?

Nuscale is building 6x77MWe reactors in Idaho.. https://www.nuscalepower.com/en/projects

Literally like you suggested, small and able to ship on a truck, with no 'active' cooling needed. Can also take offline one of the 6 at a time for refuelling, instead of shutting down whole plant.

At a Vogtle like cost of $120/MWh. The project is looking incredibly shaky.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-dream-of-mini-nuclear-plants...

You're saying $120/MWh like it's a bad thing. The current average price for electricity in the US is $166/MWh as of March 2023 [1]. In sunny San Diego it's $475/MWh.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...

You're confusing the cost charged to a consumer vs. the wholesale cost of electricity. $120/MWh is completely uncompetitive as a wholesale cost. Not even the cost of storage for solar/wind would bring their cost up to that.

Yeah, wind and solar are estimated to be $42.8 and $48.8 per MWh respectively in 2023 [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...

I'm a big fan of wind and solar, but we should compare like for like. AFAICT the numbers quoted here are for wind and solar without storage.

We need to compare solar and wind to these SMRs with the desired output characteristics. How acceptable is dropping the output for 10 hours each night, and lose 50% of your max output during long periods? If that's ok for your application, Solar without storage is probably the perfect solution. If you 99.99 of your time to be at a certain output level, all year round, solar is going to require overbuilding, and a weeks worth of storage (which changes the costs per MWh considerably).

Likewise, if you need a lot of heat for your application, solar is not going to be as good as an SMR.

The best technology is most likely going to be different depending on the use case. SMR would operate in a decently sized niche in our current world. What is not clear to me is how big this niche is, and how quickly it will shrink as gridescale storage tech becomes more economical.

Levelized cost already takes into account the capacity factor of the sources. On a per-peak watt basis, PV is 10x cheaper than nuclear.

We can look at the cost of providing steady power (synthetic baseload) from renewables + storage. This is the most favorable comparison for nuclear, since any varying demand enables storage to serve double duty (smoothing variations in both supply and demand). For reasonable cost assumptions, particularly for when any nuclear plant started today could come online, renewables beat nuclear. It's important to use more than just batteries for storage; batteries are not well suited to long term storage.

https://model.energy/

Don't misunderstand: I am a huge proponent of solar/wind + storage and grid interconnectivity. But you have completely talked past my point.

> Levelized cost already takes into account the capacity factor of the sources. On a per-peak watt basis, PV is 10x cheaper than nuclear.

You sound like you know what you are talking about, so I presume that you know that one of the limitations of Levelized cost is that it doesn't control for "time effects" which was the entire thrust of my comment.

> We can look at the cost of providing steady power (synthetic baseload) from renewables + storage

Yes, that's what I suggested is a fair comparison.

> any nuclear plant started today could come online, renewables beat nuclear. It's important to use more than just batteries for storage; batteries are not well suited to long term storage.

There are a lot of unstated assumptions/conditions here. Do you have any references I can read?

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, they're not building it yet, they are hoping and planning and continually increasing costs as it gets closer to time to build:

https://ieefa.org/resources/eye-popping-new-cost-estimates-r...

And we will see what cost increase happen once they start putting shovels in the ground. That's where nuclear really starts tk have its big prices increases, usually.

SMRs seem to get announced quite often. I'd rather they just build one instead of announcing a new one.

can't get funding to do the actual build if you don't announce the plans exist

This reactor seems similar in power and pricing to the GE-Hitachi BWRX-300. I don't think construction has begun anywhere yet, but the approval/planning processes are well underway for several projects.

https://nuclear.gepower.com/build-a-plant/products/nuclear-p...

https://www.ge.com/news/press-releases/ge-hitachi-signs-cont...

https://www.powermag.com/ge-hitachis-bwrx-300-small-modular-...

https://www.nucnet.org/news/capital-expenditure-on-first-bwr...

Getting regulatory approval to build is a very long process.

They already have the AP1000 approved, this is not an entirely new design.

The US military is soliciting bids and all these companies are trying to win that process. Until they win they don’t really have a customer

Nuscale placed orders at the end of 2022 with Doosan to start building some of their 'long-lead' materials for their new pilot plant in Idaho.

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/NuScale-places-f...

