Several US Utilities Back Out of Deal To Build Novel Nuclear Power Plant (sciencemag.org) 207
Eight of the 36 public utilities that had signed on to help build an innovative new nuclear power plant in the U.S. have backed out of the deal. Science Magazine reports: The withdrawals come just months after the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS), which intends to buy the plant containing 12 small modular reactors from NuScale Power, announced that completion of the project would be delayed by 3 years to 2030. It also estimates the cost would climb from $4.2 billion to $6.1 billion. "The project is still very much going forward," says LaVarr Webb, a spokesperson for UAMPS, which has nearly four dozen members in Utah, California, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Although some UAMPS members have dropped out, "promising discussions are ongoing with a number of utilities to join the project or enter into power-purchase agreements," Webb says.
However, critics of the project say the developments underscore that the plant, which is designed by NuScale Power and would be built at the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Idaho National Laboratory, will be untenably expensive. M. V. Ramana, a physicist who works on public policy at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, says he's not surprised that so many utilities have opted out of the project. The question, he says, is why so many are sticking with it. "They ought to be seeing the writing on the wall and getting out by the dozens," he says.
However, critics of the project say the developments underscore that the plant, which is designed by NuScale Power and would be built at the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Idaho National Laboratory, will be untenably expensive. M. V. Ramana, a physicist who works on public policy at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, says he's not surprised that so many utilities have opted out of the project. The question, he says, is why so many are sticking with it. "They ought to be seeing the writing on the wall and getting out by the dozens," he says.
Liinks? (Score:2)
Why does this story have a link about a DMCA about test taking software?.
Those fighting nukes are blind (Score:5, Informative)
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To complement wind and solar, you don't need "base power", your need peakers to fill in the troughs.
Nukes certainly aren't peakers.
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Nuke is dirty (Score:2)
Nuke is dirty like hell.
It's invisible dirt that will leak out in 100 years, and kill everybody around.
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Nuclear power has killed fewer than 10,000 people worldwide, mostly due to 3 accidents, 2 of them in Soviet reactors that could never happen in a western design. To put that in perspective, coal kills up to 800,000 people a year. And coal plants emit more radiation than nuclear plants, too.
Even rooftop solar kills 400% more people than nuclear per twH produced, mostly due to injuries sustained installing it.
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Ideally solar should be fitted at the same time that the roof is, i.e. during construction and when the roof is replaced. It adds some complexity but the danger of accidents is greatly reduced if done that way.
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Ideally solar should be fitted over car parks where you can gain access to the array with a scissor lift and not have to go on a roof at all.
Once all the car parks are covered, we can talk about putting solar arrays somewhere else.
Household solar only makes sense at all because bigger players are stalling on doing larger projects.
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No one knows how many died due to Chernobyl. Minimum 400k, as 400k of the 660k so called "regulators" are dead already. Russian scientist estimate up to two million dead, due to the fact that for years contaminated food from the region was distributed all over the USSR and mixed into the clean food.
And coal plants emit more radiation than nuclear plants, too.
No it dos not. Only a margin able amount of coal even contains anything radioactive. And that ends up in the ash. Seriously, grasp the difference. The
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Don't you think that if 400,000 people had died, some hard evidence might exist that this were true? Go ahead and look for evidence, I'll wait. If you Google "deaths caused by fossil fuels" a variety of sources will tell you about various estimates of how many millions die prematurely from air pollution. If you Google "deaths caused by Chernobyl" a variety of sources will tell you that about 31 people died as an immediate result and around 4000 may e
As usual some are smarter than the field (Score:2)
Same situation here. My guess would be these 8 have looked at actual numbers and at the exceptionally unfinished state of this "novel" technology. "Highly experimental and extremely risky (economically)" would be more accurate. And look, that is exactly what is happening. Looks like some more people are trying to get rich on nuclear.
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"Looks like some more people are trying to get rich on nuclear."
This is my shocked face.
Its because of budget (Score:5, Insightful)
If you were going to build a house and they told you it could be 100% more on the day you moved in, would you sign the contract? Probably not... same thing here. The plant couldn't guarantee the cost and so the cities backed out. It's not a good idea to buy power for your citizens if you can't guarantee the cost of the power. Uncertainty with a new design is not what municipalities need.
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Indeed. The point of this project is that it was supposed to fix the delays and cost overruns that have plagued other nuclear construction projects.
