Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor • Hacker News Board

Re: Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor

#141

Post by Certhas » Mon, May 08, 2023, 10:54 AM UTC

pyrale wrote: post #139

Certhas wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure I see the point of continuing this. Other than I initially thought you clearly are knowledgeable, yet you refuse to cleanly argue your point. You attacked me directly for bringing up that storage has a role to play in nuclear as well as renewables, and now you claim that renewables are not the point. I never claimed that they played the same role either. Again, why is that an issue? That said, the point…

> yet you refuse to cleanly argue your point. It's not a very large point, and I believe I fleshed it enough already. > so if large scale storage failure leading to undersupply is your worry (as you indicate elsewhere) I don't remember mentioning that. If we work under the hypothesis that we have large scale power supply available at reasonable cost, then yes, there is no reason not to use them. Currently, pumpable h…

Power2Gas has been a major topic. And the idea that this will become highly relevant in about a decade is behind the idea to allow Gas infrastructure investment as Green in Europe. This means Hydrogen but also synthetic natural gas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas

Methanation and methane storage is at the same level as Hydorgen storage in optimal models. This here has 500 citations:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.05290.pdf

They also cite something I haven't personally read, but which goes back all the way to 2009, again with hundreds of citations:

M. Sterner, Bioenergy and renewable power methane in integrated 100% renewable energy systems, Ph.D. thesis, Kassel University (2009).

Of course as the roundtrip efficiency is better, its preferable to store Hydrogen directly if that is feasible (and this is why a pure electricity sector optimization model will never show methane).

But fundamentally the idea has been for a long time to run Gas power plants on carbon neural gases. This is an explicit point in the EU Taxonomy of labeling Gas investments as green. They can only do so if they retrofitted to running on carbon free gas from 2035 onwards. Siemens is selling their stuff as H2-ready for that exact reason [1].

Pumped hydro can not be meaningfully expanded, its only a small part of the overall solution.

[1] https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/news/magazine/2022/...

Re: Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor

#142

Post by evilos » Tue, May 09, 2023, 1:02 AM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #86

evilos wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which SMRs don't have a full scale containment vessel?

None, although I think some (NuScale?) save money by sharing pressurized containment volume among multiple reactors. Just hope you don't see multiple correlated meltdowns. Containment vessels could also be made smaller if steam filtering were used instead of planning to just contain and condense it. I don't know if any SMRs plan to do this.

As other poster mentioned, each nuscale module is fully self contained. Not only that, but they've modeled every module having a simultaneous scram in a 12 module plant, and modeled that the water level was lower than nominal. Still walk away safe.

Re: Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor

#143

Post by Certhas » Tue, May 09, 2023, 11:33 AM UTC

friendzis wrote: post #140

Certhas wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can overprovision generation, you can build dispatchable storage solution or dispatchable alternative generation source. Every model I have seen does that. And for Europe at least that total cost of doing all that is below nuclear.

> Every model I have seen does that Not really. Both overprovisioning and dispatchable storage are hugely expensive, therefore dispatchable alternative generation is employed, which is gas. So in an attempt to move away from carbon-emitting generation these models make carbon-emitting generation integral part of the system. What models based on renewables actually do is try to find a problem for a solution: throw awa…

Please show a single publication that does what you claim it does. A single one.

I don't think they exist, or if they do they will not be the prominent highly cited ones. Yes, storage and methanation and electrolysis are expensive. These expenses are explicitly modeled in the energy system models. Modeling these expenses for a complete system that satisfies the security of supply constraints is the very essence of what these models do [1]. Criticism against them would be exactly that they don't assume some market/price dynamics but a perfect central planner.

Flexible loads are a fundamentally different thing than brownouts. Electricity consumers opt in to being flexible, and this is about sophisticated industrial consumers, not private consumers anyway. The market mechanism you describe would only be true for energy-only markets anyway, and no one is proposing energy only markets for primary and secondary control energy that balances out short term variability.

[1] E.g. Figure 7 in https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.05290.pdf gives the cost breakdown for a 0-Carbon configuration of generation storage (and optionally transmission expansion) investment that can serve all loads for the entire year under different assumptions for other energy sectors participation in flexibility provision. While this modeling set up is a lower bound on the costs, a deeper analysis shows that this is actually pretty accurate especially when storage investment is reasonably high, as the overall storage cost is dominated by seasonal variability which is highly regular.

Re: Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor

#144

Post by pyrale » Thu, May 11, 2023, 8:43 AM UTC

Certhas wrote: post #141

pyrale wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> yet you refuse to cleanly argue your point. It's not a very large point, and I believe I fleshed it enough already. > so if large scale storage failure leading to undersupply is your worry (as you indicate elsewhere) I don't remember mentioning that. If we work under the hypothesis that we have large scale power supply available at reasonable cost, then yes, there is no reason not to use them. Currently, pumpable h…

Power2Gas has been a major topic. And the idea that this will become highly relevant in about a decade is behind the idea to allow Gas infrastructure investment as Green in Europe. This means Hydrogen but also synthetic natural gas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas Methanation and methane storage is at the same level as Hydorgen storage in optimal models. This here has 500 citations: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1…

I can see that there's a lot of momentum for that, indeed. But as you told me earlier, we moved from a system where engineers and planners offered options to choose from to a system that is driven by political will, and implementation concerns come down the line.

Both systems have their flaws: the first one is clearly detrimental to democratic oversight, and may sometimes cause authoritarian problems, where administrators don't see or overlook problems caused to individuals.

On the other hand, political-first systems tend to kill unviable or uncompetitive projects way too late, because implementer signal is attenuated.

A good example of this is the development of nuclear power in France and the UK in the 60's: both countries had a local reactor project which was politically favored. France, where engineers had a strong influence on politicians, killed it quickly and bought US licenses for its program. The UK on the other hand moved on with their local graphite-gas reactors, which proved much harder to implement, and hampered their program.

All of this to point out that power2gas is currently at a very early stage, and since this program is dominated by political will, it's extremely hard to know how well it will work, let alone have a good idea of the economic figures.

Maybe it will work. I hope so. But it's certainly not a done deal, and it's extremely unsettling to see our countries' energy safety be debated based on a few scientific papers or a planned demonstrator by people that won't have to actually implement it.