Illinois EnergyProf recently did a video on USNC's design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gtog_gOaGQ
(Though I think he used audio from the wrong microphone; the earlier videos sound much better.)
Ultra Safe Nuclear
381–390 of 536 posts
Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
And unlike a natural gas plant, it costs 3-10x what the equivalent generating capacity in renewables would cost. I come to post this Same Thing every time this discussion comes up. It's not about safety. Everyone serious understand nuclear, even current technologies, is "safe enough" to be useful to build out. Nuclear is outrageously expensive , though. And new reactor designs don't seem to be making much progress on…
Picking a nit here. You wrote: > Nuclear is outrageously expensive, though. And new reactor designs don't seem to be making much progress on that. Nuclear plants are expensive the way GE and Bechtel build them not inherently so. At some point I got to look at the Diablo Canyon cost-to-build breakdown and about 2/3ds of the cost were litigation, licensing, and specialized site and construction prep. Finding people who…
Nuclear has had 70+ years and untold zillions in government research money and subsidies poured into it[1] - if the same level of investment over time had gone into renewables, imagine where they'd be now.
[1] worldwide - germany, uk, canada, france, russia etc in addition to the us - everyone did build their experimental gas/molten salt/fuel recycling/pebble bed etc reactor research programs and reactors. not to mention all the free experiments and r&d experience from the military applications.
Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear
#383Random renewable energy-related question that I've been thinking about: Specifically wrt solar, a big argument against is that it can't provide power during the night and we don't have a good way to store energy. What I'm wondering is why it's so imperative that residential/commercial properties are able to get full power from the grid 24/7? What if prices for power go way up during the night (because it can't come f…
The simple solution to that problem is indeed batteries. Currently battery production is growing exponentially. Factories are crossing into the TWH per year territory. That's right now.
Batteries are going to be absolutely everywhere. There are going to be millions of EVs on the road and plugged into the grid technically capable to absorb from and deliver energy to the grid. And that's just cars.
For reference, one mid size EV with about 50KWH of battery is the equivalent of about 4-5 days of electricity usage for a normal household. 2 million such EVs would provide about 1 TWH of battery capacity, enough to power up to 10 million houses for a day.
Now add wind, solar, domestic solar (on your roof, windows) and grid cables to the mix and we are talking about a massive distributed network of periodically (over) producing sites and hundreds of millions of EVs, trucks, grid batteries, and other energy storage solutions capable of either delivering or soaking up or delivering in the order of PWH energy. That's basically happening in the next two decades.
So, we won't need gas plants or nuclear plants on the grid long term. Or rather, we might use them if they get much cheaper than they are currently are or are expected to be.
Of course, any kind of planning involving today's price levels of battery or electricity cost are probably off by orders of magnitude as clean energy solutions and batteries are still dropping in cost.
A 10x drop in price is entirely feasible with improvements in efficiency, mass production, use of cheaper materials, etc. For both solar and battery. There are so many companies working on a wide variety of this kind of improvements that I'd go as far as saying that that 10x drop in price is more a question of when than if. 'When' here is about 2 decades or less. It's the 100x mark that interests me because I believe that's feasible as well but obviously a bit further out.
A 100x drop in the price of electricity (measured in $ per KWH) completely and utterly destroys the business case for any form of nuclear currently being planned, considered, or dreamed of. Or rather it reduces it to a niche market for places where it is desirable to have lots of power but impractical to be connected to the grid, lots of batteries, and wind/solar solutions. These places exist of course. But they are far from populated areas. Think remote sites in the arctic, large ships, etc. Small reactors would be awesome for cleaning up the shipping sector.
One little snag here is of course that while small reactors are going to be safe, they can be made unsafe rather easily by slapping some explosives to them. You say small reactor, I say dirty bomb waiting to happen. They're kind of hopeless from a safety point of view unless you keep them in a maximum security facility. That makes using them rather expensive.
Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
Picking a nit here. You wrote: > Nuclear is outrageously expensive, though. And new reactor designs don't seem to be making much progress on that. Nuclear plants are expensive the way GE and Bechtel build them not inherently so. At some point I got to look at the Diablo Canyon cost-to-build breakdown and about 2/3ds of the cost were litigation, licensing, and specialized site and construction prep. Finding people who…
My guess is that the pitch of safety is to the public (experts already know it is safe enough and that insurance more than covers expenses). And that modularity/size is a pitch to investors over cost. From my understanding, small reactors haven't been popular in the past because they still have the same insurance premiums as large reactors. If I'm wrong, or this changes, then that's a big reduction in cost alongside…
If this team convinces the insurance folks that their design really is safer, and so their premiums should be low enough to make small reactors competitive, it could be a huge breakthrough.
Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
And unlike a natural gas plant, it costs 3-10x what the equivalent generating capacity in renewables would cost. I come to post this Same Thing every time this discussion comes up. It's not about safety. Everyone serious understand nuclear, even current technologies, is "safe enough" to be useful to build out. Nuclear is outrageously expensive , though. And new reactor designs don't seem to be making much progress on…
>it costs 3-10x what the equivalent generating capacity in renewables would cost Except renewables can't actually replace fossil fuels. They need baseload provided by fossil fuels to be viable. They are also defuse energy sources, and so require huge surface area and lots of materials for collectors - not great for a growing world, both in population and per capita energy needs. Oh, they are variable across days, sea…
I think this is artificially restricting the solution space.
We have fixed price and supply of electricity over the day due to historical reasons, but it's not the future. And we can make the change gradually using variable pricing and speeding up the transition with the tools of regulation.
And of course other developments will help counter the price spikes - manufacturing and cooling systems adapting their power usage patterns, hvdc lines, energy storage, houses getting more energy efficient to cool/heat by using insulation and heat/cold recovery in ventilation etc etc. Energy is currently just so incredibly cheap that most obvious improvements are left on the table or progressing at glacial speeds.
Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
Counterpoint: why is environmental impact of solar+batteries often not mentioned? Lithium, silicon tetrachloride, hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acid isn't exactly nice to produce or put into rivers. My 2c: have an "all of the above" approach towards research, dispassionately understand pros and cons and big-picture complexity, instead of retreating to tribes that ignore the complexity.
Mining and enriching nuclear fuel is, what, benign?
Comparatively, yes. You need so much less of it. There aren't very many uranium mines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#/media/File:Ura...
Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
And unlike a natural gas plant, it costs 3-10x what the equivalent generating capacity in renewables would cost. I come to post this Same Thing every time this discussion comes up. It's not about safety. Everyone serious understand nuclear, even current technologies, is "safe enough" to be useful to build out. Nuclear is outrageously expensive , though. And new reactor designs don't seem to be making much progress on…
Not to mention the waste which needs an armed guard almost forever, making the total cost of the energy almost infinite.
let us weigh the damage of secured monitored nuclear waste leaking vs the uncollected nuclear isotopes into the open environment released today by the carbon burning industry.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
also we don't need to prevent 100% of the waste from leaking just enough to keep from rising the natural ambient background that would be in the environment naturally before we extracted it. Secondly we have the means disposing of in newer reactor designs that use waste from older reactors as fuel and their waste has a much lower half life (down from 100,000 to 500 years)
Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
>it costs 3-10x what the equivalent generating capacity in renewables would cost Except renewables can't actually replace fossil fuels. They need baseload provided by fossil fuels to be viable. They are also defuse energy sources, and so require huge surface area and lots of materials for collectors - not great for a growing world, both in population and per capita energy needs. Oh, they are variable across days, sea…
I think this is artificially restricting the solution space. We have fixed price and supply of electricity over the day due to historical reasons, but it's not the future. And we can make the change gradually using variable pricing and speeding up the transition with the tools of regulation. And of course other developments will help counter the price spikes - manufacturing and cooling systems adapting their power us…
Only residential has fixed prices for electricity over the day. Industrial electricity has always been sold in variable prices, e.g. furnaces and other large consumers run when power is cheap and go into hold mode when it is expensive. There even is a large discount if you allow the power company to switch your consumption on/off. All that is already a reality and has been for decades.
Which goes to show: there still is baseload to consider, and there always will be. There is a green electricity ceiling that can only be circumvented with storage.
Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear
#389Eh. In my view, nuclear is very clearly safe enough, and has been for some time. What's more interesting to me is whether it's cheap enough.
1% of commercial reactors Have failed catastrophically. Seems like terrible track record.
Statista claims there are 440 nuclear power plants in operation today, and most of them probably have several reactors. So unless you're using some technical meaning of "commercial" that precludes things like Chinese SOE, I think the claim is just false.
Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is artificially restricting the solution space. We have fixed price and supply of electricity over the day due to historical reasons, but it's not the future. And we can make the change gradually using variable pricing and speeding up the transition with the tools of regulation. And of course other developments will help counter the price spikes - manufacturing and cooling systems adapting their power us…
Only residential has fixed prices for electricity over the day. Industrial electricity has always been sold in variable prices, e.g. furnaces and other large consumers run when power is cheap and go into hold mode when it is expensive. There even is a large discount if you allow the power company to switch your consumption on/off. All that is already a reality and has been for decades. Which goes to show: there still…
But still "base load" is no law of nature. Half the market is on fixed price, and regulation has so far dictated that there has to be a lot of "base load" type power production, and without co2 externalities priced in that's been profitable for producers too. But it's all rules and tech we invented and can be changed.
The amount of supply following the current industrial users are incentivised to do, and the requisite investments, will be much higher once the fixed price system is dismantled from the remaining portion of the market.