But it turns out to be just more of the same.
Bad news tends to dribble out. So if they continued, the cost would continue to creep up.
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Usually engineers underscore risk with new tech to sell it, then when they get into the project they have to change it. Change is expensive.
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They were supposed to have solved the constant over-budget problems by having smaller, mass produced reactors. Seems like it didn't work.
And in any case by 2030 will there even be much demand for this type of plant? The grid is changing to support renewable energy and the profitability of anything that doesn't fit in with that (e.g. ability to vary output quickly, very low cost and very low CO2 emissions) is struggling to get funding.
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To be fair, they haven't gotten to the money-saving mass-production part yet. Doesn't mean they will get there, but as of now, it's not known that they can't.
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No, it is known that they can't. There are per-unit costs which prohibit it making things cheaper.
Reactors are already mostly based on known designs, if reusing designs made them cheaper, they would already be cheaper.
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'Experiments' should not be the realm of regular utilities and municipalities.
You either need some rich person/company willing to play with their money or you need a large government backed project.
Bill Gates is kind of playing here with TerraPower and has worked with all kinds of government funding as well. A nice combination of the two :)
Admittedly, government's can waste a lot of money, often with wasteful consequences. Yet, there has to be a certain appetite for risk when it makes sense and the amounts
Utilities are paid based on their capital (Score:5, Interesting)
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But if you read the summary/article, it's primarily public utilities that are pulling out. The whole return on capital and regulated rates stuff does not apply. What does apply is that decisions are made by city councils. Who are made up of people that don't really understand the utility business. Look at WPPSS [wikipedia.org] as an example. What they do understand is that their careers could be cut short by the sight of a couple of hippies marching in front of city hall with "No Nukes" signs.
But but but an internet commenter said... (Score:2)
why so many are sticking with it (Score:2)
Maybe they care about our climate, and about having electricity when it is not a sunny, windy day?
As for cost: you should be weighing that against the cost of more polluting forms of energy that we all get to pay. If it replaces a single coal plant it is already worth it.
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"Maybe they care about our climate, and about having electricity when it is not a sunny, windy day?"
You mean when bio-gas plants run out of plant matter and cow and pig shit during the night?
No tide running the tidal power plants?
No batteries and pumped storage power plant?
No dams producing electricity?
Sure, then we would be fucked. But still, no insurance will ever cover a nuke.
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Oh dear, do you really believe that a nuclear power plant can explode like a nuke? Educate yourself a little please...
And yes, base load really is a thing. Even if you personally don't believe in it. Do you prefer coal plants, or nuclear?
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>> Oh dear, do you really believe that a nuclear power plant can explode like a nuke? Educate yourself a little please..
Sure, the explosion is very different.
But the contamination is much more massive and long lasting in the case of a reactor with 1000 tons of fissile mterial potentially released, compared to a bomb with 3 kg material
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Base load plants are vanishing more and more, because get replaced by wind and solar.
You do not know what base load means ... hint: it neither means "coal" nor "nuclear".
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As for cost: you should be weighing that against the cost of more polluting forms of energy that we all get to pay. If it replaces a single coal plant it is already worth it.
Not if there's something better and cheaper available, and solar+wind+battery is cheaper than nuclear. You have to weigh the cost of doing the thing against the cost of doing something else, in this case something better and smarter.
If Elon Musk did nuclear (Score:3)
If Elon did nuclear it would take him 10 years to get the first one optimized. Then he'd bang out 100 of them a year and scale up from there. Why does every nuclear project always take the traditional, "one-off" path?
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Many copies of the same thing are not complex. It would be like complaining that Honda Accords are thousands of times more complex than Lamborghinis because there are thousands more of them made. If the reactor can be built out of many repeating small devices it should actually be better.
That said, I do have doubts about the cost estimates they have been giving. It is plausable if they were going to build these by the hundreds or thousands, but several dozen are going to be very expensive per-unit.
Re: Weird project (Score:2)
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Many copies of the same thing are not complex. It would be like complaining that Honda Accords are thousands of times more complex than Lamborghinis because there are thousands more of them made. If the reactor can be built out of many repeating small devices it should actually be better.
That said, I do have doubts about the cost estimates they have been giving. It is plausable if they were going to build these by the hundreds or thousands, but several dozen are going to be very expensive per-unit.
