First Planned Small Nuclear Reactor Plant In the US Has Been Cancelled (arstechnica.com) 203
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo writes: [O]n Wednesday, the company and utility planning to build the first small, modular nuclear plant in the U.S. announced it was cancelling the project. The U.S. has approved a single design for a small, modular nuclear reactor developed by the company NuScale Power. The government's Idaho National Lab was working to help construct the first NuScale installation, the Carbon Free Power Project. Under the plan, the national lab would maintain a few of the first reactors at the site, and a number of nearby utilities would purchase power from the remaining ones.
With the price of renewables dropping precipitously, however, the project's economics have worsened, and backers started pulling out of the project. The final straw came on Wednesday, when NuScale and the primary utility partner, Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, announced that the Carbon Free Power Project no longer had enough additional utility partners, so it was being cancelled. In a statement, the pair accepted that "it appears unlikely that the project will have enough subscription to continue toward deployment."
With the price of renewables dropping precipitously, however, the project's economics have worsened, and backers started pulling out of the project. The final straw came on Wednesday, when NuScale and the primary utility partner, Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, announced that the Carbon Free Power Project no longer had enough additional utility partners, so it was being cancelled. In a statement, the pair accepted that "it appears unlikely that the project will have enough subscription to continue toward deployment."
On to storage and grid, right? (Score:3)
Ah, so we're all in on renewables. So that means there's going to be investment and progress on storage and grid improvements, right? Right?
Re:On to storage and grid, right? (Score:4, Insightful)
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It depends really. If it is left up to the market there will be limited investment, because scarcity is the best way to keep power prices high. If you want a resilient power grid with redundancy and safety margins the taxpayers are going have to fund it.
It’s even worse than that, don’t keep up with improvements and repairs to save money then when parts of the grid go down with a minor weather event just charge massive surge pricing and make a years profit per day. Just like Texas. Why would anyone in charge want to change that model?
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Why wait and hope for parts of the grid to go down when you can force it by scheduling your repairs to coincide with those weather events?
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"Why wait and hope for parts of the grid to go down when you can force it by scheduling your repairs to coincide with those weather events?"
That's billionaire-level thinking
Re:On to storage and grid, right? (Score:4, Interesting)
Great, let's decouple the distribution infrastructure from the generation infrastructure. Both could be owned by the state for all I care, but they should be separate entities and the state (or feds or locality or whatever makes sense in a given case) should control the lines and substations.
Regulated utilities are another model (Score:2)
That's where a utility commission decides the rates on the criterion of getting the utility a predictable and mediocre return on their capital investment ("rate base").
Re:On to storage and grid, right? (Score:5, Interesting)
They won't be able to keep prices high because people will install solar and batteries. Their systems will automatically avoid high electricity prices by using stored energy or time shifting things like EV charging.
Wind is cheap enough that individuals can invest in it, all the way up to large corporations who can build their own turbines outright. If they are seeing high energy prices they will just build more capacity themselves.
That's the great thing about renewables. They democratize energy. No more being beholden to big energy companies, you can make your own.
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That's the great thing about renewables. They democratize energy. No more being beholden to big energy companies, you can make your own.
Yeah, if you're a homeowner. Kinda hard if you rent.
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It depends really. If it is left up to the market there will be limited investment, because scarcity is the best way to keep power prices high
That's not how supply and demand works. High prices lead to projects taking advantage of that high price. Scarcity and high power prices is precisely why peaking plants and other dispatchable power plants exist. And lack of grid investment doesn't keep prices high, it actually causes them to crash (which you can see in the north of Germany on a windy day when power prices take a nosedive despite the south of Germany electricity staying ultra expensive and being heavily imported from the neighbours.
Re:On to storage and grid, right? (Score:5, Informative)
I wouldn't put it past the carbon and nuclear lobby to politically sabotage any attempt to improve storage and the grid.
Just look at all the conservatives trying to sabotage any change in your country. You even have conservatives sabotaging the right to file taxes in a simple manner, because it would put TurboTax out of business.
Any criticism of renewables without acknowledging political sabotage by the conservative side should be automatically dismissed as partisan shilling.
Re:On to storage and grid, right? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, if you nuclear shills and denialists stop getting in the way.
I wouldn't put it past the carbon and nuclear lobby to politically sabotage any attempt to improve storage and the grid.
