"Nuclear power can play a major role in enabling secure transitions to low emissions energy systems"
Title is contained in the article under the following paragraph
> “However, a new era for nuclear power is by no means guaranteed. It will depend on governments putting in place robust policies to ensure safe and sustainable operation of nuclear plants for years to come – and to mobilise the necessary investments including in new technologies. And the nuclear industry must quickly address the issues of cost overruns and project delays that have bedevilled the construction of new plants in advanced economies. As a result, advanced economies have lost market leadership, as 27 out of 31 reactors that started construction since 2017 are Russian or Chinese designs.”
>will depend on governments putting in place robust policies to ensure safe and sustainable operation of nuclear plants for years to come – and to mobilise the necessary investments including in new technologies
So, basically it's fine and it works but it's only economically sustainable if you unload the a dumptruck full of taxpayer cash on the industry.
These would be subsidies that solar, wind and pumped storage could definitely use to boost capacity/production but not cash that they need just to exist.
"Nuclear power can play a major role in enabling secure transitions to low emissions energy systems"
No it can't, it has fundamentally lost the LCOE war with Solar and Wind, and those are still improving in cost.
The steady drumbeat of "please save the fundamentally uncompetitive nuclear industry" is getting annoying.
This is an industry that, probably due to its regulation, is used to lobbying and astroturfing to try to sustain political relevance.
But it has no economic relevance.
China is getting an MSR/LFTR power planet up soon. That will be fascinating to watch, but just doesn't work in free markets. And you can't even legally research them in the US. I would recommend research and development around next gen nuclear, but all the regulations in the US are so poisoned we'd never accomplish anything radical that would be needed to make nuclear competitive.
Every single nuke put into commercial operation, since the first, has depended for continued viability on coercion, either by direct taxpayer-funded handouts or by overcharging ratepayers in captive markets, usually both. There is no reasonable prospect for improvement.
Nukes were always the most expensive choice, and are less competitive now than ever before.
I can only assume you are heavily invested in natural gas. The Diablo Canyon plant in CA has a cost basis around 10c per kWh, which covers all expenses including reactor construction, fueling, waste disposal, maintenance, operation, and decommissioning.
And indemnification? No, that is picked by taxpayers. And, steam turbine maintenance? Doubting. I know that they are not paying into a disposal fund anymore, and are instead actually getting massive payouts, a product of a dodgy lawsuit.
(Court decided the feds had no actual plans for disposal, and therefore the money for that was collected fraudulently and had to be given back: NOT to ratepayers, of course, but to operators of still-running plants.)
Comparing levelized cost of energy between intermittent and non intermittent sources is comparing apples to oranges. The reality is that until some fantastic storage system comes along that makes storage effectively free, intermittent sources cannot provide a path to decarbonization.
We do not need a "fantastic" storage system. Ordinary dirt-cheap storage will do fine. Batteries are the most expensive alternative.
Of course it would be stupid to build out storage until after there is enough renewable generating capacity to charge it from. In the meantime, money is overwhelmingly better spent pushing toward that goal.
When the time is right to build out storage, it will be very cheap, as storage cost is falling faster than solar ever did.
And what system will provide this "ordinary dirt-cheap storage"? It'd be helpful to actually specify what you're proposing.
Furthermore, some energy markets have seen saturation during peak production hours of intermittent sources for years now. But this unspecified dirt-cheap energy storage isn't being built to capture and resell this energy.
This "ordinary dirt-cheap storage" is precisely the fantastic storage system I'm referring to. Plans for a primarily renewable grid assume that some breakthrough is going to happen in order to make storage dirt-cheap.
Or, maybe they are not stupid, and recognize the excess is because the gas plants cannot be shut down and restarted fast enough, and there is not actually enough renewable capacity yet to charge anything much.
Until there is a lot more such generating capacity, it would be stupid to divert capital from building that out to building only minimally useful storage.
Gas turbines can be rapidly activated and deactivated, they are not the cause of excess production.
Again, what is this "ordinary dirt-cheap storage" technology? Sure, you say it's not going to be built until there's an even bigger energy surplus. But at least just specify what technology is going to provide this dirt cheap storage. Because I'd really want to know. All of the alternatives I know of like compressed air, hydrogen storage, ammonia storage, all have significant drawbacks impeding cost effective deployments.