They have to start with small numbers because there is not even a working scaled-down nuclear prototype or a non-nuclear to-scale test system. Calling the whole idea highly experimental is probably about accurate. The whole thing is basically wannabees with simulation software.
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Your Honda analogy is fucking braindead.
You've just compared discrete objects with containerized discrete objects.
Perhaps your thousands of Honda Accords have been bolted together with 4 wheels driving the entire amalgam? Well then yes, the lamborghini is *definitely* less scary.
Re: Weird project (Score:2)
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small 60MW reactors put in encloser with 10 or more? That's weird way to do nuclear, multiplying complexity but ending up with something that puts out power of smallest plants in total.
The attraction of small reactors is that they can be factory built, like aircraft. Small renewables may be horribly inefficient compared to nuclear, but because wind turbines are factory-built they can be deployed fast, in any place that is willing to sacrifice forests and mountain ridges to site them, even though each unit produces only a small fraction of its nameplate capacity.
Because nuclear reactors routinely produce 90% or more of nameplate, a gigawatt composed of ten SMRs rolling off an assembly line
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even though each unit produces only a small fraction of its nameplate capacity.
Define small fraction. A peaker plant also only produces a small amount of its name plate capacity. No one complains, because that is how it is supposed to be.
And the CF, if that is your point, of a wind plant simply depends on the place you put it. Oops, so easy.
Re: Maybe they should do a pilot project? (Score:3)
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The reactor is based on many working reactors. The difference is that this is small, modular, and most of all, safe.
The reactors in US nuclear submarines are all of those things. ... :-)
Perhaps they should just get/build 12 subs and build the power plant around them
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That would require building a commercial industry for manufacturing highly-enriched uranium. Good luck getting approval for that.
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Just park a bunch of them in a bay, run extension cords down the hatch. Preferably frayed ones with non-UV safe insulation.
Or put them on blocks in a trailer park. Fit right in. :)
Re: Maybe they should do a pilot project? (Score:5, Insightful)
Most reactors are safe. The design criteria of reactors in the US have certain criteria that seriously hedge toward safe than unsafe. Even 3 mile island was relatively mild compared to Chernobyl, and that was not an issue with design, it was an issue of employees assuming alarms were just false alarms. The best power plants of any type can be a nightmare if you have Gomer Pyle running the watch stations.
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Re: Maybe they should do a pilot project? (Score:3)
Chernobyl was a breeder reactor with a positive reactivity coefficient. They were trying to make plutonium for weapons but also power the town. A positive reactivity coefficient enables a positive feedback loop. They had a cascade of events that led to not a meltdown but a chain reaction.
Re: Maybe they should do a pilot project? (Score:5, Informative)
The partial meltdown at At Three Mile Island caused no deaths, gave no one radiation sickness, and gave no one cancer. It was a financial disaster which, if it wasn't "nuclear", would have been forgotten like most of these deadly 25 energy-related disasters in the last year alone [theatlantic.com] have already been forgotten by most people.
The Fukushima disaster also caused no radiation deaths and gave no one radiation sickness, although the relocation process, which included hospitals, reportedly caused over a thousand deaths. One study finds that relocation was unjustified in Fukushima [sciencedirect.com] (although temporary evacuation was justified). I remember that in 2011, Slashdot had one or two news items on the tsunami itself (which killed 15,894 people), followed by dozens of stories about Fukushima spread over the following days, months and years. This sort of disproportionate coverage was also noticed by nuclear scientist Bernard L. Cohen regarding NY Times reporting in the 1980s [twitter.com].
The Chernobyl disaster was caused primarily by Soviet design choices that would have been illegal in the West even in the early 1970s. This is because, as noted by Bernard L. Cohen:
Meanwhile, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies reports that nuclear power has saved almost 2 million lives [nasa.gov] by avoiding the air pollution that coal plants would have caused if they had been used instead (keep in mind that current solar/wind farms don't provide baseload power and that solar/wind were nowhere near affordable enough to have been used back when the nuclear plants in question were constructed; the alternatives at the time were coal and oil.)
Most Chernobyl deaths were not caused by bad desig (Score:3)
It was much worse than that.
After it blew up, they tried to cover it up. They did not evacuate the town.
If they had done even that most basic thing, and got people away, the death toll would have been far, far lower.
But life was cheap in the Soviet Union. And the truth was something you manufacture.