I wouldn't worry too much about that situation. We've had nuc plants closed down during construction. It's just too expensive, and even the politicians will give up on the sunk cost fallacy. https://crsreports.congress.go... [congress.gov] https://theintercept.com/2019/... [theintercept.com] https://thebulletin.org/2021/0... [thebulletin.org]
That last one is a hoot - 9 billion dollars, and no power delivered at all It was cancelled because all it did was create a black hole for money. And there was some pro nuclear crimes committed as well. Can we get someone to chime in on that cost per Kilowatt hour?
It isn't just the USA. Nuc plants have a definite lifetime. They might - and often are - extended, but you can only do that so many times, That radiation is a real bitch on materials, and eventually thes safe plants will have bad problems. So you build an increasingly expensive plant next to the old one, then spend a billion or so decontaminating the place during it's demolition.
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There are billionaires with lots of money that they don't know what to do with. Any one of them that has been convinced by the nuclear lobby could sink billions into sabotaging any change, driving up short-term inconveniences to the point where the nuclear option becomes more palatable to enough of the general populace.
Well, they obviously didn't get their money by being adroit, because the nooyaler industry in the US is one big fail at the moment. As well, the renewables are quietly chugging along, getting better all the time, while nuc projects are either wildly over budget, or the increasing trend - cancelled.
In my area, there is not one financial reason to build a nuc plant. Same with many other areas I've been to.
We got this, bro!
As well, there is a strategic reason to avoid the Mega-plants so popular among
Re:On to storage and grid, right? (Score:4, Interesting)
Ah, so we're all in on renewables. So that means there's going to be investment and progress on storage and grid improvements, right? Right?
Yes. I don't want to post what we are doing in my area again, but Solar assisted Substation extension and baseload handling wind power is happening now.
The wind is even making the turbines work better - no turbine, nuc, gas or coal likes rapid changes in demand.
Storage will be next on the list. The technology exists already. It just needs implemented in an orderly fashion. Storage onsite at wind turbines will be the start.
I'll note that in places like the Allegheny front, it isn't likely to be needed. The wind blows 24/7/365.25.
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The EU 2030 targets for renewable hydrogen are huge, so maybe. Except the plans to subsidize either the demand or production side to meet the targets is still mostly absent, so maybe not.
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The same is pretty much needed with nuclear. In particular, to make nuclear fit to be used as regulation energy (and without that there is a hard upper boundary at 70% nuclear or the grid just blows up), you need storage.
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An hour is easier than a month.
Que whinging (Score:4, Funny)
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Don't worry, I'm sure MacMann will be along in a minute to tell us all that nuclear is the only way forward, despite being less safe, less economically viable and less acceptable to the public than solar and wind.
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The economics of small reactors are very bad.
Indeed. And that has been known for a long, long time and no way around that has been found in all that time. The other thing is that the economics of _large_ reactors is still pretty bad. Oh, and the CO2 emissions of current nuclear is on par with wind and 25...50% that of solar, and set to go up with more reactors as mining and refining fuel becomes harder. Meanwhile solar and wind will get a lower CO2 footprint as the tech matures.
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Oh, and the CO2 emissions of current nuclear is on par with wind and 25...50% that of solar
Kinda true as long as you don't take storage and new grid investments needed.
As soon as reality kicks in, and you decide that one of the requirement should be that the electric train should be able to leave the station even at night or when the wind is not blowing, then it's another story.
set to go up with more reactors as mining and refining fuel becomes harder
Mining and refining doesn't become harder. Especially with Gen IV reactors basically running on what we call "waste" nowadays.
Meanwhile solar and wind will get a lower CO2 footprint as the tech matures.
The more solar/wind you build (with that famous "exponential growth"), the more mining/materials
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set to go up with more reactors as mining and refining fuel becomes harder
Mining and refining doesn't become harder. Especially with Gen IV reactors basically running on what we call "waste" nowadays.
Mining and refining becomes harder with larger consumption. Don't you even understand the very basics? The ones where mining and refining is easiest get extracted first. The more you need to extract and refine, the crappier the conditions for that get because you have to go to the worse sites to do it.
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So you mean all that mining and refining needed for solar panels/wind turbines/batteries (which needs more per kWh generated than for hydro or nuclear by the way) will get worse and worse? Damn, I didn't think you would admit it.
