Maybe it's the first to technically IPO, but it's not the first to be listed because OKLO just went public via merger with Sam Altman's SPAC AltC last week.
Two in one week? What are the odds? First I've heard of it but Oklo is a fission company with zero revenue and their stock is already down %54. That seems promising. /s
There are many converging lines, climate change concerns have leveraged increased support for nuclear in general and modular nuclear in particular.
On another front a loooong standing high level global 'plan' for nuclear waste storage in Australia has advanced.
As a concept it's kicked about since the dawn of the atomic age, with Mark Oliphant, Tube Alloys, and beyond. It gained propasal status several times, eg. as Pangea in the late 1990s
with many rumours and little confirmed as to the extent of intended nuclear waste storage, whether just military waste from Australian submarines, or more general UK+US military waste, or even further.
As you can imagine, a cloud of NIMBY is breaking out about this, and with no site picked, and elections in states and federal level this has about as much chance of coming to fruition in the next electoral cycle as Fusion power has of delivering power to the public networks.
I am not personally opposed to a dump. The income stream for what is basically passive income as rent would be astronomically beneficial to the location, and the economy. We have some obligation to take back the products of our uranium mining, and compared to other choices Australia is a good pick to store radionucleotides in. We're stable politically, economically, and geologically.
I would be entirely happy for the dump to be dug underneath my house. I live on a floodplain with acid sulphate soils but I imagine at some depth, there's a good structural basis to do it. There are probably far better locations.
it may be in AUKUS, but can I point out that the US has already refused to confirm if Australia will have sole control of the Virginia class subs we've been half-promised, nor has the promise been kept in any real sense because there is already a supply chain crisis behind the subs, we've paid the US to keep the factories alive, and we don't know what the AUKUS class will look like or who will actually make them or when.. yet.
To be clear I have no objection to the nuclear aspect if handly well, it's the entire debacle from start to end that's on the nose .. I don't accept the case for hugely expensive nuclear subs over the pre existing French order (which had other, albeit lesser, issues).
Strategically nuclear submarines are an excellent choice for Australia though - the problem is ScoMo was a terrible prime minister and I have no idea what the hell he was thinking with that surprise announcement and it's resultant costs.
But it would make a lot of sense for Australia to get a fleet of ballistic-missile capable subs, put conventional warheads in them, but ensure they could become "nuclear capable" with a munition switch: these are 30+ year assets in most cases with long lead times. How comfortable we should feel about being under the US/NATO nuclear umbrella is a fluid thing over those timeframes.
We could have asked the French. Morrison tore up a strategic alliance outside of US and UK to meet a goal. The subs on order he cancelled were in effect de-nuclearised french designs. He shat on Macron for kudos.
Remarkably higher than intuition would suggest. Things happen for reasons, so when something happens there is an unusually good chance that it'll happen again quickly because events aren't happening independently. Like how if somebody is struck by lightening and don't seek shelter, there is a heightened chance it'll happen again shortly.
Can someone tell me the name of a successful company that went public by means of a SPAC? Maybe Nucor (although I don't think they were called SPACs back then)?
> integrated company across four business lines: (i) cutting edge portable microreactor technology, (ii) nuclear fuel fabrication, (iii) nuclear fuel transportation and (iv) nuclear industry consulting services.
Why integrate four business lines? What's the point of this? This sounds counterintuitive. If I were even a 100% sole owner of four business lines I would rather separate them into four companies even if they began as one. What am I overlooking?
I would have said the opposite: if the ambitious microreactor part of their business plans fails, as is likely, it's more palatable to spin that as "we are concentrating on our nuclear fuel logistics and consulting arms" rather than a pivot. And in the energy industry in general, some level of horizontal integration is typical - the same company might drill the oil, refine it, and put its name over gas stations.
The business may well be organised as multiple companies internally, but that's not what this is about.
It's sad that some people would rather see the climate change than to accept that nuclear is not that dangerous. Not only Chernobyl had one of the worst designs, which would not be approved today, but its impact is also widely overstated.
I grew up in the area affected by Chernobyl (Kaluga oblast) and I had classmates evacuated from Chernobyl itself. For the first 10 years, it was important to have geiger counters when you go shopping on farmer's market, but that's about it.
Compare it to the billions affected by the heat today. Nuclear scare is a part of the reason these people suffer.
That said - if solar & wind + batteries are cheaper and available in an area, that's a good way to go. Just don't claim that nuclear is bad. And hopefully microreactors are cheaper and faster to deploy than classic nuclear reactors, and they have a chance to be useful for the areas without large reserves of solar and wind.
It's a false dichotomy. Worldwide there are about 100 GW of nuclear reactors planned of them about 40 GW actually being constructed and about 10 GW are actually commissioned annually. This is barely sufficient to replacement of reactors that are being decommissioned and there is no growth of nuclear capacity worldwide - we have exactly as much as 15 years ago.
Comparatively, renewables are set to add 800GW this year. Yes that will translate to "only" about 130GW of average power which is an energy equivalent of about 150GW of nuclear capacity, but that still means replacing all of the world nuclear (372GW) in 2.5 years.
Wind already produces as much overall energy as nuclear (around 2550 TWh/y) and solar, 2/3 as much and will equal nuclear in probably 1 year. And almost all of this capacity has been built in the last 5 years for solar and last year 10 years for nuclear, with deployment speeds fast accelerating.
There's simply no comparison. Nuclear has already lost.
Microreactors have no chance at all in the world because nuclear scales very well with size, and as a result, is bound to be very expensive when small. In Russia, they have a bunch of microreactors, they work fine, but very expensive to run and are kept only in remote places with no other way to power them. Niche thing at best.
How many microreactors do we need to replace all the world's final energy consumption (ok around 20% will be replaced by heat pumps net energy gain)? That's 11,000 GW of continuous power. A million 10 MW ones? How many people does that take to build and maintain across the entire value chain? Sounds like hundreds of millions people, easily 10 or maybe 20% of entire world's workforce. Not going to happen.
> Microreactors have no chance at all in the world because nuclear scales very well with size, and as a result, is bound to be very expensive when small.
Solar is cheap because it has hit the economy of scale. Hell, fences made of solar (sometimes, not even connected!) are now more cheaper than those made of wood (at least, in some countries).
While I would not bet my money on the economic feasibility of nuclear microreactors, I would like them to have a fair market trial. If they do succeed, we all win.
Small reactors have lost against GW-class facilities around 60 years ago. This is why they were no longer built. I find it strange to believe that the economy of scale somehow doesn't apply to nuclear power plants, even though history clearly shows it does.
You have economies of scale (size) squaring off against economies of scale (production).
For one-offs, the economies of size win, because then the economies of production don't actually get a chance to do their thing. So kick-starting is a problem. However, the problems with the EPR and the AP-1000 hint (do not prove) that we may be hitting size limitations.
The strategy that Rolls-Royce is pursuing seems promising: factory-built microreactors (so economies of production) that you can plop into existing coal-powered plants to upgrade them to nuclear. That way you reduce the issues with the non-factory-built parts.
And decommissioning promises to be more manageable and less expensive with microreactors. Individual microreactors can be swapped as they age out and decommissioned/refurbished elsewhere.
Really? I expect microreactors would create much more irradiated material than larger reactors, due to the higher surface area/volume ratio of tiny reactors. This also negatively affects their neutron economy.
I don't see it as 'irrational fear' to fear having these small poison containers run by the lowest bidder about everywhere with about as good oversight as the increased number allows.
Exactly. Renewables are resoundly economically advantageous over micronuclear and don't have the Chernobyl, forever waste problems, physical security issues, or potential proliferation risks. It doesn't save the planet or save money, so don't spread risk throughout populated areas unnecessarily.
I'd remove the proliferation risks - face it, proliferation is a done deal and everyone who can afford a nuke will have one in the next 30 years, including many private entities (Elon Musk for sure but quite probably, many much smaller ones, plus churches as well). Otherwise, right.
I'm not him, but the Manhatten project cost ~$25 billion dollars and didn't have access to today's physics knowledge or computer-aided design capabilities.
There are a lot of countries that can match $25 billion in expenditure - Musk spent almost twice that on Twitter - and the real cost is probably lower. We've also got a lower-bound on the difficulty of producing missiles based on what North Korea can do.
No. You're wrong. The proliferation risk exists where significant enrichment fuel is used or the design is feasibly adaptable to breeding. These conditions are entirely avoidable by design, or by simply eliminating the entire category of risk by doing something else more profitable.
proliferation is a real concern but this part is completely ill-founded
> including many private entities (Elon Musk for sure but quite probably, many much smaller ones, plus churches as well)
Modern (that is since the end of the middle ages) State exists because they enforce the “monopoly of violence”, there's no way any private individual could be allowed to have nukes. Even in Russia, the realm of Oligarchs' PMCs (well before Prigojin assassination) the State always maintained full control on its nukes (and when Russia was a failed state at the beginning of the 90s, the US worked hard to make sure it was the case). Private entities with nukes could only happen in the event of a complete collapse of the US as a State, in which case nuclear proliferation would be the least of your problems (and even then, I don't see China not intervening to stop that from happening anyway, like the US did in Russia)
There’s a huge part of the equation you’re forgetting in all of this. Storage. Renewables are great and have proliferated spectacularly and I’m excited to see that they continue, but our societies are stuck on fossil fuels to plug the holes in intermittent sources. Either we have some pretty rapid and miraculous advances in large-scale battery storage and deployment infrastructure, or we stay on fossil fuels. But when those run out, are you hedging your bets on battery storage and energy management infrastructure handling ever-growing demand? Or would you rather small-scale nuclear offset some of that.
There’s room for both solutions here, and frankly we need all of them because it’s not just about intermittency. We urgently need to quit fossil fuels entirely, implying nuclear energy sources are rolled out even if they cease to become necessary. That’s a lot better than ignoring the option and continuing to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and polluting our air.
> There’s a huge part of the equation you’re forgetting in all of this. Storage.
Let me come and defend the California strategy for the energy production. As can be seen on the California grid status page ([1]) (click on the Supply tab, find batteries and play with dates), the battery capacity grew from negligible to something that eclipses imports in the peak consumption hours. I fully expect that in 2-3 years, California will have enough of solar + storage to stop firing its gas generators and importing coal electricity from Utah.
There is surprisingly little storage (or in some better cases, no storage at all) required to balance renewables and studies from 10-15 years ago confirm it, that's a favourite theme of conservatives but no longer brought up in serious circles. We already have all the production capacity (online and in committed, funded projects) for the required amount of batteries and will have many times more in only a few years - batteries will be there even before solar panels themselves will, mainly because installing them is simpler and they immediately make quick money, payback periods are shorter (and getting shorter as more solar is installed).
Also, because we're going to need storage anyway, for vehicles.
A Tesla has maybe 70 kWh of batteries. There are 283 million motor vehicles in the US. Electrify them all at that rate and it's 20 TWh of storage, about 40 hours worth of the average US grid consumption.
> but our societies are stuck on fossil fuels to plug the holes in intermittent sources.
It's not like turning nuclear reactors on and off is trivial, nuclear power plants are not used as peakers either so either we use batteries or we'll rely on gas for a while.
It's not just about peaks, it's about covering the gaps when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow. We know the former happens every night, and wind is less predictable.
That's why I'm advocating for nuclear. It's not meant to turn on and off -- fine, but it will buy us time to invest in storage infrastructure and develop plans to move those electrons around at a moment's notice. We're not there yet -- not by a long shot. Someone pointed to California as a leader in this field. Even if California manages to piece together something, do you think the 49 other states will follow suit? Certainly not with this federal government at the helm.
Speaking in general terms, I'm guessing these nuclear facilities probably have a capital runway of a few decades. Hopefully in that time, we'll have the storage networks and plans to offset peaks and cover intermittent lulls at the energy source.
The priority is to stop GHG emissions, and it's absolutely absurd to me that we're willing to sit on this technology from irrational fear while we poison our planet and our bodies. It should outrage people here how many die from pollution and how many more will die from climate changes. Enough is enough.
> That's why I'm advocating for nuclear. It's not meant to turn on and off -- fine, but it will buy us time to invest in storage infrastructure and develop plans to move those electrons around at a moment's notice.
One of the objections against nuclear is that it takes way too long to build (for instance, the latest nuclear reactor near where I live has been on construction for decades, and is still far from being complete). Which means it can't help "buy us time".
> There's simply no comparison. Nuclear has already lost.
In the 1980s wind & solar had already lost; and by a substantially bigger margin. Yet here we are. The potential for nuclear energy is still substantially greater than that of renewable power and eventually one of these companies will find a way to exploit that potential if we let them look.
Both of you are arguing about fluid numbers which reflect political expediency and local economics, not actual power-cost-scale-efficiency numbers.
Nuclear works fine. So does Wind and Solar. All three have proponents and opponents and which has more pace, or likelihood of deployment is not subject to their actual ability to supply power, but to external forces which do not relate to that power at all.
They are OK as an addition to dispatchable sources, which is why the vast majority of industrialized nations are now planning for a mix of nuclear and intermittent renewables.
Nuclear is almost as non-dispatchable? As soon as you've ramped up a nuclear reactor to full power, the weather has changed. Thus they essentially occupy almost the same niche.
Those who plan to use both nuclear and wind/solar don't do it for the dispatchability.
That turns out not to be completely not the case. As in not even close.
First, modern nuclear power plants can do load-following just fine, you often just don't want to because their variable costs are so low that it just makes more sense to keep them running.
Second, the problem with intermittent renewables is that they can't provide power when you need it. Even when you don't load-follow as much, that is not the problem of nuclear.
> As soon as you've ramped up a nuclear reactor to full power, the weather has changed
That's a problem of the intermittent renewables, not of nuclear. You don't make the clown-energy the primary and force everything else to adapt to that.
> Those who plan to use both nuclear and wind/solar don't do it for the dispatchability.
Yeah they do. Dispatchability in terms of grid demand, not in terms of compensating for intermittency.
> First, modern nuclear power plants can do load-following just fine, you often just don't want to because their variable costs are so low that it just makes more sense to keep them running.
