Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029 • Hacker News Board

Re: Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029

#341

Post by eloff » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 3:13 PM UTC

cameldrv wrote: post #321

belorn wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can absolutely power the whole of the US by 100 square miles of solar panels in the southwest. The cost would be to build the solar panels, the square mile of batteries, replace all the power lines in the US with cables that can handle very high voltage (twice or more than what current power transmission cables can handle) needed for long-distance, and replace all the power stations connected to those so that can…

It's a lot more than 100 square miles. Here's an NREL report on this exact question: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56290.pdf If you extrapolate (see analysis here: https://www.freeingenergy.com/how-much-solar-would-it-take-t... ), you get 21,250 square miles. Elon musk says 100 miles x 100 miles, which is 10,000 square miles. Both of those figures are just for current electricity demand, so if we electrified all…

Sorry, it's 10,000 square miles in the article I linked. I can't edit my post anymore, but my point stands.

Energy consumption is actually dropping in the US currently, but I don't expect that trend to continue indefinitely, eventually we will get to 100x energy usage. And you're right, at that point solar wouldn't cut it.

But that's a far cry from your original post saying it won't work for a developed nation, when it clearly can work for the world's richest and most energy intensive nation.

As for the very far future when solar won't cut it? I'm sure we'll use a lot of nuclear, and by then probably a lot of nuclear fusion. Or maybe we won't have those crazy energy requirements because we've moved most industry off the planet like per Jeff Bezos' vision of the future. It's enough to get ourselves sorted in the present, so we can have a bright future, and solar and wind power can help us achieve that. There's no reason nuclear can't be a part of that picture, but they have a hard challenge ahead because current nuclear is not competitive cost wise with renewables plus energy storage.

Re: Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029

#342

Post by asymptotically2 » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 7:38 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #337

chantelles wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horror story from my stepfather at Bruce Nuclear Power Plant in Ontario Canada: At least twice a year there was a "secret leak" where he had to come home early but no media was alerted and they had to hire racialized folks from the city to go in and make repairs. He also stole reactor sealer to seal our basement from spring leaks and our basement leaked. And on and on. Canada has very loose safety standards and cuts…

> At least twice a year there was a "secret leak" where he had to come home early but no media was alerted... Uh, [citation needed]. > ... they had to hire racialized folks from the city to go in and make repairs... Racialized... folks? > He also stole reactor sealer to seal our basement from spring leaks and our basement leaked. That might be because, and I'm speculating here, your basement isn't a reactor. I've hea…

>> Canada has very loose safety standards and cuts lots of corners.

> That's just pretty objectively false.

Don't they still mine asbestos in Canada?

Re: Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029

#343

Post by wazoox » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 8:12 PM UTC

fsh wrote: post #340

wazoox wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Germany had invested 300 billions in nuclear instead of wind, they would have 0 emissions electric power right now. It makes relative sense in Germany because they still rely a lot on coal for power generation. If they hadn't stopped nuclear power in its tracks, they would have achieved a much bigger reduction of their emissions, too. If you take the example of Spain you can easily see that they fired up 1GW of ga…

I don't see any credible source for the "300 billion" claim. The official statistics list 168 billion since 2000 for all renewables combined: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/36306/umfrage... On the other hand, nuclear power has been subsidized with about 200 billion as well without ever producing more than one third of the electricity output: https://foes.de/pdf/2010_FOES_Foerderungen_Atomenergie_1950-…

Nuclear energy is capital-intensive, but not resource intensive. The cost of the plant dwarves the cost of uranium to run it. In this way, it's similar to wind.

France had 2 working breeders reactors, Phénix and SuperPhénix, and they worked at industrial scale. They were cut off for purely political reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix

Re: Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029

#344

Post by Reason077 » Sun, Jan 26, 2020, 8:07 AM UTC

neuronic wrote: post #153

Reason077 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Nuclear fission plants take at the very least 10 years (!!) to go online from the day construction begins." Yes, but that's what the small modular reactors being proposed by Rolls-Royce, and others, intend to solve. If successful, they would greatly reduce the construction time, risk, and cost of nuclear projects.