This isn't a modular reactor (SMR). It is just a small reactor, with all the caveats of building such. Most notably, you just just get a couple delivered to a decommissioned coal plant and plug them in to meet your 2030 emissions targets, but instead have to deal with a multi-year project to build the thing.

Companies can announce all the small modular reactors they want, but it is critical that someone actually builds one.

It isn't modular. It is just a small version of the existing AP1000.

The ACP100 is the first small LWR to be constructed and is close to completion

https://nucleus.iaea.org/sites/INPRO/df13/Presentations/011_...

The BWRX300 from GE is coming on strong in terms of orders, it is parallel to the AP300 as it can be seen as a cut down version of the ESBWR which unfortunately never got built.

On one hand the small LWR might solve the constructibility problem of the large LWR but the whole reason the LWR got big is that the economics of an LWR are better than a small LWR on paper. Probably the best way to solve the constructibility problem of the large LWR is to solve the constructibility problem of the large LWR which the Russians seem to have done in that they are building VVER 1200s on a routine basis in Russia but also in Turkey, Egypt, China and other places.

I wonder how much of the trouble the first AP1000s had was due to being the first (took forever to figure out how to make the primary coolant pump) and how much is intrinsic to the design. If the world had committed to building one a year would it eventually have become routine?

Good that Germany left this evil technology! Imagine Siemens presenting such device, unbelievable. They can watch how other players eat their lunch. Like it happened with computer software and how it’s happening with electrical vehicles. Yes, please downvote me, but coal burning whole winter will not help climate at all.

I can understand concern about radioactive waste, but what does coal have to do with this?

Germany's replacing nuclear and Russian natural gas with coal.

https://www.npr.org/2022/09/27/1124448463/germany-coal-energ...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/germany-coal-energy-electricity...

This myth is very loud at the moment, I hear it on every HN thread about nuclear. Look at the data. Germany replaced nuclear pretty much 1:1 with solar + wind. Now there has been an increase in coal, but only because 2020 had an unusually low usage (you can guess why) and because 2022 saw an increase (again, I think you know an event at fault).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany#...

Because of variability of wind and solar production, there will always be coal and gas burning.

Someone somewhere has to maintain the requested load level or the network would desync.

By desync I mean that its frequency will deviate from 50Hz enough to turn off the over- or underloaded sectors.

There are alternatives to gas, which are starting to get deployed:

Demand control: There are already some electricity tariffs offering prices based on hourly market rates. There are plans to make them more accessible for customers by rolling out intelligent meters faster. Heating and Car charging are massive users for electricity that can be moved off to better hours.

Batteries: already financially attractive today, even though there are senseless taxes and duties on it.

Biomass like biogas: currently this is driven mostly as base load because of incentives, but it could play a bigger role as a dispatchable electricity source.

Green hydrogen: Can be used for longer-term storage. Production can be turned off in low electricity supply times. This one is the one most far out.

Batteries are not financially attractive in Belgium where I live. And by not attractive I mean that it is slightly more financially attractive to generate surplus electricity with solar panels during the day than to use electricity at night even without factoring in the battery cost.

Biomass and green hydrogen are utopian dreams. Hydrogen because it is so small that it always leaks. Biomass because it is not scaleable.

Demand control is the only viable option, but this means lower quality of life.

Has the quality of life significantly decreased as they have replaced nuclear power with solar + wind?

I guess we can also look at the data to find that out.

https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Germany/human_development/

Its a myth that you can replace an intermittent energy source with dispatchable energy source.

I will at any time sell 2x worth of solar + wind for 1x worth of nuclear energy, as long I can choose what day and time I get the 1x of nuclear and when I can sell the 2x of solar + wind.

With the European energy market being what it is, the price difference between high supply and low supply has gone well beyond 100x.

Again, look at the data. As nuclear power is decreased, wind + solar is pretty much equally increased. You can’t dispute this fact.

How it was done is another question, different from whether it was done—because it was indeed indisputably done—coal did never at any point replace nuclear power, solar + wind did. This is not a myth.

You have to ask somebody knowledgeable in German energy policy on how they replaced an intermittent energy source with a dispatchable one. I can think of a few possibilities, perhaps they enacted policies and pricing scheme based on the time of usage. Perhaps they patched up inefficiencies where load was greatest, perhaps they increased storage somehow. I don’t know, but all I know is that it was done, the data tells us that much.

