Small Nuclear Reactors Will Not Save the Day
oilprice.com
oilprice.com
It's hilarious all the bullshit coming out, the only reason nuclear cost so much is because it has been regulated into oblivion. And the only reason renewables are cost competitive is because we use China as the source with all their subsidies and deregulation (never mind that we don't ask anywhere near the same uptime/constant source from those solutions).
This is a big problem in general with neoliberal thinking, that capital in itself has value and should create a profit. If you consider that electricity should be a free market then it is a problem but the reality is that it isn't really a commodity that you can transport around freely. It needs to be generated locally and at the correct time to be useful, otherwise it's just wasted. And this is the basis of the problem and why we fall in the capital argument. Electricity shouldn't be a free market and largely can't (which is exactly why problems are appearing all other the place in EU). If you consider that it is actually a necessity, just like water and sanitation, then the capital argument doesn't even apply.
I think the key reason is the promise of low price, high power, and fast deployment. PROMISE being the key word, because it should be obvious (not to the author) that you don’t get low prices on the first experimental units. You get them when you have factories efficiently building hundreds. And in this hopeful future, you can turn these things on much faster than setting up acreage of wind or solar plus supporting batteries. And do it in places where you don’t have natural supply of either.
It’s a bet that hasn’t proven itself yet. But given the severity of the crisis, I for one am glad somebody is taking it.
Because it's a bet on bad government(s) continuing to be bad.
There is immense value to utilities in being able to just park SMRs on top of semi trailers beside all the infrastructure they already own and "get ahead" of onerous governments who would be all over something like a solar farm say nothing of a real large scale power generation station looking to extract their pounds of flesh.
Being able to just "inject" base load power near where you need it on the grid saves nearly infinite money in otherwise necessary upgrades in transmission between the source and users of the power.
Easy money.
Exactly. Nobody’s investing in small nuclear to be competitive with absolute-cheapest grid-scale wind/solar/storage, the point is that there are a thousand and one niches all over the world where the density and (hopefully) reliability of nuclear makes it quite attractive.
See this for example
https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/goog...
All have been economical failures.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc...
Nuclear power went large due to various scaling laws and fixed costs.
We now know that new built nuclear is horrifyingly expensive as per recent western example.
I just don't understand why everyone is so confident that nuclear power is the one thing that doesn't get cheaper with better technology and scale. Everything that is built is old tech, and, except in China and south Korea, built so rarely that the workforce is basically brand new every time. Of course they're expensive(in the West), they're one-off large engineering projects. All evidence points toward China, south Korea being able to do it cheaper and faster, so we should look there when there's sufficient (trustworthiness and quantity) data to test scaling laws. All signs point to cheaper and faster, but even then, the numbers of builds are relatively small, so you'd expect scaling gains to be modest. One of the main points of SMRs is to harness the effects of large numbers.
Why not at least try? Why are we so confident it will fail before even trying with modern designs?
They are in line or worse than Vogtle, and they haven’t even started building.
Nuclear power has been experiencing negative learning by doing for half a century.
It is a known entity. All in all an extremely complex coal power plant.
New built regular coal power plants are not competitive in 2025 either. Now make it even more complex.
Again, no to the negative learning. The learning curve theory has requisite conditions. They aren't met, except maybe in China and south Korea, where it seems so far to apply, if modestly.
Lovely that it takes an enormous corruption scandal for nuclear power to ”work”.
South Korea’s latest plants have only taken 10 years with correspondingly increased costs.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed...
It’s not that there wouldn’t be learning curves, it’s that we’ve already seen the learning curve for the easiest part of the stack, and it’s not competitive.
I’m all in favor of continuing to throw VC money at small nuclear, to be clear. The regulatory situation everywhere outside of Texas is so bad that there will be niches where “power plant arrives on a semi, no external interconnect required” is a great business proposition.
But if we had a sane regulatory environment for building transmission and interconnect, nuclear wouldn’t get enough custom to ever climb the learning curve.
> One of the main points of SMRs is to harness the effects of large numbers.
How many trillions in subsidies should we waste to try scale when the competition we also funded decades ago already delivers?
We already gave a try building nuclear power again 20 years and at the same time invested in the nascent renewable industry.
The nuclear investment evidently did not pan out.
Building 100 in a decade starts becoming very economically feasible as per recent Chinese examples.
And as we saw with the US ramp of military vehicles in WWII.
Wholly insignificant.
We should we hand out trillions in subsidies to the nuclear industry when the alternative we also invested in: renewables and storage. Already deliver what we need to decarbonize society?
SNUPPS and the AP-1000 are the only "standardized" nuclear power plant designs built in the US and there were only a small number of them built. Not enough to benefit from economies of scale benefits through standardization and modularization.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...