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Power

'The Next Nuclear Plants Will Be Small, Svelte, and Safer' (wired.com) 244

"A new generation of reactors will start producing power in the next few years," writes Wired, addingi that "They're comparatively tiny -- and may be key to hitting our climate goals." For the last 20 years, the future of nuclear power has stood in a high bay laboratory tucked away on the Oregon State University campus in the western part of the state. Operated by NuScale Power, an Oregon-based energy startup, this prototype reactor represents a new chapter in the conflict-ridden, politically bedeviled saga of nuclear power plants. NuScale's reactor won't need massive cooling towers or sprawling emergency zones. It can be built in a factory and shipped to any location, no matter how remote. Extensive simulations suggest it can handle almost any emergency without a meltdown. One reason is that it barely uses any nuclear fuel, at least compared with existing reactors. It's also a fraction of the size of its predecessors.... Perhaps most importantly, small modular reactors can take advantage of several cooling and safety mechanisms unavailable to their big brothers, which all but guarantees they won't become the next Chernobyl... Yet this small reactor can crank out 60 megawatts of energy, which is about one-tenth the smallest operational reactor in the U.S. today....

But small reactors will still need to prove they can be cost-competitive, says Steve Fetter, a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland. With the price of renewables like wind and solar rapidly falling and ample natural gas available, smaller, svelter reactors may never find their niche. Especially if a prime motivator is climate change, whose pace is exceeding that of regulatory approvals. "I am skeptical of the ability to license advanced nuclear reactors and deploy them on a scale that would make a difference for climate change," adds Fetter. "But I think it's worth exploring because they're a centralized form of carbon-free electricity and we don't have a lot of those available." At least in the US, it might be the only way nuclear power gets another chance.

NuScale Power has already secured permission to build its first 12-reactor plant at the Idaho National Laboratory, supplying power to Western states "as soon as 2026," according to the article. And they're not the only company pursuing smaller nuclear plants.

"Earlier this month, a secretive nuclear startup called Oklo unveiled Aurora, its 1.5-megawatt microreactor, and announced it had received a permit from the Department of Energy to build its first one at the Idaho National Lab."
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'The Next Nuclear Plants Will Be Small, Svelte, and Safer'

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  • by Sique ( 173459 ) on Sunday December 15, 2019 @04:31AM (#59520358) Homepage
    Statistically, a new energy conversation method (a.k.a. power plant technology) will take on average 27 years until it is widespreadly used. So those small reactors might be available in large numbers somewhere around 2040-2050.

    And we don't know the prices of renewables then. So while they are nice to have, I doubt that they will ever play a larger roll in our energy balance. One of the biggest problems with nuclear technology, the safe disposal of the spent fuel, is still unsolved. Throwing it in the Sun for instance will cost us more energy then we gain by using it in the first place.

    • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

      Yes but, for just 10x the cost of cheap electricity methods you can reprocess the fuel and it lasts nearly forever.

      • Reprocessing fuel is currently more expensive than using fresh fuel because of advances in fresh fuel processing. So why would anyone do that?
        • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

          Because there's not all that much Uranium out there if you're planning to go large scale with nuclear, as in replace fossil fuels with it.

          • But 1) mere reprocessing is not going to help you there, because if there's not enough uranium without reprocessing, there's not enough uranium with it either. Reprocessing is not like breeders that multiply your energy extrated from uranium by 100x or so. There's 0.8% of U235 in spent fuel assemblies where there is several % of U235 in fresh fuel assemblies going into the reactor. So you might get perhaps a 1.2x multiplier there. And, 2) for this slight increase of fuel utilization, your costs go up. That
        • by tepples ( 727027 )

          The proper price comparison is not against using fresh fuel. It's against the combination of using fresh fuel and permanently storing the reprocessable waste. With that taken into account, is reprocessing still more expensive than said combination?