There are many ways to do it, and all of those are being deployed in Europe. A common strategy is to use export intermittent energy while importing dispatchable one. This how a country like Denmark can produce wind power that is over 100% of yearly demand, while at the same time only consuming about 50% of that energy. The rest is imports.

Selling wind and solar when supply is high and importing energy when supply is low is naturally quite expensive, but statistically they are produce more wind than they are consuming. From a production perspective they are clean. From a consumption perspective, they are not.

An other popular method, deployed in germany, is to keep as much capacity of fossil fuel energy as possible. Fossil fuel subsidies are great to keep the power plant in a operational mode until the weather changes from optimal to suboptimal. This also has the big drawback of being very expensive, but in terms of production it promotes large numbers of wind and solar while keeping the fossil fuel production down to periods when the weather is suboptimal. Sadly there is a lot of periods of suboptimal weather so its not very clean strategy, but its better than operating the coal and gas plants 24/7.

Nuclear isn't a good dispatchable energy source though. It needs to run 100% 24/7 to have a chance of being reasonably cheap. The fuel expense is neglible after all.

Nuclear is struggling for the same reason coal is struggling. They're thermal power plants. They're slow to react to changes in demand on the grid. Gas power is doing well because they're exceptionally good at that.

That's a problem because it's pretty much a given that most countries will use at least 50% renewables. Even France is targetting that.

As costs of renewables come down further, the cost of energy storage goes down, and we get more and more flexible loads, renewables will keep getting more competitive compared to nuclear base load. EVs are extremely flexible loads. Hell, my electricity provider is controlling if my EV is charging or not, hour by hour, right this very moment. V2G is also a proven technology by this point. The hydrogen production we need for ammonia (fertilizer/fuels), long distance transportation and steel production will also be a very flexible load. Some of it might be fed back to the grid on rare cases of extremely low solar+wind. We can even use the very gas power plants we have right now with hydrogen instead.

It's inevitable that the cost of energy storage will keep going down, because getting good at energy storage and transformation is going to be the number 1 priority across many industries in the coming decades. It's essential for almost everything we need to do to decarbonize.

Thinking we NEED nuclear is basically equivalent with assuming we won't solve climate change. Because you have to basically ignore all the other problems we have to solve that are not related to electricity production. Or you have to bet heavily on carbon-capture-and-storage.. which is just a really dumb idea that yet again delays actually solving the problem, and could end up not helping much anway due to the difficulty of controlling methane leaks.

Should hedge our bets though, I'm actually very positive to keep some level of R&D and investments in nuclear. Just skeptical that it'll be important in the end.

I would trust the storage strategy a lot more if countries were not increasing the fossil fuel capacity and were not increasing subsidies to fossil fuels. I would like to see a similar law as the recent one for EV, where construction of new fossil fuel plants should be banned by 2035. If they did that and invested in their vision of green hydrogen, grid balancing, and other storage solution, then that would at least convince me that they themselves believed in it.

Sadly everything I hear tells me the opposite. Last winter during the Swedish election, those working on the green steel project was asked if and when they thought green hydrogen would start showing up in the energy grid in order to solve the current energy crisis. Their estimated was that we would see the first storage solutions first in 40-60 years from now. Green steel is just about to break even (assuming they get enough subsidies), and they are still very much in the initial phases of testing the technology at larger scale than inside a lab. They also explained in details why current gas power plants and natural gas infrastructure will not be suitable for switching to hydrogen.

The official strategy of the German green party, which is also the same strategy that the Swedish green party has, is to increase the use of fossil fuel energy capacity and subsidies to that industry. During a political debate over an oil fueled power plant in south of Sweden, the green party representative argued in keeping it while the opposition wanted to replace it with a nuclear plant.

Politics is about trust. We don't need nuclear, but we can't continue to increase use of fossil fuels. We can also not continue with the geopolitical situation with Russia. Even with all the sanctions, Europe is still indirectly dependent of the massive exports that Russia do in regard to the global fossil fuel market. The economy of Europe need to decouple itself from fossil fuels, which can only occur if our dependency on fossil fuel decrease. The past strategy of using natural gas was a bad plan that failed, and we need to accept and go past that conclusion.