I always wondered if some sort of "closed loop fuel" model was viable.
The appeal of conventional fossil fuels are high energy density and well established tech to convert it back to useful energy.
What if we had a station with some tens of thousands of litres of petrol sitting around. When the grid is strained, we burn the fuel, but in a generator carefully engineered to capture all waste. When renewables exceed demand, we use the available cheap energy to distill the waste back into burnable petrol.
Now, obviously "petrol" and "generator" can be replaced with other options to optimize performance or economic viability (maybe it's hydrogen and a fuel-cell rather than petrol and a generator, but I'm not sure if those are actually working at scale or just trotted out by Toyota to distract from them being late to the EV party)
It probably wouldn't be hugely efficient (the distilling would consume more energy than burning ever generated, after all), but it could be a way to handle "I'll pay you tomorrow for a hamburger today" with more flexibility on siting than, say, pumped hydro.
I suppose the big question is how tight the closed-loop can be. It's not a winner if you end up losing 1% of your fuel stash on every daily cycle.
Essentially you're proposing capturing the CO2 emitted by fossil fuel heat engines and converting it back to hydrocarbons using the Sabatier process. There's several barriers to this:
1. Capturing the carbon emissions. The exhaust if a gas turbine is a high temperature mix of air and C02. Separating out the CO2 requires either cooling it or a chemical process to capture the carbon dioxide. Both of these processes are every energy intensive.
2. The Sabatier process needs a source of hydrogen. Typically this is done through steam reformation, but that emits CO2. Electrolysis or thermochemical water splitting needs to be done instead, and these are both energy intensive and expensive to do.
3. The Sabatier process itself also requires energy, as it's putting the carbon in a higher energy state.
It'd probably be easier to just use the hydrogen in step 2, but that's still a difficult undertaking that nobody has done cost effectively as of now.
You're making bad future assumptions about wind/solar.
What is impressive to me is that wind/solar are now beating the best LCOE "old power" scheme (gas turbine)... and they are not done dropping in cost. There are a variety of future economies of scale and advancements yet to come that will drop them even lower.
When they drop low enough and batteries get cheap enough, then yes, effectively batteries are "free" because battery+alt energy is cheaper than any other dirty alternative.
I would guess in 5-6 years we'll have a convergence of ultracheap wind+solar and good-enough sodium ion batteries that no existing nuke design or fossil fuel can beat.
There's nowhere near sufficient battery supply to make intermittent sources viable. Annual battery output amounts to less than 15 minutes of global electricity consumption, and an even smaller fraction of total energy consumption. Inputs to batter manufacturing like lithium have sixfold since 2000: https://www.metalary.com/lithium-price/
I just found out the US DoE fronted $1.4B of taxpayers' money to some utility to turn around and hand over to NuScale.
China will mothball its nukes as their power gets undercut by renewables. We have great difficulty mothballing expensive stuff, so instead continue operating them at a net loss for years, making ratepayers or taxpayers pony up the difference.
Chinese are quite aware of cost disparities, and abandon what is not performing. They do tend to overbuild. They have scheduled a great deal of renewables, but those will not be enough to displace everything else for some time.
The fundamental problems with nuclear can't be solved by redesigning them. They are waste management (a political problem), cost, risk (a societal problem). You cant design any of those away. We tried. We failed.
Not noticeably. All those things, were they amenable to improvement, could have been done decades past. They were not done, or not enough. Spending more on nukes now is throwing good money after bad, the classic sunk-cost delusion.
Those improvements have been done, decades ago and now. They’re called Generation III / III+ and Generation IV reactors. How are such improvements not enough?
From the article: "relatively few third generation reactors have been built" and "Gen IV reactors ... are concepts for which no concrete prognoses for realization exist".
France likes their nukes so well they have no plans to replace them as they age out.
Germany is emitting much less CO2 than before they shut down their nukes. They elected to spend what it would have cost, to keep them working, instead on wind turbines. This has yielded much more generation than the refurbished nukes would eventually have offered, but immediately.
Germany is actively building out more renewable generating capacity to displace more carbon emissions, but there is a very large amount of work to be done. Building nukes instead would take much longer and yield much less.
