'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."
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."
Wait a quarter of a century. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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Yes but, for just 10x the cost of cheap electricity methods you can reprocess the fuel and it lasts nearly forever.
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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.
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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?
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Re:Wait a quarter of a century. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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Sure (Score:3)
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.
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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)
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.
Not really new – Toshiba proposed that 20 ye (Score:2)
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.
Lessons learned from TMI and Admiral Rickover (Score:5, Informative)
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.
... and have the exact same waste problems... (Score:2)
... that will cause them to lack cost efficiency just like any other nuclear plant.
Too late. (Score:2)
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.
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>"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)
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.
We promise, this time, it's different. (Score:5, Informative)
There are three big objections to the current, light water, nuclear design;
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.
Re:We promise, this time, it's different. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Re:We promise, this time, it's different. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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3 billion for a 60 Megawatt power plant isn't drastically cheaper. 3 billion for a 600 Megawatt power plant isn't either.
That's for the initial reactor. These can be mass produced which could easily drive the price down by multiple orders of magnitude.
So even in the best case, a LWR is only 10 times cheaper than chemical.
Hydrocarbon fuels cannot be used to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. It literally requires more energy to undo the process than to avoid it in the first place. Hydrocarbon fuels are always more expensive when you figure in the externalized costs. The only thing that can be compared is the cost of solar/wind which should include energy storage as well as maintenance. SMRs are
So if those new reactors are so great (Score:2)
Re:We promise, this time, it's different. (Score:4, Informative)
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)
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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.
Almost Catastrophic (Score:2)
"Almost any emergency"? This claim is not comforting in the slightest..
Nuclear Waste (Score:2)
So what emergency can't it handle (Score:2)
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Svelte? (Score:2)
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
I've been hearing this shit for 20 years (Score:3)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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That's an awfully large claim to make without offering evidence.
Price is easy to answer (Score:4)
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.
We've seen this movie before (Score:2)
It was called the SL-1. Look that one up.
Before any renewable purist jumps in (Score:2)
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.
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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.
Toldja. :-) (Score:2)
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
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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.
Still has a BIG weakness (Score:2)
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
I heave heard these lies for 30 years now (Score:2)
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.
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Maybe we should let the Navy steer this ship. They seem to know WTF they're doing.
That may be the solution. One area which the Russians got right recently:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power_station
Build them as a ship, tow them to location, hook them into the grid and tow them back to the standard facilities used to dismantle scrapped nuclear submarines at the end of the service life.
Rinse, repeat.
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Well, if Russia wasn't a country run by Putin's Kleptocrats, I'd have more faith in them floating nuclear power plants. I fear they cut corners so Putin's Poodles can line their pockets yet again. The concept of floating the plants might be good, but what happens when something goes wrong? How does the mess get cleaned?
Down with tsunami! (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd give you the insightful mod if I ever had a point to give. Did you read the book of that name?
As long as they only float the nuclear plants in places where earthquakes and tsunamis are illegal, I suppose it would be okay. Oh, wait. Fukushima...
Actually, I'm not against nuclear power. I just think we've blown it so badly that there is no way to recover. They made some terrible design decisions early on and kept doubling down and doubling down. If we could get back to square one and put safely first rathe
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Possibly.
If you're building them into a larger facility where you can trade out an entire reactor assembly like a giant battery pack, building a big facility out of an array of these could be feasible with mass production.
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I'm not convinced they know what they're doing. They did invest in the F-35, which has been an abject failure _according to every pilot permitted to speak freely_, and according to the mechanics who maintain them.
Re:Lol yea right (Score:5, Insightful)
They'll take 20 years to approval, will run 20 billion dollars over budget and will never see completion because of NIMBY. The United States is incapable to pulling off a project this like anymore. Sad but true.
What should we expect from a generation that's been fed anti-nuclear propaganda from Saturday morning cartoons, movies in theaters and on Sunday night television, books, magazines, school lectures from grade school until they graduated college, and so many other places? This fear was spoon fed to them all their life.
This isn't working any more. I didn't see the Chernobyl miniseries but I've seen the discussion it's generated on the internet. There's been a lot of YouTube videos and blog entries posted discussing this. People are learning terms like "positive void reactivity coefficient", the difference between graphite and water as a moderator, and other technical matters that separates the nuclear reactors from the past from those built now and planned for the future.
Much of this fear has been lost. First because people learned that much of this fear was based on lies. Second, what truth there was in this fear does not apply any more. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were reactors built a long time ago. Fukushima is of course far more recent but that was a power plant built before Chernobyl, and no one has built a reactor like those since. We build them better now.