          • Except the fresh fuel scenario already includes disposal costs. They don't differ all that much since the removal of usable fuel from the spent fuel assemblies doesn't make the waste magically go away. It's just that extracting usable fuel from fresh ore is apparently easier than extracting it from heavily active waste.
          • NuScale is quoting prices for power currently. In the contract I saw, the price for power that may come on line in 10 years, with a 50 year commitment at that price, was about the same as commercial scale solar with storage today. The cost of solar is still decreasing. It seems highly likely the cost of solar storage will (continue to) drop dramatically. Whoever buys these contracts is going to be paying 2x+ the market price for energy by about 20-30 years into the contract. At the end of 60 years I fee
        • So you don't have long term radioactive waste? Why recycle plastic when you can dump used plastic in the ocean and make new plastic for less?
    • by blindseer ( 891256 ) <blindseerNO@SPAMearthlink.net> on Sunday December 15, 2019 @05:45AM (#59520452)

      So those small reactors might be available in large numbers somewhere around 2040-2050.
      And we don't know the prices of renewables then.

      That's right, we don't know. Likely they are lower than they are now, perhaps higher. What we do know is that competition keeps prices under control. We also know that wind and solar power need backup power that does not rely on favorable weather.

      It should be hard to argue against looking into the development of new nuclear fission reactor designs. We already have decades of history of nuclear power providing safe, clean, abundant, and reliable energy with lower CO2 emissions than wind and solar. There's a lot of nuclear power plants reaching the end of their operation license. A renewal will mean operating for another 20 years. For some this means running for 60 years, for others this means 80 years. Just how long can we keep these running before natural wear and tear means they are too unsafe, too unreliable, or too expensive?

      One of the biggest problems with nuclear technology, the safe disposal of the spent fuel, is still unsolved.

      That's not true. We solved the technical problems decades ago. But one problem remains, the professional politicians in Congress that get more political contributions from promising to solve our problems than if they actually solve them. While I wish everyone a long and healthy life, including those in Congress, we all must face the inevitable. These professional politicians will be gone from office one way or another, and when they do meet the end of their political career is when I expect the last hurdle of the radioactive waste problem to be cleared.

      I've seen a number of these anti-nuclear politicians leave office in the last few years, many of them left feet first. As more of them disappear the problems of funding the radioactive waste sites will disappear with them.

      Throwing it in the Sun for instance will cost us more energy then we gain by using it in the first place.

      Kind of like the energy needed to launch solar panels into orbit will take more energy than what we could get from them?

      We don't need to launch nuclear waste into the sun, dropping it in a deep hole in some bedrock will do just fine. This was figured out a long time ago, but it's been tied up in political nonsense since.

    • So those small reactors might be available in large numbers somewhere around 2040-2050.

      Again, how badly do you want to keep those glaciers and coral reefs? Not denying climate science has to mean not denying any of the sciences, especially those we will need to solve the problem.

      • Or we could spend half as much money on solar panels and batteries to get the same result, and spend the rest of the money fixing the enviornment.
  • by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Sunday December 15, 2019 @05:20AM (#59520430)

    Don't tell us, tell the insurance companies.
    As soon as you can get insurance for your gizmo that the big boys don't get, we'll listen.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      There are other obvious problems. They can't be "shipped anywhere in the world" because there are lots of places we won't let have nuclear power on security grounds, or just because they won't take it because they don't trust the design. Would you trust a Russian reactor? Some people feel the same way about US equipment.

      And then there's the "almost" meltdown proof. The further you get from a carefully controlled environment the better the quality of idiot you will find to break it. It will need at least som

    • Re:Sure (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Sunday December 15, 2019 @04:54PM (#59522122)
      If you work out the cost of the two big nuclear accidents (Chernobyl, Fukushima), it works out to about a half cent per kWh [slashdot.org]. So paying for nuclear accidents is well within the scope of the value of the energy they generate.

      The reason insurers won't touch nuclear is for a different reason, based entirely on math. Insurance relies on guessing future events. They don't want to risk their payouts suddenly ballooning to exceed how much money they're collecting + their cash reserves. Statistically, the bigger your sample, the narrower the bell curve becomes [wikipedia.org]. So if an insurance company has millions of customers, the bell curve becomes very narrow, and they can reliably predict with 99% certainty that that their expenses will not exceed the average payout if they just collect an additional 5% or 10% or so. Add in a profit margin, and the premium cost is only about 10%-15% more than the cost of the incidents.

