[HN Gopher] US regulators will certify first small nuclear react...
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US regulators will certify first small nuclear reactor design
Author : papa-whisky
Score : 782 points
Date : 2022-07-29 22:56 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| sroussey wrote:
| I wonder how long it Will take to certify the even smaller ones
| that are shipping container sized, by the likes of Radiant et al?
| lven wrote:
| Probably the same or longer. In fact, the NuScale concept has
| been pursued since 2002, so more like 2 decades from concept to
| NRC certification. And you can tack on another 10 years for
| their hardware demonstration according to their published
| timelines. Size is not the question here. It's the analysis of
| the neutronics, thermal hydraulics, coupling of various
| systems, accident sequence prediction, etc. What takes time is
| credibility, ultimately getting all the parties involved to
| believe the calculations and understand the engineering
| decisions, and collectively agree that it's gonna work out.
| Have to convince the regulators, the advisory boards, the
| utility customers, the DOE, the suppliers.
| mwattsun wrote:
| _" The SMR's 12 modules, each producing 50 megawatts"_
|
| 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-...
| titzer wrote:
| I've had friends that served on nuke subs. It still blows my
| mind that a sub only needs to refuel once every 15 _years_.
|
| 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.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| The military has a much lower bar for safety though, given
| all the incidents around chemical poisonings and pollution
| like soldiers getting exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam or
| burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan.
| tragictrash wrote:
| The military has a lower bar for taking responsibility for
| those it views as disposable.
| kylemh wrote:
| does that not simply further the point of the post you
| responded to?
|
| despite lower standards, they've had no incidents
| Manuel_D wrote:
| And yet despite they lower bar, there have been no nuclear
| accidents. Perhaps the NRC's bar for nuclear safety is
| needlessly high. A realistic safety regime needs to weight
| the risk of accidents with the immense risks of continued
| carbon emissions.
| mwattsun wrote:
| The Nuclear Navy has an extremely high bar for safety,
| hence no nuclear accidents. Unlike the Air Force
| apparently, which sometimes loses hydrogen bombs. Go Navy!
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=air+force+lost+hydrogen+bom
| b...
| gpm wrote:
| The nuclear navy has had numerous nuclear accidents, just
| like the air force. Also just like the air force they
| have avoided any spectacular meltdowns so far, but that
| doesn't mean they've been problem free.
|
| I collected a list of publicly known ones in response to
| someone claiming the same previously here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28376137
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| The US Navy has fumbled a few nuclear bombs too (from
| airplanes and also submarines), their impeccable safety
| record is for nuclear reactors specifically. They've lost
| two nuclear powered submarines, but neither of those was
| due to reactor problems.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| It's harder to lose your metaphorical nuclear fuel tank
| than your metaphorical nuclear bullet I guess.
| trasz wrote:
| Navy has an extremely high bar for safety according to
| Navy itself, but accidents sometimes get classified for a
| couple of decades. It happened before,
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site for example.
| spopejoy wrote:
| The Hanford site is a horror show of the reality of how
| the US handles decommissioned nukes:
|
| > The DOE later found water intruding into at least 14
| single-shell tanks and that one of them had been leaking
| about 640 US gallons (2,400 l; 530 imp gal) per year into
| the ground since about 2010. In 2012, the DOE also
| discovered a leak from a double-shell tank caused by
| construction flaws and corrosion in the tank's bottom,
| and that 12 other double-shell tanks had similar
| construction flaws. ... Intermittent discoveries of
| undocumented contamination have slowed the pace and
| raised the cost of cleanup.
|
| > In 2007, the Hanford site represented 60% of high-level
| radioactive waste by volume managed by the US Department
| of Energy[7] and 7-9% of all nuclear waste in the United
| States (the DOE manages 15% of nuclear waste in the US,
| with the remaining 85% being commercial spent nuclear
| fuel). Hanford is currently the most contaminated nuclear
| site in the United States and is the focus of the
| nation's largest environmental cleanup.
| runarberg wrote:
| I don't think the US military is a positive example of safe
| usage of nuclear. First the Hanford nuclear site in
| Washington is one of the most polluted site in the entire
| state. The cleanup effort is the regions biggest employer and
| is costing the local communities, the state, and the federal
| government millions of dollars every year.
|
| The 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.
| smegger001 wrote:
| Hanafords mess dates back to the manahatten project and
| processed uranium and plutonium for fat man and little boy.
| the 1940s was a long fucking time ago. and when have
| learned a lot since then and technology has advanced. the
| testing in Bikini atoll was awful but has nothing to do
| with nuclear power its about weapons testing which is a
| entirely unrelated issue and we stopped doing that.
| spopejoy wrote:
| > the 1940s was a long fucking time ago
|
| And yet we're still cleaning it up :)
|
| > In 2007, the Hanford site represented 60% of high-level
| radioactive waste by volume managed by the US Department
| of Energy and 7-9% of all nuclear waste in the United
| States (the DOE manages 15% of nuclear waste in the US,
| with the remaining 85% being commercial spent nuclear
| fuel). Hanford is currently the most contaminated nuclear
| site in the United States and is the focus of the
| nation's largest environmental cleanup.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site
| titzer wrote:
| You're saying that nuclear testing produces a lot of
| radioactive fallout? Yeah, it does. This is absolutely
| _not_ the same thing as operating a nuclear reactor.
| runarberg wrote:
| Hanford had nuclear reactors.
|
| But that is despite the point. Their safety record with
| nuclear is horrendous. Full of examples of neglect and
| pollution. I'm not an expert in the nuclear history of
| the US military, but I wouldn't be surprised that many of
| their smaller reactors have similar stories as Hanford.
| It is just not as spectacular--and therefor not as much
| in the public consciousness--as Chernobyl.
| smegger001 wrote:
| yes they had reactors that were shutdown clear back in
| the 70s for being to old of design.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| It's not the US Military _generally_ that is held up as an
| example of nuclear safety, it 's _specifically_ the US Navy
| 's track record for operating nuclear reactors. Hanford was
| a big mess, but that wasn't run by the Navy. Bikini Atoll
| was bad, but that wasn't caused by a mistake operating a
| nuclear reactor.
|
| Your supposition that reactor accidents smaller than
| Chernobyl might be hidden from the public doesn't seem well
| grounded either; we know the US Army fucked up the
| operation of the SL-1 reactor, resulting in 3 deaths.
| Here's a big list of nuclear fuckups: https://en.wikipedia.
| org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid... Some of those
| severe, some minor. I don't see much reason to believe that
| substantial naval reactor incidents have been omitted from
| that list. Such accidents are hard to hide from long,
| particularly if it means a bunch of sailors got irradiated
| or a ship had to be taken out of service for
| decontamination / repair. The incidents on that list
| bracket the sort of mystery accident you're supposing; it
| lists accidents much less severe and much more severe.
| runarberg wrote:
| > Your supposition that reactor accidents smaller than
| Chernobyl might be hidden from the public doesn't seem
| well grounded either.
|
| I supposed no such thing. You don't need an accident to
| leave a mess (as evidenced by our current climate
| crisis). You just need to be negligent of the environment
| and surrounding population center. The US military
| (including the Navy) has a terrible track record when it
| comes to environmental issues around its military bases
| around the world. My supposition is that they are simply
| equally inconsiderate with their nuclear logistics as
| they are with their other operations. And Bikini Atoll is
| my ground for thinking so.
| musiciangames wrote:
| That list of military nuclear accidents was interesting.
| My impression is that the rate of accidents dropped off
| quickly over time. Maybe the military got better at
| handling nuclear material? Maybe some other explanation?
| idontwantthis wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean by "battleships", but the US navy
| is definitely not mostly nuclear. Super carriers and most
| subs yes. Everything else (many, many vessels) are not.
| mikewarot wrote:
| >I never understood the argument nuclear power is so
| "dangerous".
|
| 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.
| czstar wrote:
| I believe you are wrong about the causes of the Chernobyl
| disaster. The consensus these days is that it was due to
| poor reactor design.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Many causes can be attributed to the disaster.
| XorNot wrote:
| That's taking a blameless post-mortem approach which is a
| valid tool, but not the entire answer.
|
| The reality is to cause the issue, the operators had to
| drive the reactor well into a dangerous and hard to
| control regime which it would not get into under any
| normal operation circumstance.
|
| So while yes, it shouldn't have been physically possible
| to do it, even with that design it took substantial,
| deliberate malfeasance to get that result (you can also
| _only_ get that result with that design - a meltdown is
| not normally an explosion).
| czstar wrote:
| From what I've read some of the safety systems did not
| give real-time feedback and the critical error occurred
| because the operators didn't know they were in trouble
| due to lack of real-time feedback. I'm not an engineer
| and know nothing of these things but the test was not
| unauthorized and it wasn't an experiment. As far as I
| read about the accident.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| It was poor reactor design combined with downright stupid
| actions by management. But a nuclear plant should be
| somewhat stupid-proof.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| For whatever it's worth, Russia continues to operate
| several RBMK reactors today, and haven't blown any of
| them up since Chernobyl in the 80s. This is probably
| attributable to some combination of the retrofits they
| made after Chernobyl, generally treating the matter more
| seriously, and maybe luck.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK#List_of_RBMK_reactors
| ncmncm wrote:
| Retrofits have not generally occurred. The person most
| personally responsible was given control of another one.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| The retrofits _did_ occur. The second sentence of your
| comment does not relate to the first; 'retrofit' does
| not mean _" change in management"_
| hutrdvnj wrote:
| I think if Chernobyl happens on the open sea, then it's not
| very dangerous, but if you imagine nuke aircraft crashes in
| dense populated areas.
| inejge wrote:
| _It still blows my mind that a sub only needs to refuel once
| every 15_ years _._
|
| 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.
| schrodinger wrote:
| Can you explain more about what that means or suggest what
| to Google to learn more?
| WatchDog wrote:
| To add to what other commenters have said, apart from the
| weapons proliferation issues, enriching uranium is very
| expensive. U-235 only makes up about 0.72% of natural
| uranium, the rest of it being U-238. Running a reactor on
| low enriched uranium is much more cost effective,
| although reactor designs that can run on LEU can be less
| safe, like Chernobyls RBMK design.
| gautamcgoel wrote:
| There are two uranium isotopes present on earth, U-235
| and U-238. U-235 is the fissile material which powers
| nuclear reactions in both nuclear bombs and nuclear power
| plants. The 5% number represents the fraction of uranium
| in the fuel which is U-235 instead of U-238. Anything
| above 20% or so is considered "highly enriched", and
| nuclear bombs often have fuel which is 80-90% U-235.
| gambiting wrote:
| And the reason _why_ bombs have more of the U-235 is
| because is splits easier than U-238, so it 's easier to
| end up with a self sustaining chain reaction, where every
| U-235 that splits produces enough neutrons to split off
| two more U-235 atoms, which in turn splits 4, then 8,
| then 16 and so on - the chain reaction splits the whole
| lot all at once and you've got a bomb.
| jmyeet wrote:
| > I never understood the argument nuclear power is so
| "dangerous".
|
| 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.
| MisterMower wrote:
| 1000 square miles is a square 32 miles long or a circle 36
| miles in diameter. The size of an average county in the US
| Midwest.
