Small nuclear reactors: tiny NuScale reactor gets safety approval • Hacker News Board

Re: Small nuclear reactors: tiny NuScale reactor gets safety approval

#501

Post by Klinky » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 8:55 PM UTC

Pfhreak wrote: post #294

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we can just put it all in your house and you'll be cool with that? After all, there are more dangerous things out there, and we won't be putting any of those in your house, so that makes it okay right?

This question is asked in incredibly bad faith. No one anywhere has suggested storing waste (nuclear, coal ash, solar manufacturing, or any other kind of waste) in anyone's home. Or even their neighborhood.

He did kind of suggest that it'd be okay to just dump it in the ocean, which would be a terrible idea.

Re: Small nuclear reactors: tiny NuScale reactor gets safety approval

#502

Post by Klinky » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 8:57 PM UTC

djur wrote: post #287

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we can just put it all in your house and you'll be cool with that? After all, there are more dangerous things out there, and we won't be putting any of those in your house, so that makes it okay right?

"Would you be willing to have your house turned into a waste dump?" is a challenge that would seem to strike down virtually every industrial process dating back to the Stone Age.

I don't think anyone would say that a lot of industrial processes aren't extremely toxic and dangerous. The question was asked due to the downplaying of the dangers of nuclear waste. Just because something like dimethylmercury is possibly more toxic than radioactive waste, doesn't mean radioactive waste is safe, or that you want to be near it.

Re: Small nuclear reactors: tiny NuScale reactor gets safety approval

#503

Post by Klinky » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 9:11 PM UTC

bluejellybean wrote: post #306

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we can just put it all in your house and you'll be cool with that? After all, there are more dangerous things out there, and we won't be putting any of those in your house, so that makes it okay right?

Absolutely, why not? As long as the waste dealer is offering a deal that is satisfactory for me as the landowner/waste site, I would happily store said waste. Your question is a bit absurd; nobody is suggesting to keep it inside of someone's home. Should an individual not be allowed to make rational decisions about their land and property? If I owned 20 square miles in the desert, why shouldn't I be allowed to lease…

Your neighbors and county can certainly challenge the use of "your" land. I think you're assuming that ownership means you can "do whatever the hell you want". Ordinances, zoning, right of way, eminent domain, and federal regulations often restrict what you can do and may require ceding control of parts/all of your land, and if your neighbors are really pissed, they could certainly raise hell and make it very difficult.

Re: Small nuclear reactors: tiny NuScale reactor gets safety approval

#504

Post by p1mrx » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 9:43 PM UTC

codecamper wrote: post #438

why do we bother with this junk when we have a very large fusion reaction that is located several million miles away from us & delivers it's energy to us in the form of photons every single day.

> every single day

As a California resident, I would like the option to run A/C after sunset.

Re: Small nuclear reactors: tiny NuScale reactor gets safety approval

#505

Post by shadowprofile77 » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 9:46 PM UTC

i_am_proteus wrote: post #356

jhallenworld wrote: post #52

Here is the NRC website about this reactor: https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/smr/nuscale.html Here is an interesting sub-report: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2022/ML20224A525.pdf Information withheld for security reasons. One item concerns the "ultimate heat sink". What happens when the ultimate heat sink is lost? Well a design assumption is that it is not lost: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2020/ML20205L410.pdf…

Nuclear engineer here. I've read through a good portion of the regulatory submission to the NRC and have a few takeaways that oppose some of the less-well-informed takes in this thread: - The reactor differs substantially from existing PWRs by encasing the primary in double containment, using natural circulation flow for both normal operation and emergency cooling. There are no pumps needed (or installed) to move coo…

Layman's question: I don't see how this small reactor is so unique or why it took so long to be developed for regulatory approval. The article claims it produces about 50MW of power with a planned 60MW version. Well, there are already very compact reactors in use on today's aircraft carriers (the A1B and A4W) that produce a much larger 500 to 700MW per module and are also relatively small (after all they fit on individual ships). And obviously deemed quite safe for the exact same reason -they're on ships that travel to all major ports and contain thousands of crew members right inside the same metal hull that the reactor is in. Even more compact and fit into an even smaller vessel quite safely for the crew: submarine reactors like the S8G, which produces over 220MW and measures only 42 x 55 feet in size, with a weight that's not unreasonably greater than that of the NuScale

Basically: What's so dramatically difficult about doing the same for a terrestrial compact reactor to make something like the NuScale take so long to get approval?

Re: Small nuclear reactors: tiny NuScale reactor gets safety approval

#506

Post by freeopinion » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 10:09 PM UTC

mayama wrote: post #471

freeopinion wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't have a good track record of confronting the cleanup of nuclear waste. The US federal government recently shipped a secret load of waste into Nevada. Nevada was very unhappy about that and claimed it was done in secrecy because it was illegal. After a bit of a fight, the feds caved and have agreed to remove the waste. There is no plan for this stuff. The repository that was built in Nevada was never actually…

How can a multi million dollar construction start without necessary approvals?