So, I read a bit and this seems to be actually true, just looking at it from a technical feasibility standpoint [1]. (This is actually the first time someone refuted this point when I made it. ;) )
> Second, the problem with intermittent renewables is that they can't provide power when you need it. Even when you don't load-follow as much, that is not the problem of nuclear.
I didn't say they were, though, and this is not an argument regarding your premise.
> Yeah they do. Dispatchability in terms of grid demand, not in terms of compensating for intermittency.
From a technical standpoint that is true, but, as you've mentioned above: Load-following is not something you can do with nuclear, as the LCOE then quickly meets the other sources of energy ([1], chapter 4).
> That's a problem of the intermittent renewables, not of nuclear. You don't make the clown-energy the primary and force everything else to adapt to that.
Yeah, it's just that that the grid does not end at the gate of the nuclear power plant. Maybe a bit less snark would be helpful in a discussion that can be had based on available data. Referring to solar and wind as clown-energy essentially ends all discussion. Otherwise, people could also bring up arguments such as the limited availability of fuel and the fact that thermal energy generation itself would become a driving factor for global warming if we would still depend on it by the end of the century.
That "almost as" implies not just similarity in degree (which we saw isn't true), but even greater similarity in kind, because otherwise the two are just not comparable in the first place.
"My iPad M4 is almost as fast as a Ferrari" doesn't really make sense, except as humor.
> limited availability of fuel
Not true.
> the fact that thermal energy generation itself would become a driving factor for global warming
Well... seriously, no industrialised nation plans any significant amount of nuclear nor sees it as a necessary or even a valuable addition to their electricity mix. Not even China - they are building a bunch of reactors but the amount is negligible compared to the amount solar they are building.
And, nuclear is not dispatchable either, because it can't be regulated, it's either "on" or "off" (and going from "off" to "on" takes several days due to xenon poisoning).
You're not up-to-date. ALL of them do, except for Germany. And now that the consequences of this strategy are bing felt in Germany, opposition is rising.
Dependency on dispatchable power does not imply solely Base load continuous generation. Pumped hydro, wind and solar overbuild and batteries are capable of supplying the burden.
The objection to overbuild and storage is economic more than innately about turbines.
Dispatchable and Base load are classic models of nuclear advocacy which are fine, but not unanswerable.
Pumped hydro is largely maxed out in countries that are looking at intermittent renewables. And of course hydro is quite dangerous and environmentally destructive.
Solar overbuild and batteries alone generally can't handle the burden. You need overbuild and batteries and gas backup. And if you want that gas backup to be hydrogen, you need even more overbuild and electrolysers on top. So quadrupling the very expensive infrastructure that you then have mostly sitting around idle.
You can't get rid of the intermittency problem. You can only move it around, somewhat, at enormous expense.
And the generating capacity required you need is also insane. And that's a quote: "...which challenges the economic sanity of 100% intermittent renewable targets."
Pumped hydro is nowhere near maxed out. What is maxed out is primary hydro on rivers. Pumped hydro doesn't have to be on rivers. I can even be built in deserts, far from any waterways.
Your comments about intermittency are demonstrated to be wrong by detailed modeling. Using the tools available (various kinds of storage, transmission, demand dispatch, efficiency) intermittency can be dealt with at an overall cost lower than trying to use nuclear at its current cost.
I believe that link you are pointing to assumes batteries are used for long term storage. This is a common error (if error it is rather than deliberate deception) that inflates the cost of a 100% RE system considerably.
The "insane" comment is just a handwave. The world is going to spend something like a quadrillion dollars on energy this century. Renewables are very likely going to be the least-cost way of powering the world, when the $1000/tonne externalities of CO2 are included.
For Germany: "Der Anteil der Wasserkraft an der Stromerzeugung aus erneuerbaren Energien ist über die Jahre gesunken und liegt gegenwärtig noch bei ca. 8 Prozent. Dieser Anteil wird in Zukunft weiter sinken, da die Potenziale der Wasserkraftnutzung in Deutschland weitgehend erschlossen sind..."
The situation is similar in most of the developed world.
> Your comments about intermittency are demonstrated to be wrong by detailed modeling
Actually: they are not. All the detailed models show this exact problem, such as the paper I linked.
> The "insane" comment is just a handwave.
No, the "insane" comment is exactly the conclusion of the people who do the detailed modeling.
As this paper (and many others) show, renewables are great as long as they are used for part of energy production. Trying for 100% renewables is the part that's insane.
I recently had a close look at one of the "studies" by Fraunhofer that are frequently touted by renewable advocates as showing how feasible 100% renewables are.
I can't imagine they actually read the study.
For Germany, they say we need 750 GW of Wind/Solar + 500 GWh of batteries + 150 GW of gas plants + the electrolysers to produce the gas. In addition they also assume a massive increase in efficiency and thus reduction in consumption.
Our current electricity generation needs are around 70 GW. OK, some of that is for electrification of other sectors, but for that they also assume massive synergy effects.
This is fantasy-land material that makes the Brexiteer visions of "sunny uplands" appear to be voices of restraint and reason.
> "The share of hydropower in electricity generation from renewable energies has fallen over the years and is currently still around 8 percent. This proportion will continue to fall in the future, as the potential for hydropower use in Germany has been largely exploited..."
That's primary hydro. As I already told you, that's not pumped hydro. You don't seem to be understanding this point, so let me explain in more detail.
Primary hydro involves exploiting natural water flows, extracting energy from water that falls at higher elevations as it flows down to lower elevations. It is limited by these natural water flows, and the need to be on the rivers in which the water is flowing.
Pumped hydro, on the other hand, creates its own water flow. It does not need to exploit natural precipitation. It can recycle the water it uses, getting much more energy flow per unit of water (until the water seeps or evaporates away, but that is slow.) It can be placed in locations that aren't on rivers. As an example, consider this PHES project in an arid part of the Great Basin in Nevada:
Notice the graphics with two reservoirs, constructed on flat areas by surrounding them with earthen walls, sitting in the middle of a desert without any permanent rivers in sight.
The potential for this sort of pumped hydro is enormous anywhere there is sufficient vertical relief. In Australia, for example, the potential is some 100x what would be needed for a 100% RE grid. They've built a global PHES geographical database for finding places around the world (where they have data; Russia is excluded for example).
"With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive."
> For Germany, they say we need 750 GW of Wind/Solar + 500 GWh of batteries + 150 GW of gas plants + the electrolysers to produce the gas. In addition they also assume a massive increase in efficiency and thus reduction in consumption.
Battery storage is approaching $100/kWh (not cells, the whole turnkey system) in China now. So, 500 GWh would be $50B. If the batteries have a lifespan of 20 years that's $2.5B/year (+ interest). Can you not afford this? That's less than half of what Germany spends on pizza.
Also, consider how many GWh of storage in cars would be needed if all the cars in Germany were BEVs (I get about 3 TWh).
You also need geography for pumped hydro. Somewhere to pump the water to.
> Battery storage is approaching $100/kWh
"Approaching". A Tesla Megapack is more than 3x that.
It's funny how EE fanboys just extrapolate trends into the future. At the rate nuclear power plants were getting cheaper they'd be free now. Well, had we not stopped building them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Of course, this is very little battery, because that particular Fraunhofer study did most of the backup using gas. With 150 GW of gas fired plants.
150 GW.
Let that sink in. That's more than double the current total demand. Just for backup of the 750 GW of intermittent generators. No wonder that scenario doesn't need all that much battery.
Now add the cost of the electroylysers needed to create all that gas.
Read it again. The limits it discusses are on hydro generation, not hydro storage.
> "Approaching". A Tesla Megapack is more than 3x that.
If your argument depends on selecting expensive rather than cheap versions of a technology, I'll do the same with nuclear. Let's use the most disastrous expensive nuclear efforts as representative, shall we?
Or, we could just acknowledge that once a lower price point has been demonstrated for storage, the market will move in that direction. Storage, unlike nuclear, doesn't experience out of the blue cost escalation, and many forms are easily shipped worldwide.
> Of course, this is very little battery, because that particular Fraunhofer study did most of the backup using gas. With 150 GW of gas fired plants.
> That's more than double the current total demand.
The gas generators would not run in baseload mode; they'd be for seasonal and Dunkelflaute coverage. Most energy from the renewables would go either directly to the grid or through batteries and then to the grid. The fraction into gas would be modest.
BTW, simple cycle gas turbine + generator is about 1/20th the capital cost of a nuclear plant per unit power (combined cycle, 1/10th). So 150 GW is not nearly as much as you might imagine.
> If your argument depends on selecting expensive rather than cheap versions of a technology,
It doesn't. It depends on available versions of a technology. Not "approaching" versions of a technology.
> Read it again. The limits it discusses are on hydro generation, not hydro storage.
That turns out not to be the case. Try reading it again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> The gas generators would not run in baseload mode;
That is EXACTLY the point. You need to overbuild enormous amounts of very expensive infrastructure triply-redundantly and then have it sit around idly most of the time.
So all of this highly expensive triply-redundant and massively overbuilt infrastructure has to be financed by subsidies, as it can't be paid for by producing electricity. As it isn't actually producing any electricity most of the time.
To quote the study again: "...which challenges the economic sanity of 100% intermittent renewable targets."
This. Google: kombikraftwerk. That's a very old study that's been tried and tried many times since. It shows how little storage is actually necessary for a 100% renewable electricity system.
Generous of you to not even point to the environmental issues associated with the mining of battery metals making drilling for fossil fuels look like a band of boyscouts going into the woods to plant trees.
Question is - how can pumped hydro be probably ever "maxed out"?
Let's say if we take all the (normal, not "pumped") hydro we have and increase number of turbines on them 10x, or 100x, and make them reversible, that will easily cover all the storage needs in terms of power. Of course, it will not produce more actual electricity than currently because the water in dams in finite, but it will produce almost as much as desired in terms of storage volume. Essentially it's up to "annual hydro output in TWh x 365". In reality, less because hydro output fluctuates in different seasons with the rainfall/river water release, but still... Isn't it way more than we could ever need?
Don't get how pumped hydro can ever be "maxed out".
> Question is - how can pumped hydro be probably ever "maxed out"?
Playing devil's advocate: once you've run out of places with enough height difference to build one upper and one lower reservoir. It's going to take a long time (there are many more places suitable for pumped hydro than places suitable for traditional hydro), but it's possible.
> Let's say if we take all the (normal, not "pumped") hydro we have and increase number of turbines on them 10x, or 100x, and make them reversible, that will easily cover all the storage needs in terms of power.
That's usually not feasible. Pumped hydro needs both a lower and an upper reservoir, while non-pumped hydro normally has only an upper reservoir, and discharges water directly into a river. That is: even if you made the turbines reversible (or added pumps in parallel with them), there would be no water for them to pump upwards.
For example, Europe is quite far to the north and that means very cloudy winters over most of the continent. If the wind blows, fine, but you can also have several days without wind, when both wind and solar north of the Alps generates basically nothing.
Oh yes, the Spanish meseta will probably still be sunny, but the amount of solar that would be needed to power the rest of Europe for several days probably won't even fit there (not to mention how robust would the pan-European grid have to be to tolerate such flux of energy over thousands of kilometers and ten country borders); and if it does, what will you do with all that extra power in summer?
The fact that real (as opposed to nominal max) output of wind and solar fluctuates in a 1:100 range based on factors that are hard to predict more than a few days in advance is really hard to square with the demand for stable grid. It is a big, fundamental problem.
In Northern Europe, rare occasional Dunkelflauten are best dealt with by an e-fuel backup. The RTE of e-fuels is lousy, but because these events are uncommon that doesn't matter much. Europe has ample geology for storing hydrogen, so it would likely be the e-fuel used.
A simple cycle combustion turbine power plant has a capital cost of maybe 5% of a nuclear power plant; combined cycle, about 10%. So one can substantially back up the entire grid with these at a capital cost low compared to that of powering the grid by nuclear.
Methanol might be more practical. Theoretically, you could put floating wind turbines onto the sea in places that have almost uninterrupted wind (they are mostly far from land, though), let them produce methanol and use it as a e-fuel. It is much easier to transport and store.
From what I've been told, if you have salt formations for hydrogen storage (and Europe does) then hydrogen is better than trying to use methanol. The latter is much more complicated and has lower round trip efficiency, involving storing not just methanol, but also CO2 and oxygen (from electrolysis, to use in oxyfuel combustion to help recycle the CO2).
They have to be. But aren't. And hydrogen use today is not general energy consumption but specialized applications where the exorbitant cost, even of dirty hydrogen, is bearable.
If I am looking at what is being planned and approved, the vast majority of industrialized nations are building a mix between thermal power station, with primary fuel being natural gas, and then intermittent renewables. Even in Sweden with a large fleet of nuclear and hydro power, the new plants that are actually being built right now are a large thermal power station fueled by gas, in combination with new wind and solar. There are also talk about new thermal power stations fueled using garbage.
A popular political strategy to avoid calling attention to the new thermal power stations is to not call them power stations. They are reserve energy, to be used when intermittent renewables do not produce enough.
Intermittent renewables paired with dispatchable batteries, pumped storage or syngas are cheaper than baseload nuclear.
Nuclear is only "dispatchable" if you are willing to burn epic, titanic, gargantuan stupid amounts of money.
The only reason to build civilian nuclear power is to aid the provision of skills and an industrial supply chain for the nuclear-military industrial complex. Not the climate. Not cheap, clean power. DEFINITELY not dispatchability.
Nuclear is cheap. According to the Court of Accounts in France in 2012, the whole nuclear industry had cost € 228 billion by that time and produced 11000 TWh of electricity. 2.07 Cents/kWh.
Renewables are expensive, in particular if you want a 100% renewable grid.
There is very little overlap between nuclear and civilian nuclear programs. Lots of countries operate power plants without nuclear weapons, and Israel for example has a military reactor yet does not use nuclear power commercially.
> The LCOE of nuclear power is ~5x solar and wind.
Only if you do something insane like the infamous Lazard study that was used to come to this "conclusion": they took a single power plant and used that as "the cost of nuclear".
That alone is enough to disqualify those numbers, but it gets worse. As their one single data point for nuclear, they didn't pick a random sample, but instead they hand-picked the most expensive commercial nuclear power plant in the world: Vogtle-3. That one screwup is their entire dataset for nuclear.
