Rolls-Royce Expects UK Approval For Small Nuclear Reactors By Mid-2024 (theguardian.com) 261
Rolls-Royce is to start building parts for its small modular nuclear reactors in anticipation of receiving regulatory approval from the British government by 2024, one of its directors has said. The Guardian reports: Paul Stein, the chairman of Rolls-Royce SMR, a subsidiary of the FTSE 100 engineering company, said he hoped to be providing power to the UK's national grid by 2029. Speaking to Reuters in an interview conducted virtually, Stein said the regulatory "process has been kicked off, and will likely be complete in the middle of 2024. We are trying to work with the UK government, and others to get going now placing orders, so we can get power on grid by 2029."
Small modular reactors (SMRs) are seen by their proponents as a way to build nuclear power plants in factories, a method that could be cheaper and quicker than traditional designs. The technology, based on the reactors used in nuclear submarines, is seen by Rolls-Royce as a potential earner far beyond any previous business such as jet engines or diesel motors. The government under Boris Johnson put nuclear power at the centre of its energy strategy announced earlier this month, in response to climate concerns and a desire to ditch Russian gas. SMRs are expected to play an important role in an expansion of nuclear to supply a quarter of the UK's energy needs. Lower costs would be crucial in justifying the nuclear push, given that onshore wind is seen as much cheaper and quicker to install.
Small modular reactors (SMRs) are seen by their proponents as a way to build nuclear power plants in factories, a method that could be cheaper and quicker than traditional designs. The technology, based on the reactors used in nuclear submarines, is seen by Rolls-Royce as a potential earner far beyond any previous business such as jet engines or diesel motors. The government under Boris Johnson put nuclear power at the centre of its energy strategy announced earlier this month, in response to climate concerns and a desire to ditch Russian gas. SMRs are expected to play an important role in an expansion of nuclear to supply a quarter of the UK's energy needs. Lower costs would be crucial in justifying the nuclear push, given that onshore wind is seen as much cheaper and quicker to install.
Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
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Because they are not the same as in submarines.
Submarine and Carrier reactors run on very high enriched uranium. That is a huge difference.
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah but that would be socialism (Score:5, Interesting)
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Not just the maintenance. Those naval reactors are extremely expensive to build. They would never be commercially viable.
They also have access to a large body of water for cooling, and wouldn't work so well away from the coast.
Re: Yeah but that would be socialism (Score:2)
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Not just to built, also to operate. Naval reactors are so small they need over 90% enriched fuel.
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Re:Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
Lol, literally none of that is true. Coal kills more people in a month than nuclear power has ever killed (fat man/little boy excepted). You're spewing rubbish.
By all means we should be careful but our refusal to embrace nuclear power is literally killing us.
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"Be careful" should probably be limited to precisely accounting for the whereabouts of fissile, and ensuring that it is making energy and not weapons. Other than that, nuclear accidents have really only proven how safe the technology is, and how absurd the regulations and licensing process are. There are countless chemicals used in industrial quantities that are far more dangerous.
The LNT [hps.org] regulations are not based on science, and limit exposure to levels 1000x below that of any detectable harm. They also p
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The fissile material in a nuclear reactor is U-235. With the notable exception of the Hiroshima bomb, NO nuclear weapons have ever used U-235....
It should also be noted that it takes a LOT of U-235 to make a nuclear weapon. As opposed to, say, a bog-standard plutonium bomb.
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That's why we can't wait for nuclear. We need to fix this now. RR says they hope to get some reactors connected to the grid by 2030, but realistically every estimate about nuclear power always ends up being at least doubled. Twice as long, twice as expensive. 2040 is probably more realistic.
We have wind turbine technology right now. The UK has 20x more wind energy than the electrical energy it currently uses, just waiting to be harvested.
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This are factory build nuclear reactors.
Neither excessive cost over runs nor construction times are to be expected.
After all they only need a building where the ready made reactor is put inside.
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Being a new design the biggest risk of cost over-runs is finding design flaws, either now or decades down the line when they don't last as long as expected.
