Everyone is piling on about better designs or mythical future tech.
This is a win for clean energy. End of story.
Smaller reactors have maintenance and footprint wins that are hard to appreciate. I think this is one of a few key turning points that are coming up that will help us transition to a better carbon future.
But if not, at least now we have more options which means more competition and more innovation.
The competition is for cost. I don't mind more competition, I think it's great that there are alternatives. However, I don't see nuclear as particularly competitive on that front as it is currently, by far, the most expensive option. The only thing that comes close is natural gas. Which has seen pretty high price hikes of course.
Low carbon energy generation is basically happening with or without nuclear. At this point, we're past the point where people need to study the cost of wind or solar. They have proven much cheaper than anything else and they are being mass deployed all over the world as a result of that.
Nuclear, not so much. A few deployments here and there. Usually at prices that are way over budget and years late as well. Maybe smaller nuclear plants will change that. They have a lot to prove. I wouldn't bet the future on that. It's a wild card at best.
Meanwhile, the future is now. Lots of countries are going carbon neutral in the next decade or so and mostly without the help of nuclear power. No need to wait for small reactors to work or not. If they do somehow work at a price point that isn't prohibitively expensive, great! But not a problem if this is just the next chapter in nuclear power's long history of being too costly and complicated to be practical.
Isn't it a little disingenuous to call this clean energy? It might be carbon free energy, but doesn't clean imply that it's not stressing the environment altogether?
Each installed gigawatt of nuclear reactor power, regardless of whether this is twenty 50MW reactors or a single 1000MW reactor, requires on the order of 200 tons of uranium fuel rods per year to operate. By comparison, a 1GW bituminous coal plant burns on the order of 2,750,000 tons of coal per year to achieve the same kind of baseload power output.
However, coal requires no further processing once mined. To get those 200 tons of fuel rods, it can take a varying amount of uranium ore, and the majority of that ore is not high-grade, it's down around 0.1% U3O8 more often than not (there are a few high-grade deposits). So you might have to mine 200,000 tons of ore, extract the uranium in the form of yellowcake, convert that to uranium hexaflouride gas for enrichment from ~0.7% to (apparently) 4.95% for the NuScale design, and then convert the gas to solid uranium oxide and package it in a fuel rod. This is a pretty intensive industrial process just to make the required fuel and is neither cheap nor all that clean.
If you are in a location with plenty of sunlight and wind, I don't see how this could possibly by less expensive than some kind of integrated wind turbine/solar PV/solar thermal linked-to-storage grid of the same capacity.
Ok, sure maybe it's smaller than a PWR behemoth. It's still solid fuel rod crap.
If you have solid fuel rods, you have meltdown danger, you can't use up all the fissile material, there's no breeding, extraction of fission products. It's under a lot of pressure, so besides meltdown you have other dangers. Solid fuel rods can only use the very tiny percentage of uranium that is naturally fissile.
This is simply not a good design for a nuclear reactor. The LFTR design has meltdown proof operation, no pressurized water, near 100% use of fuel, can burn/breed old solid fuel waste, can breed more fuel from plentiful thorium, and can scale down to closet-sized reactors.
Pebble bed also shares some of these aspects, and I assume there are other new generation designs with advantages.
But this is just more of the same bad design reactors. Oh great, it got spitshined and scaled down and passed approvals.
What nuclear needs to be relevant is to tackle meltdown danger and nuclear waste. LFTR addresses both and any future reactor needs to address both. Perhaps LFTR could be a "waste processor" if LFTR isn't economical enough, while other meltdown proof designs do more economical generation in a sort of large scale web.
You know what killed nuclear power? The moving targets of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Was the NRC out to make life hard for new nuclear power plant construction? Some claim that, but I chose to believe that they were just doing their job. As more corner cases were discovered in the operation of the existing power plants, the regulations had to be upgraded to deal with them.
