Are Small Modular Nuclear Reactors Costly and Unviable? (cosmosmagazine.com) 214
The Royal Institution of Australia is a national non-profit hub for science communication, publishing the science magazine Cosmos four times a year.
This month they argued that small modular nuclear reactors "don't add up as a viable energy source." Proponents assert that SMRs would cost less to build and thus be more affordable. However, when evaluated on the basis of cost per unit of power capacity, SMRs will actually be more expensive than large reactors. This 'diseconomy of scale' was demonstrated by the now-terminated proposal to build six NuScale Power SMRs (77 megawatts each) in Idaho in the United States. The final cost estimate of the project per megawatt was around 250 percent more than the initial per megawatt cost for the 2,200 megawatts Vogtle nuclear power plant being built in Georgia, US. Previous small reactors built in various parts of America also shut down because they were uneconomical.
The cost was four to six times the cost of the same electricity from wind and solar photovoltaic plants, according to estimates from the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and the Australian Energy Market Operator. "The money invested in nuclear energy would save far more carbon dioxide if it were instead invested in renewables," the article agues: Small reactors also raise all of the usual concerns associated with nuclear power, including the risk of severe accidents, the linkage to nuclear weapons proliferation, and the production of radioactive waste that has no demonstrated solution because of technical and social challenges. One 2022 study calculated that various radioactive waste streams from SMRs would be larger than the corresponding waste streams from existing light water reactors...
Nuclear energy itself has been declining in importance as a source of power: the fraction of the world's electricity supplied by nuclear reactors has declined from a maximum of 17.5 percent in 1996 down to 9.2 percent in 2022. All indications suggest that the trend will continue if not accelerate. The decline in the global share of nuclear power is driven by poor economics: generating power with nuclear reactors is costly compared to other low-carbon, renewable sources of energy and the difference between these costs is widening.
Thanks to Slashdot reader ZipNada for sharing the article.
This month they argued that small modular nuclear reactors "don't add up as a viable energy source." Proponents assert that SMRs would cost less to build and thus be more affordable. However, when evaluated on the basis of cost per unit of power capacity, SMRs will actually be more expensive than large reactors. This 'diseconomy of scale' was demonstrated by the now-terminated proposal to build six NuScale Power SMRs (77 megawatts each) in Idaho in the United States. The final cost estimate of the project per megawatt was around 250 percent more than the initial per megawatt cost for the 2,200 megawatts Vogtle nuclear power plant being built in Georgia, US. Previous small reactors built in various parts of America also shut down because they were uneconomical.
The cost was four to six times the cost of the same electricity from wind and solar photovoltaic plants, according to estimates from the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and the Australian Energy Market Operator. "The money invested in nuclear energy would save far more carbon dioxide if it were instead invested in renewables," the article agues: Small reactors also raise all of the usual concerns associated with nuclear power, including the risk of severe accidents, the linkage to nuclear weapons proliferation, and the production of radioactive waste that has no demonstrated solution because of technical and social challenges. One 2022 study calculated that various radioactive waste streams from SMRs would be larger than the corresponding waste streams from existing light water reactors...
Nuclear energy itself has been declining in importance as a source of power: the fraction of the world's electricity supplied by nuclear reactors has declined from a maximum of 17.5 percent in 1996 down to 9.2 percent in 2022. All indications suggest that the trend will continue if not accelerate. The decline in the global share of nuclear power is driven by poor economics: generating power with nuclear reactors is costly compared to other low-carbon, renewable sources of energy and the difference between these costs is widening.
Thanks to Slashdot reader ZipNada for sharing the article.
Math (Score:4, Insightful)
These sort of simplistic math articles are silly and unhelpful.
They always compare A to B construction cost and nothing else. They never talk about long term operating cost, longevity of the plant without extensive extraordinary maintenance, safety, skill required to build and maintain, or anything else of importance and necessary to determine the true ROI and value of big projects.
Maybe small nuclear plants are the worst thing ever. Maybe they're the best. But these kind of kindergartner level math comparisons do not provide the bare minimal necessary information to intelligently decide or discuss the pros and cons.
Re:Math (Score:4, Insightful)
They never talk about long term operating cost, longevity of the plant without extensive extraordinary maintenance, safety, skill required to build and maintain, or anything else of importance and necessary to determine the true ROI and value of big projects.
Why would increasing the number of units ever help with any of these things? No one has ever explained why that even might be true. They simply claim that mass production will improve the situation because it did for other things which are very different from nuclear reactors.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They never talk about long term operating cost, longevity of the plant without extensive extraordinary maintenance, safety, skill required to build and maintain, or anything else of importance and necessary to determine the true ROI and value of big projects.
Why would increasing the number of units ever help with any of these things? No one has ever explained why that even might be true. They simply claim that mass production will improve the situation because it did for other things which are very different from nuclear reactors.