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Directly attributable. However knowledge of radiation protection (ironically from detailed studies of the effects of little boy and fat man) means that the idea that for example Chernobyl or Fukushima have not caused a significant increase in cancers and consequently deaths is simply not plausible.
Problem is that only deaths from acute radiation sickness from Chernobyl are counted.
However even if we accept your claims at face value, I can shut down a coal plant tomorrow, and the issues from the plant are go
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I sympathise with both of your views. Nuclear power has been IMPLEMENTED poorly in the private sector, but yes coal does kill a lot more people.
Since we need nuclear power (and that's limited to fission as fusion has been stifled of adequate funds for proper research), that does mean that we have to improve specifications for implemented designs - they have to be properly budgeted for, with no corner-cutting, and we absolutely have to get rid of this whole lowest-bigger fetish. Time and costs are often the
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Coal does not kill any people in civilized countries.
How the funk would that work?
Oh, you import coal from China and they have mine accidents every day ... perhaps, then import form elsewhere.
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Informative)
Causes of death:
1. Air pollution, as habig pointed out. Air pollution kills people directly, through lung diseases, but we now know that air pollution also kills via damage to internal organs.
Sources:
a) https://www.apha.org/-/media/f... [apha.org]
b) https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]
c) https://ec.europa.eu/research-... [europa.eu]
2. Radioactive debris. A paper in Scientific American shows how coal is actually worse than nuclear waste. (Yes, some coal is now "cleaned" before use, but you can't clean it completely and the radioactive waste still has to go somewhere.)
Sources:
a) https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
b) https://www.sciencefocus.com/s... [sciencefocus.com]
c) https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/... [usgs.gov]
d) https://inis.iaea.org/collecti... [iaea.org]
Any serious questions?
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
I envy your confidence in an industry that produced three mile island and Chernobyl and Fukushima when experts were in control.
Scraping the bottom of the barrel there, eh? The nuclear industry of which you speak, presumably the western one, didn't produce Chernobyl. The Soviets were going to do cheap, stupid shit no matter what happened in the west with or without nuclear power there. The west refusing to build a single plant would not have prevented Chernobyl. It's therefore facile to include it in the discussion. So sticking to something realistic we have:
How many people died at three mile island?
How many died as the result of the meltdown at fukushima?
Please excuse me if wind power and other sources are fully capable of supplying sufficient energy much less dangerously and far cheaper.
Much less dangerously == actually more deaths but not scary nuuououououuclear.
Somehow proving that mining coal is dangerous
It is. Objectively so. And you can't build renewables without steel and so coal. A lot of coal.
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Chernobyl
OK, I'll bite.
How will the UK not building nuclear reactors prevent Putin's new USSR from building a really poorly designed nuclear power plant?
Whats that? It won't? OK then how is something which the western nuclear industry had no control over, no influence over and has always been utterly illegal for nuclear power generation in the west relevant to western nuclear power safety?
Chernobyl as an accident could never happen in the west because no one was insane enough to certify powerplants with a v
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You forgot to mention the Windscale nuclear fire. Yes, not a single watt of electricity was ever generated by Windscale, it wasn't a power station, but that isn't a valid rationale from excluding it from the list of catastrophic nuclear accidents caused by the nuclear energy industry.
Th nuclear industry didn't grow cheaply - it was far more expensive than the governments at the time were willing to admit to the public - it grew *quickly*. There was a race on to build the biggest nuclear weapons arsenals the
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
You forgot to mention the Windscale nuclear fire. Yes, not a single watt of electricity was ever generated by Windscale, it wasn't a power station, but that isn't a valid rationale from excluding it from the list of catastrophic nuclear accidents caused by the nuclear energy industry.
This is just stupid. It had NOTHING to do with the nuclear energy industry.
The only reason to include it as "accidents caused by the nuclear energy industry" is if you have an axe to grind. It was part of the nuclear weapons industry. Nothing like that has ever, ever, ever been built for nuclear power.
Having nothing to do with nuclear power is a completely valid reason to not include it with nuclear power.
