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First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled

arstechnica.com

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Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled

#31

Post by bobthepanda »

monero-xmr wrote: post #8
bradbot wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible to transport wind / solar energy across the country via high powered transmission lines?

No, because of physics you lose more power the longer distance it travels. It is also very expensive and difficult to build a network that can move power great distances to where it's needed given how dense the areas that need it are (major cities).

You can certainly get it to places closer, then shift those areas' power to farther away places, etc.

China has a large network of HVDC lines. Unfortunately, due to how the Chinese power market works, they're mostly underutilized, even in times of high power stress.

Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled

#32

Post by peyton »

kagakuninja wrote: post #23
vlovich123 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s important to remember that research and commercial funding for nuclear reactors has basically frozen for the better part of 60 years, which means that fission tech hasn’t been following Wright’s law and we’re still stuck with designs from 60 years ago. Things have heated up a bit more recently but this stuff has a long lead time (+ think of all the people who didn’t go into nuclear because of the lack of funding…

All the major world powers dumped tons of money into researching light water fission, precisely because it is dual use technology for making weapons. What has not had billions of government dollars in finding were renewables.

Forced labor in solar-grade polysilicon production is effectively in the billions of dollars of government subsidies club. Let’s not kid ourselves.

Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled

#33

Post by kragen »

gravitronic wrote: post #18
scythe wrote: post #2

>With the price of renewables dropping precipitously, however, the project's economics have worsened, and backers started pulling out of the project. I would expect this to continue limiting investment in nuclear, since the outlook for renewables just keeps getting better, and the stumbling blocks are increasingly jejune, like we can't build powerlines fast enough.

A harder stumbling block compared to nuclear is land mass requirements per Mwh: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source

no because even though pv uses orders of magnitude more land per megawatt (not per megawatt hour; please get your units straight) it still uses two orders of magnitude less land than is available

please do the math instead of posting random bullshit without any regard to whether or not it is true

i did

https://dercuano.github.io/notes/solar-economics.html

Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled

#34

Post by stonogo »

8bitsrule wrote: post #5

Nothing has changed since the early days. A helluva complicated and expensive way to boil water. "At present, atomic power presents an exceptionally costly and inconvenient means of obtaining energy … This is expensive power, not cheap power as the public has been led to believe." — C. G. Suits, Director of Research, General Electric, who was operating the Hanford reactors, 1951. ( Ref: Power from the Atom - An Appra…

In 1951 the Hanford reactors were making plutonium, not power. Only one of the Hanford reactors sold electricity, and not until the middle of the 1960s. That one went over budget to construct but operating costs were well under predictions. I'm not sure Mr. Suits had enough information in 1951 to make his claim authoritative seventy years later.

Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled

#35

Post by fao_ »

threeseed wrote: post #21
gravitronic wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A harder stumbling block compared to nuclear is land mass requirements per Mwh: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source

There are many parts of the world that are uninhabitable because it is too hot. The perfect location for solar installations.

And the world production of food far exceeds the world's population, yes.

The difficulty, as always, is logistics and economics.

Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled

#36

Post by downvotetruth »

threeseed wrote: post #21
gravitronic wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A harder stumbling block compared to nuclear is land mass requirements per Mwh: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source

There are many parts of the world that are uninhabitable because it is too hot. The perfect location for solar installations.

You used the word inhabitable. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled

#37

Post by cesarb »

bradbot wrote: post #6
monero-xmr wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am still very confused how power will be generated cleanly on cloudy, no-wind days with solar and wind. I am hopeful that hydrogen can be generated in the desert and moved by hydrogen-truck. Or grid-scale batteries actually exist someday. But if we write off nuclear, a lot of coal and natural gas will be burned.

Is it possible to transport wind / solar energy across the country via high powered transmission lines?

Yes, and it's already done today; for instance, in Brazil these high power transmission lines transport wind power from the northeast region (which has lots of wind due to favorable geography) to the southeast region (where most of the electricity consumption is). The total distance is on the order of 2000 km.

(A fun fact: many of these high power transmission lines were originally to send power from the hydroelectric power plants in the southeast region to the water-starved northeast region. With the rapid expansion of wind power in the northeast region, the usual direction of the flow has reversed, and it's not uncommon for that wind power to provide over a quarter of the power for the whole country.)

Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled

#38

Post by voisin »

monero-xmr wrote: post #9
NikkiA wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's never 'not windy' everywhere, plus gravity batteries can store power for days/weeks. Geothermal is also an 'always on' renewable.

If it was this easy, gravity batteries and geothermal would be everywhere and widely used, but they remain niche.

Because there are currently cheaper options. Those are last mile, high hanging fruit solutions.

Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled

#39

Post by readthenotes1 »

downvotetruth wrote: post #36
threeseed wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many parts of the world that are uninhabitable because it is too hot. The perfect location for solar installations.

You used the word inhabitable. I do not think it means what you think it means.

I think they confused "hot" with "wet"

Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled

#40

Post by kragen »

pixl97 wrote: post #10
monero-xmr wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am still very confused how power will be generated cleanly on cloudy, no-wind days with solar and wind. I am hopeful that hydrogen can be generated in the desert and moved by hydrogen-truck. Or grid-scale batteries actually exist someday. But if we write off nuclear, a lot of coal and natural gas will be burned.

Deserts don't tend to have much water, so where do you expect to get the hydrogen from? Getting water to the desert takes a pile of energy as it is, and typically once it gets there people want to turn it into plants.

you can use the hydrogen an arbitrarily large number of times once you get it there, and the amount of water needed is so small that this is not a major part of the cost of a grid-scale storage system system even if you have to truck it in, which you don't because even deserts have groundwater

please do the math instead of posting random bullshit without respect to whether it's true or not

specifically hydrogen is 142 MJ/kg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density and is 1/9 of water by mass, so each kg of water you drill, truck in, or collect from cisterns can store 15.8 MJ as hydrogen. a square meter of 21% efficient pv panel produces 210 watts nameplate, or 52 watts derating for the 25% capacity factor typical for deserts. that is 4.5 MJ per day. the water needed to store the panel's daily production weighs much less than the panel itself and is therefore much cheaper to truck in

obviously it would be stupid to truck it back out again unless you decided to do your grid-scale storage somewhere else

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