Rolls-Royce Gets Funding To Develop Mini Nuclear Reactors (bbc.com) 161
PolygamousRanchKid shares a report from the BBC: Rolls-Royce has been backed by a consortium of private investors and the UK government to develop small nuclear reactors to generate cleaner energy. The creation of the Rolls-Royce Small Modular Reactor (SMR) business was announced following a [195 million pound] cash injection from private firms and a [210 million pound] grant from the government. It is hoped the new company could create up to 40,000 jobs by 2050. However, critics say the focus should be on renewable power, not new nuclear.
Rolls-Royce SMR said one of its power stations would occupy about one tenth of the size of a conventional nuclear plant -- the equivalent footprint of two football pitches -- and power approximately one million homes. The firm said a plant would have the capacity to generate 470MW of power, which it added would be the same produced by more than 150 onshore wind turbines. Warren East, Rolls-Royce chief executive, said the company's SMR technology offered a "clean energy solution" which help tackle climate change.
However, Paul Dorfman, chairman of the Nuclear Consulting Group think tank, told the BBC's Today program there was danger that the money spent on nuclear power would hit funding for other power sources. "If nuclear eats all the pies which it is looking to be doing we won't have enough money to do the kind of things we need to do which we know practically and technologically we can do now," he said. Greenpeace's chief scientist Dr Doug Parr said SMRs were still more expensive than renewable technologies and added there was "still no solution to dispose of the radioactive waste they leave behind and no consensus on where they should be located." "What's worse, there's not even a prototype in prospect anytime soon," he added. "The immediate deadline for action is sharp cuts in emissions by 2030, and small reactors will have no role in that."
Rolls-Royce SMR said one of its power stations would occupy about one tenth of the size of a conventional nuclear plant -- the equivalent footprint of two football pitches -- and power approximately one million homes. The firm said a plant would have the capacity to generate 470MW of power, which it added would be the same produced by more than 150 onshore wind turbines. Warren East, Rolls-Royce chief executive, said the company's SMR technology offered a "clean energy solution" which help tackle climate change.
However, Paul Dorfman, chairman of the Nuclear Consulting Group think tank, told the BBC's Today program there was danger that the money spent on nuclear power would hit funding for other power sources. "If nuclear eats all the pies which it is looking to be doing we won't have enough money to do the kind of things we need to do which we know practically and technologically we can do now," he said. Greenpeace's chief scientist Dr Doug Parr said SMRs were still more expensive than renewable technologies and added there was "still no solution to dispose of the radioactive waste they leave behind and no consensus on where they should be located." "What's worse, there's not even a prototype in prospect anytime soon," he added. "The immediate deadline for action is sharp cuts in emissions by 2030, and small reactors will have no role in that."
Good (Score:3)
The French are all nuclear and would pay no appreciable penalty for massive electrification of transportation and heavy industry. To zeroth order at least. More nations should follow.
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The French are all nuclear
The french are not "all nuclear". Stop lying.
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Do you have sources? About "power outages every summer", the last I remember was when I was a kid in the 90s maybe and it was in winter. Most nuclear reactors are built alongside rivers to guarantee proper cooling all year round. Not sure why it wouldn't be the case.
About "buying vast amounts of green energy coming from Germany", that's also not what I've heard so please cite your sources. France produces huge amount of hydro and wind electricity as well (not only nuclear), and last I read Germany was actu
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The French do not have those power outages anymore only because they are part of the European power grid. And yes, when it gets hot or cold, they have to _import_ power because they have to shut down their nukes. River-cooling will do that to you.
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So is the rest of his post.
The French *export* power to Germany, not the other way around.
Wrong. Some times they export, some times they import. Overall, they export a bit more (10% or generation) than they import. In particular, they import whenever it gets really hot or cold because they have to shut down their nukes when that happens. Also, EDF (state-owned) is basically bankrupt because their own power generation is so exceptionally expensive. All the selling of electricity does is reduce their deficit by a tiny amount.
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Why do so many anti-nukes just make up stuff? They are exactly like Climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers.
Just ignore them. They show up here every time nuclear energy is discussed and have nothing useful to add to society.
