The First Nuclear Microreactor Company Listed in the USA
nanonuclearenergy.com
nanonuclearenergy.com
Good luck using diesel when all of it will be prioritised for the military.
Also, no one would care if it's green or not in case of a full-scale war. Your only priority would be to kill as many Russians as possible to survive.
If you're a nuclear country in a full-scale war with Russia or China, you are dead. Your family is dead. Your friends are dead. Everyone you know or love or hate is dead. Everyone who isn't dead is dying or going to die. Those who survive will be holed up in bunkers built with the expectancy that the population will naturally thin out (i.e. die off) to make the scarce supplies last or they will be on the surface facing starvation if they don't die from disease, weather or lack of access to potable water first.
I don't know at which point after the Cold War people forgot what "mutually assured destruction" means but as soon as you fire the first nuclear weapon, humanity ends. And it doesn't matter if the weapon is nuclear or not because most weapons systems that can deliver nuclear payloads can also deliver conventional payloads and all that matters is what your enemy thinks you're doing.
This kind of rhetoric:
> Your only priority would be to kill as many Russians as possible to survive.
This will make your enemy err on the side of you intending nuclear annihilation and respond in kind. The only reason we haven't killed ourselves yet is that a couple of times some level-headed soldiers weren't myopic enough to fall for their country's nationalist fervor and instead refused to follow the orders they were given.
If the US enters a full-scale war with Russia or China or any other serious nuclear threat, the bombs will fall before you have to worry about FEMA camps or the US national guard knocking on your barn door to confiscate your rusty diesel barrels.
Are people really going to argue that the best energy production scheme for Brazil is 80,000 1MW nuclear reactors? Are they all going to be secured?
(It's possible that there will be an "irregular" war where one or both sides are not officially flagged as such, but that's also going to be lower intensity. Arguably Ukraine is already in this state)
Or you do what the US and Soviet Union did for most of the Cold War: a cold war involving proxies. Or you do what Russia did in Ukraine and the US did in Syria: covert operations with (diplomatically speaking) plausible deniability.
A "war between US and Russia/China" would not start with a full-scale armed conflict. It would be a gradual escalation of force. Contrary to what cold war propaganda may have conveyed: the other side is rarely suicidal. At that scale it's more Realpolitik than 1980s Hollywood villain plots.
How would killing anyone (Russians or Chinese or whatever) would help you survive?
A boots-on-the-ground invasion of the USA is absolutely not a realistic prospect. In case a war goes hot ICBMs is the thing you should worry about.
Honestly I just don't understand what you imagine might happen where "kill as many Russians as possible" is the path to survival for someone residing in the USA.
The risk is real. You may argue about its priority, but that doesn't change the reality.
> Ukrainians
Worst possible example, given the existing disaster exclusion zone in their country, and everyone watching nervously as shells fall around the Zaprozhia nuclear plant.
Batteries are better. They are a bit heavy, carries a fire risk, and can be a bit expensive, but can work depending on situation. I do know however that data centers being built in my country are not using batteries for backup. They want to use diesel generators given costs and capacity, and they also want to use places with clean fresh water for cooling. Thus they ask for environmental protection exemptions so they can use diesel generators.
Large generators are not self contained and usually need a lot of water for cooling, and they have waste heat. They are also very large concrete buildings, so environmental considerations are needed there.
Burning massive amount of diesel in population centers or in nature reserves should be not be an available option. Do you object to that?
If I were them, I'd be talking to the (US) military.
Their reactors are:
> The new generation of advanced microreactors can produce between 1 and 20 megawatts of thermal energy that could be used directly as heat or converted to electric power.
* https://nanonuclearenergy.com/microreactors/
Per Table A-1 (¶A-27), a sustained load (60-80%) of an Army camp is between 1.7 and 5.1 MW:
* PDF: https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Publications/MCRP%203-40D....
You wouldn't necessary have fewer reactors (2-4?) than generators (4-8) because of redundancy, but if you don't have to regularly truck fuel to the camp, that certainly simplifies logistics. (Or perhaps as much fuel, as vehicles would still needed, though with 'excess' power perhaps going (mild) hyrbid could be possible.)
I could also see applications in the energy sector (offshore, remote land locations).
Not sure how many 'off grid' communities would be up for a <20 MW power source.
That cost $2trn in total, proving the unlimited supply of money for bad ideas provided they involve killing the right people.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/20...
(It's interesting to compare that with the costs of WW2 and how urgent projects were handled then. WW2 involved a real threat to US territory, so everyone was on board with rapidly developing innovative solutions. Afghanistan, by comparison, was reprisals against a landlocked country which posed no real threat, so once the occupation started everyone lost interest - but it was still heresy to question spending the money. No attempt was made to really solve the power problem, because nobody would ever question the $300m a day)
"An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics:
1. It is simple. 2. It is small. 3. It is cheap. 4. It is light. 5. It can be built very quickly. 6. It is very flexible in purpose (“omnibus reactor”) 7. Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components. 8. The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now."
