Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 257 posts

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

#161

Post by bryan0 »

derriz wrote: post #137
bryan0 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their design appears to have it roots in the (false) idea that what was holding back nuclear was perception of safety, rather than cost. And why do you think they cost so much? Because people need to believe they are safe from catastrophic failure

Large scale civil engineering projects will always cost more than simply installing stuff that comes almost fully assembled from a factory (solar, wind, battery or small/medium gas turbines). Opex will always be much higher for a generation facility which requires 850 FTE specialist employees to operate (US average per plant) compared to the minimal requirements for on-site employees for utility scale solar or wind f…

I don't think I get your point. A project will not be approved and funded if the local population does not believe it is safe, so safety must be demonstrated through a variety of means, including some you mentioned. This is directly tied to the high costs involved.

https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs:

> To sum up, since the early 1970s, the cost of constructing nuclear power plants in the U.S. has been steadily rising. This can be traced to a constantly shifting regulatory environment, which has continuously changed plant design requirements, and added more and more safety features, which often were required to be implemented on plants under construction. The regulatory environment is partially a reflection of the fact that nuclear power and the risks of radiation had become increasingly controversial, and that early understanding of the likelihood of a nuclear plant accident was often inadequate.

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

#162

Post by consumer451 »

arjie wrote: post #159
unclad5968 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does burning man have to do with geothermal?

They blocked geothermal drilling in the desert. After multiple years of blocking it with use of environmental law they finally managed to preserve it as a conservation area for sustainable tourism: > Organizers of the Burning Man festival in northwest Nevada have reached a settlement with a geothermal energy developer that cancels an exploratory drilling project that some feared would ruin the ambiance of the counter…

That's so weird. I have never seen more fossil fuels and wood burned just for art, than at burning man.

They should have had an artist work with them to make whatever the exploration gear was, look like a permanent installation. It might not have even required actual changes, just a label.

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

#163

Post by sojournerc »

unclad5968 wrote: post #156
arjie wrote: post #107

It's really a pity that we missed the boat on large nuclear reactors. So much more power would enable so many use-cases and cheap electricity would have enabled us to have much less gas heating. Massive damage to the climate caused by misguided regulation. I tried to write to deregulation.gov on reducing the fund allocation required for fission reactor cleanup but c'est la vie. Death by a thousand cuts and then a few…

What does burning man have to do with geothermal?

In addition to the sibling comment, I'll say that environmentalists have opposed nuclear energy for half a century, despite it being far better than coal or ng in terms of emissions. I'd say that the venn diagram intersection of burners and opposition to nuclear is significant.

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

#165

Post by asmodeuslucifer »

arjie wrote: post #107

It's really a pity that we missed the boat on large nuclear reactors. So much more power would enable so many use-cases and cheap electricity would have enabled us to have much less gas heating. Massive damage to the climate caused by misguided regulation. I tried to write to deregulation.gov on reducing the fund allocation required for fission reactor cleanup but c'est la vie. Death by a thousand cuts and then a few…

Nuclear power has never been cheap and never will be. Every country that has tried has failed, and that included the Russians, the Chinese, South Koreans, French and the Japanese. And you can't blame it on the environmentalists in Russia and China.

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

#166

Post by api »

sojournerc wrote: post #163
unclad5968 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does burning man have to do with geothermal?

In addition to the sibling comment, I'll say that environmentalists have opposed nuclear energy for half a century, despite it being far better than coal or ng in terms of emissions. I'd say that the venn diagram intersection of burners and opposition to nuclear is significant.

Environmentalism comes in at least two forms. IMO they are entirely different things.

One form is science-based and concerned with finding out how to engineer our civilization to be more sustainable and compatible with the Earth's ecosystem. That faction has been mostly either pro-nuclear or at least open to it when renewables aren't enough or aren't ready.

The other form is a romantic back-to-the-land anti-industry or even anti-civilization movement. It's opposed to nuclear because it's a "techno-fix" when the real answer must be abandonment of high technology and advanced civilization and a return to pre-industrial (or even pre-civilization Paleolithic) ways of life. For this group that's the only acceptable answer. Finding a solution to climate change that didn't involve abandoning industry or growth would be bad, since it would allow "business as usual" to continue.

Returning to pre-industrial or pre-civ times would require the deaths of billions of people, since you can't support these populations without industry, but they don't mention that. That's the quiet part.