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Idiots will idiate. Ignore them, mostly, but sometimes there's entertainment value. What they really need is to be cornered and put on the spot with question like, where did you get this "fact" from? Who are you following? Why do you think your sources are valid?
We still don't have SMRs? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to mention that nuclear power are not enemy to renewables, instead it would help them, along with hydro, in the cloudy days or when the wind doesn't blow.
Greenies need to understand one thing once and for all: what most places have today are nukes or coal. Choose wisely.
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The US Navy has been building and operating SMRs for nearly seven decades. This is nothing new. The only new part here is bringing them to civilian use.
The reason why civilian nuclear power plants have been so large in the past had far more to do with legal limits than anything. The costs of getting a license to operate a nuclear reactor was so high that to justify that cost meant spreading that out over more megawatt-hours produced. That meant building big reactors. Once we got in the habit of buildin
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I'm not convinced solar power amounts to choosing scarcity, but I am pro-nuclear.
These SMR's proposed for civilian use -- what grade uranium do they run on? My understanding is that the Navy's reactors are so small because they're run at something like 80% U-235.
Don't get me wrong -- if a civilian reactor can run efficiently and cheaply on 80% HEU, enrich away and just make sure the wrong folks don't get the stuff.
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The main reasons for using highly enriched uranium is to extend the lifetime of the fuel load (the new designs are intended for a 30 year life without refueling.) and to reduce the size and therefore the weight of the reactor. Although submarines are intended to sink, it's really nice if they can also surface again. Keep the surface to dive ratio equal to 1.0, as we used to say. (I used to be an MM1/SS)
If I was building a SMR I would start with the S8G reactor, enlarge the reactor vessel to use the usual lo
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(the new designs are intended for a 30 year life without refueling.)
I recall reading somewhere that soon, if it hasn't happened already, the US Navy will have reactors that will run 50 to 60 years on a single fuel cycle. What amazes me on some level is that the people that design these reactors are not likely to live long enough to see how successful they were in their efforts. I remember a comment made about some new aircraft carrier that was under construction, that the mother of the last skipper of this ship has not been born yet.
The longevity of these sea vessels will
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I've read somewhere that the "fuel load" of a nuclear carrier is only enough for full-power operation for some 6 months.
Even so, a conventionally powered ship of World War 2 vintage would need to refuel every two days at max power.
As for nuclear power for star exploration, it disappeared from sci-fi because using nuclear power for star exploration is like walking all the way to the Moon. It simply got replaced with handwavium technology orders of magnitude superior, just like nuclear is compared to diesel.
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I think uranium is a mistake in the first place. It was chosen in the cold war days because it produces plutonium.
But plutonium is extreme toxic, and from a present day view it should disqualify uranium from consideration. There are much better options, such as thorium, which produces lead that is comparatively harmless. Thorium is also easier to mine.
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The problem with thorium is that it causes the reactor vessel to be damaged over time in a way that is hard to monitor and impossible to fix. Every attempt to build a commercially viable thorium reactor has failed because relatively quickly you end up with a reactor vessel that is little more than high level waste. Brittle and unusable as a reactor, and highly radioactive and difficult to decommission.
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Thorium does not fission from thermal neutrons. You either have to use a reactor that runs on fast neutrons sodium or mercury cooled, or the current hope, the molten salt reactor. Or you can use a breeder reactor to make U 233. That isotope will fission in a thermal neutron reactor.
A thorium breeder starts with a highly enriched uranium core to produce all the extra neutrons you need, or a plutonium core. Once you have been running for awhile you can use the U 233 you just made to continue the cycle.
Re:We still don't have SMRs? (Score:5, Informative)
My understanding is that the Navy's reactors are so small because they're run at something like 80% U-235.
My understanding is that the Navy runs their reactors on highly enriched uranium because they don't have the luxury of bringing the reactor to idle if too much xenon builds up.
A big problem with civilian nuclear power reactors is that certain fission products can build up and "poison" the reaction, specifically xenon. Wikipedia has an article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
There are a number of ways to deal with the buildup of "neutron poisons" in a reactor. One way is to have enough excess neutrons to burn through the poisons, and one way to have excess neutrons is to have highly enriched fuel. In a civil nuclear power plant the issue of xenon buildup is avoided by trying to keep the reactor in as steady state as possible. Xenon doesn't have much of a chance to build up unless the power output starts to vary. Once the neutron flow drops the xenon has a chance to build up, and once it builds up then it can just eat up all the neutrons in the core. Without enough neutrons the core thermal output drops. Once "in the xenon pit" about the only thing a civil reactor operator can do is wait for enough of the xenon to decay away that it is safe to bring power back up.