The whole paper is well worth reading, IMHO:
Nuclear power plants seem to be more economic the bigger they are. That's why PWRs, BWRs and CANDUs were initially far smaller than newer ones.
You have the same overhead as with smaller reactors, but you produce more energy, which means the energy is cheaper.
This has not yet worked for reactors.
The exciting thing about small modular reactors is with alternative designs, such as molten salt designs and alternative fuels such as thorium, where the risk of meltdown and hydrogen explosion are not an issue, so this cost-of-safety factor falls away heavily. Molten salt DOES bring with it issues of corrosion, so it's not a panacea, but the idea is that some of these alternative designs can bring the power generation closer to where the power is used, which raises a variety of benefits, including being able to potentially use the heat generated in a useful manner in addition to the electricity, rather than solely as something to be safely dissipated. Also, of course, you get rid of the big single points of failure and end up with a more resilient power grid.
I can't speak to this particular company's offering but I am glad to at least see some interest in the technology growing, as nuclear at this point is the only realistic way to both even consider replacing existing fossil fuel use as well as powering the increased energy demands of the future particularly in light of rapidly developing emerging markets and much heavier power draw from technologies such as generative large language models (so called "AI").
Traditional nuclear power plants are a risky proposition today because they are large, complex, expensive, and they take a long, long time to complete. Not least because they futz around with refueling and cooling spent fuel onsite.
The long completion time means they are hard to finance, you will have one or more (financial) black swan events (eg financial crisis, wars) during the construction period, and there is no such thing as someone who has prior experience building a power plant before starting because the same power plant is never built twice in consecutive generations. Even the "serial produced" ones are different.
The only way you can make nuclear cheaper is to get the manufacturing and commissioning time down to 1-2 years and no more than 3 years. Which means they have to be small and as simple as possible. Size is only relevant as a means to achieve simplicity. Mobility and widely distributed operation are pointless goals in themselves. That might be a possibility to investigate later, but it is not important initially.
If someone starts talking about a mobile power plant they have 100% the wrong focus. First there must be a power plant. And when you have one, you probably really, really want to bolt them down so they don't go missing.
By comparison, solar power costs 1/100th (99% fall) of what it did back then. https://news.mit.edu/2018/explaining-dropping-solar-cost-112...
The cost certainty any SMR company is going to need to sell a reactor is going to be extremely difficult for any company. The mines would be "happy" to go green, but even with carbon taxes, big up front CAPEX is going to be a hard sell for an unproven tech (SMR, not nuclear specifically). My guess is that offering selling the power (OPEX) as a fully managed and staffed service is the only way they're going to make this work.
I'd love to see us switch over, I'd also love to see it be sustainable and realistic. Let's hope for all of our sakes' someone figures it out, be it Nano, Global First, whomever.
On another front a loooong standing high level global 'plan' for nuclear waste storage in Australia has advanced.
As a concept it's kicked about since the dawn of the atomic age, with Mark Oliphant, Tube Alloys, and beyond. It gained propasal status several times, eg. as Pangea in the late 1990s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangea_Resources
and more recently it's back on the table as a somewhat redacted clause of the AU-UK-US (AUKUS) partnership:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AUKUS
https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/02/01/aukus-nuclear-waste-sto...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/poison-portal-...
with many rumours and little confirmed as to the extent of intended nuclear waste storage, whether just military waste from Australian submarines, or more general UK+US military waste, or even further.
I am not personally opposed to a dump. The income stream for what is basically passive income as rent would be astronomically beneficial to the location, and the economy. We have some obligation to take back the products of our uranium mining, and compared to other choices Australia is a good pick to store radionucleotides in. We're stable politically, economically, and geologically.
I would be entirely happy for the dump to be dug underneath my house. I live on a floodplain with acid sulphate soils but I imagine at some depth, there's a good structural basis to do it. There are probably far better locations.
it may be in AUKUS, but can I point out that the US has already refused to confirm if Australia will have sole control of the Virginia class subs we've been half-promised, nor has the promise been kept in any real sense because there is already a supply chain crisis behind the subs, we've paid the US to keep the factories alive, and we don't know what the AUKUS class will look like or who will actually make them or when.. yet.
This deal is half-baked, at best.
You're being generous. :-)
To be clear I have no objection to the nuclear aspect if handly well, it's the entire debacle from start to end that's on the nose .. I don't accept the case for hugely expensive nuclear subs over the pre existing French order (which had other, albeit lesser, issues).