The USA is certainly capable of building nuclear power plants again. I know this because we never really stopped. Small modular reactors describes the power plants in the aircraft carriers and submarines we've been building and operating safely for more than six decades.
This is a generation that hasn't had this fear fed to them like before. They are seeing the failures of nuclear power in the past put in the light of a political failure, not one of technology. They are also seeing success of nuclear power in real life, with nuclear powered rovers on Mars. And in fiction, with nuclear power being used to bring astronauts on Mars back to Earth.
This won't take 20 years to approve, or be 20 billion dollars over budget. The politics that caused this in the past is gone.
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I didn't see the Chernobyl miniseries but I've seen the discussion it's generated on the internet.
You should at least see the part where they implied the pregnant lady was saved because her fetus absorbed all the radiation she got from her (lying in a hospital bed) radiated husband.
Or the helicopter blades that disintegrated when flying too close to ground zero.
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The politics that caused this in the past is gone.
I wouldn't be so sure. TerraPower has been trying to get a test plant licensed for over a decade, with no luck (I think Toshiba for even longer). When people like Bill Gates and Nathan Myrvold are backing a project and it **still** gets stalled by political shenanigans I don't have a lot of hope.
Re: Lol yea right (Score:2)
But in China you can't have NIMBY.
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The appeal of these plants is that any factory-built tech can be installed years faster than site-built. Those years are what increase cost. So what if it takes ten or fifteen of them to equal the output of one site-built nuke? Set up a factory in Arizona and start installing them at existing nuclear sites in nuke-friendly states.
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>> They'll take 20 years to approval, will run 20 billion dollars over budget
Yes, and they will output only 1.5 MW. Thats the real joke here.
'Small, Svelte, and Safer' (Score:2, Funny)
Don't want 'Safer', thanks.
'Safe' will be fine.
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Build them in america and ship them to existing nuclear countries to use like china and india. Ameria makes the money and they have safer plants.
I don't think that rising superpowers will want to be beholden to the USA for their energy needs, a string of other countries for nuclear fuel and having to deal with price fluctuations in nuclear fuel when they can go for cheaper and safer alternatives that have already proven that they are cost-competitive and have none of those other problems.
Re:SaFER and ALMOST all emergencies (Score:5, Interesting)
You're an adult, and you've let a teenage girl you'll never meet get in your head to the point where you hate her and want to see her unhappy.
That's fucked up.
You seriously should get some help for that. Talk to a therapist, and get to a place where you're not threatened by 80lb teenage girls with disabilities who live on the other side of the world from you.
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Nail, head, hit dead on.
We have fusion power in the form of a big ball of energy in the sky that has billions of years of output left and it's becoming super cheap to harness that energy.
Fusion on earth will probably never be cheap because of the complexity to build it and scale required, fission has showed us this.
Until there's a worldwide grid (Score:4, Insightful)
We have fusion power in the form of a big ball of energy in the sky that has billions of years of output left
I'm interested in how you plan to ship that energy from the side of the planet that faces toward the big ball of energy (daytime in the summer) to the side that largely faces away (at night, during winter, or both).
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Yeah, shame we've never discovered any ways to store energy.
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We could use solar sail based mirrors in orbit. They can be skewed from Earth's orbital plane to avoid Earth's shadow, and pointed to land based microwave arrays. The light pressure and solar wind pressure on the solar sail itself can be used to guide its orbit. It takes thought and planning to avoid loss of power, and to avoid tagging satellites in lower orbits with very modest microwave radiation.
Re:Heard this for, how long? (Score:4, Insightful)
Solar is already cheaper
What's the price of that solar power at local midnight?
That's why people keep talking about nuclear power.
You think batteries will solve this problem? They won't. These same batteries that manage the shifting supply of solar power is the same technology that solves the problem of nuclear power having difficulty in following shifting demand.
By the time this is supposed to even produce power solar cost will probably have halved again
And if that doesn't happen? That's right, nothing bad has every happened by putting all your eggs in one basket.
Oh, and how is that global lithium and cobalt shortage going?
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WIND power cost is relevant for the local midnight, not solar power cost.
The question was about the price of solar power. The price of wind power to price of solar power is as relevant as the price of tea in China.
I realize that there are batteries that can store solar power from daylight to supply power at midnight, but this has a cost. How much that costs is the question. A question I have not been able to get anyone to answer in any meaningful way. If the cost is not stated in $/kwh then it means nothing.
And what is this about cobalt and lithium?
I read about the shortages on a website called Slashdot, perhaps you
Re: Heard this for, how long? (Score:3)
Oh, please do tell us where there is a grid powered by solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro power.