This process will continue, that's for sure. But fewer corner cases will be discovered for PWRs than for new technologies. For the reason that in the US the experience with PWR is at least two orders of magnitude higher than with any other nuclear technology.
Still, it took Nuscale 6 years to get their approval, 2 million man-hours and half a billion dollars. Whatever estimate they have for the time their first reactor goes online (2030 currently), it might be delayed because of new regulatory changes. But at least they have a proven design. If someone is trying a new design, the chance of delays increases one hundred times.
I love new technology. I am personally rooting for the gas cooled fast reactors (like Xe-100) or for the sodium cooled fast reactors (like Terrapower's Natrium).
> Ok, sure maybe it's smaller than a PWR behemoth. It's still solid fuel rod crap.
Yes, "solid fuel rod crap" same as used in every other production nuclear power plant? This SMR sounds like it might actually get built.
One of the biggest issue that SMRs try to solve is the inability of (western) nations to build nuclear plants - which itself has myriad causes, but a big one is the difficulty in building any massive facility without cost and schedule overruns
There are a number of First-of-a-Kind SMR and Micro Reactors planned for the U.S., UK, and Canada. The advantage of the three leading lightwater SMRs (NuScale VOYGR, GE Hitachi BWRX-3000, and Rolls Royce SMR) are fast time to market due to the existing supply chain and continuous innovation on well understood technology. The problem is not so much the solid fuel, but the Zirconium clad fuel bundles that produce explosive hydrogen gas during Loss-of-Coolant-Accidents (LOCA). Accident Tolerant Fuels are being deployed now and may be another important innovation that reduces the likelihood of meltdowns but these systems also address the main sources of LOCAs: 1. isolation condenser system (ICS) replace pressure release valves that caused the Three Mile Island accident, and 2. passive coolant circulation systems that don't require external/backup power like the ones that failed during the Fukushima accident.
The problem with this class of lightwater SMR is that they are essentially base load power and the projected Nth-of-a-Kind costs will be competitive with fossil fuels (coal and natural gas) at best but are not cost competitive nor a good complement to intermittent renewables (wind and solar). They are a good slot-in replacement for existing coal fired plants.
There are also a number of Advanced SMRs and Micro Reactors (mobile and campus-size) that have announced First-of-a-Kind builds like the X-Energy Xe-100, TerraPower/GE Hitachi Natrium, ARC-100, Moltex SSR-W, USNC MMR, Xe-Mobile, and Westinghouse eVinci. These designs compete on a much larger landscape of theoretical trade-offs that may leapfrog the lightwater SMRs. I prefer this diverse mix of technologies and applications over a single anointed technology like Liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTRs). YMMV.
Couldn’t this be a stepping stone though? It seems to be a move in the right direction at least. Once costs come down they’ll be more investment in the tech you mentioned.
Also this one does seem to have a good failsafe even though it has those risks.
It seems to me that the nuclear lobby is particularly active these days. My impression is that the window for nuclear is rapidly closing. The alternative (wind, solar and batteries) is becoming cheaper and cheaper (even Texas is adopting it). Soon nuclear will be completely irrelevant.
Can someone correct me if I'm wrong but I remember one of the reasons the RMBK reactor is so large was because there are efficiency gains with a large reactor (among other reasons you lose fast neutrons at a higher rate in a smaller volume right?). How do these small modular reactors get around this?
With nuclear, efficiency really doesn’t matter that much. It’s not the cost of the fuel that matters almost at all, it’s the cost of the reactor itself. The cost of the fuel and the efficiency of using that fuel is really a secondary cost compared to building the reactor in the first place, and operating the reactor with people
Let me try again, since I was snotty and got flagged.
This is not a kosher industry. It reaches its influence into the academic realm and has an epic PR budget. It can take advantage of the obscurity of the tech to promote talking points that seem quite reasonable, but generally mask a desire by energy suppliers to maintain the current means of distribution.
