First Small Modular Nuclear Reactor Certified For Use In US (apnews.com) 209
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has certified the design for what will be the United States' first small modular nuclear reactor. The Associated Press reports: The rule that certifies the design was published Thursday in the Federal Register. It means that companies seeking to build and operate a nuclear power plant can pick the design for a 50-megawatt, advanced light-water small modular nuclear reactor by Oregon-based NuScale Power and apply to the NRC for a license. It's the final determination that the design is acceptable for use, so it can't be legally challenged during the licensing process when someone applies to build and operate a nuclear power plant, NRC spokesperson Scott Burnell said Friday. The rule becomes effective in late February.
The U.S. Energy Department said the newly approved design "equips the nation with a new clean power source to help drive down" planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. It's the seventh nuclear reactor design cleared for use in the United States. The rest are for traditional, large, light-water reactors. Diane Hughes, NuScale's vice president of marketing and communications, said the design certification is a historic step forward toward a clean energy future and makes the company's VOYGR power plant a near-term deployable solution for customers. The first small modular reactor design application package included over 2 million pages of supporting materials, Hughes added. "NuScale has also applied to the NRC for approval of a larger design, at 77 megawatts per module, and the agency is checking the application for completeness before starting a full review," adds the report.
The U.S. Energy Department said the newly approved design "equips the nation with a new clean power source to help drive down" planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. It's the seventh nuclear reactor design cleared for use in the United States. The rest are for traditional, large, light-water reactors. Diane Hughes, NuScale's vice president of marketing and communications, said the design certification is a historic step forward toward a clean energy future and makes the company's VOYGR power plant a near-term deployable solution for customers. The first small modular reactor design application package included over 2 million pages of supporting materials, Hughes added. "NuScale has also applied to the NRC for approval of a larger design, at 77 megawatts per module, and the agency is checking the application for completeness before starting a full review," adds the report.
And there goes the whinge. (Score:5, Insightful)
He said he thinks they’re not competitive in price with renewables and battery storage.
Now if they factor in storage as well, rather than just intermittent power generation, and keep in mind this is CARRIER SCALE within a local grid...
As well as the fact that this produces power more or less on demand, all day, every day.
Suddenly the price is a LOT more reasonable.
It's not there to REPLACE renewables.
It's there as part of the total generation plan.
Long string of bad weather disrupting the renewables?
Think of the nuke as a "backup generator". When you ABSOLUTELY NEED it, you HAVE it.
The price! The price! What's more expensive?
Higher priced power?
Or NO power?
Ask someone depending on a ventilator.
Besides, in a hybridized delivery system, you simply fold ALL the costs together.
Cheaper sources for general everyday, together with "more expensive" sources as a hedge against emergencies.
Anyone thinking we should just "pick a winner" and go with single source power generation monoculture is an absolute moron.
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Too expensive to use as a backup generator. It is only good for base load, but it has to run at max capacity to recoup its costs.
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Keep in mind, the costs of renewables BY THEMSELVES are very low.
HOWEVER, renewables PLUS STORAGE (basically batteries, as the ONLY fully location-agnostic form of storage).
The price comes more in-line with nuclear.
Okay, explain how you're going to emergency power A GRID on anything else.
You gonna truck out a couple diesel generators?
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Think of the nuke as a "backup generator".
No, not at all. Nukes only make sense as primary baseload. Once you have sunk the cost of building them, you want to run them 24/7.
Re:And there goes the whinge. (Score:4, Informative)
GP is wrong, but one of the concepts of the SMRs is that they can do a better job at load following. They might be economically viable at a capacity factor around 50-60%. Their sweet spot will likely be for northern climates with long term winters, extremely remote operations, and costal cities that also need desalination.
Personally I really hope the magically find a way to get the cost down. 50-100MW building blocks create so many opportunities.
Re:And there goes the whinge. (Score:4, Interesting)
Part of the reason reactors are so damn expensive now is because you effectively are building one-offs almost every time.
With smaller units, it's more likely that mass production will drastically reduce the costs to manufacture AND the time spent from initial approval through startup.
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There have been a reasonable number of studies on renewables and these do include the cost of storage, or more relevantly, interconnect which is what is needed for long term variations in renewable supply. It has been thought about, of course, and included in the costs.
