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Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

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Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#31

Post by roenxi »

pfdietz wrote: post #30
roenxi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large scale production of commodity goods is generally more efficient. Which is why microreactors don't seem to have any inherent disadvantages. The efficiencies tend to kick in with the raw number of items produced.

> microreactors don't seem to have any inherent disadvantages They have diseconomies of scale. Some of the costs of a nuclear power plant scale sublinearly with power. Neutron economy is improved in a larger core. Larger turbines are more efficient than smaller turbines. It doesn't take 1000x as many operators to operate a NPP with 1000x the power output.

Is that relevant? The economics of nuclear plants doesn't have anything to do with efficiency as far as I'm aware, the fuel costs are relatively negligible. They can afford to be horribly inefficient if they can get economies of scale producing the plant. So you can use inefficient turbines and have bad neutron economy and it wouldn't change the economics by anything in particular.

You'd also probably find similar issues with diesel generators, but small diesel generators do roaring trade and have great commercial applications.

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#32

Post by rayiner »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #9

I am still quite confused on the scientific consensus: Should we double down on renewable energy and solve its issues with lots of batteries or should we invest in next generation nuclear energy? Both at the same time? Does anyone know?

That's a political and economic question, not a scientific one. Science can provide input information, but the decision involves weighing all sorts of facts and considerations outside the scope of science.

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#33

Post by pfdietz »

roenxi wrote: post #31
pfdietz wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> microreactors don't seem to have any inherent disadvantages They have diseconomies of scale. Some of the costs of a nuclear power plant scale sublinearly with power. Neutron economy is improved in a larger core. Larger turbines are more efficient than smaller turbines. It doesn't take 1000x as many operators to operate a NPP with 1000x the power output.

Is that relevant? The economics of nuclear plants doesn't have anything to do with efficiency as far as I'm aware, the fuel costs are relatively negligible. They can afford to be horribly inefficient if they can get economies of scale producing the plant. So you can use inefficient turbines and have bad neutron economy and it wouldn't change the economics by anything in particular. You'd also probably find similar is…

Cost is not only relevant, it's paramount. Efficiency is only important insofar as it affects overall cost.

Diesel generators have the advantage of being very cheap -- an order of magnitude cheaper than NPPs per unit power output -- and of having much of their total cost being fuel cost, so they can operate at lower capacity factor. But even so, we don't see large power plants composed of arrays of diesel microgenerators.

(The solution for current higher capacity factor diesel users, like say remote operation at mines, would be to supplement them with renewables and storage to reduce fuel costs. This is already happening.)

A significant problem with any small power plant is fixed costs. A 1 MW(e) plant (Antares is said to be between 100 kW(e) and 1 MW(e)) making power at 90% capacity factor and selling at $0.05/kWh will gross about $400K/year. A single full time employee, like a security guard, will cost a good chunk of that.

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#34

Post by rayiner »

pfdietz wrote: post #25
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #9

I am still quite confused on the scientific consensus: Should we double down on renewable energy and solve its issues with lots of batteries or should we invest in next generation nuclear energy? Both at the same time? Does anyone know?

Nuclear partisans like to call renewables ideological, but I think this is another example of "the accusation is a confession". The empirical evidence has nuclear being uncompetitively expensive. The current focus on variant reactor designs appears to be something of a Hail Mary attempt to get around this sad state of affairs. You sometimes see them making an argument about energy density, which goes back to Vaclav S…

> The empirical evidence has nuclear being uncompetitively expensive.

France nuclearized 75% of its grid in the 1980s while the solar folks were faffing around. It's not a cost issue, it's that anti-nuclear folks have choked out the industry.

We need to take the boot off the neck of nuclear. Wind and solar aren't an avenue to moving up the tech tree of civilization, which will involve using vastly more power.

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#35

Post by api »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #9

I am still quite confused on the scientific consensus: Should we double down on renewable energy and solve its issues with lots of batteries or should we invest in next generation nuclear energy? Both at the same time? Does anyone know?

Both.

We should be investing in all non carbon emitting sources and we should have been doing it since the 1970s when we figured out pretty conclusively that this would be a problem.

Instead we had right wing fossil fuel shills on one shoulder and unscientific woo woo greens on the other, the net effect being that we kept burning more carbon. We still have them, Trump with “beautiful coal” and greens now opposing even solar power and batteries, but climate change is no longer possible to ignore. Some still manage it but those people are nuts.

If we hadn’t stopped improving nuclear we’d probably have emitted half the CO2 we have. It would have become cheaper and safer and more scalable and then when China industrialized they would have copied that instead of burning so much coal.

France with its nearly zero carbon grid is the existence proof.

It wasn’t until the 2010s that solar and wind became grid scale in a big enough way to matter. That was too slow.

Whether someone is at least open to nuclear power is my litmus test for whether they take climate change seriously.

I do. If we hit 600, 800, 1000 ppm CO2, which is possible if the world keeps developing on the back of fossil fuels, we are entering existential risk territory. Earth has had those CO2 levels before, and higher, but our species was not alive then.