In a navy submarine they can't just shut the reactor down because of a little xenon, so they have highly enriched fuel so they can shake off the xenon poisoning and keep going. It doesn't hurt that the highly enriched fuel means the core can operate for 30 to 50 years on a single load of fuel, and that the core can be much smaller for the same power output.
The issue of civil nuclear power plants not being able to load follow is largely imposed on them by the kind of steam turbines they use and the low enriched fuel. Navy nuclear power plants can load follow just fine. When the fit hits the shan there isn't a lot of manpower left to keep an eye on the xenon in the reactor, so they use reactors that can burn through that while keeping the core temperature nearly constant, regardless of how much power is pulled from it.
To answer your question more directly, the grade of fuel needed in SMRs is dependent on the performance required from the reactor. Most SMRs proposed today will run on 5% enriched fuel because that is what is imposed on them by the laws of most nations. Fuel with that low of enrichment will operate much like the big, gigawatt scale, reactors we see in common use today. That means a refuel cycle every 18 to 24 months, and needing to ramp the power up and down very slowly or run the risk of landing in the xenon pit. If people want to see a decade long fuel cycle then the fuel needs to be richer in neutrons.
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Uranium enriched to 80% or more can be turned into a Hiroshima-style (and scale) nuclear weapon by people with fairly limited facilities and skill levels. No other material on Earth is that dangerous.
The cost of ensuring that the "wrong folks" don't get access to that HEU, to a sufficiently high confidence level, are so high that it's not worth th
Re: We still don't have SMRs? (Score:1)
Itâ(TM)s relatively easy to enrich uranium. Any sufficiently large University will have facilities and theyâ(TM)re currently all being ran by radicals with anti-western ideals, Chinese and Russian spies and a ton of other deranged people.
Even a backwater like Iran and North Korea is capable of doing it and since the fall of the Soviet Union pretty much anything nuclear is available to people globally with sufficient capital.
We will be fine, terrorists donâ(TM)t actually want to kill people, t
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The trick to making a powerful reactor small enough to fit in a submarine is to run it on highly enriched uranium. Obtaining HEU from natural uranium is fabulously expensive, and requires massive and slow-operating separation plants. Saving operational costs on a civilian reactor by running it on HEU would be like saving maintenance costs on a highway by paving it with gold bricks.
Things always appear simple to an armchair engineer because armchair engineers only care whether something is physically possi
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Thanks to you greenies and NIMBY's that demonized nuclear power to oblivion
To be fair, nuclear did a good job demonizing itself.
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Funnily enough, I once calculated how many deaths per TWh must have arisen just from uranium mining
It would not be surprising if most deaths related to nuclear power are from underground mining.
Did you look at radiation-related deaths from underground coal miners? They are exposed to radon with less protection, and have excess lung cancer rates.
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Re: We still don't have SMRs? (Score:2)
Funnily enough, rendering massive tracts of land unusable for human economic exploitation is actually quite good for the land and environment. These are like conservation areas where animals and plants are able to thrive. Maybe this could be considered "green nuclear" or "extreme re-wilding" :)
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A 0.1% increase in risk sounds very small because it IS very small. The risk itself is also small, so increasing it by 1/10th of a percent is ... wait for it ... very small.
If the raw risk is 1000 people per million get cancer (just pulling numbers out of the air), then we're talking instead of 1000 people getting cancer we have ... 1001. OK, say there are 5 million people affected (which seems pretty high to me, buy lets just say that). So now we are talking 5005 people getting cancer. Remember this i
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How many people have died because of nuclear power?
Now run the numbers for coal.
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How many people have died because of nuclear power?
Now run the numbers for coal.
I take it you've never heard of black lung.
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Re: We still don't have SMRs? (Score:2)
Yeah, I see now that I read that wrong. Mea culpa.
