Illinois Senate Approves Plan To Allow New Nuclear Reactors (apnews.com) 46
The Illinois Senate has approved a plan to allow small modular reactors in the state, lifting a 36-year-old moratorium on new nuclear power installments. Proponents say the plan will ensure the state can meet its carbon-free power production promise by 2045. The Associated Press reports: Environmentalists have criticized the plan, noting that small modular reactors are a decade or more from viability. Sponsoring Sen. Sue Rezin, a Republican from Morris, said that's the reason, coupled with a federal permitting process of as much as eight years, her legislation is timely. "If we want to take advantage of the amazing advancements in new nuclear technology that have occurred over the past couple of decades and not fall behind the rest of the states, we need to act now," Rezin said.
The House has through Thursday -- the scheduled adjournment of the General Assembly's fall session -- to OK the proposal and send it to Gov. J.B. Pritzker. Under the legislation, Illinois would allow development of small modular reactors in January 2026. That's when a report on necessary safety measures and updated guidelines would be due. The plan also tasks the Illinois Emergency Management Agency with oversight of newly installed reactors. Rezin added that layer of inspection, despite her contention that strict federal control is sufficient, to appease a concerned Pritzker. The Democrat cited the issue as one that caused him to side with environmentalists and veto initial legislation Rezin saw approved overwhelmingly last spring.
The House has through Thursday -- the scheduled adjournment of the General Assembly's fall session -- to OK the proposal and send it to Gov. J.B. Pritzker. Under the legislation, Illinois would allow development of small modular reactors in January 2026. That's when a report on necessary safety measures and updated guidelines would be due. The plan also tasks the Illinois Emergency Management Agency with oversight of newly installed reactors. Rezin added that layer of inspection, despite her contention that strict federal control is sufficient, to appease a concerned Pritzker. The Democrat cited the issue as one that caused him to side with environmentalists and veto initial legislation Rezin saw approved overwhelmingly last spring.
Let's face it (Score:1, Troll)
Meanwhile China has no problems whatsoever building complex projects like this.
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Last I heard from a Chinese nuclear power company representative, most of their projects under construction are also over budget and late.
Re: Let's face it (Score:4, Informative)
They plan their project on an 18 month timescale with a budget in the 10s of million. Being a few months late and a few million over is not like the West where we are literally taking decades to get through the red tape costing close to a 100M just in project planning cost just to spend the first 10M on a plant. We should be outperforming a third world country at this point on energy, but so-called progressives would rather have us burning dung and coal.
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Can you be a little more specific, which Chinese NPP has been built with a budget of tens of millions for 18 months?
Here's a helpful link to get you started:
https://pris.iaea.org/pris/Cou... [iaea.org]
I won't be holding my breath though.
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Unsurprisingly, you did not produce any evidence for your bullshit claim.
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Anyway, Macmann will be cumming in his already dirty underwear right now.
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Tell that to the US Navy. The US does have the experience in having nuclear power done right. However, there is a big difference between a reactor used on a ship that uses a lot of top-secret sauce to run well, versus a power reactor which is designed to handle gigawatts of power generation.
Nuclear research can't hurt. Breeder reactors would solve a lot of problems we have, especially with dealing with spent fuel. However, nuclear still has risks, and the biggest shortcoming has been human error and sho
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The USA has the worlds largest nuclear fleet, powered by small nuclear reactors - and mobile ones at that. They've had the technology in active service since the mid 50's. I think they can handle it.
Who cares? (Score:5, Informative)
Illinois will "allow" small modular reactors but who's going to build them?
Nuscale is the only real candidate, and their attempt to build a few on federal land in Idaho just went bust.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry... [huffpost.com]
The project "collapsed Wednesday night amid mounting financial troubles."
"as costs began swelling with inflation, NuScale told investors in March it would need more contracts on the books to sell at least 80% of the electricity it planned to generate by next February. That number had fallen to just 25% after a number of utilities canceled contracts to buy power from NuScale via UAMPS."
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Illinois politicians must be bummed out, I assume they were looking forward to banking coin via graft and corruption with new nuke plants.
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Perhaps they will follow up with taxpayer funded subsidies to get nuclear built.
In the UK, nobody wanted to build it. They spent years trying to convince various companies to, and in the end had to go with Chinese investment funding and paying EDF vast sums of money in perpetuity to get the project off the ground. EDF subsequently ran out of money and had to be nationalized by the French government, so our new nuclear plants are joint owned by the Chinese and the French. The subsidies go to them.
And those s
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Compare those subsidies to what fossil fuels get...