|
| So if you're that worried about it, find the least
| populated place in western Kansas or Nevada or Maine and
| build the biggest plant you can. Worst case scenario it
| turns into Chernobyl and you fence it off and call it a
| day.
|
| Alternatively, we can keep using slave labor in China to
| build solar panels fabricated with toxic compounds obtained
| via strip mining that require natural gas and coal power
| plants to actually function on hot days.
|
| Either you care about climate change or you just hate
| nuclear power. Discussions like these are great at
| revealing where folks stand on the issue when push comes to
| shove.
| rtpg wrote:
| Alright, you find the county to be declared a no-mans
| land. Remember, you need a bunch of staff to run the
| plant, a source of water for the cooling towers, and of
| course you need to spend all that money actually building
| the plant. Let's not get into the fact that the primary
| reason people don't build nuclear power plants is that
| they're extremely expensive to build in the first place!
|
| A serious question I don't have an answer to: is
| Chernobyl the worst-case scenario? Is there a way for
| there to be an even worse disaster? I do not know.
|
| Though really we can walk and chew bubble gum. Build
| reactors and more renewables. I can't put a nuclear
| reactor on the roof of my home after all! I just really
| feel like this trope that anti-nuclear sentiment is why
| we don't have nuclear reactors everywhere has always felt
| weird when we're talking about market-based economies.
| Maybe it's just that unworkable in general! Why else
| would we not build these supposed money printers?
| MisterMower wrote:
| More renewables requires more slave labor from China. If
| we produced those solar panels here under US
| environmental and labor regulations, nuclear would be
| very competitive. That we have to buy them from China for
| solar power to even make remote economic sense here in
| the US should tell us something.
|
| A counter question to yours: How many Chinese slave
| laborers would you tolerate before you'd accept another
| Chernobyl style disaster as a tradeoff? When you talk
| about substituting solar power for nuclear power, that's
| exactly the tradeoff you're making.
| rtpg wrote:
| I don't think that solar panel enthusiasm has to answer
| for the cross-sector near-universal effect of outsourcing
| of industrial production outside of the US, for
| Americans.
|
| According to a google search:
|
| > American-made solar panels generally cost from $0.50 to
| $0.80 per watt (W) - about $0.10 to $0.30 more per watt
| than imported panels. The highest quality, 'premium'
| American panels may even come in around $1.00/W.
|
| I would be more than happy to pay that premium (though
| really I would like to see working conditions improve
| across the globe). I do not live in the US so my calculus
| is perhaps different from yours.
|
| I have heard statements about labor being huge factors of
| solar panel installation, but google is saying 15%.
|
| And I would like to restate that I think we can walk and
| chew bubble gum here. The problems with nuclear being
| more expensive are real, maybe resolvable, but cannot
| simply be handwaved away in our current economic models.
| But hey, if we can get a good mix going on I'm all for
| it. It's not an either/or!
|
| And hey, if we had a full planned economy, there would be
| a lot of things that we could do differently that would
| also have great effects.
| Aerroon wrote:
| > _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._
|
| When are we outlawing hydroelectric dams? Accidents with
| those have killed far far more people.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Here are the 3 big problems with the pro-nuclear
| argument:
|
| 1. Using deaths as a metric;
|
| 2. Focusing on operational cost of a nuclear power plant
| rather than total cost (ie including capital cost). The
| total cost is borne out in the relatively high cost of
| nuclear power to users. If that point is even
| acknowledged, let alone conceded, it's just dismissed as
| the fault of government regulation or that scale will
| somehow magically solve the problem; and
|
| 3. Writing off disasters as irrelevant outliers because
| they're inconvenient to the argument. Less than 700
| nuclear power plants have been built and we've had
| _multiple_ huge disasters.
|
| So are deaths a bad metric? And by "deaths" here I mean
| any form of the metric (eg absolute, per-kWh generated,
| etc). Because deaths doesn't capture the negative
| externalities and consequences of nuclear power.
| Chernobyl killed less than 100 directly. Who knows how
| many contracted various cancers in a wide area. But 1,000
| suqare miles of land remains uninhabitable nearly four
| decades later with no real end in sight.
|
| Deaths as a metric doesn't capture that, which is
| precisely why pro-nuclear advocates focus on it. Nuclear
| power has its own propaganda just like the oil and gas
| industry does.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The nuclear stans' focus on deaths may not be leading in
| the direction they want.
|
| The way to account for the cost of deaths is by the
| "statical value of a human life", a finite quantity that
| is considered what would be reasonable to spend to avoid
| one death. The NRC uses a figure of $9 million when
| evaluating reactor safety systems.
|
| Using that figure, deaths in normal operation contribute
| negligibly to the cost of energy from nuclear or
| renewables (but not for coal; there deaths contribute
| greatly to the real cost.) Because of this, if nuclear
| stans are focusing on deaths, what they're doing is
| implying that the $9 M figure is much too low. And that
| would imply that the NRC is not imposing enough safety
| systems on nuclear plants. I doubt this last point is one
| they'd be happy with.
| spookie wrote:
| I agree, but it's not like nation states do a better job
| than private entities... I mean, you gave an example
| yourself.
| wskinner wrote:
| Nuclear power has the lowest deaths per unit of power of
| all commercial power generation methods [1]. The
| externalities of nuclear power are highly visible and
| concentrated in a small physical and temporal range. This
| makes them obvious and scary. The externalities of other
| power generation methods are diffused through time and
| space, to the point that they appear mundane if they are
| noticed at all.
|
| Coal power kills 1000x as many people per unit as nuclear.
| Natural gas kills 40x as many. Solar kills 4x as many.
| Humans have shown themselves to consistently be incredibly
| bad at comparing chronic and acute risks at scale. 1: https
| ://www.engineering.com/DesignSoftware/DesignSoftwareArt...
| pfdietz wrote:
| > Solar kills 4x as many.
|
| I dispute this number. Are you considering roof mounted
| residential solar? Most solar in a solar-powered world
| will be on the ground.
| kwere wrote:
| solar panels arent born in nature and dont degrade
| biologically. also consider output by scale. most of
| heavy production occur in xinjiang where there isnt a
| safety culture, installations are anothoer issue. btw the
| data on solar is understimated for sure due to chinese
| data quality
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-
| worldw...
| opo wrote:
| This does likely include roof mounted residential solar.
|
| >Most solar in a solar-powered world will be on the
| ground.
|
| It is probably more accurate to say that most solar in a
| solar-powered world should be on the ground. The reality
| is that roof-top solar is the most expensive form of
| power in the world and yet it continues to be heavily
| subsidized. These subsidies are in the form of direct tax
| breaks and usually higher electricity prices paid by
| those who can't install it. A dollar wasted on roof-top
| solar would be MUCH better spent on solar panels
| installed on the ground by the utility.
| jmyeet wrote:
| > Nuclear power has the lowest deaths per unit of power
| of all commercial power generation methods
|
| This is a poor metric to use. The official death count
| from Chernobyl was 31. It may be as high as 50. There are
| probably more deaths attributable through long-term
| effects, etc but you start getting into subjective
| modeling to figure out a number for that.
|
| It's almost 40 years later and the absolute exclusion
| zone is still 1,000 square miles. Treating this as only
| 31 (or 50) deaths grossly under-represents the magnitude
| of the disaster.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Chernobyl is estimated to cause 27,000 fatal cancers in
| the larger population. You can't dismiss these just
| because they can't be directly demonstrated. Technology
| regulation is not criminal law; the technology doesn't
| have to be shown guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
| jmyeet wrote:
| You realize that supports my argument, right?
|
| The comment I was replying to was arguing nuclear power
| caused the least deaths and I was explaining how that's a
| bad metric because it doesn't capture the impact and
| damage of the absolute exclusion zone.
|
| So if the actual death count is 27,000 instead of 31 or
| 50 that's actually much worse, which further undermines
| that commenter's argument.
| pfdietz wrote:
| I should have written "one can't" rather than "you
| can't". Sorry that I implied something personal.
| wskinner wrote:
| This fairly thorough analysis comes up with a higher
| estimate of around 300-500 [1]. Of course, deaths per
| unit of energy is not the only meaningful metric, and it
| ignores the environmental impact that you mention. But
| have you considered the environmental impact of using
| fossil fuels for energy?
|
| 1: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-
| from-cher...
| worik wrote:
| > > I never understood the argument nuclear power is so
| "dangerous".
|
| I would add:There are none so blind as those who will not
| see
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_an
| d...
|
| Very long list. Impossible to clean many up in any sort of
| human scale.
| kwere wrote:
| i advise to look up at hiroshima and nagasaki today, or
| even look at wildlife in chernobyl no-go zone. obviously
| some dangers are bigger (and leave permanent scars) but
| technologies have progressed by far and wide.
| deaths/damages by fossil fuels are more sneaky. the
| "world" 40 years ago made a bad decision letting go of
| nuclear energy, wich will haunt the world for generations
| to come
| chihuahua wrote:
| I agree in principle, but I am not aware of any nuclear
| powered battleships. Iowa class BBs have steam turbines
| running on fuel oil.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Not battleships, but America did have several nuclear
| powered cruisers which lasted around 15-30 years (but all
| were decommissioned in the 90s.) They weren't battleships,
| but that term is sometimes used colloquially to refer to
| any surface warship other than carriers.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-
| powered_cruisers_of_th...
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Does the USA even have a battleship?
|
| I thought they were obsolete.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| They're obsolete. There was some debate in the 90s and
| 00s over whether they should be kept around since they
| had an incredible amount of firepower and some people
| still thought that maybe contested beach landings were a
| good idea. But ultimately they were stricken from the
| Navy and are now museum ships.
| implements wrote:
| "Warship" would be the correct colloquialism, I think -
| battleships were specifically characterised by heavy
| armour and large caliber guns.
| mLuby wrote:
| > but that term [battleships] is sometimes used
| colloquially to refer to any surface warship other than
| carriers
|
| Really? I wouldn't be surprised to hear someone call a
| frigate a cruiser or a littoral combat ship a destroyer
| or an amphibious assault ship a carrier but everyone
| knows battleships are the biggest big-gun ships out
| there.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| I think so, at least for some people who don't have an
| interest in military stuff or machines generally. Similar
| to the way any armored but unarmed truck may sometimes be
| called "a tank." (https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=police
| +tank&iax=images&ia=i...)
|
| I try not to judge, I'm probably equally wrong without
| knowing it about things as far outside my area of
| interest.
| kelnos wrote:
| I would not be surprised if many people who don't have
| knowledge of naval vessels would use "battleship" as a
| generic term for "surface naval vessel". A possible
| driver of this could be the "Battleship" game.
|
| I would also not be surprised if there were many people
| who'd never heard the terms "destroyer" or "cruiser".
| josephcsible wrote:
| But the "Battleship" game has five different kinds of
| ships, only one of which it calls a battleship, and it
| does include cruisers and destroyers.
| [deleted]
| squidlogic wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong haven't Iowa class battleships all
| been decommissioned sometime in the early 1990s?