And of course LCOE doesn't actually cover the full cost. When you look at system cost, the renewable get even worse, at least when you try to 100% renewable. As you approach 100% renewables, the costs rise almost asymptotically, "...which challenges the economic sanity of 100% intermittent renewable targets.7".
>As their one single data point for nuclear, they didn't pick a random sample, but instead they hand-picked the most expensive commercial nuclear power plant in the world: Vogtle-3.
Citation? As far as I know they come out with new numbers every year and they dont just base it on one nuclear power plant.
>And of course LCOE doesn't actually cover the full cost.
It doesnt count the cost of load following, but neither the LCOE for nuclear power. Gas plants are generally used in France to supplement nuclear power when it isn't sufficient to cover their power needs or when they are taken down.
And of course, 5x cheaper = 2-3x cheaper when paired with storage under conservative assumptions.
>As you approach 100% renewables, the costs rise almost asymptotically
If you make some really bad assumptions about how storage will be handled (e.g. assuming you need 2 weeks of lithium ion batteries) sure.
"Given the limited public and/or observable data set available for new-build nuclear projects and the emerging range of new nuclear generation strategies, the LCOE presented herein represents Lazard’s LCOE v15.0 results
adjusted for inflation (results are based on then-estimated costs of the Vogtle Plant and are U.S.-focused)"
So v15 is the same. v14 has been withdrawn.
What's really funny is that this footnote has always been there, in plain sight. Yet everyone quotes the Lazard figures as if they were gospel. And if they don't name the source, it's always Lazard anyway.
> [LCOE] doesnt count the cost of load following,
Maybe that as well, but more significantly, it doesn't count system costs, which rise dramatically as more and more of your power generation capacity becomes intermittent.
I don't see exactly where the cutoff is, but most of the industrialized nations seem to betting it's around 80%. The number will obviously vary depending on how willing you are to take on risk. Germany is currently going all-in on that, so I guess the other countries can wait and see how that experiment works out.
It's not. Without nuclear scare the developed world electricity mix could have look like France's as early as the 90s, saving countless tons of CO2 emissions, and millions of lifes. Renewable are eventually coming but the tech took 40 more years to come, and that's how much we're late.
The french energy mix is around 50% fossil fuels [1]. The reduction in CO2 emissions over the last two decades were only due to better efficiency (lower energy usage) and renewables.
“Energy mix” is not the same as “electricity mix”, a lot if this is gas used to power cars and trucks, which are another problem entirely and isn't solved by renewable alone but by another technology (electric cars) which synergies even better with nuclear than with renewables.
Of course reductions over “the last two decades” aren't due to nuclear, since France was already all nuclear two decades ago, duh.
Most of emissions reductions over that period where due to: improved efficiency (car engine, notably), but also massive disindustrialization unfortunately (which ultimately raised the emissions, since we now import goods produced with a more emissive electricity mix than us), renewables are only marginal in that regard (it mostly substituted nuclear production…)
The thing is: no alternative to nuclear can help on non-electricity emissions either, so when it comes to the topic of nuclear vs the rest, it doesn't make sense to talk about the whole and it makes sense to focus on electricity. That doesn't mean we don't care about the others, it's just completely irrelevant to the discussion. I do care about biodiversity or women's right as well, that doesn't mean it's relevant to bring in unrelated topics.
Didn't France also have to literally shut down a nuclear plant because of the drought last year or so? As climate change escalates, having a power plant you need to shut down when the river runs dry and then need to spend days booting up again isn't the best choice for sustainable and reliable electricity.
Yes, but not for the reasons you think: none of the river the plants is built on ran dry, and given that we're talking about France biggest river, if they eventually do we would have much bigger problems that shutting down the riverside plants anyway (keep in mind that you van build nuclear plants on seashores as well, and we do for roughly half of them).
The reasons why we shut down (or reduce the power, more often) of some nuclear plants during summer is because we set environmental limits in terms of river temperatures, to protect wildlife.
This is a good thing, don't get me wrong, but it's also am example of the incredibly high bar we put on nuclear operations on every aspects (which we could afford for years, because how efficient they are compared to pretty much any other industries). Another example of that is how coal plants are actually allowed to, and do, emit more radioactive elements in their neighborhood than what's allowed for an NPP.
I wish more industries (and agriculture) would be set to such high environmental constraints but in the meantime there's a clear imbalance against nuclear (the fact that leveling entire forests for coal mining or to install solar fields is allowed, despite being much more damageable in comparison to localized increase in water temperature never cease to appall me).
Using the average electricity produced is not the way to plan power production. I’m sure you’re aware that there are peak usage patterns as well as “wind droughts” resulting in situations where the power generated isn’t enough. You have to look at the worst case scenario and ideally plan for that.
Also worth noting that orders of magnitude more radiation have been released into the environment from fly ash from coal than all nuclear disasters combined.
You draw a false dichotomy .. its now faster and cheaper to build out wind and solar than new nuclear fission SMRs.
Most projections show slow linear growth in fission power .. meanwhile exponential growth in Wind and Solar plants, which is what we need if we ever want to displace gas and coal power plants.
If nuclear fission was such a safe and cheap form of power .. why did we build coal and gas power plants over the past 70 years ?
If nuclear could have provided most of our power economically .. it would already be widespread and we wouldn't be a +1.5C today.
If there were no Chernobyl nor Fukushima .. people might think nuclear was safe.
> Most projections show slow linear growth in fission power
Are these the same projections from places like the IEA that have renewable growth suddenly flattening (something they've hilariously been doing for years)?
Until March 2023, expanding nuclear power in France (the "poster child" for nuclear) was actually prohibited by law. Absolute capacity was capped at current levels, and the law mandated a reduction to below 50% of total.
This law was repealed in March of 2023. With something like a 75% majority, so overwhelming cross-party support.
Which also largely explains why Flamanville was such a disaster. France knows how to build reactors quickly and cheaply: you build lots of the same design in an overlapping fashion, and you do it continuously, so you maintain the industrial capacity and workforce know-how. Flamanville was the exact opposite on all those counts. And the EPR is apparently a bad design. I mean, good once you have it, but way too complicated to build. Which is why it has been discontinued by the manufacturer. There will be no more EPRs, the successor EPR2 is vastly simplified.
3. UK
While the anti-nuclear lobbyists "know" that Hinkley Point C proved the non-viability of nuclear beyond any doubt, the UK government apparently didn't get the memo. They announced plans to quadruple nuclear generating capacity in January 2024, so well after the HPC problems were well-known.
4. Poland
Is getting into nuclear, in a big way. 2 Westinghouse AP-1000 (the Vogtle disaster) have been ordered, contracts are signed and site preparation work has commenced.
That's just the tip of the iceberg, the paperwork for 2 more reactors from South Korea is apparently being finalized and there are a bunch of SMR projects, in part by private companies who want them to directly power industrial processes (process heat?)
5. Japan
Was going to get out of nuclear. Now reactivating plants and will build new ones once the existing ones are activated.
6. USA
Has identified the need for ~200GW of new nuclear capacity. Is currently figuring out how to create the industrial policy required to make that happen.
7. Netherlands
Wanted to build 2 new reacts. Voted in early 2024 to build 4 instead.
8. Sweden
Was getting out of nuclear. Now wants to build 10 new reactors.
9. China
Tripling of capacity with just what is in the works now (20+ building, 70 planned). Currently accelerating the build out.
10. India
On track for tripling of capacity by 2031.
11. South Korea
Was getting out, now expanding.
12. Italy
Got out of nuclear late 80s. Government policy is to have the legal framework for new nuclear in place by the end of this legislature.
I can go on...and on, but I think you get the picture.
I get the picture that lots of statements are being made. My belief is that these will not be turned into actions. The USA claim in particular is ridiculous, a nuclear bro fever dream that has no chance of having any bearing on reality.
No, it's not just "statements being made". It is laws being changed. It is money being made available. It is contracts being finalized. It is sites being designated and earth being moved.
The problem with nuclear was never technical, it was always political. Technically, it's a slam-dunk. For example, the entire nuclear industry cost France € 228 billion. It produced 11000 TWh of electricity. That's cheap. 2.07 Ct/kWh cheap. And reliable. And clean. Quick, too, France converted their electricity to nuclear (and virtually no fossil fuels) in 15 years, from a standing start.
And of course, all that action is accompanied by statements, yes.
So the fact that the politics have now changed is significant, even if "renewable bros" find that hard to accept.
Oh wow, politicians are saying things, so they must be true! /s
My sweet summer child, you are in for a world of disappointment.
We hear rosy plans like this all the time. They don't come true. In China, for example, nuclear construction has been way behind the statements, and this was before the latest massive reductions in PV and (particularly) storage costs. India has had a long history of all talk, little action on nuclear, and now PV is exploding there. In the US, generous federal subsides and loan guarantees were and are going unused. The problem is getting anyone to actually commit, and they don't because nuclear just doesn't make any financial sense.
1. There has been a lot more action than just "politicians saying things"
2. Politics was the only thing holding nuclear back. Thus the change in the politics is, obviously, significant.
3. Nuclear construction in China is ahead and accelerating.
4. India is not talking, they are building. The 2031 goal is stuff they are in the process of building.
5. Nuclear is cheap. France built its nuclear industry for € 228 billion and got 11000 TWh of electricity out of that. 2,07 Cents/kWh
6. Nuclear is not expensive, but it has been extremely risky, mostly because little to none has been built and also because the best plants are very large. We have now built some, so that's been a tremendous de-risking.
For example, both Ukraine and Poland bought Westinghouse AP-1000 reactors. That's the reactor that just went online at Vogtle-3 and Vogtle-4. So are Ukraine and Poland nuts, buying into a design + company with this track record?
Nope, because those plants have been built, so we know we can build them. And we also know what can go wrong, because pretty much everything did. And we know how to not do the things that went wrong.
For example, one of the biggest drivers of delay and cost was the fact that Westinghouse started building before the plans were actually completely done.
Problem is that that they had to submit those plans to the NRC before they started building. And then build to those plans. In theory, this process is a Good Thing™ because it allows a standardized design to be checked once and then built repeatedly, whereas previously the regulations were ad-hoc per construction, making each reactor a custom build, a one-off with no economies of scale.
Alas, it turns out that the plans they submitted, due to not being complete, were not actually buildable as submitted. Oops. So they had to get almost 200 changes approved, and other times had to tear up stuff they had already built, and start again.
We now have designs for the AP-1000 that are buildable. Because they have been built, Vogtle-3 and Vogtle-4 exist and are delivering power to the grid.
We also built or are building a bunch of EPRs. There, one of the major problems (apart from FoaK and no experience in the industry) is that the design simply is difficult to build. So unlike the AP-1000, no more EPR orders. As a matter of fact, EDF has discontinued the EPR, and instead have created a vastly simplified design the EPR2. Which loses some capabilities, but should be dramatically simpler to build.
So different things went wrong, and thus there are different corrective actions.
"The United States will likely need 200 gigawatts of new nuclear generation by 2050 to meet national decarbonization targets. "
This was also the official policy statement of the United States at the Nuclear Energy Summit hosted in Belgium in March 2024.
"For the USA, John Podesta Senior Advisor to the President for Clean Energy, Innovation and Implementation, said the summit was a 21st Century update for the Atoms for Peace vision, and referenced the commitment by countries at COP28 to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050, which he said means 200 GW of new nuclear capacity in the USA. He said a start had already been made and added that the country would also aim to help tackle the climate crisis by helping other countries across the world "build safe, secure, reliable, nuclear power"."
You just clarified your first two "If's" with your last one.
Perception. Coal has killed far more people than nuclear ever has, despite the compounded blunders that led to Chernobyl and Fukushima (storing MOX on TOP of the reactors? Really?).
Wind is a fine thing to build out as a supplemental power source, but it can never satisfy baseline needs, and isn't even putting a dent in replacing fossil fuels -- at best it is helping to marginally slow the expansion of fossil fuel reliance as we add more and more consumption of power with the advancement of technologies across the world. The anti-nuclear movement was heavily funded by the fossil fuel industry from the get-go, and their propaganda has been more successful than they could have dreamed of.
But these perceptions are changing. Even Greta and her green minions are going pro-nuclear these days. It's a slow boat to turn, but there's a sign we might just turn this ship around to avert at least a portion of the looming energy crisis.
> It's sad that some people would rather see the climate change than to accept that nuclear is not that dangerous. Not only Chernobyl had one of the worst designs, which would not be approved today, but its impact is also widely overstated.
The explosion of the reactor at Chernobyl was a gargantuan disaster which still has to be managed. An exclusion zone of roughly 1,000 sq. miles was created. The USSR suppressed information about the disaster, but it killed some thousands of people, we don't know how many, and it cost an unimaginable amount of money and resources to clean up and manage over the decades following.
According to Wikipedia [1]:
> In 2018, Ukraine spent five to seven percent of its national budget on recovery activities related to the Chernobyl disaster.
Granted, Chernobyl was a faulty design, but there was also the disaster at Fukushima, which also required the creation of an exclusion zone.
It wouldn't even have been approved in the west (maybe Britain would do it, considering what they did with the Windscale piles) when it was originally built in the Soviet Union
PWR reactors that were built around that time in the west, which are already physically safer, have strong containment buildings in case something happens. Chornobyl had a more dangerous design no containment building.
Ouch, you've just triggered the die-hard nuclear energy fans on HN. I've seen countless debates on this topic.
The first thing that will be mentioned is that Chernobyl is an absolut outlier, an event that can never ever happen again or is so unlikely to happen again that it basically equals never in practice.
The second point typically raised is that Chernobyl wasn't as catastrophic as the public remembers. Despite the fact that a significant number of the 600k liquidators who worked on the cleanup received radiation doses that resulted in cancer one or two decades later with a statistical much higher chance, when compared to the overall population.
Then, they will argue that while green energy is beneficial, we need a combination of energy sources due to storage challenges. They often cite France as a perfect example, highlighting its successful use of nuclear energy alongside renewable sources.
I'm of the opinion that nuclear is done for due to economical reasons, but yes, Chernobyl is very not relevant to any discussion of modern nuclear power.
Chernobyl only happened due to the way that particular reactor type was made, and even back then nobody but the USSR did it that way, and the accident ensured nobody else ever did. Its failure mode is not inherent to nuclear but specific to the RBMK design.
