The ~25 GW nameplate capacity of wind power in the UK is producing 0.76 GW as a type this.
Last calendar, it produced > 1 GW for 784 hours.
In the last four months, assuming a 40% capacity factor and therefore an expected capacity of 10 GW, there have been at least three periods with > 100 GWh shortfall.
The UK does not yet, but plans to, shift heating loads onto the electrical grid, meaning that is likely to become a 100 GWh shortfall in heating.
Please, show me an estimate for an alternative fossil-fuel system that can guarantee that shortfall.
edit: more specific to SMRs, and I have ranted on this before: they've been given ~ £ 500 M, which does... just feel like the right amount. We're all aware how 100 times that can be disappear into consultants, and much less simply wouldn't get you a complete product. £500 M I can see engineers spending.
It looks like electricitymap is showing "estimated" data for the UK. It's fairly calm at the moment, and it probably doesn't take weather into account when estimating.
I think "estimated" is a recent addition they show, when the input data sources fail. Which unfortunately they do quite often. But then, I am not paying for the service, so who am I to complain? :)
When values are non-estimated, they are about 2 hours behind in the free version.
Not so. Fraud requires an intent to deceive to make unlawful (or unfair) gains. They're probably just abiding by the license of the data or struggling with a technical limitation.
lol - fraud isn't purely limited to gains. Where the heck did you get that from? Fraud comes into play any time someone intentionally tries to mislead - for whatever reason. And there has been plenty of fraud around energy reporting - again, for various reasons.
Someone is gaining from wind farms claiming power output numbers they don't produce. This website is grossly overestimating the output of wind farms. Seems plausible there's a relationship between those.
It seems the technical problems are resolved and currently the data is no longer "estimated". 3% of the consumption comes from wind, and 17% from solar, which isn't to bad. While the UK certainly isn't the optimal place for solar power, it shows that it can deliver a large contribution. Especially as there is still so much roof area to use that it should be a no-brainer.
While you're not wrong to imply PV doesn't work at night, concentrated solar power (CSP) actually does. It achieves this by heating salt into a molten state which can then discharge heat (and drive turbines) overnight. CSP is very promising for helping manage peak loads in place of gas, too.
There's also batteries: virtual power plants that give us the ability to arbitrage between when power is cheap and when power is needed. These can be rolled out in conjunction with residential PV systems and eventually pay for themselves. A similar approach can be used to store hot water produced during the day by PVT (photovoltaic-thermal) cells.
CSP plants have never gotten beyond the prototype phase because no one has figured out how to make them economically viable. One near me in California just shut down because maintenance costs were skyrocketing.
Batteries, in their current form, have all sorts of issues that haven't made them economically viable either. Liquid electrolytes (liquid batteries) do show promise for grid level storage, and I am pleased to see lots of activity around them but we are still probably 5-10 years away from anything worth scaling up around.
Hot water is fine for extreme micro uses - individual buildings - but again not even remotely viable for something at scale, let alone replacing base load generation for the grid.
Base load is the real nut to crack - and so far solar is no where near being anything but a nice supplement for base load.
I'll not argue with anything in your post and accept the issues with CSP as per the status quo, but hot water needn't be a micro, single household scale. I've benefited from a CHP plant powered district heating system and it more than halved my energy use. There's definitely nothing wrong with big centralised heat generation and storage schemes. It also helps address baseload.
The only good battery technology we have today - LiIon - relies on metal of which there just isn't enough on Earth for anywhere close to the required capacity.
> Please, show me an estimate for an alternative fossil-fuel system that can guarantee that shortfall.
I like nuclear. I have always liked nuclear. However: it's always sunny somewhere on Earth, and the total amount of solar energy delivered to us by nature's finest fusion reactor is something like 170TW.
If you will indulge me the geopolitical fantasy of putting a suitable planetary-scale transmission system in place, is there any particular reason we couldn't switch to all-solar?
The infrastructure scale is not even in the same ballpark, or even neighbourhood.
Besides the fact that you can't just "make" internet from a coal/petrol/etc generator somewhere nearby.
Imagine a ship's anchor damaging a cable carrying a couple megawatts of power (this happens frequently to the undersea fibre optic cables, and even those are a nightmare to repair).
The internet does not go from A -> B it is a web. You can (and some countries do) cut yourself out of it. But you cannot cut others out of it.
Solar generation of power across countries will pretty much go one way. The most obvious and likely one is from North Africa to Europe. If the North African states decide to turn off the power to Europe they can. This is why geo-politically you cannot rely on this as a 100% solution. It can add to a solution, but it is not a good idea to let another country hang a sword over your head like that. (Or more precisely to hang the sword there yourself)
Indulging such imagination, which is valuable, one particular reason, as you probably realize, could be resource limits when it comes to actually scaling up solar generation and transmission facilities.
Plus, electrification of transportation, if beyond electrified rail, still calls for storage. Here's an analysis of material inputs, focussing on vehicle electrification:
Europe has its winter all at the same time. Everyone's making their morning tea and heating their houses at the same time.
We could, maybe, import all that energy from solar farms in North Africa, but (a) that requires a willing counterparty, and (b) is that actually technically feasible? As in, sign here and pay, we build it for you.
It would be just a huge investment, which is why it did not get very far, so far.
Also there is indeed the political factor. North africa is not so stable, but of course willing for investment.
But even with solar in southern europe alone, you would get quite far, combined with wind and hydro. And if you have excess in summer, you could store that in various ways for the winter.
In other words, I believe we do need huge investments into the grid now, connecting europes south and north. And then companys can build more of all kinds of solar and wind farms.
Correct me if I’m wrong, b it we can maybe, just about, for a lot of money, store electricity for a couple of hours. Maybe days with hydro. Multiple months seems like an impossibility.
The link you provided seems to just mention plans and studies, not building subsea electricity cables. Also says
> The project failed twice due to the problem of transportation and cost-inefficiency.
Like I said, it would be a huge investment. But without huge investments, we will not get rid of the dependency of oil or dictators either way. The question is what kind of investment. And the studies of desertec implied that it is technical possible. Since then solar dropped in price a lot and oil the other way up.
And if you have a european wide grid (high voltage, direct current) you would not need to store for months, because the sun is still shining in the south and wind is blowing somewhere. You only would need to store for the rare situations of little wind and little sun.
It will be a mix either way, I am not against nuclear as base load, or backup. But they are expensive, too.
At least nuclear is more under your control geographically. If an enemy missile can hit a solar field in a North African country and cripple you, you aren't very resilient.
Not sure. First I thought you did sarcasm, but it seems, you are actually serious.
Well then, when you have lots of solar and wind fields, then it doesn't matter too much, if one gets destroyed. But even those you can defend, even with your own troops, by making adequate contracts.
On the other hand, if you have to rely on nuclear - then a potentiell enemy only needs to target those and you are screwed in many ways. It would be not too hard, for a dedicated commando to blow up, or at least render useless, a nuclear reactor with enough preparation.
But when you are only thinking in military terms: the hard parts to defend with dessert power are the power cabels. But they are also an essential part of nuclear plants and you cannot defend the whole grid.
Er no, wasn't being sarcastic. My point was that importing solar power from North Africa means you're less in control in the event of a conflict.
Your point about cabling is equally valid.
Your point about nuclear less so. I'm more comparing locally generated power, where your power generation can be covered by your own defences, with remotely generated power, which can't.
If this is priced into the cost of the solar, then fair enough, although to bring this particular risk down to what it would be if the generation were in one's own borders would I think be prohibitively expensive, or impossible.
Actual deaths from solar power are higher than actual deaths from nuclear energy, per GW delivered. Solar death is mostly from falling from high places, but so what? Death is death.
There's a conversation to have about the long tail but I'll probably start calling people cowards at some point so lets not.
It's easy to count somebody who fell off a roof. Statistical deaths from cancers are much easier to sweep under the carpet and most pro nuclear propaganda death counts I've seen do precisely that.
Im not sure if conspiracy is the right word. The special interest groups bullshitting everyone are not necessarily coordinating. Is religion also a conspiracy?
Never mind.
I believe that I'd feel safer with nuclear if they paid for their own damn insurance and raised the liability cap to "unlimited" but apparently they dont feel its safe enough just yet to raise their financial exposure. What if fukushima happened again? Dealing with that was expensive!
Perhaps you could explain why they cant volunteer to shoulder their own risks if theyre so safe?
In SPITE of free insurance they still need lavish taxpayer subsidies to be financially viable while wind and solar dont.
...including a policy to pay the cost of decommissioning.
There isn't a production nuclear power plant in the world that has ever been fully decommissioned. The earliest production plants in the UK have been taken out of service, but decommissioning (so the land they were built on can be re-used) is expected to take the rest of this century.
I don't disagree. Corporations leaving environmental cleanup as a problem for government (i.e. taxpayers) and future generations is a severe form of externalising costs, which I think amounts to theft.
There were 1 person that died in Fukushima. Some more, mostly elderly people, died during evacuation/displacement.
In Chernobyl around 50 people died as direct consequence of the disaster. As far as I know there's no studies showing increased risk of cancer in the population that lived in and around Chernobyl at the time. If Chernobyl showed us one thing it is that radiation is not as dangerous as we believed.
There were sharp increases in some cancers, however from very small bases and of cancers with very low mortality, as far as I recall.
I think it's worth assuming some reduction in life expectancy for some people, but notably the estimates of lost years of life have dropped year by year, and will likely end up being negligible.
I've said it before: we could have a Chernobyl every year, and it'd still be worth it (reducing deaths) if it got us off coal sooner...
As far as I recall, there were some measurable increases in cancer incidence among children in Belarus, mostly due to milk intake
However, all that was completely drowned by a collapse of life expectancy resulting from the chaos of the 90s. We're horrified at a few tens of extra cancers, but 100M men losing 10-15 years of their life due to socio-economic circumstances doesn't raise anyone's eyebrow
>Actual deaths from solar power are higher than actual deaths from nuclear energy, per GW delivered. Solar death is mostly from falling from high places, but so what? Death is death.
This is not a serious argument. Large scale solar farms are hardly more than 6 feet off the ground and would essentially eliminate this risk. I expect the number of deaths and decrease in quality of life attributable to fossil fuels is far far higher to speak nothing of Climate risks in general.
> If you will indulge me the geopolitical fantasy of putting a suitable planetary-scale transmission system in place, is there any particular reason we couldn't switch to all-solar?
Just how much would such infrastructure cost? How much resources would we have to mine to facilitate such a massive overhaul to a non-centralized grid?
I think when renewables are presented as the only answer it is underestimated how much it would cost in investment in storage and the grid, to a point that I feel nuclear is a fine solution for base-load.
I have no numbers though so I cannot back this up or anything.
Both nuclear and a planetary grid are theoretically possible. The real question is what's quicker and cheaper. It seems very unlikely that a planetary grid would be the winner here.
Transmission losses are something like 3-10% per 1000km for overland cables, and 60% for underwater cables. The Earth has 12000km at the equator, so solar power at night would have to be delivered at 18-60% losses to some areas in the best case; much worse in practice, since you can't realistically have overland cables connecting Eurasia to the Americas.
You also are unlikely to have enough space and enough raw materials to construct solar panels that can provide the entire earth's energy needs all-day round, given the huge transmission losses.
Furthermore, solar panels have a very short life span - barely 10 years for a decent yield - which means that you would have to constantly mine hevay metals to build new solar panels at a rapid pace just to maintain this setup.
It's perhaps a possibility for a distant future, but definitely not something that can be contemplated as a serious solution to the 0-emissions world that we need to hit in the next 30 years.
I’m not an expert in this field at all, but from the bit of research I did to try to verify these numbers, the estimates presented here about solar longevity and long-distance transmission seem unrealistically pessimistic.
Losses for 800kV HVDC systems are typically documented at ~3.5%/1000km or ~5%/2000km[0], and state-of-the-art 1.1MV systems have losses of ~1.5%/1000km[1][2]. Lower voltage systems have higher losses but I’m not sure why a lower-voltage system or AC system would be used in a project like this.
I can’t find any information about increased losses in submarine cables at all; where is that information from, and what is the mechanism that causes that added loss?
For solar panels, as far as I can tell, capacity loss occurs at a rate of ~0.3-1% per year depending upon the type of panel, with a median of 0.5%[3]. More modern panels have lower losses than older panels, presumably due to manufacturing improvements. So, after 10 years, you’re talking about something that will produce—on average—5% less power than it did when it was brand new. That’s not something that is broken and needs to be replaced the way you seem to be suggesting.
Yeah, and the UK's wind capacity factor should be better than average because most of the recently-added capacity is offshore, which is more expensive per GWh produced but produces it more reliably. There just doesn't seem to be a realistic non-nuclear path to ending fossil fuel dependence, and green groups have got away with obfuscating this fact because most of the press supports them.
It's also just turned warm and sunny in the UK. I turned the heating off for the first time in months today and solar is producing just as much as nuclear right now.
