Illinois Senate approves plan to allow new nuclear reactors | Hacker News Reader

Illinois Senate approves plan to allow new nuclear reactors

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162 pointsmattas63 comments

Illinois is the most nuclear state in the union, as well as the home of the first manmade nuclear reactor. I grew up very near the forests where they buried that reactor, and never got any powers from it. A high school friend was named after the Byron, Illinois nuclear plant, which his father had worked on.

I lived in Hickory Hills for a while as a kid. We'd ride our bikes all the way out to Red Gate on a Saturday morning. No super powers here either.

Have you run a Geiger counter over yourself and your possessions?

My father was a welding foreman on the Byron plant. He always took great pride in that. Later in life he was a lineman, he liked to point out the huge transmission towers that he built as we drove past them

My grandfather did sheet metal work at Zion. Was also proud of his work (kept the press he used in his garage after he retired). Was a different time I suppose.

We were camping at Illinois Beach SP. When we turned in, the plant was humming. In the morning it was silent. I wonder if we were there when it shut down for good.

My uncle was a welder on that project. I wonder if they worked together? (He was a pipefitter and welded big pipes - interesting challenges there between unusual materials and the sheer size of the pipes).

A lot of mountain bike and hiking trails in the area of that forest. We even have a race called Palos Meltdown because takes place in the vicinity :)

Meanwhile, in Utah:

> NuScale Power (SMR.N) said on Wednesday it has agreed with a power group in Utah to terminate the company's small modular reactor project, dealing a blow to U.S. ambitions for a wave of nuclear energy to fight climate change and sending NuScale's shares down 20%.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nuscale-power-uamps-...

Their cost estimates kept going up, and they hadn't even started construction.

It can’t go down with probably hundred levels of subcontractors. 80 of them are paid to manage their project plans and couple do actual job. I assume, that the real pay for the job done is a small fraction of the overall cost. Heck the solar panel 6 kW installation on the house near by took few weeks and there were 5 companies involved.

This is one of those things where you want a lot of people looking at everything in duplicate because it is six orders of magnitude less expensive than the alternative.

I doubt anybody is really physically going to construction site more than needed by some obscure standard and checking anything.

Only way it makes sense is to do it all in house like SpaceX. But that is a tall order.

So like with everything nuclear?

SMR never made any financial sense. They are far inferior to large-scale PWRs in almost all regards.

The SMRs' _only_ advantage was the relative ease of construction. Only a handful of companies in the _world_ can construct reactor vessels for large-scale PWRs, and none of these companies are in the US. SMRs can be constructed domestically.

Russia has a floating nuclear power stations in the Far East: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov

I was surprised they even had that, but they do have nuclear powered ice breakers, so I guess it makes sense.

Akademic Lomonosov is a prestige project, it wouldn't be economical by itself.

It makes sense as a portable power plant for emergencies, or for remote military/mining outposts where economics are different.

Nuclear energy is so economically inefficient that the biggest political scandal in Illinois this decade is about the nuclear company bribing political leaders for subsidies. Their former CEO is going to jail over it. The long time political boss was finally indicted over it. Hard to comprehend how blatant bribes have to be in this state to be prosecuted.

I'd love to see expanded nuclear, but if that requires corruption it's a tough pill for me.

Their economic inefficiency are mostly due to high capital costs needed to build a plant and high insurance costs. Renewables provide much greater bang for buck now, although you need to build them in the right locations that Illinois may lack (and getting transmission in from the great plains might not be viable?).

Maybe China will finally deliver some cheap reactors to work with, although I assume they are running into the same problems that we did (and corruption is a bit problematic with nuclear power plants).

Illinois already has tons of wind and just-offshore wind in the Great Lakes has a LCOE of $60/MWh which is less than half the claimed cost of new nuclear and roughly 10x less than the actual cost of recent nuclear.

I not infrequently drive between Chicago and Nashville and I'm struck by how many turbines I pass if I take a route that goes through Indiana. For whatever reason I see far fewer on the route that stays in Illinois, which isn't very far to the west.

I wonder why this might be? Just a quirk of where the highways run?