Maybe because higher production rates have had the effect on pretty much every complex technological thing ever?
There is no "higher production rate"... (Score:2)
Maybe because higher production rates have had the effect on pretty much every complex technological thing ever?
Not when the "higher production rate" is, even theoretically, from single digits to maybe dozens. We're talking nuclear reactors - not batteries.
Also... At 250% higher cost per megawatt, that "higher production rate" of SMRs would have to facilitate ALL of the reduction of cost of production to cover the difference.
Conventional nuclear already being several times more expensive, per megawatthour, than nearly all forms of renewables ( only outlier being offshore wind [eia.gov])... there is no economy of scale that wil
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe because higher production rates have had the effect on pretty much every complex technological thing ever?
Not when the "higher production rate" is, even theoretically, from single digits to maybe dozens.
Why do you think the number would be that small? The U.S. has O(780,000) megawatts of coal and natural gas power capacity. In any ideal world, both of those numbers would be zero. SMRs can replace not only base load, but also peaking load, so that entire number is potentially in play.
An SMR, by definition, produces 300 MW or less. So that means you would need 2,600 of them in the U.S. alone. Some SMRs produce more like 20 megawatts, so you'd need 39,000 at that size to produce the same amount of power.
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Really? If you take a moment to look into the facts you'll find that hieroglyphics were first translated [wikipedia.org] roughly 200 years ago.
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And you think that the public would want a nuclear reactor in their neighborhood?
Sure. Why not? The only reason the public is scared of nuclear power is because of safety, and ironically, the only reason nuclear plants are unsafe is because the public is scared of nuclear power. Were it not for NIMBY behavior decades ago, we would have replaced all of the old nuclear plants with newer designs by now, and nuclear power would be massively safer.
SMRs, because of their small size, at least have the potential to be designed in such a way that the worst-case failure mode would involve some
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On a sunny and windy day the cost of solar and wind power is below zero
How can wind and solar power get to be priced below zero?
Because when you produce more power than is consumed, you end up with unloaded turbines running faster and faster, which causes the line frequency to increase, at which point you have to start shedding generation capacity, both to bring the frequency back to where it should be and, at least in some cases, to prevent damage to the turbines themselves. In the interim before that generating capacity is shed, prices can fall below zero to encourage increased consumption to bring the grid frequency back under c
Re:Math (Score:5, Insightful)
Mass production reduces costs through factors beyond just scale: people figure out substitutions, simplifications, human factor improvements, and more. As someone else pointed out, these mechanisms kick in for a wide variety of artifacts, so saying "nuclear reactor are (also) different" doesn't distinguish them.
Re: (Score:2)
While all of that is true, how was that ever going to overcome the fact that the amount of work which must be done was multiplied by using it? If you go from building cars one-off in a shed to building the "same" cars (essentially) through mass production in a factory, you're not creating additional work for yourself as you're building the same number of cars.
Re:Math (Score:5, Interesting)
It depends entirely on the efficiencies that are achieved compared to the factors that you are worried about. To pick an extreme example, IBM once projected a market for five computers (out of about 20 companies they pitched to) because they were so expensive; compare that to today.
Cars are a good example, though: because we have so much experience with them, quality has gone up enormously per inflation-adjusted dollar. They're faster, safer, more fuel efficient, more comfortable, have an increasing number of driver assistance features, and so on.
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Yes imagine that. Cars, an invention that has been around for well over a century, have been improved upon. Now what on earth does that have to do with mass production? Are you saying cars would never have been improved upon in well over a century without mass production? That doesn't sound right at all.
Re: (Score:3)
I am saying there would be much less improvement over the last century. Compare a modern Ford to 1908's Model T, or its non-mass-produced predecessor (1906's Model N). Then compare a modern cruise ship to the Titanic, or a SpaceX Falcon 9 to any non-SpaceX rocket. The differences in improvement are huge.
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They're faster, safer, more fuel efficient, more comfortable, have an increasing number of driver assistance features, and so on.
They're pretty slow when they glob up to form a traffic mass. General lack of skill means people are too timid to move faster than a rascal scooter to clear an intersection or get out of the way. And since they go slower than bikes, I can look forward to getting right-hooked in the bike lane every time.
More whatever, the trend line for safety is decreasing while the expense of repairs in increasing. That's not my personal idea of comfort.
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While all of that is true, how was that ever going to overcome the fact that the amount of work which must be done was multiplied by using it?
Why do you assume that the amount of work required would increase faster than the power production increase?
I could easily imagine an SMR design in which the actual operation is 100% automated and remotely monitored, reducing the personnel costs to not much more than the number of people who work for nuclear plants right now, while producing vastly more energy.
I could also imagine the nuclear fuel being compartmentalized for safe transportation, and consolidating the cooling process, the short-term and long
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They never talk about long term operating cost, longevity of the plant without extensive extraordinary maintenance, safety, skill required to build and maintain, or anything else of importance and necessary to determine the true ROI and value of big projects.