At a much much lower cost.
Those wind shortfalls have a strong tendency to line up with good weather when solar produces more and heating is less needed.
The UK also has more pumped storage coming online and octopus even has home electricity tarriffs that promote time shifting demand.
You are not wrong. More storage is needed; more solar is needed; more connectivity to Europe is needed. The wind not blowing is a local effect. It's more rare offshore. It's very rare for it to be continent wide. So connectivity helps, storage helps, having people with solar on their roofs helps.
There's a need for "base load". I hesitate to use that term because people get carried away with weird notions of it. If you slap a percentage on it, it's probably closer to 5% than to 50% of overall capacity if you look at it at a European level. We're talking a cloudy, wind free day across the entirety of the continent. A day would be tolerable. A few weeks highly unusual.
The thing is, that base load is much smaller than the current base load provided by nuclear + legacy fossil fuel plants. Germany has been shutting them down by the GW. Nuclear is nearly done. Coal is next unless they have to get out of Russian gas first. They're putting 200 billion into fixing their grid in the next few years. Something, tells me that they'll manage without blackouts. Blackouts have not been a problem so far when they grew renewables from next to nothing to the majority of their supply. Same for other countries across Europe.
A little bit of nuclear on the side will help. But it will mainly keep energy cost high because all that stuff has to be subsidized. Maybe these smaller reactors will reduce prices to be a bit less problematic. Otherwise, expect renewables to outgrow this stuff by orders of magnitude like it has for this exact reason. Add a few GW of nuclear over ten years or so. Add a few hundred GW of wind. Just wind. It might add up to 5%. That might be enough. I'm not against it. Just realistic about prices and amounts.
>The wind not blowing is a local effect. It's more rare offshore. It's very rare for it to be continent wide.
It also tends to line up with sunny weather when solar is pumping out energy. Today is very much one of those days. Solar is producing as much as nuclear in the UK right now for a fraction of the cost.
Every winter I see the same post about how little energy solar panels are producing today and why this means we need more nuclear plants.
Today the sun is out so it's all about how little the wind is blowing.
Northern Europe tends to have a few weeks in the winter where both wind and solar are problematic for a few weeks on end. Southern Europe is fine around that time and off shore wind is fine too.
That's why interconnecting grids is so important. We can have Norwegian hydro and Moroccan solar picking up the slack. Plugin all those nice new EVs with vehicle to grid capability built in (Ford, Kia, and a few other manufacturers produce these already) and we're talking a few GWH of standby battery capacity ready to balance the grids as well.
That 5% base load is what we need to secure long term. But given that we essentially have that right now, there's no urgency for that. Maybe it's 10%.
Before anyone asks, I'm basing my numbers on what Michael Liebreich cited in his podcast a while back. Interesting person. He's a british conservative with a technical and economic background. Not your usually hippy environmentalist. Founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance; generally seems to be extremely solid on his numbers. The economics in this area are quite fascinating. If you have better numbers and sources, please share. Base load without numbers is just people waffling.
I've never actually seen numbers which take into account pumped storage, grid interconnects, actual weather, low-hanging-fruit demand shaping and the anticorrelation of wind and solar but I wish somebody would produce some.
There's a lot of very shallow analysis out there though that cheerleads some approach with some very trivially refuted assumptions.
My sense is that the price of all of those things combined is currently about 90% of the cost of nuclear power official and about 60-75% of the cost of nuclear power that pays for its own disaster insurance.
While my own model is most assuredly flawed, I havent really seen a good alternative.
It's been a while since I read it to know if the specifics you're after are in there, but I wouldn't be surprised if you could get a directionally-correct reading from https://www.withouthotair.com/. Provisos obviously include changes in costs since it was published, but it would give you a starting point.
> Every winter I see the same post about how little energy solar panels are producing today and why this means we need more nuclear plants.
The low-wind periods last December had a peak of 1.2 GW solar.
Combined wind and solar right now are producing only very slightly more than a tech that has had zero real investment in thirty years. I wouldn't brag about that.
Is the eye watering cost that inhibited investment for 20 years supposed to be bragworthy? It's not like they were ever banned. They just need ridiculously high subsidies to exist at all.
No, it isn't. It's a colossal example of both complacency at big engineering firms, and wider myopia about climate change.
Nevertheless, the >30-year old nukes still delivered what every single technology you have listed categorically failed to deliver. I have provided ample, repeated evidence of that. They failed and fossils came to the rescue. Repeatedly.
Why should they get even half the subsidy nukes get (which is what they do get), when their output is simply useless.
I've posted numbers. Please, you want to show me storage can be economically done, today, do so. Or admit you can't because it can't. We no longer have time for utopianism.
Subsidizing renewables produces permanent reductions in costs, resulting in net public savings. Nukes have been subsidized forever, and costs have gone only upward.
>Nevertheless, the >30-year old nukes still delivered what every single technology you have listed categorically failed to deliver.
This is simply, provably false. They have delivered cheap and green electricity and weaned us off fossil fuels gradually.
Theyre growing very very fast because theyre economic and a good investment. Nuclear is not because it is not.
Throw $4 billion of subsidies at solar, wind and pumped storage and youll get more power when you need it than if you did the same for a nuclear power station.
In the UK solar and wind went from < 5% to 30% in the last 7 years because it's cheap to build. Nuclear's growth has been zero because it's ridiculously expensive.
I think "plans" is putting it quite strongly re the UK planning to move to electricity for heating. We've had a "plan" do something about emissions in <today> + 5 Years for about 40 years now. So I wouldn't rely on anything actually happening. Especially given that it would be practically impossible to switch from gas...
If you have enough installed capacity that the production averaged over a year is sufficient, you can store excess energy as hydrogen or methane and turn it back into electricity while renewable production is insufficient. The amount of storage you need is a function of how much capacity you install, how large the grid is, and how smart e.g. electric car chargers are. Some clever economists probably can figure out the cheapest configuration.
Currently it's much cheaper to just burn fossil fuels or import power from your neighbors than to build hydrolyzers, which is why you don't see many, but pilot facilities in the multiple-MW range exist, so the technology is available.
conversion has losses - if it was remotely economically viable people would be doing it ALL OVER the place. Energy storage is the magic bullet to make renewables truly feasible for base load support and if this was remotely viable AT ALL someone would have implemented it already.
Just because a tech is available doesn't mean it's practical for every day use.
Conversion has losses, true. For electricity to gas and back the losses are around 50%. That's perfectly fine for a technology you need for maybe a couple of weeks per year. The real question is how expensive the equipment is. Power is essentially free for renewables, all costs are depreciation of equipment.
And as I said above, people _have_ implemented it already. There are dozens of MW of hydrolyzers installed in Germany alone.
I recall seeing a study in the 2000’s stating that there wasn’t even enough nuclear material necessary to fulfil the world’s energy needs, assuming that it could be swapped out 1:1 overnight.
I don’t know if that’s still the case. At any rate, it’s a poor argument against it, as it will always be just one part of the broader energy picture, along with renewables, and (almost certainly) fossil fuels
You're probably thinking of U238 vs U235 supply. Most reactors today use U235, which is as rare as platinum (if not more rare!). If we switched to breeder reactors that used U238, we wouldn't have this problem of running out of uranium.
Imagine if you powered cars with only what fuel outgassed naturally from a tank full of kerosene, and dumped the liquid remainder regularly - and you'd have close comparison to how much we are actually using up of the Uranium available due to focus on light water Boiling and Pressurized Water Reactors.
There are designs with much higher burnup rates (how much fuel in a rod is actually used), as well as designs that do not need enrichment and will happily run on naturally occurring uranium mix - self-enriching as they work. There are designs that will take mixed in waste from other designs and further burn it down, reducing amount of high-level radioactive waste.
The long term plan in all nuclear programs is to switch over as appropriate to breeder reactors, which are just as renewable as the solar fusion fuel that leads to wind and solar and hydro. Breeder reactors invest excess neutrons from the chain reaction into abundant 'fertile' nuclear fuel like U-238 and Th-232 to generate more rare fissile material (Pu-239 or U-233) than they consume.
Breeders are a proven technology but just aren't very common yet due to the wide availability of high grade uranium ores.
One of the concerns I had never considered with these smaller reactors is the potential security concerns. Although they might not be overly dangerous, they are still realistic targets for terror groups. It's easier protecting a small number of large sites even though they are horrifically expensive to build.
The terrorism threat has always been more media then reality with reactors though. The idea of these small reactors is that they're not big complicated structures, so there protection needs are different - i.e. the reactor body can be built into the ground and concreted over until its time to decommission it.
Such a unit would be pretty close to impenetrable to any terrorist threat - there's no building to crash into, no structure or employees to attack. The literal attack surface is greatly reduced - and any operation to penetrate the unit would be large, highly visible, and take time.
Westinghouse are big into the concept and have been for a few decades - obviously anti-nuclear sentiment tends to hold it back, though the economics are tricky.
Considering how many thousands of minimally-protected water treatment plants there are, and how much publicity a serious sabotage job would get, and how extremely few reports there are of sabotage actually happening...
Zero: small scale reactor designs like pebble bed reactors are designed as "set and forget" - they're intrinsically safe, and only need to be accessed when they need refueling.
A model of deployment was that if you were setting up a town, you'd basically go dig a pit and lower one of these into it, pave over the top (or I suppose actually install some very heavy doors) and then build the town radially outwards from the reactor. The unit itself would be hermetically sealed - no employees, no systems to maintain. If it malfunctions or fails, then the idea is you drive out, pickup the container and drop a new one in.
This was always my concern. Or frankly, terrorist-like countries going "oops we didn't mean to bomb this nuclear plant, pinky promise".
The fact that in Ukraine, abysmal and abominal as the war is, no such events occured to date, actually gives me some hope that it's less likely than I thought.
>The fact that in Ukraine, abysmal and abominal as the war is, no such events occured to date, actually gives me some hope that it's less likely than I thought.
You don't consider Russia attacking a nuclear power plant an example of this very thing? It was much closer to disaster than previously thought. You don't have to breach the containment vessel for things to go horribly wrong. There are a number of external critical systems that if destroyed, could result in a meltdown.
I'm not saying anything good about Russian invasion or their (lack of) careful approach, merely that no nuclear disaster struck so far, despite a hot and indiscriminate war in place, including literally around nuclear plants.
Ever been to a Nuclear Power Plant? I have and it's the last place a terrorist would attack. Quite literally more security that most Military bases. You wouldn't make it within 100 yards of the perimeter fence let alone the containment building.
The tons and tons of concrete that shield the reactor core would, though. You would be better off slamming a plane into a dam - much easier to crack, much less chance of containing the disaster it if you do manage to crack it.
Putting aside any consideration about the safety of running those reactors and disposing of the spent fuel, I wonder about the wisdom of investing in an energy source which would not decrease West's dependency on authoritarian and openly adversarial states.
Kazakhstan + Russia + Uzbekistan + China = about 54% of the world production in 2018. [1] Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are both in Russia's sphere of influence, especially the former one which accounts for 40% of the world production.
On the other side, Canada is the number 2 producer (13%) and Australia is estimated to have more reserves than all of the above countries combined. [2]
Uranium production doesn't really follow its actual occurrence though - you'll note the places listed are all participants or proxy states of the Cold War arms race. They inherited that production capacity and mining - whereas Australia barely mines at all because it has no nuclear weapons and only 1 research reactor.
Basically I'd say there's a lack of evidence that proven reserves only exist in unstable states, but also the refueling cycle changes things dramatically - reactor fuel can be easily and compactly stockpiled, and happens on yearly cycles - much less subject to shifting local geopolitics.
Only because the extraction process is dirty and we aren't willing to do it as cheaply. Waste from mining other minerals is rich in REMs, and deposits are plentiful. "Rare" is actually a misnomer:
So it's pretty much like Uranium then. It's not rare, but we outsource its mining to autocratic regimes, because they're willing to produce it cheaply (while destroying their environment).
Worth shouting out that it is also sourced in former colonies that still have major dependencies on their old imperial masters. Niger/France have this relationship and Niger produces the majority of uranium used by the French nuclear industry.
Photovoltaics do not, in fact, depend on rare-earth elements.
Wind turbine generators often, but far from always, depend on rare-earth magnets. Batteries often (but far from always) depend on other rare, but not rare-earth, elements like cobalt.
Also, the term rare-earth metal is really unfortunate. About half of them have no practical industrial use. The other half is neither rare, nor particularly expensive
The three most important rare earth elements are lanthanum, neodymium and praseodymium. The first two are about as "rare" as copper or nickel. Praseodymium is less abundant, about the rate of lithium or lead. Neodymium costs around $50 per kilo. About 3 kilos is necessary in an electric car. One container full of neodymium ingots is enough for 30,000 electric cars. It's not a geopolitical ace up the sleeve it's made out to be
Ytterbium used to be (carefully) splattered all over the screen of every color TV, to fluoresce red.
