So each module is a little smaller than the reactor of the 1960's era submarine I served on and is based on the same pressurized water technology. I was a "nuke" so had to go in the reactor compartment several times. As far as I can remember, the reactor was about 10 feet in diameter. We went in the shipyard for refueling after the lifetime of the rods, which was 15 years. I could never understand why we didn't build these for civilian use (cost I figured) but now we will. Cool.
https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/news/2022/22-...
I never understood the argument nuclear power is so "dangerous". The US navy has fielded nuclear reactors in warzones since 1954 and no Chernobyl. Almost the entire fleet is nuclear-powered, including all aircraft carriers, subs, and battleships.
Imagine a world where economies of scale bring nuclear power down to the cost of fuel and maintenance. EVs would be a no brainer Natural gas would be obsolete. Nuclear desalination would completely solve the water crisis in the US West. I’m confident that with advances in material science we would figure out how to build safe nuclear aircraft and nuclear rockets, ushering in a new space age. Really the possibilities are incredible. It would be the equivalent of humanity going from horse and buggy to using fossil fuels, but another order of magnitude.
One of the things making this possible is 90+ percent enrichment of U235 in the fuel. That's weapons grade and won't fly in a civilian reactor. I haven't read NuScale's application in great detail but I'd be surprised if they used anything above 5 percent.
Oil companies paid to form that opinion in the public.
>no Chernobyl
Chernobyl was the result of a HIGHLY unauthorized, and stupid experiment... phenomenally stupid. So many red flags were driven past at high speed.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/19/us-depleted-ur...
material specific energy w*h/kg
----------- ----------------------
uranium 22,394,000,000
...
diesel fuel 12,666The Bikini Atoll in the Marshall islands is one of the most polluted places in the pacific ocean. The US military conducted nuclear testing around there and simply swept the pollution in one place. There are dozens of reports of cancer from both former military personnel an nearby local population. And concerns are rising with elevated sea level that pollution will be leaking at greater pace then currently.
These are just two examples of the US military neglecting safety concerns with their nuclear technology. There is no single spectacular event like the Chernobyl disaster. But rather decades of neglect and disregard to public safety which polluted many areas leaving potentially an overall damage on par—and potentially greater—then the Chernobyl disaster.
The Chernobyl absolute exclusion zone is quite literally 1000 square miles. Nuclear advocates try to treat Chernobyl (and Fukushima and [insert nuclear disaster here]) as an irrelevant outlier rather than what it is: tangible evidence of the impact of inevitable human failure.
A plant has to be well-maintained and competently run. Waste products have to be safely stored and transported. As soon as you add corporations to the mix, you've now created a profit motive to neglect safety and maintenance because the risk of disaster is low but the failure modes are incredibly large. Humans have shown themselves to consistently be incredibly bad at managing low-probability high-impact failures.
> The US navy has fielded nuclear reactors in warzones since 1954 and no Chernobyl.
Military use of nuclear reactors is quite limited, being largely limited to a handful of submarines and aircraft carriers using highly enriched fuel. It's not done out of economic merit either. Having a nuclear missile submarine that can stay deployed for months can literally be done no other way.
All that has very little to do with commercial power generation.
I'm rooting for NuScale, but so far every attempt at realizing the SMR dream has failed, so I'd caution people about thinking this is a pure slam dunk and it's just some sort of mass stupidity keeping the technology back.
"Standard LWR fuel in 17 x 17 configuration, each assembly 2 meters (~ 6 ft.) in length; up to 24-month refueling cycle with fuel enriched at less than 5 percent"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor#List_of_...
If Nuscale can hit their LCOE goal of $65/mWh by 2030, they will still be 2-3x the LCOE of Solar+storage today [1] (which will only get cheaper).
In the long term both technologies will play an important role, but the zero carbon technology we can deploy at scale today is the technology we need today.