Germany's CO2 emissions are on an upward trend now that there reactivating coal plants to get off of Russian gas. Furthermore, the decision to shut down nuclear plants resulted in greater emissions that what would have occurred had they kept them active.
Of course they will be cancelled when it turns out no one will buy their power at a price they can offer.
Germany is burning more coal than last year and less NG, which drove up CO2. That says nothing about what they would be emitting with the nukes and without the wind farms. But we already know that answer.
> Germany is burning more coal than last year and less NG, which drove up CO2. That says nothing about what they would be emitting with the nukes and without the wind farms. But we already know that answer.
It absolutely says what they would do: add the nuclear power that was eliminated and subtract the coal. Remember, they didn't need to build new nuclear plants they just needed to not shut down their existing ones.
Because each dollar spent building a nuke is a dollar not invested building renewables that would displace much more fossil fuel, immediately instead of ten years on maybe.
Coal producers lately love nukes because they mean at least ten more years of reliable sales, more if it is cancelled. They know they are doomed, but with enough nuke projects can hang on long enough to retire. If civilization collapses, it probably won't be immediately, and that is good enough for them.
We don't have storage because we have not built out storage. Just now, a dollar is much better invested in renewable generating capacity, so we build that. When storage comes to have value, we will build out storage. After storage, carbon capture, but not before, same reason.
Good. Lets kill the $200 million liability cap then.
If it's not a real problem they should have no issue paying for their own insurance.
Once the tech has plunged in price to solar/wind/pumped storage levels and the industry feels confident enough in its own safety that it doesnt need taxpayers to shoulder potential catastrophe costs we should absolutely build tons of nuclear power.
200 million liability cap? Nuclear plants are required to have a minimum of $375 million dollars of insurance per reactor [1]. So I'm not sure where that figure of $200 million comes from.
Nuclear is cheaper than solar, wind and pumped storage. There's a limited number of economically viable pumped storage sites. You essential need an alpine lake close to a freeway to build one economically. Otherwise you're talking about pouring massive amounts of concrete to build a big tub, which is an expensive project. The reality is that dams are the only effective means of energy storage. Lake Meade is one the biggest batteries in the world. Intermittent sources are viable for regions close to hydroelectric plants, but for everywhere else nuclear power is the only feasible route to decarbonization.
"Minimum" meaning maximum. Taxpayers are obliged to pick up the difference.
There are not, in fact, a limited number of pumped storage sites, and you do not, in fact, need any alpine lakes. Dikes are not commonly made of concrete.
And, there are numerous other cheap alternative storage media, for places without hills.
But first we need to build out enough renewable generating capacity to charge it from. It would be stupid to pour capital into storage that cannot be charged, particularly as prices are falling so fast that building will be radically cheaper when we come to need it.
> There are not, in fact, a limited number of pumped storage sites, and you do not, in fact, need any alpine lakes. Dikes are not commonly made of concrete.
There are a limited number of economically viable pumped storage sites. You can find papers claiming an effectively limitless amount of hydroelectric storage. The problem is that most of these places either already use dams for most of their energy production and thus don't need to build any storage. Or, they are in extremely remote areas where construction is prohibitively expensive. There's huge hydroelectric potential in Tibet. But that's incredibly remote and prohibitively expensive to develop.
> And, there are numerous other cheap alternative storage media, for places without hills.
99% of the waste is eliminated by reprocessing it via breeder reactors. What's left has a half life in the hundreds of years instead of billions.
Reprocessing also increases the extractable energy density of uranium 100 fold, meaning that with only known uranium reserves, humanity could meet 100% of its current energy needs from fission for 38,000 years.
It would suffice not to build any more of them. Then it would be 100%, with somebody else still wasting money on those ramshackle overpriced contraptions.
What we desperately need to fend off looming climate catastrophe is for every dollar spent on energy to displace the largest possible amount of carbon emissions. We get several times as much such displacement by spending that dollar on renewables. And, we get that displacement immediately, not ten or more years on, after spending as much more on coal in that time as would pay the entire capital cost of the renewables.
And, we do not then spend a great deal more on servicing that equipment every year, but can instead use that to build out more carbon emissions displacing equipment.
Starting a new nuke brings climate catastrophe nearer.