It's a great project for the technology alone but isn't the projected time frame too late? Where will we be 10 years from now with renewables? Also, if Rolls-Royce projects 2029 it doesn't mean it's done by 2029 and most certainly not wide scale deployed/operable. So what kind of renewable infrastructure and tech will be deployed 15-20 years from now? That's what you have to compare it with.

> "It's a great project for the technology alone but isn't the projected time frame too late? Where will we be 10 years from now with renewables?"

It's not a question of nuclear or renewables - we absolutely need renewables, and right now renewables are much cheaper, and can be delivered faster, than nuclear.

But there are regions of the world that may struggle to decarbonise completely without nuclear in the mix. Especially if you consider additional demands in the future from electrification of transport, building heat, etc.

Re: Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029

#345

Post by Reason077 » Sun, Jan 26, 2020, 9:32 AM UTC

renaudg wrote: post #190

Brometheus wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For nuclear you still need to have peaker plants. ALso nuclear is really expensive.

Pretty sure it's actually cheapest per kWh

New-build nuclear is far more expensive, per kWh, than renewables. In Europe, even off-shore wind - one of the most expensive renewables - is now coming in much cheaper than nuclear projects.

In the US, even many old nuclear plants are struggling to compete without subsidies against renewables and natural gas.

Re: Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029

#346

Post by Reason077 » Sun, Jan 26, 2020, 9:48 AM UTC

belorn wrote: post #327

cygx wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and thus at peak, fossil fueled energy production is higher now then before when nuclear stood for 30% But that's an irrelevant metric: What matters is the total CO2 released, ie the integrated value. So short-term, you replace coal plants by gas peakers, and transition to next-gen storage mechanisms long-term (better batteries, cryogenic storage, power-to-gas - the latter is especially interesting as Germany has pre…

What matters is to close down the fossil fuel plants for good. The output of wind is on average 45% of maximum capacity for offshore wind, meaning if you have 100% of wind during optimal conditions and 0% when the wind is still on average you get around 45%. For land based wind parks the numbers are low, around 25%. So far there is very little investment to build out wind beyond having 100% wind in optimal conditions…

> "Nuclear plants have a linear cost. Going from 10% to 20% cost just as much as going from 90% to 100%. No overcapacity, no batteries, no conversion loss."

In your nuclear-only scenario, without storage you'd need enough capacity to cover peak demand. This can be 2X or even 3X higher than average demand, so there would indeed be significant overcapacity. Very expensive!

Typical nuclear plants are also not good at demand response: to operate efficiently, their output must remain constant most of the time. Over-capacity at off-peak times is potentially a big problem on grids with a large portion of nuclear.

Some combination of storage, peaker plants, and demand response is required regardless of whether nuclear or renewables are used. The most cost-effective future grids are likely to use a diverse mix of technologies.

Re: Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029

#347

Post by jhayward » Sun, Jan 26, 2020, 4:47 PM UTC

klyrs wrote: post #328

jhayward wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll just point out that auto makers who manufacture in the 100's of millions of units often have mandatory, stop-use, stop-sales recalls on their products 5-10 years after sale. What you are asserting isn't the reality of mass production as experienced by industrial society so far.

Two scenarios: 1. A flaw is found in a standardized design impacting hundreds of units. Engineers identity a fix, and technicians receive training on how to apply the fix. They apply the fix to hundreds of units in a standardized and repeatable fashion. If the flaw is catastrophic, chances are this will prevent hundreds of catastrophes. 2. You have an industry producing hundreds of bespoke designs. Each time a flaw i…

This is moving the goalposts quite a bit. The GP was asserting, in essence, that it was naive and fear-mongering to say that mass-produced designs may have major flaws that need recall.

Now we get the argument that yes, that will happen but it will still be profitable to do so.

All of this contradicts 70 years of nuclear industry experience. It is an unsupported assertion, not a truth, that modular manufacturing will experience a beneficial industrial learning curve that will bend costs toward being competitive with alternatives.