      The U.S. only has 100 nuclear power plants, and there are only about 400 in the entire world. Figure any individual insurance company will only be insuring 20 or so plants. With a sample size that small, the bell curve becomes almost completely flat. And to attain 99% certainty that the insurance company is collecting enough money requires the premiums to almost be the same as if you were expecting every plant to suffer a catastrophic accident. In cases like this, the government(s) is supposed to step in and provide flat-rate insurance. In this case, collecting about a half cent per kWh globally to be put into an emergency response fund would suffice. But there are political interests staunchly opposed to this despite the statistics behind it being sound, and one of the jobs of government being to deal with globally advantageous but individually risky situations like this. So nuclear power becomes untouchable by private insurers.

      For a nuclear reactor of the size in TFA (1.5 MW, or about one per thousand homes), you're talking about potentially tens of thousands of these devices. That tightens up the bell curve nicely, and they will be insurable.
  • ago. It was named "super safe, small and simple" or short 4S. It even has its own Wikipedia site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].

    The concept has not changed – make the reactor small enough and it will never have a meltdown. Sadly, this promising concept was never turned into reality.

    • by blindseer ( 891256 ) <blindseerNO@SPAMearthlink.net> on Sunday December 15, 2019 @07:14AM (#59520542)

      It was named "super safe, small and simple" or short 4S. It even has its own Wikipedia site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
      The concept has not changed â" make the reactor small enough and it will never have a meltdown. Sadly, this promising concept was never turned into reality.

      It is a reality, and it has been since nuclear power has been powering ships in the US Navy. Admiral Rickover pointed out the safety of small reactors a long time ago. Build them on the scale that will fit in a submarine and it won't melt down, because the heat cannot build up to the point to damage the containment. Build them on the scale that it can produce gigawatts of heat and this can easily overwhelm natural cooling processes.

      Since then we've been able to find ways to take advantage of natural cooling processes to make nuclear power at all scales safer. Nuclear power has been very safe from the start, we are just making it cheaper and even safer.

      One major problem with the Toshiba 4S, and others like it, is the use of sodium metal as a coolant. This was deemed unwise as sodium will burn in air and explode if in contact with water.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      These new small modular reactors share a lot with those same reactors that Admiral Rickover was talking about and familiar with. Build a small reactor, surround it with a lot of cold water, and it will be impossible for it to meltdown to where it poses a hazard to anyone.

      One theory of the meltdown at Three Mile Island was that the people used their training from Admiral Rickover in the Navy for a reactor that was far too big and different for the same tactics to apply. They were far more concerned about "keeping the ship moving" than keeping the temperature under control. This meant the reactor got far too hot and the reactor shutdown and allowed to cool far too late. Training changed since, it's now considered more important to keep the core cool than to keep the reactor operating. Smaller reactors means it is far easier to keep the core cool.

  • ... that will cause them to lack cost efficiency just like any other nuclear plant.

  • To mitigate climate change, we need to reduce emissions fast.

    That means using proven technology that is ready now. Such as hydro, wind, solar, 3rd gen nuclear, geothermal.

    The world needs to act by reducing emission quickly. There is no time to first develop another generation of nuclear plants.

    • >"To mitigate climate change, we need to reduce emissions fast."

      As long as "we" means the major emitters all do so. Not so easy when many are still trying to just feed and clothe people.

      >"That means using proven technology that is ready now. Such as hydro, wind, solar, 3rd gen nuclear, geothermal."

      Except most areas have no viable option for geothermal or hydro. And those are the only two in your list that can provide reliable, baseload renewable power without massively expensive storage systems (som

    • Re:Too late. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by PPH ( 736903 ) on Sunday December 15, 2019 @11:37AM (#59521158)

      Such as hydro, wind, solar, 3rd gen nuclear, geothermal.

      Everything you mention has a highly dedicated special interest group ready to lobby against it. Step 1: Don't allow for profit law firms to collect fees by hiding behind 501(c)(3) organizations.