The nuclear fission landscape in the US is actually pretty exciting.
The leader is of course NuScale, which already obtained the NRC approval for their proposed reactor design. Their technology is the classical pressurized water reactor, but in a Small Modular Reactor (SMR) form factor of about 78 MW per module. Their first contract is for a 6-module power plant. The envisioned technological advantage is simply the fact that manufacturing many small reactors on an assembly line is going to be much cheaper than manufacturing large ones on site. They claim a $45-60 / MWh Levelized Cost of Energy, which is really competitive. Even if they are off by a factor of 2, it's still going to be competitive.
Next ones can be found at the link [1] provided by the Department of Energy. Here's my summary:
1. Sodium-cooled fast reactor (by Terrapower). Currently the Russians operate the largest sodium cooled reactors, the BN-600 and BN-800 [2], which, as the name implies provide 600 and 800 MW of electricity for a total of 1.4 GW. The main advantage of sodium-cooled reactors is that their fission reaction uses fast neutrons rather than slow (or thermal) neutrons. With fast neutrons the nuclear waste is reduced by orders of magnitude, while at the same time the fraction of U235 that undergoes fission increases, for a significant increase of overall efficiency. The negative is that sodium may burn, but sodium burning in air is not the violent, compared with sodium burning (or rather exploding) in water.
2. Triso fuel [3]. These are poppy seed-sized particles that have Uranium in the middle surrounded by 3 layers of some sort of ceramic. They can withstand temperatures of about 1800 deg Celsius for hundreds of hours. In other words, you can drop them in lava or in molten iron, and they are fine. Triso fuel is also envisioned to used medium-enriched Uranium (up to 20% U-235, instead of the usual 4.5% used in the current generation of reactors in the US). When Uranium is more highly enriched, the interval between refueling increases, which reduces operating costs. In the extreme, the naval reactors use weapons-grade Uranium (about 95% enriched), so they need to be refueled either zero or one time during their operating life. With 20% enrichment, you can envision intervals of 5 years between refueling (vs the current 18-24 months).
3. Xe-100 pebble-bed gas cool reactor. This is again an SMR with virtually the same capacity as the NuScale one (76 MW). It will use Triso fuel. It uses Helium as a coolant rather than water, as the current reactors in the US do. There are 3 advantages of Helium. Water is a liquid at room temperature, and you prefer the coolant to not undergo phase transition if possible. But you also want the coolant to absorb as much heat from the fission core as possible, and for water this is difficult, because water boils at 100 deg Celsius. To increase this temperature you increase the pressure. A lot. Like, a lot, a lot. 150 times higher than the atmospheric pressure, or 10 times higher than in a pressure cooker. With Helium you don't have that problem, because Helium is a gas to begin with. Also Helium cannot absorb neutrons and so it does not become radioactive when it goes through the core. Finally, the pressurized water in a PWR can only be heated up to about 550 deg Celsius, while the Helium can be heated up to much higher temperatures, resulting in higher efficiency of the thermal part of the power plant.
4. Salt-cooled reactor, by Kairos Power. Instead of using water, one can use a molten salt as a coolant. Regular table salt (NaCl) is a very stable substance, but Fluoride salts are even stabler, and Kairos (and many other startups) use such salts. Such a reactor is completely unrelated to a sodium-cooled reactor, it is much more similar to a regular PWR reactor (it uses slow neutrons). The big advantage is that it does not need the huge pressures of a PWR reactor. Kairos intends to use Triso fuel.
5. Molten chloride fast reactor (by Terrapower). This is the same company as for poi...
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[ 7.8 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] thread"Nuclear power can play a major role in enabling secure transitions to low emissions energy systems"
Title is contained in the article under the following paragraph
> “However, a new era for nuclear power is by no means guaranteed. It will depend on governments putting in place robust policies to ensure safe and sustainable operation of nuclear plants for years to come – and to mobilise the necessary investments including in new technologies. And the nuclear industry must quickly address the issues of cost overruns and project delays that have bedevilled the construction of new plants in advanced economies. As a result, advanced economies have lost market leadership, as 27 out of 31 reactors that started construction since 2017 are Russian or Chinese designs.”
So, basically it's fine and it works but it's only economically sustainable if you unload the a dumptruck full of taxpayer cash on the industry.