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Also in Russia! Well, if they had not blown up Chernobyl, that is.
In actual reality, the economics of large reactors are still very bad.
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Probably just better at lying about it ...
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Your "U.S. version of a liberal" sure sounds more like a broadly-sketched caricature than any real person. Perhaps it is?
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Well, the Republicans are partially extremists (now more so than ever because basically all Republicans with decency and honor have left the party), but essentially these two are pretty much the same and both parties are fundamentally corrupt.
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the big deals and projects are all the same.
You two parties just happen to be both pro-big-business. They do differ on other, important topics, such as (just examples, as seen from the other shore of the Atlantic) women's rights, foreign affairs, and by their managerial method at the office.
"Big deals are the same" is an illusion. The *challenges* are the same. There has to be a deal with China, or with Europe, or some sort of intervention within international conflicts, because they affect each other's economy. But the devil is in the details and di
Good (Score:2, Insightful)
The last thing we need is private companies sprinkling radioactive material all over a country ruled by laissez-faire economics and aggressive deregulation.
Climate Change Solved (I guess)? (Score:2, Interesting)
I keep hearing about this climate emergency, but it must not be much of one of we don't need to subsidize/build out the one valid, power at scale producing, legitimately clean option to head off CO2 emissions, ASAP.
I guess this means we can all relax now. Right?
So do a contract with the Navy (Score:2)
Ah, the NuScale scam (Score:2, Insightful)
These fuckers have been around for a while. All they have is a scaled-down non-nuclear "prototype". It is completely unclear whether their design even works at all and if it works how well it will keep up. Funnily, the project was officially cancelled because renewables are too cheap. My take is that behind the scenes possible investors looked at the tech and decided the risks were way too large.
Incidentally, "Carbon Free" is a blatant lie. Nuclear power very much has a carbon footprint, mainly from fuel mi
Thinking about it (Score:2)
Okay, yes, nuclear power, wind, and solar all do have carbon footprints. From concrete and other supports, if nothing else.
That's mostly economics at play. With carbon-heavy electricity like coal, gas, and oil, the carbon released is part of operation, not just the construction of the equipment. Manufacturing the equipment releases carbon because our manufacturing processes aren't carbon free by default either. Carbon dioxide releasing manufacturing processes are common because they're the cheapest.
Stil
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Nuclear releases CO2 as part of its normal operation. Unless you consider refuelling and getting the fuel for that not "normal operation"? Solar and wind does not.
As to making the mining for nuclear fuel all electric, well, maybe in 50...100 years. If battery tech makes significant advances. Until then it is an exceptionally dirty business.
As for the nuclear fuel and the carbon involved, well if we expand nuclear power yeah we'll need to mine more uranium(unless we get a thorium reactor working), but the carbon released for that, especially for reactors that can take unenriched fuel, is actually quite minor. It's a survivable amount if it enables us to get off of coal, oil, and gas otherwise.
Nope. It is actually quite large when you get to the less accessible and harder to refine sites. At this time, it is already only on par with wind. It will get much, much
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Almost all human activity does. Everyone exhales CO2 all the time, just by living.
What matters is how much CO2 makes it to the atmosphere, and where that CO2 came from. Nuclear in the best case can be on a par with wind and solar, but in practice a lot of countries don't have low emission fuel sources or long term waste storage.
NuScale SMRs exacerbate the problem because they need more fuel per MWh, and more frequent refuelling. The overall amount of waste is increased.
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Maintenance and repair = refuelling? Seriously? Because nuclear had maintenance and repair all along as well and that was classified as "no CO2".
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Nuclear releases CO2 as part of its normal operation. Unless you consider refuelling and getting the fuel for that not "normal operation"? Solar and wind does not.
Refueling is part of the maintenance. Same asthe maintenance needed for the wind turbines for instance... You know, like the ones from Samsung Energy, leader in wind turbines manufacturing, which had some reliability issues [reuters.com]. But it's allright, Samsung Energy asked for a 16 billion bailout from the German government.
Jokes (or facts) aside, nuclear doesn't release CO2 to generate electricity. Same as solar, wind or hydro. Unlike coal or gas burning, which does generate CO2 to produce electricity...