Well, I don't think the reactor design mattered all that much to the many liquidator that died from cancer, but as you pointed out this is very not relevant to any discussion of modern nuclear power. For this reason I will leave it as that.
> Well, I don't think the reactor design mattered all that much to the many liquidator that died from cancer
Maybe not to them personally, but the reason they were needed, and died at all was the design.
The RBMK's design was uniquely awful in that it had a positive void coefficient that lead to it blowing its top off, lacked a containment building to contain the mess, and the graphite moderator burns in the air and spews radioactive material into the air. That's a whole lot of things that could have been done far better, and are done better in modern designs.
Better designs can still melt down, yes, but they lack such an awful failure mode. Liquidators were needed because the burning reactor was contaminating everything around it every second it was burning and uncovered.
Better designs are less prone to failure in the first place, and when they fail it's more on the side of being a very expensive problem. They destroy the reactor but they don't require throwing lives at the problem to contain it.
The key point I want to emphasize is that the specifics of reactor design become secondary given the multitude of other risks involved. Consider the example of Fukushima, which, despite having a modern and robust reactor design, still succumbed to disaster. Similarly, the potential risks to a nuclear power plant located in a conflict zone, such as Ukraine.
Human factors further complicate safety measures, as the potential for human error or intentional sabotage (e.g., a terrorist attack) remains a constant threat. Moreover, natural disasters are indifferent to the technology used; they can devastate any facility, especially with increasing likelihood in the context of climate change.
The only rational approach is to acknowledge that incidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima are, in a sense, 'normal'. They fall within the middle of the probability spectrum, which explains why they have occurred. The critical question is whether we are prepared to accept these kinds of accidents as a normal part of nuclear energy production. Much like car crashes, which no one wants, they happen despite all safety measures and are, statistically speaking, normal occurrences.
I think Fukushima shows that reactor accidents will happen from time to time, and when they happen, it's a disaster.
Sure, you can say that the operators at Fukushima were negligent (they were), but that is something you have to account for. Negligence happens. Earthquakes happen. Hurricanes and tornadoes happen. Tsunamis happen. Wildfires happen. Terrorism happens.
> I think Fukushima shows that reactor accidents will happen from time to time, and when they happen, it's a disaster.
IMO, the most important thing about Fukushima is not how much damage it might or might not have caused.
The most important thing about Fukushima, is that it counters the argument that "Chernobyl could only happen because it was a bad Russian design" (often with an implied emphasis on it being a Russian design, instead of just being a bad design). The Fukushima reactors were not of a "bad Russian design", and yet the containment was breached and radioactive isotopes escaped.
That is: before Fukushima, one could dismiss Chernobyl with a "this can't happen here". After Fukushima, it's harder to make that argument.
FWIW if you're going to argue for non-renewable energy as a solution for filling in when renewable energy sources dip, nuclear energy doesn't help with any of that.
It's important to understand the way different kinds of power plants deliver energy:
- renewables (wind, solar, tides) are highly variable in their output and the amount of energy produced by each individual wind power plant or solar panel is very small; the output can be dialed down by turning off individual power plants but the amount to which it can be dialed up depends on the weather and is outside of human control
- fossil fuels (gas, coal, lignite) and bio fuels are highly dynamic in their output because you can literally just add or remove fuel to control it, making them very predictable; they are however also literally just burning fuel, i.e. producing energy by producing CO2, and usually have some costs associated with restarting (i.e. reheating) after being fully turned off
- nuclear reactors are extremely stable and can generate a consistent large amount of energy highly predictably; however shutting them off and turning them back on can take literal days and they usually need constant water supply for cooling in order to operate
In other words, water-cooled nuclear reactors are a bad choice in any region that may experience frequent droughts (which may be hard to predict with the changing climate) and they can best be understood as an "offset" for the baseline production.
A real-life energy grid is in constant flux. Loads change as appliances and machines get turned on or off, frequencies drift all the time and need to be readjusted and renewable production supply can change at a moment's notice.
If there is a high baseline that is currently served by fossil fuels, nuclear is worth considering as a replacement for that. But in most places where nuclear would be an option, that baseline can already be easily served mostly by renewables. What's needed is a way to time-shift the overproduction to a later time when renewable production drops. That means storage technologies, not power plants. And as a stop-gap fossils are better suited for filling in the gaps by idling at a low output and being boosted up as the output from renewables drops.
A dead account replied to this in good faith so let me address this as I can't comment directly:
> [Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station] uses sewage; people are very regular at producing waste water.
Not really, no. Germany for example ran very successful campaigns for limiting water use in the 1990s and earlier and a lot of household appliances (shower heads, faucets, toilets) were made "more efficient". As a consequence some municipalities had issues from sewers running dry due to too little waste water and had to flush them with (clean) water to continue operating them.
This likely won't turn into a problem in the US in the near future but if your plan hinges on consumers being excessively wasteful with resources, you might run into some snags as soon as those resources become more limited or more expensive.
> Pumped hydro can work very well to smooth out variability from the baseload.
Yes, that's an energy storage technology that isn't a battery. The reason Switzerland makes heavy use of it is that it only works when you have a landscape with a lot of changes in altitude (i.e. large hills or mountains). It doesn't help in very flat regions. It's a great solution but it's just one solution. We need more. And we also need to improve the grids themselves.
At the same time that seems like very little, it's in the range of a single large wind turbine (e.g. https://www.vestas.com/en/products/offshore/V236-15MW). I'm not convinced this will be anything but a niche application for defence or other remote outposts which for some reason cannot rely on solar+wind+storage.
You could also use the heat directly instead of converting it to electricity. Now you could retrofit towns and cities with district heating.
Large companies with huge campuses could also use it for electricity + heating. Industry could also use the heat for chemical processes.
There are also places with small grids, where a bigger reactor can't be easily integrated, like islands or remote villages. I think Canada wants to use their BWRX-300 SMR for remote grids.
Large companies with huge campuses have huge amounts of rooftop space that are usually perfect for solar arrays + storage. The only place this makes sense is remote areas at latitudes where solar is impractical. Or if it could be made small enough to fit on a few semi-trucks, pseudo-temporary military bases.
Failsafe design. Safe, reliable, automatic, unattended shutdown. Nothing more can be done because people are their own worst enemy. Incompetence and dissolution is the ultimate end product of every organization whose members not bound by ideology or harsh punishment as the incumbents grift away what remains on the inevitable way down and the incentive structures crumble or the money simply runs out.
From Admiral Rickover's 'Paper Reactor' memo (1953)[1]:
"An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics:
1. It is simple.
2. It is small.
3. It is cheap.
4. It is light.
5. It can be built very quickly.
6. It is very flexible in purpose (“omnibus reactor”)
7. Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components.
8. The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now."
They take longer to build, which means the cost overruns are worse, and because you build so few of them the learning curve doesn't kick in to reduce costs. Similar philosophy to SpaceX raptor engines; build lots of them to drive down the per-unit cost.
This is true for water cooled reactors, which these are, thanks to a regulatory environment going back to the Nixon administration that mostly makes other designs unavailable, as the cost of safety measures is quite high, but comes down with scale on a per-watt basis.
The exciting thing about small modular reactors is with alternative designs, such as molten salt designs and alternative fuels such as thorium, where the risk of meltdown and hydrogen explosion are not an issue, so this cost-of-safety factor falls away heavily. Molten salt DOES bring with it issues of corrosion, so it's not a panacea, but the idea is that some of these alternative designs can bring the power generation closer to where the power is used, which raises a variety of benefits, including being able to potentially use the heat generated in a useful manner in addition to the electricity, rather than solely as something to be safely dissipated. Also, of course, you get rid of the big single points of failure and end up with a more resilient power grid.
I can't speak to this particular company's offering but I am glad to at least see some interest in the technology growing, as nuclear at this point is the only realistic way to both even consider replacing existing fossil fuel use as well as powering the increased energy demands of the future particularly in light of rapidly developing emerging markets and much heavier power draw from technologies such as generative large language models (so called "AI").
The world needs sealed, passively safe reactors that can be mass produced (at least in the tens of thousands), last for some number of years (10-15-20) and then gets shipped back to have its fuel reprocessed at some appropriately secured central location.
Traditional nuclear power plants are a risky proposition today because they are large, complex, expensive, and they take a long, long time to complete. Not least because they futz around with refueling and cooling spent fuel onsite.
The long completion time means they are hard to finance, you will have one or more (financial) black swan events (eg financial crisis, wars) during the construction period, and there is no such thing as someone who has prior experience building a power plant before starting because the same power plant is never built twice in consecutive generations. Even the "serial produced" ones are different.
The only way you can make nuclear cheaper is to get the manufacturing and commissioning time down to 1-2 years and no more than 3 years. Which means they have to be small and as simple as possible. Size is only relevant as a means to achieve simplicity. Mobility and widely distributed operation are pointless goals in themselves. That might be a possibility to investigate later, but it is not important initially.
If someone starts talking about a mobile power plant they have 100% the wrong focus. First there must be a power plant. And when you have one, you probably really, really want to bolt them down so they don't go missing.
I see two issues that have nothing to do with the objective safety of those reactors.
First, people will not want microreactors in their neighbourhood because of fear of radiation. These fears may be irrational, but we should expect them to lead to protests. It's hard to tell if those fears will be confirmed, hopefully not. Nevertheless, property prices may go down in such areas.
Second, based of past evidence from other industries, as soon as microreactors are available a community of "tinkerers" will emerge and I would fear those more than a properly designed, tested, and maintained microreactor that's reliably monitored 24x7.
Objectively speaking, the smallest reactor would require at least a few tens of kg of fissile material, due to the physics involved. So due to the proliferation and terrorism risks, even the smallest district nuclear would still need to be a large industrial facility with heavy security, owned by a powerful entity that can foot the insurance and legal costs etc.
So it's not something any amateur tinkerer would touch any time soon.
Good point. They'd have to, and this would mean the energy companies model of "privatise the profits, socialise the losses" might go into hyperdrive.
On the other hand, nuclear energy is heavily subsidised already anyway, and its proponents seem to be very good at ignoring that, so maybe this does not matter to most.
> owned by a powerful entity that can foot the insurance and legal costs etc.
This is not the case with current "large" reactors, why would it be different here? Those risks you mention are mutualized because no single entity but a state could bear them.
It is absolutely the case with the current "large" reactors. They are owned by huge companies not by the next door dude. This is what the commenter said. It would be the same even for "microreactors".
> Those risks you mention are mutualized because no single entity but a state could bear them.
You are talking about something else. You are saying they are not big enough to cover all possible liability. That is not what cornholio is saying.
I see what you are getting at and I agree, I could have phrased that better.
So here is what I meant to ask: the capacity to cover liability apparently has no bearing on ownership of today's large reactors, so why would it be different with smaller reactors?
From what I understand, TRISO is more about reactor safety than proliferation. A proliferating entity could easily ground up the particles and chemically leech the useful fissile material, they need to do enrichment anyway which is orders of magnitude more difficult.
A good anti-proliferation design are traveling wave U238 fast breeders. They are filled with depleted uranium and breed plutonium 239, but, due to the long residence time in the reactor, the isotopic vector is heavily polluted with things like Pu240 which spontaneous fissions reducing the yield, Pu238 which generates massive heat etc. This reactor grade plutonium is completely worthless as a bomb material and would require reprocessing that is even more difficult then enrichment of natural Uranium.
Alas, none of the TWR proposals (CANDLE, Terrapower etc.) ever made it into production.
Bankruptcy in less than five years. Those small reactors are at best very expensive and have very limited usefulness. You would have to imagine a use case where there's no reliable power grid and no space or climate for solar and wind, which are both cheap, save and scalable. Even emergency systems run reliably on diesel generators and batteries. The reasonable use cases they describe have already been covered. They are competing in a market with better solutions, which is why they have to list "crypto" and "bitcoin" to advertise their own scam.
> Also, no one would care if it's green or not in case of a full-scale war.
If you're a nuclear country in a full-scale war with Russia or China, you are dead. Your family is dead. Your friends are dead. Everyone you know or love or hate is dead. Everyone who isn't dead is dying or going to die. Those who survive will be holed up in bunkers built with the expectancy that the population will naturally thin out (i.e. die off) to make the scarce supplies last or they will be on the surface facing starvation if they don't die from disease, weather or lack of access to potable water first.
I don't know at which point after the Cold War people forgot what "mutually assured destruction" means but as soon as you fire the first nuclear weapon, humanity ends. And it doesn't matter if the weapon is nuclear or not because most weapons systems that can deliver nuclear payloads can also deliver conventional payloads and all that matters is what your enemy thinks you're doing.
This kind of rhetoric:
> Your only priority would be to kill as many Russians as possible to survive.
This will make your enemy err on the side of you intending nuclear annihilation and respond in kind. The only reason we haven't killed ourselves yet is that a couple of times some level-headed soldiers weren't myopic enough to fall for their country's nationalist fervor and instead refused to follow the orders they were given.
If the US enters a full-scale war with Russia or China or any other serious nuclear threat, the bombs will fall before you have to worry about FEMA camps or the US national guard knocking on your barn door to confiscate your rusty diesel barrels.
And people keep promoting nuclear "everywhere" without asking the question of what that means for countries that aren't the US or the small number of existing nuclear powers. Proliferation.
Are people really going to argue that the best energy production scheme for Brazil is 80,000 1MW nuclear reactors? Are they all going to be secured?
Neither side will use the nukes? Are you sure? Really, really, bet your life sure?
(It's possible that there will be an "irregular" war where one or both sides are not officially flagged as such, but that's also going to be lower intensity. Arguably Ukraine is already in this state)
No, you do what Iran (a potential nuclear power) did when Israel (a known nuclear power) committed an explicit act of war by bombing its consulate and killing some of its top brass: you respond with an appropriately measured but ultimately symbolic counter-attack and hope the other side understands that this is an opportunity to likewise exercise caution in its counter-counter-attack.
Or you do what the US and Soviet Union did for most of the Cold War: a cold war involving proxies. Or you do what Russia did in Ukraine and the US did in Syria: covert operations with (diplomatically speaking) plausible deniability.