  • by AnotherBlackHat ( 265897 ) on Sunday December 15, 2019 @08:06AM (#59520612) Homepage

    There are three big objections to the current, light water, nuclear design;

    • It costs too much per megawatt.
    • It generates a lot of hazardous waste that lasts millions of years.
    • It requires continuous cooling, including while shutting down.

    So what does this new design do differently? It's smaller.

    In other words, despite marketing claims to the contrary, NuScale's design doesn't fix any of the major problems.

    If you want to see real improvements in nuclear design, you have to go outside the US, and it's "Light Water Reactor" only mindset.

    For example;
    Seaborg [seaborg.co] proposes a Compact Molten Salt Reactor (CMSR).
    No pressure, no danger of a exploding, walk away safe design, and it fits in an ISO standard shipping container.
    It uses uranium and a special salt.
    That uranium can be U-238, which is 100 times more abundant than U-235.
    And it can also reprocess existing nuclear waste.

    Moltex [moltexenergy.com] proposes a Stable Salt Reactor (SSR).
    No pressure, no danger of a exploding, walk away safe design.
    They have a design that uses thorium, which is even more abundant than U-238

    Flibe Energy [flibe-energy.com] proposes a Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR; often pronounced lifter).
    No pressure, no danger of a exploding, walk away safe design.
    It uses FLiBe for the salt.

    • by blindseer ( 891256 ) <blindseerNO@SPAMearthlink.net> on Sunday December 15, 2019 @09:21AM (#59520758)

      If you want to see real improvements in nuclear design, you have to go outside the US, and it's "Light Water Reactor" only mindset.

      Flibe Energy proposes a Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR; often pronounced lifter).

      Flibe Energy is based in Alabama, I'm pretty sure that's in the US.

    • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Sunday December 15, 2019 @10:16AM (#59520914)

      It costs too much per megawatt.

      SMRs are specifically made to drastically reduce the cost of nuclear power. The longer we delay in going carbon neutral, the more energy will be needed to reverse the damage to our atmosphere. After ~2030 (when we lose a lot of permafrost sealing away over a petatonne of CO2) then we'll need to go carbon negative just to maintain atmosphere CO2 level. Things are going to get ugly in the 2030s if we don't act quickly to reverse course. The economic cost of failing is in the trillions.

      It generates a lot of hazardous waste that lasts millions of years.

      This is a myth. Old uranium breeder reactors generate less than a ton of waste that is hazardous for 200 years. After 200 years it's on par with Earth's environment which is also radioactive (because literally everything in the universe is).
      The new SMRs being talked about are highly efficient and generate very little waste.

      It requires continuous cooling, including while shutting down.

      A lack of cooling actually is something that triggers a shutdown. It generates so little energy that shutdown does not require external cooling.

      In other words, despite marketing claims to the contrary, NuScale's design doesn't fix any of the major problems.

      Even if every word you wrote was true, the real problem we have is that we need to be able to generate a huge amount of energy with generating greenhouse gasses so that we can power not only our nation but atmospheric CO2 capture. I agree uranium breeder SMRs are a poor option but they are what can be manufactured and deployed in a timely fashion to avert disaster while we create a better replacement.

    • why aren't they being built? Politics? Patents? I doubt it's just ignorance. There's so much money in the energy sector that it's hard to imagine anyone skipping out on a safe nuclear reactor design that was readily available without some external forces at play.
    • by doom ( 14564 ) <doom@kzsu.stanford.edu> on Sunday December 15, 2019 @10:01PM (#59522848) Homepage Journal

      So what does this new design do differently? It's smaller.

      It moves creating the product away from "construction" and toward "manufacturing". Building lots of smaller plants sacrifices some thermal efficiency in favor of economies of scale in manufacturing.

      The American construction industry has, for whatever reason, all but lost the ability to build large projects. This isn't just a disease of the nuclear industry, nearly every big project is slammed by delays and cost overruns.

