Illinois Energy Prof has an excellent YT channel on energy, and has a great talk on IV gen reactor design. Saw it 4 years ago, so pumped to see some of the ideas he was talking about get plugged into the grid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mJ3S-VQuHY&t=490s for those who want to know more
I know there's a lot of hate for nuclear (much of it understandable), but if we hadn't fucked it up in the 70's then climate change would not be a thing right now.
Yes, renewables and energy storage are good things too but the modern world is built on cheap energy and the more the merrier.
Side note: I became enamored with LFTR when it started getting promoted back in the day and I still think that too would be worth tackling.
Yes, this is also why China invests more into renewables than in nuclear: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/06/renewables-in-china-tre...
This is driven purely by economic factors, for the first time since the discovery of fossil fuels, except the blip where we dammed up pretty much every single river globally to provide hydropower, we have in renewables have found a new cheaper energy source.
Renewables are cheap energy.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carb...
It has killed very few people, expense isn't a reason for hate, and everything else has pretty much been a win (land usage minimal, minimal byproducts, etc).
I, like many of my peers feel like we are being grifted by the boomer generation.
How is the fuel efficiency for this design?
Walk-away safe is a major benefit, and is worth some sacrifice of efficiency.
Nuclear reactors must meet stringent safety standards, not with hand-wavy "but people die from fossil fuel pollution" rhetoric; and at the same time, fossil-fuel-fired plants must be made to emit a lot less, through filtering and other technological means.
For reference, traditional nuclear is 4-6x as expensive as wind/solar, and wind/solar are still dropping. For baseload the gas turbine still beats the pants off of nuclear.
I think nuclear needs to get to 2-3x unsubsidized to be relevant long-term, but that's a long road.
Not if you price carbon.
> For reference, traditional nuclear is 4-6x as expensive as wind/solar, and wind/solar are still dropping.
That's cost per MWh generated not accounting for when you need it. Renewables need both short-term storage and long-term storage.
If you generate with solar, what do you do at night? You'd need 12 hours of storage. Maybe that's economical in some contexts but it definitely raises the cost.
Now what do you do if it's cloudy or still for a week, or a month? 720 hours of storage would be crazy expensive. You could use natural gas plants or similar, but then you have to pay the cost of maintaining natural gas plants and the associated infrastructure that you only use 2% of the time.
1GW nuclear plant vs 1GW (average) of solar + 12GWh of storage + 1GW natural gas plant + rarely used gas pipelines or 720GWh of on-site reserves, which costs more?
Fingers crossed I got some of this right...
Germany has replaced what nuclear has generated years ago and is on track to decommission all its coal plants.
No reason to waste money on nuclear anymore.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nuclears-share-world...
I do dislike the terminology/categorization around 'fourth generation'. The first ever proposed commercial reactor (the Daniels Pile) was a pebble bed gas cooled reactor concept, worked on at Oak Ridge in the 1940s. We've built lots of gas-cooled reactors in the past, including helium cooled ones. Such as:
* Peach Bottom
* Fort St. Vrain
* HTTR
* Dragon
* HTR-10
* AVR pebble bed
* THTR-300
* Ultra-High Temperature Reactor Experiment (UHTREX)
Nitrogen-cooled ones, such as ML-1 and GCRE
CO2-cooled ones, like EL4, Lucens, AGR, Magnox
Air-cooled ones like HTRE
Liquid-hydrogen cooled ones like NERVA
It's kinda dumb to call this the first 4-th gen reactor.
Do you mean the term or the actual reactor technology?
China gets roughly 5% of it’s annual electricity from nuclear, 5% from solar and increasing rapidly, 10% from wind, and 15% from hydro. It’s a token investment in nuclear that only seems huge because they produce ~30% of the worlds electricity.
PS: Also, don’t forget about the defense industry. We’re maintaining nuclear expertise even if the civilian industry fails.
No, the world has decided to procure lots of cheap PV from China
But they've yet to apply for NRC approval, so who knows if that'll actually happen.
https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/advanced/who-were-...
X-Energy submitted 14 documents in December '23, and already 5 documents this month
https://adams.nrc.gov/wba/?data=(mode:sections,sections:(fil...
No banners here on FF.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Chinese-HTR-PM-D...
> "The HTR-PM features two small reactors (each of 250 MWt) that drive a single 210 MWe steam turbine. It uses helium as coolant and graphite as the moderator. Each reactor is loaded with more than 400,000 spherical fuel elements (‘pebbles’), each 60 mm in diameter and containing 7 g of fuel enriched to 8.5%. Each pebble has an outer layer of graphite and contains some 12,000 four-layer ceramic-coated fuel particles dispersed in a graphite matrix."
Note that Chernobyl was graphite-moderated and water-cooled, but hot graphite and steam is a bad combination, tending towards the generation of (explosive) hydrogen and carbon monooxide gases during loss-of-coolant type accidents. The helium coolant avoids this process, and can sustain higher operating temperatures so has industrial uses, somewhat ironically in the petrochemical sector:
> "The major purpose of HTR-PM is to co-generate high temperature steam up to 500℃ and electricity. It is cost effective currently in the Chinese market to supply steam and electricity for the petrochemical industry to substitute the burning of natural gas and coal."
It seems like a pretty safe design with some unique capabilities, although it'd be interesting to see the total cost-per-pellet inputs (each 6 cm pellet generates as much power as 1.5 tons of coal prior to its retirement, but manufacturing each pellet is probably not that cheap).
(550 C is the upper temperature limit for cheap steel against creep, so I think that choice of temperature is not a coincidence. It also makes me dubious of reactor concepts operating at higher temperature.)
And for somebody who has been following the development of 4th generation reactors, this one is rather non-exciting. Yes it uses a pebble-bed and higher temperature (hence VHTR), it's overall improvements are rather diminishing compared to Gen 3 designs. The meager output of 150m isn't exactly thrilling and the possibility for hydrogen production remains unused as well.
I don't want to be purely cynical. Every incremental advance is a form progression and can advance the status-quo as we know. But the most promising space is clearly happening in the Fast Reactor space, just maybe not the SFR, this is a nuclear disaster waiting to happen.
Is this going to hit a wall when scaling up? Helium is notoriously scarcer lately https://www.innovationnewsnetwork.com/helium-shortage-4-0-wh...
e.g. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/12/chinas-plans-to-begin-...
Ah, no, it's a physicists' project, so maybe a fortran90 program invoking a fortran77 program? Am I close?