These would be subsidies that solar, wind and pumped storage could definitely use to boost capacity/production but not cash that they need just to exist.
No it can't, it has fundamentally lost the LCOE war with Solar and Wind, and those are still improving in cost.
The steady drumbeat of "please save the fundamentally uncompetitive nuclear industry" is getting annoying.
This is an industry that, probably due to its regulation, is used to lobbying and astroturfing to try to sustain political relevance.
But it has no economic relevance.
China is getting an MSR/LFTR power planet up soon. That will be fascinating to watch, but just doesn't work in free markets. And you can't even legally research them in the US. I would recommend research and development around next gen nuclear, but all the regulations in the US are so poisoned we'd never accomplish anything radical that would be needed to make nuclear competitive.
> You can't even legally research them in the US
I think I see a contradiction here.
Every single nuke put into commercial operation, since the first, has depended for continued viability on coercion, either by direct taxpayer-funded handouts or by overcharging ratepayers in captive markets, usually both. There is no reasonable prospect for improvement.
Nukes were always the most expensive choice, and are less competitive now than ever before.
(Court decided the feds had no actual plans for disposal, and therefore the money for that was collected fraudulently and had to be given back: NOT to ratepayers, of course, but to operators of still-running plants.)
Of course it would be stupid to build out storage until after there is enough renewable generating capacity to charge it from. In the meantime, money is overwhelmingly better spent pushing toward that goal.
When the time is right to build out storage, it will be very cheap, as storage cost is falling faster than solar ever did.
Furthermore, some energy markets have seen saturation during peak production hours of intermittent sources for years now. But this unspecified dirt-cheap energy storage isn't being built to capture and resell this energy.
This "ordinary dirt-cheap storage" is precisely the fantastic storage system I'm referring to. Plans for a primarily renewable grid assume that some breakthrough is going to happen in order to make storage dirt-cheap.
Until there is a lot more such generating capacity, it would be stupid to divert capital from building that out to building only minimally useful storage.
Again, what is this "ordinary dirt-cheap storage" technology? Sure, you say it's not going to be built until there's an even bigger energy surplus. But at least just specify what technology is going to provide this dirt cheap storage. Because I'd really want to know. All of the alternatives I know of like compressed air, hydrogen storage, ammonia storage, all have significant drawbacks impeding cost effective deployments.
What is this trash? Excess solar output is already an enormous problem. https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-solar/
And, an occasional excess, a few hours in a few days out of each month is not the same as enough to usefully charge storage.
Also: 2017.
The appeal of conventional fossil fuels are high energy density and well established tech to convert it back to useful energy.
What if we had a station with some tens of thousands of litres of petrol sitting around. When the grid is strained, we burn the fuel, but in a generator carefully engineered to capture all waste. When renewables exceed demand, we use the available cheap energy to distill the waste back into burnable petrol.
Now, obviously "petrol" and "generator" can be replaced with other options to optimize performance or economic viability (maybe it's hydrogen and a fuel-cell rather than petrol and a generator, but I'm not sure if those are actually working at scale or just trotted out by Toyota to distract from them being late to the EV party)
It probably wouldn't be hugely efficient (the distilling would consume more energy than burning ever generated, after all), but it could be a way to handle "I'll pay you tomorrow for a hamburger today" with more flexibility on siting than, say, pumped hydro.
I suppose the big question is how tight the closed-loop can be. It's not a winner if you end up losing 1% of your fuel stash on every daily cycle.
1. Capturing the carbon emissions. The exhaust if a gas turbine is a high temperature mix of air and C02. Separating out the CO2 requires either cooling it or a chemical process to capture the carbon dioxide. Both of these processes are every energy intensive.
2. The Sabatier process needs a source of hydrogen. Typically this is done through steam reformation, but that emits CO2. Electrolysis or thermochemical water splitting needs to be done instead, and these are both energy intensive and expensive to do.
3. The Sabatier process itself also requires energy, as it's putting the carbon in a higher energy state.
It'd probably be easier to just use the hydrogen in step 2, but that's still a difficult undertaking that nobody has done cost effectively as of now.
What is impressive to me is that wind/solar are now beating the best LCOE "old power" scheme (gas turbine)... and they are not done dropping in cost. There are a variety of future economies of scale and advancements yet to come that will drop them even lower.
