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Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

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Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#21

Post by PaulHoule »

Retric wrote: post #16
version_five wrote: post #6

I don't think it's stagnant. I continue to see stuff like small modular reactors making progress. The obvious reason why it doesn't get more play is because it doesn't serve anybody's political goals. Renewables and carbon taxes or other measures to try and reduce quality of life (or opposition to those) get attention because they have good political value. Actually spending money and generating sustainable power, no…

Small modular reactors don’t actually solve any significant issues for the nuclear industry. Construction costs are dwarfed by operating costs and the idea that N small reactors with N times as many parts will somehow require less maintenance is wishful thinking. They very well could be slightly cheaper over the first 15 years, but nuclear reactors are designed for ~50 year lifespans and are really expensive to decom…

That's totally wrong about operating vs construction costs.

Nuclear plants are cheap to run once you have them built, but they are expensive to build when everything goes right and frequently they don't.

There has been a lot of hand-wringing about the costs of the nuclear fuel cycle and frankly it's a bit ridiculous. For instance, they were expecting Yucca Mountain to cost $100 billion to run back when they were planning to run it.

People look at that and think "that's a lot of money" but a nuclear reactor makes about $500 million worth of electricity a year so that is 2 years worth of electricity from the 100 reactors that operate in the US.

(It's more absurd that we'd bury nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain when 98% of the energy content of the fuel remains in the waste! A reprocessing cycle would cost "more" but not much compared to the capital cost of building the reactors.)

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#24

Post by missedthecue »

neonsunset wrote: post #13
missedthecue wrote: post #5

Probably for the same reason we don't see massively expanding horse carriage industry. Nuclear is on the way out despite enormous government subsidies. Just fundamentally too burdensome, expensive, and outcompeted by modern tech.

"Modern tech" is still vastly inferior to nuclear power. Think of it as humanity scoring a roll of the dice to discover 22nd century technology in the 20th.

Depends what you mean by "inferior". A horse-drawn carriage has less carbon emissions than an automobile, doesn't it? However, that's not the sole criteria.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#25

Post by PaulHoule »

evolve2k wrote: post #3

Storing nuclear waste for 10,000+ years is also unpopular and no-one wants it stored in their backyard and further does it add up to put aside proper funds to steward waste for 10,000 years.

Most of the waste is Uranium which can be put back into reactors, the most dangerous long-lived element in the waste is Plutonium which is also a good nuclear fuel.

Remove those elements plus the higher actinides (Neptunium, Americium, Curium, ...) and almost all of the radioactivity in the fission products has decayed by 500 years... It's less radioactive at that point than the Uranium ore was when it was mined.

Burying the fuel rods was a half-baked idea that was come up with in a hurry in the 1970s because of racist fears that brown people would learn to reprocess nuclear fuel and develop nuclear weapons. Now we are facing the certain danger of getting fried by global warming as opposed to a hypothetical threat of nuclear war.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#26

Post by Retric »

PaulHoule wrote: post #21
Retric wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small modular reactors don’t actually solve any significant issues for the nuclear industry. Construction costs are dwarfed by operating costs and the idea that N small reactors with N times as many parts will somehow require less maintenance is wishful thinking. They very well could be slightly cheaper over the first 15 years, but nuclear reactors are designed for ~50 year lifespans and are really expensive to decom…

That's totally wrong about operating vs construction costs. Nuclear plants are cheap to run once you have them built, but they are expensive to build when everything goes right and frequently they don't. There has been a lot of hand-wringing about the costs of the nuclear fuel cycle and frankly it's a bit ridiculous. For instance, they were expecting Yucca Mountain to cost $100 billion to run back when they were plan…

> cheap to run

2000 staff represents well over 10 billion dollars in just salary over 50 years. Add in replaced equipment, fuel, insurance, etc and it’s a long way from cheap.

The assumption they are cheap to operate simply doesn’t hold up even the most basic investigation.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#27

Post by SemanticStrengh »

Russophobia aside, the next-gen russian nuclear model (first exporter in the world, of nuclear plants) is built in 3.5 years, which is state of the art. And at the same time has a high throughput (1300MWe) (much higher than the billion dollar mini-reactor fad) and state of the art longevity. It's very difficult for me to find the actual prices, of the different nuclear plants models competitors, but since most of the cost is construction cost and 3.5 year is SOTA, I assume, if Russia price them reasonably that this will shift the balance of nuclear energy competitivity worldwide. (china nuclear is already price competitive however they don't export (yet?))

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVER#VVER-TOI If anyone has more info on those seemingly disruptive VVER-TOI, please share

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#28

Post by missedthecue »

sto_hristo wrote: post #11
missedthecue wrote: post #5

Probably for the same reason we don't see massively expanding horse carriage industry. Nuclear is on the way out despite enormous government subsidies. Just fundamentally too burdensome, expensive, and outcompeted by modern tech.

Actually that "modern tech" of yours is the subsidized one. President Obama was basically trumpeting how many new and awesome futuristic jobs those solar parks will create when the government unleashes the cash flood. Nothing competes with nuclear. It's just pure physics - atom is the biggest source of energy on this planet according to current physics. Whoever can't agree with that reality fact should see a psychiat…

Not sure what you mean by "nothing competes with them". There are fewer nuclear power stations in the world than there were five years ago, and there will be fewer in five years than there are today. Hardly anyone wants to build them anymore. They just don't make sense.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#29

Post by acidburnNSA »

Nuclear engineer here. If you want a deep dive into US reactor development history, I wrote this up on a vacation.

https://whatisnuclear.com/reactor_history.html

My take on the more modern economics is here

https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html

And waste here https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#30

Post by PaulHoule »

version_five wrote: post #6

I don't think it's stagnant. I continue to see stuff like small modular reactors making progress. The obvious reason why it doesn't get more play is because it doesn't serve anybody's political goals. Renewables and carbon taxes or other measures to try and reduce quality of life (or opposition to those) get attention because they have good political value. Actually spending money and generating sustainable power, no…

Carbon taxes are something separate from the technology. In fact, carbon taxes would drive adoption of better technology.

For instance it is completely practical to run the output of a fossil fuel power plant through

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amine_gas_treating

compress the CO2 to 1500 psi and inject it underground into a saline aquifer. Hardly anybody does it because it's expensive and nobody pays them to do it.

If there was a carbon tax that made it uneconomical to not do that, or if there was a subsidy for pumping carbon underground then people would do it.

It is all the same for nuclear power, extensions of renewables and other technologies that aren't profitable on their own.

It is a deal with the devil however to do so because it is a withdrawl from the government's legitimacy bank account. It's certain that any carbon trading system is going to lead to a few carbon traders getting rich and them feeding back 1% of their profits to politicians to keep their privileges. It's less certain that the planet gets saved.

It seems to be a more realistic plan to develop a technological revolution that really is cheaper than the alternatives... Because then you've saved the planet and the job is done

https://www.moltexenergy.com/

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