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Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise

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Re: Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise

#41

Post by mayama »

hwillis wrote: post #14

And a contrasting article from IEEE: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc... > Samuel B. Morris, the general manager and chief engineer of Los Angeles’s Department of Water and Power, traveled all the way to Geneva in 1955 to attend the first International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. There, he made a case for small reactors, arguing that because the “number of small units…

> Even if its cheaper to build small reactor vessels, MANY of the other costs become more expensive in larger numbers.

There is no way SMR could beat solar+battery power cost even now. With sodium and other batteries projected to reduce storage cost, it is even more unlikely that SMR could be price competitive in future grids. SMR is the only way that dying western nuclear industry could attempt to deal with ballooning compliance and finance costs and hope for revival. China or India doesn't have this compliance cost and still build conventional nuclear.

Even for the SMR usecase that got funding recently, mega datacenter electricity, there is new geothermal power companies getting funding and are transitioning from pilot projects to production. Some are using tech that is already being used in oil fracking industry for decades, so new geothermal tech scaling up has far less roadblocks technology and compliance wise. So other than military and mobile civil applications like nuclear icebreaker, I don't see the chance of SMR succeeding anywhere else.

Re: Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise

#42

Post by DanTheManPR »

fulafel wrote: post #21
DanTheManPR wrote: post #18

A lot of people are betting serious money that they will cheaper, more flexible, faster to build, and safer. Including me - I'm working in the industry, and I think they might very well be future backbone of energy production. But there's a real possibility when all this shakes out that SMR's only advantage will be their flexibility. And that might be enough. A major issue with gigawatt scale nuclear is that it's fra…

What % of global electricity production is in too small markets? Seems to be working well in EU at least, markets and grids being multinational. I'd guess many places in Africa could be potential markets that have underdeveloped grids but growing economies and populations. Hence the SMR industry in South Africa since the 90s I guess.

We're looking specifically at new power plant builds. The majority of that is in Asia, with China and India being the bulk of it. But there is a lot of Asia outside of those two, and in particular Southeast Asia has a lot of potential. There is a lot of long distance transmission line connectivity already, and more planned, but you still want to product power close to where it's used so as to avoid losses in transmission. And the finances for a smaller country are just more straightforward if you're not spending multiple billions of dollars on one giant plant.

The next big market is actually replacement plants in the USA and Europe. Electricity generation may have peaked there, but much of the generating capacity is decades old and needs replacement. There are a lot of smaller facilities that are not gigawatt-scale that need to shut down, and it's easier to plug that gap with SMRs.

South and Central America are small markets, but they won't be ignored. There is a lot of complexity here with the inter-national hydro projects and broken up grids, so I'm sure some countries will look into SMRs.

Africa unfortunately just doesn't factor in except as a long-term possibility for growth. It's only 3% of electricity generation now, and its share will probably fall as Asia electrifies.

This is all worst-case scenario where SMRs are less financially competitive than current gigawatt-scale designs. If SMRs do actually succeed in being cheap assembly-line reactors, then all bets are off and the industry will experience explosive growth.

Re: Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise

#43

Post by DennisP »

bell-cot wrote: post #28

Nuclear power's biggest problem is that it attracted, even back in the 1940's, a figurative army of techno-utopians - whose pie-in-the-sky promises of electric power too cheap meter, flying cars, and better-than-Santa's-sleigh safety were not quickly and loudly contradicted by people who knew better. Probably didn't help that many of those keeping quiet had obvious short-term interests in promoting "nuclear everythin…

Sure, and none of solar's advocates are utopian at all.

Re: Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise

#44

Post by actionfromafar »

RivieraKid wrote: post #32
soco wrote: post #3

With solar and batteries getting cheaper and cheaper, is this still a topic? Or at least for the time being until that "cheaper" gets cheaper enough?

Solar + battery is very land inefficient, that's basically the main argument. Edit: Per ChatGPT's calculation, nuclear is significantly cheaper than solar + battery in my country (Czech Republic) if we're talking about adding new reactors to existing power plants.

But batteries can be very distributed and stabilize and prop up the grid in ways a huge plant can't without building out distribution. (Situation dependent of course.)