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Yes, and it was a colossal waste of money keeping them
| running even that long. Realistically they should have
| been scrapped in the period after the Korean war.
| ncmncm wrote:
| It has been proposed that the reason the battleships were
| in Pearl Harbor was so they would be the ships sunk when
| the Japanese attacked. The aircraft carriers were all far
| out to sea.
|
| Whether this is true, it shows that the obsolescence of
| battleships (since aircraft carriers came on line) was
| recognized well before WWII.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Pearl Harbor converted the US in the Pacific from a 17
| knot navy to a 25 knot navy.
|
| We did get five of the eight battleships back (although
| some were basically cored out like a rotten tooth and
| rebuilt almost from scratch.) Two ships were left there
| (Utah and Arizona). Oklahoma was raised mostly to free up
| its slot in the harbor, but sank in 1947 while being
| towed to San Francisco Bay to be scrapped.
|
| The BB's role in the Pacific War was as AA platforms and
| for shore bombardment.
| frozenport wrote:
| aircraft carriers?
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| All of America's supercarriers have been nuclear powered
| since the USS Kitty Hawk was decommissioned in 2009.
|
| But if you include "amphibious assault ships" like the
| Wasp class, which can carry a lot of helicopters and
| STOVL airplanes like the F-35B and Harrier, then US Navy
| still has a lot of conventional powered carriers.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| He's technically correct. All zero of the US navy's
| battleships are nuclear powered
| chihuahua wrote:
| The best kind of correct!
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The Navy also fostered a strong safety culture with top down
| controls to get there, and they did so before anti-nuclear
| sentiment was a thing.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Civil nukes have never had any strong safety culture. The
| emphasis has always been on cost-cutting, because nukes
| have always been too expensive to compete fairly in an open
| market.
|
| Every nuke, ever, has been massively subsidized.
|
| NuScale has been and is still being massively subsidized by
| the USDoE. It would be wholly uncompetitive with renewables
| if not so propped up.
| spopejoy wrote:
| > NuScale has been and is still being massively
| subsidized by the USDoE
|
| Given the longstanding cozy relationship between the NRC,
| the DOE and industry it's hard to feel confident in this
| approval being sufficiently stringent, e.g. on worst-case
| scenarios, waste disposal and the like.
| dirkt wrote:
| There is a difference between a nuclear reactor blowing up in
| a country with low overall population density (e.g. the US;
| in Chernobyl also it wasn't that taxing to designate an
| exclusion zone for a few centuries), it happening in a very
| densely populate country (where it would be a desaster), or
| it happening in a military sub where the owning state doesn't
| care about collateral damage [1]
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/19/us-
| depleted-ur...
| justinclift wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_submarine#Accidents
| nradov wrote:
| Only a small fraction of the US Navy's fleet is nuclear
| powered, specifically just the submarines and carriers. Their
| last battleships were decommissioned many years ago, and
| those were all conventionally powered. The Navy did build a
| few nuclear powered surface warships decades ago, but that
| was largely a failure due to high costs and operational
| limitations; they don't plan to build any more.
| indymike wrote:
| What really killed the CGNs (nuclear powered destroyers)
| was VLS (vertical launch system) and AEGIS - the sensor
| suite that newer Navy destroyers and cruisers are built
| around. CGNs were all built around magazine fed rail-style
| missile launchers, and sensors were all designed when state
| of the art was a transistor. Refitting ships to modern
| sensors like AEGIS and modern VLS was almost a complete
| rebuild. Even early Ticonderoga class conventionally
| powered cruisers (CGs) that had rail launchers were retired
| early because of the cost of refit to VLS.
|
| Incidentally, VLS allows for much faster deployment of
| missiles, and doesn't require deck space for different
| launchers for different missiles, and a ship with a modern
| VLS have a huge rate-of-fire advantage on older rail
| launcher equipped ships.
| DougWebb wrote:
| That may have been the reason for mothballing the old
| ship designs, but why weren't the new ones nuclear
| powered? That seems to be independent of the missile
| launcher design.
| indymike wrote:
| Three reasons:
|
| * Cost of procurement.
|
| * Role of the ship: why have an expensive ship that turns
| into a radioactive reef in a role when one of its
| missions is to "take a bullet" for a carrier?
|
| * No competition. The Soviets were gone.
| nradov wrote:
| Mainly for cost reasons, plus nuclear reactors also take
| up more space and can't accelerate quite as rapidly
| compared to modern gas turbines. If the Navy ever decides
| to build a new cruiser class to replace the old
| Ticonderogas then it might be worth considering nuclear
| propulsion, but realistically the budget just isn't there
| to make it happen. The Navy can barely afford to provide
| enough qualified crew for their existing few nuclear
| vessels.
| c3534l wrote:
| Same reason people are afraid of getting robbed at night when
| they're more common during the day when everyone is at work,
| or why we're scared of heights and planes, but cars and
| horseback riding don't phase us. Fear is an emotional
| reaction, not a rational one.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| The fact is we could be doing a heck of a lot of cool things,
| if it weren't for the anti-nuke crowd that set the technology
| back 20-30 years.
|
| 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.
| narrator wrote:
| If we had all that then all the things besides energy that
| are used in production would be depleted faster. We would
| have bigger populations, etc.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| Seems like dirty bombs would be a lot easier to make, in a
| world with ubiquitous nuclear power plants.
| pyrale wrote:
| Dirty bombs are already easy to make: there is
| radioactive material in every town for medical purpose.
| kuhewa wrote:
| You'd think control over the materials in these small
| plants would be much better than for the radioactive
| materials already widespread and easy to obtain, like
| cesium 137 calibration sources used in healthcare [1].
| Apparently one of these would allow a dirty bomb to
| contaminate 40 city blocks [2]. So I reckon there are
| easier existing sources for radioactive materials if one
| wanted to cause mass panic, I don't think spent fuel rods
| are going to end up in the municipal waste.
|
| 1 https://www.perkinelmer.com/au/product/cesium-137-calib
| ratio...
|
| 2 https://www.wired.com/2011/10/ff-radioactivecargo/
| landemva wrote:
| That vision needs waste disposal or processing, which Jimmy
| Carter halted when he took office. It matters little that
| Ronald Reagan removed the prohibition, as investors will
| not put capital toward that again because the investment
| can be wiped out a few years later based on whims of
| politics. Without waste processing, storage of waste onsite
| forever creates an investment problem for new construction
| in USA.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclearpower-waste-
| id...
|
| 'Former President Jimmy Carter halted reprocessing in 1977,
| citing proliferation concerns.'
| pvarangot wrote:
| The proliferation concerns probably got worse. I wouldn't
| invest in this in the US unless there was like a
| constitutional amendment saying we can reprocess.
| volkl48 wrote:
| We're actively building new nuclear weapons anyway, I
| don't see how reprocessing changes any of that
| calculation?
| pfdietz wrote:
| The investors didn't put money toward it because it had
| no economic foundation. Uranium is too cheap, enrichment
| became cheaper, and separated plutonium has negative
| value. The French have admitted their reprocessing was
| net more expensive than not doing it.
| kova12 wrote:
| This is such a misguided argument. Amount of nuclear
| waste is so negligible compared to common waste, it
| doesn't deserve to even be argued about. Not only that,
| but today's nuclear waste in couple of decades could
| become a treasure for next generations. Discussion should
| be: we either develop new energy sources or we don't.
| Either works for me, but if you don't want to go on with
| progress, then shut up about climate change and stop
| calling yourself progressive
| tcbawo wrote:
| One benefit of many small reactors is that, should an area
| become a conflict zone in the future, relocation is more
| feasible.
| runarberg wrote:
| This is wishful thinking. France for example never had a
| Three mile island type of disaster which tilted the public
| opinion of nuclear power, like the USA did. They continued
| building up their nuclear power plants well into the 1990s
| but failed to bring construction costs and delays down like
| your comment suggests.
|
| In fact if we take Germany as a counter-example, when they
| stopped building nuclear power plants due to popular
| demand, they significantly increased renewable energy to a
| point where they are currently replacing coal power at a
| greater rate then France, despite Germany actively shutting
| down nuclear plants that still had years of life left.
|
| This shows that Nuclear power might actually be a hindrance
| towards an electrified future, as governments have
| historically put to much faith in it, which was ultimately
| unwarranted, instead of investing in renewables.
|
| EDIT: I feel like people are focusing on the wrong point
| here. I was apparently--and unintentionally--disingenuous
| by touting Germany's success in replacing coal power with
| renewables, as compared to France. However, my main point
| still stands, that investing in nuclear well into the 1990s
| did _not_ bring costs and delays of new plants down.
| espadrine wrote:
| > _France for example never had a Three mile island type
| of disaster which tilted the public opinion of nuclear
| power_
|
| Despite that, the public opinion soured so bad, that it
| is the detractors that had to bring disaster to nuclear
| reactors. Protestors fired rocket-propelled grenades at a
| plant[0]. It did not cause any nuclear danger.
|
| On the other hand, the costs grew because the standards
| for risk grew to tremendous levels that are way, way
| above those applied for the coal and gas industries, or
| wind and solar for that matter.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix#Rocke
| t_attack
| asib wrote:
| > Despite that, the public opinion soured so bad, that it
| is the detractors that had to bring disaster to nuclear
| reactors. Protestors fired rocket-propelled grenades at a
| plant[0]. It did not cause any nuclear danger.
|
| The wiki article you linked says the plant was
| unfinished. This would indicate the attack was a protest
| against the construction of the plant, not an attempt to
| induce a nuclear meltdown. You are perhaps
| unintentionally twisting the facts.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Besides, in France we've had "protest" attacks even
| against chip foundries. I would assume it par for the
| course for a nuclear plant.
| baq wrote:
| for good reasons...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine_trifluoride
| ncmncm wrote:
| That said, historically chip factories have left
| overwhelming chemical messes.
| orangeoxidation wrote:
| > They continued building up their nuclear power plants
| well into the 1990s but failed to bring construction
| costs and delays down like your comment suggests.
|
| Absolutely true. It proved expensive even at large scale
| and with full support of the state. I don't trust
| promises or hypotheticals of cheap nuclear power, at all.
|
| But here's the thing: France succeeded with decarbonizing
| their electricity production. It's a pretty notable
| success. Yes, it was (and remains) expensive and yes
| those plants are now failing often, remaining expensive
| ober their whole lifetime. But it worked and France could
| afford it.
|
| I'd argue many other countries could afford it as well.
| The German electricity mix is a lot dirtier by
| comparison.
| kitkat_new wrote:
| > But it worked and France could afford it.
|
| failing plants due to their age and maintenance resulting
| in less nuclear power in the long run say otherwise
| morning_gelato wrote:
| >This shows that Nuclear power might actually be a
| hindrance towards an electrified future, as governments
| have historically put to much faith in it, which was
| ultimately unwarranted, instead of investing in
| renewables.
|
| Historically the countries that invested in nuclear and
| hydro have been most successful in lowering the carbon
| intensity of their energy sector. Looking at the data,
| Germany does not appear to be nearly as successful as
| France. In 2021 France's electricity averaged 68
| gCO2/kWh, and Germany averaged 364 gCO2/kWh.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/low-carbon-share-
| energy?t...