I can't find out for sure with the nuscale generator, but their website talks of continuous power and 95% capacity factors. That's great, of course, but as far as I can see, this means the power really is continuous. You can't turn it off. I
Total cost of ownership (Score:2)
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We don't know. The reality is that if this is not too wildly expensive some of them at least will get built, because it will take many years to work out whether it really is economically cheaper or not. And, there is no doubt, that a highly predictable power supply will add value to the grid, even if it is not controllable.
It still leaves the cost of the storing waste which, as far as I can tell, will be produced in greater quantities than for conventional nuclear plants. Given that in the worse case, we ha
Re:Total cost of ownership (Score:5, Informative)
we have to store this waste for 10,000 years
Where are people getting this bullshit? I see this "fact" quoted often but no explanation as to where it comes from.
The spent nuclear fuel from today's nuclear reactors will be no more radioactive than the ore it came from in about 300 years. That comes from an estimate of having ten half-lives of the most radioactive isotopes, a kind of "rule of thumb" that after that amount of time the isotopes are effectively negligible contributors to the total radiation flux. After that time the majority of the radiation comes from very long lived isotopes, and the longer the half-life the lower the radiation flux. We use uranium as radiation shielding material because it blocks radiation so well, and because the radiation uranium produces is so low.
300 years is still a long time but we've built things that last that long before. Think of bridges, cathedrals, dams, and so much else. Once the 300 years have passed then the "spent" nuclear fuel becomes very valuable as nuclear fuel again. The radiation is so low that it can again be handled with gloves and goggles like we do now with new nuclear fuel. The gloves more for preventing contaminating the fuel with oil from skin than protecting the person. Carbon is a potent neutron moderator and we are made largely of carbon, getting carbon based materials in the fuel would mess with the reactor. This problem of nuclear waste disposal becomes less of a problem with molten salt and molten metal reactors because the isotopes that produce the most problems can be removed continuously from the reactor, as opposed to staying in the solid fuel reactor bundles to cause problems for hundreds of years.
Spent nuclear fuel isn't a burden for future generations, it is a gift. We are producing for them something of considerable future value as fuel. It is this reason of gifts for future generations that we plant trees today. We don't expect to live to see the mature forest that results but we do expect future generations to enjoy the fruits of our labors.
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https://www.science.org/conten... [science.org]
Here is an article from Science about Onkalu, which is designed for 100,000 year storage. Sorry, I was out by a factor of ten.
Of course, buildings 300 years in age are common place and I value them for history that the bring to the our built environment, despite the cost of maintaining them.
You might be right that future generations will dig out our geologic nuclear stores as a valuable resource. Similarly we some places where they are digging up old land fill waste, to extr
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That article talks about the storage facility, but only spends half a sentence on the required storage time: it asserts the 100,000-year number without providing a citation or any other backing.
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It also doesn't take into account fuel reprocessing or diversification of fuel types.
We can reprocess.
(Yes! But that creates byproducts like PLUTONIUM!!!!! {/Scare Quotes})
Plutonium, also a nuclear reactor fuel.
YES, Plutonium is a much "fussier" fuel to burn in a reactor due to decay product pollution.
But it's usable and the sceince is well understood.
Depending on the isotope used.
Most common is Pu-239.
Which decays into Uranium-235.
Which, is itself, nuclear fuel.
Which decays into Thorium-231. With a half-
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Where are people getting this bullshit? I see this "fact" quoted often but no explanation as to where it comes from.
The spent nuclear fuel from today's nuclear reactors will be no more radioactive than the ore it came from in about 300 years. That comes from an estimate of having ten half-lives of the most radioactive isotopes, a kind of "rule of thumb" that after that amount of time the isotopes are effectively negligible contributors to the total radiation flux.
Thanks for at least offering an explanation about where your bullshit claim is coming from.
The calculation you described leads to a false conclusion because it ignores the existence of longer lived radionuclides, and frames the matter in a bizarre way that hides many undisclosed caveats and assumptions.