Interestingly Illinois actually doesn't have a very large coastline. Would it be sufficient for off shore wind? I guess it is convenient that Chicago is right on the lake, and the city must represent a huge percentage of Illinois power consumption.

> Just a quirk of where the highways run?

Yes, most likely. According to this site [1][2][3], Illinois has almost double the wind generation capacity of Indiana. The average megawatts per site is almost 50% higher. Neither state holds a candle to Iowa, but again with Iowa most of those turbines aren't visible from an interstate.

EDIT - This wikipedia page [4] shows a list of large wind farms in the US. Sort it by capacity, and you'll see that the turbines you see on I-65 in Indiana are part of two adjacent farms that each are in the top 15 largest in the US and would be the second largest in the US if considered a single project.

[1] https://cleangridalliance.org/focus-areas/projects?gp=indian...

[2] https://cleangridalliance.org/focus-areas/projects?gp=illino...

[3] https://cleangridalliance.org/focus-areas/projects?gp=iowa&t...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wind_farms_in_the_Unit...

>Nuclear energy is so economically inefficient

They're only economically inefficient when you ignore the costs of burning fossil fuels. Would you rather spend a couple (tens of) billion on a nuclear power plant, or face global starvation?

Everything looks expensive when you externalize the cost of status quo.

They are much more expensive than renewables, which is why the corporations don't want to build them.

Renewables are cheap only if you don't care about reliability.

Part of the high price of nuclear comes from pricing in all potential negative externalities upfront. Production of solar cells requires a lot of energy and 80% of them are made in China where most energy comes from brown coal. If we priced that negative externality into the solar cells the numbers would look a lot different. Battery storage has similar problems.

Energy subsidies is a tricky one since depending on what kind of technology one want to promote/demote there are prime examples for why they are corrupt (except for geothermal I think. I never heard any stories about energy subsidies issues in Iceland).

Nuclear do like their subsidies in term of research, building, deconstruction and waste storage. However looking at Europe, around 70% of that is for the single fusion research project called ITER, and like supercolliders, its not exactly about producing a product for paying consumers.

Wind/Solar are the single biggest recipient of subsidies in EU by a factor of 2x of everything else in the grid. They also get far more per watt produced than anything else, mostly going to building, deconstruction, grid connections and price guaranties.

Hydro receive a lot of subsidies for repair and modernization. Dam repair and flooding protection is expensive and with climate change there is even bigger need for fixing Europe old hydro power dams. They are also in general non-compliant with the environmental regulations (several species are going extinct), but that is not a subsidies issues directly. Fixing the dams so they allow for fish to pass is however a subsidies issue, but as far as I know no country in EU has so far started to put any serious money into it.

And then we have fossil fuel subsidies. A large portion of the "reserve energy" plan in eu (the one that is used to balance the grid) is based on keeping a large number of fossil fuel plants on stand-by, paid through subsidies. Then there is subsidies on extracting the fuel itself, subsidies on trading fuel, and subsidies on storage of the fuel, and transportation of the fuel. This is not accounting for the environmental cost from burning fossil fuels, which some see as a form of subsidies.

Energy subsidies are quite frankly very corrupt in basically every part that there is.

Great, because we could really use some modern nuclear power plants here. We do not have the natural resources to provide power base with wind/solar alone and in all likelihood even with large storage banks it would be very hard to compete with what amounts to an atomic battery in nuclear fuel rods.

> We do not have the natural resources to provide power base with wind/solar alone

Well, that's what you have a national grid for. China for example has links that go way more than 2.000km - that's more than enough distance to transfer power in times of low wind or whatever around.

I'm not an electrical engineer but it sounds implausible for power to be transferred that far without losing a bunch of it in the process, unless you have massive cables.

HVDC loses 3% in 1000 km, depending on the value of "HV".

Maybe take some EE courses then? They're not that hard...

From EE101: P=V * I. But power transmission losses are I^2 * R.

So one way to transmit large amounts of power with low losses is to, well, turn the voltage up and use a lower current.

And with lower current, you can use smaller cables.

And in fact, that's what we do.

That's why your power lines to your house are thousands of volts and the transformer hanging on the pole will convert it into 220V (but with higher current to run your hair dryer, say).