Why would increasing the number of units ever help with any of these things? No one has ever explained why that even might be true. They simply claim that mass production will improve the situation because it did for other things which are very different from nuclear reactors.
Running smaller units at less extreme conditions might be handy, and a big one most people don't think of, is strategic. If at war, your enemy wants you to have as few big nuc reactors as possible. Less targets with exceptional value if destroyed. Many more people now without power, and a big contaminated area to boot.
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They simply claim that mass production will improve the situation because it did for other things which are very different from nuclear reactors.
That may be true but 200 years of experience says the marginal cost of items virtually always decreases as quantity increases. Quality also goes up as you automate. If you want a good recent example, take SpaceX's rocket engines. They're also high-stress, complicated machines which used to be essentially built by hand. SpaceX demonstrated you can make them cheaper, faster, and at higher quality on a production line.
That said, you may be right. There may be something special about nuclear reactors. Maybe the
Re:Math (Score:5, Interesting)
We already know that large reactors of the same design and constructed under the same regulations drop cost as lessons are learned in the construction and the custom machinery used to create bespoke parts is amortized over the number of reactors. There's no reason to believe the same wouldn't be true of the small reactors.
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I think one place to expect operational savings is refueling. Conventional reactors spend about 8% of the time offline being refueled. Every eighteen months thousands of workers from all around the country come to the site to do the work. SMRs are designed to need refueling much less often, typical every 3-7 years. Some designs go for up to thirty years without refueling. Plants with a larger number of smaller reactors can also do maintenance and refueling without losing any revenue, as the remaining re
Re: Math (Score:2)
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Why would increasing the number of units ever help with any of these things? No one has ever explained why that even might be true. They simply claim that mass production will improve the situation because it did for other things which are very different from nuclear reactors.
Increasing the number of manufactured units would definitely help in amortizing nonrecurring engineering costs. Another non-NRE cost that would be huge is the cost of securing government approval. Inspection costs are per unit, but design approval costs are per design. I'm guessing that NRE and government approval are a huge part of the cost.
Re: (Score:2)
cost.
businesses survive because their costs are less than their revenue.
but maybe it is a case of materials that can be evaluated.
google the following
nickel isotope battery.
some company in china is working on a 50 year battery.
using nickel isotopes.
also the cost of purchasing a geiger counter would be useful also
Well they better hurry up... (Score:2)
Cause they were invented in the 1970s. You can buy them. [citylabs.net]
It's a dead end for anything but the most basic sensors. [youtube.com]
Re: Math (Score:2)
Re:Math (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not saying it would. I'm saying we're on a site that posts articles for further discussion that failed to provide articles with sufficient information on the topic to have intelligent discussion.
Just because you're too stupid to look at the links doesn't mean the actual smart people can't.
Well if they weren't to busy wading though your horseshit.
I'd like an article that answers that question rather than leaving us to guess and snipe uselessly at ea h other but I know I ask too much.
Then read the links you lazy fuck.
Re:Math (Score:5, Insightful)
Quick summary of conversation:
iAmWaySmarterThanYou: this summary is too simplistic, it doesn't give details. I want details.
AC: there are plenty of details in the link given
iAmWaySmarterThanYou: I'm too lazy to read the links. I want a simplistic summary.
Re:Math (Score:5, Funny)
Quick summary of conversation:
iAmWaySmarterThanYou: this summary is too simplistic, it doesn't give details. I want details.
AC: there are plenty of details in the link given
iAmWaySmarterThanYou: I'm too lazy to read the links. I want a simplistic summary.
This is too confusing. I want a simplistic summary of the conversation.
Re: (Score:2)
You've got a real valid point here, but the fact is that you'd expect the data to be available because SMRs are planned for public spending but it isn't, so what can they do. Real SMRs [ieefa.org] have had predicted prices per MWh at $58 which had already risen to $89 even with subsidies (or is that over $100??).
Lots of us have been predicting this, not because of the science or anything, simply because experience with the Nuclear industry is always that they are overoptimistic. Looking at levelised costs this looks ve [statista.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Math (Score:5, Informative)
They always compare A to B construction cost and nothing else.
If you had read the article, you might have noticed the link to the source for the costs, the GenCost consultation report [csiro.au]. Quoting from the associated FAQ: "Levelised costs combine capital costs with running costs such as operating, maintenance and fuel, in units that enable us to compare technologies side by side." In particular, they do not just compare construction costs, but take all costs associated with building, running and maintaining the power plants into account.
Re: (Score:2)
They always compare A to B construction cost and nothing else.
If you had read the article, you might have noticed the link to the source for the costs, the GenCost consultation report [csiro.au]. Quoting from the associated FAQ: "Levelised costs combine capital costs with running costs such as operating, maintenance and fuel, in units that enable us to compare technologies side by side." In particular, they do not just compare construction costs, but take all costs associated with building, running and maintaining the power plants into account.