Erbium is used in nanogram quantity in optical fibers to amplify signals purely optically. You shine a light on a fiber doped with it and the signal gets stronger.
The countries with large uranium reserves are basically just 'big countries'. And the nature of nuclear power is such that the cost of fuel is not as important as it is for fossil fuels. Even if it were, as you point out, Australia is the Saudi Arabia of uranium reserves. I'd say they're about as far away from adversarial as you could get.
Also as far away as you could get geographically, though I suppose this is far less of an issue that it would have been in the past. I wonder if nuclear-powered ships could be utilised to deliver the uranium, further cutting the climate impact?
If Australia were to refine the uranium for export you wouldn't need anything special in the ways of shipping other than good containment and careful handling. If you replaced all power generation with nuclear that alone would drastically reduce the amount of shipping necessary for oil, gas and coal to a point where you would hardly need to be concerned about it. There's even a relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1162/
The problem is that Gen4 reactors are essentially vaporware, with the expected first reactors to come online in 2040-2050 - and given the desaster that has been the (third gen) EPR regarding timing and budget, I believe it's foolish to rely on that date. Especially since a lot of focus is on molten-salt reactors and to this date no one has come close to solving the problem that molten salt is highly aggressive towards pipes.
We need solutions now, and we already have them in mass production: solar panels, wind power generation and battery storage.
> We need solutions now, and we already have them in mass production: solar panels, wind power generation and battery storage.
This is the one thing I like about Tesla and SpaceX: they solve problems with today's tech.
When I imagined reusable spacecraft, I was dreaming about anti-gravity drives, which just furthered my believe of it being impossible.
SpaceX did it on a kerosene rocket, same physics that the Saturn V used decades ago.
We don't need to wait for some Sci-Fi physics to solve this issue. We can go really far with we already have today.
> we already have them in mass production: solar panels, wind power generation and battery storage.
I always hear that abstract argument but do we have the math right on this?
What would it take to provide enough power in the US with only those solutions (+ hydro and other non nuclear non fossil fuel solutions)?
Do we have an idea of the amount of material and pollution that would be generated by building (and then recycling) all those panels and batteries?
I would like to live in a world where we don't need nuclear but I am not convinced we can realistically do without (assuming the same standard of living).
We have better chances of producing that many solar panels than we have getting Gen4 reactors before 2050. As for energy storage - there's a lot of possibilities:
1) electric cars acting as buffers. Particularly rarely-used vehicles could earn some side money for being used in a smart grid.
2) battery storage like Tesla constructed in Australia
3) hydro pumped storage
In particular, base load could also be generated by permanent renewable energy (e.g. geothermal or running-water hydro power aka dams) to ease the requirement for energy storage.
> 1) electric cars acting as buffers. Particularly rarely-used vehicles could earn some side money for being used in a smart grid.
Bidirectional V2G systems only exist as demonstration projects now, and we'll need a bunch of time to ramp that up. It requires a lot of EVs, lots of grid updates all over the place, and for people to willingly participate at a meaningful scale. This won't be cheap and the grid we have now can't handle it.
No, it was just easiest to get running. You can make natural uranium reactor with no enrichment of fuel needed, even - it's how Manhattan Project could get fissile material in the first place.
Thorium was actually more of military-only solution than Uranium->Plutonium chain, as unlike Uranium it doesn't have obvious "easy" energy use path, but early on it was researched as mix of uranium and thorium fuels due to uranium availability concerns.
Thorium for military kind of sucks. If you want to build a substainable long term program you dont want U-232 around.
The only real advantage of Thorium is that you can use it in a thermal breeder. If you are not building a thermal breeder using thorim is mostly pointless.
China is charging ahead with Thorium - maybe after they embarrass the rest of the world people will get more rational and less emotional about nuclear?
A better reactor design could allow more commonly available radioactive (but non-fissile) elements such as Thorium to be bred into fissile elements such as Uranium-233.
This kind of reactor is called a Breeder reactor [1], for example the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) [2].
Another mostly forgotten aspect is that there are designs that explicitly work without enrichment, so no lengthy and limiting process of enrichment necessary (now, postprocessing the waste to separate materials to mix into new fuel, that would be useful)
This keeps coming up, but far as I can tell spent fuel disposal is not, and has never been a substantial issue. It's above all an engineering and administrative challenge and is safe when done properly. Also, spent fuel can be reused, and as technology improves, we'll be able to reuse more and more of it.
Radioctivity accidents can at most make places uninhabitable, but they won't contribute to the greenhouse effect (which might ultimately lead to a major socioeconomic collapse), or cause petrol-oligarchies (which have led, and will lead to war, and might lead to a thermonuclear war too). In my eyes, burning mineral fuels is much, much worse than risking radioactivity accidents.
Trivia: in Italy there was a lot of illegal dumping going on during 1980s and 1990s, they even secretely transported nuclear waste to Somalia for illegal burying and have sunk a number of ships carrying nuclear waste (for the purpose of disposal). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_waste_dumping_by_the_%27...
Also there are only two outcomes - humanity survives, and remembers where we've deeply buried spent fuel, or humanity reverts to the stone age, and loses the technology to dig down to the deeply buried fuel (or goes extinct). Either way, it's not really a problem.
I believe we're getting to the point where, if we regress below the level of viable industry capable of running any of our high-tech energy sources (whether it's oil, coal, nuclear or any of the renewables), then we aren't getting it back ever - nor will any future civilisation, because without huge geological shifts all the sources will be beyond reach of primitive tech...
I used to think that 15,000 years from now Scientologists would be fighting with Mormons to break into Yucca Mountain and extract plutonium for nuclear weapons.
(The undesirable for weapons Pu240 isotope has a half life of about 6,000 years in contrast to the 24,000 year half life of the desirable Pu239 isotope.)
Now I don’t think the Scientologists will be around that long.
What we label as spend fuel (or even more maddening, waste!) is still viable fuel we should be burning in newer, better designs. NOT burying it in the desert.
The problem with spent fuel isn't the need to bury it. The problem is politics and myopia (on rampant display in this thread!) are winning the day instead of logic and reason.
There is currently still no licensed long term storage site for high-level waste in the world. That is amazing really. I consider that a major issue, even if the barriers are mostly political rather than technical.
Australia could be producing a lot more Uranium, it has an estimated 30% of world reserves and if you sort the list in the Wikipedia article about reserves by Reserves as of 2015, it's at the top. Canada also has large reserves and is 3rd in that list. There is also South Africa and Brazil along with other African and South American countries that could contribute to supply. I don't think supply of uranium ore would be a problem for the West.
As for safety, nuclear power production is probably one of the safest industries that exist since we are so acutely aware of the consequences. Waste storage is only a hot button issue because of trumped up fears. Compared to the variety of toxins we release into the air, the amount of nuclear waste produced is tiny and easy to contain. I'd rather all of the life threatening by products of power production be safely buried under a mountain hundreds of miles away from anyone than just dumped into the atmosphere all around the globe.
Switching to modern reactors you will be able to continually run them without U-235. Thorium os fertil and you can have a thermal breeder. There are other methods of doing the same with Uranium.
Every country has plenty of Thorium.
And even so you can stockpile these fuels for years in advance.
lets hope this works. The two fastest growing energy consumers in the world - India & China - are pulling people out of the poverty line by the millions every year. And so are not signatories to any climate accord.
Both are incidentally also the worlds largest reserves of Thorium. And has no military use.
An accelerated nuclear power research could end up being the next "COVID vaccine marathon". Cleaner air for everyone.
theoretically yes. but from what i know, nobody does it because of better alternatives. in any case - both the countries are well recognized to be nuclear powers and "on the table".
Ultimately Manhattan Project "prove" the usability of Uranium->Plutonium path and simultaneously made inroads for power generation using Uranium (or Uranium-Thorium mixes). So why experiment with untested version if the tested one is more versatile?
Disagree. If you were now in the 1960s and could plan out a long term energy strategy thorium thermal breeders are by far thebest long term bet from a number of perspectives.
Im not an expert here, but from what I have read - every one of those programs are not getting funding because of a larger disinterest in nuclear power per se.
Im fact US, China, Russia, etc have all a thorium reactor in some stage of late stage development.
I don't really care about Thorium that much. A Uranium Fast Breeder can be almost as economical and is more achievable in the short term.
The most important is to get a molten salt cooled or molten salt fueled reactor licensed.
The problem with all these projects is that they are either government driven and then the resources are very devised and 99% of the time it will not be commercial. Or its semi commercial and then those companies have huge issues with financing.
The closest thing to a molten salt reactor that might actually be commercial (with an actual operational license) in the Western world will almost certainty come from Canada. Canada after their Candu project was sold commercially looked for a next generation project.
They have a very well respected regulator that is fully committed to actually supporting next generation designs and have implemented a process that actually makes it practically possible to get to a real commercial reactor.
but you are not talking from the perspective of India and China - which will soon grow into the most polluting countries on the planet...and steadfastly refused to sign environmental accords.
India and China dont have access to Uranium reserves - today or for projected growth in 20 years.
You are right that from a Western perspective - a uranium fast breeder reactor is probably better.
But I'm hoping the general interest and investment in the space will help Thorium as well as a side effect.
I was talking more from the perspective of how easy the tech was to get working and what were the outputs. Thorium actually fell out of favour by 1960s because it was seen as adding more complexity for little gain. Was it good long term thinking? I think we both disagree.
However what I was responding to is more the perception that Uranium was used due to being usable for bombs, when the reality is that Pu-239 (from Uranium) cycle "won" over U-233 (from Thorium) mostly for reasons of it being easier to start the reaction. Normal Uranium reactor tends to produce too much Pu-240 which is undesirable in weapons, so special modified designs and operations had to be introduced all the way back in Manhattan Project.
I totally agree, the Uranium-Plutonium was always gone be the first one you develop.
So it made sense to make the first fission reactors like that.
The big mistake of the nuclear age, in my opinion was the adoption of water cooled reactors for civilian nuclear power. They simply make no sense. It makes sense for the Navy, and the navy had the money to develop them.
Once that was done the technology was just scaled to a crazy degree for commercial, scale was needed to make it commercial, but result in plants so big that the total number of plants was gone be really small.
They could have developed a molten salt cooled reactor as an alternative. You wouldn't even need to go to a fully molten salt fueled reactor.
We need to replace natural gas with nuke plants. Fossil fuel extraction is the worlds largest source of nuclear waste, not nuclear energy. No one worries about the tons of radon released from fracking. They call it "natural". https://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-04-14/fracking-incre...
I'm all for renewable - don't stop it. But there are many places in the world where a nuke plant would be the right choice. It would be great if we got this amount of resistance to new hydrocarbon vehicles or plants.
The huge problem with nuclear vs. natural gas is, that nuclear power plants have only a limited range, in which the power output can be regulated and they are not too quick in that either. So you need something else you can power switch quickly to maintain grid integrity. Natural gas is great for that, as the plants are very quick in response and can be regulated between 0 and 100% and back.
Nuclear is great to replace coal, but you still need the same amount of e.g. storage to complement changing net load and production (renewables).
I think the real problem there is carbon capture is very new and often still on the drawing board. But definitely one way to get carbon capture working is to start with whatever we’ve got.
It’s not really that huge of a problem to have more energy than needed. It just takes additional engineering to put the excess to use. Having a national grid it can be moved around. Or used for energy intensive uses that can be useful elsewhere. Kind of like the flare gas oil rigs burn when those gasses aren’t economic. I’d like to see us have that excess power pull useful gasses out of the atmosphere or sea water, for instance. Done right it could act as a hydrogen source for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, for instance. Or power a national water grid. Tons of uses for more power than needed.
It's not a huge engineering problem. But it is a huge problem, lower the rates when you have excess power and we will have more uses for the energy. But if the rates are low the revenue is low.
(This would not be so significant a problem if the capital costs weren't so high)
Small modular reactors may improve on that. Molten salt reactors in particular are supposed to be able to adjust to demand within a minute or so.
Another possibility, for any sort of high-temperature reactor, is to use molten salt as energy storage. Heat the storage salt directly from the reactor, and put the turbine after that, so you don't have conversion losses before storage. Terrapower is working on this with their Natrium project.
I've seen non-photovoltaic solar collectors that heat molten salt and then store it for off-peak use. I wonder if they could be hybridized with small modular MSRs.
And four hours storage is just what you need to shift peak daytime sun to peak evening demand. You need more to get through a windless night. To cover reduced supply on cloudy winter days you need some combination of overcapacity and long-duration storage, which typically involves some kind of turbine.
A bunch of companies are developing molten salt reactors commercially, including Terrestrial Energy, Moltex, Elysium, Seaborg, Thorcon, and Terrapower.
And if a fraction of the funding that was dumped on frivolous "renewables" in the last 20 years (Solara? Ha - tip of the iceberg for waste!) was instead spent on new reactor designs we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
Which is probably why nuclear continues to be demonized. Follow the money...
