'What Drives This Madness On Small Modular Nuclear Reactors?' (cleantechnica.com) 331
Slashdot reader XXongo writes: Nuclear power plants have historically been built at gigawatt scale. Recently, however, there has been a new dawn seeing multiple projects to build Small Modular Reactors ("SMRs"), both funded by billionaires and by the U.S. Department of Energy.
Recently one of the players farthest ahead in the development, NuScale Power, canceled their headline project, but many other projects continue. In a lengthy analysis, Michael Barnard thinks that's crazy, and attributes the drive toward small reactors to "a tangled web that includes Bill Gates, Silicon Valley, desperate coal towns, desperate nuclear towns, the inability of the USA to build big infrastructure, the U.S. Department of Energy's budget, magical thinking and more." Due to thermal inefficiencies, small reactors are more expensive per unit of power generated, he points out, and the SMR projects ignore most of the field's history's lessons about both the scale of reactors for commercial success and the conditions needed for success.
They are relying on Wright's Law, that each doubling of the number of manufactured items in production manufacturing would bring cost per item down by 20% to 27%, but Barnard points out that the number of reactors needed to achieve enough economy of scale in production to make the reactors make economic sense is unrealistically optimistic. He concludes that only government programs can meet the conditions for successful deployment of nuclear power.
At one point Barnard characters SMRs as "a bunch of lab technologies that have been around for decades that depend on uranium from Russia, that don't have the physical characteristics for cheap nuclear generation and don't have the conditions for success for nuclear generation will be the saviours of the nuclear industry and a key wedge in fighting climate change...
"I like nuclear generation. I know it's safe enough. I'm not concerned about radiation... I just know that it doesn't have the conditions for success to be built and scaled economically in the 21st Century, and wind, water, solar, transmission and storage do."
Recently one of the players farthest ahead in the development, NuScale Power, canceled their headline project, but many other projects continue. In a lengthy analysis, Michael Barnard thinks that's crazy, and attributes the drive toward small reactors to "a tangled web that includes Bill Gates, Silicon Valley, desperate coal towns, desperate nuclear towns, the inability of the USA to build big infrastructure, the U.S. Department of Energy's budget, magical thinking and more." Due to thermal inefficiencies, small reactors are more expensive per unit of power generated, he points out, and the SMR projects ignore most of the field's history's lessons about both the scale of reactors for commercial success and the conditions needed for success.
They are relying on Wright's Law, that each doubling of the number of manufactured items in production manufacturing would bring cost per item down by 20% to 27%, but Barnard points out that the number of reactors needed to achieve enough economy of scale in production to make the reactors make economic sense is unrealistically optimistic. He concludes that only government programs can meet the conditions for successful deployment of nuclear power.
At one point Barnard characters SMRs as "a bunch of lab technologies that have been around for decades that depend on uranium from Russia, that don't have the physical characteristics for cheap nuclear generation and don't have the conditions for success for nuclear generation will be the saviours of the nuclear industry and a key wedge in fighting climate change...
"I like nuclear generation. I know it's safe enough. I'm not concerned about radiation... I just know that it doesn't have the conditions for success to be built and scaled economically in the 21st Century, and wind, water, solar, transmission and storage do."
Characters. (Score:3)
At one point Barnard characters SMRs [...]
This is not the verb you're looking for.
Re: Characters. (Score:3, Informative)
Small scale solar also doesn't make sense. 2-axis controlled solar panels are far more efficient. Huge fields of solar on land nobody wants makes more sense, and is more efficient than the very small line losses of farther energy transmission.
Re: Characters. (Score:5, Insightful)
But it only needs to make enough power to pay for itself, not to beat some hypothetical efficiency. I just need the panels on my roof to make enough electricity to pay for themselves over their lifetime. All the additional benefits (carbon emissions avoided, extra power beyond what pays for the panels, reduction in hot afternoon brownout risk) are just icing on the cake at that point.
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The cost per watt is very high, which means it's not economical for the energy brokers to buy from small reactors. To remain competitive in the marketplace, they'll need to be able to sell at a cost not significantly greater than the competition. To remain profitable, the amount they pay has to be significantly lower than this.
End result - the reactor will never make the money back.
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> I just need the panels on my roof to make enough electricity to pay for themselves over their lifetime.
Rooftop panels are producing power at the retail rate. Utility panels are producing producing power at the wholesale rate.
Not sure where you are, but here in Toronto the retail rate averages around 14 cents (it's time-of-day, PV is mostly on-peak) while the wholesale rate is averaging around 3 cents.
Thus a rooftop system can pay for itself even if it costs a lot more to build on a per-watt basis. Lik
Tracking [Re: Characters.] (Score:5, Insightful)
Small scale solar also doesn't make sense. 2-axis controlled solar panels are far more efficient.