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Several people died out of air pollution while you were typing this post, and several more died while i was typing as well
Nuclear can be very bad, but it's not coal or gas bad.
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Well, so far nuclear killed around 11.000 people that is around what air pollution kills per day.
Nuclear has quite a lot of catching up to do if it wants to get even close to coal.
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Coal and gas wont be killing people a billion years from now, the way your nuclear waste bunkers can
You just torpedoed any credibility on this with such a claim.
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Coal and gas wont be killing people a billion years
You are one of the many far lefties that have not a single understanding of what AGW, as well as Nuclear power, is really all about.
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It's the best we got so far, at least until we have good enough battery technology that makes the solar and wind limitations irrelevant.
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Unfortunately for nuke cultists, I do.
Uh no. U don't. If you had any real idea or knowledge of science, you would realize how far wrong you really are. Even now, to solve the 'spent fuel' or 'nuclear waste' issue, we MUST continue to cycle, but through fast reactors.
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Every time I see people disparaging nuclear, they are always pointing to reactors made in the 50s-60s, maybe 70s.
This would be like saying cars suck and are highly dangerous, and only mentioning the Ford Model T, the Chevy Corvair, or the Ford Pinto, while ignoring the latest generation of automobiles with a metric ass-ton of safety features.
Nuclear can be done right, especially thorium, and gen IV reactors. It takes money and people thinking that they want a real solution, and not give into disinformation
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Every time I see people disparaging nuclear, they are always pointing to reactors made in the 50s-60s, maybe 70s.
Nuclear can be done right, especially thorium, and gen IV reactors.
Please point to a commercial nuclear reactor done right which is in operation. Do not point to plans for future reactors: the security of vaporware always looks great. Also pay special attention to how it can be safely operated by corrupt people who only care about money (e.g. the people who ignored all tsunami studies at Fukushima [wikipedia.org]).
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Fossil fuels kill about 1 person per 20GW-H of power generation capacity. Chernobyl had 4 1GW hour reactors, it literally c
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Deaths by source per terawatt-hour of energy generated:
Coal 24.6
Oil 18.4
Biomass 4.6
Nat Gas 2.8
Nuclear 0.07
Wind 0.04
Hydro 0.02
Solar 0.02
https://ourworldindata.org/saf... [ourworldindata.org]
The main issue with nuclear is the cost, and the fact that it is unsuitable for many countries because of that cost. As well as being expensive the build and operate, if it goes wrong the cost can be astronomical. Fukushima wasn't that bad relative to the worst case scenario, but is on track for a total cost of about half a trillion USD. Japa
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Fucking idiot. Nuclear is too _expensive_ in addition to all the other severe problems it has. You people are fanatics with no understanding of reality.
I've been anti-nuke for decades, for all the reasons mentioned in various posts above and probably a few more. But recently I've started to advocate for small, neighbourhood-scale nukes. "Nukes" because I'm afraid we can't get enough renewables online fast enough to stop AGW, never mind starting to reverse it. "Neighbourhood-scale" because for several reasons putting all of our eggs into a small handful of grids is a sucker's bet.
So I'm asking, in all seriousness, for sources that indicate how and why I mig
Mini nuclear reactors (Score:2)
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Re: Mini nuclear reactors (Score:2)
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It's the amount of power rather than the number of people.
A nuclear submarine reactor is in the 50 MW range. People need more than 50 watts, so these would have to be larger -- but not overwhelmingly so.
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You can look this sort of thing up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
S6G being the reactors in the LA class submarines.
Instead of the 30,000 shaft horsepower you install a generator. Actually it already has two smaller turbine generators to power the ship, so all you would do is make one of them much bigger. The other one you can keep at its present size for plant loads.
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The cost (of both construction and operation) of US Navy nuclear reactors is prohibitive. The US Navy uses them because no other alternative is good enough.
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Unsuitable for civilian power production. You _can_ do it as a stunt (as the Russians recently did), but that is it.
But here is the thing: Most of the safety and reliability issues of current nuclear comes from taking submarine reactors at the starting point.
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Rolls-Royce REALLY knows how to make turbines, but I kinda find it interesting that they're (apparently) going to build the complete loop and not be a turbine manufacturer for an established SMR project.