The last plant built in the US was the Watts Bar Unit 2, estimated cost around 6.1B USD for ~1.1 GW of output and construction took over 40 years. Average cost for Solar is something like 2-3$/watt. Follow the money indeed.
Solara failed purely because cost for the competition dropped well below theirs. It was an honest business failure, like many others; and ultimately good news for the rest of us. They burned through $1/2 billion. Nukes always burn much more; US subsidies are more, every year, for equal value in the end.
Harping on Solara only calls attention to nukes' overwhelmingly worse performance. Nukes are "demonized" because they cost overwhelming more than alternatives.
Commercially usually means they are actually outputting things.
Lftrs have been hyped since like 2010 and I don't think any new molten salt reactor has made any net power on the grid since then. From what I could tell of the companies you listed not a single one even has a demo reactor and the earliest ones are slated for years from now.
So you wouldn't define pre-release tech startups as commercial? Ok. They have investors who hope for profits, call them what you like.
None of these projects are LFTRs. They're generally uranium-fueled, which retains the safety and cost advantages of MSRs without the radioactive chemical engineering of LFTRs.
That's handled by grid-scale storage: Batteries, pumped storage, compressed air.
Renewable energy has the same need.
BTW, when I was a teenager I got to go deep inside of a mountain to tour a pumped storage facility built to pair with some early 1970s nuclear power plants. The nuclear plants are long-decommissioned, but the pumped storage is happily running with renewables.
The other capital and operational costs stay the same even if you just discard the production you don't need, so just focusing on fuel costs is not very helpful to determine if it's economical to do that.
Financial profitability is not a requirement for infrastructure projects. If it is the best way to supply power in the most sustainable way, it should be subsidized by governments to make it happen. If you want to pretend it balances on paper add eco taxes elsewhere, but again thats not necessary.
It is not that easy, we have privatised the energy markets so there are rules that need to be followed. Ignoring cost is not something governments can or should do, there are many more factors that need to be taken into account and this combination is what should be optimized for instead of just one factor.
The most sustainable way to supply power is to reduce the need to supply it in the first place, insulation and other energy saving measures are usually subsidized already.
My point is that, once you’ve paid the capital cost for, say, 1GW of nuclear, the marginal cost of energy produced is low and you can adjust the production on fairly short timescales. I’m not saying you should, but the calculation is different from a natural gas or coal plant in which the marginal cost of energy is much higher.
The OpEx is coal < nuclear < gas [0]. This is for regular nuclear plants, SMRs will have higher OpEx. Not sure how they'll fare against gas exactly. The SMR handbook has some estimations I believe, but I don't recall the numbers.
This is the actual plan for renewables, because they are just cheap period (though their fuel is pretty darn cheap too). Demand response, simply dumping the excess, storing excess as heat etc.
It's not a good idea for nuclear, because even nuclear that runs all the time can't compete on cost with renewables and any deviation from that schedule destroys the economics conpletely.
A small amount that runs all the time is probably a good idea in places far from the equator, but even then the plummeting costs of renewables opens a few other doors, like shipping green hydrogen around.
Can machines for extracting CO2 from the atmosphere have how hard they are running be ramped up and down quickly? Or do they just have a rate they work at, where changing how much one is doing would require changing how much machine there is / which ones are active ?
Machines for removing CO2 from the air need consume no power at all. (E.g., a big fabric corral that waves slop into, connected to a fabric tube 10 m across that opens 1000m below.)
Machines to synthesize H2 and NH3 could be ramped up and down, but in practice will run 24/7 except when price peaks and stockpiles are burned for power instead.
The general preferred choice for energy that can quickly turn on and off (in terms of weather changes that cause low production in wind/solar) is hydro. As long you don't deplete the water reserves it can be turn on and off fairly fast, through there can be considerations downstream. Nuclear can help in keeping those reserves high by reducing demand and letting hydro deal with the peaks.
Using natural gas is non-viable. It funds war as has been fairly obvious lately, and it puts a dependence between those that has the natural resource and those that don't. The climate can also not continue to take the continuous damage that burning/leaking natural gas causes.
The choices that we have is either nuclear, renewables, and batteries. The natural gas plants need to be replaced and so one can either choose nuclear, renewables or batteries.
This is not true. Modern nuclear plants can load follow.
The reason they usually don't is because fuel is such a small portion of the cost of operating a nuclear plant. It's comparatively more efficient to run nuclear at 100% and idle fossil plants. But nuclear can absolutely load follow if there's a reason to, such as load sharing with renewables.
Only in a very limited way. As we move forward, we are quickly reaching the point where for more and more time, renewables can carry the whole grid load alone. Nuclear power plants would have to be switched off in those times. And while they can follow the load over a large part of their power output, they can't be swithed off and on again. So as the transition to renewables progresses, nuclear power plants are less and less a good counterpart.
Gas plants however are. They are very quick and switching them off is possible and saves precious fuel. As the transition progresses, they should use less and less fuel as they are used more rareley and the fuel could be switched to renewable sources (bio, power2gas). The pre-war plans of the current German government included extending the gas infrastructure but with a clear ability for new installations to be also able to use H2 as it becomes available.
Yup, nuclear fission and burning oil are EXACTLY the same processes. /s
Your response would be hilarious if it wasn't so utterly tragic. Our civilization exists because of cheap, abundant energy - and there is no more cheap or abundant or RENEWABLE energy (ever hear of breeder reactors? Might want to do some reading) then nuclear - if we can ever separate the politics and emotion from this "debate".
Uranium isn't only created by mining out of the ground - once again, you might want to look into breeder reactors.
It's not the only substance that can be used in a reactor either - China is racing ahead with Thorium reactors; based on technology that was mature in the US in the 50's but not deployed for purely political reasons.
Because it produces a kind of pollution that has to be stored permanently. The non-renewable resource is safe places to store the waste for thousands of years.
More importantly it differs from other renewables in its lead-up time. Nuclear plants can take decades to build. There is hope that small modular reactors can fix that problem, but it's not proven yet. And there is the risk of conflict with renewables which are ready right now: "Don't build solar/wind/etc but instead wait indefinitely for this other technology which may not work."
I would welcome successful deployments of SMRs. But I don't expect them soon, and today there remains a lot of opportunities to deploy wind and solar at costs that continue to improve in economies of scale. If SMRs join them as a supplement to reduce greenhouse gases, so much the better, but for the foreseeable future they are not a sole solution.
It uses fuel that exists in a limited amount. We call "renewable" things that plug into natural flows of energy, and not things that require artificial flows.
Natural - if there ever was a more misused word! Breeder reactors utilize "natural" processes and create more fissionable material than they consume. Sounds pretty renewable to me.
Because our policies are being construed by environmentalists with a Communist or leftist agenda instead of scientists and pragmatic leaders.
Renewables are much less cost-effective if you take into account the energy storage needed to make them work. And even then they're ineffective because you essentially need 100% backup capacity for an indefinite period of time for when the wind doesn't blow or the sun is obscured by clouds. Current energy storage systems can only provide enough power for two days at the most.
We're being led like Lemmings into the ravine by these environmentalists. It's time we scientists and engineers took charge.
Blaming the commies does not make you seem more sane. And, "taking charge" smells fascist. Maybe try to come up with a legitimate economic argument? Just one?
You have suggested, "every drop of fossil fuel and every pound of coal will be burned" by poorer nations as prices respond to reduced demand. At some level, though, the cost of extracting exceeds that price. As cost for renewables declines, using renewables becomes strictly cheaper than the cost of extraction, and even the poorest people will thus prefer renewables. Anyway, we may expect access to coal and oil under many countries will be forbidden.
In addition, as renewable energy gets cheaper, extracting carbon from the atmosphere to fix in solid form gets cheaper than mining it, so excess atmospheric carbon dioxide can be drawn down. (That, besides extracting carbon to volatiles to be burned and re-emitted.)
The deep ocean has capacity to safely sequester excess carbon already in the atmosphere. It may be moved there cheaply.
Yes, there is uranium in seawater as a trace element. And there is gold in human blood also as a trace element, but nobody uses corpses yet to make gold.
In any case there is still a finite amount of it, is not uniformly distributed in the planet, most of them in Australia and nuclear converts it into other elements (if I'm not wrong you can't take the opposite path yet), so is not a renewable resource by definition.
Has uranium ever been refined in any quantity from anything but mined ore?
Extracting from seawater, were it cheaper, would surely have been done. Nukes are already way more expensive than renewables; adding on more cost will not make them more attractive.
I'm sorry but this is just silly, HN threads about non-nuclear renewables are mostly fairly positive. I'm pro nuclear and do in fact agree with most of this list, but also recognize that there is a huge amount of unfair resistance against building nuclear, despite the huge push for renewables.
I didn't say that HN threads were mostly negative about renewables. But the people who comment about nuclear in them are by and large attempting to launder anti-renewable views, and not doing a very good job of it.
I mean it's really not hard to say something positive about nuclear without attacking renewables, or environmentalists or various other basically unrelated issues. But you wouldn't think so from most HN discussions. Feel free to survey the comments here as an example.
> Nuclear should compete with fossil fuels - not renewables. Nuclear power provides 50% of the US's clean energy.
No, it should compete with both on market terms. If a nuclear plant is built instead of a hydroelectric plant, a wind farm or a gas-fired plant, I’ll be able to sleep just as easily about it so long as it wasn’t built for political reasons.
The market does not price in externalities. That's why they call them that. Nuclear has significantly cheaper externalities than fossil fuels. You should prefer it, and subsidize it in kind.
Subsidizing nuclear is entirely theoretical for me, unless I’m subsidizing it in other States which I wouldn’t be happy to do if it won’t benefit me directly (not indirectly: directly).
California presently has a flat prohibition on new nuclear construction. I would rather keep my dollars for my own utility bill, unless Nevada would like to play host to a nuclear plant built to serve the Bay Area.
You’re not wrong but that’s exactly my problem: this isn’t something for the Feds to subsidize. They need to get out of the business of subsidizing industry.
Anything that is capable of negotiating on behalf of society in the case of a transaction that produces externalities is going to be indistinguishable from a government. If you're arguing that no one should advocate for society's interests in these transactions, then you should make that position explicit.
Living and human civilization are high energy activities, and becoming higher energy over time. Just the number of electronics I employ in my day-to-day life has made electricity alone more central to my life than it maybe was 20 years ago even.
So plants and energy transmission lines and such are going to be built, especially as more battery-electric vehicles become available in more model lines and at more varied price points for people to buy. If I had a personal preference, I would prefer that electricity to be coming from nuclear and solar plants, but I’m not willing to condemn the poor to raise prices and make those the only options. What gets built will be what makes sense according to the knowledge and expertise of people who build plants, i.e. what is economical in the context of the market which is just trillions of accumulative transactions happening across society made by people; and we’ll make decisions about where to import/export energy from in geopolitical and military contexts where those decisions rightfully belong which can and does inform markets.
The harder we make it to build nuclear though, the less likely nuclear will be chosen. In California for example there is a flat prohibition on new construction, so we’re going to keep building gas-fired plants alongside whatever renewables because that is what we have chosen to do, until we make a different choice.
I don't understand how modularity is meant to solve nuclear's issues.
* Nuclear is expensive
* Nuclear is unpopular locally (aka nimbys veto it)
* Nuclear waste needs to be dealt with properly.
Making reactors smaller doesn't seem to fix any of these does it? Are people willing to accept a 100MW reactor but not a 1000MW reactor next to their kids schools? Is it cheaper to build and run 10 100MW reactors than a single 1000MW one?
The point is that yes, it should be cheaper. More reliable, too. The way that happens is that if you're building them at all, you're building lots of them, on a production line, which lets you build them continuously, and build them well. At this point of industrial history we're far better at setting up production lines than one-off construction projects.
Nuclear is expensive due to politics, not pure science or economics
Nuclear is unpopular because it has been vilified and made an emotional argument. Plus you can't see, touch, taste or feel radiation - the ultimate boogyman to trigger our lizard brain.
Nuclear "waste" is waste only due to politics and stupidity. Everything we classify as "waste" today is not waste for other reactor designs that will more than happily (and safely!) burn that "waste" and turn it into useful energy.
If you were able to separate out politics and emotion from the nuclear "debate" there wouldn't be a debate. It would be a slam dunk no brainer decision.
Luckily for China their despotic internal rule doesn't have to suffer fools for stuff like this. They are charging ahead with Thorium and god help the rest of the world if they crack it at scale. Then people will see just how critical a role energy is to the success of a civilization. All of our ridiculous and continued postering around energy while not really doing anything significant (and all the resources wasted on many renewables that are anything but) is going to bite the west in the ASS big time. Rome is burning and we are fiddling.
So the article mentions NuScale, which are planning to build a couple of test reactors in 2030, but fails to mention Rosatom modular reactors which are decades ahead and ready to go.