To make matters worse, the hydro power energy in Europe is both maxed out and in dire need of modernization, with research saying we need to reduce capacity in order to avoid ecological collapse and extinction of several species. This will worsen the already strained storage problem.

> Germany replaced nuclear pretty much 1:1 with solar + wind.

In other words, instead of fully removing coal by nuclear, they replaced nuclear with solar+wind.

The myth is that Germany replaced nuclear with coal. This myth is false, and obviously false.

How fast they did and could have weaned off coal is another question. I don’t know how fast they could have if they had kept the reactors running, perhaps more perhaps less. The energy market is a very dynamic system and one should avoid overly simplistic models and predictions.

We could just as easily be arguing that Germany could have spent it’s excessive GDP to fund green infrastructure projects in poorer countries, and there for prevented even more green house gasses from polluting our climate. By several factors greater than by cleaning their domestic energy production. But they didn’t, so why would we talk about it?

> The myth is that Germany replaced nuclear with coal. This myth is false, and obviously false.

Starting point: nuclear + coal

Option 1: nuclear + renewables

Option 2 (selected): coal + renewables

While this is true, that yes, Germany didn't replace nuclear with coal directly, the delta between option 1 and 2 (which was the choice made) is (-nuclear, +coal).

In 2013 (2 years after the decision to shut down nuclear) 45% of Germany's electricity production came from coal. In 2021 this was down to 30%. So -15% coal delta. The data does not support your narrative.

I’m not aware of any specific policy about coal (which would be a justifiable criticism of German energy policy which has nothing to do with nuclear) but coal is down nonetheless even as nuclear power plants are being shut down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:...

My original comment above still stands.

So does mine.

Why does it matter that "The myth is that Germany replaced nuclear with coal"? I do not care. I care that the world has too much coal today, as a result of the Germany's policy, as I stated above.

I’m not aware of any policy related to the decision to shut down the nuclear power plants which mandates the use of coal. Germany could very well decrease coal with a more ambitious green infrastructure plan. However the lack of such policy has nothing to do with nuclear power. All I know is that Germany is able, and has demonstrated that they can reduce coal and shut down all nuclear power plants.

Above it was stated that Germany replaced nuclear power with coal. We both agree this is false. So what are we arguing about now?

> Germany is able, and has demonstrated that they can reduce coal and shut down all nuclear power plants

I disagree right here. The coal was reduced insignificantly, definitely not sufficiently to reach any climate goals. The reduction of the nuclear energy prevented that. Due to the latter, Germany simply has insufficient energy generation to fully exit coal, although they could probably do it, if chose nuclear.

> We both agree this is false. So what are we arguing about now?

I argue that, in the big picture, the consequences are the same as if Germany replaced nuclear power with coal.

It is easy to blame the nuclear policy for the lack of sufficient climate goals, however it is even easier to blame the climate goals them selves.

A reduction from 45% to 30% of the whole German energy market in less than a decade is certainly a sizeable reduction, I would even call it significant. However I agree it wasn’t sufficient, anything above 0% is insufficient, we are in a climate emergency after all. But I fail to see how keeping the nuclear powerpants open is a guaranteed strategy while faster rollout of renewables isn’t. We have proof of the latter, and we also see different energy markets such as France where the renewable rollout is a lot slower, and so is coal reduction.

> I fail to see how keeping the nuclear powerpants open is a guaranteed strategy while faster rollout of renewables isn’t

This is a false dichotomy. Nuclear powerplants should not have been stopped. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26603464.

You put the dichotomy there, and I refuted it. So far my points have been:

a) Coal did not replace nuclear power

b) Coal was reduced during a policy to shut down nuclear power

c) The policy to shut down nuclear power has nothing to do with coal

The first two are facts you can see in the data. The third one is a matter of simple policy. If it were up to me I would have replaced this policy with. “Nuclear power will be shut down as well as all coal power plants”. The data seems to suggest this is possible.

Looking at different energy markets whether they decided to keep their nuclear power plants (like USA) or to do away with them (like Germany) coal is down everywhere. Nuclear policy seems completely irrelevant to coal usage. What seems relevant is renewable policy and coal policy. Countries which have a policy to reduce coal do so faster, countries that have a green energy policy replace coal with green energy, and countries that don’t (like USA) replace coal with gas.