Re: Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029

#348

Post by arcticbull » Sun, Jan 26, 2020, 5:48 PM UTC

asymptotically2 wrote: post #342

arcticbull wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least twice a year there was a "secret leak" where he had to come home early but no media was alerted... Uh, [citation needed]. > ... they had to hire racialized folks from the city to go in and make repairs... Racialized... folks? > He also stole reactor sealer to seal our basement from spring leaks and our basement leaked. That might be because, and I'm speculating here, your basement isn't a reactor. I've hea…

>> Canada has very loose safety standards and cuts lots of corners. > That's just pretty objectively false. Don't they still mine asbestos in Canada?

While a fair point, no, the last mine stopped operating in 2011 in Thetford Mines, and a total ban was brought in around 2018. The government is investing in some technologies to extract magnesium from the left-overs while neutralizing the remaining fibers [1].

[1] https://business.financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/canada-b...

Re: Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029

#349

Post by jillesvangurp » Mon, Jan 27, 2020, 10:13 AM UTC

ctdonath wrote: post #215

jillesvangurp wrote: post #133

What's missing is a $/kwh quote. It's important because renewables are the cheapest option on the market right now and nowhere near done dropping further in price. If the last ten years are any indication, an order of magnitude further drop in prices before the end of the decade is not unreasonable considering mass production of batteries, solar, and wind is still ramping up and considering the enormous amount of R&D…

I'm running on partial "utility solar". Cost varies wildly over the year, from 1x to >3x vs regular electric; average is 1.5x ... but that's with a reliable instant backup supply for every second solar supply is insufficient vs demand. During summer, I run my office 100% solar. It's a fun exercise, but it's deeply reliant on batteries. Storage capacity is a cliff: run out of stored power, you're done. This "brick wal…

You can solve that by installing more solar. Also, if you have an EV, it comes with a (typically 60kwh) battery. If you have the right systems installed, you could power your house from that for a few days. For reference, e.g. a tesla powerwall would come in at only 13.5 kwh (i.e. less than 25%) and you could buy a more expensive EV with 75kwh or even more. So, you could power your house using your car for a while. If you have the square meters, you could install enough solar to charge that battery capacity. It's just a matter of what still makes sense in terms of cost.

Doing stuff like this is currently expensive but will eventually drop in price to the point where it stops being a cost reducing supporting technology and can actually become your main source of energy together with maybe a more expensive option as an emergency fallback based on some grid level solution (wind, more solar, tidal power, nuclear even, gas, etc). It's just a matter of $/kwh of battery & solar panels. Both are still coming down in price. The reason people are putting this stuff in their homes is that they are already on the right side of that price compared to the grid.

Re: Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029

#350

Post by christophilus » Mon, Jan 27, 2020, 11:14 AM UTC

Melting_Harps wrote: post #325

christophilus wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear energy has a PR problem that is very hard to solve. It doesn’t help that movies dramatize it. From what I remember, the only people who died due to Fukushima were those that died of fear. The reality is that nuclear is remarkably safe, clean, etc.

> From what I remember, the only people who died due to Fukushima were those that died of fear. The reality is that nuclear is remarkably safe, clean, etc. Then you have a faulty memory, and a selective one at that because the crisis is still on-going; there were an estimated 2000 from evacuation alone: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2014/03/01/editorials/f... You think this is safe or healthy? 100k+ displaced…

There were no known deaths from accute radiation syndrome[0]. There were deaths from things like the tsunami, the evacuation, and stress, which was essentially the point I was trying to make. The nuclear part of the equation caused a lot of fear, but it was all of the other things (and maybe the fear itself) that caused the deaths. That said, you're not wrong about the long-tail effects being hard to quantify and measure.

> I honestly think people like you should only be able to have this opinion if you live near Nuclear Plants, for a decade at a minimum.

For what it's worth, I've lived near nuclear power plants for over 30 years, and have no problem living near them until I die-- which will almost certainly not be from radiation unless we have a nuclear war. I had more radiation exposure from the coal fired power plant in my childhood town than from any of the nuclear plants I've been around.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...