The second group is mostly the group that has opposed nuclear power. A few have even opposed wind and solar power, believe it or not. It sounds ridiculous but look it up. You can find cases, albeit more fringe than anti-nukes.

The second group also horseshoes around to the far right in some cases. Anti-vax and general anti-medicine ideology and the idea that we need to be "natural" in everything was originally something more associated with these types of greens, but today it's part of MAGA. There'a also an offshoot known as ecofascism. Look it up, it's also a thing. Also search up "Savitri Devi," a very odd crossover figure here.

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

#167

Post by zdragnar »

testing22321 wrote: post #13

I wish the article had more details on the cost to build these reactors, the cost to operate, refuel, dispose of fuel and then decommission. Details about how long they’re expected to operate, and how much power they will generate in their lifetime. Then we could get a projected cost per kWh for the power they will generate. I ask because the last reactors the US brought online took so long to build and cost so much…

There's two reasons they take so long: large plants need to be redesigned as conditions on the site develop (soil type unexpectedly changes as excavation occurs) or regulations change during the process, and the second reason is that there's basically no nuclear construction industry.

The benefit of an SMR is that it can theoretically be built largely off-site without the same risk that larger plants have wrt needing to customize everything. That allows construction companies to centralize and reuse talent and suppliers rather than needing to drag them all over the country or subcontracting to people more accustomed to building offices.

In areas like where I live, there's weeks or more of time in winter where every day is overcast, short, and has little wind. To go completely renewable, we would need to pay southern regions to overproduce by triple digit percentages of their needs and then send the energy to us by HVDC that don't exist yet either.

A bad ice storm or tornado could leave millions without any power at all at the most dangerous time of the year to not have electricity.

It's doable, but we are a long way off and if SMR miraculously hits the right numbers, it'd be a better fit for us. Until then, we'll keep burning gas supplemented with solar.

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

#168

Post by rcxdude »

elcritch wrote: post #79
mayama wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ballooni…

If solar+battery were cheaper wouldn't the new AI data centers be opting to pay to build that rather than nuclear or LPG options?

It works better on a geographically spread-out grid, and the data centers are running into the same limit that renewable plants are, which is that the grid is struggling to keep up (in large part, in many places, due to a history of underinvestment).

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

#169

Post by dopa42365 »

asmodeuslucifer wrote: post #165
arjie wrote: post #107

It's really a pity that we missed the boat on large nuclear reactors. So much more power would enable so many use-cases and cheap electricity would have enabled us to have much less gas heating. Massive damage to the climate caused by misguided regulation. I tried to write to deregulation.gov on reducing the fund allocation required for fission reactor cleanup but c'est la vie. Death by a thousand cuts and then a few…

Nuclear power has never been cheap and never will be. Every country that has tried has failed, and that included the Russians, the Chinese, South Koreans, French and the Japanese. And you can't blame it on the environmentalists in Russia and China.

Except some of them are still building new plants today (large ones cause higher efficiency, unsurprisingly). For China and Russia those are entirely separate from the kind of reactors used for plutonium reprocessing or medical isotopes or whatever else, they only exist to boil water at the end of the day. The only incentive here is electricity, and both have plenty of other options available.

Bit of a paradox isn't it? They'd just burn coal or gas instead if that was much cheaper.

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

#170

Post by rcxdude »

UltraSane wrote: post #84
ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that you can’t assume ”always on” anymore. Why should consumers choose expensive nuclear powered electricity when cheap renewables, or stored renewables are available? They don’t and now capacity factors crater. Leading to what was once seen as ”baseload” plants being forced to become peakers. And running a nuclear plant with those fixed costs as a peaker/firming becomes stupidly expensive per MWh prod…

Baseload is simply the lowest wattage your grid demands in a time period. Solar and wind have not made it irrelevant at all. All of the demand from data centers very much assumes constant reliable power which is in fact a perfect match for nuclear.

What solar and wind have made irrelevant is the assumption that constant supply of the baseload is an addressable market for a power plant. That only works if the supply is the cheapest on the market (something nuclear has even historically struggled to achieve without big subsidies), and solar and wind will supply the baseload much cheaper than any other source when they're running, causing a lot of problems for any plant on the grid that wants to run at a constant output.
Post reply on HN