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-
| electric...
| pyrale wrote:
| > They continued building up their nuclear power plants
| well into the 1990s but failed to bring construction
| costs and delays down like your comment suggests.
|
| > In fact if we take Germany as a counter-example, when
| they stopped building nuclear power plants due to popular
| demand, they significantly increased renewable energy to
| a point where they are currently replacing coal power at
| a greater rate then France, despite Germany actively
| shutting down nuclear plants that still had years of life
| left.
|
| Rarely have I seen reality mistreated so blatantly.
|
| France has barely used coal in the last 4 decades, and so
| it seems to be enough to claim that, by slowly reducing
| their coal use, Germany does much better.
|
| That reminds me of the popular definition of chutzpah:
| the person that asks for mercy after murdering his
| parents, since, afterall, he's now an orphan.
|
| > However, my main point still stands, that investing in
| nuclear well into the 1990s did not bring costs and
| delays of new plants down.
|
| Your main point is wrong. [1] shows that each model has
| experienced faster build time as new units were built.
| What is true is that new, more advanced designs can take
| more time to build than older, less advanced designs.
|
| [1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_r%C3%A9acteu
| rs_nucl%...
| thematrixturtle wrote:
| That graph shows nothing of the sort, and it conveniently
| excludes the 2010s, where Areva's Olkiluoto 3 plant in
| Finland has been under construction for _17 years_ and is
| still not finished.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Pla
| nt
| pyrale wrote:
| > That graph shows nothing of the sort
| CP0: first reactor 6.5y, last reactor 5y CP1: first
| reactor 6y, last reactor 5y CP2: first reactor
| 5y, last reactor 6y P4 : first reactor 7y, last
| reactor 6y P'4: first reactor 7y, last reactor
| 6.5y N4 : first reactor 12y, last reactor 7.5y
|
| That's 5/6 designs where building multiple plants lead to
| faster build times.
|
| > it conveniently excludes
|
| Honestly, I suspect you're just namedroping here. But
| let's adress the point: Olkiluoto and Flamanville are the
| first 2 reactors of their generation, I'm not sure what
| you want to compare them to in terms of build time. My
| guess is that Hinkley point will get built much faster,
| and that we may see further improvements if more are
| built.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Even after being declared finished, it isn't.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| > governments have historically put to much faith in it
|
| If we (US) hadn't stopped building nuclear in the 80s and
| had instead merely key up the pace, our grid wouldn't be
| 20% nuclear like it is today, it would be 100% nuclear.
|
| Instead, we made the choice to pump 20 gigatons of carbon
| into the atmosphere while we waited for solar and wind to
| become viable. I'm glad they finally are -- they just
| broke into double digits, in a few years they will pass
| the nuclear buildout we stopped in the 80s -- but that
| was one helluva waiting cost.
| [deleted]
| runarberg wrote:
| This is false dichotomy. The US government also had the
| option of investing in renewables as early as the 1970s.
| They simply didn't. The success of Germany's recent
| investment suggests that was a wrong choice.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| German success? You mean the country headed into a winter
| where they will be shutting down their industry have
| people freeze to death at the whim of Putin?
|
| I shudder to think what failure looks like to you.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Germany is today _burning less coal_ than would have been
| necessary if they had refurbished their nukes instead of
| spending the money building out wind.
|
| Operating the wind farms is much cheaper than operating
| the nukes and mining the extra coal would have been. That
| opex savings goes to more capex wind generation capacity,
| further reducing costs by each GW displaced.
|
| So, yes, success. Not being off coal _already_ is not
| failure. Replacing an entire country 's energy
| infrastructure takes time, no matter what.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| > Germany is today burning less coal than would have been
| necessary if they had refurbished their nukes instead of
| spending the money building out wind.
|
| _Looks at France_
|
| Sure.
| ncmncm wrote:
| France is, at the moment, importing power, because their
| nukes are largely turned off. So, sure, look at France.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| And are a net exporter by around 10%. Meanwhile in
| Germany: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-
| turns-electrici...
| ncmncm wrote:
| You are comparing emergency war response to energy
| policy. Desperate much?
| thrown_22 wrote:
| You're the one comparing the worst heat wave in recorded
| history to business as usual.
| ncmncm wrote:
| You seem to imagine that heat waves are not now normal.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Yes, imagine thinking that the hottest day in record
| across Europe is not something that will happen daily.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| In fairness solar efficiency was below 10% in the 1970s,
| while the world was already producing many gigawatts of
| nuclear energy at that time.
|
| It's not as though Germany could have 'decided' in the
| 1970s to have 2022 technology. Sure, increased investment
| at the time may have sped up the development of
| renewables, but it still wouldn't be fast. Science
| doesn't quite work that way.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Solar efficiency and cost would have been where they are
| today by 1990, and we would not now be facing imminent,
| impending Climatic Catastrophe. Energy during ie past 30
| years would have been radically cheaper. Coal plants and
| nuke plants alike would have been shuttered as
| unsustainable, not for their CO2 but just because they
| cost too damn much.
|
| But here we are, instead. Thank Reagan. And Bush. And
| Bush, again.
|
| US spent $5T trashing Iraq and Afghanistan. That would
| have paid for completely switching over to renewables,
| several time over.
| pyrale wrote:
| > Solar efficiency and cost would have been where they
| are today by 1990
|
| This seems to be implying that basically all the research
| was done between the 2000's and now, and that scientists
| had been twiddling their thumbs between 1970 and 2000.
| Actually, scientific advances between 1970 and 2000 were
| critical to enable the renewables boom that we
| experienced since 2000.
|
| Could it have gone faster if more funds had been made
| available? Maybe. But claiming that we "lost" 30 years in
| research on that topic simply shows ignorance about the
| way research works.
|
| > US spent $5T trashing Iraq and Afghanistan. That would
| have paid for completely switching over to renewables,
| several time over.
|
| Yeah, and if the Romans hadn't spent so much time
| fighting with their neighbours, we would all be eating
| free lunches now.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Simply not subsidizing polluting fossil fuels would have
| been a major boon to solar, wind, nuclear, energy
| efficiency, economic growth.
|
| There's reports around about what actually drove the
| price drops in renewable, and while research plays it's
| part, market support and scale are big factors, we
| definately squandered multiple opportunities to nip
| climate change in the bud.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| So you're argument is that in an alternative timeline
| where we'd invested more money we would have invented
| technology in the 1980s that still doesn't exist in the
| 2020s?
| runarberg wrote:
| Not OP, but yes! I believe the argument _is_ that in an
| alternative timeline where the US government invested in
| renewables, they would be both more technologically
| advanced and more commercially feasible today.
|
| I'm not the biggest fan of arguing about alternate
| history, but this thread originally spun out after an
| ancestor poster claimed we would have a rosy present if
| only we had invested more in nuclear energy. I claim I
| find way more wishful then claiming the same about
| renewables.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| So on the one hand we have a technology that existed
| since the 1960s and would have solved global warming if
| we'd merely spent money building it out.
|
| On the other we have a technology that still doesn't
| exist in the 2020s and would also need to be build out.
|
| Cockroach archeologists will be puzzled why we chose to
| go extinct.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _On the other we have a technology that still doesn 't
| exist in the 2020s_
|
| You keep saying this, but I'm not sure where it's coming
| from. Reading upthread, my interpretation is that we are
| specifically talking about the technology that exists
| today, in 2022.
|
| I think it's entirely reasonable that, if investments
| into renewables were made in the 70s and 80s at a level
| comparable to investments in fossil fuels or nuclear, we
| would have seen, in the 90s, renewables technology
| comparable to what we have today. No, it wouldn't be the
| _same technology_ , but I could see efficiency numbers
| being similar, though perhaps at a bit higher cost.
| spopejoy wrote:
| Uhh, renewables are here today. The parent was refuting
| that "solar wasn't ready" by making the point that the
| progress in renewables is attributable to increased
| industrial activity and funding.
|
| Reagan took the solar panels off the White House for a
| reason, so his buddy James Watt could kill off any
| alternatives to fossil energy. That regime lasted until
| the 90s and by then any memory of the oil crises in the
| 70s was long gone.
| opo wrote:
| >Reagan took the solar panels off the White House for a
| reason, so his buddy James Watt could kill off any
| alternatives to fossil energy.
|
| The panels installed on the White House were not
| photovoltaic solar panels - they were solar water heater
| panels. (After they damaged the roof, they weren't
| replaced after the repairs were done.) It wouldn't have
| been possible to run the economy on solar water heater
| panels.
| pfdietz wrote:
| And traditional solar hot water is today obsolete. It's
| cheaper to use PV and a heat pump water heater.
| pfdietz wrote:
| "If nuclear hadn't failed, it would have succeeded."
| andrewmutz wrote:
| Do you have a source on the France vs Germany thing?
|
| France uses 20x less coal than Germany to begin with
| (https://www.worldometers.info/coal/coal-consumption-by-
| count...) so I'm not sure about the comparison of
| reducing consumption
|
| Also, during the recent conflict with Russia, Germany is
| turning coal plants back online and France is not.
| ncmncm wrote:
| France is right now buying coal-fired power from across
| borders.
|
| Domestic coal consumption figures are meaningless.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Franc
| e
|
| That's wrong. France is a net exporter of power, by over
| 50%. So even on aggregate it is a net benefit to the
| world since 90% of the power generated is CO2 free.
| ncmncm wrote:
| France exports energy when the rivers are cold enough to
| operate their nukes. Rivers are just now close to maximum
| temperature.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Yes and? French electricity is 10 times less CO2
| intensive to produce than German. Given that France
| exports 30% more electricity to Germany than they import
| it reduces the carbon footprint of both countries.
| Redoubts wrote:
| > they are currently replacing coal power at a greater
| rate then France,
|
| Germany is like 40% coal, and France is maybe 5%. It's
| easier to reduce at a faster rate when your use is still
| massive.
| [deleted]
| The_Double wrote:
| > they are currently replacing coal power at a greater
| rate then France, despite Germany actively shutting down
| nuclear plants that still had years of life left.
|
| That sounds a less impressive when you rephrase it as
| saying they went from 15x more coal use than france to 9x
| as much. Percentage wise the decrease seems similar in
| the last few years.
|
| source: https://www.iea.org/countries/france
| https://www.iea.org/countries/germany
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Oh yeah, and Germany is totally _not_ in any kind of
| energy crisis right now due to lack of domestic energy
| sources...
| kitkat_new wrote:
| nuclear isn't a domestic energy source either
| TameAntelope wrote:
| As if the source of the uranium was in any way comparable
| to gas or coal...
| samatman wrote:
| But then you have to ask: why not?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_by_country#G
| erm...
| akiselev wrote:
| _> 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._
|
| I'm absolutely certain of it. In regards to nuclear
| rocketry, it wasn't even the anti-nuclear crowd that killed
| one of the most promising technologies but they certainly
| guaranteed it would die in the dustbins of JPL's archive.
|
| NASA and the United Aircraft Corporation came up with a
| reactor design called the nuclear lightbulb [1] that used
| tens of kilograms of uranium instead of thousands by
| heating uranium hexaflouride [^1] to a plasma and using an
| irrotational vortex [^2] of neon gas to compress it until
| it became a self sustaining [^3] black body radiator [^4].