A "war between US and Russia/China" would not start with a full-scale armed conflict. It would be a gradual escalation of force. Contrary to what cold war propaganda may have conveyed: the other side is rarely suicidal. At that scale it's more Realpolitik than 1980s Hollywood villain plots.
> Your only priority would be to kill as many Russians as possible to survive.
How would killing anyone (Russians or Chinese or whatever) would help you survive?
A boots-on-the-ground invasion of the USA is absolutely not a realistic prospect. In case a war goes hot ICBMs is the thing you should worry about.
Honestly I just don't understand what you imagine might happen where "kill as many Russians as possible" is the path to survival for someone residing in the USA.
Because I don't want the West to fail? You must be ready to protect yourself. Calling nuclear reactors environmentally unfriendly is pure insanity. It's a suicide in a situation when your enemies are actively plotting plans on how to kill you. You can't be naive. Ukrainians already made this mistake.
> Calling nuclear reactors environmentally unfriendly is pure insanity
The risk is real. You may argue about its priority, but that doesn't change the reality.
> Ukrainians
Worst possible example, given the existing disaster exclusion zone in their country, and everyone watching nervously as shells fall around the Zaprozhia nuclear plant.
Diesel generators are really dirty and they need to be regularly tested in order to function as backup, which in city cores, nature protected areas or protected water areas is a major issue.
Batteries are better. They are a bit heavy, carries a fire risk, and can be a bit expensive, but can work depending on situation. I do know however that data centers being built in my country are not using batteries for backup. They want to use diesel generators given costs and capacity, and they also want to use places with clean fresh water for cooling. Thus they ask for environmental protection exemptions so they can use diesel generators.
Small reactors are already used in environments where the unit is self contained with no environmental impact during operation (passive cooling). The discussion of environmental impact of those units are generally about decommissions once they are removed from the environment where they have been operating.
Large generators are not self contained and usually need a lot of water for cooling, and they have waste heat. They are also very large concrete buildings, so environmental considerations are needed there.
Use batteries and ban diesel generators. If places that uses diesel generators find batteries cheaper, safer and better than other alternatives then they should use that.
Burning massive amount of diesel in population centers or in nature reserves should be not be an available option. Do you object to that?
> Bankruptcy in less than five years. Those small reactors are at best very expensive and have very limited usefulness.
If I were them, I'd be talking to the (US) military.
Their reactors are:
> The new generation of advanced microreactors can produce between 1 and 20 megawatts of thermal energy that could be used directly as heat or converted to electric power.
You wouldn't necessary have fewer reactors (2-4?) than generators (4-8) because of redundancy, but if you don't have to regularly truck fuel to the camp, that certainly simplifies logistics. (Or perhaps as much fuel, as vehicles would still needed, though with 'excess' power perhaps going (mild) hyrbid could be possible.)
I could also see applications in the energy sector (offshore, remote land locations).
Not sure how many 'off grid' communities would be up for a <20 MW power source.
That is certainly going to be the #1 use. It was a huge problem during the occupation of Afghanistan that all electricity had to be generated from diesel that was shipped 1500+km from ports in Pakistan, through dubiously-controlled areas.
That cost $2trn in total, proving the unlimited supply of money for bad ideas provided they involve killing the right people.
(It's interesting to compare that with the costs of WW2 and how urgent projects were handled then. WW2 involved a real threat to US territory, so everyone was on board with rapidly developing innovative solutions. Afghanistan, by comparison, was reprisals against a landlocked country which posed no real threat, so once the occupation started everyone lost interest - but it was still heresy to question spending the money. No attempt was made to really solve the power problem, because nobody would ever question the $300m a day)
Highly unlikely. No way the US Army will put a nuclear reactor in a place that can be overrun by insurgents. Any other piece of equipment, you can put a stick of TNT next to it and detonate it on your way out of there. Not so with a nuclear reactor.
No they have not been covered, as mentioned in a root comment, I work at a remote mine site in the sub-arctic where 95% of energy comes from diesel. All the inuit villages and all the mines this high up generate power the same way. This could make a huge difference. That said, I'm very cognisant that the quantity of sites is limited. However, Canadian, Russian, Svalbardian, Greenlandic mining is picking up and I think these could be a key way to enable electric mining as climate change opens up these new areas of exploraiton and exploitation of mineral reserves.
In The Netherlands, we have lots of days where electricity pricing is negative and there are even days where prices are so negative, it also covers taxes and you effectively get paid to use electricity.
Try and imagine how a nuclear reactor makes any sense in this context? Unfortunately the right-wing government has plans to build 4 reactors, which will be an absolute disaster for the tax payers. No commercial entity will want to touch nuclear as it's impossible to make money with so much wind and solar.
Try to imagine how many renewables + storage you can build for the price of just one nuclear reactor. It's not even a debate. And as we shore up our grids (especially on a European scale) we don't need new nuclear reactors.
Indeed, the problem right now is not production. We have overproduction in parts of Europe. The problem is storage and distribution. We need to improve the grids and invest in storage technologies to better time-shift renewable energy instead of shutting down wind parks when there's too much energy from solar on a day that's both very sunny and very windy.
Was there already a company that failed badly on this?
Found that running them and maintaining them, and dealing
with the increase of nuclear waste to be processed.
(Not more in terms of total weight but as a function of
power generated.
I work at a remote mine just south of the Arctic Circle, the perfect place for this type of thing as diesel-fueled power generation is just about the only way all these remote sites have reliable power.
The cost certainty any SMR company is going to need to sell a reactor is going to be extremely difficult for any company. The mines would be "happy" to go green, but even with carbon taxes, big up front CAPEX is going to be a hard sell for an unproven tech (SMR, not nuclear specifically). My guess is that offering selling the power (OPEX) as a fully managed and staffed service is the only way they're going to make this work.
I'd love to see us switch over, I'd also love to see it be sustainable and realistic. Let's hope for all of our sakes' someone figures it out, be it Nano, Global First, whomever.
Many people may not recall that from 1962 to 1972, a small nuclear reactor was operational in a very remote location (Antarctica McMurdo Station). The cost of maintaining the reactor proved to be higher than using 1,500 gallons of diesel oil daily. Consequently, the reactor was discontinued, and diesel generators were reintroduced as the primary power source.
This is more or less fraud. Not legal fraud, let's just call it "vaporware".
Here's their IPO prospectus [1].
Whenever you hear about some new nuclear startup or reactor design or anything, in the US, you head to the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) website and see where they are in the approval process. Many are only at the stage of pre-approval, but you get an idea what the NRC thinks of them.
These guys are completely absent from NRC's radar.
It goes without saying that no reactor can be commercialized under any form without the NRC approval. How long does it take to get this approval, if everything goes well. In the case of NuScale, the application was filed in January 2017 [2], and the pre-application started in 2008. The approval was published in the Federal Register in February 2023. So, start to finish, 15 years. And this was for a pressurized water reactor design.
These guys here don't even mention what their design is, but we can infer it does not use water as a coolant. Which means it's not one of the reactors that the NRC is familiar with (as it is the regulator of all the 96 commercial reactors in the US, all cooled by water). Good luck getting an approval in 15 years.
Here's the thing: if you go to the webpage of any nuclear company, be it established or just a startup, you'll find at least 100 times more details on their design than what you'll find at Nano Nuclear.
These guys give Nuclear a bad name. Shame on them.
182 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 232 ms ] threadOn another front a loooong standing high level global 'plan' for nuclear waste storage in Australia has advanced.
As a concept it's kicked about since the dawn of the atomic age, with Mark Oliphant, Tube Alloys, and beyond. It gained propasal status several times, eg. as Pangea in the late 1990s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangea_Resources
and more recently it's back on the table as a somewhat redacted clause of the AU-UK-US (AUKUS) partnership:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AUKUS
https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/02/01/aukus-nuclear-waste-sto...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/poison-portal-...
with many rumours and little confirmed as to the extent of intended nuclear waste storage, whether just military waste from Australian submarines, or more general UK+US military waste, or even further.
I am not personally opposed to a dump. The income stream for what is basically passive income as rent would be astronomically beneficial to the location, and the economy. We have some obligation to take back the products of our uranium mining, and compared to other choices Australia is a good pick to store radionucleotides in. We're stable politically, economically, and geologically.
I would be entirely happy for the dump to be dug underneath my house. I live on a floodplain with acid sulphate soils but I imagine at some depth, there's a good structural basis to do it. There are probably far better locations.
it may be in AUKUS, but can I point out that the US has already refused to confirm if Australia will have sole control of the Virginia class subs we've been half-promised, nor has the promise been kept in any real sense because there is already a supply chain crisis behind the subs, we've paid the US to keep the factories alive, and we don't know what the AUKUS class will look like or who will actually make them or when.. yet.
This deal is half-baked, at best.
You're being generous. :-)
To be clear I have no objection to the nuclear aspect if handly well, it's the entire debacle from start to end that's on the nose .. I don't accept the case for hugely expensive nuclear subs over the pre existing French order (which had other, albeit lesser, issues).
In an entirely unrelated aside; see: https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/05/14/scott-morrison-memoir-r...
But it would make a lot of sense for Australia to get a fleet of ballistic-missile capable subs, put conventional warheads in them, but ensure they could become "nuclear capable" with a munition switch: these are 30+ year assets in most cases with long lead times. How comfortable we should feel about being under the US/NATO nuclear umbrella is a fluid thing over those timeframes.
Remarkably higher than intuition would suggest. Things happen for reasons, so when something happens there is an unusually good chance that it'll happen again quickly because events aren't happening independently. Like how if somebody is struck by lightening and don't seek shelter, there is a heightened chance it'll happen again shortly.
Why integrate four business lines? What's the point of this? This sounds counterintuitive. If I were even a 100% sole owner of four business lines I would rather separate them into four companies even if they began as one. What am I overlooking?
The business may well be organised as multiple companies internally, but that's not what this is about.
It's sad that some people would rather see the climate change than to accept that nuclear is not that dangerous. Not only Chernobyl had one of the worst designs, which would not be approved today, but its impact is also widely overstated.
I grew up in the area affected by Chernobyl (Kaluga oblast) and I had classmates evacuated from Chernobyl itself. For the first 10 years, it was important to have geiger counters when you go shopping on farmer's market, but that's about it.
Compare it to the billions affected by the heat today. Nuclear scare is a part of the reason these people suffer.
That said - if solar & wind + batteries are cheaper and available in an area, that's a good way to go. Just don't claim that nuclear is bad. And hopefully microreactors are cheaper and faster to deploy than classic nuclear reactors, and they have a chance to be useful for the areas without large reserves of solar and wind.
Comparatively, renewables are set to add 800GW this year. Yes that will translate to "only" about 130GW of average power which is an energy equivalent of about 150GW of nuclear capacity, but that still means replacing all of the world nuclear (372GW) in 2.5 years.
Wind already produces as much overall energy as nuclear (around 2550 TWh/y) and solar, 2/3 as much and will equal nuclear in probably 1 year. And almost all of this capacity has been built in the last 5 years for solar and last year 10 years for nuclear, with deployment speeds fast accelerating.
There's simply no comparison. Nuclear has already lost.
Classic nuclear did lose. Microreactors have a chance unless irrational fear prevents it from entering the game.
And yes, it gives me a great pleasure to see the rapid deployment of wind & solar installations.
How many microreactors do we need to replace all the world's final energy consumption (ok around 20% will be replaced by heat pumps net energy gain)? That's 11,000 GW of continuous power. A million 10 MW ones? How many people does that take to build and maintain across the entire value chain? Sounds like hundreds of millions people, easily 10 or maybe 20% of entire world's workforce. Not going to happen.
Solar is cheap because it has hit the economy of scale. Hell, fences made of solar (sometimes, not even connected!) are now more cheaper than those made of wood (at least, in some countries).
While I would not bet my money on the economic feasibility of nuclear microreactors, I would like them to have a fair market trial. If they do succeed, we all win.
For one-offs, the economies of size win, because then the economies of production don't actually get a chance to do their thing. So kick-starting is a problem. However, the problems with the EPR and the AP-1000 hint (do not prove) that we may be hitting size limitations.
The strategy that Rolls-Royce is pursuing seems promising: factory-built microreactors (so economies of production) that you can plop into existing coal-powered plants to upgrade them to nuclear. That way you reduce the issues with the non-factory-built parts.
There are a lot of countries that can match $25 billion in expenditure - Musk spent almost twice that on Twitter - and the real cost is probably lower. We've also got a lower-bound on the difficulty of producing missiles based on what North Korea can do.
> including many private entities (Elon Musk for sure but quite probably, many much smaller ones, plus churches as well)
Modern (that is since the end of the middle ages) State exists because they enforce the “monopoly of violence”, there's no way any private individual could be allowed to have nukes. Even in Russia, the realm of Oligarchs' PMCs (well before Prigojin assassination) the State always maintained full control on its nukes (and when Russia was a failed state at the beginning of the 90s, the US worked hard to make sure it was the case). Private entities with nukes could only happen in the event of a complete collapse of the US as a State, in which case nuclear proliferation would be the least of your problems (and even then, I don't see China not intervening to stop that from happening anyway, like the US did in Russia)
There’s room for both solutions here, and frankly we need all of them because it’s not just about intermittency. We urgently need to quit fossil fuels entirely, implying nuclear energy sources are rolled out even if they cease to become necessary. That’s a lot better than ignoring the option and continuing to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and polluting our air.
Let me come and defend the California strategy for the energy production. As can be seen on the California grid status page ([1]) (click on the Supply tab, find batteries and play with dates), the battery capacity grew from negligible to something that eclipses imports in the peak consumption hours. I fully expect that in 2-3 years, California will have enough of solar + storage to stop firing its gas generators and importing coal electricity from Utah.
1. https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx
A Tesla has maybe 70 kWh of batteries. There are 283 million motor vehicles in the US. Electrify them all at that rate and it's 20 TWh of storage, about 40 hours worth of the average US grid consumption.
It's not like turning nuclear reactors on and off is trivial, nuclear power plants are not used as peakers either so either we use batteries or we'll rely on gas for a while.