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NuScale apparently got a $1.4 billion grant from Trump's DOE in 2020;
https://www.popularmechanics.c... [popularmechanics.com]
"the Inflation Reduction Act passed last year includes $30/MWh in credits for nuclear power plants."
https://www.technologyreview.c... [technologyreview.com]
The Office of Nuclear Energy may have received nearly $700 million to "help drive innovative U.S. advanced reactor technologies to market"
https://www.energy.gov/ne/arti... [energy.gov]
Sigh (Score:2, Interesting)
Environmentalists have criticized the plan, noting that small modular reactors are a decade or more from viability
I would love to ask this crowd what their actual solution is for climate change. Every single thing suggested except "solar panels" and "wind" is shot down by them for $reasons. I love solar, wind is alright, but neither can even under the most optimistic scenario replace all existing generation. I'm tempted to lump them in with the NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) and BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) crowds. They certainly love joining with them to stop ALL progress on things they hat
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Re:Sigh (Score:5, Informative)
There's not much connection between SMRs for power production and naval reactors for propulsion. A lot of naval reactor design is Top Secret, as you say, but quite a bit is known in the public domain. The biggest difference, naval reactors run on highly enriched uranium, as in, beyond weapons grade. Little Boy was 80% enriched on average. A USN submarine reactor runs on >93% enriched fuel. None of this is Top Secret, it's pretty common knowledge in the nuclear (civil and military) community, and the rationales for it (quick power changes and compact design) aren't secret either.
The secret stuff is in the design/layout of the reactor, its exact power output, cooling system capacity, control systems, noise isolation, etc., because all of those factors are useful to would be adversaries looking to build counters to our subs. None of that knowledge is needed for civil nuclear engineering. Lots of nukes get out of the USN and go to work in the civil nuclear field. The bulk of their training and experience can transition into civilian life without the exposure of classified information.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Interesting)
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Well, not in the west. But the better soviet reactors (VVER) have been designed along the lines of their submarine reactors, mostly because the same team was responsible.
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If you've run out of periods, I'd be happy to lend you some.
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Military SMRs need highly enriched fuel, which civilian reactors don't have access to due to proliferation issues.
Even if the technology was made available, the fuel wouldn't be.
Also consider that we need solutions that will work world-wide, because we have lots of big countries industrializing. Even conventional civilian nuclear is a problem for proliferation, and highly enriched fuels are a complete non-starter.
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Military SMRs need highly enriched fuel, which civilian reactors don't have access to due to proliferation issues.
While certainly true current US carriers and subs use HEU and while it has obvious advantages in requiring much less fuel to be loaded into the reactors this is not something that is necessary. There are also nuclear powered ships (e.g. French Navy) that burn LEU.
https://irp.fas.org/agency/dod... [fas.org]
Also consider that we need solutions that will work world-wide, because we have lots of big countries industrializing. Even conventional civilian nuclear is a problem for proliferation, and highly enriched fuels are a complete non-starter.
Nobody is talking about burning HEU.
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The biggest problem with SMR is not that they can't be built they already are and in are in use for the Military which means a lot of the tech is "Top Secret"
Nope. US and UK naval reactors, while small and "technically" modular as they are usually cut out of the ship and (for the US Navy) sent to the same Idaho National Labratory site TFA is talking about for disposal and replaced with a whole new fully-fueled reactor vessel, run on highly-enriched uranium. Not the low-enriched fuel that commercial reactors use, but >90% U235, which is practically weapons grade material. And it's not so much "top secret" as "non-nuclear-proliferation" that holds back highl
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Environmentalists have criticized the plan, noting that small modular reactors are a decade or more from viability
I would love to ask this crowd what their actual solution is for climate change. Every single thing suggested except "solar panels" and "wind" is shot down by them for $reasons. I love solar, wind is alright, but neither can even under the most optimistic scenario replace all existing generation.
My current first draft of a solution involves anti-nuclear protesters and a giant hamster wheel attached to a generator. :-D
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I would love to ask this crowd what their actual solution is for climate change. Every single thing suggested except "solar panels" and "wind" is shot down by them for $reasons. I love solar, wind is alright, but neither can even under the most optimistic scenario replace all existing generation.
What do you mean by "actual" besides what you are willing to accept, and why are you never going to be willing to do enough?
Those dams have been here for generations, the damage to the salmon is done, a sunk cost at this point.
It might well be too late to save some of these salmon that the dams are now threatening and haven't already made extinct, but it is not too late for all of them unless it's too late for all of us.
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US stole computing from the soviets? I think people like the late great John Von Neumann (who wrote what is widely regarded as the first full description of how a fully programmable digital computer would work) would disagree with you there.
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Regardless of who actually came up with the idea of a stored program computer, its clear that the yanks definitely didn't steal the idea from the Soviets as the previous poster claimed.
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What color is the sky in your world?
Here's a hint: the transistor, the microprocessor, and a big long list of other components critical to "computers" were invented in the west, and export controlled from being shipped to the USSR when it still existed. So please tell me how it was all stolen from the USSR, when Russia doesn't even have a semiconductor industry to speak of today, and virtually all advances in computing come from either the US or China (mostly Taiwan)?
Even the codebreakers at Blechtley Park
Holy English, Batman (Score:2)
Where does your tax money go? (Score:1)