More exactly, ignoring atmospheric losses, tracking solar arrays collect pi/2 times as much energy, a factor of 1.57 gain over fixed tracking arrays, But that's only if they can crack all the way to the horizon. If you have a whole field, they self-shadow unless you space them out, and when the sun is low you don't get as much power. And, atmospheric losses are increase at low sun angles. So, realistically, less than 1.5.
Back when solar panels were expensive, tracking was definitely worth it. Now, the solar panels themselves are one of the less expensive parts, and it may well be more effective to just accept the lower power per panel and simply use more panels.
Huge fields of solar on land nobody wants makes more sense, and is more efficient than the very small line losses of farther energy transmission.
Probably true for utility scale power. Less true if you want to be self-powered.
Re:Tracking [Re: Characters.] (Score:5, Informative)
> Back when solar panels were expensive, tracking was definitely worth it. Now, the solar panels themselves are one of the less expensive parts, and it may well be more effective to just accept the lower power per panel and simply use more panels.
Except that tracking also helps produce power at early and especially late afternoon hours which is much more economically valuable. And the electronics aren't so cheap. Battery storage is still valuable but much more expensive than a panel which can still track to make power at 4:30 pm. Save the battery for 7pm.
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"Especially late afternoon hours" is thus a reason to put some more panels facing more to the west then.
Still cheaper than tracking.
Re:Tracking [Re: Characters.] (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that tracking also helps produce power at early and especially late afternoon hours
It is cheaper to install two panels, one facing east and one west, than to build one panel with a tracker.
It is the same with cleaning mechanisms. Cleaning the panels to keep them dust-free increases power by 10%. But it's cheaper to just install 10% more panels.
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Back when solar panels were expensive, tracking was definitely worth it. Now, the solar panels themselves are one of the less expensive parts, and it may well be more effective to just accept the lower power per panel and simply use more panels.
Last time I priced it out, it was definitely cheaper to just have static panels with a "best shot" orientation. If I remember right, it was a factor of 3 - you could have 1 tracking panel, or 3 static panels.
Since then, panel prices have dropped even more, and I presume that the cost of tracking systems has increased because, well, nobody is really using them anymore, so they're now special purpose.
So you can afford like 5 static panels for the same price as 1 tracked. Especially 2 axis controlled, which
Re:Tracking [Re: Characters.] (Score:4, Interesting)
> And, atmospheric losses are increase at low sun angles. So, realistically, less than 1.5.
Sold Deger 2-axis trackers for several years.
Had lots and lots of data that put it at 1.35.
Geometry [Re:Tracking [Re: Characters.]] (Score:3)
Self Shadowing (on a flat plane) only happens during sunrise and sunset.
For panels space infinitely far apart, yes.
For panels at a finite distance apart, no, the self-shading occurs before sunset, and the closer they are spaced, the farther from sunrise and sunset
The geometry's straightforward; unfortunately slashdot doesn't support pictures, but here's an ascii image. Imagine the sun coming in perpendicular to the panels.
/ / / / / /
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Solar rooftop often makes sense economically because the energy transport cost may be as large as the energy production cost.
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Pretty typical /. editorial incompetence. They're also incapable of correcting errors as well. No idea why
Re: Characters. (Score:2)
Why "uranium from Russia"? (Score:5, Insightful)
One sign that this article, and summary, is chock full of lies is the throwaway line "depend on uranium from Russia".
Why do they say that? The closest guess is that Russia has been the source of somewhat cheaper uranium to date...
However it ignores the fact that the cost of uranium itself is a small fraction of the overall cost of running a nuclear plant, because uranium is vastly more powerful than any other energy source we have, so it doesn't matter if you end up having to pay even 100% more for uranium sourced in the U.S.
Another thing that the summary at least totally ignores what a perfect match small reactors are to existing coal plants - you already have electricity hookups on the scale a much smaller reactor can deliver (again showing how the article author and story submitter totally lack understanding of just how much power a full scale reactor produces) and there's also very little fissionable material to worry about in an SMR, making it far more likely people around them will accept it. And if you can shut down a coal plant and put in an SMR, you are getting a boost of even more power with a drop to 0% CO2 emission immediately. Can the author truly not see how this is appealing?
As for the economics of it, long term an SMR is much cheaper to run than a coal plant.
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There's also the fact that SMRs are small enough that when decommissioned they can be comparatively easily and much more quickly disassembled and moved.
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Re:Why "uranium from Russia"? (Score:5, Interesting)
As much as I like nuclear, I'm stopping you there because there is no proof that is a true statement. In fact, the backend of the life cycle is the most controversial part of SMR. In a smaller reactor, you have less cross section because the ratio of reactor to core is much higher than traditional reactors that have layers and layers of cement. Higher cross section with the containment means neutron leakage and activation of which none of the SMRs have plans for handling that, because they continue to indicate that this won't happen because of design parameters to prevent that, though none of them have indicated what they are nor demonstrated them. And in fact, I would dare say that this is likely a big hold up for SMR.