Even the World Nuclear Association [world-nuclear.org] (quoting a 30 year old IAEA report) puts that number at 3000 years, not 300, since they include longer lived radionuclides. And even that assertion is very questionable sinc
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What can I say. I post an article from Science about the design of what is the most advanced geologic storage in the world and you claim this is bullshit. Followed by further claims that the World Nuclear association has an approach which is "bizarre".
It's not that I don't trust you, of course, but I think that I and you have given reasonable amount of evidence in support of my claim that radioactive waste needs handling and long term storage.
Happy to accept that there are other forms of waste which are als
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It is a bizarre approach to the subject: take the ten most intense radionuclides of fresh spent fuel, which are intense because of their relatively short half-lives and when they are virtually gone declare "no problem" when the next tier of radionuclides, most actinides, with half-lives of thousands of years are only slightly decayed, but ignore them since they were a minor contributor when the spend fuel was fresh.
That's actually the only reasonable approach to the subject. The material came out of the ground with a given level of radioactivity, so it stands to reason that putting it back into the ground at a similar level of radioactivity per ton is probably not an ecological disaster.
If the claim is that a tonne of spent fuel is no more dangerous than a tonne of uranium ore after 3000 (not 300) years the claim is clearly wildly false. The concentrated actinides in spent fuel is orders of magnitude hotter at 3000 years. This diagram also at the World Nuclear Association [world-nuclear.org] blows away the bullshit by not using a fake a made up measure and states the actual activity level per tonne, apples to apples, and shows that the cross-over point when the radiotoxicity per tonne is actual similar to uranium ore is 300,000, not 300, years.
Only if you don't reprocess it. This article (figure 10) [epj-conferences.org] gives a clearer breakdown with more separation between material types. Most of the remaining radiation comes from plutonium, which can be separated out from the spent fuel (al
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Once the 300 years have passed then the "spent" nuclear fuel becomes very valuable as nuclear fuel again.
Spent nuclear fuel in long term storage is vitrified to avoid it escaping. It's safer this way, but by definition we are working very hard to make it extremely difficult to de-encapsulate and re-use.
The correct way to use spent fuel would be to build a fast neutron reactor ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ) that will promote further fission of all these elements, producing much more usable energy and leading to low activity isotopes that are not a safety problem.
Your proposal says future generation shoul
Re: Total cost of ownership (Score:2)
Sometimes I think that those future generations likely wont be very nice to me when I am old and expecting to have rights and be able to drive and stuff.
I think when that happens, I might be not so sorry that we dumped some of our burden onto them.
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What's the total cost of ownership (TCO) including building/installing, fuelling, running/maintaining, processing & storing waste, & decommissioning, per MWH?
Since none have been built, much less operated, it is a little early to have definitive data about this - but Nuscale has recently modified its projections about this and now states costs that make it similar to conventional large nuclear power plants. So no savings whatsoever, according to the vendor.
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The price! The price! What's more expensive?
Higher priced power?
Or NO power?
Ask someone depending on a ventilator.
Ok, I asked one and he said they have a diesel generator behind the garage.
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Ok, I asked one and he said they have a diesel generator behind the garage.
We have spent 70 years burning fossil fuels instead of building out nuclear. Why stop now?
Re:And there goes the whinge. (Score:4, Insightful)
We've spent a LOT longer than 70 years burning fossil fuels.
Coal's been burned for heat for millennia. The first coal fired power plant was an Edison facility in London in 1882.
Of course, but nuclear has only been a viable alternative for ~70 years. And we have not taken advantage of it, that was my point.
People protesting nuclear power during the 20th century were effectively choosing coal instead. That is why the world has 8000 coal plants and only 400 reactors. They have done quite enough damage already, we should be ignoring them going forward.
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Once people have the technology for "base load" nuclear power and inexpensive grid-scale energy storage then where is the value add in having intermittent renewable energy sources?
Nuclear power is not likely to replace low-tech low-cost energy like hydro and onshore wind but it is likely to make many renewable energy options no longer economically feasible. Governments have been propping up the solar power energy sector for a long time, and it appears it is finally sinking in that government subsidies for
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It might happen, I guess. But, at the moment, it's more likely we will just use more power over time. At the moment, though, nuclear is being displaced, along with oil and coal, by solar and wind; it is the government subsidies for nuclear that are in question.
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I'm sorry, but the people trying to displace nuclear with renewables are living a pipe dream.