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The TerraPower project [energy.gov] in Wyoming looks to be going ahead as well. The plan is to build an SMR at an existing decommissioned coal plant and use the existing infrastructure for power generation. The TerraPower plant is molten sodium and has thermal storage and is somewhere in the range of 350-400 MW thermal IIRC. They are siting it at a ~750 MW coal plant, so they can use that storage to peak out much higher than the capacity of the SMR and idle down at night or when Wyoming's abundant wind power is plent
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Once the CO2 import tax starts being gathered, they'll be more competitive.
Also, maybe somebody could use the waste heat for some other industrial process... Just like co-generation with gas or coal reaches 90% efficiency, 30% to electricity and 60% for central city heating.
And, by the way, there are "home-sized" co-generators (Combined Heat and Power, CHP, micro CHP).
Re:Mini nuclear reactors (Score:4, Interesting)
I've read about them for 30+ years but they never actually materialize. When is a single example actually going to be put into production?
As soon as the politicians allow them to be put into production.
The politicians created a catch-22 on nuclear power. They say that we can't build any new nuclear power plants until they can be proven safe and economical. How is one supposed to prove them safe and economical? Well, you'd have to build one that is safe and economical. What this tells me is that, like so many other technologies in the USA, we will get SMRs in the USA approximately three years after China gets SMRs. The only way to break this catch-22 is to build SMRs outside of the USA. Once that happens then the politicians will get real upset about how the USA fell behind in technological advancement, throw so much money at the problem that the pile of money will reach critical mass.
We haven't solved the problem of CO2 emissions because the politicians don't want to solve the problem. If they wanted to solve the problem then they would have got a bunch of intelligent and educated people together to look into the problem, then do what they could show as the solution. The UK did this. They got a bunch of intelligent and educated people together, hired Dr. David MacKay as the lead, and had them look into a solution. They told the UK government that nuclear fission power is vital to solving UK's energy problems. After that the UK got real serious about building nuclear power plants. Hinkley Point C may look bad as far as how much money was spent and how long it took but there's no shortcut on this. The only way to learn how to build nuclear power plants is to build nuclear power plants. So, the UK is going to build nuclear power plants.
You want to see SMRs get built? The only thing stopping them being built right now are a bunch of chickenshit politicians that don't want to take the chance of seeing a nuclear power project run up the budget twice the estimate and triple the expected build time. Once the industry has gone to the school of hard knocks to learn how to build nuclear power plants then the industry should really take off. In the USA, decades ago, we could see dozens of nuclear power plants under construction at a time. At the peak we'd see an average of about one gigawatt per month of new generating capacity added to the grid. I expect that to happen again, and then some.
I expect the politicians in the USA to get very interested in SMRs about the time China starts showing us their SMRs. After that the catch-22 is broken.
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Once that happens then the politicians will get real upset about how the USA fell behind in technological advancement, throw so much money at the problem that the pile of money will reach critical mass.
I see what you did there...
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The problem isn't that building new designs needs laws passed by *politicians*; building a new reactor involves getting the design approved by *regulators*, and that's happening. The US NRC just approved the design for NuScale's SMR last year. The next step is for a utility company to seek a building permit from federal and state authorities, and that's happening too.
Now politicians *could* pass laws giving regulatory relief, but that's assuming regulation is the problem here. It's not. The problem is fin
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The UK is a couple of small islands surrounded by seas with high winds. And again, don't bother talking about when the wind dies down when your radioactive water heaters go down for weeks, months, or even years at a time.
The UK is a couple of small, densely populated islands surrounded by seas with high winds. The thing is, maths and physics work and we can work out how much energy is in them:
https://www.withouthotair.com/ [withouthotair.com]
The answer: not really enough.
Nuclear in the UK provides about 20% of electricity with
The UK is too dark and rainy for solar (Score:2)
Nuclear is a necessity. We need aggressive research and implementation of new nuclear - now, not in 30yrs.
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Strange that my puny 6 panel solar system generates around half the power that my house and EV consume. I'm in the UK and around 50 miles west of London. It is not too rainy or dark here.
There are plenty of people a lot farther north than me who use solar successfully. It is time to rethink your ideas.