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I envy your confidence in an industry that produced three mile island and Chernobyl and Fukushima when experts were in control.
Scraping the bottom of the barrel there, eh? The nuclear industry of which you speak, presumably the western one, didn't produce Chernobyl
The problem with this whole "the nuclear industry" thing and trying to draw a distinction between east and east like it matters is that in the long run, it doesn't matter. You cannot trust that the people in charge today are going to also be in charge tomorrow. You can't hope for things to not change because they will, and you can't hope things will get better because they might not. I know that nuclear weapons are not nuclear power but there's a parallel to be drawn to MAD here, which works fine until you
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It is not rational to compare decades old technology to emerging technology that is, explicitly, designed to be safer with the benefit of past experiences.
It's like rejecting flying on a Boeing 737-800 (one of the statistically safest planes with a long history of operations) because if you had piled about 200 people onto the Wright Brothers Flyer it wouldn't have been airworthy.
Or like refusing to drive a modern car with air bags, seat belts, anti-lock brakes, advanced collision detection, crumple zones, s
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Nevertheless safety matters probably change immensely when industry gets its hands on this highly dangerous power source.
Do you know, at the end of December 2020, the United States had 94 operating commercial nuclear reactors at 56 nuclear power plants in 28 states? The Private Industry you are so worried about, has been running nuclear power plants since the 1950s. https://www.eia.gov/energyexpl... [eia.gov]
Dumping food production, pharmaceuticals, nuclear energy, and "corrupt" government regulation into one big collection of pessimistic FUD doesn't help move us toward a concrete goal. If you have problems with any of these items,
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...private industry (even in the case of pharmaceuticals) has proved totally untrustworthy in protecting the public from horrible damage, and government regulation is so immensely corrupt that it is almost totally useless in the matter.
Corruption? More specifically, it's called regulatory capture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] This is the part of the American economic system that they don't like talking about, especially not at election time.
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The Navy knows how to build them.
Ya, but these will be *really* fancy small nuclear reactors, kinda like the Rolls-Royce of reactors. :-)
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Could you make it a car analogy?
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Current US Navy designs use highly-enriched uranium, making them less suitable for commercial use.
The Navy also has an infinite heat sink available, so they don't have to deal with temperature limits on outflow into local rivers, or cooling towers. And they don't have to deal with site geology, etc.
Re: Good for them (Score:2)
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Yes, subs use seawater to cool their reactors. Technically you could use the heat plume to follow a sub. There's no way to avoid this. A typical system will produce more than 100 MW of heat. Not rejecting that into the ocean will cause a problem in minutes.
But the sea is large enough that you can spread that 100 MW over many m3 and get a tiny temperature increase, which will dissipate as the heated water mixes with its surroundings.
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Re:Good for them (Score:4, Insightful)
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France, or more specifically the state-owned energy company that builds nuclear plants EDF, doesn't have a good track record when it comes to delivering nuclear power.
They are currently working on a few projects in Europe. All at least 2x over budget and 2x the expected build time.
In fact they are now saying that new plants starting this year will take 20 years to come online, which is actually realistic given how their other projects are going.
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Nuclear priced themselves out of the market. Watts Bar unit 2 costs over $12 billion. Who is going to finance that?
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Informative)
Regulation priced nuclear out of the market.
https://rootsofprogress.org/de... [rootsofprogress.org]
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention that with other fuels people can get others to pay the cost.
Nordstream funded and continues to fund Putin's war machine.The cheap gas that allowed Germany to ditch nuclear in hurry is being paid in Ukrainian blood. And Germany is still foot dragging on turning it off because it will be expensive (for Germany).
But Ukraine pays the price.
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1.5% of all power-generating nuclear reactors have melted down.
EBR-1 in Idaho, 1955.
Mulvihill Windscale in the UK, 1957.
Chalk River in Canada, 1958.
Santa Susana in Los Angeles, 1959.
SL-1 in Idaho, 1960â"1961.
Fermi 1 in Michigan, 1966.
Chapelcross in Scotland, 1967.
Saint-Laurent in France, 1969.