And a good part of that PR budget certain goes into negative marketing against wind and solar, specifically because they are disruptive to the distribution model. Profit. There's no conspiracy theory in profit. We know that's what industries want. And historically, industries are not invested in public safety to the extent that it cuts into profits.
So then, why does anyone TRUST the nuclear industry. And even if we do, why would we EVER trust governments to regulate that technology, given that history of absolutely clear about the likelihood of self-regulation?
All I see is billions spent to keep power generation out of our homes. Wind and solar are ready to deploy and yet people seem to suggest that tech in development, which might not be ready of commercial application for a decade, are the solution to our problems?
I highly encourage you to look at this factsheet I only just found today [1]. Some highlights:
> - Levelized cost of energy (LCOE) includes the lifetime costs of building, operating, maintaining, and fueling a power plant. Estimated LCOE for plants built in the near future are: combined cycle natural gas: 3.71 ¢/kWh; advanced nuclear: 6.31 ¢/kWh; and biomass: 8.92 ¢/kWh
and
> - Spent fuel is placed in a storage pool of circulating cooled water to absorb heat and block the high radioactivity of fission products
> - Many U.S. spent fuel pools are reaching capacity, necessitating the use of dry cask storage.
This point is often overlooked. Nuclear waste generates heat. It needs to be actively cooled, possibly for a decade or longer, until it can be stored in dry storage. There's transportation risk there (for tens of thousands of tons per year at current rates) and facilities that need to be maintained to do that. Plus adding water increases the risk of site contamination.
Also consider:
> - ... Managing nuclear waste requires very long-term planning. U.S. EPA was required to set radiation exposure limits in permanent waste storage facilities over an unprecedented timeframe—one million years
> - The U.S. has no permanent storage site.
TIL:
> - The U.S. Price-Anderson Act limits the liability of nuclear plant owners if a radioactive release occurs to $450 million for individual plants and $13.5 billion across all plants.
WHY?
This is the big problem with nuclear: failure modes have incredibly high cost but relatively low likelihood. Companies have limited liability so they get to pocket the profits for under-maintaining plants and move the costs to the government.
In addition to being a bad idea this presents a falsely cheap picture of the true costs of nuclear power.
In this same vein:
> - The Nuclear Waste Policy Act required the U.S. federal government to begin taking control of spent nuclear fuel in 1998.
Another cost shifted to the government.
EDIT: over the years I've learned that the more rabid one side of an argument is, the more likely they are to simply downvote anything they disagree with, regardless of the merit. This, sadly, is my experience with nuclear on HN (which isn't plagued with downvote-as-disagreement like, say, Reddit is). It's not a reason to be anti-nuclear but it sure makes it hard to be swayed by pro-nuclear arguments.
I don't necessarily agree with this comment, but I do agree that it's sad this is getting downvotes. The comment is thoughtful and I learned something from it.
I support building more reactors but I don't support reflexively shouting down commenters which take the opposite stance.
A bit of radioactive waste is the least of our worries relative to global warming from CO2 and not all nuclear produces waste that lasts thousands of years. Some newer nuclear plants cannot melt down and have no risk of killing people by radiation.
Right now we don't have sufficient means to produce excess or store solar power for nighttimes or wind for windless times. Nuclear can make up the difference when solar and/or wind are insufficient. It's the best interim solution we have. Without nuclear, temperatures will become much higher than if we build more nuclear.
>This is then used to drive a turbine that generates electricity.
We could have Nuclear Fusion but we will still using turbine to generate electricity. :P
>these smaller reactors are actually likely to produce more radioactive waste than conventional plants.
>nuclear power expert M.V. Ramana also points out that the cost of renewable energy like wind and solar is already lower than that of nuclear, and continuing to fall rapidly.
Why are we repeating these same questions when we already have an answer? Edit: Solar and Wind aren't constant, and nuclear waste is a solved problem.
>SMRs could cost more than bigger nuclear plants, he adds, because they don’t have the same economy of scale.
I thought the whole point of SMRs were economy of scale?