And the molten reactors that want to use sodium, lead, or LBE. None have indicated what they'll do with activated salts, nor how they plan to drain it from the reactor at the backend of the life cycle.
With a high neutron leakage to get same effective burn, more enriched U235 is needed and POOF, we're back to proliferation issues.
I don't dismiss nuclear, but facts are facts. Big reactors are better and are at the scale for these kinds of reactions. The small stuff are a neat novelty, but it's just a Silicon Valley techbro grab for Government cheese. We need reactors in the gigawatt, we need coal/oil plants closed, and we need to get rid of this handling the issue with mittens by thinking we can plop a soda can reactor underneath the coal plant and phase it out gently. None of this is going to be nice, but the correct approach is band-aid right off. Build the 3.5 GWth reactors, invest in better transmission, stop with this dumb 500MWth BS from the West Coast. They've never been right about nuclear before, I doubt they're right about it now.
I'm done with people trying to answer this with a kitty cat meow when we need to address this with a lion's roar. The US Government, if they're serious about climate change we will know when that day comes, because they'll start setting up government-owned companies for nuclear, which is where it should have been in the first place. It solves all the proliferation, waste management, and so on issues related to nuclear and deals with the TCO issues once and for all.
That's my two cents. I don't expect anyone to agree, but damn it, NuScale bowing out shows, this small stuff, it ain't going to work.
Re:Why "uranium from Russia"? (Score:5, Interesting)
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> Because these engineered materials - had problems. Remember the pebble reactors - radiation got out of silicon carbide!
A bigger problem is that there is no practical way to get the fuel back out when they're done in the reactor. So you end up with a big pile of these things that have to be physically separated and are a radio hazard. With conventional fuels the volume of waste is much smaller, and we do have methods to reprocess it if we every want to spend the money to do so.
> I think small reactor
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Your recall Synrock or glassification of nuclear waste never caught on.
It actually has, but in a very delayed, very expensive, very Department of Energy way: the Hanford vitrification plant will start up the low-level waste vit plant before the end of this year by legal consent decree, and the high-level vit plant will start operation by 2025 by the same federal judge's order.
Re:Why "uranium from Russia"? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Why "uranium from Russia"? (Score:4, Funny)
The basic concept of SMRs is flawed. While in theory the reactor itself may be cheaper to build through serial production, it also goes through more fuel and has all the same support requirements as a larger reactor.
That means you need a cooling pool, which must be made earthquake proof and carefully monitored for degradation and leaks. It means you need a containment building. A control room to monitor everything. All the fuel and waste management stuff.
Since SMRs produce a lot less power anyway, it's actually doubtful that they will be cheaper. If you have a lot of them on one site they might reach cost parity with larger reactors, but if you distribute them then the support material costs are going to vastly outweigh any savings from serial production.
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Well, this all is just efforts to appear innovative to keep failed nuclear tech alive. Yes, if you must build reactors, they _must_ be large, nothing else works economically. But the numbers on large reactors are still so abysmally bad that nobody really wants to do them anymore. The Brits are planning one to keep their nuclear arsenal maintained. The French (outside of political propaganda lies to get votes) are planning a whopping 4 long-term for the same purpose.
Hence the SMR proponents and their clueles
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Re:Why "uranium from Russia"? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's trash. It's funny that this guy is from Alberta - Canada has premium uranium mines up there.
One goal of some SMR projects is to clean up existing nuclear waste, which we're morally obligated to do anyway.
The biggest threat from sensible atomic power is the fear and control apparatus and its sychophants who want that sweet consulting money.
Anyway this guy apparrently makes a living saying absolutely everything will run on batteries and selling articles about that.
SMR's make heat most directly and in a distributed way - turbines are fine but battery storage isn't required.
The thorium company from Amaterdam is going into production so we don't really have to debate the future anyway.
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SMRs are a neat idea if your alternative are coal plants, and coal plants only. And they make for nice talking points if you want to preach to the choir posing with a tough stance against those enviro-
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I am not a fan of NuScale (it is a thermal reactor and we need fast reactors to complete the nuclear fuel cycle), but this project going through is not about anything that Bernard claims. Lazards, Bernard, and Bernard's followers ( such as drinkypoo, AmmiPro, etc on this site ) have an agenda and are playing massive games with stats.
Re:Why "uranium from Russia"? (Score:5, Interesting)
SMRs are much cheaper and safer than Wind/PV backed by either FF, or long-term storage.
Citation?
Nuclear reactors scale well to high power levels. If you make one ten times as big, it's not ten times as expensive. The downside of that is that this means they are proportionately more expensive at low power levels, and the SMRs are typically one-thirtieth the output of existing large power plants.
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Like the "too cheap to meter" claims, this is a fantasy where SMRs are completely self contained units that come out of the factory ready to be deployed. Like giant AA batteries or something.
