Could Safer, Cheaper Modular Nuclear Plants Reshape Coal Country? (msn.com) 345
"No massive cooling towers, miles of concrete, expansive evacuation zones," writes the Washington Post, describing modular nuclear reactors instead as "space-age plants that can be small enough to fit in a large backyard," using "downsized" reactors like the ones on nuclear-powered submarines.
And America's coal country "is a ripe target for this experiment, with infrastructure that can be repurposed, capable workforces and communities eager to reclaim prominence in the energy economy." More than 300 retired and operating coal plants in the United States are good candidates for a nuclear conversion, according to a recent Department of Energy report that has touched off a frenzy of activity. Communities that previously rejected nuclear power as unsafe or a threat to the coal industry are now clamoring to be a part of what might be branded nuclear 2.0. "See that hilltop over there?" said Michael Hatfield, a former coal company engineer who is now the administrator for Wise County [in Virginia]. "If you put a nuclear plant someplace like that, it is not going to be near anybody's backyard. This would keep us in the forefront of the energy business. We see it as our future...."
It was only a year ago that nuclear power was banned in West Virginia, under a state law intended to protect the coal industry. The state is among several to either lift such a ban or pass a law encouraging development of small nuclear reactors over the last few years. Political leaders see opportunities to boost regional economies and to get a piece of the billions of dollars in subsidies for generating "advanced nuclear" power available through the recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act.... Virginia is among at least eight states pursuing a small reactor. At least another eight have launched feasibility studies, according to federal energy officials.
And back in Washington D.C. there's also high hopes for the technology: U.S. climate envoy John F. Kerry said in a recent interview with The Post that the technology's success is vital for meeting the world's goal of avoiding the most catastrophic fallout from climate change by limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
"I don't think we get there without it," Kerry said.
And America's coal country "is a ripe target for this experiment, with infrastructure that can be repurposed, capable workforces and communities eager to reclaim prominence in the energy economy." More than 300 retired and operating coal plants in the United States are good candidates for a nuclear conversion, according to a recent Department of Energy report that has touched off a frenzy of activity. Communities that previously rejected nuclear power as unsafe or a threat to the coal industry are now clamoring to be a part of what might be branded nuclear 2.0. "See that hilltop over there?" said Michael Hatfield, a former coal company engineer who is now the administrator for Wise County [in Virginia]. "If you put a nuclear plant someplace like that, it is not going to be near anybody's backyard. This would keep us in the forefront of the energy business. We see it as our future...."
It was only a year ago that nuclear power was banned in West Virginia, under a state law intended to protect the coal industry. The state is among several to either lift such a ban or pass a law encouraging development of small nuclear reactors over the last few years. Political leaders see opportunities to boost regional economies and to get a piece of the billions of dollars in subsidies for generating "advanced nuclear" power available through the recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act.... Virginia is among at least eight states pursuing a small reactor. At least another eight have launched feasibility studies, according to federal energy officials.
And back in Washington D.C. there's also high hopes for the technology: U.S. climate envoy John F. Kerry said in a recent interview with The Post that the technology's success is vital for meeting the world's goal of avoiding the most catastrophic fallout from climate change by limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
"I don't think we get there without it," Kerry said.
Reshape Coal Country? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who knows.
But small safer, cheaper modular nuclear plants are certainly a good idea.
Re:Reshape Coal Country? (Score:5, Funny)
Senator Joe Manchin ("D" - WV) is for it -- as long as those nuclear plants burn coal. :-)
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Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are not a good idea. They have most of the same problems as full size reactors, only now you have many more units to worry about.
They produce more nuclear waste than larger reactors, and need refuelling more often. They still need large pools of water for cooling and storage of spent fuel. You still need all the same geological and metrological surveys, the same site security. More so, if anything, as you have many more reactors to protect. Of course, the heat needs to be turne
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There modularity might make them a better fit for the swings in power demand that large nuclear doesn't handle very well, however.
Large nuclear as a baseline for the normal powerloads works as well as Dams, but peak demand is usually handled by spinning up a generator that burns fuel, either coal or Natural Gas for the most part.