You cannot replace stable base power with intermittent sources.
Adding in the cost of necessary storage to stabilize obliterates the cost benefit.
Let's not forget all the government subsidies (which WILL end one day) currently skewing the CBA.
In the end, this sort of partisanship and an attempt to "pick a winnner" will wind up biting us in the ass and getting people killed.
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What makes a system strong or robust? In additions to high-capacity transmission lines, the anchoring source is large rotating machines that operate in synchronism with the grid. They provide inertia, they can respond quickly through ramping, they can inject vars, they increase short circuit MVA (mega volt amperes). All good things necessary for a reliable power system. Asynchronous generation, sources which don’t spin with the system, such as wind and solar, do not as readily add strength to a system; rather they tend lean on other resources.
https://judithcurry.com/ [judithcurry.com]
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The cost of utility scale batteries capable of peak shaving (ie. 8 hours duration) works out to about $2700 per kw. https://atb.nrel.gov/electrici... [nrel.gov] whearas nuclear generation capital cost is at least $,7800 per kw, and perhaps as much as $12,000 / kw https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com].
Using KW as your metric results in a very distorted comparison. Batteries used in that manner last at most maybe 15 years. A nuclear power plant lasts 40+ years. So you have almost a 3x difference from that alone. And nuclear power plants produce power 24x7, while batteries just make power available for a few hours, so you have a 3x difference there. Using your numbers, that makes the nuclear power plant potentially less than half as expensive per kWh as the batteries.
Mind you, there's fuel required fo
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Even with storage, wind is cheaper. Your don't even need much storage, it's just for smoothing and not some kind if grid scale UPS.
More useful are long distance transmission lines to move energy where it's needed. Nuclear needs those too because it's all concentrated in one place typically far from where it's used in case there is an accident.
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No, just to be less intermittent than nuclear. And cheaper. A lot cheaper.
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Reprocessing costs money, but storage has a lot of its own issues. Besides, material is needed for many reasons, look at the challenge NASA had getting material to power various spacecraft not long ago.
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Jesus Christ the formatting man. I couldn't even read your post, I suspect you make some good points, but have you heard of a fucking paragraph?
How does it compare? (Score:4, Informative)
Today, the most powerful, commercially deployed, wind turbine is 11 MW. In the future, we'll have 16 MW.
Who would win the race (time, total cost over time) between one of these 50 MW nuclear plants and 5 of the 11 MW, or 3/4 of the 16 MW wind turbines?
Seems to me it would be marginally easier to expand windfarms by turbines at a time. Whereas all those reactors would need tons of safety certifications or whatnot.
And then, that's not even counting PV solar, and non-PV solar in the future.
Re:How does it compare? (Score:4, Informative)
The NuScale SMR requires refuelling every two years. It produces more nuclear waste than a conventional reactor, on a per MWh basis.
I needs a cooling pool. The pool has to secured in several ways. No access to people, protection from events like extreme weather and earthquakes. Constantly monitored for temperature and leaks, as well as contamination of the water that could clog the system or indicate a leak.
These have been promoted as "batteries" that can be easily deployed, but they actually require much of the same infrastructure as a conventional nuclear plant. That includes all the monitoring equipment on-site, staff etc.
No word on final cost yet, but very likely to be an order of magnitude more than wind + storage, if you really want to compare.
Re:How does it compare? (Score:4, Funny)
I needs a cooling pool.
Well, ya, who doesn't? :-)
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but very likely to be an order of magnitude more than wind + storage, ?
I'd really love to have the logic chain here, especially since this operates even when wind doesn't can be sited in locations that can't easily be served by wind, and when the wind isn't blowing. No need to examine how the maintenance needs of wind turbines don't even seem to exist in what you presented, you can have that as a gimme.
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Re:How does it compare? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you going to claim it will be cheaper to maintain a nuclear plant vs a bunch of wind turbines?
No I am not claiming anything about the relative costs. Let me ask you this, Just how much are the annualized costs of 24/7 x 30 megawatts wind turbines vs one of the small reactors ? If you can't say, you should back off and find out before putting your mouth in gear.
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No I am not claiming anything about the relative costs.
If you can't say, you should back off and find out before putting your mouth in gear.