Lucens in Switzerland, 1969.
Greifswald in Germany, 1975.
Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, 1979.
Saint-Laurent in France, 1980.
Chernobyl in Ukraine, 1986.
Fukushima #1 (dai-ichi) Reactors 1,2 & 3, Japan 2011.
Tha
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Cars are horrible deathtraps because seatbelts and crumplezones don't exist.
That's what you just said right? I mean you just rattled off a list of incidents occuring at plants which were 60+ years old in design. I mean the most recent example you cite was a BWR-3 design from General Electric which was only approved in the very early 60s.
Fuck cars back then were deathtraps. It's a shame that there's not been any progress on safety since then right? /sarcasm
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Failure to enforce speed limits on the UK's roads kills more people each year, but nobody's making such a big fuss about that.
You misspelled "failure to use PRT instead of personal automobiles" there, sport. This whole car thing is insensible, arguing over fossil fuels vs. EVs when we should be ditching the whole lot of automobiles on pneumatic tires is the same as arguing over fossil fuels vs. nuclear plants when we should be building wind and upgrading the grid. We do not need nuclear power, it's not even the cheapest way to get what we need, if we built a bunch of nuclear plants we would have to make grid upgrades anyway since
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Well, if you want to go down that road, you're missing the point altogether: get rid of cars!
Uh no, that was exactly what I said. Dump cars for PRT. Preferably on an elevated monorail, which is really cheap to build and maintain. You could actually convert existing cars to run on it, but you wouldn't. You'd build much lighter-weight ones because they wouldn't have to handle rollover safety and such. And you could even still have personal vehicles if you wanted to pay for the switch and siding, or for more people more likely storage in a nearby garage which had such.
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So your solution is what, unregulated nuclear reactors? Gonna give that a hard pass.
The nuclear industry has demonstrated that they can't function responsibly, so there needs to be regulation and oversight. And because the penalty for failure is so massive (even if not in terms of lives lost, then in terms of sacrifice zones) the regulation and oversight need to be correspondingly massive.
Meanwhile this whole coal vs. nuclear thing is the biggest, most pathetic false dichotomy going right now. That logical
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That's how it has to work if it wants to continue to work. Sustainability has to be job #1. Sadly, it's not even job #2 now.
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Re:Good for them (Score:5, Interesting)
Whether wind is better than nuclear in this context is irrelevant. That is because this is the UK and there is massive tidal power potential of between 20-30GW which is as reliable as you can get combined with substantial pumped storage potential to smooth out the tidal (though several sights around the cost of the UK would do much of the smoothing out anyway due to different tide times) there is no need for fission nuclear power pants of any description.
To get 20GW of generation would take 8-10 large nuclear power stations, which would be at current build costs at least 240 billion GBP. For a fraction of that price you could sling tidal barriers across the Seven and Mersey estuaries and the Pentland Firth and then build a bunch of pumped storage. Oh and could also pay to replace everyones gas boilers with ground source heat pumps.
So why the hell does the UK need nuclear. So let me flip that around and you can provide the 1000 word essay by Tuesday hey as to why the UK should spend on nuclear rather than tidal, pumped storage and some wind?
Economics? (Score:3)
The article is little more than a powerpoint slide, and leaves me with the following questions:
How much power does one of their mini reactors output?
How much do they cost to purchase?
How much do they cost to operate?
Without any of that there is no way to judge if this is a worthwhile effort or not.
Re:Economics? (Score:5, Informative)
470MW, 1/10th the footprint of a traditional reactor site, factory-built components trucked to site, 60 years of continuous baseload power for 1 million homes.
Re:Economics? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Economics? (Score:4, Interesting)
So assuming a cost over-run of 400% (the average in the US, at least) and an annual operational cost of 2% of the original capital cost, that's (gets out calculator) ...
Cost: £16B capital cost + ((2% of £16B = £320M) * 60 years) = £35B lifetime cost
Price: £35B total / 1M homes / 60 years = £583 per home, per year (roughly $720 in USD)
And that's assuming no economics of scale or reductions due to automation which isn't really fair in this case, since the design is modular and the assembly is factory-built. So yeah, those are perfectly rational back-of-the-envelope numbers. You'd have to be a pretty bad business person to not be able to turn that for a profit.