Can you even find a place with three of those?
Because in the real world those solar, wind, and hydro power plants aren't being covered by other renewables, but by coal and natural gas.
Just because you are easily annoyed by facts doesn't mean anyone is out to get you.
Re:Heard this for, how long? (Score:4, Informative)
A 1 megawatt nuclear plant that delivers power 24/7 requires aproximately 1 square mile of land. An equivalent solar installation that delivers power only when the sun is shining requires between 45 and 75 square miles.
So you get to "save the environment" by plastering it with silicon. Further, chinese panels have been failing after roughly 5 years, so you will have to replace those vast fields of silicon that often which represents a recycling cost which far exceeds anything you would see in a nuclear plant.
There are lots of other points like this that make nuclear much more attractive than solar but there will always be the unwashed masses and their irrational fears. Nuclear will kill us all! Never mind it has fewer deaths attributed to it than even solar.
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Re:Heard this for, how long? (Score:5, Informative)
Right, like the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - oh wait those are thriving cities now despite having been hit with an actual nuclear bomb.
Well at least there's Fukishima. Oh wait, the government is now saying the evacuation was unwarranted and actually caused significant problems.
But of course, Three Mile Island - that was a major disaster. Oh wait, there was zero exposure to the surrounding area and it's sister reactor is still online providing clean power to the area.
The only nuclear disaster was with Chernobyl and that was a 1960's design that would have not even been an issue if there had been a containment vessel as is required in the west. And that type of accident isn't even possible with current designs.
But surely a nation like France which invested heavily in 50-60 reactors, they're an example of how horrible nuclear is. Oh wait, they've been getting 80% of their energy from clean nuclear for decades and have half the CO2 emissions of Germany which closed down it's own nuclear and the people of France literally pay half as much as Germany for their power.
Yep, Nuclear. It's really horrible isn't it.
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My post was not meant to discredit nuclear power, I actually live where it's used and have no issue with it, nor I live in fear of it.
My point is that if the priority is the environment, getting humans out of the way has proven to be incredibly effective and an exclusion zone is the best way to get that. The problem is, nobody wants an exclusion zone without a very good reason, since people want to exploit the land for whatever reason, so nuclear accidents have provided the motivation and nature has provide
Re:Heard this for, how long? (Score:5, Informative)
An equivalent solar installation that delivers power only when the sun is shining requires between 45 and 75 square miles.
Even at a 20% capacity factor, a 1 MW average plant would require around 14000 panels, which would imply over 1 hectare per solar panel...are you sure you haven't made a mistake somewhere?
Chinese panels have been failing after roughly 5 years
Uh...says who? Where's your statistics of this expected value?
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Indeed. I'm not sure how that load of BS got modded up to +5.
Re:Heard this for, how long? (Score:4, Insightful)
A 1 megawatt nuclear plant that delivers power 24/7 requires aproximately 1 square mile of land.
That's clearly supposed to be "1 gigawatt".
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An equivalent solar installation that delivers power only when the sun is shining requires between 45 and 75 square miles.
You're forgetting that solar generation can co-exist with existing land uses - such as rooftops of buildings, and shade covers in car parks.
Even at a large scale solar generation plant in Australia, the farmer hosting the solar arrays has said that his cattle are still able to graze the area as usual, except now that have shade. There was even an unexpected extra benefit in that it is a particularly dry area, but the condensation on the panels over night runs down and concentrates in a line along the base
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You have this backwards. Nuclear power has proven objectively that it's the safest, cleanest, most effective form of power we have today throughout its entire supply chain and lifetime. Solar power on the other hand is an environmentally catastrophic scam reliant on slave labor that constantly promises breakthrough after breakthrough and revolution after revolution without ever delivering. Solar companies are the ones constantly seeking investment money for their latest and greatest miracle that quietly fai
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that constantly promises breakthrough after breakthrough and revolution after revolution without ever delivering
The what now? [solarcellcentral.com] "Withour ever delivering"? I'd say that a 100x price fall over four decades is very much "delivering breakthoughs". In any other field this would be massive, why is it "not delivering" in case of solar?
Re:Heard this for, how long? (Score:4, Insightful)
WE DO NOT HAVE THE TIME.
Solar is great. It is very effective in certain areas. We should build more of it right now.
But we're still waiting on large scale storage. Every solution I've seen proposed here is "in testing" or will be available in five to ten years. That's great, and all, but we do not have the time to be fucking around while they keep building natural gas plants to take up the base load. If this is a power solution that can be built today, then we should build it today. We cannot build the battery capacity that we need today.