As to nuclear, the truth is that deadly radioactive wastes will poison the planet. Someone just needs to say those two words, Nuclear Waste, and they have won any argument. Reality is irrelevant.
Best to move
Re: Most Chernobyl deaths were not caused by bad d (Score:2)
I know a guy that wad living there at the time. They actually made everyone go outside to celebrate May 1st. Not only did they not evacuate, they forced them to be exposed even more. He has to take synthroid the rest of his life now.
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If your pro-nuclear argument relies on using the recall formula for relocations, you can promptly go fucking kill yourself; or alternatively, i'll sell you an acre of perfectly safe land in Pripyat.
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"The Fukushima disaster also caused no radiation deaths"
The 573 people who died will be relieved to hear that they died only from fleeing the reactor instead of getting killed by it.
Re: Maybe they should do a pilot project? (Score:2)
I wish more people understood this. Keeping the core covered with water is all that is required for our plants. 3mi happened because they were operating with less than the minimum number of available feed pumps, as the rest were tagged out for service. Then when pressure rose the primary relief valves lifted. There are temperature alarms downstream to indicate overpressure. The operators assumed it was a false alarm. Had they scrammed at that point there would not have been a partial meltdown. In the navy,
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The Fukushima disaster also caused no radiation deaths and gave no one radiation sickness,
How do you know that?
Oh, you do not know it.
There are dozens of death, and many more with sickness. Just for fuck sake start reading international news and stop idling in 20 year old wrongness. e.g. a few hundred workers where hired to work on the site from Vietnam: all got sick. And no one had told them before that they would be working on a nuclear contaminated site. That was big news in Japan ...
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Perhaps you should simply read the wikipedia site about Chernobyl.
All your claims about the reactor are completely irrelevant for the "accident". Accident in quotes, as it was no accident. Some idiot wanted to do an illegal experiment, and that backfired.
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The J-Value assessment puts a literal dollar value on human life as a percentage of GDP/day.
The assumption that any Government would be "reasonable" in assigning that value to a human life living under it is so fucking cynical it makes me angry.
I, for one, were I a Japanese national, would be thankful that the Government does not assess my continued existence in terms
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"The best power plants of any type can be a nightmare if you have Gomer Pyle running the watch stations."
If half the manpower has an IQ of under 100, the end is near.
Re: Maybe they should do a pilot project? (Score:2)
Consider that the US Navy has been running nuclear power plants since the 60s without one accident. I can assure you that everyone working in the field has an IQ way north of 100 and years of training of every what-if scenario to ever concocted. Ask me how I know.
Its not cheap to have an entire plant run by degreed individuals who have extensive knowledge in physics, chemistry, thermodynamics, radcon, etc. But it does solve a Gomer Pyle issue.
Re: Maybe they should do a pilot project? (Score:2)
Consider that the US Navy has been running nuclear power plants since the 60s without one accident.
That you know of. Pipe down.
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well I can definitely say as of 1995 when I stopped working for them, we were still accident free. In fact, we are the only autonomous entity outside the purview of the NRC, specifically because there has not been an accident. Should any accident arise, the NRC would have jurisdiction. You really cannot keep a lid on that sort of accident. There are high altitude balloons, btw, whose only job is to look for certain types of particulate/isotopes that indicate an atomic event. Even if the US tried to cover it
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The best power plants of any type can be a nightmare if you have Gomer Pyle running the watch stations.
The problems are this:
A) there's simply an unavoidable chance that Gomer Pyle at some point comes to exist in your plant.
B) Stop that horse shit. There's no comparison between a pressure vessel containment failure in a natural gas fired plant and a nuclear plant.
Re: Maybe they should do a pilot project? (Score:2)
So you think the environmental impact of fracking or drilling oil is better? Lets look at the environmental impact of 3-mile island versus all the environmental disasters from coal mines, oil spills, oil leaks, shipping oil etc. And dont even bother to bring up Chernobyl, if you do you will show your complete ignorance in nuclear energy. Chernobyl was a BREEDER reactor run by the USSR. Its primary job was to make plutonium for nuclear weapons. They tried to also harness steam to run a power plant in the pr
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So you think the environmental impact of fracking or drilling oil is better?
Let me stop you right there.
What you meant to say is:
Yes, you are right.
I didn't say a damn thing about the environmental impact of fracking or oil drilling. I am a proponent of nuclear power. I am not a proponent of manipulative arguments.
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yes you fucking did... right here..