>Tellingly, some utilities have already backed out of NuScale’s first project over cost concerns.
Anyone could chime in here? Was it because NuScale is too expensive?
I was expecting SMRs, once approved could be built much more quickly. I was thinking in terms of 3 years with perfect project planning. But right now even the earliest ( and likely optimistic ) first SMRs site is 2030. Why does it take so long?
Nobody has managed to build even an experimental fusion reactor that produces more power than is necessary to start each reaction cycle... unless you count bombs.
Assuming we did, to get away from mechanical turbines and generators as the heat->motion->electricity step would require a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_generator -- which have had more success but still face serious material issues.
As for "why does it take so long?" -- the first of anything takes longer. And the US has terrible problems in building anything new or big.
>> Tellingly, some utilities have already backed out of NuScale’s first project over cost concerns.
> Anyone could chime in here? Was it because NuScale is too expensive?
The NuScale VOYAGR, in particular, is a really big SMR in terms of [plant size]/[megawatt]. The economies of SMR come when you can reduce that footprint by making smaller safety systems or eliminating active safety features (because the plant is small enough not to need them) AND factory-build them with on-site assembly. Other SMR designs seem to have more promising ideas for doing both, but NuScale's is just too big. (There are also micro-reactors that optimize for replacing diesel engines and gas turbines with a very small footprint at the tradeoff of cost.)
>I was expecting SMRs, once approved could be built much more quickly. I was thinking in terms of 3 years with perfect project planning. But right now even the earliest ( and likely optimistic ) first SMRs site is 2030. Why does it take so long?
There's a lot going between "approved today" and "SMR online": particularly that factory infrastructure needs to come on line and site licensing need to happen, and then the plant needs to get commissioned after it is built (which takes longer for the first). It's very conceivable to me that the Nth SMR could be a ~3ish year project, but longer for the FOAK unit is almost inevitable.
Turbines are a great, mature technology. The SMR alone is new enough.
Imagine writing a piece of software that needs to parse XML. It is probably better just to use an existing library for that, instead of reinventing the wheel.
> >This is then used to drive a turbine that generates electricity.
> We could have Nuclear Fusion but we are still using turbine to generate electricity. :P
This is actually one of the main points of why the whole talk about "economies of scale" for nuclear just doesn't make much sense. More than 50% of a nuclear plant is essentially the same as any other thermoelectric plant. Despite the many power plants being build we haven't seen a this elusive cost reduction. Construction projects (in contrast to things build in factories) don't lend themselves to economies of scale (in terms of building many).
There was an HN submission that analysed the cost of a nuclear plant and showed that there is really not much room for any economies of scale reductions.
> >these smaller reactors are actually likely to produce more radioactive waste than conventional plants.
> >nuclear power expert M.V. Ramana also points out that the cost of renewable energy like wind and solar is already lower than that of nuclear, and continuing to fall rapidly.
> Why are we repeating these same questions when we already have an answer?
> >SMRs could cost more than bigger nuclear plants, he adds, because they don’t have the same economy of scale.
Yes that's always the weird part of the discussion. There are reasons why nuclear plants are build large, it's cheaper.
> I thought the whole point of SMRs were economy of scale?
> >Tellingly, some utilities have already backed out of NuScale’s first project over cost concerns.
> Anyone could chime in here? Was it because NuScale is too expensive?
> I was expecting SMRs, once approved could be built much more quickly. I was thinking in terms of 3 years with perfect project planning. But right now even the earliest ( and likely optimistic ) first SMRs site is 2030. Why does it take so long?
> Why are we repeating these same questions when we already have an answer?
The answer is not solar and wind. For solar and wind to replace fossil fuels for electricity generation will require ramping up mining activity by a factor of a few tens from current levels. Not to mention the fact that we still don't know how to produce solar panels and wind turbines without using fossil fuels - for mining, metallurgy and transport. The numbers are just not there.