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Strange that my puny 6 panel solar system generates around half the power that my house and EV consume.
How does that work out at night?
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Very well indeed. I have 33kWh of batteries.
Oh wait... you were being sarcastic.
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Nuclear is a necessity. We need aggressive research and implementation of new nuclear - now, not in 30yrs.
Nuclear is the road to hell. It will take far too long to implement anything and it will be far to expensive for what it delivers, i.e. it will take too much money away from renewables and make the upcoming global catastrophe much worse.
Creative accounting or just crap reporting? (Score:2)
470MW to "power approximately one million homes". UK homes must be truly miserly electricity consumers at approximately 470 watts per home.
In Rolls Royce's 2017 SMR brochure, the figure was 220-440MW. Marketing inflation is alive and well, but the 470MW figure seems roughly consistent. I guess there's an unstated, "ten reactors per power station," assumption. At 2 billion per SMR they come in around the 20 billion mark, just like derided figure attached to "large scale nuclear."
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What's a 100W light bulb? Those things went out 20 years ago. You'd get that much light from something like a 25W mini fluorescent or a 10W LED. And who runs a microwave oven 24/7 at home?
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That said, I'm sure this only includes electricity. If your water heater, home heat, and stove are gas, are you really "powering" that home by replacing only the electricity? (no)
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As a thumbnail, the baseline energy use of my house in the UK is about 400 W. That goes up briefly if I'm doing laundry or cooking. That figure of 470 W seems plausible to me.
Rolls Royce Nukes (Score:2)
Is this for their cars, or for their airliner engines?
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That would be cool. An RTG-powered car would run for decades --- up to centuries -- without needing refueling. I mean, the Voyager space probes are 45 years old and still ticking aren't they?
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The Voyager space probes are 45 years old, and still ticking.
And the RTGs in the Curiosity Rover produce about 125W electrical power (1/5th of a horse power) in a 45-kg enclosure. And 100W after 8 years, and presumably some 80W after another 8 years.
We do need nuclear. (Score:2)
Like it or not, renewables cannot power everything. Take for example those mega-sized cargo ships. There simply isn't going to be the technology in the next 20 years to power those behemoths with anything clean except nuclear power. If we want to go carbon neutral then we need a lot more energy. If we want to go carbon negative then we need and obscene amount of energy.
I'm all for renewables but they are only part of the solution. Greenpeace is a bunch fucking morons for demonizing nuclear technology.
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Wrong. There really needs to not be said any more at this point. You are willfully ignoring reality.
Also, no amount of effort will convert any significant part of those ships to any other fundamentally different power source in the next 20 years. Seriously. Oh, and you cannot convert them to nuclear at all.
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That's quitter talk.
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That's quitter talk.
Well, if you define a "non quitter" as somebody that beats his head against a wall against all reason and all evidence, then yes.
Defeatism is stupid. (Score:2)
Here's the thing, it sure seems like you have forgotten that you don't know what you don't know. You believe you know all the outcomes but you completely exclude the possibility that something unexpected will happen. Wallowing in defeatism gets us no closer to a solution but insisting on change to raise the awareness of the urgency of the situation will attract minds to solve the problems we face. There many intelligent people in this world who know things you do not and you have presumptuously concluded
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Bullshit. I, unlike you, have actual solid engineering skills and insights. Getting those requires a keen insight into one's own limitations. You, on the other hand, seem to have mindless trust in "tech will fix it". Looks very much like a Dunning-Kruger left-side case to me. Because tech is very limited in what it can do in actual reality and things often take a long time and often cost a lot of money.
So here is a concrete example: France (the oh so great nuclear power country) _has_ a nuclear power statio
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Except they've been operating for decades without nuclear power.
Yes, they've been operating using fossil fuel, which is producing large amounts of CO2. So, to try to reduce the amount of CO2 produced and control global warming, nuclear-powered cargo ships would be an alternative. What is your argument here?
when you can roll out equivalent wind and solar in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the price.
Are you advocating for wind/solar powered cargo ships? Why not, but what makes you believe this is going to get to the market faster than nuclear engines, which have been used by submarines for decades? Surely it is in a different context (see comment about fuel enri
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Soo, you think a nuclear powered cargo ship is a good idea? Are you insane? Ever heard about pirates and proliferation?