"B) Stop that horse shit. There's no comparison between a pressure vessel containment failure in a natural gas fired plant and a nuclear plant."
where they hell do you think that fuel comes from? the industry required to provide the fuel for oil, coal, and gas powered plants MUST factor into the environmental impact. And no, you are not right, consider these incidents , https://www.theatlantic.com/te... [theatlantic.com]
How many fatalities happened from 3mi island again? oh thats right, none
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"B) Stop that horse shit. There's no comparison between a pressure vessel containment failure in a natural gas fired plant and a nuclear plant." in response to:
"The best power plants of any type can be a nightmare if you have Gomer Pyle running the watch stations."
Is saying:
"So you think the environmental impact of fracking or drilling oil is better?"
No. you tried to compare disaster scenarios between nuclear and non-nuclear plants. I slapped you down, and now you're trying to worm
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wrong again.... you dont know shit about nuclear power. admit it. You didnt slap anything but your own dumb ass face by showing your ignorance. You are trying to worm your way out of looking stupid. How many people died in a loss of containment incident in the US? 3 all 3 died from the US Army experiment at SL-1. The biggest incident in US history, 3 mile island, killed how many people? ZERO. Admit it, you are a portland poser who pretends to think they know what they are talking about. You dont actually ha
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It won't work.
Notable problems: Only one in that list was a catastrophic failure at a power plant. You've included refinery disasters, well disasters, and everything in between. I'd call you lazy, but you went the extra mile to make a misleading argument... Again. At this point, the only conclusion that we, the readers, can make, is that you've got an agenda, and intellectual honesty isn't something you consider binding to your sales pitch.
Se
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Let’s not forget, the US navy spares no expense over keeping them safe, it’s likely a private corporation owned reactor will do the bare minimum, so a direct comparison has little relevance.
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There is also the fact that, if anything really goes wrong, it is awfully hard to escape the reactor. On a submarine, you and the rest of the crew are probably all goners. For a surface ship, some might escape a disaster, but the reactor crew probably won't.
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"The reactor is based on many working reactors. The difference is that this is small, modular, and most of all, safe."
It will be considered safe if any insurance of the planet will insure it, as for now, none does.
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Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe we will still have to deal with the horrible nuclear waste when this thing is eventually decommissioned.
Given the leaps and bounds solar (and other renewables) and batteries have made recently both in terms of price and performance I just can't be enthusiastic about nuclear power and its massive price tag and waste issues.
Go back even just 5 years and I was an advocate for it but I don't see any sense in it any more.
Re: Maybe they should do a pilot project? (Score:5, Informative)
Say what? NuScale's 60 MWe modules are over 16 times smaller than the traditional 1000 MWe reactors that were popular in the 1970s. Giant reactors are less attractive these days because of the need for super-super safety, as explained in Chapter 10 of this book [pitt.edu], although I myself wonder how modules this small can be economical. If you want something that can be smaller (in cubic metres) than NuScale's light-water reactors, though, look into Molten Salt Reactors (e.g. this documentary [youtube.com], which continues the interesting trend of also focusing on thorium.)
Nuclear plants must generate large amounts of energy in order to be economical, because the costs of engineering and regulatory licensing depend little on how much energy will be generated, and other costs, such as the containment building, are not proportional to energy output. Building a nuclear reactor is very easy: nature once did it by accident [scientificamerican.com]. The need to tightly control the reaction, to guarantee safety in all plausible accident and natural disaster scenarios, to secure a fuel supply, to plan for decommissioning, and to open the plant over the objection of anti-nuclear activists, these are harder problems.
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Giant reactors are less attractive these days because of the need for super-super safety
So the solution to that is to have sixteen times as many individual components that can fail?
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Pretty much. The same way SpaceX's solution to many of the things that can go wrong with a rocket engine was to put 9x as many engines on their rocket.
Lots of small reactors means a much smaller concentration of power to deal with when something goes wrong (and entropy being what it is, something will inevitably go wrong), which means containment is easier, and perhaps even more importantly, means that a single reactor can be shut down for thorough diagnostics and maintenance at the first sign of trouble,
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There will be 0 mushroom clouds because that's not what reactors do when they fail.
But if there's a serious flaw, it will have to be addressed 16 times, which will cost 16 times as much as doing it once.
Re: Maybe they should do a pilot project? (Score:2)
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What the heck is a U135 process? I've never heard the term, and Google offers nothing relevant.
