Why not thorium?
Why not both? Other companies are working on thorium reactors, as well as molten salt reactors running on uranium. Terrestrial Energy in particular is pretty far along, partly due to friendly regulators in Canada.
Making Nuclear Energy Smaller, Cheaper And Safer
21–30 of 116 posts
Re: Making Nuclear Energy Smaller, Cheaper And Safer
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Leaks are designed out because the entire reactor vessels are surrounded by a giant swimming pool. The temperature stays low enough because this swimming pool is passively cooled. Lack of relible decay heat[1] cooling caused both Fukushima and three mile island accidents. Having passive decay heat removal usually decreases the probability of core damage by about 100x. 1 https://whatisnuclear.com/decay-heat.html
What happens if the swimming pool leaks ?
What happens if a windmill explodes?
Re: Making Nuclear Energy Smaller, Cheaper And Safer
#23I have a hard time accepting their premise that they are designing for "cheaper" based on that artists rendering (which I assume is based on some real design elements). Curvy roofed buildings and arced cooling ponds are not at all the most cost effective construction methods. I want truly cheap nuclear that sits in unobtrusive cheap concrete boxes like the old Bell telephone exchange buildings.
The issue right now is every plant is a unique one-off. Meaning the inspectors need to pour over the plans, construction crews need to learn how to build each design specifically, fabricators providing parts need to make each plant's run of stuff special. If we could have just one standard nuclear plant design, even if it was silly curved roofs or whatever, it would massively decrease plant construction costs by taking advantage of standardization.
France did this in the 1970s. They hired engineers to design them 1 single kind of plant that was cheap, safe and would last a long time and then they pumped them out by the dozens. Every plant was the same as every other plant, so construction crews got good at it, part manufacturers could tool up for big production runs and lower per-part cost, and government inspection was drastically simplified because everything on the project was as stock as possible and the original design had already been approved. Now France's problem is it has too much electricity, as it over-estimated how much energy demands would ramp up going into the 21st century, and so now sells excess wattage to Germany.
Re: Making Nuclear Energy Smaller, Cheaper And Safer
#24I have a hard time accepting their premise that they are designing for "cheaper" based on that artists rendering (which I assume is based on some real design elements). Curvy roofed buildings and arced cooling ponds are not at all the most cost effective construction methods. I want truly cheap nuclear that sits in unobtrusive cheap concrete boxes like the old Bell telephone exchange buildings.
I think the artists were just told to make something that looks attractive for the public.
Re: Making Nuclear Energy Smaller, Cheaper And Safer
#25I have a hard time accepting their premise that they are designing for "cheaper" based on that artists rendering (which I assume is based on some real design elements). Curvy roofed buildings and arced cooling ponds are not at all the most cost effective construction methods. I want truly cheap nuclear that sits in unobtrusive cheap concrete boxes like the old Bell telephone exchange buildings.
> Curvy roofed buildings and arced cooling ponds are not at all the most cost effective construction methods.
Just because the architectural facade is 'fancy' does not mean the internal plumbing is.
Re: Making Nuclear Energy Smaller, Cheaper And Safer
#26> "My concern about NuScale is that they believe so deeply that their reactor is safe and doesn't need to meet the same criteria as the larger reactors, that it's pushing for lots of exemptions and exceptions," says Edwin Lyman, acting director of the Nuclear Safety Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists Bit of a red flag there... Edit: The article further states: > "Licensing this design is challenging. It's s…
Is there evidence of this actually happening?
Considering said Edward Lyman has made a career out of FUD'ing anything nuclear, I'd be sceptical of taking anything he says on face value.
Re: Making Nuclear Energy Smaller, Cheaper And Safer
#27SMR based on old school water PWR is just not the best idea. The only reason to do it, is basically because everything else is impossible to get regulated. Putting whole PWR systems in one module seams pretty crazy compared to the alternative reactors we could be building. The PWR SMR are still massively bigger other SMRs.
We built and tested better smarter designs for reactors that would be way smaller and cheaper but those are essentially impossible to license in the US and no other country has a market big enough to finance development it.
Nuclear is so energy dense the market for it is so divided that the economics of scale are just not there in the same way unless you do it stat driven as in France or you have a large unified market like the US was when nuclear was cheap and expanding fast.
Re: Making Nuclear Energy Smaller, Cheaper And Safer
#28Per gigawatt-hour, nuclear power as it stands may very well be the safest power source that we have got already.
The biggest hurdle is irrational fear and the regulatory barriers consequent.
Re: Making Nuclear Energy Smaller, Cheaper And Safer
#29Re: Making Nuclear Energy Smaller, Cheaper And Safer
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happens if the swimming pool leaks ?
I mean ... millions of people who barely maintain their homes avoid pool leaks, and when it does leak, it tends to be slow enough that they can call in a professional to fix the problem. Imagine a fastidiously maintained facility ... I think they can probably work it out
You have to consider stuff like terrorist attack and so on. Nobody is so incentivized in making your backyard pool leak.