In reality they need the usual nuclear facilities, primarily a cooling pool, containment building, and control centre.
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> SMRs are much cheaper and safer than Wind/PV backed by either FF, or long-term storage.
Hmmm.
The only firm numbers we have on the costs for SMRs are NuScale and the BWRX-300. The former was cancelled after its price skyrocketed, and the latter has been quoted at around $5 billion, which makes it ~$17/We. In contrast, 59 hybrid PV systems were installed this year in the US at an average price around $2/Wp with 4-hour firm. They are signing 20-year PPAs at an average of 3.9 cents/kWh, *excluding* the tax
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Re:Why "uranium from Russia"? (Score:5, Insightful)
High assay low enrichment uranium (HALEU). (Score:2)
Russia is the only volume source of High assay low enrichment uranium (HALEU).
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But this isn't some fundamental restriction. There isn't some magic reason that only Russia can make HALEU. It isn't like Russia is sitting on giant natural HALEU fields that go through HALEU pipelines through the Baltic sea to keep Germany warm during the winter.
HALEU production is an industrial process, and that industry can be built anywhere as needed. There's no large scale HALEU production in the west because there's no demand for it yet, but uranium enrichment is a well understood process.
(There is, o
Re:High assay low enrichment uranium (HALEU). (Score:5, Informative)
The article doesn't present it as a fundamental restriction, just an added cost and timeline bottleneck - the fact that you have to build new infrastructure for the fuel, too.
Uranium refining is not as trivial as your average industrial process. Not that it's chemically complicated, but because, you know, people kinda care whether uranium hexafluoride leaks or whether you're taking proper precautions to prevent a criticality accident or whatnot.
Or is it (Score:2)
Russia is the only volume source of High assay low enrichment uranium (HALEU).
Not for long. [prnewswire.com].
As the article states Centrus is ramping up slowly to start, but could be a high volume producer within 42 months given enough funding.
The U.S. has been working to increase all aspects of nuclear fuel production in the U.S.
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Russia is the only volume source of High assay low enrichment uranium (HALEU).
Not for long. [prnewswire.com].
As the article states Centrus is ramping up slowly to start, but could be a high volume producer within 42 months given enough funding.
The U.S. has been working to increase all aspects of nuclear fuel production in the U.S.
You believe a press release by a company that is predicated on "securing the necessary funding"? Can I interest you in a bridge over the Hudson river?
Re:Why "uranium from Russia"? (Score:5, Insightful)
One sign that this article, and summary, is chock full of lies is the throwaway line "depend on uranium from Russia". Why do they say that? The closest guess is that Russia has been the source of somewhat cheaper uranium to date...
If you read the article, it points out that the Small Modular Reactor design depend on High-assay low enrichment uranium (HALEU), which currently is made in Russia.
No reason that in the future it can't be made elsewhere, though, so this is only an issue in the short and medium term, until production facilities elsewhere can be set up.
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Kazakhstan + Canada make up 90% of the world's uranium exports. Russia doesn't even make it in the top 10 or exporters. The article is worth less than toilet paper, because if it were in print it could have at least served a useful purpose.
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Russia doesn't even make it in the top 10 or exporters.
Russia is the world's top nuclear _fuel_ exporter. They take the raw uranium (and even uranium tailings), enrich it, and manufacture fuel. Right now, Russia has the world's best enrichment technology.
Re:Why "uranium from Russia"? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Why "uranium from Russia"? (Score:2)
The title says plenty: "madness" If that isn't opinionated.. Sets the tone for the rest of the 'article' instantly, makes me want to read. Not.
Re:Why "uranium from Russia"? (Score:5, Interesting)
The fine article is an interview with people from Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an organization that is opposed to nuclear power, they are not going to say anything nice about nuclear power and are not above at least bending the truth a little to make their point.
While I believe that SMRs will be a valued technology in the future there is really nothing wrong with the 3rd generation nuclear power plants that are currently being built all over the world right now. It would be wise to build more 3rd generation nuclear while we develop 4th generation technologies like SMRs.
I'll see plenty of hand wringing over supplies of fuel for nuclear reactors. This is an artificial problem, a problem we produced with our own policies. For the longest time there was a pile of plutonium sitting in some DOE warehouse that was intended to be converted into fuel rods for nuclear power plants. I don't recall the source of all this plutonium but I believe is is a mix of cores from decommissioned weapons (so weapons grade or nearly so from being already partially demilitarized), and plenty of reactor grade plutonium from various power plants and weapon development programs. During the Obama administration came a deadline to turn this into fuel, if it wasn't converted into fuel then that gave Russia permission to keep a pile of their own weapon grade plutonium. I don't know where this plutonium is now but our failure to convert this into fuel means we don't have fuel but Russia does. If Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists wants to see fewer nuclear weapons in the world then they'd be demanding more nuclear power plants, and more reprocessing of spent fuel, so that we'd see Russia and other nations calm down about their own nuclear weapons.