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Currently offshore wind is about 1/5th the cost of new nuclear at retail, and that doesn't factor in subsidies. The gap is widening.
Onshore is even cheaper.
Even if you include long distance power lines to transport the energy from multiple places where it can be generated (and in that case you should include the same infrastructure costs for nuclear), it's still cheaper to have a load of distributed turbines and maybe some storage for smoothing.
That will easily exceed the capacity factor of nuclear in Europ
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I'd really love to have the logic chain here, especially since this operates even when wind doesn't can be sited in locations that can't easily be served by wind, and when the wind isn't blowing
There is always wind or solar somewhere. What you are really highlighting is failures to develop the grids in the USA.
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These have been promoted as "batteries" that can be easily deployed, but they actually require much of the same infrastructure as a conventional nuclear plant. That includes all the monitoring equipment on-site, staff etc.
Their service life will also be shorter because the neutron bombardment of the reactor vessel will make it brittle sooner, making them prone to loss of cooling accidents.
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The NuScale SMR requires refuelling every two years. It produces more nuclear waste than a conventional reactor, on a per MWh basis.
Came here to say this:
https://earth.stanford.edu/new... [stanford.edu]
This is a pretty huge downside that greatly limits the usefulness of SMRs. They're quick and cheap to build compared to conventional nuclear, so they might be tempting to use for a quick phase-out of fossil power, but that could end up replacing a global climate crisis with a global nuclear waste crisis.
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You need to have pretty much the same safety mechanism of a full scale nuclear reactor, with a fraction of the output. And a widespread use of those, with skimped safety nets, might lead to incidents which will in turn trigger even more scare about nuclear in the population.
I don't know the numbers. You may be right. I think the hope is that much of the safety cost is generated by studies and a lengthy review process. If we mass produce these, we should be able to also stamp out safety plans and gear, reducing the overhead. As we have lots of these deployed, we ought to also learn what safety measures really are necessary and which are driven by unfounded fears.
Whether that's realistic, can't say.
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Deciding that safety measures were unfounded fear is what lead to Chernobyl and Fukushima.
"It can't melt down."
"We don't need a containment building."
"Tsunami like that are once in a millennium events."
Re:How does it compare? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm all for nuclear but I'm not sure if scaling it down so much makes sense either. I get that they're supposed to be mass produced but you'll still have to deal with "nuclear" issues like convincing the locals that they won't grow a second head, waste disposal, etc. While a single big reactor is like 1,500MW. That's 30 of these.
Re: How does it compare? (Score:2)
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Just because they are small, doesn't mean they have to be installed in a town. ãSbrã
Think 20 in the same place as a normal reactor
I can see how this would make sense. The idea of an SMR is that they should be generic and interchangeable, and most parts of it can be made in a factory then trucked to the deployment site, instead of custom built onsite. There may be economies of scale here, or potentially the site could be generating "some" electricity while the final SMRs are still being assembled or commissioned. Refuelling may also be less disruptive as you could just refuel one SMR at a time while the other 19 are still generating.
Re: How does it compare? (Score:4, Insightful)
Think 20 in the same place as a normal reactor
I can see how this would make sense. The idea of an SMR is that they should be generic and interchangeable, and most parts of it can be made in a factory then trucked to the deployment site, instead of custom built onsite.
It doesn't make sense. The idea of a SMR is that you don't need a whole big ass plant to support one. If you're building a big plant it's much cheaper and also more reliable to build one because of per-unit costs. Each unit has to be certified, inspected, etc etc. Each unit has just as many welds as a real reactor which all have to be inspected, are potential points of failure, etc. It just obviously raises the costs per MWh. When you add to all of that the fact that it has to be refueled more often so the uptime will be even worse than usual they make even less than no sense.
The argument for SMRs is that you can sprinkle them all over the landscape so they don't need as much infrastructure. If you put them all in one place then you're back to having just as much new infrastructure needed as a wind farm. And if you have that infrastructure, then on a continent this size the wind does everything nuclear does, except cause massive problems for future people.
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Hmm I don't think sprinkle nuclear reactors over the landscape would be welcomed by any residents in that landscape.