Well, it's that same thing the US did with 5G. When Europe, Australia and most of the world was ready to build their 5G infrastructure, the U.S. cooked up some lies about some subsidiary of Huawei having some business deal with some company related to North Korea and sanctioned Huawei.
Yeah, that is not a very thorough analysis of the situation.
China's control of other countries communications infrastructure is a global concern as their footprint has expanded through commercial enterprise to match the US military footprint. You don't have to like the US, but unless you're Han Chinese, that isn't a good system for you.
> China's control of other countries communications infrastructure is a global concern
Except globally everybody wanted to use Huawei, until the US cooked up the lie and threatened everyone against it. Australia had a soft regime change because of this issue. You're fooling nobody.
>So the article mentions NuScale, which are planning to build a couple of test reactors in 2030, but fails to mention Rosatom modular reactors which are decades ahead and ready to go.
If you are discussing technological progress, there is absolutely no reason to not discuss the industry leaders regardless of their political standing at the time... unless of course you have no intention to write about the technology itself... you're merely using that plot as a guise to sneak in a promotion for one specific company which is a decade behind a company actually ready to roll out today.
> a complete non option for most of the world right?
India and China are perfectly happy to... and parts of middle east and some of Africa. That's almost half of the world population. What is "most of the world" to you?
So much in the energy literature is like a stopped clock because a lot of work gets done because of an ‘energy crisis’ and unfortunately the old books don’t get withdrawn from libraries when they are obsolete.
You still hear people compare nuclear costs to coal because coal was competitive in the 1970s. They quit building coal plants at the same time they quit building nuclear plants, for the same reason —- gas turbine generators based on airplane engines have a capital cost about 10% of the steam turbines used for coal and nuclear.
Even if the heat were free and you could burn coal without asking “what do you do with the waste?” you would struggle to be profitable with either coal or nuclear…. Unless you could couple these energy sources to a gas turbine. In the case of coal you need to gasify it (say make hydrogen out of it and pump the carbon underground) in the case of nuclear you need a new reactor type that runs at higher temperatures (liquid metal, molten salt, gas cooled) and a breakthrough in closed-cycle power sets. If it succeeded though you could fit the power plant in the employee break room at the turbine house of today’s LWR.
>gas turbine generators based on airplane engines have a capital cost about 10% of the steam turbines used for coal and nuclear.
Do you have a source for this? Most gas power plants today are combined-cycle [0], meaning they first put the hot combustion gas through a gas turbine as you said and _then_ they use the waste heat to drive a steam turbine as well. This design is responsible for the significant efficiency advantage natural gas generation has over coal. So it doesn't make sense to claim that gas power plants are cheaper due to the turbine technology because most built today use both gas and steam turbines.
The economics of the pure gas turbine vs the combined cycle depends on the fraction of the time it spends running.
For a peaking plant you are only going to run it a fraction of the time so you care about the capital cost and not about the fuel cost... So you're going to use the cheaper to build but more expensive to operate pure gas turbine.
If you are running the plant all day then the economics are favorable to go combined cycle where you start with a gas turbine, recover heat from the exhaust, and feed that through a steam turbine. The capital cost is more than the peaking plant, less than the steam turbine on it's own, but the fuel efficiency is great which leads to lower operating costs. (e.g. the steam turbine in a combined cycle plant is much smaller than a stand-alone steam turbine with the same energy output as the whole plant)
In the case of nuclear it is worse though because you do absurd things: a PWR has "steam generators" which are huge heat exchangers, larger than the pressure vessel, that use hot water at high pressure to boil water at low pressure. For liquid metal reactors the heat exchangers are even larger
Contrast that to the heat recovery units used in the combined cycle turbine that couple hot gases to water or the sodium-to-air heat exchangers that rejected heat from the fast flux test facility. In terms of size these are like a bug splatter on the plans for a PWR.
Yeah. but the HTGR probably loses in the cost of the reactor what it could save in the powerset. The power density is low so the reactor vessel is big for its power output.
Nuclear reactor developer here. I personally have not really gotten on the small reactor bandwagon. I can see them as useful for trying out new tech but the way to really reduce costs is to pick a known and proven tech, serialize it, and increase power. I think SMRs are a response to boondoggle construction projects, but if and when a smr project goes well there will be lots of pressure to make bigger versions of the reactor.
For decarbonising rapidly we should currently be building lots of ABWR and APR-1400 and Hualong One reactors (big, modern, proven).
> I think SMRs are a response to boondoggle construction projects, but if and when a smr project goes well there will be lots of pressure to make bigger versions of the reactor.
I think there's some value in that right? Proving designs, rebuilding public trust, and building up all of the economic infrastructure again will be really useful for scaling up.
I'm definitely going to read your article, seems fascinating from the intro.
> I think SMRs are a response to boondoggle construction projects...
This +10 (if I could).
Consider orbital-class rockets - another very advanced technology, and far less forgiving than nuclear power reactors. How much does it cost to launch (say) 10 tons of satellite on a rocket from plucky upstart SpaceX? Vs. how much did it cost back when only a few bloated "cost plus plus" mega-corporations were providing orbital rockets?
Orbital rockets are less forgiving than reactors in that they operate closer to engineering limits even when they work correctly. They are more difficult to make reliable. But they have a far more forgiving-to-neighbors failure mode. When a SpaceX test vehicle explodes only SpaceX is harmed. With reactors you can't start by testing a design that spontaneously disassembles itself and iterate toward a reliable one like the organizations that build rockets have done.
Well, true. But since reactors run nowhere nears engineering limits, they need "build, explode, iterate" R&D about as much as they need testing at 5g, or in vacuum. (Yes, I know that destructive testing of many reactor components & sub-systems is quite reasonable.)
Yup they're one of the best/only examples of large country-scale rapid deep decarbonization of electricity. ~50 standardized reactors in ~15 years and done.
I believe they're right. The cost advantage of having standardized, factory built reactors is enormous. Instead of having one big reactor providing 1,5GW you can have five 300MW reactors strapped in parallel and have the same output.
The reason nuclear reactors are so expensive is that each one is more or less a bespoke build, with regulators changing the rules constantly, sometimes during construction. There's no reason for nuclear reactors to be more expensive than a similar non-nuclear plant.
I have seen a some of analysis that suggested that as long as you are working with PWR you are not gone do a huge amount better economically.
It might be a little better, but we have to break free of water cooled reactor. It makes simply no sense as a design point. The only reason we have it is because it made sense for nuclear submarines.
Yes but as I pointed out, if you study mass production, the benefits of standardization and mass production are proportional to amount you produce.
Going from producing 1 of something to 4 of something, the benefits are not actually that large.
There is a far, far bigger effect going from PWR to a Molten Salt because that results in a factor 10 or more in difference in size of plant for the same output.
I would definitely appreciate the reasons on why small hydroelectric plants aren't seen as a good alternative to other power generation systems in economic terms.
To my understanding, they seem to be pretty responsive in demand fluctuations and pretty cheap with minor environmental impact.
I think OP's "small hydroelectric plants" point is important, there. Imagine something more akin to the water wheels that powered industry of yore along rivers prior to steam and then electric power, not valley-filling reservoirs behind huge hydroelectric dams. I believe the term is "run-of-the-river" hydroelectric.
If there is sufficient continuous flow down the river, and a goodly elevation drop you can use to build head pressure, you can indeed tap a small canal off, pass the flow through some turbines, and feed it right back in to the river.
I think it is a matter of scale, water flow, and NIMBY-ism. While such stations to generate power, individually its not a whole hell of a lot, and who wants their river-front view besmirched by penstocks and a concrete blockhouse of a turbine building?
I will say, if I had property with a little creek running year round on it, I'd be hard pressed not to install a waterwheel to get a little something out of it.
There used to be lots of little hydro plants in the U.S. The problem is dis-economies of scale once there is a large-scale power grid. (So a little hydro plant no longer has a local monopoly.) If river you're damming up has (say) 1/50 of the Colorado River's flow rate at Hoover Dam, and 1/20 of the ~500 foot head (meaning how far the water level drops at the dam), then you've got 1/(50 * 20) of the potential power generation of Hoover Dam - or about 2 megawatts. Which is worth ~$100 per hour on the wholesale market. To get that, you have to build and maintain a dam, a spillway, turbines, generators, a grid connection, etc., etc. Oh - and also buy the land that will be flooded by water behind the dam.
I can't wait to see a disappearance of the irrational fear of everything nuclear in the modern discourse. Popular culture by the likes of the Chernobyl tv series and fallout further instilled that fear.
Two other big upsides to SMR's, which I don't see mentioned:
- If 'most all of the expensive parts are shipped in from the factory, very late in the construction process - then there's far less construction debt to float (vs. traditional reactors), while years of regulatory, NIMBY, etc. legal crap drags out.
- If your modest-sized country (think of Europe) has a bunch of SMR's...that's a sort of "our lights will not go out" energy security which recent events has made far more attractive. Gas pipeline from now-untouchable Russia? Natural gas wells in Texas that stopped working in cold weather? Massive spikes in wholesale energy prices? Solar or hydro-stored power from a country that "seemed stable and friendly when we cut the deal"? Calm & cloudy winter days, that you didn't spend enough $$$$ on storage to get through? SMR's sound like an insurance policy against a whole lot of nasty surprises.
"War, climate worries and oil prices make nuclear power attractive"
should be:
"War, climate worries and oil prices make ALTERNATIVE ENERGY attractive"
The economics of alternative energy + storage is basically a victory in LCOE terms, and the cost / technology curve of solar and storage and the economies of scale are still in ramp-up. So this will go from a "close narrow victory" to a landslide in five years.
What nuclear project will be under ten years to delivery? What is the LCOE price point they are contending with to be marketplace competitive? No one knows this, but I would shoot for 1/3 the current nuclear LCOE at a minimum, probably 1/4.
Again, I geeked out over LFTR presentations. Modular, safe, 99% fuel use/no solid rod waste, online products extaction, no long-term isotopes, "burn/breed" existing long-term waste into usable fuel, brayton cycle.
It doesn't matter, economics are a clear win for alternative energy from a 10 year standpoint. Nuclear and Fusion should simply be research projects at this point.
If energy security is the goal, then all-in on alternative energy and EV transportation is the goal. I'm not saying tear down existing generation. Just phase it out as soon as possible
I think the sweet spot are about 500MWe reactors rhat use molten salt fuel. They are just way smaller then your AP-1000s and once we get going we can build them just way faster.
There are several approaches to "small". One is, "we don't need containment because our design is safe". That's NuScale. It's worrisome.
Then there's "we make it as big as we can but all the parts have to be transportable by road/rail so we can build it in a factory". That's Rolls-Royce. They're kind of hand-wavy about containment in their PR.
There's a lot to be said for big, strong containment vessels.
- Chernobyl - fire, containment insufficient, major disaster
- Fukushima - meltdown, containment too small, major disaster
- Three Mile Island - meltdown, big, strong containment, problem contained.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 354 ms ] threadLast calendar, it produced > 1 GW for 784 hours.
In the last four months, assuming a 40% capacity factor and therefore an expected capacity of 10 GW, there have been at least three periods with > 100 GWh shortfall.
The UK does not yet, but plans to, shift heating loads onto the electrical grid, meaning that is likely to become a 100 GWh shortfall in heating.
Please, show me an estimate for an alternative fossil-fuel system that can guarantee that shortfall.
edit: more specific to SMRs, and I have ranted on this before: they've been given ~ £ 500 M, which does... just feel like the right amount. We're all aware how 100 times that can be disappear into consultants, and much less simply wouldn't get you a complete product. £500 M I can see engineers spending.
--
[1] https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/GB
[2] https://i.imgur.com/URVfMDT.png
currently 0.63 GW.
That's interesting that they disagree. Gridwatch has been around a while but I'll have a look.
edit: yep, electricitymap's free figures are not even close to live.
When values are non-estimated, they are about 2 hours behind in the free version.
The common and legal definition of "fraud".
There's also batteries: virtual power plants that give us the ability to arbitrage between when power is cheap and when power is needed. These can be rolled out in conjunction with residential PV systems and eventually pay for themselves. A similar approach can be used to store hot water produced during the day by PVT (photovoltaic-thermal) cells.
See:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/01/f7/csp_revie...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_power_plant
Batteries, in their current form, have all sorts of issues that haven't made them economically viable either. Liquid electrolytes (liquid batteries) do show promise for grid level storage, and I am pleased to see lots of activity around them but we are still probably 5-10 years away from anything worth scaling up around.
Hot water is fine for extreme micro uses - individual buildings - but again not even remotely viable for something at scale, let alone replacing base load generation for the grid.
Base load is the real nut to crack - and so far solar is no where near being anything but a nice supplement for base load.
I like nuclear. I have always liked nuclear. However: it's always sunny somewhere on Earth, and the total amount of solar energy delivered to us by nature's finest fusion reactor is something like 170TW.