If you can trade that for smaller nuclear with batteries to save the power not used during the non peak usage times, you could better match the need and use the batteries when peak
Re:Reshape Coal Country? (Score:5, Insightful)
Please tell me you don't think you can set up a HUGE solar farm in the Mojave Desert and ship power to Chicago, even with INSANE line loss...
That's about 1800 miles or about 2900 km. At 3.5% loss per 1000 km for HVDC lines, that's a less than 10% loss. That's not really what I would call an "INSANE line loss". Do you just have really different standards than the rest of us, or did you just not do the math?
Re:Reshape Coal Country? (Score:4)
AmiMoJo has been spouting this line of bullshit about SMRs for the last 2 or 3 years. It should be clear to anyone that he knows nothing about SRM's.
The correct answer is not only will SRM's be competitive with batteries they will be eliminating the need for batteries. This is how it needs to be. Current battery technology is ill-suited to be deployed on the grid. The largest battery set up can only supply a useful load for 4 hours. Baring some radical advancement in energy density, this will not change.
A pack of SRM's will take up a quarter of the space of a battery grid battery pack and will supply the grid with useful power for months if not years. Since SRM"s are designed to be mass produced the cost of them will drop as more are deployed.
Re:Reshape Coal Country? (Score:5, Informative)
If you're going to be anti-nuclear, you should do it on the merits of the claims.
The only advantage is that they can be built on an assembly line, which is a bit quicker and cheaper. They produce less power though, so it's likely that any savings will be offset by needing many more of them.
Whether you're pro or anti nuclear you must surely recognise this is a daft claim. You're arguing that assembly line production of identical units is no better than bespoke, one off projects. We have over 200 years of history pointing towards increasing levels of standardisation and repetition being a very good way to improve efficiencies of manufacturing.
On to the nuclear specific stuff, I don't think your claims substantially hold up there either. The Rolls Royce SMR is designed for 470MWe, compared to the ACGR's output power of 660MWe. It's a bit of a stretch to call 1.4 times more, "many". Second, nothing stops you putting 1.4 times as many on the same site, so it's not like you need 1.4x the security. Also, they're a lot more compact, so you could likely fit more power onto the same site than in the UK's current nuclear fleet.
Re:Reshape Coal Country? (Score:4, Informative)
I should have also pointed out that the RR SMR only exists on paper at the moment. It's questionable if it counts as an SMR. NuScale, who are much closer to having a prototype, are claiming 77MWe output. They also claim their reactors require 1% of the space of a traditional reactor, but that's obvious marketing BS.
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We have over 200 years of history pointing towards increasing levels of standardisation and repetition being a very good way to improve efficiencies of manufacturing.
Production lines also improve quality and reduce lead time. Better, faster, cheaper, pick three.
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I've you're going to make antinuclear arguments, please make one that make sense. I can think of several, but the one you're making is not a good argument.
You do realize that many things produced on assembly lines are inferior to even handmade parts, right?
By that logic, we should have artisanal one-off hand made airliners too, where each one is unique. Inferior given the same production capacity and price point? OK, I'll bite... like what?
This being a capitalist nation, they're going to focus on cost reduc
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What I'm saying is that you will save money with serial manufacturing, but those savings will be offset by needing more reactors.
Yeah I hear what you're saying and I disagree. You're basically saying that a bunch of large, bespoke, one off projects will be about the same cost/capacity as a production line system.
Say they cot 25% of a traditional reactor, and produce 25% of the energy.
Yes, if you choose those numbers then sure. The last 200 years though has shown production line based systems to be rather ef
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The estimate is more 10% of the cost of a traditional reactor, 25% of the energy.
Idaho National Laboratory proposes [inl.gov] 920MW NuScale SMR in 35 acres, while a traditional nuclear power plant of the same generating capacity would need 500.
We're looking at, after a 75% jump, around 8 cents a kWh for the first plants (it should drop if they get and keep actual production lines up).
I'm not actually seeing a raw dollar construction cost.
Re:Reshape Coal Country? (Score:5, Interesting)
Still, so far those are only promises. There are a number of companies working on this, with widely varying designs, but AFAIK no units in production or even prototypes exist. Little is yet know about the cost to manufacture, run, and decommission these reactors. They might make sense for some applications like remote areas, but for replacing existing gas and coal plants, scaling up seems more sensible.
