California lawmakers vote to keep Diablo Canyon online

That is drawing short side conclusions from limited data drawn from a world that has per-selected against nuclear.

If you look at the energy need of the whole world, and from first principle try to figure out what is the best way to generate enough power for the whole world to live a first world live-style, nuclear is by far the winner.

And the result will be system far more reliable and robust compared to one built with solar/wind/storage and long distance transportation.

Well we can only speculated, but if you really think threw it, there is no reason what so ever that fusion should be cheaper. Maybe Aneutronic fusion but we are not even close enough to that do an even estimation.

Lets go threw the major costs of a power plant.

- Building the primary plant

- Operations in form of maintenance and salary.

- Fuel cost (including transportation and so on)

Now lets start with fuel cost. If we are talking about an advanced breeder fission reactor, thorium or natural uranium is basically free. Thorium is a waste product of Rare Earth mining, we have far more then we could ever use already. This material needs to be devolved into some salt.

Fusion on the other hand will need to breed its fuel. That would basically require to mine lithium and then circulate it around an already existing fusion reactor. That possible but doesn't sound exactly cheap, it would be an incredibly complex process.

So on fuel cost, fission wins pretty clearly.

In terms of building the plant, if you look at some basic assumptions about a bill of materials, its pretty clear as well. Many advanced fission reactors are not much more then a big bucket of some sort of steel alloy (stainless steal or some sort of nickel alloy). Not more complex then many advanced materials used in airplane or rocket construction. Its more of an issue with qualification then production. Inside of that bucket you are gone have some graphite tubes or some other metal tubes. That bucket is likely filled with some molten salt, not so much different from molten toothpaste.

Now compare this to a containment facility that needs to literally contain the heat a small sun. Not only do you need a magnetic containment that consists of large of highly advanced materials but you also need a physical material that can be blasted by a small sun.

What's cheaper to build, a bucket full of hot toothpaste or a complex shaped object that contains a small sun?

In terms of operations, a modern load following breeder needs very little refueling. Depending on the exact design you might even just continuously refuel and all you would have to do is dump some additional thorium into the salt. In some designs you need a crane to shuffle around fuel tubes every so often.

Not sure how commercial operation of a fusion reactor would exactly work and how automated you could do all of that. I don't think we have enough information to really estimate that. However its hart to see how much easier it would be then a fission reactor.

So I think in all major cost aspects, fission looks better. The real advantage of fusion is 3 order of magnitude higher density. But fission fuel is essentially free and dense enough that transporting it is absolute non issue, so not sure how increase density really helps fusion.

So I'm not against fusion research, I think its great. But we need to do research, not obsess about trying to build commercial fusion power.

Canada is actually the globally leading country in terms of commercial GenIV nuclear. Many nuclear companies are moving to Canada from the US and Britain because Canada has a sane legislator, utilities that want nuclear. Ontario is really at the core of global nuclear innovation.

The CNSC is at the very lead in terms of GenIV (hate that term) reactor designs. They created an innovate new way of going threw licensing. See:

https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-li...

Canada is also finally investing some amount of money into next generation fuel reprocessing. Canada might actually be the first country to really solve fuel reprocessing. Together with Moltex Energy they have a real plan of turning their CANDU fuel waste in fuel for next generation reactors. This kind of reprocessing is much better then the process used in France for example. It could be a model for the world.

All that said, Canada is simple not the market that is big enough. Its not the US, India or China. So for real impact this technology has to move from Canada to the US.

The US really did a horrible thing regulation, NRC is a terrible agency in a number of ways, specially when it comes to next generation reactors. The AEC had been far more active, since the NRC took over, almost nothing has been done.

Thankfully the US DoE finally started to realize how bad they were doing in some aspects. They made some fantastic changes like the GAIN program.

https://gain.inl.gov/SitePages/Home.aspx

However turning the DoE is like turning a ship 100x the size of the titanic.

So the real hope is that the DoE will look into the process of the CNSC and do a co-licensing. Meaning that if a plant gets a license in Canada. It will be very easy to do the same in the US. That would be the best outcome. Nuclear safety should have one globally process, at least for the west.

There are also some interesting things happening in the US. NuScale is a interesting company and their efforts while still being focused on PWRs does actually have number of things in its license that other companies will be able to use and build on.

In addition to that, Kairos Power is doing some pretty interesting things trying to 'hack' the traditional licensing process. They are trying to do fast iteration with nuclear the same way SpaceX does in space. And have the regulator follow along so when they are ready to build a full plant, the regulator already knows a huge amount about the design.

There is also some hope that some countries in Eastern Europe (Poland, Estonia ...) might start buying advanced nuclear plants, giving these plants more of a market. Since these countries don't have the very high level regulators, they might just mostly reuse the Canadian process. So a single GenIV plant built in Canada could be globally transformative.

So yeah good things are finally happening again. A lot of credit goes to ground up nuclear movements kicked of partly by Kirk Soronson. He rediscovered a lot of the molten salt work and published. And many of the nuclear companies, like Terrestrial Power, actually met at these early events about molten salt and thorium. He himself has Flibe Energy, their vision is somewhat more complex and longer term but very interesting and fundamental.

Its hard to see what happening in China. India has every intensive to do nuclear and they have some of the right ideas, but India is pretty slow moving.

Europe is just highly divided and every country is cooking its own soup. So its hard for Europe to serve as market. That is why the US is so fundamental. Its the only market driven state where you don't necessarily need focused central government driven push for next generation nuclear.

You will never have some Canadian startup building plants in France. So France did great with nuclear but also their technology stagnated and they are somewhat of an island. They threw away promising reactors like Superphonex, a GenIV reactor that was 3GW thermal and actually connected to the grid. But of course it was killed by left/green alliance and never revived.

So lots of stuff happening, finally also some actual button up support that politicians can point to.

I still believe in 2100 people will use mostly nuclear power and will look back on these times thinking we were idiots. "They discovered all the technology in the 60s, why are they not using it".

> The plant's once-through cooling system (OTC) draws water from the Pacific Ocean to condense steam driving its turbines [0]

Wikipedia seems to say that Diablo canyon is cooled by salt water, not fresh water. The Wikipedia page also outlines how they attempt to protect marine wildlife in the region. Do most nuclear power plants require fresh water? Is it a big problem?

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant

There is no requirement that reactors use fresh water. And there is nothing that says fresh water can't be used after being used to cool a nuclear reactor. It's not like the fresh water is consumed.