Some years ago it looked like the future of small reactors might be so-called pebble bed modular reactors (PBMR). I wonder what ever happened to them. IIRC the most salient outstanding issue seemed to be that there way no clear way to handle a graphite fire.
First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled
281–290 of 332 posts
Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like, imagine something maybe 1000x as complicated as your car, that has to work reliably 100% of the time for 50+ years . Now imagine that we don’t have any practice building one of these things because people have been scared of building them for approximately 40 years, so the last person to make one is 70-90. Now imagine that the failure case for this thing is a disaster that causes an expensive cleanup in the sur…
You're right, however nearly every single point was also true 50 years ago, when we built many of these things around the globe (and many are still going, pumping out the cleanest energy the world has ever seen). The real difference between then and now, is willingness to take on risk. Developed countries of today are essentially victims of the innovators dilemma. We're fat and happy and complacent, and that's why we…
Not really, the original set had “defense” backing because of the Cold War, because nukes are useful for making, well, nukes. (As well as being an alternative to fossil fuels in the situation where that supply chain broke down).
Which means we’d spend any amount of money on them and they’re a strategic asset.
Many safer designs are (basically) useless for enrichment, (pebble bed, molten salt thorium, w/e), which means the military might use one on an aircraft carrier or remote outpost, if they had any reason to (which they don’t as there’s no NIMBYism far out at sea). But safer designs are likely cheaper to run long term as the failure modes are significantly less catastrophic. (Not that the current gen ones are particularly dangerous).
Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
Olkiluoto-3's budget also overran a lot to reach 11b. It's also an extra reactor at an existing nuclear plant so perhaps that somehow reduces costs, and it's built by a very established company. Now, on the other hand, as far as I know NuScale never built a commercial reactor before... so we'll see how many of their current projects actually come to life.
Olkiluoto 3 was a first of a kind project too. Was built by an established company, but one that had been on a decades long hiatus in building nuclear power plants.
Ah yes, it's true that Olkiluot-3's construction started first, although Taishan (in China) finished first.
Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Extreme events and subsequent changes are why it can be the "safest form of energy". After Chernobyl and Fukushima, regulation did change in those countries as well.
There must be a name for the fallacy when one is focused on avoiding a single risk while completely ignoring much larger and closer dangers. Nuclear energy has a minuscule list of total casualties throughout history. Casualties per megawatt produced? It's practically zero . At the same time burning hydrocarbons kills every single day through pollution. It kills millions yearly. Burning coal even spews radioactive ash…
When discussing nuclear vs coal, it's always funny to point out that coal power plants produce several times as much radiation as nuclear power plants.
Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly the parking lots should be the absolute first stop on the search for places to put solar. Literally all parking lots can and should be filled with solar. Nature preserves should be the absolute last place to install it. Why on earth would we displace wildlife and thus rile up the nature conservationists when the parking lot real estate has already displaced the wildlife that was there? The benefits are two-f…
> Why on earth would we displace wildlife and thus rile up the nature conservationists when the parking lot real estate has already displaced the wildlife that was there? Politicians probably don't like it because the construction riles up their constituents while it's happening.
The last solar install I saw retrofitted to a (reasonably large) parking lot took about 3 days & the lot was only partially reduced in capacity for that time.
There’s really very little excuse
Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not the battery being used for seasonal storage but the difference in rates of battery degradation. Suppose a normal discharge cycle costs 10c/kWh and a very deep discharge costs 100c/kWh to access that last 10%. That means there are energy reserves unacceptably expensive for normal operations, but it also means simply operating batteries efficiently automatically creates reserve capacity which is the entire poi…
Yes, what you're saying works. But only for short term outlier events, not storing power from summer for winter.
We can’t predict seasonal demand that accurately so trying to use a finite reserve for anything but outlier events is risky. Plan for a large deficit and the infrastructure you create to fill that reserve is sitting around in the off season reducing the size of your deficit. Plan for a small one and your estimate may be wildly inaccurate.