That's why I'm advocating for nuclear. It's not meant to turn on and off -- fine, but it will buy us time to invest in storage infrastructure and develop plans to move those electrons around at a moment's notice. We're not there yet -- not by a long shot. Someone pointed to California as a leader in this field. Even if California manages to piece together something, do you think the 49 other states will follow suit? Certainly not with this federal government at the helm.
Speaking in general terms, I'm guessing these nuclear facilities probably have a capital runway of a few decades. Hopefully in that time, we'll have the storage networks and plans to offset peaks and cover intermittent lulls at the energy source.
The priority is to stop GHG emissions, and it's absolutely absurd to me that we're willing to sit on this technology from irrational fear while we poison our planet and our bodies. It should outrage people here how many die from pollution and how many more will die from climate changes. Enough is enough.
One of the objections against nuclear is that it takes way too long to build (for instance, the latest nuclear reactor near where I live has been on construction for decades, and is still far from being complete). Which means it can't help "buy us time".
In the 1980s wind & solar had already lost; and by a substantially bigger margin. Yet here we are. The potential for nuclear energy is still substantially greater than that of renewable power and eventually one of these companies will find a way to exploit that potential if we let them look.
Nuclear works fine. So does Wind and Solar. All three have proponents and opponents and which has more pace, or likelihood of deployment is not subject to their actual ability to supply power, but to external forces which do not relate to that power at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation
They are OK as an addition to dispatchable sources, which is why the vast majority of industrialized nations are now planning for a mix of nuclear and intermittent renewables.
Those who plan to use both nuclear and wind/solar don't do it for the dispatchability.
That turns out not to be completely not the case. As in not even close.
First, modern nuclear power plants can do load-following just fine, you often just don't want to because their variable costs are so low that it just makes more sense to keep them running.
Second, the problem with intermittent renewables is that they can't provide power when you need it. Even when you don't load-follow as much, that is not the problem of nuclear.
> As soon as you've ramped up a nuclear reactor to full power, the weather has changed
That's a problem of the intermittent renewables, not of nuclear. You don't make the clown-energy the primary and force everything else to adapt to that.
> Those who plan to use both nuclear and wind/solar don't do it for the dispatchability.
Yeah they do. Dispatchability in terms of grid demand, not in terms of compensating for intermittency.
So, I read a bit and this seems to be actually true, just looking at it from a technical feasibility standpoint [1]. (This is actually the first time someone refuted this point when I made it. ;) )
> Second, the problem with intermittent renewables is that they can't provide power when you need it. Even when you don't load-follow as much, that is not the problem of nuclear.
I didn't say they were, though, and this is not an argument regarding your premise.
> Yeah they do. Dispatchability in terms of grid demand, not in terms of compensating for intermittency.
From a technical standpoint that is true, but, as you've mentioned above: Load-following is not something you can do with nuclear, as the LCOE then quickly meets the other sources of energy ([1], chapter 4).
> That's a problem of the intermittent renewables, not of nuclear. You don't make the clown-energy the primary and force everything else to adapt to that.
Yeah, it's just that that the grid does not end at the gate of the nuclear power plant. Maybe a bit less snark would be helpful in a discussion that can be had based on available data. Referring to solar and wind as clown-energy essentially ends all discussion. Otherwise, people could also bring up arguments such as the limited availability of fuel and the fact that thermal energy generation itself would become a driving factor for global warming if we would still depend on it by the end of the century.
[1] https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
Yeah, you kind of did:
"Nuclear is almost as non-dispatchable?"
That "almost as" implies not just similarity in degree (which we saw isn't true), but even greater similarity in kind, because otherwise the two are just not comparable in the first place.
"My iPad M4 is almost as fast as a Ferrari" doesn't really make sense, except as humor.
> limited availability of fuel
Not true.
> the fact that thermal energy generation itself would become a driving factor for global warming
Also not true.
And, nuclear is not dispatchable either, because it can't be regulated, it's either "on" or "off" (and going from "off" to "on" takes several days due to xenon poisoning).
https://www.energy.gov/articles/cop28-countries-launch-decla...
And you're wrong about nuclear. Brief intro:
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2021/ph241/lecroy2/
The objection to overbuild and storage is economic more than innately about turbines.
Dispatchable and Base load are classic models of nuclear advocacy which are fine, but not unanswerable.
Solar overbuild and batteries alone generally can't handle the burden. You need overbuild and batteries and gas backup. And if you want that gas backup to be hydrogen, you need even more overbuild and electrolysers on top. So quadrupling the very expensive infrastructure that you then have mostly sitting around idle.
You can't get rid of the intermittency problem. You can only move it around, somewhat, at enormous expense.
And the generating capacity required you need is also insane. And that's a quote: "...which challenges the economic sanity of 100% intermittent renewable targets."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...
Your comments about intermittency are demonstrated to be wrong by detailed modeling. Using the tools available (various kinds of storage, transmission, demand dispatch, efficiency) intermittency can be dealt with at an overall cost lower than trying to use nuclear at its current cost.
I believe that link you are pointing to assumes batteries are used for long term storage. This is a common error (if error it is rather than deliberate deception) that inflates the cost of a 100% RE system considerably.
The "insane" comment is just a handwave. The world is going to spend something like a quadrillion dollars on energy this century. Renewables are very likely going to be the least-cost way of powering the world, when the $1000/tonne externalities of CO2 are included.
The situation is similar in most of the developed world.
> Your comments about intermittency are demonstrated to be wrong by detailed modeling
Actually: they are not. All the detailed models show this exact problem, such as the paper I linked.
> The "insane" comment is just a handwave.
No, the "insane" comment is exactly the conclusion of the people who do the detailed modeling.
As this paper (and many others) show, renewables are great as long as they are used for part of energy production. Trying for 100% renewables is the part that's insane.
I recently had a close look at one of the "studies" by Fraunhofer that are frequently touted by renewable advocates as showing how feasible 100% renewables are.
I can't imagine they actually read the study.
For Germany, they say we need 750 GW of Wind/Solar + 500 GWh of batteries + 150 GW of gas plants + the electrolysers to produce the gas. In addition they also assume a massive increase in efficiency and thus reduction in consumption.
Our current electricity generation needs are around 70 GW. OK, some of that is for electrification of other sectors, but for that they also assume massive synergy effects.
This is fantasy-land material that makes the Brexiteer visions of "sunny uplands" appear to be voices of restraint and reason.
That's primary hydro. As I already told you, that's not pumped hydro. You don't seem to be understanding this point, so let me explain in more detail.
Primary hydro involves exploiting natural water flows, extracting energy from water that falls at higher elevations as it flows down to lower elevations. It is limited by these natural water flows, and the need to be on the rivers in which the water is flowing.
Pumped hydro, on the other hand, creates its own water flow. It does not need to exploit natural precipitation. It can recycle the water it uses, getting much more energy flow per unit of water (until the water seeps or evaporates away, but that is slow.) It can be placed in locations that aren't on rivers. As an example, consider this PHES project in an arid part of the Great Basin in Nevada:
https://www.whitepinepumpedstorage.com/
Notice the graphics with two reservoirs, constructed on flat areas by surrounding them with earthen walls, sitting in the middle of a desert without any permanent rivers in sight.
The potential for this sort of pumped hydro is enormous anywhere there is sufficient vertical relief. In Australia, for example, the potential is some 100x what would be needed for a 100% RE grid. They've built a global PHES geographical database for finding places around the world (where they have data; Russia is excluded for example).
http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/
Go play with this; the opportunities are vast.
PHES is not suitable for flat terrain, so it can't be a complete solution in general, but to call it maxed out is very wrong.
> Actually: they are not. All the detailed models show this exact problem, such as the paper I linked.
Let's look at a review paper.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
"With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive."
> For Germany, they say we need 750 GW of Wind/Solar + 500 GWh of batteries + 150 GW of gas plants + the electrolysers to produce the gas. In addition they also assume a massive increase in efficiency and thus reduction in consumption.
Battery storage is approaching $100/kWh (not cells, the whole turnkey system) in China now. So, 500 GWh would be $50B. If the batteries have a lifespan of 20 years that's $2.5B/year (+ interest). Can you not afford this? That's less than half of what Germany spends on pizza.
Also, consider how many GWh of storage in cars would be needed if all the cars in Germany were BEVs (I get about 3 TWh).
Yes, you made that claim. However, it's not true. The page is about all hydro in Germany.
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/themen/klima-energie/erneuerb...
You also need geography for pumped hydro. Somewhere to pump the water to.
> Battery storage is approaching $100/kWh
"Approaching". A Tesla Megapack is more than 3x that.
It's funny how EE fanboys just extrapolate trends into the future. At the rate nuclear power plants were getting cheaper they'd be free now. Well, had we not stopped building them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Of course, this is very little battery, because that particular Fraunhofer study did most of the backup using gas. With 150 GW of gas fired plants.
150 GW.
Let that sink in. That's more than double the current total demand. Just for backup of the 750 GW of intermittent generators. No wonder that scenario doesn't need all that much battery.
Now add the cost of the electroylysers needed to create all that gas.
https://taz.de/Wasserstoffprojekt-abgebrochen/!5974569/
> "Approaching". A Tesla Megapack is more than 3x that.
If your argument depends on selecting expensive rather than cheap versions of a technology, I'll do the same with nuclear. Let's use the most disastrous expensive nuclear efforts as representative, shall we?
Or, we could just acknowledge that once a lower price point has been demonstrated for storage, the market will move in that direction. Storage, unlike nuclear, doesn't experience out of the blue cost escalation, and many forms are easily shipped worldwide.
> Of course, this is very little battery, because that particular Fraunhofer study did most of the backup using gas. With 150 GW of gas fired plants.
> That's more than double the current total demand.
The gas generators would not run in baseload mode; they'd be for seasonal and Dunkelflaute coverage. Most energy from the renewables would go either directly to the grid or through batteries and then to the grid. The fraction into gas would be modest.
BTW, simple cycle gas turbine + generator is about 1/20th the capital cost of a nuclear plant per unit power (combined cycle, 1/10th). So 150 GW is not nearly as much as you might imagine.
It doesn't. It depends on available versions of a technology. Not "approaching" versions of a technology.
> Read it again. The limits it discusses are on hydro generation, not hydro storage.
That turns out not to be the case. Try reading it again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> The gas generators would not run in baseload mode;
That is EXACTLY the point. You need to overbuild enormous amounts of very expensive infrastructure triply-redundantly and then have it sit around idly most of the time.
So all of this highly expensive triply-redundant and massively overbuilt infrastructure has to be financed by subsidies, as it can't be paid for by producing electricity. As it isn't actually producing any electricity most of the time.
To quote the study again: "...which challenges the economic sanity of 100% intermittent renewable targets."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...
> about 1/20th the capital cost of a nuclear plant per unit power
Yeah, not even close.
Anyway, I think we've reached the limit of what can be accomplished by discussion.
Let's say if we take all the (normal, not "pumped") hydro we have and increase number of turbines on them 10x, or 100x, and make them reversible, that will easily cover all the storage needs in terms of power. Of course, it will not produce more actual electricity than currently because the water in dams in finite, but it will produce almost as much as desired in terms of storage volume. Essentially it's up to "annual hydro output in TWh x 365". In reality, less because hydro output fluctuates in different seasons with the rainfall/river water release, but still... Isn't it way more than we could ever need?
Don't get how pumped hydro can ever be "maxed out".
Playing devil's advocate: once you've run out of places with enough height difference to build one upper and one lower reservoir. It's going to take a long time (there are many more places suitable for pumped hydro than places suitable for traditional hydro), but it's possible.
> Let's say if we take all the (normal, not "pumped") hydro we have and increase number of turbines on them 10x, or 100x, and make them reversible, that will easily cover all the storage needs in terms of power.
That's usually not feasible. Pumped hydro needs both a lower and an upper reservoir, while non-pumped hydro normally has only an upper reservoir, and discharges water directly into a river. That is: even if you made the turbines reversible (or added pumps in parallel with them), there would be no water for them to pump upwards.
For example, Europe is quite far to the north and that means very cloudy winters over most of the continent. If the wind blows, fine, but you can also have several days without wind, when both wind and solar north of the Alps generates basically nothing.
Oh yes, the Spanish meseta will probably still be sunny, but the amount of solar that would be needed to power the rest of Europe for several days probably won't even fit there (not to mention how robust would the pan-European grid have to be to tolerate such flux of energy over thousands of kilometers and ten country borders); and if it does, what will you do with all that extra power in summer?
The fact that real (as opposed to nominal max) output of wind and solar fluctuates in a 1:100 range based on factors that are hard to predict more than a few days in advance is really hard to square with the demand for stable grid. It is a big, fundamental problem.
A simple cycle combustion turbine power plant has a capital cost of maybe 5% of a nuclear power plant; combined cycle, about 10%. So one can substantially back up the entire grid with these at a capital cost low compared to that of powering the grid by nuclear.
That infrastructure is expensive.
And will be sitting idle most of the time.
A popular political strategy to avoid calling attention to the new thermal power stations is to not call them power stations. They are reserve energy, to be used when intermittent renewables do not produce enough.
Nuclear is only "dispatchable" if you are willing to burn epic, titanic, gargantuan stupid amounts of money.
The only reason to build civilian nuclear power is to aid the provision of skills and an industrial supply chain for the nuclear-military industrial complex. Not the climate. Not cheap, clean power. DEFINITELY not dispatchability.
Nuclear is cheap. According to the Court of Accounts in France in 2012, the whole nuclear industry had cost € 228 billion by that time and produced 11000 TWh of electricity. 2.07 Cents/kWh.
Renewables are expensive, in particular if you want a 100% renewable grid.
There is very little overlap between nuclear and civilian nuclear programs. Lots of countries operate power plants without nuclear weapons, and Israel for example has a military reactor yet does not use nuclear power commercially.
Of course, their plants are aging out in the meaning that those costs are spiking immensely. 2012 is the absolute sweet spot.
The LCOE of nuclear power is ~5x solar and wind.
As a client state of the US, Israel can rely upon and tap the US's nuclear supply chain and skills base.
Its main "not nuclear but not far off it" rival Iran does have nuclear power though, precisely in order to be able to build a nuclear weapon.
Only if you do something insane like the infamous Lazard study that was used to come to this "conclusion": they took a single power plant and used that as "the cost of nuclear".
