Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology

We just need moar nuclear plants and we can eliminate the few remaining coal and gas plants.

> it wouldn't be too hard to just ban fossil fuels tomorrow

That sounded a "super green" idea to me - with no idea myself how you thought that could be done. Nuclear ?! How can I tell to what degree your writing is to be understood as exaggeration - affordable nuclear supply by tomorrow? by next year? by next decade? When you have a rational case, you should be able to promote it with accurate rational language. Sorry but I cant tell what you are really intending or concerned about, because your case has not been coherent. Perhaps examine whether you have a prejudice towards the idea of "green" policy (sounds like an insult?) and prejudice allows one to be hyper critical while inattentive to the coherence of ones own convictions.

The green movement has harbored some prejudice towards nuclear power, but nuclear power is not more expensive now than renewable options because of green prejudice. Its just an excessively complex, resource and high level human attention demanding industrial process to safely generate large amounts of heat from radioactive materials, besides the normal expense of cooling and extracting power from concentrated heat. Sure nuclear might have not been the monster which many greens have pictured it as, also consider whether it is the affordable suppressed magic which nuclear has promoted itself as in the preceding decades while spending many billions on undercosted projects which where delayed to the point of never producing any power. That doesnt happen with wind and solar so even if they foist "misregulation" and fear on nuclear - at least they have shown that they deliver !

There isn't double-counting, that's the entire point of the system where "green" producers end up with "dirty" credits, because a "dirty" pays that "green" provider to take its credits in exchange, to prevent double counting.

But the notion of which sort of credit you buy and what sort of energy you actually produce are two separate things.

As an example Iceland is exempt from certain EU/EEA energy efficiency regulation because of its near-100% use of green energy, even though its power companies have something like >80% "dirty" energy credits on hand.

This is because the regulators can distinguish between a "dirty" power plant with 100% green credits on hand (i.e. they've subsidized a "green" power plant) v.s. a "green" power plant with 100% green credits on hand.

    > There is no need for them to sell
    > many of those credits, as evidenced
    > by the fact that they don’t even transfer
    > much of that power.

The electron that comes through your socket doesn't need to be generated by a "green" power plant for you to consume "green" energy, this is because electrons are fungible.

Of course we also want to shift to 100% green energy power plants, but in the meantime energy demand is also elastic. The point of the energy credit system is to shift electricity demand from areas that supply real "dirty" energy to those that supply "real" green energy.

This happens because a "green" power plant in Norway might sell its energy for 20 cents/kWh, which would be the same as a "dirty" power plant in Denmark. But if the "dirty" plant needs to buy "green" credits from the Norwegian one it might have to raise its prices to 25 cents/kWh, and the Norwegian one can lower them to 15 cents/kWh.

This would then have the effect that an energy consumer (say a factory) might move its operation to Norway to benefit from cheaper energy, or consumers would buy the subsidized Norwegian product over the Danish one.

Except for the small detail that it doesn't actually have much of an effect from a macro-economic point of view, but that's because we collectively think this whole climate change thing isn't really all that important, and thus the energy credits are relatively cheap and add almost nothing to the end-user price.

But that's the fault of political priorities, the system itself is relatively elegant and would have more of an effect if its designed was backed up by larger political commitments.

No, I just added a bit on top to get an estimate for the entire power conversion system, assuming your estimate of 20% for the nuclear parts were in the right ballpark.

> Not sure how shaft power is what we are considering here as this would be converted to purely electricity generation

The power to turn the prop shaft would roughly be what's available for turning the generator if the thing is used to produce electricity rather than propulsion.

Sure, there's the "hotel load" to run the rest of the sub, but then again a generator isn't 100% efficient either so I think roughly 30 MW electrical output is about right.

Details are classified, but from publicly available sources my understanding is that naval reactors tend to work at lower pressure and temperature than civilian land based PWR's, so efficiency takes a (substantial) hit. So I do think my estimate of 30 MWe is closer to the mark than your 70.

> doesn’t need refueling for 20 years

So it's a life of ship core which is supposedly 33 years. But, that's 33 years of average use. AFAIU subs spend most of their time creeping along pretty slowly in order to stay silent, so on average they'll be using a small fraction of max power. Civilian power reactors otoh want to run at full power as much as possible to amortize capital costs.

Not to mention that HEU just won't fly for civilian use, as I tried to explain my previous message.

As for economics, yes I think that decarbonizing the electric grid with series produced reactors would, in the end, be pretty cheap. France did that some decades ago, for about $1500/kW in today's money. AFAICT that would require the government to handle it (like in France), both to decide on one reactor model (to get on the learning curve by series producing it) and to have access to cheap capital.

If one wanted to do it with SMR's rather than large reactors like France, I suggest e.g. Nuscale would be a better starting point than submarine reactors.

Also the potential damage is a lot higher e.g. if you're in a car accident and the RTG gets punctured vs. just a Li-ion battery catching fire. In terms of cleanup and containment.