The only possible answer is a significant reduction of energy consumption, but it seems very few people are ready to accept it.
[+] [-] jvanderbot|3 years ago|reply
This is a win for clean energy. End of story.
Smaller reactors have maintenance and footprint wins that are hard to appreciate. I think this is one of a few key turning points that are coming up that will help us transition to a better carbon future.
But if not, at least now we have more options which means more competition and more innovation.
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|3 years ago|reply
Low carbon energy generation is basically happening with or without nuclear. At this point, we're past the point where people need to study the cost of wind or solar. They have proven much cheaper than anything else and they are being mass deployed all over the world as a result of that.
Nuclear, not so much. A few deployments here and there. Usually at prices that are way over budget and years late as well. Maybe smaller nuclear plants will change that. They have a lot to prove. I wouldn't bet the future on that. It's a wild card at best.
Meanwhile, the future is now. Lots of countries are going carbon neutral in the next decade or so and mostly without the help of nuclear power. No need to wait for small reactors to work or not. If they do somehow work at a price point that isn't prohibitively expensive, great! But not a problem if this is just the next chapter in nuclear power's long history of being too costly and complicated to be practical.
[+] [-] epistasis|3 years ago|reply
Producing a design has never been a challenge for nuclear power, that's the easy part. The hard part has been building the designs.
[+] [-] 411111111111111|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] photochemsyn|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_ore
Each installed gigawatt of nuclear reactor power, regardless of whether this is twenty 50MW reactors or a single 1000MW reactor, requires on the order of 200 tons of uranium fuel rods per year to operate. By comparison, a 1GW bituminous coal plant burns on the order of 2,750,000 tons of coal per year to achieve the same kind of baseload power output.
However, coal requires no further processing once mined. To get those 200 tons of fuel rods, it can take a varying amount of uranium ore, and the majority of that ore is not high-grade, it's down around 0.1% U3O8 more often than not (there are a few high-grade deposits). So you might have to mine 200,000 tons of ore, extract the uranium in the form of yellowcake, convert that to uranium hexaflouride gas for enrichment from ~0.7% to (apparently) 4.95% for the NuScale design, and then convert the gas to solid uranium oxide and package it in a fuel rod. This is a pretty intensive industrial process just to make the required fuel and is neither cheap nor all that clean.
Enrichment level & NuScale plant design parameters: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1034/ML103470495.pdf
If you are in a location with plenty of sunlight and wind, I don't see how this could possibly by less expensive than some kind of integrated wind turbine/solar PV/solar thermal linked-to-storage grid of the same capacity.
[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|3 years ago|reply
Ok, sure maybe it's smaller than a PWR behemoth. It's still solid fuel rod crap.
If you have solid fuel rods, you have meltdown danger, you can't use up all the fissile material, there's no breeding, extraction of fission products. It's under a lot of pressure, so besides meltdown you have other dangers. Solid fuel rods can only use the very tiny percentage of uranium that is naturally fissile.
This is simply not a good design for a nuclear reactor. The LFTR design has meltdown proof operation, no pressurized water, near 100% use of fuel, can burn/breed old solid fuel waste, can breed more fuel from plentiful thorium, and can scale down to closet-sized reactors.
Pebble bed also shares some of these aspects, and I assume there are other new generation designs with advantages.
But this is just more of the same bad design reactors. Oh great, it got spitshined and scaled down and passed approvals.
What nuclear needs to be relevant is to tackle meltdown danger and nuclear waste. LFTR addresses both and any future reactor needs to address both. Perhaps LFTR could be a "waste processor" if LFTR isn't economical enough, while other meltdown proof designs do more economical generation in a sort of large scale web.
[+] [-] credit_guy|3 years ago|reply
Was the NRC out to make life hard for new nuclear power plant construction? Some claim that, but I chose to believe that they were just doing their job. As more corner cases were discovered in the operation of the existing power plants, the regulations had to be upgraded to deal with them.