The argument for SMRs in my opinion is mostly for preventing the nuclear plant manufacturing cost from ballooning up. The thinking is mass production and prefabrication in factory shall streamline the certification and inspection process, to the point that a new nuclear plant shall not be delayed by lawsuit or whatever in the middle of building process and rise the cost, as there should be
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Your overall uptime will be good, but the argument for SMRs is supposed to be that it reduces costs. It just doesn't make sense to think that will happen if you multiply the number of units, and therefore multiply the labor. It doesn't make sense up front when you're multiplying the number of permits, and all that entails; and it doesn't make sense at decommissioning time for the same reason. That already always costs more than "planned" and The People wind up paying for most to all of the difference, to sa
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On the topic of grid improvement, I think that's going to be a huge issue for these. They do pump out a lot of power, so you can't just "scatter them over the landscape". I don't know enough about power line capacity and substations to speak to it, but I'd imagine you're going to need a whole lot more than residential lines to pump power into the grid.
So each one will need it's own connection to at least medium sized power lines, if not pretty damn big ones. And that, of course, means significant limitation
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Neither do the big plants but the morons will drive hours out of the way to go protest against them being built "in their backyard"
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Who would win the race (time, total cost over time) between one of these 50 MW nuclear plants and 5 of the 11 MW, or 3/4 of the 16 MW wind turbines?
Ya, but the nuclear plant would be great when the wind isn't blowing, or not enough to generate a enough capacity, or in places where there isn't enough wind for turbines, etc... Although, I *guess* you could use the nuclear plant to just power giant fans to blow wind into the turbines in those cases...
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Wouldn't it be good to get both?
It's about cost, which implies expansion. As far as I can tell, there's nothing stopping people from continuing to add more turbines to wind farms to increase capacity quickly over a relatively short period of tim
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How exactly is it solved?
I mean other than just burning coal and gas, which will of course be cheaper, but runs into this whole CO2 thing we're trying to avoid.
Re:How does it compare? (Score:5, Informative)
The local wind turbines were becalmed, as in less than 1% of nameplate power output, for eight days. So that is 2830 MW times 24 times 8 or 543,360 MW-hr of storage.
How many Tesla power wall modules is that?
As for solar power, the worst day last month the solar panels put out 5.6% of their rated capacity during the 8.1 hours of daylight. And no, the wind was not blowing then either. It's a weather condition called an inversion. In German it's a dunkelflaute. Look it up.
You don't seem to grasp just how much storage is going to be needed.
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And it's not simply a case of meeting the storage needs of the current electrical system: the design goal people want is a carbon-free total energy system. And the first big thing to do is to electrify as much as possible of heating and transportation. So when you have a two week polar vortex with mostly sub-zero temperatures covering the Midwest with very little wind and solar generation you need to handle the total heating needs (unlike today when the large majority of the heating comes directly from foss
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Nuclear needs fossil fuel backup too. It also needs fossil fuel plants for load following because nuclear is crap at that.
So even if you don't have enough renewable power to cover 100% of the time, it's still no worse for emissions. Considerably cheaper too.
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You can store energy, you dipshits. How many fucking times does it need to be said?
And atoms can be split to generate energy too. The challenge is in the details.
How exactly are you storing the energy? How much of it, and how much is it going to cost? What are the externalities of the solution?
You'd need about 20GWh for a mid-size country. E.g. substituting all the non wind (teal) sources here when it wasn't blowing much the first two weeks https://i.imgur.com/NydgRXa.pn... [imgur.com]
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then we can store energy when nuclear power plant output exceeds demand.
But that's not how it's done. Different types of generating resources are used to provide the peak demand. Like gas turbines and hydroelectric (neither of which are acceptable to the Greens). Nuclear is scheduled to run continuously to supply the base load demands.
There is a bit of pumped hydro storage on the grid. But available sites are scarce. To date, other types of storage on anything like the scale our grid needs have yet to be tried. And when it comes to discussing the cost, the wind and solar peopl
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How fast can these small reactors be built to catch up to adding a new turbine(s) every few months?
That is a good question to pose to add some reality to discussions of the Nuscale plans.