When they drop low enough and batteries get cheap enough, then yes, effectively batteries are "free" because battery+alt energy is cheaper than any other dirty alternative.
I would guess in 5-6 years we'll have a convergence of ultracheap wind+solar and good-enough sodium ion batteries that no existing nuke design or fossil fuel can beat.
China will mothball its nukes as their power gets undercut by renewables. We have great difficulty mothballing expensive stuff, so instead continue operating them at a net loss for years, making ratepayers or taxpayers pony up the difference.
What is the basis for this? Is there any indication from the Chinese Government that this is a real policy or is this just pure speculation?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor
You clearly didn’t read the list of constructed and operating Gen III / III+ reactors on the page I linked.
Not sure why you’re ignoring them. For reasons?
Both the constructed Gen III and yet to be built Gen IV reactors represent design improvements you claimed never materialized in an earlier post.
Germany is emitting much less CO2 than before they shut down their nukes. They elected to spend what it would have cost, to keep them working, instead on wind turbines. This has yielded much more generation than the refurbished nukes would eventually have offered, but immediately.
Germany is actively building out more renewable generating capacity to displace more carbon emissions, but there is a very large amount of work to be done. Building nukes instead would take much longer and yield much less.
Germany's CO2 emissions are on an upward trend now that there reactivating coal plants to get off of Russian gas. Furthermore, the decision to shut down nuclear plants resulted in greater emissions that what would have occurred had they kept them active.
Of course they will be cancelled when it turns out no one will buy their power at a price they can offer.
Germany is burning more coal than last year and less NG, which drove up CO2. That says nothing about what they would be emitting with the nukes and without the wind farms. But we already know that answer.
It absolutely says what they would do: add the nuclear power that was eliminated and subtract the coal. Remember, they didn't need to build new nuclear plants they just needed to not shut down their existing ones.
100% renewables mix is extremely difficult to manage cause we are far from having enough storage. Storage is a big challenge on its own.
Coal producers lately love nukes because they mean at least ten more years of reliable sales, more if it is cancelled. They know they are doomed, but with enough nuke projects can hang on long enough to retire. If civilization collapses, it probably won't be immediately, and that is good enough for them.
We don't have storage because we have not built out storage. Just now, a dollar is much better invested in renewable generating capacity, so we build that. When storage comes to have value, we will build out storage. After storage, carbon capture, but not before, same reason.
Not a real problem.
>cost
Self-inflicted problem.
>risk
Not a real problem.
Good. Lets kill the $200 million liability cap then.
If it's not a real problem they should have no issue paying for their own insurance.
Once the tech has plunged in price to solar/wind/pumped storage levels and the industry feels confident enough in its own safety that it doesnt need taxpayers to shoulder potential catastrophe costs we should absolutely build tons of nuclear power.
Nuclear is cheaper than solar, wind and pumped storage. There's a limited number of economically viable pumped storage sites. You essential need an alpine lake close to a freeway to build one economically. Otherwise you're talking about pouring massive amounts of concrete to build a big tub, which is an expensive project. The reality is that dams are the only effective means of energy storage. Lake Meade is one the biggest batteries in the world. Intermittent sources are viable for regions close to hydroelectric plants, but for everywhere else nuclear power is the only feasible route to decarbonization.
1. https://www.iii.org/article/insurance-coverage-nuclear-accid...
There are not, in fact, a limited number of pumped storage sites, and you do not, in fact, need any alpine lakes. Dikes are not commonly made of concrete.
And, there are numerous other cheap alternative storage media, for places without hills.
But first we need to build out enough renewable generating capacity to charge it from. It would be stupid to pour capital into storage that cannot be charged, particularly as prices are falling so fast that building will be radically cheaper when we come to need it.
There are a limited number of economically viable pumped storage sites. You can find papers claiming an effectively limitless amount of hydroelectric storage. The problem is that most of these places either already use dams for most of their energy production and thus don't need to build any storage. Or, they are in extremely remote areas where construction is prohibitively expensive. There's huge hydroelectric potential in Tibet. But that's incredibly remote and prohibitively expensive to develop.
> And, there are numerous other cheap alternative storage media, for places without hills.