They should probably average in the costs of spending 12 billion on a nuclear plant that was never finished, and had people arrested, unqualified designers, and drove Westinghouse bankrupt.
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Quite the habit you have for defending that WayMoreIgnorantThanMost chap. Try not to let reality get in the way of defending your team. just makes you look as foolish as him.
You think that he looks foolish, or me? When you are a coward of the most accurate aspect?
Can't write that stuff. But we can get you wound up enough to stalk us, and mod us down any time you get mod points, sissy.
Re: (Score:2)
These sort of simplistic math articles are silly and unhelpful.
They always compare A to B construction cost and nothing else. They never talk about long term operating cost, longevity of the plant without extensive extraordinary maintenance, safety, skill required to build and maintain, or anything else of importance and necessary to determine the true ROI and value of big projects.
Maybe small nuclear plants are the worst thing ever. Maybe they're the best. But these kind of kindergartner level math comparisons do not provide the bare minimal necessary information to intelligently decide or discuss the pros and cons.
I could not agree more. Monovariant analysis usually sucks and that's because it is usually wrong.
Of course economy of scale has its pluses. Indeed, Running everything in as huge a reactor, as hot as possible will be sort of more efficient in that way.
Of course, that assumes that the reactor never goes boom, or that criminal elements in the design and construction of one's fancy new reactor don't have your state spend 12 billion dollars for not one Wattsworth of electricity generated. https://thebull [thebulletin.org]
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These super efficient gas heaters also capture all their smoke in an electrostatic filter, so they are super clean to run also. The only better system would be an electric heat pump powered by a nuke station.
True dat. And the condensation is routed to the drain.
Re: (Score:2)
I could not agree more. Monovariant analysis usually sucks and that's because it is usually wrong.
And you're also ignorantly claiming that's what they did?
I'm ignorantly claiming that my sole purpose in this discussion is to piss you off. People who don't have the balls to even post with a pseudonym are proven to be cowards in real life. And that is almost certainly true in your case. Probably a lack of testosterone, or perhaps gargling too much with it.
Heyoh!
Slovakia to build small reactors (Score:2)
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Seems to me that the operating cost is exactly what they talked about.
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There are two papers cited by the article. Unfortunately one is behind a paywall.
The other is this: Nuclear waste from small modular reactors [pnas.org]:
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for adding information that was not provided in the summary and proving my point.
Disproving your point. You said "These sort of simplistic math articles are silly and unhelpful."; he gave you the information you asked about, WHICH WAS IN THE ARTICLE, and which directly contracted the point you had asserted (without reading the article) "They never talk about long term operating cost."
Yes, the article did talk about long term operating cost.
Oh, and you changed the goalposts. Initial post: "These sort of simplistic math articles are silly and unhelpful." Revised goalposts: that was i
Yes obviously (Score:4, Insightful)
What I have been saying since we started seeing the "SMRs will solve everything wrong with nuclear" argument is that per-unit costs will make them more expensive, not cheaper. More reactors for the same output means for example more welds to make, which means more X-ray inspections of welds which can wind up costing more than the welds themselves (which is why the automated welding they're doing on prototypes isn't going to solve the problem.) The small reactors still need all the same stuff as the big ones. If you're trying to get the same output on a site then not only are you magnifying your costs by building many reactors instead of one, but you're also multiplying the costs of making connections to those reactors from the water source and so on.
Everything tends to get cheaper per unit of output as it gets larger until it reaches the point where it's so large that its very size causes new engineering problems. Why would SMRs ever have been different? It just never made any sense that doing more work to arrive at the same level of output would be cheaper.
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The small reactors still need all the same stuff as the big ones. If you're trying to get the same output on a site then not only are you magnifying your costs by building many reactors instead of one, but you're also multiplying the costs of making connections to those reactors from the water source and so on.
So ... bring on the big ones then ... right?
What's that? No?
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There is also the operating personnel issue. More units will need more people to operate, maintain, and update them, and the nuclear power industry is already having problems finding enough 20-somethings willing to work in their plants much less devote themselves to a 30 year career
I was going to add probability of failure also, since the airline maintenance and aircraft design worlds long ago observed that with more engines there is a higher probability of failure and reducing the number of engines from f
It Depends (Score:3)
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This is why they have to be located near highly reliable water sources like major rivers, lakes and oceans.
This is pure bullshit. The largest nuclear power plant in the US (Palo Verde) is in the middle of a desert, and it sheds heat by evaporating treated wastewater. Moreover, having 15 small reactors instead of 1 large reactor won't affect your total cooling needs.
Re:Yes obviously (Score:4, Insightful)
> More reactors for the same output means for example more welds to make, which means more X-ray inspections of welds which can wind up costing more than the welds themselves
Ridiculous. That ancient issue was solved by the mass production car industry.