1. https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
However, I am optimistic about storage, particularly since zinc-bromine seems poised to break into the market, with excellent resource availability. Zinc production is about 13 Mt/yr [1], and the battery offers about 67 Wh/kg, with ~1/3 the weight in zinc, so 200 Wh/(kg Zn), so potential production is over 1 TWh/year before running into availability problems. There are also about half a billion tonnes of bromine in the Dead Sea alone [2]. (Since this is my third Zn-Br post, I'll add that I don't currently have investments in them, but I'm considering it.)
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc#Production
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromine#Occurrence_and_product...
Furthermore, it is not feasible to power individual personal vehicles or homes with nuclear reactors, so using nuclear for the grid frees up those resources that can be used for other stuff, for that stuff.
I’ve noticed that many solar+storage installations these days are 4-hour storage, so not sufficient for baseload. I think the number would be higher if we were shooting for baseload from our storage.
I didn't expect that.
Similar bottlenecks occur with pumped hydroelectricity. To build it economically you not only need an alpine lake handy, it also needs to be close to transportation infrastructure. As those sites are developed, we'd turn to more and more remote sites.
That’s nowhere near enough to sensibly compare with a nuclear plant.
- Assumes solar installation in a sunny climate. It’s an order of magnitude difference in potential solar output between San Diego and NYC.
- Underestimates battery requirements by multiple orders of magnitude. Again, because it has comically inept assumptions.
- We literally cannot deploy solar at scale today. We do not have anywhere near the battery production necessary for utility scale deployment. We would need to double our worldwide battery manufacturing ability, double it again, double it again, and then double it one more time.
- Massive demand for solar and battery, combined with finite production capacity, would lead to dramatic increase in prices.
TLDR the other energy technologies can actually be deployed at estimated prices. Solar cannot be deployed at scale globally. At all. Period.
Because they use enriched uranium, 30% compared to ~7% in LEU which is used in civilian power plants. It's seen as a proliferation risk. And big reactors are more efficient. The problem is they cost a lot and have always had cost overruns. The reactor vessel has to be comissioned for building and rach one is esentially a prototype build to specs. There were even cases were the reactor vessel was defective and had to be scrapped. Building a larger fleet of smaller reactors in production facility with QA could bring these costs down and enhance safety.
The NuScale design will use >5% LEU with a 24 month refuelling cycle. At least we won't have to shut down an 1000 MWe reactor for refuelling every 2-3 years.
We shall see.
The US now has an equilavent to China's Belt and Road initiative, caled PGII, that it will use to finance infrastructure projects in developing contries. There are plans to build a 6 reactor NuScale plant in Eastern Europe with studies financed through this project.
https://www.state.gov/united-states-takes-next-step-in-suppo...
Is there a single small nuclear reactor of this kind that has ever been successfully dismantled? As far as I know, all small nuclear reactors that have ever been used by any navy are still in storage somewhere [1] until someone figures out how to get rid of them properly. Maybe that's one of the reasons why they aren't common in civilian use.
[1] Well, except for those still in use or on the ground of the ocean somewhere.
While scale is what killed nuclear, the people who initially decided on scale, did so for good reason. You lose a huge amount if you scale down, specially with PWRs.
These small PWRs try to get some of that efficiency back with factory production, but at best it just evens out. The advantage is the added flexibility. So I don't think that putting traditional PWR in a tube is really any kind of series solution to transform our energy system.
However there are good things coming out of this. For example, NuScale went threw a process managing multiple reactors from the same control room. That is the same thing that essentially all GenIV reactors want to do as well. Having managed to get that concept threw the regulator will make it massively easier for anybody that follows.
Its a damn shame that we don't have GenIV reactors since the 80s. We had the technology and every reason to use it. We could be living in a nuclear age right now, and I consider it the largest failure of humanity that we failed to do so. People in 100 years will look back and think we were insane that we did not use the technology we discovered.
Large scale plant construction is hard, takes a long time and the knowhow is disappearing (see recent issues in France with their latest project).
With a miniaturized plant the time to market is quicker, which hopefully will start having a positive effect on peoples opinions sooner when it comes to nuclear power.
It may not be optimal, but it has the potential of changing things for the better.
