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/
construction cost?
Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
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Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#92no one ever mentions nuclear proliferation risk associated with the production of plutonium.
it does get mentioned, and you can have nuclear power without producing plutonium.
The rest of hackernews seems to have decided that plutonium is a step on the way to solve the waste problem. What's your take on that?
Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#93The article doesn’t include the word “baseload”, which is an important consideration. Utilities pay more for peaker capacity. For the same reason, market pricing regulations need to encouraging sources that provide a base amount of power despite weather conditions: network reliability and security of supply are valuable. (Let’s ignore Texas though).
In New Zealand, we are dependent on seasonal rain for our hydro-power, and in some years we run dry and the whole economy is affected. In NZ the 1992 power crisis due to a 1:100 year drought required 10%-15% reduction in power usage nationwide, which caused a 0.6% reduction in the NZ GDP: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/how-we-learned-the-lessons-fro...
Even a predicted security of supply risk of 1% has consequences (even thinking we could run dry causes costs). Fantastic article: https://www.newsroom.co.nz/will-nz-run-out-of-electricity-th...
NZ is lucky that if we install solar electricity, we can effectively store it in our existing lakes, no batteries needed. We are unlucky that politically our government wastes money[1] on subsidising electric cars, when they could subsidise solar instead (in fact it just needs political will, private investors have $X*100 million plans already designed for solar, but surprisingly held up by lack of interest by government).
[1] https://www.1news.co.nz/2022/05/16/29b-climate-change-boost-... “A new scrap-and-replace scheme to help low-and-middle income New Zealanders buy EVs and a nationalised curbside waste collection service is part of a significant $2.9 billion investment into tackling climate change and reducing New Zealand's emissions.”
Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#94Nuclear is not popular because the fossil fuel industry co-opt the environmentalist to fight on their behalf. We should have better developed nuclear for the last few decades and we would be in a much better energy posture. Especially for an EV future.
Do you have any serious sources on this ridiculous conspiracy theory bread in Shellenbergers bubble reactor?
The reason we don't have reactors that recycle nuclear wastes is because ecologists have attacked the next-gen model with a bazooka.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix#Rocket_attack
This is why we can't have nice things, the ecologists have prevented the solutions from the issues that legitimate their political existence.
In germany and in the U.S the shutdown of nuclear has been a blatant lobby too.
Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#95Nuclear 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.
I think we should be building the best LWRs right now to decarbonize immediately: ABWR, APR-1400, AP1000. My favorite decarbonize rapidly at scale idea is to build a shipyard-based nuclear reactor gigafactory and mass-produce floating PWRs. (This was actually almost done in the 1970s in Jacksonville Florida. They had a manufacturing license from the NRC, the world's largest gantry crane installed and, everything [1]).
Assuming we do build 1000+ gigawatts soon, then we will need to look into nuclear fuel recycling with breeder reactors. The most popular Gen-IV concepts in this area are sodium-cooled fast reactors (SFR) and thorium molten salt breeder reactors (T-MSRs). We have 450 reactor-years of experience with SFRs and like 5 with MSRs. Many of the SFR years were not great, and the MSR tech performance has never been seen at industrial scale (though China is about to turn on a T-MSR really soon!)
So yeah I'm kind of a "decarbonize now with what we know 100% works" person. Focus on Gen-IV is fine for some people, but I think the industry and fans of the industry are way too overhyped on Gen-IV and not nearly hyped enough about Gen-III+. Japan can build gigawatt-class ABWRs in 36 months.
We had a ABWR licensed and ready to build at South Texas Project but we just let it sit there. What a sad sad thing. That's a billion carbon-free watts we are not using.
[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-01-26-offshore-power-sys...
Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#96Energy crises are caused by cheap energy. When energy is cheap people use a lot and stop investing in new sources. The resulting crisis causes high energy prices which causes people to be more efficient and to invest in new energy sources. It takes 20 or 30 years for this to play out. (mid 1970s, early 2000s, current 2022) Each cycle leaves behind a tranche of books that reprise the last crisis, with the interesting…
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Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#97Earlier 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.
No, NRC services are not free. They charge several hundred dollars per hour.
All the reactor people were asking for was to pay in several stages, instead of all at the end after a very expensive reactor design process.
Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few years ago I got to sit in a meeting between reps from a bunch of GenIV reactor startups, and a former chair of the NRC (not Jaczko). The reactor people said their main problem was that the NRC required near-complete blueprints before they would even look at a design. Getting to that point took several hundred million dollars. Then the NRC would give a flat yes or no. If no then you were out of business. That's…
Requiring blueprints would seem critical to actually being able to have a product to review for safety. Not only blueprints, but detailed material specs as well.
Nobody was asking for complete approval without blueprints. They just wanted an early indication along the lines of "sure, you're on the right track" or "don't waste your time, no way in hell we're approving anything like that." Or maybe "that sorta works but we would require X and Y," and then they could incorporate that into the design.
Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#99This 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…
Among the fusion concepts that does not heat water is Helion's. For that reason (and some others) I consider it the least dubious of the various commercial fusion approaches.
Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#100This 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…
> 3. We still don't have a good long-term plan for dealing with processing waste at scale;
Who is 'we' that should come up with the plan? Government? Most westerners don't like government planning - your own post considers government involvement as a downside. We expect the market to manage most things, but markets don't come up with long term plans, that's not their function.
If you come with a subject at random and ask, 'do we have a long term plan for X', generally the answer is no.
We don't have a good term long-term plan for dealing with global warming, the oil running out, falling birthrates for some nations, rising house prices, or for anything really.