| They were just about to test the reactor with real fuel
| when it was canceled (during Nixon's administration as part
| of the Mars program) but they managed to experimentally
| identify the remaining production challenges like the
| computational power needed to keep the core stable and the
| material science necessary to separate the vortex from the
| fluid economically. There has been so much progress in
| fields that address those challenges that many of the
| problems are considered solved and the remainder are
| surmountable engineering problems.
|
| I really hope with this renewed interest in nuclear someone
| eventually revives the design and tries to bring it to its
| conclusion. Just based off of the declassified publications
| from the 60s and early 70s [2][3][4][5] it is obvious how
| much potential this design had: it's safe [^5], useful for
| rocketry and terrestrial power generation, and self
| breeding by nature of its design [^6]. Who knows where we
| could be in space exploration and the battle against
| climate change had the design been fully explored.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb
|
| [2] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19730018850
|
| [3] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19730018851
|
| [4] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19710010820
|
| [5] and many more in the JPL archives! Search for "gas core
| reactor"
|
| [^1] UF6 is the most common intermediate in the enrichment
| process _and_ depleted UF6 is how most of our nuclear waste
| is stored... and this reactor is a perfect breeding reactor
| for the waste (see [^5]). All of the infrastructure for
| dealing with the materials have existed since the Manhattan
| project.
|
| [^2] the opposite of a rotational vortex like a tornado,
| which have calm centers. In an irrotational vortex the
| particles in the center have the highest velocity and in
| the reactor it acts like a centrifuge, forcing the uraninum
| to the center and compressing it to tens or hundreds of
| atmospheres. This part was tested experimentally.
|
| [^3] the energy of the plasma and compression from the
| vortex increase the neutron cross section to the point
| where the nuclear reaction becomes self heating with only
| 20kg of fuel. They stopped just short of testing the full
| cycle but this is the same concept behind nuclear weapons,
| which use precise explosives to compress nuclear fuel until
| it reaches criticality, except the vortex can't generate
| the kind of pressures necessary for a nuclear explosion.
|
| [^4] the NASA/UAC design heats the UF6 till it radiates
| most of its energy away as UV. Classical steam turbines or
| hydrogen gas seeded with tungsten nanoparticles (in the
| case of a rocket engine) allow the system to extract power.
|
| [^5] since it's an active design, tons of power is required
| to pump the vortex and keep the core in a fissile regime.
| If any part of the system fails, the core loses pressure
| and becomes a really expensive gas canister until the
| chamber is cleaned up and the core restarted. With a plasma
| window separating the core from a vacuum, the entire system
| can be designed to depressurize safetly.
|
| [^6] anything injected into the core gets bombarded by
| neutrons and the vortex system constantly wicks away small
| amounts of the core. The system forms a closed loop that
| recycles unused fuel via centrifuge and it can also
| separate out transmuted waste [*]. The NASA/UAC team tested
| this with a neutron gun to simulate fission in the core.
|
| [*] we could have had honest-to-god alchemy!
| Maursault wrote:
| > Imagine a world where economies of scale bring nuclear
| power down to the cost of fuel and maintenance.
|
| Economies of scale were applied from the inception of
| commercial nuclear power, yet the promise of electricity
| too cheap to meter has never materialized. Quite the
| opposite. In fact, nuclear has always been the most
| expensive method of generating electricity, and the anti-
| nukes don't enter into it. Even if every individual on the
| planet was pro-nuke, it would still be too expensive. If it
| was otherwise, nothing whatsoever could prevent investors
| from coming out of the woodwork to fulfill your dream of
| nuclear power plants everywhere. Make nuclear energy
| economical and you can have all the nuclear power plants
| you want, as well as being absurdly wealthy. But when you
| fail, try to avoid blaming anything other than nuclear
| energy itself.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| None of this is true in Japan, you might want to read up
| about the cost scaling that's happened there.
|
| The short version is, you need to have enough generations
| of reactor building to allow later projects to benefit
| from previous learnings. Because of various outside
| effects (this is a euphemism for the anti-nuke lobby)
| that type of iterative improvement and workforce skilling
| didn't happen in other countries.
| worik wrote:
| ekianjo wrote:
| you better leave it there because any other word would
| show how bad of a point it is.
| tragictrash wrote:
| You shouldn't leave it there, because that accident has
| nothing to do with cost scaling.
|
| Why don't you leave the thinking for the ones better at
| it.
| worik wrote:
| > You shouldn't leave it there, because that accident has
| nothing to do with cost scaling.
|
| The accident, that single accident on its own, probably
| doubled the cost of nuclear power to Japan. It is hard to
| tell because the costs have not all been paid and are
| mounting still.
|
| This is the Achilles heal of nuclear power, that the
| boosters want us to ignore: The risk of catastrophic
| failure. One reactor can be looked after carefully (not
| economically - others have pointed out here the eye
| watering costs) and safely. But lots of reactors? No. We
| will keep have catastrophic failures until we stop.
| saxonww wrote:
| Genuine question: is this a nuclear power failing, or a
| business failing?
|
| According to the wiki article, several issues from the
| inception of the plant through the failure were ignored,
| all of which either made the failure worse or would have
| arguably prevented it. My understanding is that the plant
| itself was already supposed to have been shut down, but
| duty was extended; I'm not sure if this was to move
| towards break-even on cost, or just to prevent a power
| generation gap, or make more money. Note that the plant
| in question is one that had been shut down previously
| because TEPCO had been caught falsifying inspection and
| repair records.
|
| IMO (as a total non-expert) nuclear is probably safe,
| it's the people running it that screw it up for everyone.
| Maybe that's not a meaningful distinction? I'd sure like
| to have a discussion about nuclear that doesn't conflate
| failures of leadership with failures of technology,
| though.
| shakna wrote:
| > But lots of reactors? No. We will keep have
| catastrophic failures until we stop.
|
| The military have fielded many reactors for a
| considerable amount of time. We've got a bit over fifty
| years of fielding nuclear reactors in submarines. Where
| are all the inevitable disasters, if that is the case?
| worik wrote:
| > The military have fielded many reactors for a
| considerable amount of time. > We've got a bit over fifty
| years of fielding nuclear reactors in submarines. Where
| are all the inevitable disasters, if that is the case?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sunken_nuclear_subm
| ari...
|
| Three from the USA navy. It is a lie that the nuclear
| reactors on submarines have been safe. Two have been lost
| at sea (one was sunk in harbour)
|
| Nuclear reactors on ships generally, submarines in
| particular, are a terrible idea. As evidenced by the fact
| that the US Navy has sunk three, two catestrophically. If
| the US Navy cannot do it, who can?
| kelnos wrote:
| Huh? Only _one_ of those subs had issues with its nuclear
| reactor, but there was no "disaster": it was scuttled in
| a controlled manner (though unfortunately in a location
| that the IAEA disagreed with).
|
| All the other incidents listed had nothing to do with
| their nuclear reactors; they would have all sunk just the
| same had they been powered by diesel fuel.
|
| I'm not sure what you mean by the US Navy sinking two
| "catastrophically": none of the deaths listed on the page
| you link have anything to do with the fact that nuclear
| power was used.
|
| However, you probably should have linked _this_ section
| of the overall article on nuclear submarines:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_submarine#Reactor_a
| cci...
|
| It's weird that the section starts off with "Some of the
| most serious nuclear and radiation accidents by death
| toll in the world have involved nuclear submarine
| mishaps", as the following list doesn't seem to support
| that, only cataloguing 28 deaths and 162 cases that
| probably included lifelong health problems. (These
| numbers are not great, but still not as bad as for land-
| based reactor incidents, and tiny compared to deaths and
| health problems caused by burning fossil fuels.) They do
| claim "substantial radioactivity released" in several of
| the incidents, but don't quantify the effects, or what
| the effects would have been if it had been a land-based
| reactor (so maybe very bad!).
|
| I hesitate to mention this (as I don't want to sound
| dismissive), but it might be notable to consider that all
| of these incidents occurred on Soviet subs, and that
| there hasn't been an incident since 1989. The navies of
| the US, UK, France, China, India, and post-Soviet Russia
| have never (at least as far as we know) had a reactor
| incident with their nuclear-powered subs.
| shakna wrote:
| 2 disasters in 50 years is not exactly catostrophic.
|
| We've had over 120 shipping disasters in that same
| timeframe, resulting in many thousands greater loss of
| life, and greater environmental disasters.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_maritime_disaster
| s_i...
|
| Should global shipping be abolished?
| worik wrote:
| Two disasters that leave nuclear reactors irrecoverably
| deep is indeed a catastrophe.
|
| If you care at all for the future.
|
| But the present trumps the future...
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| Why don't you keep reading the article on the list
| submarines that you referenced, all the way down to the
| 4th paragraph that talks about causes of sinking.
|
| 1 of 9 (Soviet K-37) was scuttled with no loss of life
| due to reactor issues spanning years. 1 had an
| undetermined cause of sinking with theories having to do
| with the usual submarine issues (fire, torpedo accent,
| ballast/pressure issues), not its reactor. All others
| were lost for reasons having nothing to do with nuclear
| reactors.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| What are the issues with sunk nuclear submarines?
|
| I tend to think the bottom of the ocean is a reasonably
| good place for the nuclear reactors in those subs.
| runarberg wrote:
| I don't think you actually believe that the bottom of the
| ocean is a good place to keep nuclear waste.
|
| You would probably agree with me--and most other people--
| that a nuclear power plant, the was caught throwing their
| waste into the ocean, would be an environmental disaster.
| The US navy doing the same thing is also an environmental
| disaster.
| worik wrote:
| Do you really think that?
|
| We are dealing now with barrels of DDT dropped in deep
| water off the Californian coast
| hedora wrote:
| Fukishima was still probably cleaner per kWh than most
| coal plants.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The capital costs of nuclear are so high the current
| model of marketing electricity doesn't work.
|
| The same will be true of fusion. Set a target level of
| service and make electric generation a government
| service. The government is better at capital projects
| anyway and if energy were a taxpayer funded service it
| would transform society in many ways.
| tomohawk wrote:
| Can you name any capital projects in the last 30 years
| where the US government did a great job of a) controlling
| costs, b) meeting the stated design goal, c) on time?
| pyuser583 wrote:
| I'm very happy with the massive road construction and
| maintenance in my area.
| tomohawk wrote:
| I have a family member who was an engineer in the Federal
| Highway Administration for many years. The amount of
| waste and excess cost on these projects is really hard to
| exagerate.
|
| Comparative costs to other OECD countries for similar
| infrastructure - there really isn't one, as the US is way
| out of line in terms of cost and quality.
|
| My family member communicated with counterparts in other
| countries, impressed with what they were doing. When
| asked what the research was that they based their
| projects on, they all said it was the US funded research
| (which the US doesn't take advantage of).
| Spooky23 wrote:
| A few that come to mind:
|
| - Alaskan Way Viaduct
|
| - Tappan Zee bridge replacement
|
| - Billions in highway projects.
| cpwright wrote:
| I might not hold up the new Tappan Zee Bridge as a beacon
| of meeting design goals.
