NuScale power just went public. Their modular 77 megawatt reactor was designed to be easy to operate and have passive failure modes.
https://www.nuscalepower.com/
Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
71–80 of 672 posts
Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Much like carriages, more modern alternatives have rendered it obsolete despite the loud voices that continually refuse to accept its eventual extinction.
The only superior potential more modern source of energy we're aware of that can match energy density, resource efficiency and carbon-free characteristics of nuclear fission is nuclear fusion. Other alternatives lose on one or more parameters, especially when it comes to environmental costs.
Maximum possible energy density and resource efficiency are not really considered when designing grids.
Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
It would be nice if, say, ten million dollars into the process of preparing blueprints, the agency could look over the prints and the plans for the remaining prints and say "yes it looks like you're on the right track, make sure the reactor wall you decide on isn't too heavy for those struts." In a much more precise way that probably costs a million bucks, of course. Regulatory intervention could happen at any point…
NRC is not a free consultancy group for postgrads who think they can build a nuclear reactor on their own.
Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#74Storing 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. Bur…
Haha. Flagged? I really wanted to know more about the racial motivation behind burying nuclear waste! Guess it's a sensitive topic around here.
Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#75Nuclear 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
What's your favorite or most closely watched Gen IV reactor? Figure you'd be one to ask.
Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you would benefit from reading TFA. It looks at the actual operating costs of current designs and the dropping price of renewables and points out that the fundamental economics of the nuclear industry are not great right now. It also points out that most of the high-priced daytime usage is about to be scooped up by renewables. This may or may not be fatal to the nuclear industry, but it points to the need for…
Sorry. Largest power density is still in the atom. Can't work your magic around this. The only reasonable and sane strategy is to R&D around nuclear. Whoever gets it right will rule, the others will be ruled. Not single bubble kept its integrity; renewables will burst as well.
You are right about power density,
If only we had an absolutely massive fusion reactor that could passively manage its own containment.
It would be so powerful that one such nuclear reactor would produce millions of times more power than we could ever consume.
The reactor could be designed to run indefinitely. No fuel or decommissioning costs incurred.
We could site the reactor at a large enough distance from population centers that we would not need to deal with its waste.
We could decouple the reactor from power generation. Just use safe EM radiation to freely distribute power wherever it would be needed.
The reactor itself, perhaps funded by some benevolent quadrillionaire, having no operating costs would be literally "too cheap to meter".
Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#77This is a solid write-up. I particularly like this part: > Most fusion concepts are just a more complicated way to heat water. It's kind of wild that our means of power production do ultimately mostly boil down (pun intended) to turning a turbine with steam and, as the article notes, this is an inherent cost problem whereas solar is a direct form of energy. I hadn't really thought about it in those terms but it's tru…
There is a known way to handle "nuclear waste": burn it in fast-neutron reactors [1]. The waste is mostly still uranium. The rest can still be burned, turning it into much less active isotopes and producing energy.
Yes, these machines produce plutonium suitable for nuclear weapons. But plutonium is a perfectly good nuclear fuel, too, and the US already has nuclear weapons, longer than any other country.
Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be nice if, say, ten million dollars into the process of preparing blueprints, the agency could look over the prints and the plans for the remaining prints and say "yes it looks like you're on the right track, make sure the reactor wall you decide on isn't too heavy for those struts." In a much more precise way that probably costs a million bucks, of course. Regulatory intervention could happen at any point…
NRC is not a free consultancy group for postgrads who think they can build a nuclear reactor on their own.
NRC's services don't necessarily need to be free. But they should be reasonable, both in fees, and in the process. They are a service run by government.
Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#79Storing 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.
Nuclear waste is not a problem at all. There's just a very very tiny amount of it produced, so storing and securing it, even with super-high expensive security is very cheap from the general viewpoint.
Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#80Russophobia 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…
Why don't you click from there to
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkuyu_Nuclear_Power_Plant
and on to
?
Which is about a project in progress in Turkey, having 4 of them. Just skimming [2] gives:
> The stake of Rosatom State Corporation in the project is 99.2%. The total project cost is estimated at 20 billion US dollars.