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0 pointsacidburnNSA3y ago0 comments

I'm not super excited about current SMR projects either, sadly. The economies of scale that they explicitly turn away from are very real. The economies of mass production that they rely on can't be achieved unless a lot of people are willing to buy the first N for high cost. But who will buy after the first few boondoggle a bit?

I am excited about standardized large light-water reactors at the moment, like the US/Japanese ABWR or Korean's APR-1400 designs. I wish there was more hype around them rather than SMRs and advanced reactors.

My favorite idea in nuclear to rapidly deeply decarbonize is to use a shipyard to mass-product large floating reactors. This gives you economies of scale and economies of mass production. Amazingly, this was seriously attempted in the 1970 and 80s in Jacksonville, Fl on Blount Island, where Offshore Power Systems installed the world's largest gantry crane and got an honest-to-goodness manufacturing license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build 8 of these. [1]

Sadly, my concern above with SMRs happened to OPS and they couldn't break through. Such a good idea though.

[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/offshore-nuclear-plants.html

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3 comments · 3 top-level

ZeroCool2u3y ago

I'm curious, when you're talking about the SMR projects, does that include the Natrium reactors from TerraPower? I think they're backed by the Gates Foundation? Those seemed pretty interesting to me as a nuclear layman. Also, I don't know a lot about Bill Gates, but he does seem like the kind of guy that if they showed some real success, boondoggle or not, he'd be willing to brute force his way past those issues by throwing money at the problem.

panick21_3y ago

I would say Canada is the furthest along (in the West) for true GenIV reactors.

They are taking an active approach:

https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-li...

Reactors like ISMR from Terrestrial Energy and SSR from Moltex that will operate at 500MW (rather then true 'small' reactors) are for more reasonable for scale.

They look like 'small' reactors but they pack quite a punch in comparison to PWR designs.

Any nation that just seriously commits to a single reactor design like this and plans to build 50 of them will do really well.

But I agree the same could be done with APR-1400 or AP1000.

peteradio3y ago

Wouldn't the possible location for floating reactors be much more limited than SMR projects? I would think special financing might get the ball rolling for SMRs, strong decades spanning incentives for first movers.

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