|
| https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/mario-cuomo-
| bridge-s...
| pyrale wrote:
| Maybe you should stop electing people whose campaign talk
| is that US agencies are a big mess?
|
| I mean, these people basically gain popularity when
| government is shown to be inefficient, but at the same
| time, they're the ones tasked with running the
| government.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| > The capital costs of nuclear are so high the current
| model of marketing electricity doesn't work.
|
| It doesn't work because nuclear is the only power where
| all the externalities are accounted for. The average coal
| plant kills more people with radiation released from
| burning coal every year than all nuclear accidents
| combined.
|
| But because it's nicely diffuse no one cares.
| scaredginger wrote:
| Sorry, what radiation is released from coal? Do you mean
| gas emissions?
| SECProto wrote:
| > what radiation is released from coal?
|
| https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-wastes-coal-
| fired-po...
| scaredginger wrote:
| Thanks
|
| The link you provided indicates the level of radiation is
| negligible, so I'm not sure what your point is.
| danielheath wrote:
| It's higher (IIRC, orders of magnitude higher) than the
| amount of radiation released by an operating nuclear
| plant.
| aperson_hello wrote:
| And that number includes all nuclear accidents as well
| iirc
| VintageCool wrote:
| Coal is dying in the United States for economic reasons,
| anyway.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Yes, because natural gas is cheaper.
|
| Amazing.
|
| When people said we'd be using renewables I somehow
| didn't think dinosaur farts would be the largest slice of
| the pie.
| karaterobot wrote:
| This is an article about nuclear plants starting to be
| produced at scale.
| Paradigma11 wrote:
| The most expensive energy is wind and solar after a few
| weeks of low wind in a cloudy winter.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Fortunately, that very rarely happens, so backing it up
| with gas turbine plants (burning hydrogen, ultimately) is
| cheaper than dealing with the 365/24/7 high cost of
| nuclear.
| Paradigma11 wrote:
| Nice, i would have guessed that duplicating the
| production infrastructure and the added loss of hydrogen
| transformation would be more problematic.
|
| Do you have any actual numbers at hand?
|
| "...is cheaper..." is a bit vague.
| pfdietz wrote:
| I'll point to the simulation site I always link to:
| https://model.energy/
|
| This uses real weather data for various countries and
| optimize solar + wind + batteries + hydrogen to provide a
| constant output at minimum cost. The results are
| interesting. You can tweak the cost assumptions.
| kortilla wrote:
| Nuclear never achieved economies of scale because of the
| anti nuclear crowd. The cumulative number of nuclear
| power plants built is a drop in the bucket compared to
| coal and gas plants.
| epistasis wrote:
| I'm not sure how the anti-nuclear crowd stopped that.
| There was a general mismanagement and misestimstion of
| how much nuclear was needed. And then there was a massive
| amount of construction mismanagement.
|
| Even in France, which has a very supportive population,
| and is usually heralded as a nuclear success story, saw
| increasing costs rather than decreasing costs as they
| build more of the same reactor model.
|
| Construction productivity doesn't increase like
| manufacturing productivity does. Nuclear's failures are,
| as far as I can tell, entirely the responsibility of
| those tasked with building it. And it's quite possible
| that nuclear only makes sense at a certain level of
| economic development, with the right level of technology,
| but not too much technological development such that
| manufacturing has completely eclipsed construction.
|
| Go to any investor that would build nuclear, and they
| won't cite public opposition as the reason not to build,
| they will cite the construction risk.
|
| And that's why this SMR design is being tried rather than
| large reactors.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Hail Mary Reactors are being tried because they're
| nuclear's last chance.
| pyrale wrote:
| > Even in France, which has a very supportive population,
| and is usually heralded as a nuclear success story, saw
| increasing costs rather than decreasing costs as they
| build more of the same reactor model.
|
| I'd be curious to learn where you got your data for this,
| because I have never been able to find such data. Best I
| could get was average cost of a plant in a "pallier".
|
| What I can provide is building duration, which definitely
| goes down as more of the same model are built, but
| there's no guarantee that building duration and cost are
| equal here.
| epistasis wrote:
| I spent years asking people who claim that France's cost
| were low for the data behind it to no avail, but only
| finally stumbled upon somebody linking to this paper in a
| different context:
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03
| 014...
|
| There's another paper somewhere in my bookmarks that
| shows this for reactors of the same model built in the
| US, and maybe also France, but I'm having trouble
| locating it right now...
|
| As with any single publication, it can't be taken as the
| revealed truth, but it's the best I have at hand.
|
| Edit: how could I have forgotten about the infamous
| Loveringe, Yip, Nordgard paper! This is impressive
| because it does the analysis across many countries, and
| finds a few with cost decreases, but a dominant trend
| towards more expensive construction:
|
| https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S03014215163001
| 06?...
|
| My personal, untested, hypothesis is that these
| variations have mostly to do with the general cost of
| labor in a country, and in particular their level of
| economic advancement, which establishes a floor on the
| value of an hour of a person's labor. Specifically, my
| guess is that construction is only feasible for nuclear
| when a country is in a magic sweet spot where labor is
| cheap, and technological advancement is moderate, like
| 1950s-70s US level. But not so advanced that labor has
| gotten so expensive that skilled labor like welders have
| more productive uses of their time.
|
| If my theory is correct, future costs for South Korea
| should rise from where they were before stopping their
| program (in a flurry of corruption scandals, I would
| note. Nobody brings up South Korea as an example of
| successful construction anymore, instead having to resort
| to suggesting Rosatom should embark on a massive building
| spree across the globe.)
| pyrale wrote:
| The abstract looks interesting, but I can't find it in
| open access. If you have access to it, what would be
| interesting to look at is cost evolution within a batch
| ("pallier" in french). Cost of newer batches compared to
| older batches isn't really relevant, as France
| progressively moved from 900MW reactors to 1450MW ones.
| Newer batches were also notably smaller, leaving less
| room for design improvement or cost optimization.
| nojvek wrote:
| Do you have source for nuclear energy is "too expensive"?
| baix777 wrote:
| Nuclear needs subsidies due to a long history of large
| cost overruns and other issues.
|
| https://energypost.eu/how-profitable-is-an-investment-in-
| nuc...
|
| And France, with many Nuclear plants, has recently had
| issues keeping the plants up. Many of the most
| problematic plants are newer ones.
|
| https://www.ans.org/news/article-3939/frances-energy-
| woes-wo...
|
| The reality is economies of scale have kicked in for
| solar and wind energy in a way they never can for
| nuclear. We are at the point where it makes sense, at
| times, to overprovision renewals to ensure enough supply.
|
| The issue with renewables is storage, of course. But that
| problem looks to be more solvable than cost effective
| nuclear, a problem which we have not solved in over 50
| years. One can say if we were only smarter we could make
| nuclear more cost effective, which is probably true. But
| we built a nuclear power plant where a tsunami occurred
| in the past, only to find it occurred again, so we aren't
| that smart. The issue with nuclear is everything has to
| be right for it to be cost effective and safe, and
| nuclear is too complex for humans to consistently do
| this.
|
| Safe nuclear power that is also cost effective is not a
| problem we have solved.
| zizee wrote:
| SMRs are an opportunity for economies of scale to kick in
| for nuclear. If you can start building reactors in
| factories, and interate on designs, then you can see
| economies of scale kick in.*
|
| That said, I am not super bullish on nuclear, and agree
| with your position. Solar and wind are just getting too
| cheap for nuclear to get the investment needed to catch-
| up. If we see someone crack the code on cheap storage of
| electiciy, solar and wind will runaway with the prize.
| Not coincidentally, storage is has vastly more investment
| of money and brains on looking for ways to scale vs
| nuclear.
|
| *Safety concerns with nuclear will make iterative design
| difficult to pull off!
| tremon wrote:
| _Nuclear needs subsidies_
|
| So do oil and coal [0]:
|
| > Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $5.9 trillion in
| 2020 or about 6.8 percent of GDP, and are expected to
| rise to 7.4 percent of GDP in 2025
|
| [0]: https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2021/0
| 9/23/Sti...
| okr wrote:
| Never say never. And about solvable storage: right now it
| is not solved. So it makes sense to go nuclear (again).
| VintageCool wrote:
| There was scarcely any financial incentive to address the
| grid scale energy storage problem until like two or three
| years ago. There are a half dozen startups working on it
| now.
|
| My vote is to rapidly install renewables while we have
| the natural gas backstop, and give the storage startups a
| few years to make it happen. Energy Dome, Hydrostor, and
| Form Energy all look promising.
|
| And if new nuclear turns out to be less expensive than
| expected, great.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > There are a half dozen startups working on it now.
|
| Many more than that.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| What are even the yardsticks by which nuclear storage
| success is even measured? /gen
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's pretty easy to google comparative costs.
|
| It's really hard to invest billions of capital dollars
| that won't produce any return for a decade while you can
| realize immediate return on solar with costs that drop
| every year.
|
| Accountants are the worst enemy of nuclear, not
| activists.
| nightski wrote:
| If they were comparable that might be true, but they are
| not interchangeable.
| titzer wrote:
| > In fact, nuclear has always been the most expensive
| method of generating electricity
|
| Just wonder if we're pricing in those externalities from
| coal, like hundreds of thousands of deaths per year due
| to air pollution and the fact that it is completely
| fucking up the atmosphere, leading to a global
| catastrophe. Because...we're not.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Including air pollution externalities, nuclear is
| definately cheaper.
|
| Some of the costs/risks with nuclear are a bit black
| swannish though which complicates matters.
|
| Energy efficiency, pollution controls and carbon taxes
| are the real magical tech we've not exploited.
|
| Because cheaper in the long run means more expensive
| right now, which is a vulnerable political soft spot that
| psycopaths can easily exploit.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| Great that the alternative is renewables then!
| [deleted]
| Veedrac wrote:
| Nuclear is uneconomical because safe, economical nuclear
| is illegal. That's it. If everyone were pro-nuclear,
| those laws wouldn't exist (or would exist in a sane
| form), and nuclear would be cheap.
| Melatonic wrote:
| The other problem is that the anti nuke crowd had a point
| back in the day - they were wrong about Nuclear not being
| safe theoretically - but they were right about a few
| asshole corporations doing things too cheaply.
| parkingrift wrote:
| Instead we got decades of coal power which has caused at
| least tens of millions of deaths and has led to runaway
| global warming which might kill billions.
|
| Truly glad we prevented a few assholes corporations from
| making a mess of things. I get grossed out just thinking
| about the clean air and normal climate.
| gitanes wrote:
| Yeah, I hate that corporation called USSR blowing up
| Chernobyl.
| baq wrote:
| they built too cheaply, ignored safety procedures and
| blew the thing up in the process.
|
| it doesn't matter they were USSR. might as well have been
| PG&E. soviet people and usa people were both just people
| and still are.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| The anti-nuclear argument pretty much simplifies to:
| Nuclear is hard, maintenance needs to be done diligently
| and regularly, no corners can be cut, and humans are
| historically really bad to doing ANY of that!