From the data, what I can gather, is that nuclear policy is simply a decision about country’s willingness to keep operating these plants. Germany didn’t want to so they got rid of theirs. If a country wants to get rid of coal, they do so with a different policy. Alas Germany has a renewable policy, so you see that the nuclear power was replaced with wind + solar. And now that the nuclear plants are all gone, we shall see coal increasingly being replaced by these two power sources in the coming years.

> the nuclear power was replaced with wind + solar

Between 2021 and 2022 Germany's share of electricity from Nuclear declined from 12.6 to 6.3%, coal increased from 30.2 to 33.3% [0]

In a hypothetical scenario where Germany didn't reduce nuclear generating capacity what do you think is the likeliest amount of electricity generated from coal?

a. higher than 33.3%

b. lower than 33.3%

If you think that answer is (b) than decision to shut down nuclear did indeed increase coal usage as compared to hypothetical 2022 with nuclear not closed

If you instead think that answer is (a) I would be interested in hearing the reasoning.

[0] https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2023/03/PE23_090_43312.html

I’m pretty sure the war in Ukraine and the following energy crisis is responsible for this one year increase in Coal. I’m also pretty sure that 2021 energy usage was still recovering from the global pandemic yielding an abnormally low usage. Comparing only these two years is manipulating the data to fit your narrative. Climate change deniers are known to employ similar tactic when they they say: “See, in this one weather station in Alberta between July 1996 and January 2003 the temperature actually cooled”

The parent's first sentence may have been sarcastic.

If so, that ball landed squarely in Nathan Poe's hazard.

On bad winter days goal plus gas generated 80% of electricity in Germany. It’s crazy to turn off functional (and I guess safe enough) nuclear plants and generate lost 6 GW capacity burning coal like during first Industrial Revolution.

Siemens left nuclear behind mostly because they realised what a money-pit it is when they were partners on the EPR project. The decision to sell off happened before Fukushima and the sale happened 7 days after Fukushima.

Turning on reserve coal power plants for unreliable French nuclear reactors does not help climate either. Germany meets its ambitious goals for expansion of renewables, while France fails the goals for keeping old nuclear reactors running, constructing new nuclear reactors and building out renewables.

Betting on nuclear wouldn't in itself stop Germany for burning coal and gas.. because they use those for a lot more than just electricity. They're the industrial center of Europe. You can't run a steel factory with nuclear power. There are methods of doing it with electricity. Incidentally one of them looks a hell of a lot like a molten metal battery, and will very likely be a very flexible load, so then you might as well just use renewable energy.

I like nuclear, but honestly I think it will simply be completely knocked out by renewables in a decade or so. It's more or less a given that renewables will be the way many - if not most - countries achive zero carbon emission. It's simply the cheapest and easiest way. It's a given that energy storage technology will keep developing at a rapid pace, because it's essential to decarbonizing the transport sector, and for balancing renewables which we absolutely need anyway. Nuclear will not be able to solve the problem fast and cheap enough alone. And nuclear isn't good at balancing renewables so it doesn't let us avoid solving the energy storage problem.

As the oil/gas sector starts scaling down, I think a lot of engineers from that sector will go into advanced geothermal. We're already seening some very promising developments, and in a decade I'm willing to bet it will take off.

Why build new expensive nuclear reactors when there's a completely free fusion reactor already in the sky, and a free fission reactor under our feet? All we have to do is to harvest the energy, and if you run the numbers there's way more energy than we could ever possibly need.

Btw. A small consern about nuclear is that they are thermal power plants. They add heat directly to our planet that wasn't there before. I was honestly very surprised to learn how significant that is for the impact on global warming. Much less than CO2, but still significant. If we get the impact of green house gases down a couple of orders of magnitude, then if we still have a lot of thermal power plants they could actually put a break on further progress.

Should absolutely continue nuclear R&D to enable the exploration of space though. Or just for the advancement of technology in general. And to hedge our bets. Still many reasons to be pro nuclear to a certain extent.

The only reason nuclear doesn’t compete with cheap is because we require 100% capture of waste for nuclear and effectively none for things like coal. Require coal burning to not emit any pollution and nuclear becomes 100x relatively cheaper

“Westinghouse has an agreement to build nine AP1000s in Ukraine.”