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As you say, there are lots of paper designs for theoretical reactors. The only people even close to producing a prototype are NuScale, and their one requires refuelling every few years.
I don't think any of them could be buried though. At least none of the serious ones that produce useful amounts of energy. Maybe some kind of RTE, but those aren't going to help with our energy grid emissions. The NuScale ones, at 77MWe, require a cooling pool.
Re: Reshape Coal Country? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Military reactors, cost not a factor, surrounded by water for cooling. Different safety rules due to national security. Not commercially viable.
Re: Reshape Coal Country? (Score:3)
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The naval ones use highly enriched fuel, which civilian ones do not have access to due to proliferation issues.
Re: Reshape Coal Country? (Score:2)
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Umm, no.
While a Naval reactor uses more enriched fuel than your average civilian plant, this is irrelevant to "proliferation issues" since we make nuclear weapons with plutonium, NOT Uranium (which is what is used for fuel in a Navy Reactor (or civilian reactor, for that matter)). Do try to remember that the Hiroshima bomb is the only uranium atomic weapon ever built (and it was large, heavy and l
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The only advantage is that they can be built on an assembly line, which is a bit quicker and cheaper.
I wouldn't minimize this. We don't know how this will play out but "a bit" might be "10% of the cost". Things get dramatically cheaper when produced in bulk with repeatable (and optimized) processes. Not to mention quality tends to skyrocket.
Just compare the production and operation cost of SpaceX's Raptor engines versus the RS-25s used by the Space Shuttle.
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The nuclear waste issue depends on design. "SMR" means *any* small design that can be built in a modular fashion, and not all designs perform the same in this area. A recent study of three prominent designs by Argonne (source [anl.gov]) found that each produced different kinds of waste in different quantities. Designs that use higher levels of enrichment produce more depleted uranium from fuel processing; designs with higher fuel burn up produce less spent nuclear fuel. But overall none of the designs examine seem de
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But small safer, cheaper modular nuclear plants are certainly a good idea.
I am not sure about that. You could also read the sentence as "distributing nuclear materials to people you can't control." How many militant groups will try to acquire one or two of the modular reactors just as building blocks for their own nuclear bomb? We had Timothy McVeigh blowing up 165 people just with fertilizer and racing additives. What would he have done with the materials to power a atomic reactor?
Re: Reshape Coal Country? (Score:2)
He wouldâ(TM)ve at worst irradiated himself, at best he would have learned something and become a productive member of society. Building a nuclear bomb is not something you do in an afternoon in your basement, it takes years of learning, testing and scientific progress. Anyone patient enough to build one would have time to put things in perspective as they got older.
Re: Reshape Coal Country? (Score:4, Insightful)
Building a nuclear bomb is not something you do in an afternoon in your basement
Never heard of a dirty bomb, have you? Get half a pound of nuclear waste material and detonate it with convential explosives and you've contaminated, and irradiated, a large area for minimal cost. Want to really cause havoc? Do it at ********* when it's busy.*
* Censored due to possibilty of investigation by various three letter agencies, though they should already know about this.
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Not unless Bubbah happens to work at a nuclear plant and knows how to handle the material. Think of how many police and military personnel are aligned with the Nazis and white supremacists in this country and are offering their expertise on weapons and tactics. Now think how Bubbah from coal country who hates immigrants more than President Biden and works at a nuclear plant could use that information to help those same groups.
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you're funny, you have no idea what it would take to handle such materials. Bubbah the moron terrorist would maim or kill himself
You mean like suicide bombers?
Re: Reshape Coal Country? (Score:2)
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Simply because something is "nuclear material" doesn't mean it's something that is, or can be made into bomb-grade material.
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Re: Reshape Coal Country? (Score:2)
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I am not sure about that. You could also read the sentence as "distributing nuclear materials to people you can't control."
How the hell did you read it like that? The small modular reactors would be used just like the regular big reactors. They won't give them out with Happy Meals.
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If, in the end, you concentrate them at a few, heavily watched areas, then you can go all in and build a big one.
