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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

#211

Post by asmodeuslucifer »

dopa42365 wrote: post #169
asmodeuslucifer wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They just wish away the decommissioning costs by claiming they will last 60 years, 100 years, or forever.

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

#212

Post by Timon3 »

sensanaty wrote: post #171
asmodeuslucifer wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How has France failed with their nuclear fleet, exactly? Considering they produce so much power they're selling it to their neighbours at a profit.

Unfortunately they have to shut down their nuclear reactors when it gets too warm in the summer, which is only going to get worse. Since nuclear isn't capable of generating baseload, we should instead invest into solar & batteries.

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

#213

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

UltraSane wrote: post #209
ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. That’s called ancillary markets. One such are ”capacity markets”. Nuclear power’s problem is that neither its spread between CAPEX and OPEX, nor its operational profile fits them. We also have electricity futures. Again with the problem that their cost is far far below what new built nuclear power requires. Here’s some reading on electricity futures: https://www.next-kraftwerke.com/knowledge/futures-market

The flawed economics of nuclear are largely do the NRC basically making it as hard as possible to make a new reactor. China and Korea can build reactors for reasonable cost per watt.

[dead]

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

#214

Post by bryanlarsen »

robocat wrote: post #141
bryanlarsen wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most cost efficient new-build grid is 90-98% solar/wind/battery depending on your locales insolation & wind coverage. (Source Ember Energy) The remaining 2-10% is nat gas, if you have a piped source, or coal if you don't. But 98% renewable doesn't mean you can hit 100% by adding 2% more of something else, it means your something else has to supply ~100% of the power 2% of the time. If China is aiming for that cos…

> supply ~100% of the power 2% of the time Or you design the majority of loads so they can be turned off for 2% of the time. Load shedding is a better solution than running peakers for [heated] towel rails.

If you do that, you'd then need to find a way to supply 98% of the power 2% of the time. It helps, but not much.

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

#215

Post by bryanlarsen »

UltraSane wrote: post #146
bryanlarsen wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Baseload is a cost optimization strategy only relevant if your non-dispatchable power generation is cheaper than your dispatchable power generation. https://en.acatech.de/publication/baseload-power-plants/

You need to have dispatchable capacity equal to or greater than your base load in order be able to guarantee you will be able to deliver it with 100% reliability year round. I am very dubious of any energy policy coming form Germany because they have managed to make their electricity among the most expensive in the world while STILL being high carbon.

> You need to have dispatchable capacity equal to or greater than your base load in order be able to guarantee you will be able to deliver it with 100% reliability year round.

Just one word change needed:

You need to have dispatchable capacity equal or greater than your peak load in order be able to guarantee you will be able to deliver it with 100% reliability year round.

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

#216

Post by melling »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #51
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…

To a first approximation, China does not build nuclear power. Nuclear's share of power production in China is 4% and dropping. It seems to me that the main reason China keeps building a relatively tiny amount of nuclear is strategic. Reasons like ensuring they never forget how and ensuring they always have buildable designs so that if something changed they could ramp up the program. And probably even more likely: nu…

China is building more new nuclear power than the rest of the world combined. They’ll soon produce as much renewable electricity as the United States produces electricity

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

#217

Post by inglor_cz »

moogly wrote: post #90
inglor_cz wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fission reactors in multiple European countries had to shut down due to heatwaves. And in Scandinavia (Sweden), they are "routinely" stopped for scheduled and most importantly unscheduled maintenance. But those don't have scary sounding German names, I guess.

I don't find the word Dunkelflaute any more scary than the word Kindergarten, but I am used to speaking and reading German...

And you might have noticed me commenting on the need to shut down some reactors due to lack of water elsewhere.

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

#218

Post by dalyons »

UltraSane wrote: post #208
dalyons wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i know they are (or claim to be). Im extremely unconvinced that meaningfully changes the flawed economics of nuclear power. I would love to be proven wrong and a wave of innovative economically competitive nuclear technology emerges... possible, but seems vanishingly unlikely. I think we'll see a few companies and projects connected to the administration get grants and tax breaks and favors, pull a few headlines, see…

The flawed economics of nuclear are largely due to the NRC basically making it as hard as possible to make a new reactor. China and Korea can build reactors for reasonable cost per watt.

thats, not true at all. Safety costs a little, but they are fundamentally massively complicated, huge, specialized, EXPENSIVE things to build. They require 100s of staff to run at all times. The insurance is so expensive only nation states can back them. The economics are flawed because on modern grids with cheap renewables, they will never pay back the ridiculous up front capex. Relaxing regulations changes very little about this situation.

China and Koreas are massively state subsidized (koreas 51%, chinas 100%). Which obscures the real cost, and these state enterprises dont have to pay insurance or decommissioning. Which is the only way you can make them work today - massive state subsidies.

if your argument is "well without regulations someone could build a reactor that somehow avoids all these economic constraints" . Maybe, but today thats a fantasy.

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

#219

Post by stymaar »

will5421 wrote: post #110
stymaar wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is new geothermal power companies getting funding and are transitioning from pilot projects to production. If geothermal works economically (outside of volcanic zones where it already does) then it's game over for any other power source except existing dams though because it solves all problems at once. That'd be a great thing for humanity but I don't think it's worth stopping pursuing alternatives already, b…

Won’t geothermal cool the Earth’s core?

Technically it would, but the same way an individual ant's breath contribute to global warming.

Note that the thermal energy contained in the inner earth isn't a fixed amount: the earth constantly generates new heat from friction and radioactivity, and that new heat is radiated away in space at night, alone the heat captured from the sun during the day. So technically geothermal will increase the efficiency of this heat transfer a tiny bit, but it's really a negligible amount. (In reality the ant's contribution to global warming is probably orders of magnitude than the phenomenon we're talking about here).

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

#220

Post by bb88 »

Mawr wrote: post #178
bb88 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The potential for widespread radiation leakage from nuclear doesn't exist with wind or solar. I would think a terrorist would hit a nuclear power plant over any wind or solar farms. The Chernobyl exclusion zone will remain uninhabitable for the next 20,000 years.

Now calculate what % of habitable land on Earth that exclusion zone takes up. Yeah, that's a lot of zeroes.

When you can sell NYC on building a nuclear power plant on Manhattan, then I will agree with you.
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