However, if you move to a molten salt reactor (cooled or fueled) you can significantly reduce the scale while still doing a 0.5-1.5GW plant. And you can use CCGT as well. This totally transforms the economics and while it would still a large plant it would be much more comparable to a gas plant in terms of capx. And in terms of opex the fuel should be significantly cheaper, while the labor required should be less in a modern plant.
The PWR real cost are the gigantic heat pumps and the huge required containment system. A molten salt reactor can be air cooled even in the desert of Arizona.
Hopefully in the future we can replace the CCGT with even smaller turbines like Super-critical CO2 turbines.
So I prefer large plants 500MW+ but they need to be molten salt cooled at least. My favorite design (for what is achievable in a reasonable time) is by Moltex Energy, the Static Molten Salt Reactor. Its basically the idea of filling the fuel assemblies with molten salt fuel rather then pellets and to cool you use another molten salt. And with some small amount of repossessing you can use current 'waste' as fuel. I think that design is of a scale and complexity that if some real capital got behind and government were willing to invest in their 'waste' rather then to drop it into a cave it could solve both the 'waste' problem and the grid problem.
Smaller plants can be produced faster with lower overhead, because the consistent design reduces risks.
So as dumb as it sounds, just making the thing smaller might be enough to soften public opinion
The second big use case would be Europe right now. If small PWR can be produced fast, like say within a year, those could be economical viable. The energy price for next winter is predicted (depending on which gloom and doom you read) to reach around 2x to 20x compared to the record prices of last year. Such prices can make a lot of technology economical viable, and a big factor will then be product availability.
It's not just factory production.
There's a lot of savings from just scaling down the design. Currently the pressure vessels for a typical large reactor (the AP1000) are build using forges that weigh (take a moment to appreciate the number) 15 thousand tons [1]. No such forges exist in the US.
Truth is, NuScale plans to source their pressure vessels from one of the existing vessel manufacturers, the South Korean Doosan [2]. However, it is very likely that their vessel can be produced with much smaller forges, and in time more manufacturers will have the capability to build it.
[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
[2] https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/doosan-to-make-pres...
If I were a poor remote county and I wanted to make sure that
1) my residents emergency needs were covered hospital, sanitation, water, emergency heating, etc
2) also had access to cheap power
Having one of these provide the base load for critical infra allows one to shop around for cheap renewable power wherever it may come from.
If the smaller reactors can take advantage of easier fabrication and logistics they might be cheaper, but that is an unknown.
However that is not the backbone of your infrastructure. I makes much more sense to start with one large scale design 500MW+ and deploy that as many times as you can and then you can see the places where that is overkill and you develop smaller reactors for those regions.
But in most countries with ~500MW design you can reach 80-90%+ of the population and since the design would be so well known and so mass produced it might make sense to just build more of those rather then some 50MW reactor that might be only be 25% the cost but 10% the production.
Last I heard, the big "solution" was to stick it in sacred Native American mountains in Nevada and New Mexico and let future generations worry about it.
If that's all we can do, people in 100, 200, 300 years may not be thinking what you're thinking they will think.
Sorry, but given that the climate catastrophe is the most pressing concern for humanity, I think that gives more weight that religious superstition over the "sanctity" of a mountain in the middle of the desert miles from any humans.
Securing nuclear waste to decay at the bottom of a mountain is a pretty good solution, the only thing against it really is political nimbyism.
Besides, if we don't tackle the global warming problem, there might not _be_ generations 300 years down the line to judge our actions.
Future people will be fine. Shit we discovered uranium because some guys wandered into a cave and it burned their skin. Locals avoided it afterwards and eventually it was studied by people who knew what radiation was. Any actual storage though would be deep underground, in casks, and behind concrete with lots of warning signs.
Solar and Wind require a backup for when there's no wind or it's cloudy. Their current default backup is burning fossil fuels.
Of those, coal plans are particularly salient because they do generate radioactive waste. Continuously. And pour it over the atmosphere. They contribute far more radiation to the environment than nuclear power stations.
> let future generations worry about it.
