Hacker News Reader

Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

The same caveats are also true of nuclear, and happen far more frequently for nuclear.

If we are serious about displacing fossil fuel use, and I am deadly serious about it, wind, solar, storage, demand response, new transmission, thermal storage, hydrogen for chemical process... all these things are deployable today at massive scale and should be quickly adopted. However, nuclear is further away and more expensive than we thought it was in 2008 when these reactors got started.

Back in the mid-2000s I was a huge proponent of nuclear. In the mid-2010s I change my tune because we had a ton of new data about nuclear being far more expensive than promised, and other tech had advanced massively. Nuclear has never advanced as a tech, it does not have a learning curve.

If we are going to reach a future with energy abundance, with clean tech, we need to invest in technologies with learning curves, that advance. Nuclear tech does not advance.

View on HN

Is this inherent to the technology, or because so few nuclear reactors are being built? Is there anyone involved in the construction of the latest reactor that contributed to another one? You learn by doing, and there has been very little construction in the last decades.

Learning by doing has been tried many times, and it's never resulted in a learning rate where one could expect more than a small decrease in costs, and it has conclusively proven that even a halving of costs is probably out of the question.

Look at France in their first build out; subsequent reactors of the same design cost more than the first. And France was considered a success by most. The few buildouts that have seen cost decrease have never produced learning like you get in manufactured products.

I wish I had access to my bibliography right now for the papers on this, sorry I'm making statements without the research to back them up. But those that have looked into which technologies develop learning curves find that the learning curve is found early, and it tends to be tech wheee lots of the same small thing is made, with minimal customization at install.

Nuclear is inherently a big tech, with some customization for site install. Combined cycle gas turbines found some efficiency of scale by being small enough that they could have standardized plant designs that don't require design changes for the site (though it does limit which sites can install the designs). SMRs might change this for nuclear, but what people are calling "SMR" today is still is as big as 300MW, and it's hard to see how that could be standardized and manufactured. Nuclear does not scale down very well, which is why all these places are trying to pass off really big reactors as part of the SMR hype wave.

> I wish I had access to my bibliography right now for the papers on this,

Here is the most well-known: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

> Nuclear is inherently a big tech, with some customization for site install Russia has successful small floating power stations, that can just dock and power a nearby town. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov

There is nothing "inherently big" about nuclear

Sure, if you want expensive reactors. Much of the technological base on nuclear either:

1. Scales with square or cube laws.

2. Are essentially fixed.

A 100 MWe reactor requires a very similar amount of security as a 1600 MWe reactor, maintenance intervals are similar and so on.

Thus, it has been evident from the very first days that bigger is better, from an economic perspective because you get both a more efficient reactor and more output to spread the huge fixed costs on.

The problem has been that even the bigger reactors are hideously expensive. Nuclear power never breached the cusp where it would be worth it and today the cost to build new renewables are in the same range as the operations and maintenance cost of existing, paid off, nuclear plants. Let alone trying to build one.

A non-negligible fraction of the costs were hidden because the army paid for it in order to obtain, build and maintain atomic weapons. The French Court of audit (Cour des comptes) could not establish it, and had to guesstimate. The need for such weapons diminishes and transparency is getting better and better, therefore this trick is becoming obsolete.

I think every technology advances first, but then reaches a plateau. We build lots of houses, but they're not getting cheaper. Computers still are, but not as dramatically as they did during the 1990s (I think that's going to reach a plateau at some point). It's quite possible that nuclear has plateau'd.

I don't think it is fair to say that Nuclear technology has not advanced. There is a lot of excitement around small modular reactors now that are attempting to achieve some economies of scale. Yes, the aren't there yet, but the concept shows promise.

I do agree that the biggest threat to Nuclear at the moment isn't environmentalists or even NIMBY types, it is wind and solar getting so cheap and storage finally being deployed at scale that it will never be able to compete on price.

This is the nuclear industry's third attempt at "SMR". It is what they bounce to when the large-scale reactors get too expensive.

"THE FORGOTTEN HISTORY OF SMALL NUCLEAR REACTORS"

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc...

NuScale specific reading:

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

> The same caveats are also true of nuclear, and happen far more frequently for nuclear.

Out of interest, how do you find the issues to be more frequent for nuclear?

Around these parts we run nuclear for base load and it pretty much runs full tilt 24/7. There is of course scheduled downtime for service, etc.

There is unscheduled down time as well. Almost invariably the planned down time stretches out far longer than planned.

See the UK and France over the last few years for recent examples.

Here in Finland nuclear availability is over 90%. Admittedly this is better than in most other countries.

Solar load factor is 9% and wind 30%.

I got a bit suspicious when I could only find the most recent year figures for the Finnish power plants but having now found the life time figures they are still incredibly impressive at ~88% for Loviisa and ~92% for Olkiluoto.

In the UK you have multiple reactors with 68% Load Factor.

If I ever need to build a Nuclear Reactor I am definitely getting the Finns to run it.

And the off-shore wind currently being built is targeting +60% according to the manufacturers.

Nuclear tech does not advance

Do you think part of the reason is that dampened demand over the last few decades (due to NIMBY, Chernobyl, etc) deterred the technology from attracting more innovation and growing a bigger ecosystem?

> Nuclear tech does not advance.

Sure it does. New reactors are not the old designs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com