This "but it's going to be more expensive for a bit" whining is total crap.
We have the following options:
1. Build nuclear better, that means SMR, in factories, not on site.
2. "Save the planet" (TM) while maintaining our energy hungry lifestyles that everyone and their dog relies upon to simply live in todays society.
or the alternative
1. Build nothing because it is cheaper to.
2. Get used to living like it's the 1930's again. When people are told they cant have a bath because it isnt sunny enough and no sod has built a reactor that wont be completed within 20 years, you know what they will do? They'll buy tin baths and burn stuff in the garden to heat water to have one every so often.
Youre going to have a hard time convincing people to give up energy. When the sun goes down, the wind hasnt blown for a week or so and the grid batteries have only managed to get a small charge due to the cloud, you think we will just accept grinding to a halt in todays world?
Storage (Score:2, Insightful)
>"This 'diseconomy of scale' was demonstrated"
Probably expected. There will be a better economy of scale with a larger reactor. Much more so if they can be built on-budget (which never seems to be the case for some reason).
> "The money invested in nuclear energy would save far more carbon dioxide if it were instead invested in renewables,"
But they are not doing the same job unless they also include storage. Plus the output could still be inconsistent if generation was too low for too long (due to n
Re:Storage (Score:5, Informative)
>"The money invested in nuclear energy would save far more carbon dioxide if it were instead invested in renewables,"
But they are not doing the same job unless they also include storage. Plus the output could still be inconsistent if generation was too low for too long (due to not enough storage or freaky weather). And if that storage is lithium batteries, you have to add in all that life cycle carbon, as well.
To quote from the article: "In comparison, the cost of each megawatt-hour of electricity from wind and solar photovoltaic plants is around AUD$100 [as opposed to AUD$400-600 for SMRs], even after accounting for the cost involved in balancing the variability of output from solar and wind plants." (emphasis added by me).
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>"even after accounting for the cost involved in balancing the variability"
Well, that could just mean balancing inputs (shedding power or adding from other sources), not necessarily storing power. Not enough info. But it is a good catch.
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Studies suggest that reactors that are sensibly budgeted at the start take around the expected time and cost around the expected amount. It is the reactors they tried to build as cheaply and quickly as possible that cost more and take longer.
Perhaps the only problem they could solve... (Score:5, Insightful)
... would be reliability. Instead of one huge power plant shutting down because of things like heat or low water levels, wear, minor incidents, you would have many small plants, of which only a part is shut down at the same time. It's not a big improvement as shown in France, where during heat-waves a large fraction of their plants are down, but it could improve the problem a bit.
Other than that, it's fairly mad. They are, at best, as expensive as normal power plants to build, but they require far more people to secure since each one of those would be an attractive target for terrorists. You still have all the "normal" problems of nuclear power.
What will kill the nuclear fission plant industry is a combination of the following:
1. We have, by far, cheaper options to generate electricity, namely solar and wind. Nuclear power has, so far, proven to be extremely expensive. Countries betting on it, like France, actually need to subsidize their electricity heavily.
2. Storage gets cheaper by the month. For home owners it's already becoming feasible to go (virtually) off-grid, only getting power from the grid on cloudy days. (when the grid typically has lots of wind power)
3. Much of the currently running nuclear plants are nearing the end of their life. Sure you can upgrade the control systems, you can theoretically change the fuel rods. However changing critical components like the reactor chamber isn't feasible. Cracks are an unavoidable consequence of making such components, so they are monitored and catalogued. However once they get to large you cannot replace the chamber without tearing down the whole building.
BTW it currently looks as if we'd solve the storage problem differently. Since solar power is so incredibly cheap, we could just scale it up to surpass demand on typical days. We could then use the excess electrical power for things like the chemical industry, or storing it as heat domestically, etc.
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Salt reactors should be less of a problem.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
OK, how do salt reactors solve the problem of someone taking a pick-up truck and just slamming it into the building or stealing stuff to create a "dirty bomb"?
How are salt reactors cheap enough to even come close to solar and wind?
Re: (Score:2)
If they were a viable solution then why isn't anyone building them?
Re:Perhaps the only problem they could solve... (Score:5, Interesting)
Molten Salt reactors are known since 70 years now, as the first experimental one was running in 1954, the ASR. A second one was built 60 years ago, in 1964, and ran until 1969, clocking up two years of actual operation, an availability of about 50%, the MSRE
Those are the only two Molten Salt reactors ever being operational. Everything else was just theory. Most close to completion was the Molten Salt Breeder, but this one was never completed, as to work as a breeder, it would have had a positive temperature coefficient, making it close to become supercritical. Why, after 70 years of experience with an actual molten salt reactor, are there no viable plants actually producing electricity? To me, Molten Salt reactors look like the reactor equivalent of Anna Kournikova: They look nice, but they never win a single's tournament.
