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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

#221

Post by bb88 »

coryrc wrote: post #152
bb88 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terrorists are only one piece of the issue. Corporations and "Responsible Adults" have done more to harm nuclear power in this country than any terrorist act has. ConEd and Three Mile Island meltdown brought out a mass of normal people to chant "Hell No! We won't Glow!" Hanford in Washington State. San Onofre in So Cal. Santa Susana Meltdown. The reality is that everyone wants nuclear, but no one wants to live near a…

Hanford was nuclear weapons, not nuclear power.

See "Responsible Adults" in quotes.

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

#222

Post by [deleted] »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #215
UltraSane wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#223

Post by UltraSane »

dalyons wrote: post #218
UltraSane wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lit…

You can't compare wind and solar to nuclear you have to compare wind and solar with enormous amounte of battery storage which is extremely expensive and it would be hard to make enough storage

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

#224

Post by UltraSane »

dalyons wrote: post #89
UltraSane wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

it is not at all a perfect match for nuclear. Solar produces incredibly cheap power for the daytime hours, pushing the nuclear off the grid (why would a data center buy expensive nuke power in the hours when cheap renewables are available?). Nuclear needs to be running and selling power at its high price 24/7 for it to be even close to economically viable. Only supplying power that people want(due to its high price)…

Data centers need power at night

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

#225

Post by defrost »

UltraSane wrote: post #223
dalyons wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lit…

You can't compare wind and solar to nuclear you have to compare wind and solar with enormous amounte of battery storage which is extremely expensive and it would be hard to make enough storage

For interest, solid actual real world as of now numbers on solar + wind + battery storage in South Australia:

Renewables Revolution in South Australia (April 2026) https://sagj.scholasticahq.com/article/160759-the-renewables...

Some hand waving on full nuclear build out across all Australia: https://nuclearforclimate.com.au/how-many/

That is soft on timeline, skills and expertise, sourcing to make it happen, etc. All the things that caused the Australian scientific body's energy feasibility report to conclude that nuclear in Australia (no existing reactors, staff, etc) wasn't economic or rational given so much can be done with the upfront cost of nuclear that immediately begins with returning energy compared to an uncertain timeline and blowouts not returning energy for ???

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

#226

Post by UltraSane »

defrost wrote: post #225
UltraSane wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't compare wind and solar to nuclear you have to compare wind and solar with enormous amounte of battery storage which is extremely expensive and it would be hard to make enough storage

For interest, solid actual real world as of now numbers on solar + wind + battery storage in South Australia: Renewables Revolution in South Australia (April 2026) https://sagj.scholasticahq.com/article/160759-the-renewables... Some hand waving on full nuclear build out across all Australia: https://nuclearforclimate.com.au/how-many/ That is soft on timeline, skills and expertise, sourcing to make it happen, etc. All…

Australia is the best case scenario for solar power. It doesn't work as well in a lot of places that don't get so much sun.

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

#227

Post by defrost »

UltraSane wrote: post #226
defrost wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For interest, solid actual real world as of now numbers on solar + wind + battery storage in South Australia: Renewables Revolution in South Australia (April 2026) https://sagj.scholasticahq.com/article/160759-the-renewables... Some hand waving on full nuclear build out across all Australia: https://nuclearforclimate.com.au/how-many/ That is soft on timeline, skills and expertise, sourcing to make it happen, etc. All…

Australia is the best case scenario for solar power. It doesn't work as well in a lot of places that don't get so much sun.

> Australia is the best case scenario for solar power.

Yes. (and no - it's a big country)

The USofA is also a large country with the same land area (mainland USofA at least) and many places suitable for solar and wind.

The South Australian capital, Adelaide, is on the 35th parallel (South), what works there likely works in the US at or below the 35th parallel North.

The essential point is that nuclear isn't a flat parameter free answer to all that ails - some places it makes no economic sense, other places it makes good economic sense ... and there's a world in between.

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

#228

Post by chickenbig »

fpoling wrote: post #185
chickenbig wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If solar becomes 2 times cheaper It would be good to see a techno-economic analysis of this. For instance, taken to the limit, if solar were free what would be the CAPEX and OPEX to produce the ammonia? In addition, the plant to consume the ammonia to produce electricity would not be free.

Ammonia does not require a plant to generate electricity. While fuel cells running on it require temperatures over 600 Celsius to get to 70% percent of efficiency and not exactly small, with cheap way to produce ammonia they would provide energy dense batteries that could run for months if necessary.

> Ammonia does not require a plant to generate electricity. While fuel cells running on it

OK, so it requires a plant of fuel cells. And the cost per kW (i.e. discharge capacity) is? And it requires some facility to produce the ammonia; what is the cost per kW of electricity consumed, and at what efficiency?

Numbers would help to assess the proposal, given the claim that a halving of the cost of electricity from solar would make all the economics for ammonia work.

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

#229

Post by seanmcdirmid »

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…

You need to look at where those nuclear plants are being built, in the east, and where the new energy is out west that makes it appear that nuclear is falling behind. Having power generation that doesn’t need to be transported via UHV lines is useful, it also acts as a nice baseline that keeps the grid stable.

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

#230

Post by chickenbig »

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #121
chickenbig wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no way SMR could beat solar+battery power cost even now. Not a particular fan of this paper, but it does illustrate a point ... https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8867359 showed that for the UK to go 100% solar it would need an energy capacity of 1/3 of the total grid energy demand over the year. Figure 6 A shows the big trend of 6 1/2 months of discharge and 5 1/2 months of charge (i.e. cycle perhaps on…

Not sure what relevancy a 2019 paper has today? It also seems like they are constraining the system to have no overproduction. It’s like assuming that a fossil based system has all its producers generating the expected capacity factor and then smoothing out the season and daily demand changes with storage. Due to the difference between summer and winter demand such a fossil system would also need to have months of st…

> Not sure what relevancy a 2019 paper has today?

The underlying demand and production has not changed so much since then. The requirements for storage still exist, and strongly depend on when the power is delivered as well as needed.

> a fossil system would also need to have months of storage

Coal and gas also get produced in the winter at a relatively constant rate. Plus we know how to handle piles of coal, caverns full of gas, tanks full of LNG, and linepack for shorter duration gas storage.

> you can just overbuild production capacity and leave a far simpler problem to solve

Sure, you then have an economic problem. The effective capacity factor of the intermittents get driven down. How are they going to be paid for, if much of the time the market is saturated?

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