As to making the mining for nuclear fuel all electric, well, maybe in 50...100 years. If battery tech makes significant advances. Until then it is an exceptionally dirty business.
This is tru
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You know, like the ones from Samsung Energy, leader in wind turbines manufacturing, which had some reliability issues.
That article is about Siemens, not Samsung.
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I am tempted to say they both begin with an S ;)
You are right, sorry for the confusion, didn't re-read before clicking submit.
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Nuclear releases CO2 as part of its normal operation. Unless you consider refuelling and getting the fuel for that not "normal operation"? Solar and wind does not.
In the case of nuclear? No, getting the fuel is not part of "normal operation" - It's part of maintenance. The plant doesn't require that so much CO2 be created and released for said fuel, it only cares that it's uranium(or alternatives) of specific enrichment level(can be zero).
Because nuclear fuel is so extremely power dense, the amount of CO2 associated with the fuel, folded into CO2 associated with other maintenance, is up there with solar and wind maintenance CO2. It's all extremely minor compared t
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Nuclear releases CO2 as part of its normal operation. Unless you consider refuelling and getting the fuel for that not "normal operation"? Solar and wind does not.
As to making the mining for nuclear fuel all electric, well, maybe in 50...100 years. If battery tech makes significant advances. Until then it is an exceptionally dirty business.
That's not really a useful figure.
Released how? As some fundamental part of the Nuclear plant operation? As a result of people driving gas guzzling trucks to and from the plant? Or is it from some part of the refining process that's impossible/difficult to do without large CO2 emissions?
Nope. It is actually quite large when you get to the less accessible and harder to refine sites. At this time, it is already only on par with wind. It will get much, much worse if we go more nuclear.
A big, though just like Peak Oil it's likely further off than anticipated, as demand increases so does exploration and refining technology.
It may be true that the economics of Nuclear never pan out, but I'm not too worried a
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World Nuclear Association is an industry shill organization, whose numbers cannot be trusted. Some better lifecycle estimates for total greenhouse gas emissions: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21... [nrel.gov]
Solar PV is similar to wind and nuclear overall.
The issue with nuclear is that lifetime emissions really depend on where the fuel comes from, and where it ends up when spent. If a country doesn't have low emission sources of fuel, it can't have low emission nuclear.
Wind and solar also depend on how the metals and co
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I quoted them intentionally because they will try to make nuclear look better than it is. And even with that, nuclear does not look good.
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Ah, good tactic.
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And the winner is... (Score:3)
And This Was the Best Modular Nuke Project (Score:2)
This is exactly what I expected and have publicly predicted based, as it was, on simple economics. NuScale had initially projected lower costs than traditional mega-nuclear plants, but in the last couple of years had admitted that the costs were going to be no better -- efficient construction apparently not offsetting giving up economy of scale. Without a cost advantage over "Old Nuclear" NuScale had no case to make.
And this project could not have contributed significantly to decarbonizing the rest of the U
Time for government to step in... (Score:4, Interesting)
With the controlled ebbs and flows of oil, which production can be dialed up to destroy renewable projects, then once those are destroyed, and then dialed back to keep prices up, nuclear power and other renewables should be funded by US, European and other governments, just so their development can't be easily hamstrung by foreign cartels.
Nuclear has a ways to go, but there is a ton of promise, especially modular construction where everything can be inspected and put in place before it goes on site, and defueling/refueling can be done easily. Bonus points if we can get breeder reactors so spent fuel rods can be reused.
The advantage of research on nuclear power is energy independence. You have enough nuclear power on hand, you can do things like generate high quality gasoline from CO2, like what Porsche is doing in Chile. Right now, this is not viable, but add a reactor or two, and one now has gasoline without the need for oil infrastructure. Thermal depolymerization could take waste plastics and turn those into monomers ready for use again, or for use as oil or diesel fuel. Combine nuclear power with relatively low energy means to desalinate water, and you now can rescue desert areas and have them be used for green crops, or even just a forest. With enough energy, there are things that can be done that we can't even think of doing now, where chemical processes which are too expensive to be viable can be used.