If you will indulge me the geopolitical fantasy of putting a suitable planetary-scale transmission system in place, is there any particular reason we couldn't switch to all-solar?
>geopolitical fantasy of putting a suitable planetary-scale transmission system in place
That combined with geo-politics, war, big oil etc.
Besides the fact that you can't just "make" internet from a coal/petrol/etc generator somewhere nearby.
Imagine a ship's anchor damaging a cable carrying a couple megawatts of power (this happens frequently to the undersea fibre optic cables, and even those are a nightmare to repair).
Solar generation of power across countries will pretty much go one way. The most obvious and likely one is from North Africa to Europe. If the North African states decide to turn off the power to Europe they can. This is why geo-politically you cannot rely on this as a 100% solution. It can add to a solution, but it is not a good idea to let another country hang a sword over your head like that. (Or more precisely to hang the sword there yourself)
Indulging such imagination, which is valuable, one particular reason, as you probably realize, could be resource limits when it comes to actually scaling up solar generation and transmission facilities.
Plus, electrification of transportation, if beyond electrified rail, still calls for storage. Here's an analysis of material inputs, focussing on vehicle electrification:
https://www.minersoc.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/3ICM-Mic...
We could, maybe, import all that energy from solar farms in North Africa, but (a) that requires a willing counterparty, and (b) is that actually technically feasible? As in, sign here and pay, we build it for you.
It is, see the Desertec initiative.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec
It would be just a huge investment, which is why it did not get very far, so far.
Also there is indeed the political factor. North africa is not so stable, but of course willing for investment.
But even with solar in southern europe alone, you would get quite far, combined with wind and hydro. And if you have excess in summer, you could store that in various ways for the winter.
In other words, I believe we do need huge investments into the grid now, connecting europes south and north. And then companys can build more of all kinds of solar and wind farms.
The link you provided seems to just mention plans and studies, not building subsea electricity cables. Also says
> The project failed twice due to the problem of transportation and cost-inefficiency.
And if you have a european wide grid (high voltage, direct current) you would not need to store for months, because the sun is still shining in the south and wind is blowing somewhere. You only would need to store for the rare situations of little wind and little sun.
It will be a mix either way, I am not against nuclear as base load, or backup. But they are expensive, too.
Well then, when you have lots of solar and wind fields, then it doesn't matter too much, if one gets destroyed. But even those you can defend, even with your own troops, by making adequate contracts.
On the other hand, if you have to rely on nuclear - then a potentiell enemy only needs to target those and you are screwed in many ways. It would be not too hard, for a dedicated commando to blow up, or at least render useless, a nuclear reactor with enough preparation.
But when you are only thinking in military terms: the hard parts to defend with dessert power are the power cabels. But they are also an essential part of nuclear plants and you cannot defend the whole grid.
Your point about cabling is equally valid.
Your point about nuclear less so. I'm more comparing locally generated power, where your power generation can be covered by your own defences, with remotely generated power, which can't.
Making a deal with the moroccean government, would include their troops defending the investment, or could be modified to include own troops.
But like I also said above, the south of europe has plenty of sun, too.
Storage only for nights, is very managable.
Actual deaths from solar power are higher than actual deaths from nuclear energy, per GW delivered. Solar death is mostly from falling from high places, but so what? Death is death.
There's a conversation to have about the long tail but I'll probably start calling people cowards at some point so lets not.
Im not sure if conspiracy is the right word. The special interest groups bullshitting everyone are not necessarily coordinating. Is religion also a conspiracy?
Never mind.
I believe that I'd feel safer with nuclear if they paid for their own damn insurance and raised the liability cap to "unlimited" but apparently they dont feel its safe enough just yet to raise their financial exposure. What if fukushima happened again? Dealing with that was expensive!
Perhaps you could explain why they cant volunteer to shoulder their own risks if theyre so safe?
In SPITE of free insurance they still need lavish taxpayer subsidies to be financially viable while wind and solar dont.
...including a policy to pay the cost of decommissioning.
There isn't a production nuclear power plant in the world that has ever been fully decommissioned. The earliest production plants in the UK have been taken out of service, but decommissioning (so the land they were built on can be re-used) is expected to take the rest of this century.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
In Chernobyl around 50 people died as direct consequence of the disaster. As far as I know there's no studies showing increased risk of cancer in the population that lived in and around Chernobyl at the time. If Chernobyl showed us one thing it is that radiation is not as dangerous as we believed.
I think it's worth assuming some reduction in life expectancy for some people, but notably the estimates of lost years of life have dropped year by year, and will likely end up being negligible.
I've said it before: we could have a Chernobyl every year, and it'd still be worth it (reducing deaths) if it got us off coal sooner...
However, all that was completely drowned by a collapse of life expectancy resulting from the chaos of the 90s. We're horrified at a few tens of extra cancers, but 100M men losing 10-15 years of their life due to socio-economic circumstances doesn't raise anyone's eyebrow
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...
I am personally doubtful of your comments around deaths being more frequent. Statistics around the specific cause of death would also be appreciated.
This is not a serious argument. Large scale solar farms are hardly more than 6 feet off the ground and would essentially eliminate this risk. I expect the number of deaths and decrease in quality of life attributable to fossil fuels is far far higher to speak nothing of Climate risks in general.
Just how much would such infrastructure cost? How much resources would we have to mine to facilitate such a massive overhaul to a non-centralized grid?
I think when renewables are presented as the only answer it is underestimated how much it would cost in investment in storage and the grid, to a point that I feel nuclear is a fine solution for base-load.
I have no numbers though so I cannot back this up or anything.
As if the idea of getting all our energy from the Sun is an original thought.
How do we accomplish this?
"I don't know, I am just the idea man. You do all the engineering for my idea and we will split the profit 50/50!"
https://news.mit.edu/2011/energy-scale-part3-1026
You also are unlikely to have enough space and enough raw materials to construct solar panels that can provide the entire earth's energy needs all-day round, given the huge transmission losses.
Furthermore, solar panels have a very short life span - barely 10 years for a decent yield - which means that you would have to constantly mine hevay metals to build new solar panels at a rapid pace just to maintain this setup.
It's perhaps a possibility for a distant future, but definitely not something that can be contemplated as a serious solution to the 0-emissions world that we need to hit in the next 30 years.
Losses for 800kV HVDC systems are typically documented at ~3.5%/1000km or ~5%/2000km[0], and state-of-the-art 1.1MV systems have losses of ~1.5%/1000km[1][2]. Lower voltage systems have higher losses but I’m not sure why a lower-voltage system or AC system would be used in a project like this.
I can’t find any information about increased losses in submarine cables at all; where is that information from, and what is the mechanism that causes that added loss?
For solar panels, as far as I can tell, capacity loss occurs at a rate of ~0.3-1% per year depending upon the type of panel, with a median of 0.5%[3]. More modern panels have lower losses than older panels, presumably due to manufacturing improvements. So, after 10 years, you’re talking about something that will produce—on average—5% less power than it did when it was brand new. That’s not something that is broken and needs to be replaced the way you seem to be suggesting.
[0] https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29232512
[2] http://en.people.cn/n3/2018/0622/c90000-9474097.html
[3] https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/51664.pdf
At a much much lower cost.
Those wind shortfalls have a strong tendency to line up with good weather when solar produces more and heating is less needed.
The UK also has more pumped storage coming online and octopus even has home electricity tarriffs that promote time shifting demand.
There's a need for "base load". I hesitate to use that term because people get carried away with weird notions of it. If you slap a percentage on it, it's probably closer to 5% than to 50% of overall capacity if you look at it at a European level. We're talking a cloudy, wind free day across the entirety of the continent. A day would be tolerable. A few weeks highly unusual.
The thing is, that base load is much smaller than the current base load provided by nuclear + legacy fossil fuel plants. Germany has been shutting them down by the GW. Nuclear is nearly done. Coal is next unless they have to get out of Russian gas first. They're putting 200 billion into fixing their grid in the next few years. Something, tells me that they'll manage without blackouts. Blackouts have not been a problem so far when they grew renewables from next to nothing to the majority of their supply. Same for other countries across Europe.
A little bit of nuclear on the side will help. But it will mainly keep energy cost high because all that stuff has to be subsidized. Maybe these smaller reactors will reduce prices to be a bit less problematic. Otherwise, expect renewables to outgrow this stuff by orders of magnitude like it has for this exact reason. Add a few GW of nuclear over ten years or so. Add a few hundred GW of wind. Just wind. It might add up to 5%. That might be enough. I'm not against it. Just realistic about prices and amounts.
It also tends to line up with sunny weather when solar is pumping out energy. Today is very much one of those days. Solar is producing as much as nuclear in the UK right now for a fraction of the cost.
Every winter I see the same post about how little energy solar panels are producing today and why this means we need more nuclear plants.
Today the sun is out so it's all about how little the wind is blowing.
That's why interconnecting grids is so important. We can have Norwegian hydro and Moroccan solar picking up the slack. Plugin all those nice new EVs with vehicle to grid capability built in (Ford, Kia, and a few other manufacturers produce these already) and we're talking a few GWH of standby battery capacity ready to balance the grids as well.
That 5% base load is what we need to secure long term. But given that we essentially have that right now, there's no urgency for that. Maybe it's 10%.
Before anyone asks, I'm basing my numbers on what Michael Liebreich cited in his podcast a while back. Interesting person. He's a british conservative with a technical and economic background. Not your usually hippy environmentalist. Founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance; generally seems to be extremely solid on his numbers. The economics in this area are quite fascinating. If you have better numbers and sources, please share. Base load without numbers is just people waffling.
There's a lot of very shallow analysis out there though that cheerleads some approach with some very trivially refuted assumptions.
My sense is that the price of all of those things combined is currently about 90% of the cost of nuclear power official and about 60-75% of the cost of nuclear power that pays for its own disaster insurance.
While my own model is most assuredly flawed, I havent really seen a good alternative.
The low-wind periods last December had a peak of 1.2 GW solar.
Combined wind and solar right now are producing only very slightly more than a tech that has had zero real investment in thirty years. I wouldn't brag about that.
Unlike wind, solar and pumped storage.
Nevertheless, the >30-year old nukes still delivered what every single technology you have listed categorically failed to deliver. I have provided ample, repeated evidence of that. They failed and fossils came to the rescue. Repeatedly.
Why should they get even half the subsidy nukes get (which is what they do get), when their output is simply useless.
I've posted numbers. Please, you want to show me storage can be economically done, today, do so. Or admit you can't because it can't. We no longer have time for utopianism.
150 MW currently.
This is simply, provably false. They have delivered cheap and green electricity and weaned us off fossil fuels gradually.
Theyre growing very very fast because theyre economic and a good investment. Nuclear is not because it is not.
Throw $4 billion of subsidies at solar, wind and pumped storage and youll get more power when you need it than if you did the same for a nuclear power station.
I'm sorry we're just living in fantasy land now.
We're not weaned off fossils. Not even close. That's just a lie.
Currently it's much cheaper to just burn fossil fuels or import power from your neighbors than to build hydrolyzers, which is why you don't see many, but pilot facilities in the multiple-MW range exist, so the technology is available.
Just because a tech is available doesn't mean it's practical for every day use.
And as I said above, people _have_ implemented it already. There are dozens of MW of hydrolyzers installed in Germany alone.
From wikipedia's energy density page:
I don’t know if that’s still the case. At any rate, it’s a poor argument against it, as it will always be just one part of the broader energy picture, along with renewables, and (almost certainly) fossil fuels
There are designs with much higher burnup rates (how much fuel in a rod is actually used), as well as designs that do not need enrichment and will happily run on naturally occurring uranium mix - self-enriching as they work. There are designs that will take mixed in waste from other designs and further burn it down, reducing amount of high-level radioactive waste.
All of that is barely scratched in practice.
Breeders are a proven technology but just aren't very common yet due to the wide availability of high grade uranium ores.
https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...
Such a unit would be pretty close to impenetrable to any terrorist threat - there's no building to crash into, no structure or employees to attack. The literal attack surface is greatly reduced - and any operation to penetrate the unit would be large, highly visible, and take time.
This seems wild. Who is doing or proposing it?
That's a community in the US that can safely be estimated as 70% prior US Navy nuclear reactor techs and officers.
A model of deployment was that if you were setting up a town, you'd basically go dig a pit and lower one of these into it, pave over the top (or I suppose actually install some very heavy doors) and then build the town radially outwards from the reactor. The unit itself would be hermetically sealed - no employees, no systems to maintain. If it malfunctions or fails, then the idea is you drive out, pickup the container and drop a new one in.
The fact that in Ukraine, abysmal and abominal as the war is, no such events occured to date, actually gives me some hope that it's less likely than I thought.
You don't consider Russia attacking a nuclear power plant an example of this very thing? It was much closer to disaster than previously thought. You don't have to breach the containment vessel for things to go horribly wrong. There are a number of external critical systems that if destroyed, could result in a meltdown.
https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-nuclear-power-plant-russi...