I think they will appreciate having to worry about that in exchange of not having to deal with not existing because of climate change.
Why would future generations have to worry about something buried deep underground? Just don't drill there.
Is your objection due to the sanctity of the mountain or another reason?
At the time, Robert Muldoon was Prime Minister of New Zealand and was pursuing "think big" projects for NZ including a planned nuclear power station. As one of the "GE Three" [2], Bridenbaugh blew the whistle that the quoted price tag of the power plant did not include necessary safety precautions which he eloquently explained would cost at least an order of magnitude more (greater than the GDP of NZ). Of course the whole idea made no sense in a country blessed with hydro and geothermal resources. In the end the project was abandoned for total cost of ownership budget reasons rather than nuclear issues.
I wonder what has changed since then?
[0] https://www.times.org/nuclear-power-back/2018/3/8/the-long-t...
It's situations where the emotional terror of acute risks forces you to default to a behavior that has less tractable, long term, systemic risks. Mitigating the acute risks is too expensive, so instead, you accept being the frog boiled alive because long term risks are harder to quantify and more nebulously terrifying. You're terrified of a nuclear meltdown, so instead you subject global civilization to decades of unnecessary fossil fuel burning. A nuclear meltdown that kills hundreds or thousands is terrifying, but coal burning that quietly kills millions from air pollution is silent.
Other examples...
* When you're terrified of Covid, so you suspend most of your activities and spend two years mostly staying home, gaining 50 pounds and decimating your fitness which drastically increases your risk of cardiovascular disease and overall significantly increasing your likelihood of dying young far in excess of the acute risk that Covid actually posed to your demographic.
* When we're so scared as a society of the Covid death spike that we stunt the social and educational development of children by years, which is potentially unrecoverable.
* When a small group of religious radicals kill 3000 people in a fantastical way, so you set yourself on a trillion dollar war to lose thousands more of your young people to combat deaths and directly and indirectly kill hundreds of thousands of poor foreigners, coming away not practically any safer than the basic changes to airline security policies would have done for a fraction of the dollar and human life costs.
This example (that I suspect you shoe-horned in to rant) undermines, but also fully demonstrates, your entire point because you've just casually and conveniently ignored the reduced risk _to society as a whole_. I.e., those actually vulnerable from getting sick in the first instance, but further still overwhelming the health and welfare services to the detriment of *everybody*.
But also reeks of FY;GM.
This sounds a lot like "we should ignore warnings about pollution because the cost of moving away from fossil fuels would be too expensive," actually.
Picking such an open-ended thing like this really undermines your point here. You want people's Covid-prompted behaviors (exaggerated into stuff like "two years mostly staying home, gaining 50 pounds") to be compared to "fear of nuclear meltdown." But you can't substantiate those long-term risks in anything like the same way we can those of burning coal at this point. Is Covid more "potentially unrecoverable" for kids and young adults than themselves or family members being drafted for a world war and dying en masse? Than school shootings that we tolerate for vague "protect our liberty" talk?
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/7/5/heres-why-we-re...
"Cowardice"? From an old version of the Wikipedia article, "Fear and excessive self-concern lead one to not do things of benefit to oneself and one's group" [0]
It's funny because I was actually able to lose 50 pounds by establishing an exercise routine at home.
I understand your argument but it doesn't work for COVID: if anything lockdowns gives people more time to exercise instead of commuting via car.
It's kind of fair enough to be afraid with a chances of meltdown projected at 1/3704 reactor years:
https://lemielleux.com/what-are-the-chances-of-a-nuclear-pow...
Those odds are why not a single insurance company will insure a nuclear reactor for more than 0.3% the cost of a nuclear disaster.
Speaking of fallacies, your argument squarely falls under the false dilemma fallacy. Nuclear is not the only form of green energy. In fact it is by far the most expensive one as well as the only one that imparts a small chance of catastrophe.