That alone is enough to disqualify those numbers, but it gets worse. As their one single data point for nuclear, they didn't pick a random sample, but instead they hand-picked the most expensive commercial nuclear power plant in the world: Vogtle-3. That one screwup is their entire dataset for nuclear.
And of course LCOE doesn't actually cover the full cost. When you look at system cost, the renewable get even worse, at least when you try to 100% renewable. As you approach 100% renewables, the costs rise almost asymptotically, "...which challenges the economic sanity of 100% intermittent renewable targets.7".
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...
Citation? As far as I know they come out with new numbers every year and they dont just base it on one nuclear power plant.
>And of course LCOE doesn't actually cover the full cost.
It doesnt count the cost of load following, but neither the LCOE for nuclear power. Gas plants are generally used in France to supplement nuclear power when it isn't sufficient to cover their power needs or when they are taken down.
And of course, 5x cheaper = 2-3x cheaper when paired with storage under conservative assumptions.
>As you approach 100% renewables, the costs rise almost asymptotically
If you make some really bad assumptions about how storage will be handled (e.g. assuming you need 2 weeks of lithium ion batteries) sure.
>Citation?
This is v16, April 2023, the most recent I could find,
https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april...
Page 5, Footnote (3)
"Given the limited public and/or observable data set available for new-build nuclear projects and the emerging range of new nuclear generation strategies, the LCOE presented herein represents Lazard’s LCOE v15.0 results adjusted for inflation (results are based on then-estimated costs of the Vogtle Plant and are U.S.-focused)"
So v15 is the same. v14 has been withdrawn.
What's really funny is that this footnote has always been there, in plain sight. Yet everyone quotes the Lazard figures as if they were gospel. And if they don't name the source, it's always Lazard anyway.
> [LCOE] doesnt count the cost of load following,
Maybe that as well, but more significantly, it doesn't count system costs, which rise dramatically as more and more of your power generation capacity becomes intermittent.
I don't see exactly where the cutoff is, but most of the industrialized nations seem to betting it's around 80%. The number will obviously vary depending on how willing you are to take on risk. Germany is currently going all-in on that, so I guess the other countries can wait and see how that experiment works out.
It's not. Without nuclear scare the developed world electricity mix could have look like France's as early as the 90s, saving countless tons of CO2 emissions, and millions of lifes. Renewable are eventually coming but the tech took 40 more years to come, and that's how much we're late.
[1] https://www.iea.org/countries/france/energy-mix
Of course reductions over “the last two decades” aren't due to nuclear, since France was already all nuclear two decades ago, duh.
Most of emissions reductions over that period where due to: improved efficiency (car engine, notably), but also massive disindustrialization unfortunately (which ultimately raised the emissions, since we now import goods produced with a more emissive electricity mix than us), renewables are only marginal in that regard (it mostly substituted nuclear production…)
The reasons why we shut down (or reduce the power, more often) of some nuclear plants during summer is because we set environmental limits in terms of river temperatures, to protect wildlife.
This is a good thing, don't get me wrong, but it's also am example of the incredibly high bar we put on nuclear operations on every aspects (which we could afford for years, because how efficient they are compared to pretty much any other industries). Another example of that is how coal plants are actually allowed to, and do, emit more radioactive elements in their neighborhood than what's allowed for an NPP.
I wish more industries (and agriculture) would be set to such high environmental constraints but in the meantime there's a clear imbalance against nuclear (the fact that leveling entire forests for coal mining or to install solar fields is allowed, despite being much more damageable in comparison to localized increase in water temperature never cease to appall me).
Most projections show slow linear growth in fission power .. meanwhile exponential growth in Wind and Solar plants, which is what we need if we ever want to displace gas and coal power plants.
If nuclear fission was such a safe and cheap form of power .. why did we build coal and gas power plants over the past 70 years ?
If nuclear could have provided most of our power economically .. it would already be widespread and we wouldn't be a +1.5C today.
If there were no Chernobyl nor Fukushima .. people might think nuclear was safe.
Are these the same projections from places like the IEA that have renewable growth suddenly flattening (something they've hilariously been doing for years)?
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/...
I think a reasonable projection of fission is one of long term decline. Even in China the installed capacity curve for nuclear is flattening.
Nuclear power output expected to break global records in 2025
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/24/nuclear-...
And that is before any of the turnaround past 2022 has had a chance to take effect.
And the turnaround after 2022 has been massive. If you haven't significantly updated your priors since before 2022, you are vastly behind the times.
1. We already had the COP28 declaration to triple nuclear output.
https://www.energy.gov/articles/cop28-countries-launch-decla...
2. France
Until March 2023, expanding nuclear power in France (the "poster child" for nuclear) was actually prohibited by law. Absolute capacity was capped at current levels, and the law mandated a reduction to below 50% of total.
This law was repealed in March of 2023. With something like a 75% majority, so overwhelming cross-party support.
Which also largely explains why Flamanville was such a disaster. France knows how to build reactors quickly and cheaply: you build lots of the same design in an overlapping fashion, and you do it continuously, so you maintain the industrial capacity and workforce know-how. Flamanville was the exact opposite on all those counts. And the EPR is apparently a bad design. I mean, good once you have it, but way too complicated to build. Which is why it has been discontinued by the manufacturer. There will be no more EPRs, the successor EPR2 is vastly simplified.
3. UK
While the anti-nuclear lobbyists "know" that Hinkley Point C proved the non-viability of nuclear beyond any doubt, the UK government apparently didn't get the memo. They announced plans to quadruple nuclear generating capacity in January 2024, so well after the HPC problems were well-known.
4. Poland
Is getting into nuclear, in a big way. 2 Westinghouse AP-1000 (the Vogtle disaster) have been ordered, contracts are signed and site preparation work has commenced.
That's just the tip of the iceberg, the paperwork for 2 more reactors from South Korea is apparently being finalized and there are a bunch of SMR projects, in part by private companies who want them to directly power industrial processes (process heat?)
5. Japan
Was going to get out of nuclear. Now reactivating plants and will build new ones once the existing ones are activated.
6. USA
Has identified the need for ~200GW of new nuclear capacity. Is currently figuring out how to create the industrial policy required to make that happen.
7. Netherlands
Wanted to build 2 new reacts. Voted in early 2024 to build 4 instead.
8. Sweden
Was getting out of nuclear. Now wants to build 10 new reactors.
9. China
Tripling of capacity with just what is in the works now (20+ building, 70 planned). Currently accelerating the build out.
10. India
On track for tripling of capacity by 2031.
11. South Korea
Was getting out, now expanding.
12. Italy
Got out of nuclear late 80s. Government policy is to have the legal framework for new nuclear in place by the end of this legislature.
I can go on...and on, but I think you get the picture.
The problem with nuclear was never technical, it was always political. Technically, it's a slam-dunk. For example, the entire nuclear industry cost France € 228 billion. It produced 11000 TWh of electricity. That's cheap. 2.07 Ct/kWh cheap. And reliable. And clean. Quick, too, France converted their electricity to nuclear (and virtually no fossil fuels) in 15 years, from a standing start.
And of course, all that action is accompanied by statements, yes.
So the fact that the politics have now changed is significant, even if "renewable bros" find that hard to accept.
My sweet summer child, you are in for a world of disappointment.
We hear rosy plans like this all the time. They don't come true. In China, for example, nuclear construction has been way behind the statements, and this was before the latest massive reductions in PV and (particularly) storage costs. India has had a long history of all talk, little action on nuclear, and now PV is exploding there. In the US, generous federal subsides and loan guarantees were and are going unused. The problem is getting anyone to actually commit, and they don't because nuclear just doesn't make any financial sense.
1. There has been a lot more action than just "politicians saying things"
2. Politics was the only thing holding nuclear back. Thus the change in the politics is, obviously, significant.
3. Nuclear construction in China is ahead and accelerating.
4. India is not talking, they are building. The 2031 goal is stuff they are in the process of building.
5. Nuclear is cheap. France built its nuclear industry for € 228 billion and got 11000 TWh of electricity out of that. 2,07 Cents/kWh
6. Nuclear is not expensive, but it has been extremely risky, mostly because little to none has been built and also because the best plants are very large. We have now built some, so that's been a tremendous de-risking.
For example, both Ukraine and Poland bought Westinghouse AP-1000 reactors. That's the reactor that just went online at Vogtle-3 and Vogtle-4. So are Ukraine and Poland nuts, buying into a design + company with this track record?
Nope, because those plants have been built, so we know we can build them. And we also know what can go wrong, because pretty much everything did. And we know how to not do the things that went wrong.
For example, one of the biggest drivers of delay and cost was the fact that Westinghouse started building before the plans were actually completely done.
Problem is that that they had to submit those plans to the NRC before they started building. And then build to those plans. In theory, this process is a Good Thing™ because it allows a standardized design to be checked once and then built repeatedly, whereas previously the regulations were ad-hoc per construction, making each reactor a custom build, a one-off with no economies of scale.
Alas, it turns out that the plans they submitted, due to not being complete, were not actually buildable as submitted. Oops. So they had to get almost 200 changes approved, and other times had to tear up stuff they had already built, and start again.
We now have designs for the AP-1000 that are buildable. Because they have been built, Vogtle-3 and Vogtle-4 exist and are delivering power to the grid.
We also built or are building a bunch of EPRs. There, one of the major problems (apart from FoaK and no experience in the industry) is that the design simply is difficult to build. So unlike the AP-1000, no more EPR orders. As a matter of fact, EDF has discontinued the EPR, and instead have created a vastly simplified design the EPR2. Which loses some capabilities, but should be dramatically simpler to build.
So different things went wrong, and thus there are different corrective actions.
Engineering.
Hmm...you think it's ridiculous, but it's from the US government's energy.gov website:
https://www.energy.gov/lpo/articles/sector-spotlight-advance...
"The United States will likely need 200 gigawatts of new nuclear generation by 2050 to meet national decarbonization targets. "
This was also the official policy statement of the United States at the Nuclear Energy Summit hosted in Belgium in March 2024.
"For the USA, John Podesta Senior Advisor to the President for Clean Energy, Innovation and Implementation, said the summit was a 21st Century update for the Atoms for Peace vision, and referenced the commitment by countries at COP28 to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050, which he said means 200 GW of new nuclear capacity in the USA. He said a start had already been made and added that the country would also aim to help tackle the climate crisis by helping other countries across the world "build safe, secure, reliable, nuclear power"."
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Leaders-back-nuc...
Perception. Coal has killed far more people than nuclear ever has, despite the compounded blunders that led to Chernobyl and Fukushima (storing MOX on TOP of the reactors? Really?).
Wind is a fine thing to build out as a supplemental power source, but it can never satisfy baseline needs, and isn't even putting a dent in replacing fossil fuels -- at best it is helping to marginally slow the expansion of fossil fuel reliance as we add more and more consumption of power with the advancement of technologies across the world. The anti-nuclear movement was heavily funded by the fossil fuel industry from the get-go, and their propaganda has been more successful than they could have dreamed of.
But these perceptions are changing. Even Greta and her green minions are going pro-nuclear these days. It's a slow boat to turn, but there's a sign we might just turn this ship around to avert at least a portion of the looming energy crisis.
The explosion of the reactor at Chernobyl was a gargantuan disaster which still has to be managed. An exclusion zone of roughly 1,000 sq. miles was created. The USSR suppressed information about the disaster, but it killed some thousands of people, we don't know how many, and it cost an unimaginable amount of money and resources to clean up and manage over the decades following.
According to Wikipedia [1]: > In 2018, Ukraine spent five to seven percent of its national budget on recovery activities related to the Chernobyl disaster.
Granted, Chernobyl was a faulty design, but there was also the disaster at Fukushima, which also required the creation of an exclusion zone.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
It wouldn't even have been approved in the west (maybe Britain would do it, considering what they did with the Windscale piles) when it was originally built in the Soviet Union
PWR reactors that were built around that time in the west, which are already physically safer, have strong containment buildings in case something happens. Chornobyl had a more dangerous design no containment building.
The first thing that will be mentioned is that Chernobyl is an absolut outlier, an event that can never ever happen again or is so unlikely to happen again that it basically equals never in practice.
The second point typically raised is that Chernobyl wasn't as catastrophic as the public remembers. Despite the fact that a significant number of the 600k liquidators who worked on the cleanup received radiation doses that resulted in cancer one or two decades later with a statistical much higher chance, when compared to the overall population.
Then, they will argue that while green energy is beneficial, we need a combination of energy sources due to storage challenges. They often cite France as a perfect example, highlighting its successful use of nuclear energy alongside renewable sources.
Chernobyl only happened due to the way that particular reactor type was made, and even back then nobody but the USSR did it that way, and the accident ensured nobody else ever did. Its failure mode is not inherent to nuclear but specific to the RBMK design.
This new design has nothing to do with the RBMK.
Maybe not to them personally, but the reason they were needed, and died at all was the design.
The RBMK's design was uniquely awful in that it had a positive void coefficient that lead to it blowing its top off, lacked a containment building to contain the mess, and the graphite moderator burns in the air and spews radioactive material into the air. That's a whole lot of things that could have been done far better, and are done better in modern designs.
Better designs can still melt down, yes, but they lack such an awful failure mode. Liquidators were needed because the burning reactor was contaminating everything around it every second it was burning and uncovered.
Better designs are less prone to failure in the first place, and when they fail it's more on the side of being a very expensive problem. They destroy the reactor but they don't require throwing lives at the problem to contain it.
Human factors further complicate safety measures, as the potential for human error or intentional sabotage (e.g., a terrorist attack) remains a constant threat. Moreover, natural disasters are indifferent to the technology used; they can devastate any facility, especially with increasing likelihood in the context of climate change.
The only rational approach is to acknowledge that incidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima are, in a sense, 'normal'. They fall within the middle of the probability spectrum, which explains why they have occurred. The critical question is whether we are prepared to accept these kinds of accidents as a normal part of nuclear energy production. Much like car crashes, which no one wants, they happen despite all safety measures and are, statistically speaking, normal occurrences.
Sure, you can say that the operators at Fukushima were negligent (they were), but that is something you have to account for. Negligence happens. Earthquakes happen. Hurricanes and tornadoes happen. Tsunamis happen. Wildfires happen. Terrorism happens.