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You are really behind the times when it comes to nuclear tech. You're stuck in the 60s with all the greenpeace idiots.
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You are really behind the times when it comes to nuclear tech. You're stuck in the 60s with all the greenpeace idiots.
Nope. I have followed nuclear tech for about 35 years now. And I am an engineer. You, on the other hand, clearly have no clue.
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Fine let's address your issues:
1) Pirates: Just how long do you think we're going to keep paying people to aboard ships with expensive cargo when we have the technology to do otherwise?
2) Proliferation: Just how much fuel do you think would put into a ship? What makes you think such technology would be given to just anyone or without strict conditions and inspections? What's preventing anyone from making a rule so that if you do anything fishy with a ship reactor that the UN unconditionally drops the hamm
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Seriously, how disconnected can you get? Not a single thing of that would work. Automated ships are _more_ vulnerable to pirates. And you do nit even seem to be able to think that pirates may want to steal nuclear material.
Incidentally: "Sans nucléaire civil, pas de nucléaire militaire, sans nucléaire militaire, pas de nucléaire civil." (E. Macron, 2020)
Reference: https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/a... [lemonde.fr]).
So you think Macron is "Stuck in the 60s"? Or a "Greenpeace idiot"?
The clueless idiot stuc
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I think you misunderstood Macron. The technology can be made safe: https://usnc.com/ [usnc.com]
Greenest energy (Score:2)
Nuclear is the greenest energy.
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Nuclear is the greenest energy.
Only if you don't count the externalities from mining, like water table contamination with radioactives which could technically be avoided but at higher cost so it never is.
Nuclear Consulting Group (Score:2)
The "Nuclear Consulting Group" and Paul Dorfman are to nuclear power as Andrew Wakefield and Vaccination Network are to vaccines.
i.e. rabidly anti, and using deceptive names. Why is TFS quoting him?
By their irrational anti-nuclear stance, Greenpeace has arguably contributed to more carbon emissions in recent decades than China has.
In a perfect world (Score:2)
Ideally we would not need nuclear energy; there are a lot of issues with it. That said, nuclear provides a realistic, reliable, zero-carbon power source for higher latitudes that cannot otherwise be provided.
Specific to the proposal though, 500MW isn’t what I would call a SMR, unless it is 500MW Thermal. We need to be looking at reactors under about 100MWe, and ideally under 50MWe. They need to be everywhere and not centralized like the old plants to support a modern grid.
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More reactors means more points of failure, which means more inspections, more sites, more commissioning/fueling, more decommissioning, more pieces of radioactive material to handle during decommissioning, etc. Making smaller reactors is an excuse not to upgrade grids, which is a dumb idea and frankly the only reason not to make grid upgrades is to kill renewable power.
Meanwhile if you make the grid upgrades you don't need nuclear because you can ship in renewable power from places where it is currently bei
More energy put into nuclear than you get out. (Score:2)
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Would not surprise me. Even with very costly things like waste storage, accident costs and decommissioning completely unaccounted for, nuclear is an unmitigated economic disaster. Nobody has ever made money off running a nuke. All they can do is partially recover government subsidies.
Tell critics to f*&k off. (Score:2)
However, critics say the focus should be on renewable power, not new nuclear.
All of these far lefties that push just wind/solar, are total disasters. We NEED energy matrix. It can not be 100% AE, nuclear, geothermal, etc.
Even now, evidence is showing that Solar is having a NEGATIVE environmental impact on various utility style set-ups. [theconversation.com] JUst as we had studies that showed that CO2 and other GHGs were coming disasters, so is utility solar.
It is time for the world to quit listening to extremists. Between the GOP/far right fascists in the west, combined with marxists from China,
My problem with SMRs (Score:2)
My problem with SMRs is that *I think* 50 of these would cost more and produce less power and more pollution than a proper modern huge nuclear reactor.
What's the efficiency of SMRs? In other words - how much nuclear waste they produce? They don't mention that. My guess is they're not as efficient and produce more nuclear waste. Is that true or not? I don't know.
Thus I'd rather see one humongous, modern, properly made and safe facility that produces enough power as 50 [?] of these SMRs.
The philosophy behind