We already passed the FAFO threshold for ppm CO2 and now we will FO. But that’s not X-risk yet. I’m talking about the next threshold, which may start around 600 but really kicks in near 1000. This is where you actually start asphyxiating. You get lowered IQ and impaired judgement to a small degree, but across the globe at a time when we really don’t need it.

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#36

Post by api »

Tade0 wrote: post #16
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #9

I am still quite confused on the scientific consensus: Should we double down on renewable energy and solve its issues with lots of batteries or should we invest in next generation nuclear energy? Both at the same time? Does anyone know?

China does: all of the above, where it makes sense. Renewables and batteries to keep your AC, workplace EV charger, stove, pool heater and (since recently) green ammonia producer going, nuclear to prevent e.g. aluminium smelters from seizing up. Also the cheapest way to make renewables work 24/7 is to build HVDC lines - they cost as much as a highway per unit length and even undersea cables would deploy for less and…

China is also still building coal and has passed Europe and will (if they don’t change course) soon pass the US and Canada and the other big ones on a per capita emitter basis. They already passed everyone as top emitter in an absolute sense.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

Not saying they’re not also building renewables and nuclear, but it seems like the policy is more “build anything and everything to satisfy demand” than a focused effort.

BTW: if you look at US emissions, the data center bubble hasn’t had much if any effect. They are still trending down. There’s reasons to dislike that industry but I’m sick of the mindless echo chamber doom on that issue. They’re not that significant in the grand scheme of things.

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#37

Post by roenxi »

pfdietz wrote: post #33
roenxi wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that relevant? The economics of nuclear plants doesn't have anything to do with efficiency as far as I'm aware, the fuel costs are relatively negligible. They can afford to be horribly inefficient if they can get economies of scale producing the plant. So you can use inefficient turbines and have bad neutron economy and it wouldn't change the economics by anything in particular. You'd also probably find similar is…

Cost is not only relevant, it's paramount. Efficiency is only important insofar as it affects overall cost. Diesel generators have the advantage of being very cheap -- an order of magnitude cheaper than NPPs per unit power output -- and of having much of their total cost being fuel cost, so they can operate at lower capacity factor. But even so, we don't see large power plants composed of arrays of diesel microgenera…

> Cost is not only relevant, it's paramount. Efficiency is only important insofar as it affects overall cost.

Oh sorry, I thought you were talking about efficiency. Ok, what is the cost is for these plants?

> A single full time employee, like a security guard, will cost a good chunk of that.

I dunno, a 1MW nuclear plant could end up being pretty small. It might easily be economic to install them places that already have security guards.

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#38

Post by api »

Is anyone working in the US on a waste solution that isn’t a big hole with a straight out of cyberpunk sci-fi warning plaque?

The French reprocess and recycle fissile material but that’s kind of a gnarly industrial process. Still they do it and it works.

The long term solution is to create a second kind of reactor that has a higher burn fraction which means a more fuel efficient fast reactor. Those would be, ideally, the big base load plants if we did this rationally.

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#39

Post by pfdietz »

rayiner wrote: post #34
pfdietz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear partisans like to call renewables ideological, but I think this is another example of "the accusation is a confession". The empirical evidence has nuclear being uncompetitively expensive. The current focus on variant reactor designs appears to be something of a Hail Mary attempt to get around this sad state of affairs. You sometimes see them making an argument about energy density, which goes back to Vaclav S…

> The empirical evidence has nuclear being uncompetitively expensive. France nuclearized 75% of its grid in the 1980s while the solar folks were faffing around. It's not a cost issue, it's that anti-nuclear folks have choked out the industry. We need to take the boot off the neck of nuclear. Wind and solar aren't an avenue to moving up the tech tree of civilization, which will involve using vastly more power.

We don't actually know how much that cost France, sine it was mixed in with their military nuclear effort. French auditors threw up their hands trying to figure out the actual costs.

What we do know is their attempt to build more NPPs now has gone spectacularly tits up, with costs completely out of control. This should make one view their earlier efforts with great suspicion. Have they become much worse, or were earlier problems concealed?

Re: Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

#40

Post by pfdietz »

roenxi wrote: post #37
pfdietz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost is not only relevant, it's paramount. Efficiency is only important insofar as it affects overall cost. Diesel generators have the advantage of being very cheap -- an order of magnitude cheaper than NPPs per unit power output -- and of having much of their total cost being fuel cost, so they can operate at lower capacity factor. But even so, we don't see large power plants composed of arrays of diesel microgenera…

> Cost is not only relevant, it's paramount. Efficiency is only important insofar as it affects overall cost. Oh sorry, I thought you were talking about efficiency. Ok, what is the cost is for these plants? > A single full time employee, like a security guard, will cost a good chunk of that. I dunno, a 1MW nuclear plant could end up being pretty small. It might easily be economic to install them places that already h…

Microreactors have been tried before by the military, for use at bases, which have guards. They not only didn't make sense to install, they didn't make sense to continue to operate once installed.
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