Fukushima was not as bad as perceived ...
Lets continue nuclear energy, just look at france.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not intending to troll. I'm honestly interested in new arguments, not the same copy and paste all over again.
IMO, the most important thing about Fukushima is not how much damage it might or might not have caused.
The most important thing about Fukushima, is that it counters the argument that "Chernobyl could only happen because it was a bad Russian design" (often with an implied emphasis on it being a Russian design, instead of just being a bad design). The Fukushima reactors were not of a "bad Russian design", and yet the containment was breached and radioactive isotopes escaped.
That is: before Fukushima, one could dismiss Chernobyl with a "this can't happen here". After Fukushima, it's harder to make that argument.
It's important to understand the way different kinds of power plants deliver energy:
- renewables (wind, solar, tides) are highly variable in their output and the amount of energy produced by each individual wind power plant or solar panel is very small; the output can be dialed down by turning off individual power plants but the amount to which it can be dialed up depends on the weather and is outside of human control
- fossil fuels (gas, coal, lignite) and bio fuels are highly dynamic in their output because you can literally just add or remove fuel to control it, making them very predictable; they are however also literally just burning fuel, i.e. producing energy by producing CO2, and usually have some costs associated with restarting (i.e. reheating) after being fully turned off
- nuclear reactors are extremely stable and can generate a consistent large amount of energy highly predictably; however shutting them off and turning them back on can take literal days and they usually need constant water supply for cooling in order to operate
In other words, water-cooled nuclear reactors are a bad choice in any region that may experience frequent droughts (which may be hard to predict with the changing climate) and they can best be understood as an "offset" for the baseline production.
A real-life energy grid is in constant flux. Loads change as appliances and machines get turned on or off, frequencies drift all the time and need to be readjusted and renewable production supply can change at a moment's notice.
If there is a high baseline that is currently served by fossil fuels, nuclear is worth considering as a replacement for that. But in most places where nuclear would be an option, that baseline can already be easily served mostly by renewables. What's needed is a way to time-shift the overproduction to a later time when renewable production drops. That means storage technologies, not power plants. And as a stop-gap fossils are better suited for filling in the gaps by idling at a low output and being boosted up as the output from renewables drops.
> [Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station] uses sewage; people are very regular at producing waste water.
Not really, no. Germany for example ran very successful campaigns for limiting water use in the 1990s and earlier and a lot of household appliances (shower heads, faucets, toilets) were made "more efficient". As a consequence some municipalities had issues from sewers running dry due to too little waste water and had to flush them with (clean) water to continue operating them.
This likely won't turn into a problem in the US in the near future but if your plan hinges on consumers being excessively wasteful with resources, you might run into some snags as soon as those resources become more limited or more expensive.
> Pumped hydro can work very well to smooth out variability from the baseload.
Yes, that's an energy storage technology that isn't a battery. The reason Switzerland makes heavy use of it is that it only works when you have a landscape with a lot of changes in altitude (i.e. large hills or mountains). It doesn't help in very flat regions. It's a great solution but it's just one solution. We need more. And we also need to improve the grids themselves.
Electrical output isn't listed, my wild guess would be about a quarter of that figure.
https://nanonuclearenergy.com/microreactors/
The page does indeed say that.
At the same time that seems like very little, it's in the range of a single large wind turbine (e.g. https://www.vestas.com/en/products/offshore/V236-15MW). I'm not convinced this will be anything but a niche application for defence or other remote outposts which for some reason cannot rely on solar+wind+storage.
Large companies with huge campuses could also use it for electricity + heating. Industry could also use the heat for chemical processes.
There are also places with small grids, where a bigger reactor can't be easily integrated, like islands or remote villages. I think Canada wants to use their BWRX-300 SMR for remote grids.
Profit motives are incompatible with redundancy.
If left to private companies, the design of the reactor will not save you, because the design will be altered to extract the maximum profit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YrpmZFixp0
"An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics:
1. It is simple. 2. It is small. 3. It is cheap. 4. It is light. 5. It can be built very quickly. 6. It is very flexible in purpose (“omnibus reactor”) 7. Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components. 8. The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now."
The whole paper is well worth reading, IMHO:
[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html
Nuclear power plants seem to be more economic the bigger they are. That's why PWRs, BWRs and CANDUs were initially far smaller than newer ones.
You have the same overhead as with smaller reactors, but you produce more energy, which means the energy is cheaper.
This has not yet worked for reactors.
The exciting thing about small modular reactors is with alternative designs, such as molten salt designs and alternative fuels such as thorium, where the risk of meltdown and hydrogen explosion are not an issue, so this cost-of-safety factor falls away heavily. Molten salt DOES bring with it issues of corrosion, so it's not a panacea, but the idea is that some of these alternative designs can bring the power generation closer to where the power is used, which raises a variety of benefits, including being able to potentially use the heat generated in a useful manner in addition to the electricity, rather than solely as something to be safely dissipated. Also, of course, you get rid of the big single points of failure and end up with a more resilient power grid.
I can't speak to this particular company's offering but I am glad to at least see some interest in the technology growing, as nuclear at this point is the only realistic way to both even consider replacing existing fossil fuel use as well as powering the increased energy demands of the future particularly in light of rapidly developing emerging markets and much heavier power draw from technologies such as generative large language models (so called "AI").
Traditional nuclear power plants are a risky proposition today because they are large, complex, expensive, and they take a long, long time to complete. Not least because they futz around with refueling and cooling spent fuel onsite.
The long completion time means they are hard to finance, you will have one or more (financial) black swan events (eg financial crisis, wars) during the construction period, and there is no such thing as someone who has prior experience building a power plant before starting because the same power plant is never built twice in consecutive generations. Even the "serial produced" ones are different.
The only way you can make nuclear cheaper is to get the manufacturing and commissioning time down to 1-2 years and no more than 3 years. Which means they have to be small and as simple as possible. Size is only relevant as a means to achieve simplicity. Mobility and widely distributed operation are pointless goals in themselves. That might be a possibility to investigate later, but it is not important initially.
If someone starts talking about a mobile power plant they have 100% the wrong focus. First there must be a power plant. And when you have one, you probably really, really want to bolt them down so they don't go missing.
By comparison, solar power costs 1/100th (99% fall) of what it did back then. https://news.mit.edu/2018/explaining-dropping-solar-cost-112...
First, people will not want microreactors in their neighbourhood because of fear of radiation. These fears may be irrational, but we should expect them to lead to protests. It's hard to tell if those fears will be confirmed, hopefully not. Nevertheless, property prices may go down in such areas.
Second, based of past evidence from other industries, as soon as microreactors are available a community of "tinkerers" will emerge and I would fear those more than a properly designed, tested, and maintained microreactor that's reliably monitored 24x7.
So it's not something any amateur tinkerer would touch any time soon.
This is not the case with current "large" reactors, why would it be different here? Those risks you mention are mutualized because no single entity but a state could bear them.
> Those risks you mention are mutualized because no single entity but a state could bear them.
You are talking about something else. You are saying they are not big enough to cover all possible liability. That is not what cornholio is saying.
So here is what I meant to ask: the capacity to cover liability apparently has no bearing on ownership of today's large reactors, so why would it be different with smaller reactors?
A good anti-proliferation design are traveling wave U238 fast breeders. They are filled with depleted uranium and breed plutonium 239, but, due to the long residence time in the reactor, the isotopic vector is heavily polluted with things like Pu240 which spontaneous fissions reducing the yield, Pu238 which generates massive heat etc. This reactor grade plutonium is completely worthless as a bomb material and would require reprocessing that is even more difficult then enrichment of natural Uranium.
Alas, none of the TWR proposals (CANDLE, Terrapower etc.) ever made it into production.
Good luck using diesel when all of it will be prioritised for the military.
Also, no one would care if it's green or not in case of a full-scale war. Your only priority would be to kill as many Russians as possible to survive.
If you're a nuclear country in a full-scale war with Russia or China, you are dead. Your family is dead. Your friends are dead. Everyone you know or love or hate is dead. Everyone who isn't dead is dying or going to die. Those who survive will be holed up in bunkers built with the expectancy that the population will naturally thin out (i.e. die off) to make the scarce supplies last or they will be on the surface facing starvation if they don't die from disease, weather or lack of access to potable water first.
I don't know at which point after the Cold War people forgot what "mutually assured destruction" means but as soon as you fire the first nuclear weapon, humanity ends. And it doesn't matter if the weapon is nuclear or not because most weapons systems that can deliver nuclear payloads can also deliver conventional payloads and all that matters is what your enemy thinks you're doing.
This kind of rhetoric:
> Your only priority would be to kill as many Russians as possible to survive.
This will make your enemy err on the side of you intending nuclear annihilation and respond in kind. The only reason we haven't killed ourselves yet is that a couple of times some level-headed soldiers weren't myopic enough to fall for their country's nationalist fervor and instead refused to follow the orders they were given.
If the US enters a full-scale war with Russia or China or any other serious nuclear threat, the bombs will fall before you have to worry about FEMA camps or the US national guard knocking on your barn door to confiscate your rusty diesel barrels.
Are people really going to argue that the best energy production scheme for Brazil is 80,000 1MW nuclear reactors? Are they all going to be secured?
(It's possible that there will be an "irregular" war where one or both sides are not officially flagged as such, but that's also going to be lower intensity. Arguably Ukraine is already in this state)
Or you do what the US and Soviet Union did for most of the Cold War: a cold war involving proxies. Or you do what Russia did in Ukraine and the US did in Syria: covert operations with (diplomatically speaking) plausible deniability.
A "war between US and Russia/China" would not start with a full-scale armed conflict. It would be a gradual escalation of force. Contrary to what cold war propaganda may have conveyed: the other side is rarely suicidal. At that scale it's more Realpolitik than 1980s Hollywood villain plots.
How would killing anyone (Russians or Chinese or whatever) would help you survive?
A boots-on-the-ground invasion of the USA is absolutely not a realistic prospect. In case a war goes hot ICBMs is the thing you should worry about.
Honestly I just don't understand what you imagine might happen where "kill as many Russians as possible" is the path to survival for someone residing in the USA.
The risk is real. You may argue about its priority, but that doesn't change the reality.
> Ukrainians
Worst possible example, given the existing disaster exclusion zone in their country, and everyone watching nervously as shells fall around the Zaprozhia nuclear plant.
Batteries are better. They are a bit heavy, carries a fire risk, and can be a bit expensive, but can work depending on situation. I do know however that data centers being built in my country are not using batteries for backup. They want to use diesel generators given costs and capacity, and they also want to use places with clean fresh water for cooling. Thus they ask for environmental protection exemptions so they can use diesel generators.
Large generators are not self contained and usually need a lot of water for cooling, and they have waste heat. They are also very large concrete buildings, so environmental considerations are needed there.
Burning massive amount of diesel in population centers or in nature reserves should be not be an available option. Do you object to that?
If I were them, I'd be talking to the (US) military.
Their reactors are:
> The new generation of advanced microreactors can produce between 1 and 20 megawatts of thermal energy that could be used directly as heat or converted to electric power.
* https://nanonuclearenergy.com/microreactors/
Per Table A-1 (¶A-27), a sustained load (60-80%) of an Army camp is between 1.7 and 5.1 MW:
* PDF: https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Publications/MCRP%203-40D....
You wouldn't necessary have fewer reactors (2-4?) than generators (4-8) because of redundancy, but if you don't have to regularly truck fuel to the camp, that certainly simplifies logistics. (Or perhaps as much fuel, as vehicles would still needed, though with 'excess' power perhaps going (mild) hyrbid could be possible.)
I could also see applications in the energy sector (offshore, remote land locations).
Not sure how many 'off grid' communities would be up for a <20 MW power source.
That cost $2trn in total, proving the unlimited supply of money for bad ideas provided they involve killing the right people.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/20...
(It's interesting to compare that with the costs of WW2 and how urgent projects were handled then. WW2 involved a real threat to US territory, so everyone was on board with rapidly developing innovative solutions. Afghanistan, by comparison, was reprisals against a landlocked country which posed no real threat, so once the occupation started everyone lost interest - but it was still heresy to question spending the money. No attempt was made to really solve the power problem, because nobody would ever question the $300m a day)
Try and imagine how a nuclear reactor makes any sense in this context? Unfortunately the right-wing government has plans to build 4 reactors, which will be an absolute disaster for the tax payers. No commercial entity will want to touch nuclear as it's impossible to make money with so much wind and solar.
Try to imagine how many renewables + storage you can build for the price of just one nuclear reactor. It's not even a debate. And as we shore up our grids (especially on a European scale) we don't need new nuclear reactors.
The cost certainty any SMR company is going to need to sell a reactor is going to be extremely difficult for any company. The mines would be "happy" to go green, but even with carbon taxes, big up front CAPEX is going to be a hard sell for an unproven tech (SMR, not nuclear specifically). My guess is that offering selling the power (OPEX) as a fully managed and staffed service is the only way they're going to make this work.
I'd love to see us switch over, I'd also love to see it be sustainable and realistic. Let's hope for all of our sakes' someone figures it out, be it Nano, Global First, whomever.
Here's their IPO prospectus [1].
Whenever you hear about some new nuclear startup or reactor design or anything, in the US, you head to the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) website and see where they are in the approval process. Many are only at the stage of pre-approval, but you get an idea what the NRC thinks of them.
These guys are completely absent from NRC's radar.
It goes without saying that no reactor can be commercialized under any form without the NRC approval. How long does it take to get this approval, if everything goes well. In the case of NuScale, the application was filed in January 2017 [2], and the pre-application started in 2008. The approval was published in the Federal Register in February 2023. So, start to finish, 15 years. And this was for a pressurized water reactor design.
These guys here don't even mention what their design is, but we can infer it does not use water as a coolant. Which means it's not one of the reactors that the NRC is familiar with (as it is the regulator of all the 96 commercial reactors in the US, all cooled by water). Good luck getting an approval in 15 years.
Here's the thing: if you go to the webpage of any nuclear company, be it established or just a startup, you'll find at least 100 times more details on their design than what you'll find at Nano Nuclear.
These guys give Nuclear a bad name. Shame on them.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1923891/000149315224...
[2] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/smr/licensing-acti...