| m463 wrote:
| exactly, especially when you read wikipedia's article on
| energy density: material specific energy
| w*h/kg ----------- ----------------------
| uranium 22,394,000,000 ... diesel fuel
| 12,666
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Solar panel is like 800,000 wh/kg
| [deleted]
| andbberger wrote:
| we really oughta let the navy run the power grid
| collinmanderson wrote:
| Yeah, they should get vehicle-to-grid capability.
| NavinF wrote:
| My libertarian knee jerk reaction was "fuck that". But then
| again, it can't possibly be worse than PG&E so... sure why
| not.
| [deleted]
| AnonymousPlanet wrote:
| > I could never understand why we didn't build these for
| civilian use (cost I figured) but now we will
|
| 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.
| samstave wrote:
| worik wrote:
| Ouch, so shouty.
|
| IMO the future of energy is decentralisation not
| centralisation.
|
| One of the reasons I do not think nuclear fits. It is
| impossible to handle nuclear in anything other than huge
| establishments (I feel this proposal for mas produced nuclear
| plants is going to end in tears).
|
| The future is local.
| ksidudwbw wrote:
| And that reactor has also tested and proven reliability. Quirks
| have been evened out
| [deleted]
| mwattsun wrote:
| We never had a single problem with it in the years I was on
| board. There were few moving parts besides the control rods
| and a few valves. When I stood watch on the steam throttle
| the reactor power would spike when I opened the throttle up.
| I tell my kids I've controlled a nuclear chain reaction with
| my bare hands.
| omginternets wrote:
| How long did you serve? When you say "never had a single
| problem", are you being literal?
|
| I'm abstractly aware that nuclear technology is reliable,
| but your anecdote somehow makes it more relatable. You've
| piqued my curiosity :)
| lnsru wrote:
| I really don't understand this reliability question.
| There was Fukushima and Chernobyl in my lifetime.
| Fukushima got earthquake and tsunami at the same time.
| Shit happens. I have no opinion about Chernobyl since it
| was in a country with extremely poor working culture. But
| otherwise in my opinion nuclear power plant is just
| another piece of big machinery. Comparable to
| semiconductor fab. They have there enough of interesting
| gases to gas whole population of the next city. But it
| never happened yet.
| omginternets wrote:
| I suspect the reason you don't understand is because
| you're unaware of the reliability issues and health risks
| associated with the alternatives.
| smegger001 wrote:
| you mean like the literal tons of radioactive waste sent
| into the atmosphere by burning hydrocarbons?
| sitkack wrote:
| > extremely poor working culture
|
| You should do some research on what the actual flaw was
| in both the reactor and the test that the crew was doing.
| Attributing it to "poor working culture" sounds bigoted.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| The crew running the reactor during the accident were
| poorly trained, poorly managed, and weren't comfortable
| pushing back against bad management. There is no doubt
| that Chernobyl had a poor work culture, a rot that came
| from the top but nevertheless permeated the whole
| facility.
| ncmncm wrote:
| The person most personally responsible went on to manage
| another, similar system.
|
| Management failings are part of the risk profile of any
| hazardous technology, from nukes to feedlot pig farming.
| Leaving them out produces dishonest numbers.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| What are you responding to? I am responding to a claim
| that acknowledging poor work culture at Chernobyl is
| bigotry.
|
| It's not bigotry (an intolerance of others) nor is it
| even prejudice (judging before you have the relevant
| facts.) It's a widely acknowledged historic fact that
| Chernobyl had a terrible workplace culture.
|
| If you want to criticize somebody for ignoring
| Chernobyl's workplace culture, then you should have
| responded to sitkack, who seems to think that people
| shouldn't talk about this aspect of the disaster.
| mwattsun wrote:
| I was on the sub for three years. I am not aware that we
| had any incidents with the reactor. We had a pipe break
| and start to flood the sub, but that wasn't nuclear
| related. In the shipyard we had an incident where the
| neutron detector pegged high but it was determined to be
| caused by TIG welding.
|
| https://www.twi-global.com/technical-knowledge/job-
| knowledge...
| omginternets wrote:
| >We had a pipe break and start to flood the sub, but that
| wasn't nuclear related.
|
| That sounds absolutely terrifying. How did you guys end
| up fixing it?
|
| >In the shipyard we had an incident where the neutron
| detector pegged high but it was determined to be caused
| by TIG welding.
|
| Neat! :)
| mwattsun wrote:
| People on submarines tend to know the systems they are
| responsible for very well since their life may depend on
| it. In this case they knew which valves to turn to stop
| the flow.
| c3534l wrote:
| This makes me think the navy now has something better, so
| they're loosening the reigns on last-gen nuclear technology.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Military reactors run on very highly enriched fuel, nearly
| weapons grade. That dramatically increases proliferation
| concerns when you're talking about large fleets of civilian
| reactors.
|
| 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.
| Retric wrote:
| Cost is a larger issue than proliferation. Civilian nuclear
| reactors care a lot more about fuel costs than military
| reactors do and highly enriched uranium just costs more.
| spookie wrote:
| Isn't weapon's grade uranium at 85%? I know that western
| powers got really worried at Iran past 19.75%. But, I still
| doubt it's that heavy for energy applications, even if
| military.
| ncmncm wrote:
| U for a nuke mounted on a missile needs to be heavily
| enriched. On a semi trailer, not so much.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| You are mistaken. US naval reactors run on around 95%
| enriched uranium. There's a desire to switch to lower
| enrichment fuels, but it meets a lot of competing concerns,
| such as state of the art naval reactors can be fuel'd just
| once for a ~40 year lifetime. Basically, military naval
| reactors are not a pathway to economic civilian reactors
| because the military has different concerns and less price
| sensitivity vs those concerns.
| spookie wrote:
| >95% Jesus effin Christ almighty
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| What danger is there with proliferation? Does it really
| matter when the US has thousands of nuclear weapons?
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Yeah I never quite got this. We can have Putin say "you'd
| better let me kill whoever I want or I'll destroy the
| entire world", but we can't have power plants.
| [deleted]
| apendleton wrote:
| Obviously a very US-oriented perspective, but: yes, to the
| extent that the US has historically attempted at least
| sometimes to be a global police power, they're
| significantly constrained when the country they're trying
| to police has nuclear weapons. The US response to Russia
| invading Ukraine has been fundamentally different in kind
| from, say, Iraq invading Kuwait, in which Iraqi forces were
| pushed back to the border in a matter of days. There are
| lots of reasons for this (much greater asymmetry in
| conventional military forces, etc.), but at least in part
| this is because of US concerns that direct conflict with
| Russia would escalate to nuclear war. Similarly, can
| already start to see how US posture towards North Korea is
| starting to change and will likely continue to do so as a
| result of their nuclear advancement.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Sorry this article is about US regulators approving the
| use of reactors in the US, right? That's why I wrote in a
| US centric way.
|
| Why does it matter that the US has more nuclear reactors
| that could potentially become weapons if they already a
| massive arsenal of nuclear weapons?
| antioppressor wrote:
| Sure, terrorists will rummage around these and steal the fuel
| rods. Then they somehow figure out how to make a
| thermonuclear weapon.
|
| "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"
| Retric wrote:
| Proliferation among nations is also a concern not just
| terrorists.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Frankly, I think the most dangerous countries have
| nuclear weapons already. I mean of course those countries
| prone to starting imperialistic wars, threatening their
| neighbors, apartheid, etc.
| Retric wrote:
| I would be rather concerned if Iran gained nuclear
| weapons. They have recently had both overt and covert
| wars of aggression and have threatened their neighbors
| etc. But they have also had a recent insurgency
| demonstrating instability.
| ncmncm wrote:
| But on the plus side, North Korea already has them.
| p2detar wrote:
| It seems China and Russia are actively building SMRs. [0] I'd
| be a pity if the west do not get serious at least about
| exploring the opportunity to test some of the designs being
| made.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor#List_of_.
| ..
| danans wrote:
| > I could never understand why we didn't build these for
| civilian use (cost I figured)
|
| 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-...
| scythe wrote:
| It appears that the LCOE for utility-scale solar which you're
| referencing here, community and rooftop both being
| significantly more expensive, is based on existing
| installations. But existing installations would have used the
| cheapest available land, and the cheapest available land
| tends to be in short supply. Solar installations on a
| significantly larger scale would have to use less ideal land
| (less accessible, more rugged, more expensive) and would
| incur associated cost increases. Solar is like a huge orange
| tree where we have been mostly picking from the lower
| branches -- there are more than enough oranges on the tree
| for everyone, but you can't expect them all to be as easy as
| the low-hanging fruit.
|
| 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_produ
| ct...
| ncmncm wrote:
| Cheap land is cheap specifically _because_ there is a very
| great deal of it. But it is a stupid place to site solar,
| anyway: there are much better places, already in use, that
| may continue in that use, but with added solar revenue.
|
| The overwhelming bulk of utility scale storage will not be
| in batteries. They cost too much per kWh stored. Bulk
| storage will be in media where incremental kWh are
| cheapest. Think tankage.
| scythe wrote:
| >The overwhelming bulk of utility scale storage will not
| be in batteries. They cost too much per kWh stored. Bulk
| storage will be in media where incremental kWh are
| cheapest.
|
| One side of this comparison has cost estimates, the other
| one is vaporware. You need a certain generation capacity
| for hydrogen (or whatever) measured in watts, not watt-
| hours; these plants require maintenance and operation
| costs likely much higher than batteries. With battery
| costs approaching $100/kWh, many TWh of storage are
| attainable.
|
| I'm assuming that nuclear will be a significant part of
| the energy supply, so I would not expect it to be
| necessary to, for example, store six months' worth of
| energy for the winter.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Nukes will soon be unable to find buyers for their power
| at a price they can offer, most of the time, so will be
| unable to collect enough revenue to continue operating,
| anywhere they are not propped up from money coerced by
| taxation.
|
| Cheap storage will displace them.
| pfdietz wrote:
| There is an enormous amount of cheap land, globally. Any
| land that is cheap enough for farming is cheap enough for
| PV, and land that isn't even adequate for farming tends to
| be even cheaper than that.
| scythe wrote:
| Apparently, my use of the phrase "cheap land" was
| misleading. The acquisition price is one thing. But then
| you have site suitability, regional suitability, site
| access (running powerlines/roads), and construction labor
| availability. Any of these can drive up costs. Desert
| sands are soft and blow around, rocky hillsides are
| difficult to maneuver equipment on, forests have to be
| cleared, et cetera.
| gmkiv wrote:
| The link you provide seems to say that the cost of wholesale
| PV + storage is $85-$158 (bottom figure, line 3). Am I
| misreading that?
|
| 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.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| Nuclear uses far less resources and land area than both wind
| and solar plus storage. So sure, it costs some more money but
| it costs less actual real stuff.
|
| 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.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| You do know that you can exchange money for "actual real
| stuff", including natural resources and land? So that why
| we cite costs in "money".
| lumost wrote:
| Land use is a substantial concern for renewables and
| energy storage. We pay for electricity in marginal
| dollars. Currently we are building solar in low
| cost/utilization land. At some point prior to full
| rollout of renewables, this "cheap" land will run out.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Land use is of _absolutely no concern_ for renewables
| _or_ storage.
|
| Solar and wind coexist synergetically with existing uses,
| so renewables do not need any dedicated land at all.
| There is enough existing reservoir area to float solar
| on, alone, for many times the world's conceivable power
| needs.
|
| Solar farms are built in deserts only because idiot
| investors want them there. They are fantastically less
| efficient there, and degrade in the heat.
|
| Concern trolling about land demand is the low road.
| lumost wrote:
| Why do you believe that land use is absolutely no
| concern? What data do you have for this?