More baseless fear of the invisible nuclear boogyman.
Kazakhstan + Russia + Uzbekistan + China = about 54% of the world production in 2018. [1] Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are both in Russia's sphere of influence, especially the former one which accounts for 40% of the world production.
On the other side, Canada is the number 2 producer (13%) and Australia is estimated to have more reserves than all of the above countries combined. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_p...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...
Basically I'd say there's a lack of evidence that proven reserves only exist in unstable states, but also the refueling cycle changes things dramatically - reactor fuel can be easily and compactly stockpiled, and happens on yearly cycles - much less subject to shifting local geopolitics.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/06/15/are-rare-earth-elements...
Worth shouting out that it is also sourced in former colonies that still have major dependencies on their old imperial masters. Niger/France have this relationship and Niger produces the majority of uranium used by the French nuclear industry.
Wind turbine generators often, but far from always, depend on rare-earth magnets. Batteries often (but far from always) depend on other rare, but not rare-earth, elements like cobalt.
The three most important rare earth elements are lanthanum, neodymium and praseodymium. The first two are about as "rare" as copper or nickel. Praseodymium is less abundant, about the rate of lithium or lead. Neodymium costs around $50 per kilo. About 3 kilos is necessary in an electric car. One container full of neodymium ingots is enough for 30,000 electric cars. It's not a geopolitical ace up the sleeve it's made out to be
Erbium is used in nanogram quantity in optical fibers to amplify signals purely optically. You shine a light on a fiber doped with it and the signal gets stronger.
Have you seen them play cricket?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor#Advantag...
so you wouldn't have to mine that much new uranium (or be that dependent on that)
We need solutions now, and we already have them in mass production: solar panels, wind power generation and battery storage.
This is the one thing I like about Tesla and SpaceX: they solve problems with today's tech.
When I imagined reusable spacecraft, I was dreaming about anti-gravity drives, which just furthered my believe of it being impossible. SpaceX did it on a kerosene rocket, same physics that the Saturn V used decades ago.
We don't need to wait for some Sci-Fi physics to solve this issue. We can go really far with we already have today.
I always hear that abstract argument but do we have the math right on this?
What would it take to provide enough power in the US with only those solutions (+ hydro and other non nuclear non fossil fuel solutions)?
Do we have an idea of the amount of material and pollution that would be generated by building (and then recycling) all those panels and batteries?
I would like to live in a world where we don't need nuclear but I am not convinced we can realistically do without (assuming the same standard of living).
A little more than the area of West Virginia [1] if you're only going for solar power using conventional panels.
[1] https://www.axionpower.com/knowledge/power-world-with-solar/
1) electric cars acting as buffers. Particularly rarely-used vehicles could earn some side money for being used in a smart grid.
2) battery storage like Tesla constructed in Australia
3) hydro pumped storage
In particular, base load could also be generated by permanent renewable energy (e.g. geothermal or running-water hydro power aka dams) to ease the requirement for energy storage.
Bidirectional V2G systems only exist as demonstration projects now, and we'll need a bunch of time to ramp that up. It requires a lot of EVs, lots of grid updates all over the place, and for people to willingly participate at a meaningful scale. This won't be cheap and the grid we have now can't handle it.
Not likely to be a widely useful storage mechanism except in very specific geography.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/
You just don't chuck out a field of solar panels and ignore them.
Modern reactor designs - you do basically ignore them once they are initially set up.
Look at Canada, their program is advancing reactors. They are targeting before 2030.
if governemnt actually cared and invested the way they did in renwables these reactors would exist already.
The tech was proven in the 60/70, its just investment that is needed. But reactor companies have a really hard time with that.
I thought uranium is used in reactors because it also produces A-bomb material as a by-product.
Plutonium, Thorium and a few others yes
> I thought uranium is used in reactors because it also produces A-bomb material as a by-product.
It doesn't and it's used mostly because it was easiest to work with and best researched when the majority oft reactors Werke build
Thorium was actually more of military-only solution than Uranium->Plutonium chain, as unlike Uranium it doesn't have obvious "easy" energy use path, but early on it was researched as mix of uranium and thorium fuels due to uranium availability concerns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...
The only real advantage of Thorium is that you can use it in a thermal breeder. If you are not building a thermal breeder using thorim is mostly pointless.
The thing holding us back from having thorium reactors seems to be how expensive nuclear reactor research is and how unpopular nuclear reactors are.
Not holding my breath....
This kind of reactor is called a Breeder reactor [1], for example the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reacto...
This keeps coming up, but far as I can tell spent fuel disposal is not, and has never been a substantial issue. It's above all an engineering and administrative challenge and is safe when done properly. Also, spent fuel can be reused, and as technology improves, we'll be able to reuse more and more of it.
Accidents have happened where disposal was improper, but that's rare and consequences are not dire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Accidents
Radioctivity accidents can at most make places uninhabitable, but they won't contribute to the greenhouse effect (which might ultimately lead to a major socioeconomic collapse), or cause petrol-oligarchies (which have led, and will lead to war, and might lead to a thermonuclear war too). In my eyes, burning mineral fuels is much, much worse than risking radioactivity accidents.
Trivia: in Italy there was a lot of illegal dumping going on during 1980s and 1990s, they even secretely transported nuclear waste to Somalia for illegal burying and have sunk a number of ships carrying nuclear waste (for the purpose of disposal). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_waste_dumping_by_the_%27...
(The undesirable for weapons Pu240 isotope has a half life of about 6,000 years in contrast to the 24,000 year half life of the desirable Pu239 isotope.)
Now I don’t think the Scientologists will be around that long.
The problem with spent fuel isn't the need to bury it. The problem is politics and myopia (on rampant display in this thread!) are winning the day instead of logic and reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
https://www.science.org/content/article/finland-built-tomb-s...
"Here's a nice loaf of bread. Let's bury it in a mountain!"
Utter madness.
So the solution is obvious: extract it domestically or buy from friendly countries.
As for safety, nuclear power production is probably one of the safest industries that exist since we are so acutely aware of the consequences. Waste storage is only a hot button issue because of trumped up fears. Compared to the variety of toxins we release into the air, the amount of nuclear waste produced is tiny and easy to contain. I'd rather all of the life threatening by products of power production be safely buried under a mountain hundreds of miles away from anyone than just dumped into the atmosphere all around the globe.
Every country has plenty of Thorium.
And even so you can stockpile these fuels for years in advance.
Both are incidentally also the worlds largest reserves of Thorium. And has no military use.
An accelerated nuclear power research could end up being the next "COVID vaccine marathon". Cleaner air for everyone.
Im fact US, China, Russia, etc have all a thorium reactor in some stage of late stage development.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
The most important is to get a molten salt cooled or molten salt fueled reactor licensed.
The problem with all these projects is that they are either government driven and then the resources are very devised and 99% of the time it will not be commercial. Or its semi commercial and then those companies have huge issues with financing.
The closest thing to a molten salt reactor that might actually be commercial (with an actual operational license) in the Western world will almost certainty come from Canada. Canada after their Candu project was sold commercially looked for a next generation project.
They have a very well respected regulator that is fully committed to actually supporting next generation designs and have implemented a process that actually makes it practically possible to get to a real commercial reactor.
See: https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-li...
Terrestrial Energy is the closest in actually passing Phase 2. They hope to complete it this year.
India and China dont have access to Uranium reserves - today or for projected growth in 20 years.
You are right that from a Western perspective - a uranium fast breeder reactor is probably better.
But I'm hoping the general interest and investment in the space will help Thorium as well as a side effect.
However what I was responding to is more the perception that Uranium was used due to being usable for bombs, when the reality is that Pu-239 (from Uranium) cycle "won" over U-233 (from Thorium) mostly for reasons of it being easier to start the reaction. Normal Uranium reactor tends to produce too much Pu-240 which is undesirable in weapons, so special modified designs and operations had to be introduced all the way back in Manhattan Project.
So it made sense to make the first fission reactors like that.
The big mistake of the nuclear age, in my opinion was the adoption of water cooled reactors for civilian nuclear power. They simply make no sense. It makes sense for the Navy, and the navy had the money to develop them.
Once that was done the technology was just scaled to a crazy degree for commercial, scale was needed to make it commercial, but result in plants so big that the total number of plants was gone be really small.
They could have developed a molten salt cooled reactor as an alternative. You wouldn't even need to go to a fully molten salt fueled reactor.
Example: https://kairospower.com/technology/
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/ebf301/node/457
We need to replace natural gas with nuke plants. Fossil fuel extraction is the worlds largest source of nuclear waste, not nuclear energy. No one worries about the tons of radon released from fracking. They call it "natural". https://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-04-14/fracking-incre...
I'm all for renewable - don't stop it. But there are many places in the world where a nuke plant would be the right choice. It would be great if we got this amount of resistance to new hydrocarbon vehicles or plants.
Nuclear is great to replace coal, but you still need the same amount of e.g. storage to complement changing net load and production (renewables).
(This would not be so significant a problem if the capital costs weren't so high)
Another possibility, for any sort of high-temperature reactor, is to use molten salt as energy storage. Heat the storage salt directly from the reactor, and put the turbine after that, so you don't have conversion losses before storage. Terrapower is working on this with their Natrium project.
On the PV side, batteries are not known for being especially cheap. Lazard puts the wholesale cost of PV plus four hours storage at 8 to 14 cents/kWh, as of 2020: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
And four hours storage is just what you need to shift peak daytime sun to peak evening demand. You need more to get through a windless night. To cover reduced supply on cloudy winter days you need some combination of overcapacity and long-duration storage, which typically involves some kind of turbine.
Nobody is making these commercially and the SMR companies out there are making standard pressurized water reactors afaik.
Which is probably why nuclear continues to be demonized. Follow the money...
Harping on Solara only calls attention to nukes' overwhelmingly worse performance. Nukes are "demonized" because they cost overwhelming more than alternatives.
Lftrs have been hyped since like 2010 and I don't think any new molten salt reactor has made any net power on the grid since then. From what I could tell of the companies you listed not a single one even has a demo reactor and the earliest ones are slated for years from now.
None of these projects are LFTRs. They're generally uranium-fueled, which retains the safety and cost advantages of MSRs without the radioactive chemical engineering of LFTRs.
Terrestrial Energy, to take one example, has been doing well with regulators in Canada, and plans to operate a 390MW plant in 2028: https://www.powermag.com/terrestrial-energy-launches-390-mw-...
So yes, years away, but not that many years.
Renewable energy has the same need.
BTW, when I was a teenager I got to go deep inside of a mountain to tour a pumped storage facility built to pair with some early 1970s nuclear power plants. The nuclear plants are long-decommissioned, but the pumped storage is happily running with renewables.
[0] It’s not that simple, but dump loads exist, as do mechanisms to intentionally waste power inside a plant without producing electricity. For example: https://www.thermal-engineering.org/what-is-turbine-bypass-s...
[0] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/eme801/node/530
Just run wind turbines backwards, easy!
It's not a good idea for nuclear, because even nuclear that runs all the time can't compete on cost with renewables and any deviation from that schedule destroys the economics conpletely.
A small amount that runs all the time is probably a good idea in places far from the equator, but even then the plummeting costs of renewables opens a few other doors, like shipping green hydrogen around.
That's not demand response. That's failure.
Machines to synthesize H2 and NH3 could be ramped up and down, but in practice will run 24/7 except when price peaks and stockpiles are burned for power instead.
Using natural gas is non-viable. It funds war as has been fairly obvious lately, and it puts a dependence between those that has the natural resource and those that don't. The climate can also not continue to take the continuous damage that burning/leaking natural gas causes.
The choices that we have is either nuclear, renewables, and batteries. The natural gas plants need to be replaced and so one can either choose nuclear, renewables or batteries.
The reason they usually don't is because fuel is such a small portion of the cost of operating a nuclear plant. It's comparatively more efficient to run nuclear at 100% and idle fossil plants. But nuclear can absolutely load follow if there's a reason to, such as load sharing with renewables.
You will find further information on this web site: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant
Anyway there will be no need to load follow, because load producing H2 and NH3, and pumping hydro and compressed air, can follow price, instead.
If they actually wanted nuclear and believed it was better then they'd be in broad agreement with renewables people.
Agreeing timetables to phase out fossil fuels? Check.
Removing fossil subsidies? Check.
Carbon fees? Check.
Pricing in pollution? Check.
Electrifying transport, heating, industry? Check.
Demand response? Check.
Battery storage for short term time shifting? Check.
Efficiency and insulation? Check.
Green hydrogen? Check.
All these things are being done by renewable groups and they are the biggest thing helping keep nuclear plants running.
Does anyone pushing nuclear on HN ever mention any of those things?
Do they mention how renewables don't work, cost too much, it's all the Environmentalists fault, how amazing fossil fuels are?
Yes, they can't see to help themselves for some reason even though it makes their argument for nuclear totally transparent.