It isnt needed to provide reliable power either. Wind, solar, pumped storage, batteries and demand shaping can, together, do it cheaper:
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3539703-no-mi...
https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-530000-potent...
that trillion estimate, one of the lower ones by the way, is a cost figure without the associated profits and revenue. As horrible as it is and was, the 'military industrial complex', as a whole, profited incredibly -- this 'trickled down', a phrase I hate to use , all across the United States in the form of jobs from market players and call-for-bids across the nation to fill in niche topics (like airport security, for example) that were otherwise un-worked beforehand.
Another aside : the proof that airport security has changed anything for the better is scant at best, and corrupt at worst.
tl;dr : if you think any of the wars in the middle east were fought for the sake of 'American Safety', whatever that might be, then you're just not paying enough attention.
Why replace one type of antiscience/antiintelectualism (anti nuclear people) with another (antivax)?
Good thing nuclear doesn't produce hazardous waste we need to store safely for thousands of years. That would be a pretty horrible, long term risk.
But OTOH who gives a fsck about generations to come, storing the waste safely while I'm still alive should be doable.
NZ has a very green power grid but it's not perfect and suffers from reliability issues dependent on snowfall to fill the hydro lakes. Nuclear would have and still could provide a lot more security in that area.
I'm hoping NZ sees the light and accepts small nuclear as a decent method of going to 100% green sources (currently it's 85%)
If they did go ahead without safety measures, and had an incident, the plant would likely be shut down, and then you have the domino effect that Fukishima had (e.g., Germany shutting down all their plants). Nuclear can be viable when both proper safety can be ensured economically, and when that surety can be shared by its voting population
What matters more imo is reliability and energy security and in those respects nuclear makes me a lot more confident than renewables such as solar or wind.
With oil and gas, the hidden cost was climate change. Although global climate change was imagined as early as 1896 by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius [1], it was not publicly acknowledged by the "7 Sisters" [2] until April 2014 [3]. We think we know what oil and gas costs with what we pay at the pump, but those costs usually miss the $500 billion in direct subsidies [4], the military costs of protecting those interests and of course the costs of neutralizing climate change.
With nuclear, the hidden cost is both long-term storage of waste and the cost of nuclear accidents. The merchants of nuclear power plants do not list those costs on the sale price. Again we get the sticker shock once it is too big to fail. I still have not met anyone who is prepared to have nuclear waste stored in their "neighborhood" for the next thousands of years. So it accumulates on-site, where there was no real planned long-term storage accommodation.
I'm not arguing for or against one form of energy. Rather I am arguing for more transparency in our presentation of the costs.
[1] https://www.livescience.com/humans-first-warned-about-climat...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sisters_(oil_companies)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont...
Each dollar spent on a nuke is exactly that dollar not spent on renewables, instead. But it takes with it another dollar spent on coal while waiting for construction to complete.
The amount spent just on coal and coal plant operation during those ten long years is enough, by itself, to build enough renewables to displace the nuke. The cost of building the nuke itself is enough to build several times enough to displace the nuke, beyond.
And the renewables would come on immediately, displacing carbon immediately.
Without radically increasing build-out of renewables, we will fail to avert climate catastrophe. The exact mode of civilization collapse in that case is debatable, but global thermonuclear war punctuates many.
Fewer than 50 people have died from nuclear power in its entire history, meanwhile an estimated 8.7 million people die each year from fossil fuels [0].
[0] https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-are-the-ef...
The environmental lobby does not exist, but pressure from NatGas producers to "orient" the Greens towards fear of NP did & does.
However the idea that climate change is political capital for them is ludicrous: clearly their activism totally failed...
No, it’s just that the roots of the green movement are mixed with the nuclear disarmament movement, and the rejection of nuclear unfortunately got carried on to civilian power plants :(
How about the oil and gas lobby?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...
fossil fuel lobby though... they have billions of reasons to lobby against nuclear, to the point that they may give eco-terrorists money to do their work for them. can't say this happened, but see Germany - it's the least effort rational explanation.
> In addition, they're structured in a way to allow passive safety, where no operator actions are necessary to shut the reactor down if problems occur.
The picture in the article is a NuScale Power Small Modular Power plant[0].