The whole charm and also the inherent danger with nuclear fuel is that it concentrates magnitudes more energy in the same place compared to chemical energy. But magnitudes more energy concentration also means magnitudes more devastation if you manage to blow it up. The hard limit
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Then what's the point in having them, if not for decentralizing nuclear power plants and put small ones everywhere?
If, in the end, you concentrate them at a few, heavily watched areas, then you can go all in and build a big one.
The point is that building a giant, 1-2GW reactor is very expensive since it's usually a one-off project and requires a lot of very specialized and expensive equipment.
When they're smaller, you can build them in a factory where the manufacturing process improves with each one, and they can be installed and brought online, and thus start generating electricity and money, much sooner.
You can see NuScale's pitch here [nuscalepower.com]. It's not about putting a reactor in your backyard. Of course whether or not all this works ou
Re: Reshape Coal Country? (Score:2)
no one in the Capital building even had a gun. Stop with the hysteria over mere unruly mob.
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Oh really? https://www.justice.gov/usao-d... [justice.gov]
Re:Reshape Coal Country? (Score:5, Insightful)
Provided the nuclear waste can be reworked until all used up, leaving no trace. Any storage requirement over 100 years is a non-starter.
Why? Everything has waste. That coal plant puts out ash that is radioactive, not even mentioning the CO2 which ends up in the atmosphere for far longer than 100 years, given the excess amount we are pumping in. The volume of waste from a Nuclear plant is trivial to manage. They are small casks. The waste can also be buried, or taken to a place like Yucca mountain. The energy we get from nuclear is reliable, safe, CO2 free, and plentiful. Forget the small reactors. Build some Gen 3 or Gen 4 giga-watt reactors, locate them relatively close to where the power is being consumed, beef up the grid where possible, and let the good times roll. If you are against nuclear power, you were not educated in maths.
Suppose that we will get one Chernobyl, one Three Mile Island, and one Fukushima Daichii for the energy we have received from Nuclear power over the last 50 years, every time we use that much energy? So what? Even those disasters, the amount of death and damage is trivial. It would still be worth it, and it will still kill far less than practically every other form of energy we can use. By far.
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Build some Gen 3 or Gen 4 giga-watt reactors, locate them relatively close to where the power is being consumed, beef up the grid where possible, and let the good times roll. If you are against nuclear power, you were not educated in maths.
Heh, you're going to need a big mind shift among the public before anything like that will fly. Going off recent history in the US at least it doesnt seem likely we'd ever get a major nuclear plant built near a population center as I doubt you'll find the people of any major population hub to be receptive to that. Any project like what you proposed done under today's public mindset would be buried under lawsuits for so long it would take several decades to build.
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So, set an idiotic and arbitrary limit.
And when reality can't comply, declare it "dead".
Typical no-nuke'er.
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> Mainly because every reactor to date is essentially a "one off".
Why do you believe that? Even the most casual and quick look at actual reactor builds will demonstrate this is not true. The OPR-1000 fleet is basically identical, and is, in turn, a licenced version of the System 80. The CANDU 6 installs are also identical, all around the world. There are many examples, go to en.wiki and look.
I've always found this argument particularly vacuous in the case of SMRs, because it invariably ends up boiling do
Re: Reshape Coal Country? (Score:2)
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Iduno about everyone else, but I'd probably try a free market solution. Like I'd do an ad campaign to convince everyone that it tastes great and is good for your chakras, and turn it into a new diet fad or something.
Safe, cheap, efficient. Pick any two. (Score:2)
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No cooling tower (Score:3)
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Like Windscale? Were they had a burning core? That got supplied with fresh Oxygen by the fans?
Re:No cooling tower (Score:4, Interesting)
So, how are they supposed to be cooled? Just because you make them "modular" doesn't change the elementary physics and the biggest problem of any thermal power plant is always getting rid of the heat...
A cooling tower is not needed, what is is cooling water for the turbine; something a coal plant also needs. If tehy use a coal plant site, a source of cooling water will already exist, perhaps even a cooling tower as they are not nuke only.
Coal plants are radioactive and around the chimney (Score:4, Interesting)
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If you replace the furnaces, which is the economical/space saving decision, then there isn't any use keeping a coal mine open for it - you no longer have the ability to burn coal to generate the steam.