This process will continue, that's for sure. But fewer corner cases will be discovered for PWRs than for new technologies. For the reason that in the US the experience with PWR is at least two orders of magnitude higher than with any other nuclear technology.
Still, it took Nuscale 6 years to get their approval, 2 million man-hours and half a billion dollars. Whatever estimate they have for the time their first reactor goes online (2030 currently), it might be delayed because of new regulatory changes. But at least they have a proven design. If someone is trying a new design, the chance of delays increases one hundred times.
I love new technology. I am personally rooting for the gas cooled fast reactors (like Xe-100) or for the sodium cooled fast reactors (like Terrapower's Natrium).
But you need to walk before you run.
[+] [-] SECProto|3 years ago|reply
Yes, "solid fuel rod crap" same as used in every other production nuclear power plant? This SMR sounds like it might actually get built.
One of the biggest issue that SMRs try to solve is the inability of (western) nations to build nuclear plants - which itself has myriad causes, but a big one is the difficulty in building any massive facility without cost and schedule overruns
[+] [-] sradman|3 years ago|reply
There are a number of First-of-a-Kind SMR and Micro Reactors planned for the U.S., UK, and Canada. The advantage of the three leading lightwater SMRs (NuScale VOYGR, GE Hitachi BWRX-3000, and Rolls Royce SMR) are fast time to market due to the existing supply chain and continuous innovation on well understood technology. The problem is not so much the solid fuel, but the Zirconium clad fuel bundles that produce explosive hydrogen gas during Loss-of-Coolant-Accidents (LOCA). Accident Tolerant Fuels are being deployed now and may be another important innovation that reduces the likelihood of meltdowns but these systems also address the main sources of LOCAs: 1. isolation condenser system (ICS) replace pressure release valves that caused the Three Mile Island accident, and 2. passive coolant circulation systems that don't require external/backup power like the ones that failed during the Fukushima accident.
The problem with this class of lightwater SMR is that they are essentially base load power and the projected Nth-of-a-Kind costs will be competitive with fossil fuels (coal and natural gas) at best but are not cost competitive nor a good complement to intermittent renewables (wind and solar). They are a good slot-in replacement for existing coal fired plants.
There are also a number of Advanced SMRs and Micro Reactors (mobile and campus-size) that have announced First-of-a-Kind builds like the X-Energy Xe-100, TerraPower/GE Hitachi Natrium, ARC-100, Moltex SSR-W, USNC MMR, Xe-Mobile, and Westinghouse eVinci. These designs compete on a much larger landscape of theoretical trade-offs that may leapfrog the lightwater SMRs. I prefer this diverse mix of technologies and applications over a single anointed technology like Liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTRs). YMMV.
[+] [-] rich_sasha|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bilsbie|3 years ago|reply
Also this one does seem to have a good failsafe even though it has those risks.
[+] [-] replygirl|3 years ago|reply
we already had the ingredients for that, but we cancelled yucca and a bunch of ap1ks
[+] [-] atwood22|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macintux|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joak|3 years ago|reply
It seems to me that the nuclear lobby is particularly active these days. My impression is that the window for nuclear is rapidly closing. The alternative (wind, solar and batteries) is becoming cheaper and cheaper (even Texas is adopting it). Soon nuclear will be completely irrelevant.
[+] [-] VBprogrammer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcosdumay|3 years ago|reply
A larger reactor also gains efficiency on the power generator. Larger turbines are cheaper by power than smaller ones.
[+] [-] thehappypm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grej|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Julesman|3 years ago|reply
This is not a kosher industry. It reaches its influence into the academic realm and has an epic PR budget. It can take advantage of the obscurity of the tech to promote talking points that seem quite reasonable, but generally mask a desire by energy suppliers to maintain the current means of distribution.
And a good part of that PR budget certain goes into negative marketing against wind and solar, specifically because they are disruptive to the distribution model. Profit. There's no conspiracy theory in profit. We know that's what industries want. And historically, industries are not invested in public safety to the extent that it cuts into profits.