The best means to destroy nuclear weapons is with nuclear power. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is opposed to nuclear power because they convinced themselves that nuclear power plants lead to more nuclear weapons. That is hardly proven by the evidence before us.
I watched a YouTube video of an interview with the author of the book that lead to the recent film Oppenheimer, and in that interview came up the debate in the book and film on the threat of nuclear weapons. Oppenheimer commented publicly just how easy it was for anyone to make a nuclear bomb if they wanted it badly enough, and we proved that with the bombs dropped on Japan. The cores used in those weapons didn't come from nuclear power plants. One weapon didn't even need a reactor to get the material used in the core. They got the uranium they needed by mining it out of the Earth and enriching it with centrifuges.
We don't need Russia to get uranium, we have plenty in the USA. We have just piles of steel drums full of enriched uranium buried in some desert. We have piles of plutonium we can use for fuel. With heavy water reactors we don't even need centrifuges to enrich uranium for fuel, we can use natural uranium, or we can mix some of that plutonium with thorium for fuel.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists equating nuclear power with nuclear weapons is like equating jet fuel with napalm. When people think of all the jet fuel used in the world they don't leap to thinking how that could be used to burn villages and cities in some foreign nation, they think of other reasons to avoid having it around. To get away from fossil fuels we need more nuclear power. To quickly dispose of the piles of weapon grade plutonium in the world we need more nuclear power.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is a group that is stuck in contradictions. Their mission statement of opposing nuclear power is contradictory to their mission statements of lowering the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the threat of global warming. The arguments they make to oppose nuclear power contradict reality. I have to wonder just how many of the people in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists are actual scientists because to understand science is to think logically and use the evidence of experimentation to guide your actions. They do not speak with logic, they speak with emotion.
Facts don't care about your feelings.
Re:Why "uranium from Russia"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Both North Korea and Iran started with civilian nuclear programmes, built up the knowledge and experience that way, and then ran a secret weapons programme in parallel. Maybe they could have done it without the nuclear power facilities, but having them certainly helped provide cover for building up their supplies of material and the knowledge they needed.
Thing is, even in countries we trust not to make weapons, it's not like you can just install a reactor, even an SMR. They need a whole nuclear regulatory legal framework and body, a nuclear industry to operate the plants, a supply of fuel and somewhere to store the waste. It's not a very deployable technology.
Re:Why "uranium from Russia"? (Score:5, Interesting)
We need solutions for the whole world, and most of the world doesn't already have nuclear weapons. And even in countries that do, we are concerned about them not having large stockpiles of them, or being able to develop more effective ones.
To solve climate change we need technology that can be deployed everywhere, including in developing nations. Otherwise they will just build coal and gas, because they certainly aren't going to forego development.
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Ummm...the article makes it clear that Russia has a quasi-monoply on HALEU (Uranium with a higher amount of U235 enrichment than used in conventional reactors, but lower than weapon-grade). HALEU is the fuel used in SMRs, and building an enrichment plant that produces this on an industrial scale is highly non-trivial and "economically challenging".
It also specifically discusses the case of replacing old coal plants as the strongest case for SMRs - just not strong enough. You must scroll beyond the first
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it doesn't matter if you end up having to pay even 100% more for uranium sourced in the U.S.
True, but there's plenty of uranium in Canada and Australia.
Uranium? (Score:2, Interesting)
All new reactors should be designed to burn cheep and abundant Thorium, not Uranium.
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Yeah. I also suggest people pour diesel into their petrol cars because it's cheaper at the pump. Life is very easy when you ignore all engineering problems.
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Here too. I always thought it odd that the less refined fuel would cost more.
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Here too. I always thought it odd that the less refined fuel would cost more.
Diesel has higher energy density; it's not surprising that it's more expensive.
Re:Uranium? (Score:5, Interesting)
Diesel has higher energy density; it's not surprising that it's more expensive.
I realized a long time ago how closely differing energy sources match on price per unit of energy. This makes sense to anyone that has toured a power plant like I have.
In one power plant they burned coal but the tour guided pointed out that to do a "cold start" (the plant was forced to shutdown for some reason and they lost the updraft created by the burning coal powder) they would have to pre-heat the boiler with natural gas. It seems to me that if there was something preventing coal from coming in, the coal prices spiked, or whatever, then they could likely keep producing power by pumping in natural gas.
In a different power plant I toured they had a then new coal burning boiler and an older idled coal boiler behind it. I found out many years after my tour that the power plant now has two coal boilers, and three boilers that can burn natural gas or fuel oil. They stated that they rarely run all the boilers at a time, switching between them as fuel prices dictate. This is a co-generation plant, providing electricity, heating, and cooling to surrounding buildings. This tells me that if natural gas prices go up because of the prevalence of natural gas furnaces in homes of the area that they'd switch to coal for heat and electricity.