  • safer than what? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hydrodog ( 1154181 ) on Sunday December 15, 2019 @08:57AM (#59520702)
    The idiocy of the assumptions here are mind boggling. Let's assume that it's safer than current plants. A lot safer. But at 60MW, you need 18 to reach 1GW. So you have 18 of these, according to this fanboy article, distributed around the landscape. How are they guarded from terrorists? Whether modular or not, nuclear needs to be centralized, heavily guarded and armored because a nuclear plant turns anyone's conventional weapons into a nuclear dirty bomb arsenal. Then there's the human factor. If you start scattering these around, they will get put in places they shouldn't, like flood zones, unknown faults, etc. We know what happens. If cars get safer, people drive more recklessly. It's human nature. If plants are safer, more corners will be cut. Either way, we will see continuing failures. Don't get me wrong, we desperately need to do something about the current nuclear setup. Keeping 40 years spent fuel onsite is a huge disaster waiting to happen. The idea of a factory where they can recycle the plant and centralize the waste is good. I just wish someone would perfect a LFTR, use Thorium rather than Uranium, and most important do liquid chemical separation so the low-level waste can be segregated from the highly radioactive materials. I want to see nuclear waste reduced to levels below the original ore and buried, with the highly radioactive waste fed back and irradiated near the core to rapidly degrade them. We haven't had a major disaster in the US, but we have come ridiculously close. In confessions of Rogue Nuclear Regulator, Jaszco says he visited a plant that was nearly flooded. If the river had crested two feet higher, they would have been in trouble. Passive cooling is great but not enough. Making sure the plant is highly secure, watertight, above any potential flood plain, heavily armored, these are the important things. The people who should evaluate the sites for nuclear reactors are not nuclear fanboys, but wargamers and nuclear critics.The fanboys just say the chances are "1 in a million" which is the modern euphemism for "unsinkable" which is no longer permissible since we know better. We need new nuclear capacity, so we can remove all the current (unsafe) reactors and burn through 40-50 years of fuel that is in those cooling tanks on site. But solar and batteries are much better for most of the load. As a matter of national security, having overcapacity is a great idea. We should have solar on all new roofs that have access to sun, so that people have distributed communications and refrigeration backups and use less power.
    • There is something missing from the this discussion. As the parent thread says, "Keeping 40 years spent fuel onsite is a huge disaster waiting to happen." Here are some questions.

      1. What is the useful lifespan of the plants.?

      2. What nuclear waste is left and how do we dispose of it safely?

      3. Can the plants be dismantled or do we need to leave them in place?

      These are some of the questions that I have not seen answered that need to be part of the discussion.

  • "Extensive simulations suggest it can handle almost any emergency without a meltdown"

    "Almost any emergency"? This claim is not comforting in the slightest..

  • The fuel will need processing and reprocessing creating a "waste stream." Not every state is going to want this waste, so start looking around your neighborhood for a good spot where you want it.
  • The trouble I have with nuclear is that I don't trust people. Fukushima happened because the business people cut corners, but we're lying to ourselves if we think we can stop that. Nuke plants need to be cheaper to run safe than not. And not just by factoring in the clean up. The Biz people never pay for the clean up. That's always the taxpayer
    • Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island - all heavily regulated plants that were effectively under the control of the Government. How about we get bureaucrats out of the system (you know, those folks who enter Government on $120K/yr salaries and leave worth $10MM, like lots of Congresspeople), add real penalties for failures, use the funds that nuclear must pre-pay for what it was actually set aside to do (decommissioning and storage), and see how it works. Because what I see so far is a lot of Government
  • Svelte: adj. slender and elegant. (Usually in reference to a person.)

    Is that really what we want in a power plant?

    Reading [1] makes it seem fairly clear that big, complex nukes are nearly impossible to design without some hidden design flaw that will only be revealed at the worst possible moment, usually compounded by the wetware making bad decisions due to poor understanding of the physics involved.