> Each NuScale reactor vessel is expected to be 9 feet (2.7 m) in diameter and 65 feet (20 m) tall, weighing 650 short tons (590 metric tons).
https://news.mit.edu/2022/thermal-heat-engine-0413
> Engineers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have designed a heat engine with no moving parts. Their new demonstrations show that it converts heat to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency — a performance better than that of traditional steam turbines.
All I can think of is Snowcrash and multiple sovereigns.
Micro grids with multiple redundancies make the size perfect for a community project.
I am firmly against a technology with such a unequal downside/upside ratio. It's not that nuclear fission is inherently unsafe, it's just that every reactor needs to be playing it's A game every day.
We need to be lucky every day, mother nature only needs to be lucky once.
Maybe, maybe we can treat these as giant durcell batteries and use them for five years then seal it in concrete on site. But that does not seem to be the play here - so all the recycling and transport and handling just scales up - and it costs to be on your A game. The US military might afford this. but even they will probably want to run down the costs in the next few decades.
I'm very curious what you're basing this opinion on.
That is not necessarily true of modern reactor designs. Reactors can be designed so that neglect by the operators, loss of coolant and other failures result in the reaction passively coasting to a halt.
Which leads me to an idea: a power plant divided into four parts, where each part starts construction on 1/3 the eventual power using the newest designs every decade. They run for 30 years. Then deconstruct and rebuild the last one with the newest design.
This would incentivize a continuous market for new designs over the next century.
What if you start by assuming failure, and then account for that by operating your reactors under millions of gallons of emergency cooling water? That is NuScale's approach.
The second half of your sentence is literally arguing that fission is inherently unsafe. Which is it?
You have two choices:
1. Fission is inherently unsafe: then why do the numbers contradict you?
2. Fission is not inherently unsafe: then what's the problem?
Sounds more like a slogan than an argument
The ability to centralize the production I imagine radically reduces the cost, or at least has the potential to.
With all the energy challenges we face, could the US government subsidize a program like this and make it a silver bullet?
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/smaller-safer-cheape...
[2] https://www.nucnet.org/news/first-customer-has-set-lcoe-targ...
Putting a conventional PWR in such a modular system isn't a silver bullet and has you to be proven to actually be cheaper and a game changer.
If you simply want 1.5GW it might be simpler to just put a single PWR there rather then like 5 of them.
I would say real GenIV modular reactors are the silver bullet, this is a step in the right direction.
Doesn't the modularity (multiple 60MW reactors in a single installation) in the NuScale design obviate the "Xenon poisoning" issue, since shutting down one or more reactors doesn't mean halting power generation as it would with a single, larger reactor?
Presumably the reactors can be shut down and powered up independently so addressing the "Xenon poisoning" issue should be just a matter shutting down, then powering up some fraction of the reactors, scheduled to maintain the base load required, no?
“An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose (’omnibus reactor’). (7) Very little development is required. It will use mostly off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.
“On the other hand, a practical reactor plant can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated."
> It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated."
Correct. That's why you design once and build multiple ones
How did SpaceX manage to get the costs down?
Re-prioritizing is also important. Safety of course should be the main issue. But I suspect most current designs focus too much on efficiency and max power as well.
How would you "bloat up" a reactor that uses passive convection, submerged in millions of gallons of emergency cooling water?
Light Water Reactors aren't the ideal way to generate nuclear energy, but they're proven technology, and it's hard to imagine a safer LWR design than what NuScale is planning.
Even France, without the regulatory or public opinion problems, is having difficulty building nuclear, and the construction project at Flamanville is an unmitigated disaster, just exactly the same as the US's recent projects at Vogtle and Summer.
And that's the reason that SMR designs are even being attempted. The design has always been rejected in the past as uneconomical. But with large reactor design proven to uneconomical, and a huge devotion to nuclear among some, SMRs are giving it a go again.
If nuclear worked well, there are always populations that welcome them nearby. Most, but not all, of our current 100GW has supportive neighbors.
But I always find it curious that these lesser problems of public support and regulations get so much more attention than a far more fundamental problem: economic efficiency.