I get that waste is an issue, but the existential crisis that we face is bigger. Waste is a very annoying, but tractable problem. Let's try to make sure millions aren't displaced or killed by climate change, and that we are still around as a species in 100 years first.
Indeed, seriously? (Re:Seriously?) (Score:4, Interesting)
but I also know they must be Government property
Am I the only one with an account on Slashdot that does not see more government as the solution to all of our problems?
Chernobyl was a government owned and operated nuclear power plant. When it blew it's top from the actions of incompetent administrators, likely put there out of political favors to powerful families, it resulted in the deaths of dozens of people. Fukushima was a privately owned and operated nuclear power plant. It took a once in a thousand year tsunami right to the face to destroy it. There were perhaps a handful of people dead from the flooding, again an unforeseen and rare natural event, and one suspected death from radiation.
Which one of these cases had the better outcome? Which one had the most to do with government incompetence?
Another thing that seems to be rampant on Slashdot, Trump derangement syndrome. Do you want our electrical grid run by Trump? Or whomever happens to replace him in the next election? Have you seen the people that run our government? And you want this bunch of lawyers and petty criminals running nuclear power plants?
I see a lot of people wanting to keep money out of politics, now tell me how putting nuclear power plants worth billions of dollars under government ownership removes money from politics.
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Amen. One thing that Grover Norquist emphasized to his followers was that it was going to be hard to convince voters that government was broken unless they deliberately broke it first. They're getting closer to achieving that goal every year.
Re:Indeed, seriously? (Re:Seriously?) (Score:4, Insightful)
44% of Americans make under $18k/yr (Score:4, Insightful)
The GOP is funneling way, way more money into fossil fuels than green energy. And they'd have done more if the courts hadn't slapped them down. Rick Perry, Trump's energy guy, tried to do just that, handing billions in subsidies to coal plants in order to keep them open so Trump would have a political prop. So much for the free market.
Meanwhile the moderate wing of the Democratic party (I refuse to call Sanders and Warren "left", both are social democrats) has the Green New Deal, but that would create way, way too many good paying middle class jobs, and we can't have anything getting in the way of cheap labor conservatives.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Informative)
So... unless they have figured out the last piece of security (what to do without electric system...)
They have. Their design uses passive (unpowered) circulation cooling.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem was and AFTER ALL THAT an electric system failure...
So... unless they have figured out the last piece of security
You've totally missed the central point of the article. Small reactors don't need powered cooling after a shutdown. The weakness that lead to the destruction of the three active Fukushima reactors does not apply to smaller reactors such as naval ones. This was a contributing factor to the Three Mile Island accident: the staff on duty as the time had naval training, and were more conscious of risks other than loss of cooling.
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Informative)
This was figured out a decade ago.
Reactor designs like the Westinghouse AP1000, GE-Hitachi ESBWR and China General HPR-1000 are all resistant to a complete loss of the electrical system. These systems all provide 72 hours of assured cooling in the event of a complete loss of AC electricity. They also have mitigations in case of a complete loss of battery/UPS electricity, as well as much higher levels of protection of the batteries than at older sites.
However, smaller reactors are much easier to cool than larger ones - which makes it easier to provide longer grace times and reduce the requirement for manual intervention. For example the Nuscale reactor (60 MW, compared to 1000-1600 MW for other modern PWRs) means that there is an indefinite grace period following almost any conceivable accident scenario. Total loss of electricity and UPS - cooling automatically activates and will operate indefinitely without further intervention. Reactor coolant leak - significant coolant level drop impossible due to containment fill up. Containment is self-cooling indefinitely without further intervention.
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Most (all?) of the Gen 4 reactors have a failsafe mode of "quench the nuclear reaction". If everything completely fails the reactor just goes cold.
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Well but since the 1950's and the 1960's we have learned how to build large wind turbines. We also have had steady progress with solar panels and batteries.
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from the wiki..
"In 2015, EIA has been criticized by the Advanced Energy Economy (AEE) Institute after its release of the AEO 2015-report to "consistently underestimate the growth rate of renewable energy, leading to 'misperceptions' about the performance of these resources in the marketplace". AEE points out that the average power purchase agreement (PPA) for wind power was already at $24/MWh in 2013. Likewise, PPA for utility-scale solar P
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No, the climate goals the U.S. is the heat up the atmosphere so that Greenland melts and can then strong arm Denmark into selling it cheap so a few knuckleheads running mineral extraction companies can earn a few more millions before they go to the great coal mine in the sky.
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Nope. The nuclear fanatics are just trying another push for this unworkable idea. This time they pretend it is about climate change.