In an entirely unrelated aside; see: https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/05/14/scott-morrison-memoir-r...
But it would make a lot of sense for Australia to get a fleet of ballistic-missile capable subs, put conventional warheads in them, but ensure they could become "nuclear capable" with a munition switch: these are 30+ year assets in most cases with long lead times. How comfortable we should feel about being under the US/NATO nuclear umbrella is a fluid thing over those timeframes.
Remarkably higher than intuition would suggest. Things happen for reasons, so when something happens there is an unusually good chance that it'll happen again quickly because events aren't happening independently. Like how if somebody is struck by lightening and don't seek shelter, there is a heightened chance it'll happen again shortly.
First, people will not want microreactors in their neighbourhood because of fear of radiation. These fears may be irrational, but we should expect them to lead to protests. It's hard to tell if those fears will be confirmed, hopefully not. Nevertheless, property prices may go down in such areas.
Second, based of past evidence from other industries, as soon as microreactors are available a community of "tinkerers" will emerge and I would fear those more than a properly designed, tested, and maintained microreactor that's reliably monitored 24x7.
So it's not something any amateur tinkerer would touch any time soon.
This is not the case with current "large" reactors, why would it be different here? Those risks you mention are mutualized because no single entity but a state could bear them.
> Those risks you mention are mutualized because no single entity but a state could bear them.
You are talking about something else. You are saying they are not big enough to cover all possible liability. That is not what cornholio is saying.
So here is what I meant to ask: the capacity to cover liability apparently has no bearing on ownership of today's large reactors, so why would it be different with smaller reactors?
A good anti-proliferation design are traveling wave U238 fast breeders. They are filled with depleted uranium and breed plutonium 239, but, due to the long residence time in the reactor, the isotopic vector is heavily polluted with things like Pu240 which spontaneous fissions reducing the yield, Pu238 which generates massive heat etc. This reactor grade plutonium is completely worthless as a bomb material and would require reprocessing that is even more difficult then enrichment of natural Uranium.
Alas, none of the TWR proposals (CANDLE, Terrapower etc.) ever made it into production.
Here's their IPO prospectus [1].
Whenever you hear about some new nuclear startup or reactor design or anything, in the US, you head to the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) website and see where they are in the approval process. Many are only at the stage of pre-approval, but you get an idea what the NRC thinks of them.
These guys are completely absent from NRC's radar.
It goes without saying that no reactor can be commercialized under any form without the NRC approval. How long does it take to get this approval, if everything goes well. In the case of NuScale, the application was filed in January 2017 [2], and the pre-application started in 2008. The approval was published in the Federal Register in February 2023. So, start to finish, 15 years. And this was for a pressurized water reactor design.
These guys here don't even mention what their design is, but we can infer it does not use water as a coolant. Which means it's not one of the reactors that the NRC is familiar with (as it is the regulator of all the 96 commercial reactors in the US, all cooled by water). Good luck getting an approval in 15 years.
Here's the thing: if you go to the webpage of any nuclear company, be it established or just a startup, you'll find at least 100 times more details on their design than what you'll find at Nano Nuclear.
These guys give Nuclear a bad name. Shame on them.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1923891/000149315224...
[2] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/smr/licensing-acti...
Electrical output isn't listed, my wild guess would be about a quarter of that figure.
The page does indeed say that.
At the same time that seems like very little, it's in the range of a single large wind turbine (e.g. https://www.vestas.com/en/products/offshore/V236-15MW). I'm not convinced this will be anything but a niche application for defence or other remote outposts which for some reason cannot rely on solar+wind+storage.
Large companies with huge campuses could also use it for electricity + heating. Industry could also use the heat for chemical processes.
There are also places with small grids, where a bigger reactor can't be easily integrated, like islands or remote villages. I think Canada wants to use their BWRX-300 SMR for remote grids.
Why integrate four business lines? What's the point of this? This sounds counterintuitive. If I were even a 100% sole owner of four business lines I would rather separate them into four companies even if they began as one. What am I overlooking?
The business may well be organised as multiple companies internally, but that's not what this is about.
Try and imagine how a nuclear reactor makes any sense in this context? Unfortunately the right-wing government has plans to build 4 reactors, which will be an absolute disaster for the tax payers. No commercial entity will want to touch nuclear as it's impossible to make money with so much wind and solar.
Try to imagine how many renewables + storage you can build for the price of just one nuclear reactor. It's not even a debate. And as we shore up our grids (especially on a European scale) we don't need new nuclear reactors.
Profit motives are incompatible with redundancy.
If left to private companies, the design of the reactor will not save you, because the design will be altered to extract the maximum profit.