In 2029 Nuscale projects having 6 small modular units in operation, producing 462 MW or 3.8 million MWH (if we accept their 95% capacity factor claim). In that same year the amount of new renewable production (not capacity) added that same year is projected to be 130 million MWH. To match that rate of new renewable production deployment the production of these modular reactor units would need to be about 200 a year. In o
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I don't know of a zero carbon solution for wh
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Not my fault people like you have been sabotaging the political solutions for the past 5 decades.
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sabotaging the political solutions
But it's not political. Many power companies are private, investor owned companies. And if they wanted to install your "technological" solution, there's nothing to stop them. The economics just don't pencil out.
Politics only enters the equation if you are waiting for someone else to step in and pay your expenses. In that case, anything is possible.
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Who would win the race (time, total cost over time) between one of these 50 MW nuclear plants and 5 of the 11 MW, or 3/4 of the 16 MW wind turbines?
Unfortunately those are different measurements both called "MW".
Capacity for nuclear generators is measured MW average power. Capacity for wind turbines are measured in MW peak power.
Five 11 MW turbines can produce as much power as a 50 MW nuclear plant, but not the same energy.
You need to compare energy at the total system level, including capacity factor.
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I wasn't weighing in on the relative virtues of nuclear versus wind, just pointing out that you can't compare the units.
(Really they occupy different niches.)
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Re: How does it compare? (Score:2)
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If the race were sheer quantity of power generated per unit, conventional light water reactors would already have won. SMRs are being pursued largely to address conventional nuclear power's Achilles heel, which is not *safety*, but *economics*. Current nuclear plant operating and financing costs make them the least profitable source of electricity we have.
Wind power on the other hand is one of the cheapest ways to generate electricity, and you can turn an empty field into a wind farm in just a year, making
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This is a troll from a fanatic who doesn't like reality.
What about submarine and carrier reactors? (Score:2)
How do they compare in design, output and cost? Anyone know?
Re: (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Basically the same as PWR SMRs in design principles and output, but not in cost :-).
Submarine reactors in particular are very specialised, with US designs using highly enriched uranium.
Re: (Score:2)
Thank you
Just checked ERCOT... (Score:2)
Sitting here drinking my morning coffee, and decided to check ERCOT... The state of Texas infamously independent electrical grid is posting a demand of just shy of 40,000 MW, with a little over 10,000 MW being wind generated at the moment. The sun isn't up yet, so no solar contribution... Demand bottomed out around 4am, but hasn't really started to climb yet despite my coffeemaker. Real time pricing is about $20 MW, and expected to stay below $45/MW all day. If we had 600 of these reactors, Texas could b
Re:Just checked ERCOT... (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed, having lived thru the Enron debacle in California and later moving to deregulated Texas, I've been watching ERCOT for almost two decades. Overall they've done a decent job integrating renewables, right up until they fail. There's a hard edge there that doesn't have an easy fix. The problem with ERCOT specifically is they got lax on the winterization oversight, and nobody has really gotten ahead of the game on the spinning reserves problem. ERCOT & Oncor appear to be moving on that problem no
climate v renewables (Score:3)
If we get just one good volcano erruption, it seems like all the solar plants will stop working for weeks or months.
Remember 1816? What happens if we get another year like that? Not only will there be no food, there won't be any electricity, either?
With climate change, will the wind still be blowing hard enough in the places where the turbines are? There are going to be major shifts in where and how the wind blows?
These are naive questions; they are real questions. I imagine these have been studied. What's the answer?
Re: (Score:2)
If we had months of no solar power we would have bigger problems, like mass starvation as crops fail.
As for wind, there is so much of it that even if it did decline for some reason we would just need to build more turbines. That said, an eruption of the type you describe would actually increase wind. Ever noticed how there is more wind in the winter when there is less sun?
Re: (Score:2)
What happens if we get another year like that?
I think not enough politicians/scientists think/plan about it. About every 200 years we have a volcano that cuts down all food production by 50% for 2 years. If this happened NOW, with all the tense logistics lines we already have, it would be an existential disaster.
Re:climate v renewables (Score:5, Funny)
Joe Biden?
How fixed is the design? (Score:2)
Does anyone know how much the design is allowed to evolve over time? As with any "mass" produced item, you'll want to change things as you learn. Maybe this pump is too big and that pipe joint needs to be reinforced. Will NuScale be allowed to make those changes?