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A nice follow-on calculation is cost per kWh.
Assuming a capacity factor of 0.9 over the 60 year plant lifetime, this is:
£35bn / (60 years * 365 days/year * 24 hours/day * 470MW * 0.9) = £0.157/kWh
In comparison, the strike price agreed for the new nuclear power station currently under construction in the UK (Hinkley C), was £89.50/MWh, or £0.0895/kWh.
This makes the SMRs almost twice the price, assuming all the earlier assumptions about cost-overruns hold true. If Rolls Royce produce
Re: Economics? (Score:5, Informative)
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The problem is that the energy produced is more expensive than rival sources like wind. We have already had instances where the wholesale cost of electricity goes negative due to nuclear power not being able to ramp down during periods of high wind and low demand.
I imagine these will come with the usual subsidies. Free insurance, and a guaranteed price for any electricity generated. For comparison, Hinkley Point C is getting £106/MWh guaranteed, with inflationary increases every year. Wind farms
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That 1M figure comes from the linked article. As you point out, that works out to 20kWh per home. As a back-of-the-envelope figure, it's fine, I think. We're just trying to figure out if it is reasonably profitable, which it quite clearly is.
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Oh and one more thing I forgot to point out: the energy niche that these small reactors will fill is baseload power, not peak power. 20kWh of baseload is quite a lot, even by US standards. But you're quite right, the total household cost will be the cost baseload + the cost of peak power.
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Re:Economics? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Economics? (Score:2)
Re: Economics? (Score:5, Insightful)
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They're trying to take advantage of the economics of scale.
The problem with that idea is that the economies of scale run the other direction in the case of nuclear reactors. Specifically, there are per-unit costs when it comes to inspection, security, and decommissioning in particular which make small reactors insensible. A lot of those costs are regulatory, which sounds onerous until you remember we're dealing with nuclear power and if you get it wrong you can ruin large areas for human use for long periods. And smaller reactors are more prone to be sited in locat
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You left out another vital question. What do they cost to decommission?
The UK is facing a a £7.5 billion bill to decommission 20 of it's defunct nuclear subs.
https://www.chemistryworld.com... [chemistryworld.com]
That would buy a hell of a lot of solar, batteries and wind turbines.
Rolls Royce is about to eat our lunch (Score:5, Insightful)
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For some countries with limited resources, like Britain, nuclear is competitive. They literally have to ship trees from the ameri
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The economics in the US makes nuclear reactors non competitive. The industry has had 70 years to show it build at original estimates and supply energy at a reasonable cost. Instead in multiple jurisdictions rate payers are seeing higher bills for energy they never receive veto put in bluntly, in the US nuclear is a scam to funnel public funds to private pockets
By this same thinking, history has shown the economics in the US makes urban and inter-city mass transit non-competitive. It's not a matter of regulations, government planning and strategy, and competition (true or otherwise) from competing industries. So, the US should stop all efforts at continuing the failed mass transit experiment.
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Small modular reactors built in factories may be economically viable. Fast reactors, which the US abandoned in 1994 but the private sector has since embraced, can burn nuclear waste as fuel by making fertile fuel fissile. It also makes an ~27 million year problem a 100 year problem by burning actinides. So yeah, there are reasons to invest in fission. Fusion has a 100 year problem in tritium and deuterium byproducts, Fast fission? Also about 100 years. Fusion also seems to be 40 years out constantly (maybe
Re: Rolls Royce is about to eat our lunch (Score:2)
Re: Rolls Royce is about to eat our lunch (Score:2)
Re: Rolls Royce is about to eat our lunch (Score:2)
Fast reactors burn full stop.
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For some countries with limited resources, like Britain, nuclear is competitive [...] in the US we have tons of natural gas and lots of land for wind and solar.