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As I said: They look nice, they even play well, but they don't win any single's tournament. Apparently, they are a technology, whose time never was.
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Countries betting on it, like France, actually need to subsidize their electricity heavily.
Really? The average cost of energy in France is 22 eurocents per kWh, in Germany it's 42 eurocents per kWh. The total amount of subsidies into French nuclear power is less than the difference in the total electricity cost paid by consumers. And Germany is not finished, the prices will have to rise much more to make renewables there viable.
Australian politics at play (Score:5, Interesting)
The conservative (LNP) party who are behind the latest push for SMR's, were in government from 2013-2022 and strongly opposed any nuclear power generation.
Since losing government their leader Peter Dutton has taken a keen interest in SMR's as a path forward for Australia to transition from fossil fuel (coal and gas) base load power generation. The key issue is, Australia's coal power plants are being retired now. The fossil fuel industry is pushing the SMR pipedream (via the LNP), knowing SMR's are years off (if practical), as it will extend the dependence on gas.
LNP hasn't provided any plan or policy detail other than a pamphlet and a few slides. Yet the MSM media continue to give this nonsense idea oxygen, despite various experts and reports dismissing it as unproven, too expensive, slow to build and multiple times more costly to operate per MW.
Australia is blessed with ample space and abundant sunshine, wind, where renewable's provided 40% of the total power in 2023. By 2030, that will reach close to 80% (current target). Gas will have a part, but only for dispatchable power generation. The idea that it will be a major source of power generation fanciful, given how expensive gas is in Australia.
While Australia is the 2nd largest LNG exporter, local gas is expensive. For most of Australia, there is no local reservation policy, meaning producers charge locals global prices, thus making gas power generation a very lucrative proposition for the gas cartel, hence their drive to stifle moves to renewable's.
Talk of SMR has been playing out for months in Australian politics. With any luck RAI and CSIRO reports will finally put it to bed.
Re:Australian politics at play (Score:4, Insightful)
That being the driver makes complete sense. Before I scrolled down to this post I was contemplating what problem these reactors solve.
The only problem miniature reactors solve is "doing something, anything, to say we're deploying nukes, while remaining within a fixed (insufficient) budget".
In political terms,"fixed budget" means "we don't dare raise more revenue."
In modern western politics, "we don't dare raise more revenue" means "we don't dare tax the rich."
Re:Australian politics at play (Score:5, Insightful)
It also fits their procedural modus operandi regarding solving problems:
1. When in power, stonewall solutions
2. When out of power, pretend to have a solution
3. Never manage to deploy your solution, or deploy it and blame the failure on the other guy
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This whole mess is why organizations like universities and manufacturers are looking at these reactors in the first place. Because maybe they can shoehorn them in somewhere in the budget.
Nobody asks the question: Why should a company or a school have to build its own utilities? That's the government's job, but they're too busy fucking around. So now it falls on everyone else.
Maybe tax the rich to keep our business sector and education (and healthcare and and and...) in the black? Maybe it's time to try that
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Australia is blessed with ample space and abundant sunshine, wind, where renewable's provided 40% of the total power in 2 close to 80% (current target).
And one of the interesting pluses with most renewable energy like solar and wind is that the cost of expansion and repair is drastically simplified. Need more power when say a new subdivision is built? Emplace some more panels or put up a new wind turbine or two.
And when your nuclear plant ages out - eventually you are tickling the dragon's tail when you extend their lifetime. That is when battery storage will hit its stride.
Other than zealots, and politicians who are paid to endorse it, nuc power opt
Did costs account for administrative sabotage? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nuclear project costs escalate in part because of intentional interference by people and organizations opposed to the projects. Conversely opposition to 'renewable' projects is limited and politically incorrect. Additionally the cost assessments for 'renewables' frequently hide the production and disposal aspects. Finally, the hidden costs of renewables that never seem to factor in:
- the periods of non-generation (lack of wind/sun) when the non-renewable backup systems have to be activated. In this area that means gas turbine engines that are costly to install, costly to run, and costly to sit idle; and
- extra costs of appropriating land and connection to the grid.
Re: (Score:2)
>> intentional interference by people and organizations opposed to the projects
Show evidence for that tired chestnut. Vogtle Unit 3 was built at a site where there are already 2 reactors and it was way late and over budget.
>> the periods of non-generation
That was addressed in the article. The cost of electricity from SMR is 4-6 times more than renewables "even after accounting for the cost involved in balancing the variability of output from solar and wind plants".
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>> intentional interference by people and organizations opposed to the projects
Show evidence for that tired chestnut. Vogtle Unit 3 was built at a site where there are already 2 reactors and it was way late and over budget.
To be fair, the grandparent poster did say "in part". Mistakes during design or construction that have to be fixed later can cause cost overruns and operational delays in pretty much anything, and aren't specific to nuclear power.