And to what level does this help other companies who want to get approval for similar designs? Clearly they will be different in substantial ways. Do they need to start the approval process from square one?
Re: (Score:2)
AFAIK, the have a 1:3 non-nuclear prototype at this time and that is it. Hence they will need at least massive re-design and several generations of prototypes that each need to run several years to yield insights. Complete failure is definitely a possibility as well. They amy also fail to ever make this economically viable.
Not quite (Score:2)
" It's the final determination that the design is acceptable for use,"
No, that would be if you can find somebody on the planet who is willing and able to insure it.
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Actually, nuclear reactors _can_ be insured. Friend of mine was the chief risk modeller at a back-insurer for a while and he explained this to me. The risk just gets spread over a larger number of back-insurers. The actual problem is that the premium would be calculated on real risks and risk cost and that would make all reactors massively uneconomic. Hence the nuclear mafia takes the profits and puts the excessive risk-cost on society.
I want one in my backyard (Score:2)
As Grid Capacitors? (Score:2)
Maybe these can be used to fill in fluctuations in power from wind farm and solar farm generation. Prevent fluctuations across continental power grids as they balance when different areas compensate for loss of power in one region due to slow winds or winter storms. Not replace power, just help keep it smooth. They can create some sort of turbine capacitor mechanism like some thermal electrical generating stations are set up to do, to absorb bumps. That is, use the modular reactor to drive turbines for that
Will probably never really work (Score:2)
NuScale has no experience with real reactors. The problem is that the conditions in a real reactor (SMR or not) are extremely hostile to all kinds of materials routinely used in machines. My take is they need at least 3 generations of nuclear prototyped to get things to work and each one will need to run at least 5 years to provide the needed insights. That makes for overall something like 30 years (including construction time) and by then it will be far too late to be of use.
Re:Not in my backyard. (Score:5, Insightful)
You should enjoy watching the lefties having to begrudgingly accept nuclear power, after spending literal decades screaming against it and doing all sorts of anti nuclear propaganda (i'm looking at you, simpsons) that probably was partially responsible for all the CO2 and stupid amount of air pollution deaths we're getting from coal and fossil fuel burning.
Also don't trust the science, study it (for real), and fight it with even more science, so shit gets better.
Re: Not in my backyard. (Score:2)
A group of people failing to live up to your shallow caricature of them sure is difficult to turn into a flex, huh.
Re: (Score:2)
The shallow caricatures were basically writing most of the tv shows in the 90's and 2000's
It's just NOW we're having this pro-nuclear shift.
Re: Not in my backyard. (Score:3)
Really? Cos the Simpsons "pRoPaGaNdA" was all about the management of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, mainly the cutting of corners and the general lack of competence of the staff which was attributable to low pay. (as opposed to nuclear tech in general being the problem...) This is the concern the nuclear-evangelists can't argue against so they crank up silly stereotypes to eleven and argue about those instead. "They're stupid nimbys! hahaha I win!"
Trying to flex when nuclear tech comes along tha
They do the same with everything else. (Score:3)
Ohhh we can't drill for oil and gas, but we will ship it in from Oklahoma and Texas. Then they whine about how expensive it is when their own regulations drive up the price by requiring 30 different version of gasoline to meet all their stupid requirements. Ok fine we will have reactors in Oklahoma and Texas and sell Cali the energy, with a 500% markup, If they don't like they boil inside their houses while sitting in the dark. Tired of trying to save stupid people that would've been eaten by wolves 30
Re: (Score:2)
I mean, that's a step up from doing protests until shit get regulated out of existence.
Re:Far too expensive (Score:5, Interesting)
But modular reactors are reliable power generators. Solar and wind are not. And they can be running by 2029. It is doubtful wind and solar will be reliable this century without grid scale batteries to help moderate power grid power/transmission levels. And there are no grid scale batteries that are even close to realistically being produced. They absolutely are required to make a completely green power grid. It is very possible that modular reactors can fill the place of those batteries. There needs to be something that fills in when wind and solar output drops, and absorbs spikes when different areas of the grid, and even different grids are called in to balance things. Spikes always happen when grid level events happen; it's what causes many regional blackouts.