So then, why does anyone TRUST the nuclear industry. And even if we do, why would we EVER trust governments to regulate that technology, given that history of absolutely clear about the likelihood of self-regulation?
All I see is billions spent to keep power generation out of our homes. Wind and solar are ready to deploy and yet people seem to suggest that tech in development, which might not be ready of commercial application for a decade, are the solution to our problems?
I don't see it.
[+] [-] downvotetruth|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbverschoor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ericson2314|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmyeet|3 years ago|reply
> - Levelized cost of energy (LCOE) includes the lifetime costs of building, operating, maintaining, and fueling a power plant. Estimated LCOE for plants built in the near future are: combined cycle natural gas: 3.71 ¢/kWh; advanced nuclear: 6.31 ¢/kWh; and biomass: 8.92 ¢/kWh
and
> - Spent fuel is placed in a storage pool of circulating cooled water to absorb heat and block the high radioactivity of fission products
> - Many U.S. spent fuel pools are reaching capacity, necessitating the use of dry cask storage.
This point is often overlooked. Nuclear waste generates heat. It needs to be actively cooled, possibly for a decade or longer, until it can be stored in dry storage. There's transportation risk there (for tens of thousands of tons per year at current rates) and facilities that need to be maintained to do that. Plus adding water increases the risk of site contamination.
Also consider:
> - ... Managing nuclear waste requires very long-term planning. U.S. EPA was required to set radiation exposure limits in permanent waste storage facilities over an unprecedented timeframe—one million years
> - The U.S. has no permanent storage site.
TIL:
> - The U.S. Price-Anderson Act limits the liability of nuclear plant owners if a radioactive release occurs to $450 million for individual plants and $13.5 billion across all plants.
WHY?
This is the big problem with nuclear: failure modes have incredibly high cost but relatively low likelihood. Companies have limited liability so they get to pocket the profits for under-maintaining plants and move the costs to the government.
In addition to being a bad idea this presents a falsely cheap picture of the true costs of nuclear power.
In this same vein:
> - The Nuclear Waste Policy Act required the U.S. federal government to begin taking control of spent nuclear fuel in 1998.
Another cost shifted to the government.
EDIT: over the years I've learned that the more rabid one side of an argument is, the more likely they are to simply downvote anything they disagree with, regardless of the merit. This, sadly, is my experience with nuclear on HN (which isn't plagued with downvote-as-disagreement like, say, Reddit is). It's not a reason to be anti-nuclear but it sure makes it hard to be swayed by pro-nuclear arguments.
[1]: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/nuclear...
[+] [-] gautamcgoel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Julesman|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] timbit42|3 years ago|reply
A bit of radioactive waste is the least of our worries relative to global warming from CO2 and not all nuclear produces waste that lasts thousands of years. Some newer nuclear plants cannot melt down and have no risk of killing people by radiation.
Right now we don't have sufficient means to produce excess or store solar power for nighttimes or wind for windless times. Nuclear can make up the difference when solar and/or wind are insufficient. It's the best interim solution we have. Without nuclear, temperatures will become much higher than if we build more nuclear.
[+] [-] TheDudeMan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Drblessing|3 years ago|reply
Any evidence, bro?
[+] [-] ksec|3 years ago|reply
We could have Nuclear Fusion but we will still using turbine to generate electricity. :P
>these smaller reactors are actually likely to produce more radioactive waste than conventional plants.
>nuclear power expert M.V. Ramana also points out that the cost of renewable energy like wind and solar is already lower than that of nuclear, and continuing to fall rapidly.
Why are we repeating these same questions when we already have an answer? Edit: Solar and Wind aren't constant, and nuclear waste is a solved problem.
>SMRs could cost more than bigger nuclear plants, he adds, because they don’t have the same economy of scale.
I thought the whole point of SMRs were economy of scale?
>Tellingly, some utilities have already backed out of NuScale’s first project over cost concerns.