However, this has to be governments that fund this. OPEC+ knows extremely well how to turn their dial one way to make oil shale not profitable, then turn it the other way to keep oil over $100 a barrel, and energy development needs to be insulated from the whims of foreign cartels.
that's too bad (Score:2)
At 45N latitude, I'd ***FAR*** rather have my 1500 person community running off a 5th gen fission microreactor that's incapable of meltdown than watching acres and acres of what is otherwise some of the most productive farmland on the planet vanish underneath thousands of solar panels that will need replacement every 25 years and don't actually have a recycling stream.
Re:There's a better design out there.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Potentially.
But what killed this one wasn't that it was a bad design -from what I have read it is quite good. It was that it is less expensive to produce the electricity with solar/wind. Economics is a bitch.
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Suddenly all the nuclear shills here hate reality.
Re: There's a better design out there.... (Score:2)
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Economics is the only thing that matters to Humans.
Good. Because we are focusing on humans in this thread.
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Economics is the only thing that matters.
Cancelation of this carbon free power project is terrible news for the abatement of global warming. Money is not all that matters.
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We already know climate change is bad.
We are talking about something more specific. Stick to the topic.
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Not really. All the money that would have been pissed away on NuScale can now be put to productive use building the new infrastructure and generation that we need.
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Economics is the only thing that matters.
Suddenly all the nuclear shills here hate reality.
No wonder the planet is doomed. I would pay more to have as much power as I want from a relatively clean source.
Or in other words, the only thing that matters is a livable biosphere. Economics doesn't mean shit if everything is dead.
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I would pay more to have as much power as I want from a relatively clean source.
There are options available from basically every single electric provider in the US to do exactly this - pay more for renewable sourcing. And yet, I would bet money that you haven't availed yourself of exactly what you just said you want.
It's a "market solution" that most free marketers don't bother with; when the cards are down everyone wants their electric bills to be less, not more.
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"Economics is the only thing that matters."
Yes indeed, and it's bringing down wind power too.
https://www.reuters.com/market... [reuters.com].
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/n... [pbs.org].
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Economics is not immune to shortsightedness.
Actually it is, which is why peaking plants and dispatchable power plants are also profitable despite not running most of the time.
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That's very normal in a system of coal and gas plants, but it doesn't work for a system full of renewables and nuclear.
Of course it does. Economics doesn't mandate specific solutions, it funds solutions. The gas station of yesterday is the pumped storage / battery of today. Economics != free market, if you want to drive a solution governments can impose taxes or provide subsidies so that the economics favours a particular solution, in this case one that works for a system full of renewables and nuclear.
Re:There's a better design out there.... (Score:5, Funny)
No, I'm sure the utility companies and grid operators that already deliver megawatts of renewables daily completely forgot about intermittency and capacity factor of renewables.
It's a good thing you're here to remind them after the decisions were already made.
Re:There's a better design out there.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Spoiler alert: It's always economics.
Nuclear is always going to be at a disadvantage against energy generation methods where the "fuel" is free. That's simply how the game of turning money into useful energy is played.
Re: There's a better design out there.... (Score:2)
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Also wind and solar take up a lot of physical space for the energy produced. Covering land in solar and wind removes natural soil and replaces it with a crazy amount of concrete
Found the guy who's never driven any of the freeways between Pittsburgh and Salt Lake City. Windmills and agriculture co-exist quite nicely all across the great plains and midwest - as it turns out, it's very easy to just not crash your incredibly slow moving tractor into the turbine masts because they have to be ~7 rotor diameters apart from each other for maximum efficiency. There's plenty of space to drive farm implements between them in a multi-hundred acre field; you can do the math on just how much
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Potentially.
But what killed this one wasn't that it was a bad design -from what I have read it is quite good. It was that it is less expensive to produce the electricity with solar/wind. Economics is a bitch.
Exactly, Our local power Utilities aren't building out substations with solar extension technology because they cost more. They build them out because they don't have to run more heavy lines, new substations, and maybe build new reactors. The solar provides a big boost at the times it's needed most.
And wind is handling base load now, not just peaking. Amazing the number of wind turbines along the Allegheny front now.
Now this small reactor might be able to be used in place of the solar arrays at the su
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You can't install these reactors at the substation. They need a containment building, cooling pool, fuel storage etc. Big industrial complexes, with a lot of necessary security and regulation. Even the ground has to be extensively surveyed to make sure it is stable, and a plan to protect the area and those living in it should the worst happen has to be developed.