The post-war reconstruction project planning is already in the works.

Seems kind of crazy. What are the terms of this agreement? What kind of stability is required to make the agreement executable?

Let's see. First German nuclear power plant has been commissioned in 1961 (laid in 1958). That's 16 years after Germany was carpet bombed and was in the year of Berlin crisis.

That's not a similar situation at all. Germany was very safe to build soon after the war, but was an occupied country that had to first prove good intentions. Remember the famous quote about NATO's purpose: "to keep Russians out, Americans in and Germans down". The last part was dropped some time later.

Well Ukraine didn't start a Word War and already operates NPPs, so.

Well, probably a post-war, stable Ukraine. Fingers crossed anyway. Westinghouse is hoping to have these available by 2027.

Not crazy at all. Western Ukraine is already being rebuilt, it's safer there than in, IDK, Argentina where you can get robbed very easily. For example the bridges around Kyiv that were blown up during the failed assault on the capital are almost completely restored.

"If you want to make money you need to go to scary places"

Kyiv is still being bombed though. With shitty poorly aimed missiles and drones, sure, but still. Is that ok for a nuclear reactor?

Edit: Kyiv appears to have shot down a hypersonic missile yesterday. Very cool. But still, seems like a bad place for a nuclear reactor.

The EU has already held a conference for companies interested in rebuilding Ukraine. The best part of war is all of the business opportunities and government contracts the aftermath creates. Of course, your side has to win for these opportunities to be realized at their maximum value. If the other side wins, you might get some contracts out of it but usually as a sub and with lower margins, so it's really important that your side comes out the victor to maximize profits.

This is actually sort of brilliant, because Russia has been unwilling to cross the line of bombing nuclear reactors in their efforts to terrorize Ukraine's electrical grid.

So replace every thermal plant in Ukraine with a mini-nuclear generator!

About a year ago, a study was published which looked at 3 types of SMRs and found that they produced more waste per unit energy produced, in part because smaller reactors have more neutron leakage. Of course, this new reactor was not one of the designs analyzed, but I wonder if the same concerns apply.

https://news.stanford.edu/2022/05/30/small-modular-reactors-... https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2111833119

There's such a small amount of high-level waste that even a 30x increase isn't going to be that big of an issue, even if you don't count waste recycling.

Recycling or reprocessing of used nuclear fuel is not done in the USA currently. I'm curious if this will change in the near future with what appears to be renewed interest in nuclear power plants. Being able to renew what's currently considered a waste seems like a logical thing to do but obviously it's not financially worthwhile in the USA currently: https://www.nrc.gov/materials/reprocessing.html

There are proliferation concerns because spent fuel has plutonium, and burning the waste in the breeder produces (and then burns) more plutonium.

I personally find these concerns obsolete, but they still get mentioned.

Almost certainly not, because with the nuclear industry shrinking uranium will remain cheap. And if uranium is cheap, reprocessing costs more than it's worth.

You should compare not just the cost of new uranium but also disposal of the spent fuel.

Reprocessing doesn't reduce disposal cost. The cheapest way to dispose of spent fuel is simply sealing it in dry casks and letting the magic of nonzero interest rates and radioactive decay do their work. Even if you want to reprocess the fuel at some point, it's cheaper to wait rather than do it immediately.

This paper's findings have no basis in reality. Perhaps because it was written by three people with a political angle and no relevant training.

I'm not a nuclear engineer and have no relevant training, and from my layperson's position am not immediately able to see what's wrong here. Would you mind expanding on what's wrong with the paper from your perspective?

I don't know how to weight your remark about the qualifications of the authors. I would expect that PNAS used reviewers with sufficient expertise in the field.

Information about the authors is in the report, and on the web.

It's not possible to debunk every bit of nonsense written about nuclear energy. And often better not to dignify it by trying. Here goes anyway:

A reactor is a can filled with fuel. Per unit of energy liberated and modulo every other degree of freedom in the design, the size of the can has nothing to do with the amount of fuel or its disposition.

The size of the can does have something to do with the size of the can, per unit of energy liberated. That's because volume scales as radius cubed while surface area scales as radius squared, and the energy depends only on the volume.