> I'm not an electrical engineer but it sounds implausible for power to be transferred that far without losing a bunch of it in the process, unless you have massive cables.

Read up about Hydro Quebec. They generate gigawatts in Northern Quebec and export large amounts to New England. HVDC is pretty efficient.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydro-Qu%C3%A9bec's_electricit...

The cables don't need to be massive, but the voltage has to be because the power loss is related to the current flowing - so the Chinese just raised the voltage to 1 million volts instead of the usual 220/380 kV, and used DC instead of AC to get rid of reactive power and skin effect issues. Their longest line transfers 12 gigawatts of power over almost 3.300km distance - that's not that much that remains to cover the distance from the US East to West coast!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...

The large long distance AC transmission lines are 765KV. They step that down various substations as lines branch off to feed smaller and smaller areas until you get to the distribution network.

If you draw the map of lines with proportional thickness for various voltage levels it looks vaguely fractal, like an old tree.

China is investing heavily in nuclear power. I believe they are even trying the new modern designs (cannot remember the name, but it's the latest generation that the US doesn't have because of over-regulation). Why would they go so large on nuclear if they are the capital of production for solar panels?

Illinois has service with both MISO and PJM grids [1]. They're going to be pulling power over HVDC from wind in the central US [2]. NuScale wasn't cost competitive [3], so while nuclear approval is nice (because it is silly to prohibit it from being built if safely and responsibly operated), renewables, batteries, transmission, and demand response is cheaper (collectively) [4] [5] [6].

[1] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-MIDW-MISO?wind=false...

[2] https://soogreen.com/project-overview/

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38199061

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37502924

[5] https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf

[6] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/21/us-can-get-to-100percent-cle...

Excellent news! Clinton should be receiving a second on the site as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Power_Station

Illinois and other former industrial states badly need this having lost much of their manufacturing base to southern states, Mexico, etc. The exodus has been accompanied by migration from these states, elsewhere. Anything that creates an economic incentive for good paying manufacturing jobs to return to these states - even if its a decade away - needs to happen.

> Anything that creates an economic incentive for good paying manufacturing jobs to return to these states...

The article talks a lot about carbon-free electricity by 2045, but I see nothing about where the SMR's might be manufactured. Between the Mississippi River and St. Lawrence Seaway - SMR's could easily be brought in from ~anywhere on earth.

Stellantis is opening the Belvidere plant back up as part of their contact with the UAW. Rivian builds in Normal.

In the early 80s, the field trips to the station at Cordova included a tour of the control room. I'm guessing times have changed?

I live in Illinois, and we have the exact same GE design that was used in Fukushima on the banks of the Mississippi.

Anything that we build in the future must be walk-away safe, a Gen4 reactor or better. There can't be any question of exploding cooling ponds or other surprises with (design) flaws in safety systems. This obviously rules out diesel generators in the basement.

Over the years, there have been nagging stories of drones that overfly reactors. We have no idea who is collecting this data or what they want with it. We have to reach much higher safety standards than the elderly fleet of reactors that remains with us.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2020/09/07/dozens...

With one major difference...the Mississippi River isn't subject to the same seismic (New Madrid notwithstanding) and tsunami events.

I would indeed be curious about the risk as estimated by Japan and Illinois about their respective reactors before and after the Fukushima disaster, before forming an opinion on whether this is actually a problem. As you say, there's likely fundamental differences not obvious from the provided rhetoric...

However, I don't know what these drones are doing.

36 hours. That's all it takes.

This. Having ongoing concerns from a once-in-a-lifetime perfect storm of an event such as Fukushima in application to a facility that is not vulnerable to nearly any of the series of worst-case scenario events is simply doomerism. This is exactly the kind of mindset that has prevented the US as a country from developing nuclear power in any substantial fashion for the last 50 or so years. In that timeframe, it's not unlikely to assume we could have a much more substantial amount of our energy produced by nuclear power; if not completely deprecating coal power plants.

At the moment, barring magical energy sources that haven't been proven in any meaningful sense, nuclear technology has shown itself to have the fewest long-term consequences and the highest efficiency. However, it is unfortunately also the easiest to point to a few events in history and easily make the layman cast doubt on its safety. It's worth pointing out that the most significant nuclear accident in history took place in the USSR (which wasn't particularly notorious for its safety protocols), on a reactor that had several known design flaws that were ignored, and the only other major accident representing a one in a thousand years perfect-storm that overcame several redundancies.