It's not just a solar fam where you can convert some random bit of land into one with minimal fuss, and a simple fence to protect it.
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You can't install these reactors at the substation. They need a containment building, cooling pool, fuel storage etc. Big industrial complexes, with a lot of necessary security and regulation. Even the ground has to be extensively surveyed to make sure it is stable, and a plan to protect the area and those living in it should the worst happen has to be developed.
It's not just a solar fam where you can convert some random bit of land into one with minimal fuss, and a simple fence to protect it.
No argument there, that's why it would be so expensive.
The business of ground, made me think about how a lot of PA is actually geologically active. Most think about earthquakes, we certainly don't have them here. But we ground subsidence and sinkholes. and the water table's effect on them. And we do have the earthquake effects from other places. Maybe ten years ago, an earthquake in Virginia, through some unexpected channeling, hit here, hundreds of miles away. SO and I were sitting on our patio, and su
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The economics won't change until night time power costs substantially more than daytime power. Even then the big natural gas powered ICE generators can carry the load and they start up and shut down within minutes.
The problem up north is the winter days are only 8 hours long, and the same temperature inversions that bring heavy overcast also bring dead calm, the dreaded dunkelflaute. So divide nameplate PV power by 14, and wind is a flat zero. And yes I have real data to back up that 7% PV output.
Re:There's a better design out there.... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not so sure on that. You have seasonality as well, so the economics likely need to work for 4380 hours per year operation-- 50% capcity factor. The added issue though is that you cannot have a plant that is distribution constrained.
I still think NuScale makes sense where you can couple it with costal desalination, district heating, or industrial steam. Honolulu, Los Angeles and San Diego should be able to easily support four units each, and Puerto Piñasco would be another ideal location (to sell water back to Arizona and the Salton Sea).
Re:There's a better design out there.... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:There's a better design out there.... (Score:4, Interesting)
People tends to overestimate this problem.
The reason because the economics favors renewable is because this problem is less expensive that people realize.
A well deployed system is an integration of technologies.
Solar+wind+hydro in generation.
Pumped hydro+hydrogen+batteries in storage.
In generation, you don't force to meet the 100% generation, requiring a lot of storage, which is more expensive than generation with current technology.
Instead, we can generate over current demand. It's not a problem, as the generation is cheap, and there is enough elastic demand to manage this energy and shift from old plain consumption to new consumption over cheap energy availability.
It depends on the sector. While some sectors require a constant influx of energy, others prefer to work half on the time on cheap energy than 365x24 over expensive energy.
From storage perspective, batteries are coming down on price, and it will reach even lower prices with new technologies like sodium-ion batteries.
They are already not too expensive from lifetime perspective, but lifetime are around 3000 cycles, so it needs to be used daily. 365x10 years are more or less their lifetime. Using batteries for season storage, 1 cycle per year is an impossible economics.
But batteries definitely removes the day/night problems plus some extra about weather changes, than also are mitigated with long distance transmissions (rarely there is a bad weather across both coasts). A small continent interconnection (like North America) is not a big deal for HVDC lines.
Pumped hydro is one of the bests storage techs available. Reasonable efficiency, price and big storage capability. The only problem is that it's limited on right places and we need more storage than that.
But because the better economics, pumped hydro became first in terms of storage than other season shift storage technologies. After that, it came other technologies, like hydrogen.
Hydrogen, unlike batteries, decouples storage and power. The total storage is driven by tanks, which are very cheap, while power is driven by hydrolyzers, fuel cells and/or turbines.
If you want very big storage, for ultralong (multiple months, maybe years) reserves, you can consider other "power to fuel" tecnologies, as hydrogen is efficient, but more expensive to store than other fuels.
So for regular season storage, hydrogen is fine, while for a crisis reserve, methane, methanol or ammonia are probably the best candidates.
In the end, the economics are something like...
Summer generate a big quantity of energy through extra solar, most for adapter industries that generate 100% at summer, but less at other dates, with very cheap energy (for example, extra hydrogen not for storage, but for fertilizers, clean concrete and steel, etc.). Even with that, this is the season when most of the season storage is filled. If there is extra hydrogen, a bountiful year, then some hydrogen is converted to other fuels and stored in the ultralong storage, or in case of full storage, sold in the international market.