Fuel oil is just diesel fuel by a different name. Diesel fuel is taxed differently because of road use taxes but it is still the same stuff. If diesel fuel is cheap then fuel oil is cheap, and that means power plants would switch to fuel oil. With less fuel oil burned for heat and electricity that means more natural gas for everyone else, and that lowers prices.
What made diesel fuel prices go up in the USA was the mandate to switch to low sulfur fuel. That made the fuel more expensive to produce but it also meant that it opened up the USA diesel fuel market to more international trade, so now diesel fuel prices in the USA is linked to diesel fuel prices in Europe, with any difference in prices being the overhead of shipping it over the ocean. I believe there was a similar thing that happened with gasoline prices as people shifted to unleaded fuel.
Energy is energy, so expect prices on one energy source to impact another. Natural gas holds something of a unique place in energy pricing because of how difficult it is to ship overseas. I have to expect some of that to fade as Canada builds more facilities to ship natural gas out, and Germany builds more facilities to ship natural gas in. UAE, India, and many other nations are getting in the trade of natural gas too.
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The less refined part went away, I think, when the ultra-low sulfur requirements came into place. That requires more processing.
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Uranium just isn't that scarce, given its very high energy density. That is especially the case when you start requiring designs that work for non-fissile fuel.
Broadly speaking the designs that work for 0% fissile Thorium will also work for the 99.3% U-238. The only thing for which there's any scarcity at all is U-235, but even then the fuel is cheap compared to all the other costs of power production)
(There is a legitimate issue that these designs require more highly enriched uranium -- that's a tradeoff t
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If someone could make money with Thorium reactors don't you think they would have already?
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If someone could make money with Thorium reactors don't you think they would have already?
If it weren't effectively illegal to mine thorium in the USA the you might have a point. The cost of thorium is largely dictated by policy, not any engineering problems. We can thank President Nixon for the current high price on thorium. When he was in office he put in place policies that helped his friends in California to develop uranium as a nuclear fuel, making things difficult for the people working on thorium reactors elsewhere in the USA. There were prototype thorium reactors in the 1960s, but be
Re:Uranium? (Score:5, Informative)
If it weren't effectively illegal to mine thorium in the USA the you might have a point.
1. It is not illegal to mine thorium in America. It is produced as a byproduct of monazite mining.
2. Even if it was illegal (it isn't) the USA is not the only country.
3. You can buy thorium right now for much less than the cost of natural uranium and much much much less than the cost of enriched uranium fuel.
The reason we don't have thorium-MSRs is not because of the cost or availability of thorium. Thorium is cheap and abundant.
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The reason we don't build Thorium reactors is that every prototype/experimental unit has turned into an expensive fiasco. While it has some advantages in theory, the difficulty of making it work and the major downsides (particularly the damage it does to the reactor vessel, which is impossible to replace or repair) far outweigh any potential commercial gains.
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Wow! Somebody should get on that! Have you told them?
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All new reactors should be designed to burn cheep and abundant Thorium, not Uranium.
Experiments with mixed thorium-plutonium fuel shows that existing reactors will burn thorium. There's a process that needs to be followed to get this change in fuel certified as safe, and if there's some kind of fuel shortage then I expect that process to happen. New reactors might be certified to burn thorium from the start just because it would be a trivial matter to do so since there's more room for engineering changes before construction starts than after a plant has been operating for decades, and a
Keeping the knowledge (Score:3)
One documentary I watched, made the case for SMR in that they allowed for a system where nuclear engineers kept their knowledge as they keep in building and also lower the construction risk because they are cheaper. The advantages include reduced impact of a failure and the possibility to iterate the technology improvements faster.
Idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
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Nope. Nuclear power can do nothing to have any impact on climate fuckery at all. Start building now, and you won't even have the first project across the line by any deadlines governments have set for themselves (and even those are woefully inadequate).
If you're standing on a train line watching an oncoming train, making a decision on how to save your life, I suggest stepping off the train line, rather than hoping an infrastructure project will build a new train line around you in the next 20 seconds.
Re: (Score:3)
Nope. Nuclear power can do nothing to have any impact on climate fuckery at all. Start building now, and you won't even have the first project across the line by any deadlines governments have set for themselves (and even those are woefully inadequate).
The "deadlines governments" have set are arbitrary. The problem gets worse the longer we wait, but it's not like we don't care about solving the problem thirty years hence or fifty or a hundred. We will still need low carbon energy a hundred years from now.
Re: (Score:2)
Climate change is not an oncoming train coming at you. Nor is it a wall we are hurtling into. A better metaphor would be to see climate change as a series of walls we will go through, each one a bit more painful.
Choosing the renewables path only means we will have to go through a lot more walls than going renewables + nuclear.