It'd also be really expensive to keep all the burners for the coal system operational but not operating until something came to pass.
Nah, it's better to just build a few standby or extra plants for the "just in case" stuff. For example, if station 1 has to go offline unexpectedly, then station 2 delays its ma
Nuclear fears are outdated and misinformed. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Nuclear fears are outdated and misinformed. (Score:2)
Chernobyl was a Russian military experiment gone wrong, we have known that since the 90s. The are is still livable but it was a communist secret city in the middle of nowhere, besides the plant there was nothing there to begin with but some people remained to date.
Three Mile Island is in the middle of New York City and I donâ(TM)t see it being abandoned over radiation, people are only now leaving because governance of the city and state is atrocious.
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I dislike nuclear because of the cost and time required to build a plant. You’re looking at a decade minimum and >$10 billion. Look at the final tally for building Watts Barr if you don’t believe me.
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...unable to separate the concept of a nuclear power-plant from a nuclear-bomb.
I would be surprised if anyone had such a misconception. I think the far larger concern is the very real leakage of nuclear waste from its containers into the surrounding landscape and water supplies. Despite the claims of nuclear waste disposal being a solved problem, leakages of still highly radioactive materials still happen. So it's still a problem in need of a solution.
Can you convince people? (Score:2)
Ultimately that is the question. Can we give it a different name so it doesn't have the stigma of nuclear associated with it? Maybe that will get the NIMBY's to actually care.
It irks me... (Score:4, Funny)
But yeah, loads of small nucular reactors scattered around the country maintained to the same standard as American roads, bridges, & power lines. What could go wrong?
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...when people don't know how to spell nucular; n - u - c - u - l - a - r. But yeah, loads of small nucular reactors scattered around the country maintained to the same standard as American roads, bridges, & power lines. What could go wrong?
According to, you know, actual scientists and engineers, who, you know, actually designed the thing: pretty much nothing. Next question?
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The same scientists, engineers, and bureaucrats that shipped hydrochhloric acid in bulk through Ohio, and failed to contain the spill? Or who design oil supertankers that leak? Or nuclear plants that suffer catastrophic failures and become hazard sites for years? Those scientists?
Scientific expertise has to be handled with some caution, because science does not pay the budgets to build things as safely as conceivable.
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The problem is not with Science. The problem is with scientists that are bought. The nuclear industry has only that kind, with the indoctrination starting at university.
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That accident was 100% caused by regulations rolled back by trump and further cost saving measures by the railway company.
https://www.cleveland.com/news... [cleveland.com]
ECP brakes would have detected the problem and brought the cars to a stop before this catastrophe. But safety features hurt bottom lines and we certainly can’t have that.
Mike DeWine also told Biden he didn’t need any help with cleanup.
https://www.marketwatch.com/am... [marketwatch.com]
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The same scientists, engineers, and bureaucrats that shipped hydrochhloric acid in bulk through Ohio, and failed to contain the spill? Or who design oil supertankers that leak? Or nuclear plants that suffer catastrophic failures and become hazard sites for years? Those scientists?
Scientific expertise has to be handled with some caution, because science does not pay the budgets to build things as safely as conceivable.
Since when are we allowed to doubt the Holy Scientists? I thought doing that makes you a climate denier, anitivaxxer, flat-earther and everything. Or is it only when they're saying things the leftists don't like?
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That's the horrible thing, even when those things go wrong, they're still not as terrible as coal power plants. It's like those generators are constant ongoing disasters that you're supposed to pretend it's fine.
banned (Score:2)
under a state law intended to protect the coal industry.
Politicians passing such laws should be banned or imprisoned as that's just blatant bribery by the coal industry.
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Are you crazy? (Score:2)
Nukes in Boyd Crowder's backyard?
Solar Or Go Home (Score:2)
Solar panels on the roof. Batteries in the garage and car.
Coal and nuclear can go home.
Now if we just had some more charging infrastructure utilizing the same thing for travel.