Spring and Autumn generate extra hydro. Still, because the wind and solar generate more than current 100%, there is little days that non-daily storage needs to be required. As an average, it generate some energy "excess" that are also used by adapted consumers.
Winter is the season of use the year savings. With the hydraulic and hydrogen, wind and solar are boosted. They energy is more expensive anyway as storage prices are added to the sale price, so people tends to save as much as possible. Non critical industries with high energy consumption are turned off, because is cheaper to work half of the year with cheap prices than the other half with peak prices or, in a different energy model with nuclear, expensive all year around.
The problem with nuclear is that is close to the price of renewable+season storage (=hydrogen and alike technologies), so the prices is close to worse case renewable scenario.
Maybe a little better
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The design wasn't great. It still requires a lot of the things that make nuclear unattractive - a large and well protected cooling pool, even more refuelling pauses than a standard reactor, waste storage and eventual disposal, a containment building...
And all for a relatively small output. It was more of a prototype than a viable commercial product.
Given the timeframes they were laying out, the tendency for new nuclear designs to run into expensive problems, and the fact that renewables are cheap, rapidly e
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Less expensive whilst providing not high percentage of baseload...?
We'll be begging them to build these in future.
Re:There's a better design out there.... (Score:4, Interesting)
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I mean I'm happy to learn, but how do we comprehend the scale with charts like this?
world energy consumption [theconversation.com]
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Ironically, renewables could really help here. When the sun shines and the wind blows, they generate a surplus of electricity w
Re:There's a better design out there.... (Score:4, Interesting)
As I'm reading the press, the steep drop in cost for renewables AND battery tech to "smooth the flow" has made nuclear less & less practical. Small reactors make sense if you need high-power-per-cubic solutions (see: submarines) and are willing to deal with the maintenance/disposal issues (which US plants still don't do since they won't/can't move wastes to the designated dump sites).
Consider also that you don't need cutting-edge, high-density battery storage to back up a solar/wind farm setup; presumably you have enough land to fall back to older less expensive solutions, and even there we're seeing tech innovations to make things even cheaper.
The bang-per-buck equation is just not working out for nuclear, however kewl it may be technically. Costs for Other Options are dropping hard and getting better performance in the bargain; that whole competition-works argument.
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I have no idea where "you heard" what you heard.
It's factually false, for the simple reasons of geographics. Solar and wind are location-dependent, and therefore cannot be "cheaper". They can only be "cheaper at a handful of select locations".
I'm not going to even mention the massive trouble that most of the renewables are in with even minor downscaling in extreme subsidies regime that supports them, as seen in several places that were forced to recently cancel wind projects because just one of the many sub
Re:There's a better design out there.... (Score:4, Funny)
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And you don't think it's a problem that military spending is about to be dwarfed by T-bill interest payments?
Yes, entitlement / social spending is a huge chunk of the federal budget, just like it is in any developed nation. What do you propose, mass starvation and an ever-decreasing life expectancy as people can't get food, medicine, medical treatment, or housing because you don't like paying a bit of your paycheck to keep poor and elderly people alive?
What do you think THAT would do to the economy if all
Re:There's a better design out there.... (Score:4, Informative)
Potentially.
But what killed this one wasn't that it was a bad design -from what I have read it is quite good. It was that it is less expensive to produce the electricity with solar/wind. Economics is a bitch.
Offshore wind is being scrapped too: https://apnews.com/article/off... [apnews.com]
"High inflation, supply chain disruptions and the rising cost of capital and building materials are making projects more expensive while developers are trying to get the first large U.S. offshore wind farms opened. Ørsted is writing off $4 billion, due largely to cancellation of the two New Jersey projects."
And yet, if you read a the rest of the article as well:
Re: There's a better design out there.... (Score:2)
New Yorkâ(TM)s wind project will likely get canceled as well. Kathy Hochul just rejected a request for more money from the project managers.
https://www.offshorewind.biz/2... [offshorewind.biz]
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Large modular reactors.
Re: There's a better design out there.... (Score:2)
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No, just better cost options for sourcing energy.
Utilities aren't interested in sourcing expensive electron excitation. They only want to deliver expensive electron excitation to us.
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"Who knew slashdot had friends and foes, How long has this been there"
20 years, iirc
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How the time flies.
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Time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like a banana
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