Nuclear has already been delayed too long by listening too much to anti-nuclear folks like you (and because fossil fuels were still cheap to allow postponing it while making you happy)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I can take up to 40 years to get a new plant up in the US.
Then we'd best get started right away.
At this point investing in nuclear power is an academic exercise because it's not going to solve any short term problems.
Long term, such as in 40 years, we will see the solar panels and windmills we put up today reach end of life. What happens then?
We can do more than one thing at a time. We can put up windmills for the short term gain that gets us in energy production and CO2 emission reduction while we break ground on new nuclear power plants. Windmills last about 25 years if my quick search of the internet is correct. We have built nuclear power plants that are expected to run for
Re: Idiots (Score:4, Insightful)
We put solar panels up every year and replace the 25 year old units with somewhat more efficient units. We aren't going to hit some brick wall where all the solar panels stop working at the same time.
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Re: (Score:3)
Can we afford to divert large sums of money to future nuclear projects though? It's hard enough to get people to spend any money on climate change at all, since they tend to think it is their kid's problem and they don't need to incur any expense.
The other issue is attracting investors. A solar or wind far has a build time of a few years or less, and a similar payback time before they start turning a profit. With nuclear an investor will be lucky to see any return for 30-40 years.
As for solar panels and win
Re: (Score:3)
I did say let's use 1/10th the cost of HPC for the example. Can you show us where a nuclear power plant was built for less than 3.3 billion? I doubt even China can build them for less than that.
Re: (Score:2)
timescales in many instances. But, it only takes the Navy a couple of years
to get a nuclear submarine built; those small reactors do not incur the time-waste
that a commercial power plant has to deal with.
It's entirely possible to make commercial nuclear power feasible, with modern
engineering designs, if by modular engineering we can employ a multiplicity
of small units, to suit prompt needs rather than projections 40 years into the
So many humorous things here. (Score:5, Informative)
And like many other times, Bernard is opposed to Nuclear, but is esp opposed to SMRs. Even his assessment of NuScale's failure indicates his bias.
Why did NuScale fail? Multiple reasons piling up.
1) NuScale's BIGGEST fault was developing and getting approval for 50 MWe reactors and then deciding to hold off while they worked on 77 MWe reactors. This was their own making. Had they started 2 years ago when they had full approval, they would already be half way there. The 50 MWe were perfect for first builds.
2) NuScale was fighting against inflation. Had they started 2+ years ago, the major expense would have been in low inflation and it would not have impacted them. Oddly, wind, PV, etc are fighting and losing as well, but Bernard had nothing to say about that.
3) NuScale has been fighting against the Anti-Nuclear nutjobs. These ppl have been busy pushing Utilities AND western governments to NOT build Nuclear. Oddly, these same ppl seem to be okay with China and Russia building pretty bad quality reactors, but many of those are based on western, esp American, designs. These ppl pushed a number of governments to not back NuScale to the point where it was tipping further.
4) NuScale ALSO screwed up in not building out the plant with a dual source of energy. All of these nuclear start-ups need to build the plants with 2 sources of energy: First with Nat Gas. This allows the back-end of the plant to be up and operational and fully tested and above all, making a profit for the utility. Then add in the reactor(s) to initially supplment Nat Gas and later replace it. The Nat gas remains so that when the utility needs to power down the reactor(s), then Nat Gas can serve as backup to keep the plant going.
All in all, there is no madness with SMRs. The real madness is the insane drive against nuclear by nutjobs that do not know what they are talking about. Oddly, many of these same nutjobs support stopping AGW, but then work harder to stop Nuclear, Geothermal, etc. All they want is Wind, PV and Storage. All things imported from China.
Hmmmm.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
So in other words nuclear is so expensive the plants have to subsidize their cost with fossil. If a bit of inflation killed the nuclear industry then they were already circling the drain.
Re: (Score:2)
Kinda like inflation and finance is killing wind farms projects right and left?
Truth is, on big infrastructure projects, having loads at +10% interest rates kills any actual project, whatever the nature. Maybe, just maybe, some infrastructure projects shouldn't be used to feed the pension funds?
Re:So many humorous things here. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
The biggest problem with nuclear is that in the admittedly unlikely event of a serious problem, taxpayers will be responsible for more than 90% of the cost of cleaning up the mess. That's the only terms the insurance industry will offer.
There are, of course, many other problems as well, but that's the one that makes sensible people opt for just about anything else except nuclear.
Us anti nucular people aren't nut jobs (Score:5, Interesting)
Go read up on the water crisis in Flint michigan. A public utility was privatized in corners were cut by idiots who didn't know what they were doing. As a result there is dozens of children with permanent brain damage among other health problems and the community was without water for close to 15 years before Joe Biden of all people came in with a ton of money and finally replaced the last of the compromised water pipes.
That's the kind of regulatory and social environment you want to convince me you can safely deploy nuclear power into? Sorry but I'm just not buying it.