So in that, the authors have a point. But the details they provide have little to do with it, and some are misleading or wrong. And why we should care, or how much we should care, about the amount of cans is not investigated.

The result is that there's nothing in this report anyone could use to inform a decision.

Edit: It has been disputed elsewhere...

https://www.powermag.com/small-modular-reactors-arent-diffic...

https://www.anl.gov/article/argonne-releases-small-modular-r...

https://neutronbytes.com/2022/05/31/stanfords-questionable-s...

I think you're being snide and not constructive. You've characterized their work as "nonsense" and having "no basis in reality", but even when asked for details, you haven't really pointed at specific issues. Between someone on the internet saying it's too much work to debunk their nonsense, and a PNAS article, I think absent very specific claims by the forum poster, any reasonable person has to give greater trust to the published article.

Of the limited amount you've actually said, it doesn't appear that you've tried to read their claims.

> the size of the can has nothing to do with the amount of fuel or its disposition.

Part of the concern of increased neutron leakage is that _non-fuel_ material, including structural materials surrounding fuel assemblies, also must be considered. In the paper, see section 3.

I _do_ think there's an inevitable set of questions to address when trying to analyze reactor designs when they aren't yet operational -- i.e. actual measurements of the waste streams are not available.

I don't know what you think the credentials of authors contributing to this field _should_ be, but from what's quickly available, all of these people seem to have worked in related areas:

- Krall has a geochemistry background, has researched "geologic repository development" and worked at "the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company"

- MacFarlane was chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (!), and has done a lot of work related to nuclear policy and nuclear waste

- Ewing's list of prior titles include "Adjunct Professor of Chemical & Nuclear Engineering", "Professor of Nuclear Engineering & Radiological Sciences", "William Kerr Collegiate Professor of Nuclear Eng. & Radiological Sciences"

I.e. together they have academic, government/regulatory and industrial experience, which sounds like a pretty good combination to me.

https://cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/people/lindsay-krall https://sppga.ubc.ca/profile/allison-macfarlane/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allison_Macfarlane https://cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/people/rodney_c_ewing

I'm not sure why this is surprising to anyone, but I will note that the discussion is muddled.

The paper notes

> The excess waste volume is attributed to the use of neutron reflectors and/or of chemically reactive fuels and coolants in SMR designs. That said, volume is not the most important evaluation metric; rather, geologic repository performance is driven by the decay heat power and the (radio-)chemistry of spent nuclear fuel, for which SMRs provide no benefit.

There should be no surprise that smaller reactors require more shielding when normalized to output energy. Scaling has advantages.

More importantly, the muddling comes from the non-nuanced discussion of waste that is ever so common. We cannot conflate high level waste with low/mid level waste. One is dangerous, the other isn't. Long lives mean lower danger. We should know this from first principles: radioactivity is shedding of mass, the faster you shed mass the shorter you live. And this is exponential too! Iodine-129, which has a half life of 1.57×10^7 yr has a decay energy of 0.189 MeV through beta- decay (electron). On the other hand, Sodium-24 has a half-life of 15hrs and has a 1.39MeV beta+ decay (10x) followed by a 2.76MeV gamma decay and a 1.38MeV gamma decay, both happening in a fraction of a fraction of a second and reaching a stable ground state (the most common form of magnesium, who's main danger is flammability).

At a 1cm distance, a 10uCi sample of I-129 results in a dosage of 57uSv/hr while 10uCi of Na-24 results in 1609uSv/hr, and almost 30x difference. Public dose limit is 1mSv/yr and occupational is 20mSv/yr. That's the difference of 17.5hrs (351hrs occupational) vs 37 minutes (12hrs occupational) to reach recommended limits. This is all before we even start talking about cancer risk (there's >an order of magnitude safety. 1Sv single does requires intervention but is non-fatal), and ease of shielding (you can assume that one is easier to shield) or how natural radiation exposure is around 2mSv/yr and a flight crew going NYC-Tokyo gets about 9mSv/yr. Conflating these is not helpful to the discussion. Our required storage techniques are vastly different for these components and so our perception also needs to be.