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We’re going to struggle to find enough resources simply for battery vehicles, let alone bulk grid storage. Flow batteries require expensive and uncommon materials like vanadium. Hydrogen electrolysers that can be throttled to deal with intermittent solar and wind require iridium. To create a TW of electrolyser capacity would require 27 years of current production of iridium. This is a problem
So given that we need 5000TWh to produce green steel and 10000TWh to power transport, do we need nuclear? Shit
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Let me get this straight (Score:4, Insightful)
- 20 MW of electrical energy, 50 MW of heat energy.
- Power generated continuously, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
- Factory-built, delivered on a flatbed
- Needs just 0.5 acres of siting
- Doesn't need to be sited next to water body.
- Safe enough to install in an industrial park.
With just four of these, you could power a small city.
It's literally insane we aren't stepping all over ourselves to do this.
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It's literally insane we aren't stepping all over ourselves to do this.
Actually, it is not. You see, these things do not exist and the projected numbers are a complete fabrication. Incidentally, this would be the first time nuclear tech would ever have delivered on its promise.
Re:Let me get this straight (Score:4, Insightful)
Dense, dispatch-able and safe (Score:2)
Dense, dispatch-able and safe. This is nuclears story solar and wind are bit players, cheap and diffuse however that have large environmental footprint both in materials required and land area. Offshore wind farms will make seabirds like albatrosses extinct in a decade.
It’s a bit sad.
Safer, cheaper, available (Score:3)
Pick any two.
Going against the principle of economies of scale (Score:4, Interesting)
So, the idea with SMR is to make many small reactors. The problem with current big ones is that they are too expensive, and making something smaller is not the way you usually go to reduce prices; but the argument is that building many identical SMRs will eventually bring the unit price down, with the point of contention being whether this can offset the loss of economies of scale.
However there is not just the reactor that is being scaled down: there are a lot of other things that benefitted from large scale.
I find it a dubious proposition that SMRs can be per-MW cheaper than traditional reactors, and I still have not seen a credible source (i.e. not a company brochure) claiming SMRs are any game changer.
Browsing in Google Scholar, I found papers are quite tepid, from "[modularized] SMRs [...] could possibly compete with large reactor baseline total construction costs" (Lloyd et al. [sciencedirect.com]) and "cost effectiveness of SMR [...] is in line and of the same order with LR’s" Boarin & Ricotti [hindawi.com]. This is not sufficient: nuclear power must come down with a factor of at least 4 before it's even competitive with renewables.
I appreciate any link to more recent or comprehensive TCO analyses of SMRs.
Scaling the power plants (Score:4, Insightful)
I have to point out that having multiple reactors doesn't mean that you also have to scale down the turbines.
For example, take the steam: Steam is a gas. There's nothing preventing you from having, say, 50 of these reactors in parallel all feeding steam to a single turbine. Heck, you could over provision - say, have 55 reactors, but only 50 operating at a time running the turbine, with the other 5 undergoing maintenance. Or even have 2-3 turbines so you can vary output better.
Personnel: You state "stations" here, where the article is "reactors". Nuclear power stations, even today, typically have more than 1 reactor. Now, they're huge enough that each reactor generally has their own turbine and everything else, but that isn't actually required.
So with some automation you could have the same personnel who are watching one giant traditional reactor watch multiple small ones, as they can all be collocated. Dropping the additional personnel needed down to a minimum.
Waste: Same deal with traditional plants actually, it's not like if you're installing a nuclear plant that digging a waste pool is all that difficult. For many SMRs though, the idea would be that the factory would have the waste pool, and the waste from the SMRs would end up in that. After 20-40 years, they'd just move the waste into above-ground casks for storage. At some point, they'd have enough waste, hopefully all standardized, that has cooled enough, that reprocessing it isn't any big deal. Or we'll have defeated the NIMBY types and gotten a practical disposal method going.
Containment building: Actually, smaller containment buildings can be cheaper than big ones. Especially if it can be small enough to simply ship the building in in pieces rather than having to bring in specialized equipment to make pours that big on site. Still, nothing preventing them from putting multiple reactors in a single containment building. Also, meltdown is much less of a risk due to energy density being a function of volume, and passive air cooling one of surface area - meaning smaller is more easily made to self-cool without melting down.