The problems with nuclear are social they're not technical but they still are problems. Solving those problems is hard and frankly a lot of people don't want to solve them. They have too many other sacred cows tied up with privatization and deregulation and no other solutions on the horizon.
If you want to get me and people like me on board with nuclear power you need to solve those social problems. And please for the love of God don't just try to scare me with climate change like folks tend to do when I bring up these social problems. That's not going to move me or anyone like me.
Bottom line people who want nuclear power have a job to do. It's your job to figure out how to fix those social problems and you cannot have nuclear power until you do.
Re:Us anti nucular people aren't nut jobs (Score:5, Informative)
Go read up on the water crisis in Flint michigan. A public utility was privatized in corners were cut by idiots who didn't know what they were doing.
If you do read up [wikipedia.org] about it, you won't actually find that at all. The city switched from one government-owned water source (the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department) to a different one (the Karegnondi Water Authority, jointly owned by several cities and counties in the area).
By your logic, we therefore shouldn't trust government to build, run or regulate power generation, and people who want government to do that need to fix government's social problems first.
Re: (Score:3)
Were you expecting competence and honest work from bureaucrats? Those are more social problems you'll have to fix first! Maybe you can solve one of them next time you're in line at the DMV.
You claimed it was a failure of privatization. You were wrong, as usual, and now you won't admit that your logic would mean you are wrong about a lot of other government policies as well.
Re: (Score:3)
You complain about "social problems" that are holding up nuclear power and they say you will withhold support for nuclear power until the social problems are resolved. How does that not make you part of the problem? You want me to convince everyone else to support nuclear power to get your support? What if they point to you as the "social problem" and demand you be convinced to support nuclear power before they move?
I'm reminded of comments from RFK Jr. that he'd support nuclear power if it was proven sa
Re: (Score:3)
The problem is privatization leading to a lack of maintenance leading to disasters.
What a load of bullshit. There's something like 400 civil nuclear reactors in operation around the world, how many of those ended up as disasters? Now compare that to "disasters" from other energy sources. Nuclear power is the safest energy source we've created.
If you want to convince me that there is a "social problem" surrounding nuclear power then you are going to have to be more specific on what that problem is. Is the problem public opposition? That's what it sounds like you are describing but I c
Re: (Score:2)
Goal (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Guess we'd better move to a mineral-poor planet on the periphery of the galaxy pronto, amirite?
I'll believe it when I see it (Score:3)
Bigger is better when scaling linear (Score:2)
That was the whole idea behind scaling up nuclear plants.
But in reality things don't scale in a linear way until there is a point where it is more economically to use a bunch of small reactors.
It's because we don't trust nuclear power (Score:3)
SMRs we're supposed to be able to be built in factory settings to specific specifications and were promised to be meltdown proof.
So far as I can tell the factories didn't materialize and while they do have some additional safety tech it is still possible for a determined idiot who cuts enough funding to the maintenance budget to cause a meltdown with the things.
As always the problems with nuclear are social not technical but people who want to see more nuclear power plants either can't figure out a way to solve the social problems or just plain don't want to. So we're stuck in a rut and wind and solar are going to be the only viable renewable technology.
Manufacturing vs civil infrastructure (Score:2)
Madness? (Score:2)
Either Or... (Score:2)
Why are all these options always presented as either or solutions? In terms of these smaller reactors, some advantages not spoken of are they are a great baseline power source, since they output a steady amount of energy. Dams are also of this type, they produce a steady amount of power at all times.
When paired with Solar, this makes a lot of sense, since most variability of usage occurs during the day, if you produce a reactor that covers the typical usage during the night with a little room to grow, and s
Regulatory arbitrage (Score:2)
SMRs have the well-known advantages of mass production, but there is also a regulatory angle. The majority of the costs with nuclear are not in the pure construction but in complying with legal requirements that force every available penny to be spent (ALARA) and lawsuits that keep projects frozen in the courtroom until they go bankrupt.
SMRs are a technological solution to a political problem - want a reactor? It's in the warehouse, we deliver and install it today, before the lawfare can start. EU wants to
They are forgetting the human factor... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In more ways than one. The individual reactors require less care & protection, AND the grid you plug them into is less susceptible to power plant failure.
Distributed generation is the way to go if you can manage it.
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In more ways than one. The individual reactors require less care & protection, AND the grid you plug them into is less susceptible to power plant failure.
Distributed generation is the way to go if you can manage it.
In Japan they will build nuclear power plants with as many as 8 reactors on site. Fukushima Daichii was supposed to have 8 reactors but a series of events delayed construction, then forced an early decommissioning. After that power plant took an earthquake and tsunami to the face they decided to look at changes to operations at other power plants. The plants with only one reactor were mostly deemed too expensive to operate to consider safety upgrades. Those that are expected to restart have large reacto
Re: (Score:2)
Sometimes people think they're being clever, but they're so far off the point it's just dumb.