Re: Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise

#45

Post by bryanlarsen »

fasterik wrote: post #38
soco wrote: post #3

With solar and batteries getting cheaper and cheaper, is this still a topic? Or at least for the time being until that "cheaper" gets cheaper enough?

The problem with 100% solar+batteries is that you need to massively overbuild for the system to meet demand. It's far more cost-effective to have some portion of generation come from a firm, weather-independent source. The main options are fossil fuels, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear. Since fossil fuels emit carbon and hydro and geothermal are geographically limited, nuclear is the best option in a lot of places.

> firm

That's the opposite of what you want. You want something that is cost-effective to operate at a 10%, 1% or 0.1% duty cycle. Like nat gas or hydro. Not nuclear.

And overbuilding isn't the only lever you have to ensure coverage meets your target 99.99% level -- geographic diversity works really well (the wind is always blowing somewhere), and wind power production is usually negatively correlated with solar power production.

Re: Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise

#46

Post by inglor_cz »

DanTheManPR wrote: post #18

A lot of people are betting serious money that they will cheaper, more flexible, faster to build, and safer. Including me - I'm working in the industry, and I think they might very well be future backbone of energy production. But there's a real possibility when all this shakes out that SMR's only advantage will be their flexibility. And that might be enough. A major issue with gigawatt scale nuclear is that it's fra…

Big reactors also need a lot of cooling, and we've just had a very dry summer in Europe which forced some nuclear power stations to dial down or shut down entirely.

Re: Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise

#47

Post by hocuspocus »

fulafel wrote: post #21
DanTheManPR wrote: post #18

A lot of people are betting serious money that they will cheaper, more flexible, faster to build, and safer. Including me - I'm working in the industry, and I think they might very well be future backbone of energy production. But there's a real possibility when all this shakes out that SMR's only advantage will be their flexibility. And that might be enough. A major issue with gigawatt scale nuclear is that it's fra…

What % of global electricity production is in too small markets? Seems to be working well in EU at least, markets and grids being multinational. I'd guess many places in Africa could be potential markets that have underdeveloped grids but growing economies and populations. Hence the SMR industry in South Africa since the 90s I guess.

Even in Europe you can't necessarily bring online a 1200+ MW plant just anywhere, especially in the recent market where some PV production is curtailed in summer and brings the spot rates to zero.

In theory we should start investing in synthetic fuel production, but it's been mostly vaporware so far.

Re: Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise

#48

Post by pfdietz »

georgefrowny wrote: post #31
pfdietz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The differences in deaths from (non-accident) nuclear and wind/solar are very small compared to the amount of energy produced. The effect of the statistical value of lives lost is tiny compared to direct differences in energy cost, and so shouldn't have any effect on which is chosen. This is not the case for coal, where the cost of lives can be substantial.

Yes, indeed all are far below the next one (hydro, 1.3, dam failures, I imagine). And brown coal is sitting pretty at 36+, i.e. ONE THOUSAND times worse than nuclear.

The cost for coal depends a lot on how the emissions are treated, and how deaths from CO2 are calculated. A general problem with the latter is these are global deaths, and foreign lives are valued far below domestic lives. Kind of horrible, but choices on spending illustrate this.

Re: Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise

#49

Post by wing-_-nuts »

actionfromafar wrote: post #33
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #25

Donald Trump does a lot of stupid evil stuff to further fossil fuels but getting all the tech nerds excited about even more expensive nuclear power is actually evil genius.

Yes. They are apparently scrubbing the truth but archive.org still has it. https://web.archive.org/web/20250507123042/https://docs.nrel...

I'm sorry, if you're gonna link to a 111 page pdf, please at least quote the area of interest?

Re: Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise

#50

Post by inglor_cz »

soco wrote: post #3

With solar and batteries getting cheaper and cheaper, is this still a topic? Or at least for the time being until that "cheaper" gets cheaper enough?

Scaling is a problem.

How many batteries do you need to power, say, entire Scandinavia during winter? That would be a lot of lithium, btw.

"Dunkelflaute" periods when it is dark and no wind to run the wind turbines are common in northern winters, IIRC the longest one a few years ago was 12 days long.

Which means that in order to have a reasonable buffer against it, you would need enough batteries to supply the entire region for three weeks. Not going to happen, unless we discover some much more efficient class of batteries.

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