This concern about "drones" in relation to nuclear power plants is borderline paranoia. Are you concerned about drones dropping bombs or somehow disabling safety systems on a nuclear reactor? Every single nuclear power in the world has nuclear power plants, so they're all equally susceptible to the same attack in the same way that they're all equally capable of responding to said attack- mutually assured destruction as it goes.

> Having ongoing concerns from a once-in-a-lifetime perfect storm of an event such as Fukushima

A lot of the world's living population lived through Chernobyl, the various incidents at Sellafield and then Fukushima. All events that "statistically" should not have happened nearly as close together as they did - and that's without taking the risk of 9/11-style terrorism, actual acts of war (see Zaporizhzhia NPP) or catastrophic earthquakes into account.

There are only two kinds of power generation that have a mass-casualty potential: nuclear power plants and dammed hydro power (as evidenced by what went on at Kakhovka Dam). We should, as a species, get rid of these. The sooner, the better.

There are more deaths directly attributable to coal fired power plants than to nuclear energy in all forms (including Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/archive/2013_khare...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2019/ph241/marshall2/

https://www.engineering.com/story/whats-the-death-toll-of-nu...

Fly a plane into a coal plant and nothing much (besides the death of everyone involved) will happen.

Fly a plane into an NPP and you're looking at a massive contamination issue.

Hell, I live in Bavaria, and to this day you have to inspect shrooms and wild game meat for radiation - and it's likely to exceed safety thresholds, even decades after Chernobyl.

> Fly a plane into an NPP and you're looking at a massive contamination issue.

Or not: https://bigthink.com/the-present/nuclear-power-plant-survive...

While we're at it, when airplanes were invented there were dozens of crashes relatively close to each other that killed almost a hundred thousand people (almost 100x that of all nuclear power accidents combined). Better get rid of the airplanes too. And let's not even mention cars or boats or horses. Best to just stay indoors.

Stay indoors? Do you know how many people have died to radon? From house fires?

No, it's not paranoia.

The people at the Nova music festival in Israel would have said exactly the same thing as you in the hours before the event.

Black Swans can and do appear.

Comparing a regulated industry to a terrorist event is about the most irrational thing I have read today.

One person died and six people got cancer from the Fukushima incident - which of course is very sad.

In contrast, a single coal plant in Illinois, Prairie State, kills about 75 people every year with coal soot: https://www.sierraclub.org/illinois/blog/2023/02/prairie-sta...

For coal plants, murder is business as usual. That's why we need nuclear power.

I love how you just gloss over the 2nd worst nuclear disaster in world history, that required abandoning an entire town...

We need to stop burning fossil fuels, but nuclear is simply too expensive compared to renewables.

I think that nuclear power must focus on safety and efficiency.

Fuel rods from reactors near me are discarded after only 2% of the potential power is released from them. I understand that the best designs can extract 40%, leaving less waste. New reactors should be held to a minimum of 20%.

The "daughter nuclei" in the 2% exhausted fuel rods require active cooling (circulating water) for well over a year before they exhaust and cool sufficiently for dry storage. We need "walk-away safe" designs where a complete loss of power doesn't result in catastrophic explosions.

We have kept this 50s technology way past its design life. It isn't replaced because of resistance to building any more nuclear at all, which is not helping.

The problem isn't "resistance". Reactors are just too expensive. The great hope of the pro-nuclear crowd is SMRs, and the current one being built in the US got canceled due to cost.

Until the cost problem is solved, nuclear power is dead on arrival. The existing plants were only built because of massive subsidies and the government placing a cap on the maximum liability from nuclear accidents.

I’m sure having to evacuate was very hard on the people of Fukushima, I don’t doubt that. But, burning fossil fuels is also causing us to abandon entire towns (costal towns), and at a much faster rate.

Burning fossil fuels is too expensive.

Only one person died... but only because 150 thousand were evacuated!

I'm sorry for them but, in comparison to all the deaths from fossil fuels, who cares?

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