Also, big building with smaller reactor = less overall pressure, which means the building doesn't have to be built as heavy.
lets think this through first (Score:4, Insightful)
I suggest we deal with the states that are banning math in schools before we think about a nuclear reactor in every home. OK maybe that's a little extreme, but you get the idea... I think the common folk need more education before we start putting serious science in their basement.
(a bit of a segway, but we also need to get away from "disposable" society and get back to our roots of repairing things - and building things to BE repairable - since you can't just throw a reactor in the trash when it breaks or gets old)
tl;dr: it's a good idea but we're not ready for this yet.
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a bit of a segway
Segue is the word you are looking for kind sir. It is pronounced Segway, but is not actually a motorized auto-balancing device.
I thought coal already did this (Score:2)
Doesn't mountaintop removal strip mining reshape the geography?
Space age? (Score:2)
Really? Space Age? 23-skidoo!
Why do conservatives love nuclear with no success? (Score:2)
Yes! They will turn it into a nuclear waste dump. (Score:2)
Is toxic coal ash better or worse than nuclear waste?
Let's try it out on the poor people of West Virginia.
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Pebble bed reactors are a gamble, even odds that after 10 years they realize it was a stupid idea all along.
Re: China has been working on this for some years. (Score:2)
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Pebble bed designs sound great but also have issues - for example the pebbles tend to crack up and break into gravel which can cause hot spots making it worse.
Which pebbles? The ones in the prototype reactor or the new pebbles they'll make based on what they learned from the old ones?
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There is no water, unless you really screw up on a colossal scale like the Germans did. In which case all bets are off and in all likelihood everything is going to break including the pebbles, the Germans got lucky.
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Your use of "Chinks" is interesting. Why would you do that? Please tell us your reasons, don't hold back. They better be good reasons too if you wish to make any intelligent point.
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Indeed, I think that if he had simply used "the Chinese" and "China" instead of "Chinks" as appropriate the point would have been made a lot more strongly.
Somebody else in the thread compared one-off nuclear reactors to the RS-25s used in the Space Shuttle, and the Raptors of SpaceX.
I remember looking at the comparison before. They're amazingly similar engines, specification wise. 1.9-2.3MN for the RS-25, 1.8-2.3MN for the Raptor.
Cost for an RS-25? $40M. Cost for a Raptor? "Under $250k".
That's two orde
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The entire point of the argument is lost by using the bad wordage by the poster. I'm wondering if this is intended to trigger a variant of Poe's law, where someone says something factual, but in a way where it is repugnant to read, so is dismissed.
Rephrasing the parent poster's point, and going to wind up skirting around Godwin's law by not mentioning names, one reason why Germany didn't get nukes is because they never bothered experimenting in that direction. Instead, they worked on chemical and biologic
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> If you look at the deaths per TWh of nuclear power compared to other energy sources, you will find nuclear in a class of its own.
They are not. Here are actual numbers:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/
But I'm sure you're relying on Wong's blog post from 2009 which says otherwise, based on an arm waving argument that doesn't use actual statistics. That's the one that gets passed around the pro-nuclear blogs, after all, the truth is so *over* these days.
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How about getting impaled by a control rod and pinned to the ceiling? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
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> this is exactly what we need in America
Why, is it running out of land? It's the third-largest nation. There seems to be no space to put new retirement communities and parking lots.
No one who actually builds power plants cares about areal density. The only people who believe this is an issue do not actually work in the power industry. You do not work in the industry, and the reddit posts that convinced you of this were made by randos who also don't work in the industry. And no, the people working on the
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While this will kill less people than letting the coal power plants run their entire life, you probably can do something less drastic and that emit less radiation.
Re:From dust to dust (Score:4, Insightful)
Given that coal dust is ALSO nuclear fallout dust with extra lead, mercury, arsenic, and such, nuclear fallout dust.
Not to mention that coal dust is many OOMs more in magnitude, being part of "standard operation", while nuclear fallout dust would only be in the most severe of accidents (of the 3 big nuclear accidents, only 1 had it), again, the nuclear fallout dust from nuclear power is generally better.
Don't want to be in either, but I have a much better chance of avoiding the nuclear bits.