What’s left for “seasonal storage” is to cover gaps in production from extreme outlier events using surplus production. That is useful, but also largely covered by battery power as I just covered.
Granted if someone comes up with cheap enough seasonal storage it might have a place, but that’s a possibility not a guarantee.
Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your equation is correct except when it's not. We build so few gigawatt-size reactors. In the US only 4 came online since 1990. For most of the construction crew of such a reactor, that job is the first of that type in their career, and the last. They get trained on the job, and that (ultra-expensive) training is then never used again. Contrast that with the building of naval reactors, which are essentially SMRs. The…
> For most of the construction crew of such a reactor, that job is the first of that type in their career, and the last. They get trained on the job, and that (ultra-expensive) training is then never used again. I am not disagreeing with the idea of Wright's law. The US Navy very likely benefits from it, but NuScale does not, and possibly never will. However, a) this does include other prices such site licenses and e…
> Why does the Navy not build 3 smaller modules and get even better scaling?
That's a good point.
Actually the Navy does build such smaller modules. The Navy uses 2 types of naval reactors, one for Virginia-class submarines, the S9G, which is very close to one NuScale module, and one for Ford-class carriers, the A1B, about 3 times larger.
Each Ford-class carrier uses 2 A1B reactors. Why not 6 S9G? I don't know. But then why not a single reactor twice as large as an A1B? I don't know either. It looks like there are some tradeoffs.
In any case, the fact that the Navy can build economically SMR-sized reactors is encouraging. Of course, the Navy can use technologies that are not available on the civilian market, for example their reactors use weapon-grade uranium. So it's not completely an apples-and-apples comparison.
Still, NuScale has produced more than one million pages of documentation to get their SMR design approved by the NRC. One can imagine they also put a lot of thinking in the economic viability of the project. One way or another they convinced a large engineering, procurement and construction company (Fluor Corp) to buy them.
Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For most of the construction crew of such a reactor, that job is the first of that type in their career, and the last. They get trained on the job, and that (ultra-expensive) training is then never used again. I am not disagreeing with the idea of Wright's law. The US Navy very likely benefits from it, but NuScale does not, and possibly never will. However, a) this does include other prices such site licenses and e…
> Why does the Navy not build 3 smaller modules and get even better scaling? That's a good point. Actually the Navy does build such smaller modules. The Navy uses 2 types of naval reactors, one for Virginia-class submarines, the S9G, which is very close to one NuScale module, and one for Ford-class carriers, the A1B, about 3 times larger. Each Ford-class carrier uses 2 A1B reactors. Why not 6 S9G? I don't know. But t…
> Still, NuScale has produced more than one million pages of documentation to get their SMR design approved by the NRC. One can imagine they also put a lot of thinking in the economic viability of the project.
Just because the pile of sh*t is massive doesn’t mean there’s a pony somewhere underneath it.
Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why does the Navy not build 3 smaller modules and get even better scaling? That's a good point. Actually the Navy does build such smaller modules. The Navy uses 2 types of naval reactors, one for Virginia-class submarines, the S9G, which is very close to one NuScale module, and one for Ford-class carriers, the A1B, about 3 times larger. Each Ford-class carrier uses 2 A1B reactors. Why not 6 S9G? I don't know. But t…
> Still, NuScale has produced more than one million pages of documentation to get their SMR design approved by the NRC. One can imagine they also put a lot of thinking in the economic viability of the project. Just because the pile of sh*t is massive doesn’t mean there’s a pony somewhere underneath it.
You mean the docs they sent the NRC? That's not a pile of shit. The NRC is one of the most conservative regulatory bodies anywhere in the world, you can't send them garbage. Oklo tried that stunt and fell flat on their face [1].
[1] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/large-lwr/col/auro...
Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't you think we should regulate more the energy industries with most deaths per produced megawatt?!
If you are referring to coal, the answer isn't regulation, it's ending burning it completely.
I am referring to everything. Even wind has more deaths per unit of electricity produced. Only solar has less.