U235 is the only naturally occurring fissile isotope of uranium, and is thus used in uranium reactors, but while it can be produced as a side reaction in thorium reactors, U233 is the primary fissile fuel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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That Boeing 737-Maxes are not nuclear reactors?
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Well, there's the problem: You don't dot capital "I"s.
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Being known to work, i.e. produce energy and not explode, is very different from being known to work for 40+ years without expensive fixes or unforeseen problems forcing premature retirement.
When building a new nuclear plant investors look at the risk. What are the risk factors?
- New design has expensive issues. Doubling the price before it's even built doesn't inspire confidence.
- Will it be profitable at least long enough to pay for itself?
- Will it be more profitable than other things they could invest $
we can have 1 homer just not more then one! (Score:2)
we can have 1 homer just not more then one!
Re:Maybe they should do a pilot project? (Score:5, Informative)
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They still have no prototype. When a design meets the real world, lots of surprises are customary. More so for nuclear designs as the human race has far less experience with them than with other mechanical engineering.
It will definitely be interesting to see whether these devices actually work and whether they work well and whether they work out on the economic aspects (almost nothing nuclear has so far). But any predictions that they will do any of that are quite premature.
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Even a small reactor is expensive to build - and since they're using existing reactor technology they have as much of a prototype as any commercial reactor has ever had. To date, I believe virtually all commercial reactors in the world have been one-of originals - reactor prototypes are the little things they build at universities to prove the process works, before scaling the technology up to hundreds or thousands of megawatts in a commercial reactor.
One of the big benefits to a factory built small modula
Re: Maybe they should do a pilot project? (Score:2)
Maybe you should study up on the subject before you make preposterous claims like that. All power sources have their uses and environmental impacts. Hydroelectric even has environment impacts. Nuclear power had its place. It is not THE answer but it does provide power 24x7 regardless of weather, position of earth to the sun, axial tilt, and other transient aspects. Nuclear power fills the gaps in supply. Or maybe you like living in a world of rolling blackouts? Not only will it work 24x7 but it works everyw
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Not only will it work 24x7 but it works everywhere. You do not have to pick the perfect location or worry about solar index. ... and perhaps you are smart enough to grasp with one sight what all of them have in common.
Yes, you have to pick the site carefully. Hint: check on a map where all those reactors are
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"Nuclear is dangerous" is a slogan - Greenpeace would agree, but the scientific literature wouldn't. Look at the data and you see a different story: coal & oil pollution has killed millions of people, but nuclear has killed thousands [ourworldindata.org] (and almost all of these deaths are cancers caused by Chernobyl, a type of reactor that never would have been legal in the United States [pitt.edu]).
And this safety record has been achieved with an aging fleet of the least safe and least efficient 1970s reactors, which we are keepi
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(iii) wind & solar achieved their low prices after receiving subsidies for decades
And yet you propose:
administration that will pay for innovation - not necessarily to subsidize nuclear plants, but merely to pay for R&D, for the NRC's work, and to reduce risks for would-be investors.
Seems you use the word `subsidize when it is bad and other words when it is good?
Hint, google what base load actually means. Has not really anything to with intermittent or not intermittent. Do you actually know
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Nuclear reactors produce less radioactive waste than coal (due mostly to radon). And a a nuclear reactor keeps that waste contained so it can be sequestered, while a coal plant continuously vents it into the atmosphere.
Nuclear power plants poison the Earth. Fusion. (Score:3)
Okay, then, do you like this? Spent Nuclear Fuel: A Trash Heap Deadly for 250,000 Years or a Renewable Energy Source? [scientificamerican.com]
Wait for fusion power plants. Fusion Energy Is Coming, and Maybe Sooner Than You Think [powermag.com]
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Fusion plants aren't coming.
Unlike fission, which is doable, because of a bunch of happy coincidences.
First, your fuel contains and produces all that is necessary for a continuous burn and for a controllable reaction. Second, as a bonus, it is solid, malleable into basically any convenient shape, which it can keep at high temperatures and even after it is all used up. Third, you have a miracle substance - water - that works both as a reaction moderator and as energy extraction medium with sufficient capacit
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You've never looked up the temperature of the fusing protons inside a star?
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In what way is it cold?
10-15MK, depending on distance from the core, isn't cold fusion.
What am I missing?
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