Such as?
Reprocessing also increases the extractable energy density of uranium 100 fold, meaning that with only known uranium reserves, humanity could meet 100% of its current energy needs from fission for 38,000 years.
What we desperately need to fend off looming climate catastrophe is for every dollar spent on energy to displace the largest possible amount of carbon emissions. We get several times as much such displacement by spending that dollar on renewables. And, we get that displacement immediately, not ten or more years on, after spending as much more on coal in that time as would pay the entire capital cost of the renewables.
And, we do not then spend a great deal more on servicing that equipment every year, but can instead use that to build out more carbon emissions displacing equipment.
Starting a new nuke brings climate catastrophe nearer.
As best as I can tell the Chinese are ahead of the rest anyway so if something has to be built it might as well be that
The leader is of course NuScale, which already obtained the NRC approval for their proposed reactor design. Their technology is the classical pressurized water reactor, but in a Small Modular Reactor (SMR) form factor of about 78 MW per module. Their first contract is for a 6-module power plant. The envisioned technological advantage is simply the fact that manufacturing many small reactors on an assembly line is going to be much cheaper than manufacturing large ones on site. They claim a $45-60 / MWh Levelized Cost of Energy, which is really competitive. Even if they are off by a factor of 2, it's still going to be competitive.
Next ones can be found at the link [1] provided by the Department of Energy. Here's my summary:
1. Sodium-cooled fast reactor (by Terrapower). Currently the Russians operate the largest sodium cooled reactors, the BN-600 and BN-800 [2], which, as the name implies provide 600 and 800 MW of electricity for a total of 1.4 GW. The main advantage of sodium-cooled reactors is that their fission reaction uses fast neutrons rather than slow (or thermal) neutrons. With fast neutrons the nuclear waste is reduced by orders of magnitude, while at the same time the fraction of U235 that undergoes fission increases, for a significant increase of overall efficiency. The negative is that sodium may burn, but sodium burning in air is not the violent, compared with sodium burning (or rather exploding) in water.
2. Triso fuel [3]. These are poppy seed-sized particles that have Uranium in the middle surrounded by 3 layers of some sort of ceramic. They can withstand temperatures of about 1800 deg Celsius for hundreds of hours. In other words, you can drop them in lava or in molten iron, and they are fine. Triso fuel is also envisioned to used medium-enriched Uranium (up to 20% U-235, instead of the usual 4.5% used in the current generation of reactors in the US). When Uranium is more highly enriched, the interval between refueling increases, which reduces operating costs. In the extreme, the naval reactors use weapons-grade Uranium (about 95% enriched), so they need to be refueled either zero or one time during their operating life. With 20% enrichment, you can envision intervals of 5 years between refueling (vs the current 18-24 months).
3. Xe-100 pebble-bed gas cool reactor. This is again an SMR with virtually the same capacity as the NuScale one (76 MW). It will use Triso fuel. It uses Helium as a coolant rather than water, as the current reactors in the US do. There are 3 advantages of Helium. Water is a liquid at room temperature, and you prefer the coolant to not undergo phase transition if possible. But you also want the coolant to absorb as much heat from the fission core as possible, and for water this is difficult, because water boils at 100 deg Celsius. To increase this temperature you increase the pressure. A lot. Like, a lot, a lot. 150 times higher than the atmospheric pressure, or 10 times higher than in a pressure cooker. With Helium you don't have that problem, because Helium is a gas to begin with. Also Helium cannot absorb neutrons and so it does not become radioactive when it goes through the core. Finally, the pressurized water in a PWR can only be heated up to about 550 deg Celsius, while the Helium can be heated up to much higher temperatures, resulting in higher efficiency of the thermal part of the power plant.
4. Salt-cooled reactor, by Kairos Power. Instead of using water, one can use a molten salt as a coolant. Regular table salt (NaCl) is a very stable substance, but Fluoride salts are even stabler, and Kairos (and many other startups) use such salts. Such a reactor is completely unrelated to a sodium-cooled reactor, it is much more similar to a regular PWR reactor (it uses slow neutrons). The big advantage is that it does not need the huge pressures of a PWR reactor. Kairos intends to use Triso fuel.
5. Molten chloride fast reactor (by Terrapower). This is the same company as for poi...