In England and also in Scotland they have some of the world's most ideal offshore wind conditions for power generation, and are also near enough to other nations that they could be supplying their excess to others. They don't need nukes, they need offshore wind.
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Solar panels, wind farms, wild and coal and gas all going more expensive.
Solar and wind have fallen over the last five years and are all predicted to fall further. If you are talking about prices in the short-term, well that's short-term, and you also need to look at real terms, not nominal. Unless you have some other information which is counter to all the other information I have ever seen on the subject, that is. If so, then please post this.
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Re: Rolls Royce is about to eat our lunch (Score:2)
If I were a long term investor in Nuclear power I'd be scared of PV.
How cheap does PV have to get to make PV+hydrogen competetive with Nuclear? The answer will be a number achievable in 2 decades IMO. Ineffient hydrogen round trip efficiency doesn't need to be a problem if the electricity gets cheap enough when the sun does shine.
Re:Rolls Royce is about to eat our lunch (Score:4, Insightful)
Premium reactors (Score:3)
SMR is a dead end design (Score:5, Interesting)
Water-cooled SMRs like that are looking like a dead-end because molten salt reactors are going to take over. Not take over only from SMRs and conventional reactors, but from coal, gas, petroleum, wind and solar.
By the end of the decade we will see at least four experimental molten salt reactors come online. China just finished construction of the first molten salt reactor since the Oakridge thorium reactor was shut down in 1969. Elysium Industries and TerraPower should have working prototypes. Then between the remaining groups such as Seaborg, Copenhagen, ThorCon, Flibe and Moltex we should see at least one more. By the end of he following decade, 2040, the molten salt reactor construction boom will be well underway, hundreds will be coming online per year all over he the world.
Really nothing else will be able to compete. Molten salt reactors can not blow up or leak. They are not a proliferation risk. They fully consume their fuel. They burn thorium, a plentiful mining waste material, spent fuel waste from conventional reactors, uranium or plutonium. Overall very safe, incredibly versatile, very cheap to fuel and operate, anti-polluting and inexpensive to manufacture measured as $/kW.
Molten salt reactors should remain the dominant source of power on earth for centuries if not millennia. Really the only foreseeable significant potential competitors could be deep geothermal wells and fusion.
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By the end of the decade we will see at least four experimental molten salt reactors come online.
Yes, experimental. And then a decade to work out how to produce them efficiently. And then a decade to scale up production. So they'll be ready for use in 25 years. That's far too late. If SMRs can be ready in 2024 then even it it's 'old technology' it's the far better option.
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Re: SMR is a dead end design (Score:2)
Re: SMR is a dead end design (Score:2)
Rolls Royce? Well... (Score:4, Funny)
if they slap 12 cylinders on it and call it Merlin, you can count me in :-)
On a more serious note, we as a society need to learn to differentiate between designs and designers/builders who perform at different levels; Rather than being hostile to all things nuclear, we need to say "no" to letting soviets build reactors without containment buildings, "maybe not" when a Japanese outfit proposes building one on a fault line on the shore of the ocean which gets frequent typhoons and tsunamis, but not to panic when the US Navy builds one or when a company like Rolls Royce does it with proper design, construction, and siting.
Re: Rolls Royce? Well... (Score:2)
Re: Rolls Royce? Well... (Score:2)
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I'm well known to prefer that we build none, but how about we always require best practices no matter who's building one?
I bet (Score:2)
Nobody seems to read any contracts in the UK before signing them.
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Re:Just what the world needs (Score:5, Interesting)
What you need to do is compare the risk of some day digging up an itty bitty lump and getting sick vs. the ecological horrors you're going to have to visit on your beautiful land in order to supply baseload power to 1 million homes over 60 years. It's no contest. And don't tell me "wind power" will save you. These small reactors are about the size of a shoe factory. You'd have to blanket the countryside with 150 wind turbines to replace just one of them.
Re: Just what the world needs (Score:2)
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Absolutely. And then you'll end up with a whole bunch of wind and a bit of PV solar.
Re:idea: put on in an aeroplane (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: idea: put on in an aeroplane (Score:2)