The article there is making the same mistake that they are criticizing. They criticize studies for only looking at spent fuel, saying that it offers little insight into danger and storage concerns. But then they only focus on mid and low-level waste (i.e. mass) which similarly offers little insight. Complex systems require complex discussions. This is why public conversations like we have on HN and Reddit are less than useless. It is a bunch of armchair experts who have convinced themselves that they understand an extremely complex subject and confidently discuss the issues in naive and inaccurate ways. At the end of the day we live in a specialized world and we have to accept that we need to learn on expert decisions because there is no possible way that we can have (high) expertise knowledge in more than one or two domains. This isn't a jab at your (anyone who is reading) intelligence, but a fact of our world. I don't want to discourage people from learning more about these complex subjects, but I do want to discourage confident discussions when one doesn't have domain expertise. Fruitful conversations can be had if we discuss under this premise but if we don't we just muddle the conversation and there's a good chance we actually decrease our domain knowledge.

Yes, the scientists who published it are a previous chairman of the NRC specialized in public policies, two geologists, a director of communications. I'd put more trust in the Union of Concerned Scientists.

So why is the bigger one almost 2x as expensive per MW than the smaller one to build ?

How does power output scale relative to reactor size? Is the size difference for "1/3 the output" significant?

The bigger the reactor, the lower is the ratio of its surface to its volume, and the fewer neutrons escape without doing useful fission work. Smaller reactors produce more radioactive junk (irradiated steel and concrete) than bigger ones, per MW produced, AFAIK.

How long does it take for a nuclear plant to get approved and come online?

Can consumers buy this? I'd like one in my backyard

westinghouse literally changed the game with their low cost lcd tvs, and now this!

Those were TV's made by TCL and licensed the Westinghouse name

interesting information, thanks!

> Westinghouse is offering a smaller-scale nuclear reactor in an effort to expand access to nuclear power as demand for clean energy soars.

Did they copy that verbatim from the press release? Seems kind of uncritical on CNBC's side to simply equate "nuclear" with "clean energy"...

Nuclear is clean by the criteria that is applied to energy these days, which is in the context of climate change. Because that is the actual big problem we have. Sure, it generates nuclear waste that must be stored, but it doesn't uncontrollably emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

It doesn’t exactly “generate” nuclear waste. The fuel is extracted from nature, not “generated”, and the spent fuel is mostly just the same thing with slightly less fissile isotopes in it.

Partly true. The bulk of the waste is just U238, which isn't really dangerous.

However, instead of the U235 there are unstable fission products, left over after heavy atoms split. They provide most of the radioactivity for the first century or two. There's also plutonium, formed when U238 absorbs a neutron without fissioning, and other transuranics formed in similar ways. The transuranics make up most of the long-term radioactivity.

(This is an appealing thing about fast reactors; they fission more of the transuranics so only the fission products are left, and overall you're back to the radioactivity of the original ore in a couple centuries.)

Freshly discharged spent fuel is many orders of magnitude more radioactive than the source material because of the fission products generated:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission_product

That's also why an explosive breach of an operating reactor, like at Chernobyl, is far more dangerous than an explosive accident at a uranium mining site. The danger of radioactive materials is inversely proportional to their half-lives, so acute danger from fission products lasts only a few centuries. But it's pretty important to contain those fission products until said centuries have passed.

> Nuclear is clean by the criteria that is applied to energy these days [...] Sure, it generates nuclear waste that must be stored, but it doesn't uncontrollably emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Whether nuclear is clean or not depends on whether you're looking inside or outside of the can. From the outside it's clean, because the "non-clean" part is very well contained inside the reactor and/or fuel pools and/or dry storage casks. But if that barrier is ever breached (and a lot of the cost and complexity of nuclear is because of all the work necessary to keep it intact at all times), you mix the inside with the outside, and nuclear is no longer clean. Sure, it would still not produce greenhouse gases (other than all the concrete necessary to build the plant, but that applies to other kinds of power plants too), but it's hard to argue that uncontained toxic radioactive heavy metals are "clean".

It is defined as clean because they don't just put up a big chimney and let all the waste go into the air where it is someone else problem to fix.

The closes comparison to nuclear power in term of environmental impact is underground mining, except that nuclear generally do not impact ground water. Both produce a lot of toxic waste products, and both store it where it hopefully won't get into contact with any human being.

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