Also note that SMRs would likely have lower risk of delays caused by design or construction mistakes, because they would presumably be making tens of thousands of them, all alike.
But SMRs would also likely have much higher risk of NIMBY-related delays per gigawatt of output, becau
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Show evidence for that tired chestnut. Vogtle Unit 3 was built at a site where there are already 2 reactors and it was way late and over budget.
There were a number of lawsuits filed around Vogtle 3 and 4, but the major delays were political/regulatory (source) [ans.org]. The NRC changed the design specification for the AP1000 after construction had already begun, causing a stop in construction because the containment structure had to be completely redesigned. Stopping construction on any huge project like this is very costly, you have contractual costs to your contractors as well as capital costs - you're paying interest on money you can't yet deploy becau
MacMann? (Score:2)
There's a reason the Germans ... (Score:2)
... ditched nuclear fission. It isn't cost-effective. The Kalkar fastbreeder - to be the most advanced fission reactor ever btw. - and the Wackersdorf replenishing plant were stopped by government clerks who did some basic math and figured this ain't gonna work.
Nuclear Fission isn't cost-effective and smaller reactors seem to be even worse in efficiency. That's appears to be the cold hard truth. Sadly.
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Indeed. The German government basically used Fukushima to get out of an idea they _knew_ was bad.
The best approach (Score:2)
Would be to construct solar arrays in space and beam the energy down.
US SMR project cancelled (Score:5, Interesting)
Nuscale was required to issue updates from time to time, including current estimates for what the wholesale price of power would be. That price had gone up pretty much each iteration. The next update was due Jan 1, 2024, but the participants announced a month before that the project was canceled. No reason was given, but all of the rumors were that the projected wholesale price had gone to something over $60/MWh.
Regionally, independent wind farms are signing contracts to provide power at $19/MWh, or less.
What about really small ones? (Score:2)
It was over years ago (Score:4, Insightful)
Put yourself in the shoes of one of those Masters of the Universe, the people who make the calls on where to invest ten billion dollars and more. You do not have a nuclear engineering degree, or anything like it; you just study trends in industry, more than R&D.
So you've been watching batteries and renewables get exponentially cheaper for over a decade. Solar, in particular, can already beat nuclear's assumed $/MWh, only "firm clean" needs for base-load keeps nuclear in the running, so your nuclear "play" depends on cheap storage not happening for the 40 years it will take to build your plant, and pay it off.
- Halving again the price of existing batteries has to stall;
- The "iron air" 120-hour battery from Form Energy has to fail;
- The discovery by Eavor that their geothermal wells from fracking can store a lot of energy by pumping into them has to not work;
- For that matter, geothermal-via-fracking in general has to turn out a big disappointment
The odds on all of that R&D failing for 40 years is very small.
My copy of "The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear" by Dr. Petr Beckman is 50 years old; I've been championing nuclear from early high school to government pension. But I spent most of that 50 years as an engineer, and we follow the cheapest solution that is reliable and sustainable. The nuclear industry has failed me, after all those subsidies and free research dollars.
It is already baked-in that China is going to try several new reactor designs; as analysts say, they did the *opposite* of that recent wisdom that we should have picked 3 designs and made many of each; China wants to export, so they developed a bunch of reactor designs to please possible customers, and still are, including small and Thorium. For once, we should let them take point, and go back to look at nuclear if they do something good and amazingly cheap; it seems far more likely that they will fail.
Re:It was over years ago (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, the nuclear industry has always been massively overpromising and under-delivering. The dirty secret is that all it was made "viable" by was making bomb-stuff, with a few designs non-capable of that throwing in as a diversion. The French admit that openly. The rest is lying about it.
But yes, civilian nuclear has completely and utterly failed. It never had any real efforts behind it though.
So the problem they're supposed to solve (Score:2)
The latter may be correct since in theory they would be built in factories to exact specifications. The former I haven't seen any indication that large numbers of these would require any less maintenance or be any safer in a failure state.
At the moment I'm pretty anti nuclear. The money spent especially in America with
Russian, Chinese SMR designs poised to dominate (Score:2)
https://balkangreenenergynews.... [balkangree...gynews.com]
Yes (Score:2)
Because once you factor in the fixed costs of having to fight off the screaming hippies, economics dictates that you "go big" and spread that over a 1GW+ plant.
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An often repeated lie. France has its nuclear industry go bankrupt time and again (with the government quietly rescuing it with billions after billions), and they do not have any "screaming hippies" regarding nuclear.
Potential for mass production (Score:3)
the downside of small reactors, is that if you imagine say 10,000 small reactors across the country, the worst operated, worst maintained reactor is going pretty bad, and an accident would still be quite ugly.
NuScale failed, therefore all SMRs will fail. (Score:2)
NuScale was an uninteresting variant of a conventional LWR reactor that was badly planed and executed.