Nukes have only ever been built where the cost was substantially or completely absorbed off-budget, typically by taxpayers.
NuScale says their nuclear power module (NPM) output capacity is 77 MW (gross) [1].
NuScale says their plant designs can combine up to 12 NPMs for 924 MW total output [2].
One megawatt can power 400-1000 homes [3].
[1] https://www.nuscalepower.com/technology/technology-overview
[2] https://www.nuscalepower.com/about-us/faq#T2
[3] https://www.betterhomelab.com/how-many-homes-can-1-mw-power/
https://www.nuscalepower.com/environment/coal-plants
And the grid already has good connections to those sites.
Whether that actually can be done is another question. Many people want traditional nuclear located as far away as possible from populated areas, but with coal they aren't as picky about location.
NuScale's version of nuclear is supposed to be much safer, but who knows if that will put people at ease enough that it can be put wherever is convenient.
I want to see modular reactors succeed, but the prospect of more nuclear waste depots with no long term plan in the US comes of to me as brazenly irresponsible.
Waste management is pretty much a solved problem [1][2]
> Some pose catastrophic risks to the communities they are stored in
"catastrophic" would have to be qualified here, and I think you are being hyperbolic, but essentially the only waste sites that have major risks are those from decades ago before we had good solutions. Nuclear is incredibly safe [3]
1. https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1550148385931513856?s=2...
2. https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1552655863751421955?s=2...
Plans to vitrify waste at Hanford are only barely reaching operation, more than a decade behind schedule. The plant won't be able to process all the waste on site when running at capacity until after 2100.
Meanwhile 56 million gallons of high grade waste is slowly seeping into the water table of the Columbia River basin.
My problem is with the lack of success in this area towards competently reducing risk and sequestering waste. It hardly seems like a solved problem when we our concrete implementation of a solution has yet to arrive.
Warn us, really.
NuScale is publicly traded. You can buy shares, the ticker is SMR.
The majority owner (about 60%) in NuScale is Fluor Corporation [1], another publicly traded company (FLR). The top 10 Fluor owners are mutual funds, such as BlackRock, Vanguard and Fidelity [2] . If your 401(k) is managed by one of these funds, chances are you own shares in FLR too.
I don't see how Bill Gates is involved in NuScale.
[1] https://newsroom.nuscalepower.com/press-releases/news-detail...
[2] https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?s...
What a colossal failure. This seems more like evidence that the regulatory regime was designed to make nuclear power expensive and controlled by a small number of companies with deep pockets.
Small nuclear reactors: tiny NuScale reactor gets safety approval - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24358850 - Sept 2020 (541 comments)
NuScale’s small nuclear reactor is first to get US safety approval - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24345288 - Sept 2020 (5 comments)
Nuclear Commission Approves a Safety Aspect of NuScale Power’s Advanced Reactor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16225386 - Jan 2018 (47 comments)
After having dealt with SONGS not long after Fukushima and seeing first hand the long-term adverse effects of Chernobyl in Europe I became anti-nuclear, but in time I realize that in reality what I was actually anti 20th Century nuclear business model and the corrupt regulatory frame work as most were built haphazardly in locations with immense inherit pitfalls, coupled with poor long-term logistical and waste management planning and ignored continuous warnings to decommission--TEPCO stated that the Fukushima disaster was entirely avoidable.
And that is what I think still needs to addressed, because the regulatory capture of these agencies poses a much bigger issue than these small reactors do, which are seemingly promising solutions to contribute to the World's energy needs.
0: https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactor...
"However, the NRC faced the same problems in obtaining accurate information as the state, and was further hampered by being organizationally ill-prepared to deal with emergencies, as it lacked a clear command structure and did not have the authority either to tell the utility what to do or to order an evacuation of the local area."
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
War is an enabler of gate approvals to innovation and development
It seems no one wants to discuss the huge progress made in the design of nuclear reactors over the years.
The idea that a technology which has been in development for 70 years hasn't improved enough to be practical is simply bollocks.