Your response would be hilarious if it wasn't so utterly tragic. Our civilization exists because of cheap, abundant energy - and there is no more cheap or abundant or RENEWABLE energy (ever hear of breeder reactors? Might want to do some reading) then nuclear - if we can ever separate the politics and emotion from this "debate".
Therefore, if it consumes a finite resource, I would say it isn't renewable.
It's not the only substance that can be used in a reactor either - China is racing ahead with Thorium reactors; based on technology that was mature in the US in the 50's but not deployed for purely political reasons.
More importantly it differs from other renewables in its lead-up time. Nuclear plants can take decades to build. There is hope that small modular reactors can fix that problem, but it's not proven yet. And there is the risk of conflict with renewables which are ready right now: "Don't build solar/wind/etc but instead wait indefinitely for this other technology which may not work."
I would welcome successful deployments of SMRs. But I don't expect them soon, and today there remains a lot of opportunities to deploy wind and solar at costs that continue to improve in economies of scale. If SMRs join them as a supplement to reduce greenhouse gases, so much the better, but for the foreseeable future they are not a sole solution.
Renewables are much less cost-effective if you take into account the energy storage needed to make them work. And even then they're ineffective because you essentially need 100% backup capacity for an indefinite period of time for when the wind doesn't blow or the sun is obscured by clouds. Current energy storage systems can only provide enough power for two days at the most.
We're being led like Lemmings into the ravine by these environmentalists. It's time we scientists and engineers took charge.
In addition, as renewable energy gets cheaper, extracting carbon from the atmosphere to fix in solid form gets cheaper than mining it, so excess atmospheric carbon dioxide can be drawn down. (That, besides extracting carbon to volatiles to be burned and re-emitted.)
The deep ocean has capacity to safely sequester excess carbon already in the atmosphere. It may be moved there cheaply.
Sheesh.
In any case there is still a finite amount of it, is not uniformly distributed in the planet, most of them in Australia and nuclear converts it into other elements (if I'm not wrong you can't take the opposite path yet), so is not a renewable resource by definition.
Extracting from seawater, were it cheaper, would surely have been done. Nukes are already way more expensive than renewables; adding on more cost will not make them more attractive.
I mean it's really not hard to say something positive about nuclear without attacking renewables, or environmentalists or various other basically unrelated issues. But you wouldn't think so from most HN discussions. Feel free to survey the comments here as an example.
No, it should compete with both on market terms. If a nuclear plant is built instead of a hydroelectric plant, a wind farm or a gas-fired plant, I’ll be able to sleep just as easily about it so long as it wasn’t built for political reasons.
California presently has a flat prohibition on new nuclear construction. I would rather keep my dollars for my own utility bill, unless Nevada would like to play host to a nuclear plant built to serve the Bay Area.
So plants and energy transmission lines and such are going to be built, especially as more battery-electric vehicles become available in more model lines and at more varied price points for people to buy. If I had a personal preference, I would prefer that electricity to be coming from nuclear and solar plants, but I’m not willing to condemn the poor to raise prices and make those the only options. What gets built will be what makes sense according to the knowledge and expertise of people who build plants, i.e. what is economical in the context of the market which is just trillions of accumulative transactions happening across society made by people; and we’ll make decisions about where to import/export energy from in geopolitical and military contexts where those decisions rightfully belong which can and does inform markets.
The harder we make it to build nuclear though, the less likely nuclear will be chosen. In California for example there is a flat prohibition on new construction, so we’re going to keep building gas-fired plants alongside whatever renewables because that is what we have chosen to do, until we make a different choice.
* Nuclear is expensive
* Nuclear is unpopular locally (aka nimbys veto it)
* Nuclear waste needs to be dealt with properly.
Making reactors smaller doesn't seem to fix any of these does it? Are people willing to accept a 100MW reactor but not a 1000MW reactor next to their kids schools? Is it cheaper to build and run 10 100MW reactors than a single 1000MW one?
I doubt it...
Nuclear is expensive the way we do it now.
Nuclear is unpopular because there have been concentrated efforts to vilify it by corporations
Nuclear waste is not an issue that any nuclear scientist or physicist considers worth debating
If you were able to separate out politics and emotion from the nuclear "debate" there wouldn't be a debate. It would be a slam dunk no brainer decision.
Luckily for China their despotic internal rule doesn't have to suffer fools for stuff like this. They are charging ahead with Thorium and god help the rest of the world if they crack it at scale. Then people will see just how critical a role energy is to the success of a civilization. All of our ridiculous and continued postering around energy while not really doing anything significant (and all the resources wasted on many renewables that are anything but) is going to bite the west in the ASS big time. Rome is burning and we are fiddling.
Well, it's that same thing the US did with 5G. When Europe, Australia and most of the world was ready to build their 5G infrastructure, the U.S. cooked up some lies about some subsidiary of Huawei having some business deal with some company related to North Korea and sanctioned Huawei.
How long until the world says enough is enough?
China's control of other countries communications infrastructure is a global concern as their footprint has expanded through commercial enterprise to match the US military footprint. You don't have to like the US, but unless you're Han Chinese, that isn't a good system for you.
Except globally everybody wanted to use Huawei, until the US cooked up the lie and threatened everyone against it. Australia had a soft regime change because of this issue. You're fooling nobody.
Is this a joke? How much is KGB paying you lmao.
> a complete non option for most of the world right?
India and China are perfectly happy to... and parts of middle east and some of Africa. That's almost half of the world population. What is "most of the world" to you?
You still hear people compare nuclear costs to coal because coal was competitive in the 1970s. They quit building coal plants at the same time they quit building nuclear plants, for the same reason —- gas turbine generators based on airplane engines have a capital cost about 10% of the steam turbines used for coal and nuclear.
Even if the heat were free and you could burn coal without asking “what do you do with the waste?” you would struggle to be profitable with either coal or nuclear…. Unless you could couple these energy sources to a gas turbine. In the case of coal you need to gasify it (say make hydrogen out of it and pump the carbon underground) in the case of nuclear you need a new reactor type that runs at higher temperatures (liquid metal, molten salt, gas cooled) and a breakthrough in closed-cycle power sets. If it succeeded though you could fit the power plant in the employee break room at the turbine house of today’s LWR.
Do you have a source for this? Most gas power plants today are combined-cycle [0], meaning they first put the hot combustion gas through a gas turbine as you said and _then_ they use the waste heat to drive a steam turbine as well. This design is responsible for the significant efficiency advantage natural gas generation has over coal. So it doesn't make sense to claim that gas power plants are cheaper due to the turbine technology because most built today use both gas and steam turbines.
[0] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=34172
The economics of the pure gas turbine vs the combined cycle depends on the fraction of the time it spends running.
For a peaking plant you are only going to run it a fraction of the time so you care about the capital cost and not about the fuel cost... So you're going to use the cheaper to build but more expensive to operate pure gas turbine.
If you are running the plant all day then the economics are favorable to go combined cycle where you start with a gas turbine, recover heat from the exhaust, and feed that through a steam turbine. The capital cost is more than the peaking plant, less than the steam turbine on it's own, but the fuel efficiency is great which leads to lower operating costs. (e.g. the steam turbine in a combined cycle plant is much smaller than a stand-alone steam turbine with the same energy output as the whole plant)
In the case of nuclear it is worse though because you do absurd things: a PWR has "steam generators" which are huge heat exchangers, larger than the pressure vessel, that use hot water at high pressure to boil water at low pressure. For liquid metal reactors the heat exchangers are even larger
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIkYOFxcqRg
Contrast that to the heat recovery units used in the combined cycle turbine that couple hot gases to water or the sodium-to-air heat exchangers that rejected heat from the fast flux test facility. In terms of size these are like a bug splatter on the plans for a PWR.
This happens because you're forgetting an important factor: coal is much more available in many regions than gas.
But I agree, we will want to have CO2 braydon cycle eventually.
China is burning more than three billion tons of coal per year. Now. Replacing coal is not some issue for the 70’s. It’s a huge issue now.
For decarbonising rapidly we should currently be building lots of ABWR and APR-1400 and Hualong One reactors (big, modern, proven).
My take on economics of nuclear is here https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html
I think there's some value in that right? Proving designs, rebuilding public trust, and building up all of the economic infrastructure again will be really useful for scaling up.
I'm definitely going to read your article, seems fascinating from the intro.
This +10 (if I could).
Consider orbital-class rockets - another very advanced technology, and far less forgiving than nuclear power reactors. How much does it cost to launch (say) 10 tons of satellite on a rocket from plucky upstart SpaceX? Vs. how much did it cost back when only a few bloated "cost plus plus" mega-corporations were providing orbital rockets?
I think those kinds of reactors are just much smaller then your PWRs but its not exactly SMRs.
We should focus on GenIV designs.
However I would not be opposed to bulding traditional designs but it must be proven and have people who have done it before available.
but it went sideways, and their recent projects had huge problems and overruns, and westinghouse ended up going bankrupt a few years ago..
The reason nuclear reactors are so expensive is that each one is more or less a bespoke build, with regulators changing the rules constantly, sometimes during construction. There's no reason for nuclear reactors to be more expensive than a similar non-nuclear plant.
No reason other than politics and stupidity (over regulation, emotional fear mongering, ignorant baseless assumptions, etc.)
And you need to actually hit way higher production numbers to truely hit economics of scale.
Making 5 1.4GWe plants or making 24 300MWe doesnt garantee that it is much cheaper.
Spezially if the 300MWe is a reactor of the same type. 300MWe PWRs will not be a huge benefit.
Comparing a 500MWe (or even 1GWe) Molten Salt fueled reactor (or even Molten Salt cooled) will compare much better then any PWR, modular or not.
You don't need economies of scale to make SMR's profitable. They already are from the get go.
It might be a little better, but we have to break free of water cooled reactor. It makes simply no sense as a design point. The only reason we have it is because it made sense for nuclear submarines.
Going from producing 1 of something to 4 of something, the benefits are not actually that large.
There is a far, far bigger effect going from PWR to a Molten Salt because that results in a factor 10 or more in difference in size of plant for the same output.
To my understanding, they seem to be pretty responsive in demand fluctuations and pretty cheap with minor environmental impact.
If there is sufficient continuous flow down the river, and a goodly elevation drop you can use to build head pressure, you can indeed tap a small canal off, pass the flow through some turbines, and feed it right back in to the river.
I think it is a matter of scale, water flow, and NIMBY-ism. While such stations to generate power, individually its not a whole hell of a lot, and who wants their river-front view besmirched by penstocks and a concrete blockhouse of a turbine building?
Or in other words, economic viability :)
I will say, if I had property with a little creek running year round on it, I'd be hard pressed not to install a waterwheel to get a little something out of it.
Edit: s/40/20/g to fix wrong numbers.
- If 'most all of the expensive parts are shipped in from the factory, very late in the construction process - then there's far less construction debt to float (vs. traditional reactors), while years of regulatory, NIMBY, etc. legal crap drags out.
- If your modest-sized country (think of Europe) has a bunch of SMR's...that's a sort of "our lights will not go out" energy security which recent events has made far more attractive. Gas pipeline from now-untouchable Russia? Natural gas wells in Texas that stopped working in cold weather? Massive spikes in wholesale energy prices? Solar or hydro-stored power from a country that "seemed stable and friendly when we cut the deal"? Calm & cloudy winter days, that you didn't spend enough $$$$ on storage to get through? SMR's sound like an insurance policy against a whole lot of nasty surprises.
"War, climate worries and oil prices make nuclear power attractive"
should be:
"War, climate worries and oil prices make ALTERNATIVE ENERGY attractive"
The economics of alternative energy + storage is basically a victory in LCOE terms, and the cost / technology curve of solar and storage and the economies of scale are still in ramp-up. So this will go from a "close narrow victory" to a landslide in five years.
What nuclear project will be under ten years to delivery? What is the LCOE price point they are contending with to be marketplace competitive? No one knows this, but I would shoot for 1/3 the current nuclear LCOE at a minimum, probably 1/4.
Again, I geeked out over LFTR presentations. Modular, safe, 99% fuel use/no solid rod waste, online products extaction, no long-term isotopes, "burn/breed" existing long-term waste into usable fuel, brayton cycle.
It doesn't matter, economics are a clear win for alternative energy from a 10 year standpoint. Nuclear and Fusion should simply be research projects at this point.
If energy security is the goal, then all-in on alternative energy and EV transportation is the goal. I'm not saying tear down existing generation. Just phase it out as soon as possible
Then there's "we make it as big as we can but all the parts have to be transportable by road/rail so we can build it in a factory". That's Rolls-Royce. They're kind of hand-wavy about containment in their PR.
There's a lot to be said for big, strong containment vessels.
- Chernobyl - fire, containment insufficient, major disaster
- Fukushima - meltdown, containment too small, major disaster
- Three Mile Island - meltdown, big, strong containment, problem contained.