I'd say it was also badly built, but they pulled the plug on it before it get that far.
Instead of an unproven, piss poor design, why not look at something like the GE/Hitachi BWRX-300.
Assumptions about the competition... (Score:2)
Bogus - its APPLES TO ORANGES (Score:2)
Solar never gets lugged with battery requirements in these direct comparisons - which are currently very large for minimal capacity (2hs).
Until we properly look at what the future state is we will continue to progress down a path that is frighteningly unrealistic.
Solar does not compete with any baseload clean power, because its not baseload clean power.
Nobody knows (Score:3)
As there still is not a single prototype. So actual industrial roll out (i.e. building the _first_ one) is something like 50 years in the future at the very least. Add another 50 for mass-production. (Yes, designing machinery is slow. It gets slower is the operating conditions are very untypical.) Hence they do not matter beyond giving the nuclear fetishists something to fantasize about.
What we know from a theoretical side is that nuclear has to be very large to be remotely economically viable. Mass production could make SMRs viable, but that is about 100 years in the future if we start now. You probably need 3-5 prototype cycles (at 10 years each) to even get a viable design at all.
Re:Sorry (Score:4, Insightful)
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>"You should be thanking the communists for bringing the cost of solar down to pennies on the dollar. It certainly wasn't capitalists that had any interest in that."
It isn't hard to do when your model communist's country's standards of living is low, people are much more controlled and oppressed, and actual environmental concerns are low. And, of course, when you have rich capitalist markets who are buying all your stuff and created the demand. I don't think you are making a great pro-communism argumen
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Some would argue they are rolling in Western money by acting like an unbelievably big monopoly... one that also ignores IP, manipulates currency, undercuts pricing, market-floods, has very low safety standards, and more. They aren't "playing by our rules".... but we are so addicted to cheap labor/goods, we continue to play the game with them.
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Re:Sorry (Score:4, Informative)
Indeed. I am a huge fan of capitalism and a huge critic of cronyism. We are not doing nearly enough to reign-in abusive monopolistic practices. But it pales in caparison to the situation in China, where the companies and government are barely distinguishable from each other.
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Not saying one's better or worse than the other; just pot, kettle, black.
Re: Sorry (Score:2)
I distrust any "science" where the solution is a communist's wish list.
You should be thanking the communists for bringing the cost of solar down to pennies on the dollar.
I don't think you are making a great pro-communism argument.
I don't think you are making a great argument for disregarding science because communist slave labor makes steel cheap, for example.
If a solution, backed by science, depends on goods produced by capitalist markets, are you drawing a connection to the trustworthiness of the science? If a solution depends on American oil and steel, is the science behind it higher quality than if it depended on electronics produced by a communist country? I suppose it would be a ratio of both, how's that work?
Even if we buy in
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>"I don't think you are making a great argument for disregarding science because communist slave labor makes steel cheap, for example."
I never made such an argument- you are replying to the wrong person...
Re:Sorry (Score:4, Informative)
You should be thanking the communists for bringing the cost of solar down to pennies on the dollar.
Not sure what you refer to as "communists". The cost of solar was brought down by a focused research program through the 80s and 90s, funded in the US by the Department of Energy (but also with significant work in Europe and some brilliant work at University of New South Wales in Australia). Is that "communist"? It is the hybrid economy that we have in the US.
It certainly wasn't capitalists that had any interest in that.
But, turns out it was. China has capitalists, and they grabbed on to solar production in order to make money.
Re:Sorry (Score:4, Informative)
You left out the lack of environmental protection laws and no worker safety standards. The lack of anything like the fair labor standards act is sort of covered in the slavery still being acceptable clause you did mention.
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Not sure I follow. Solar+battery is the individualistic option. You could be entirely off the grid. Nuclear is the option that entails multi-generational societal commitment.
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Are you saying wind and solar are on the Communist "wish list"? I had no idea energy generation technologies had any particular political alliance.
Communist vs capitalist approaches [Re:Sorry] (Score:2)
I distrust any "science" where the solution is a communist's wish list.
First, this article is about an economic analysis. Not science. Economic trade-studies like these are very explicitly market-based analyses, not communist.
Second, nuclear reactors are and have been a very communistic solution to energy. Large scale, centralized utilities fit very well into the planned economy method of economics. So, if your statement was intended to mean "the solution, [large nuclear power plants rather than small ones], is a communist's wish list, yes, correct.
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Is protecting a given technology from 'undue roadblocks' in the form of lawsuits not an 'exemption'; for instance? Then there's something like 'subsidies' which is pretty obvious if you are talking the "we just outright cut them a check" flavor; but gets a lot more fiddly when less direct things like "we allow them to impose particular negative externalities at no,
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Sure. Needs a proven design and a lot of industrialization. Say in 100 years. Maybe.