Anyone could chime in here? Was it because NuScale is too expensive?
I was expecting SMRs, once approved could be built much more quickly. I was thinking in terms of 3 years with perfect project planning. But right now even the earliest ( and likely optimistic ) first SMRs site is 2030. Why does it take so long?
[+] [-] dsr_|3 years ago|reply
Assuming we did, to get away from mechanical turbines and generators as the heat->motion->electricity step would require a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_generator -- which have had more success but still face serious material issues.
As for "why does it take so long?" -- the first of anything takes longer. And the US has terrible problems in building anything new or big.
[+] [-] _n_b_|3 years ago|reply
The NuScale VOYAGR, in particular, is a really big SMR in terms of [plant size]/[megawatt]. The economies of SMR come when you can reduce that footprint by making smaller safety systems or eliminating active safety features (because the plant is small enough not to need them) AND factory-build them with on-site assembly. Other SMR designs seem to have more promising ideas for doing both, but NuScale's is just too big. (There are also micro-reactors that optimize for replacing diesel engines and gas turbines with a very small footprint at the tradeoff of cost.)
>I was expecting SMRs, once approved could be built much more quickly. I was thinking in terms of 3 years with perfect project planning. But right now even the earliest ( and likely optimistic ) first SMRs site is 2030. Why does it take so long?
There's a lot going between "approved today" and "SMR online": particularly that factory infrastructure needs to come on line and site licensing need to happen, and then the plant needs to get commissioned after it is built (which takes longer for the first). It's very conceivable to me that the Nth SMR could be a ~3ish year project, but longer for the FOAK unit is almost inevitable.
[+] [-] BobbyJo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inglor_cz|3 years ago|reply
Imagine writing a piece of software that needs to parse XML. It is probably better just to use an existing library for that, instead of reinventing the wheel.
[+] [-] cycomanic|3 years ago|reply
> We could have Nuclear Fusion but we are still using turbine to generate electricity. :P
This is actually one of the main points of why the whole talk about "economies of scale" for nuclear just doesn't make much sense. More than 50% of a nuclear plant is essentially the same as any other thermoelectric plant. Despite the many power plants being build we haven't seen a this elusive cost reduction. Construction projects (in contrast to things build in factories) don't lend themselves to economies of scale (in terms of building many).
There was an HN submission that analysed the cost of a nuclear plant and showed that there is really not much room for any economies of scale reductions.
> >these smaller reactors are actually likely to produce more radioactive waste than conventional plants.
> >nuclear power expert M.V. Ramana also points out that the cost of renewable energy like wind and solar is already lower than that of nuclear, and continuing to fall rapidly.
> Why are we repeating these same questions when we already have an answer?
> >SMRs could cost more than bigger nuclear plants, he adds, because they don’t have the same economy of scale.
Yes that's always the weird part of the discussion. There are reasons why nuclear plants are build large, it's cheaper.
> I thought the whole point of SMRs were economy of scale?
> >Tellingly, some utilities have already backed out of NuScale’s first project over cost concerns.
> Anyone could chime in here? Was it because NuScale is too expensive?
> I was expecting SMRs, once approved could be built much more quickly. I was thinking in terms of 3 years with perfect project planning. But right now even the earliest ( and likely optimistic ) first SMRs site is 2030. Why does it take so long?
[+] [-] treeman79|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ciconia|3 years ago|reply
The answer is not solar and wind. For solar and wind to replace fossil fuels for electricity generation will require ramping up mining activity by a factor of a few tens from current levels. Not to mention the fact that we still don't know how to produce solar panels and wind turbines without using fossil fuels - for mining, metallurgy and transport. The numbers are just not there.
The only possible answer is a significant reduction of energy consumption, but it seems very few people are ready to accept it.
[+] [-] panick21_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] danuker|3 years ago|reply
What are the questions? Are renewables the answer?
Only hydro can store energy cheaply. And solar and wind are not available constantly.