    Small, simple, mass produced nukes sounds desirable to me after reading that book (But I'm not a nuk
  • And it's always been bullshit. There is a fundamental problem with building mini nukes: You have to build more of them. That means more nukes to manage, but before that, it means more chances to get something wrong and build a bad reactor. There are relatively fixed costs to building and decommissioning reactors, which are per-reactor. What's cheaper, building one big reactor and X-ray inspecting 100 pipes (number pulled directly out of asshole) or building 100 small reactors and X-ray inspecting 10,000 pipes? Meanwhile, nuclear is already the least economic form of power generation. You think building more reactors will make it cheaper? Think again. All the inspections, all the paperwork, all of the approvals have to be multiplied by the number of reactors. This is a stupid idea from stem to stern.

    • by PPH ( 736903 )

      Building 100 small reactors and x-ray inspecting 10,000 pipes would be cheaper. 1000 small reactors and 100,000 pipe cheaper yet. It's a matter of the economy of refining a process and scaling it up that will save you a bundle of money. Big reactors built infrequently are bespoke products with all of the one-off costs associated with that.

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Small reactors are bespoke products until you have a working prototype that has seen at the very least 10 years of operation without major problems. With all the bad effects radiation has on steel, concrete and machinery, it would probably take 50 years of testing to actually get a good design once you have that prototype. At the same time, this fantasy has been around fro a long, long time, but, no prototype. That should tell you something.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. My take would be that I read about this first in some children's books. That would make it the last 40 years. One of these really bad ideas that will not die. The nuclear fanatics are now pretty close to anti-vaxxers and flat-earthers in their denial of the actual facts. Nuclear is exceedingly expensive, very slow to build, cannot really be made safe with the tech we have and the whole industry is corrupt to the core.

    • Meanwhile, nuclear is already the least economic form of power generation.

      That's an awfully large claim to make without offering evidence.

  • by LynnwoodRooster ( 966895 ) on Sunday December 15, 2019 @11:04AM (#59521042) Journal

    Is the generation source dispatchable, it can run on-demand, 24/7?

    Yes (like nuclear)? Then the cost is the cost.

    No (like solar/wind which require backup other options)? Then you need to include the full costs of all that backup option as well (which makes it a LOT more expensive).

    Of course, if you don't care that the lights don't come on when you flip the switch, or your computer randomly turns off because the grid's generation capacity dies because the sun sets or the wind stops, well... I guess power isn't that important to you.

  • It was called the SL-1. Look that one up.

  • Any solution that excludes nuclear is useless.

    Because they invariably require people to curb their energy demand, and everyone knows it only happens in fairyland, therefore not practical.

    Nuclear helps bridge the gap to renewables or fusion while allowing people to continue to splurge on energy use. This along with hopefully better ways to store power than cobalt / lithium based methods, is the path of least resistance forward.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Well, let's home you are wrong, because otherwise the human race is doomed. We have a lot of clean energy tech that works. Nuclear is neither really clean nor does it really work. And it takes wayyy too long to install in addition.

  • I told you all that this was going to happen, and that it would be a Good Thing, and that it's part of the overall plan to pull our asses out of this climate-change mess we've made for ourselves. Now you have to listen. :-)
    Anti-nuclear knee-jerkers be damned. This is moving forward regardless of your ooga-booga irrational caveman fears of the bad zoomies. Just chill out, everything will be fine, this technology is going to be awesome, and fission will tide us over until we finish cracking the code of susta
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      It is not going to happen this time either. There are morons believing the lies time and again, even though they have been around for decades. Hell, I had the concept in some children's books when I was little. But is there even one working prototype that does not suffer from massive problems? Nope.

  • They are LWTR, basically the exact same technology that has been used since the dawn of the Nuclear age and the real cause of almost every accident in the nuclear power industry.

    The LWTR uses water as coolant and it has to be kept under pressure to keep it from boiling off into steam near instantly at the temperatures needed for power generation. If the containment vessel develops a leak, even a small crack, and the coolant will be completely lost leaving a mass of semi melted fuel in the core that will co

  • These things never materialize. They are basically a fantasy of the nuclear apologists. If they could work reasonably well with the tech we have now, we would have seen at the very least some working prototypes. Instead, nothing. And that is how things will remain.

Let's organize this thing and take all the fun out of it.

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