DOE and NRC have requested something approaching $200 million over the last two years for Yucca Mountain even though it has been killed and revived and killed again. It's been dead for years, but it never really dies. They continue to pour money into it. But, as previously stated, they aren't allowed to use it.

Nevada has fought hard against it. But people outside Nevada (and some inside Nevada) keep trying to jam it down Nevada's throat. The illegal midnight run was just one example.

There had been some $10 billion sunk into the project 10 years ago. You can guess who has the incentive to keep pouring 100s of millions more into a supposedly cancelled project. If the whole point is to funnel giant money into somebodies' pockets, the legal status of the facility has nothing to do with the money allocated for it.

Re: Small nuclear reactors: tiny NuScale reactor gets safety approval

#507

Post by njarboe » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 10:13 PM UTC

shadowprofile77 wrote: post #505

i_am_proteus wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear engineer here. I've read through a good portion of the regulatory submission to the NRC and have a few takeaways that oppose some of the less-well-informed takes in this thread: - The reactor differs substantially from existing PWRs by encasing the primary in double containment, using natural circulation flow for both normal operation and emergency cooling. There are no pumps needed (or installed) to move coo…

Layman's question: I don't see how this small reactor is so unique or why it took so long to be developed for regulatory approval. The article claims it produces about 50MW of power with a planned 60MW version. Well, there are already very compact reactors in use on today's aircraft carriers (the A1B and A4W) that produce a much larger 500 to 700MW per module and are also relatively small (after all they fit on indiv…

The $1/2 billion they had to spend due to paperwork related to certification of the design. From an earlier comment[1] from a different thread about this approval quoting NuScale's press release:

"NuScale spent over $500 million, with the backing of Fluor, and over 2 million labor hours to develop the information needed to prepare its DCA application"

Military reactors don't have to go through this process and those designs (modified to work on land, etc) would.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24346808

Re: Small nuclear reactors: tiny NuScale reactor gets safety approval

#508

Post by therealdrag0 » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 10:41 PM UTC

mikeyouse wrote: post #44

foxyv wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$0.24 per kwh is a rough estimate I've seen for NuScale. Typically initial costs for microreactors right now are around $0.25 to $0.30/kwh which is about the cost of energy created by diesel generators. Natural gas is much lower. However they hope that as we make a lot of them the cost will drop.

Wow. That’s substantially more expensive than I was expecting. It’s been years but we always assumed ~$0.08/KWh for on-site natural gas generated electricity on US based projects.

I wonder how much more would that be if the median carbon-tax proposal was added?

Re: Small nuclear reactors: tiny NuScale reactor gets safety approval

#509

Post by therealdrag0 » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 10:45 PM UTC

pvaldes wrote: post #302

RangerScience wrote: post #131

Thinking about the cooling pool: Could you just make an off-shore in-ocean "farm" of these?

> Could you just make an off-shore in-ocean "farm" Not! Ocean is inherently unstable!. The first serious storm would dislodge and damage the whole farm crashing one module against the other before to vomit them in the shore. Some modules just would dissapear. And then you have a humongous environmental damage and a really expensive rescue problem trying to clean the fragmented mess.

Don't offshore wind farms do okay?

Re: Small nuclear reactors: tiny NuScale reactor gets safety approval

#510

Post by roenxi » Fri, Sep 04, 2020, 10:51 PM UTC

Klinky wrote: post #498

roenxi wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wouldn't be surprised if that liability is considered "tomorrow's problem", so no one in power cares about it. I was talking to an environmental scientist that other day who was lamenting that the liability for solar panel waste was being treated as "tomorrow's problem", and no one in power cares about it. If we factor in the tomorrow problem nuclear looks even better, because we have a chance of being able to de…

Solar does not have the special handling and proliferation issues that nuclear waste does. Disposing of or recycling broken solar panels is significantly less complicated than spent nuclear fuel and waste byproducts. Recycling and disposal does need consideration for renewables, as well as nuclear. You cannot just say "Well no one is looking into it for solar, so nuclear should get a free pass too!", especially when…

> Solar does not have the special handling and proliferation issues that nuclear waste does.

That is also what I'd expect to see if people aren't taking the issues seriously, so it isn't really evidence of anything.

> You cannot just say "Well no one is looking into it for solar, so nuclear should get a free pass too!"

Sure I can. The evidence to me suggests that, for equivalent amounts of effort and adjusting for the energy produced, nuclear waste dumps will do far less damage than solar waste dumps after adjusting for the energy produced. The amounts of waste are tiny to the point where it is unclear to me why anyone cares. If proliferation is a problem, bury it 2km underground in a desert and don't tell anyone where it is. Good luck recovering that on the sly.