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-82042-5
|
| Notes that at 80% penetration, solar will occupy roughly
| 5% of total land. The paper goes on to study methods of
| ensuring that this land use change does not drive net
| carbon increases from vegetation loss etc.
| ncmncm wrote:
| You didn't read or understand the posting you replied to.
| Why should anybody expect you to read or understand
| anything else?
| lumost wrote:
| I'd suggest reviewing the site guidelines on comments.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| I posted a response on some of the challenges with
| marginal economics in renewables and responded to your
| comment with a peer reviewed and cited journal article on
| these issues and the relevant data point from this study.
|
| Your response contains an ad-hominem personal attack, and
| does not contribute to the discussion.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Which part of a reservoir surface do you consider "land"?
| lumost wrote:
| Presuming a total adoption of solar across all reservoirs
| on the planet. We would have roughly 220k sq km of
| available "land", roughly enough to support the EUs
| energy demand (assuming the energy could be magically
| transported from reservoirs on other continents)
|
| Placing panels everywhere we can is a great idea, however
| pretending that there is a silver bullet is putting our
| heads in the sand.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Globally, there is no shortage of cheap land for a
| renewable-powered economy. If locally land is expensive,
| don't put energy-hungry industry there.
|
| This may mean Europe ends up deindustrializing vs. sun-
| soaked places closer to the equator. I suppose King
| Leopold wouldn't have liked that.
| lumost wrote:
| This is a fair statement, major industrial metros such as
| Chicago emerged due to proximity to resources (iron,
| grain), transportation (lakes, rivers, rail), and energy
| (coal).
|
| There surely will be a new equilibrium including newer
| power generation means, however many sunny places are far
| from water and other industrial inputs - moving steel
| mills to New Mexico is not quite a slam dunk in terms of
| transportation.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| We cite costs in money because it's useful. But you can't
| eat money and you can't build from it. You need actual
| stuff and land to do so. That is limited in a way that
| the money supply isn't.
|
| Case in point, the currently ongoing global supply
| shortage.
| wizofaus wrote:
| I would think the point is that if nuclear costs more
| money, it's suggestive that it doesn't really use less
| resources than other options that cost less. Of course,
| that's not entirely true, as some of the costs for
| nuclear are insurance, which isn't priced particularly
| rationally, and of course, for human expertise, but
| that's arguably a far more scarce resource as are land
| and raw building materials - i.e. if you're using highly-
| skilled human brain power to design/build/run nuclear
| power plants, it prevents us from using that brain power
| to do other potentially more productive things (which
| might include coming up with better solutions for our
| environmental challenges). To be clear - I'm quite
| supportive of more nuclear power, but certainly not
| because it uses less land or resources.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| I realise that, but this argument is based on the
| assumption that things in the world are rationally
| priced.
|
| When an NFT sells for more than a small power plant and a
| celebrity dog walker can be paid more than a nuclear
| engineer I don't have a lot of faith in that premise.
| wizofaus wrote:
| Fair call. But while obviously imperfect, cost in $ is
| about the best estimate we have of the underlying value
| of all resources involved for a given economic output.
| Unfortunately it typically doesn't include externalities
| - if it had done so historically nuclear might already be
| cheaper now than fossil fuels.
| [deleted]
| Ma8ee wrote:
| Uh? Try reading my comment again. That the federal
| reserve in principle could print unlimited money is
| irrelevant here.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| There's no viable way to build storage at the scale required
| to run a wind and solar grid. Even building just 1 hour of
| electricity storage amounts to 2,500 GWh. The entire world's
| annual output of battery storage is somewhere between 300 and
| 400 GWh. Any attempt at grid scale storage would lead to
| shortages driving up prices.
|
| 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.
| ncmncm wrote:
| As has been pointed out to you many times before, there is
| no need to use batteries to store utility-scale energy, so
| battery production capacity is immaterial. Mentioning
| battery production of the moment _again_ is disingenuous,
| not to say dishonest. Production capacity, anyway,
| increases with demand.
|
| The key principle of bulk energy storage is E = Fx, applied
| liberally worldwide for _centuries_. It is taught to every
| freshman engineering student. Nothing blocks further
| application of the principle, at any scale.
|
| And as has been pointed out numerous times, _no existing
| alpine lake_ is needed for hydro storage. And, the site
| _does not need_ substantial "transportation
| infrastructure". Dozens of hydro dams, still in use, were
| built in California's Sierra Nevada mountains in the 1920s
| via roads a car cannot use.
| SECProto wrote:
| > The key principle of bulk energy storage is E = Fx,
| applied liberally worldwide for centuries. It is taught
| to every freshman engineering student
|
| Hi there, I graduated engineering and am currently
| applying for professional licensure. I took only one
| course focused on energy, but I've never heard of E=Fx.
| Googling it brought up no relevant results. Could you
| expand on what it is?
| ncmncm wrote:
| You may go back to your freshman physics textbook.
|
| If you get a professional engineering license without
| recalling basic Newtonian physics, that just tells us the
| licensing process has utterly failed us.
| SECProto wrote:
| > You may go back to your freshman physics textbook.
|
| I may, but I live in a country that doesn't use the word
| freshman, so I don't know which year physics text that
| would be.
|
| I assume from context you were meaning to refer to
| gravitational potential energy, which is generally
| represented as [?]U=m _g_ [?]h (change in gravitational
| potential energy equals mass times gravity times change
| in height). The variables you used (E=Fx) would mean
| energy equals force times (variable). From dimensional
| analysis the variable would have to be units of length
| (m), however it clearly only applies in the vertical
| dimension so it's better to use a specific variable like
| [?]h
|
| Regardless, energy storage via gravitational potential
| energy (i.e. pumped storage) has been in use for about a
| century, and still makes up a rsmall proportion of grid
| operations. It has very specific requirements that aren't
| available everywhere. It's not an end-all solution for
| energy storage.
| lumost wrote:
| Not the parent, but feel compelled to clarify the physics
| here. Delta E= force * distance always holds. This is the
| same physics of a car breaking or a jet accelerating.
|
| However a more general formula would be the integral of
| net force over distance.
| SECProto wrote:
| Yes, I was just suggesting that force times distance is
| not relevant to energy storage as gravitational potential
| unless the distance is vertical.
| [deleted]
| Manuel_D wrote:
| What do the values of E, F, and x even stand for?
| Googling this yields no related results [1]. Presumably F
| and x stand for the energy output of a storage system and
| the duration that system is online, respectively. But
| simply stating that equation is pointless, unless you
| actually give a plan to deliver on appropriate values of
| F and x. It's about as inane as saying "E + MC^2 so let's
| just build fusion and be done with it."
|
| 1. https://google.gprivate.com/search.php?search?q=E%20=%
| 20Fx%2...
| ncmncm wrote:
| You really are fooling no one. Why maintain the
| imposture? Are you not embarrassed at being called out on
| falsehoods each time you trot them out again?
| Manuel_D wrote:
| For the third time, what do F, E, and x stand for? Are
| you not embarrassed about telling people to go back to
| their physics textbook when the equation you're writing
| has nothing to do with energy storage?
| lumost wrote:
| They are likely referring to force * distance = energy.
| Which in context is a pitch for pumped hydro storage.
|
| This all sounds well and good, however it's highly
| unclear that utility scale pumped hydro is viable. To
| make it work you need to have plentiful water, limited
| evaporative loss/other losses, and two large basins to
| store both the charge, and discharge of water.
|
| In the event of drought, these facilities could become
| impractical. Hydro facilities have their own
| environmental concerns. Combined with shifting climates
| and rainfall patterns there are many challenges to be
| solved. (some of which go away if the hydro storage is in
| underground ceiled chambers... which also has a cost
| associated)
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Then what will be used for grid-scale storage if not
| batteries and hydroelectricity?
|
| > And as has been pointed out numerous times, no existing
| alpine lake is needed for hydro storage. And, the site
| does not need substantial "transportation
| infrastructure". Dozens of hydro dams, still in use, were
| built in California's Sierra Nevada mountains in the
| 1920s via roads a car cannot use.
|
| Such as? How did they get heavy machinery to these dams
| to build them? All of the dams I can find like the Shasta
| dam, Orville dam, etc are in fact close to major
| transportation infrastructure.
| adrianN wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The Sabatier process has significant blockers to actually
| being used: First, it needs a source of carbon dioxide,
| and the small concentration of it in he atmosphere is
| insufficient. Biofuels could be used for this, but they
| aren't produced in sufficient quantities. Second, it
| needs a source of hydrogen. Almost all hydrogen produced
| today is done through steam reformation, which emits
| carbon dioxide. Electrolysis accounts for a slim minority
| of hydrogen produced today, mainly due to inefficiency
| and issues with electrodes corroding. Nobody is operating
| commercial power to gas storage facility, it's only
| prototypes.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Yes, and in 1950, no nuclear power plants operating;
| therefore nuclear power is impossible.
|
| Who do you imagine you are fooling?
| adrianN wrote:
| Commercial power-to-gas facilities are in operation in
| Germany, but large scale investments make little sense
| right now. The money is better spend in increasing the
| supply of renewable energy, or electrifying things that
| currently burn fossil fuels. Days where we have too much
| renewable energy are very rare still. It would be a waste
| to turn it into Hydrogen.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > Commercial power-to-gas facilities are in operation in
| Germany
|
| Source? I'm only aware of pilot programs in Japan and
| Germany, not commercial operators.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Disingenuity is deceptive everywhere it appears. Know
| that you are not fooling anybody.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Pointing to one or two _current_ storage technologies as
| evidence that the problem is fundamentally unsolvable is
| quite a logical leap.
|
| Can we apply the same reasoning and conclude that because
| existing nuclear reactors are inadequate, no possible
| future nuclear reactors can be adequate?
|
| Why does pumped hydro have to be close to transportation
| infrastructure, btw? Can one not build roads or rail lines?
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The point is that no existing storage system is
| sufficient and thus solar and wind is really solar, wind,
| and fossil fuels. And nuclear power is indeed sufficient.
| They can indeed modulate power output, and we have the
| capacity to build them at the required scale. Some
| countries already have, like France.
|
| > Why does pumped hydro have to be close to
| transportation infrastructure, btw? Can one not build
| roads or rail lines?
|
| You can, but the more remote the build site the more
| expensive it becomes.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Current nuclear technology isn't sufficient either. A
| world powered by nuclear burner reactors runs out of
| uranium very quickly. Breeder reactors or seawater
| uranium extraction would be needed, and neither of these
| are "existing" in the sense you're using for storage.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| This is incorrect, even existing supplies with no
| different form of extraction would last over 200 years:
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-
| glo...
|
| Nuclear seawater extraction is already conducted, at a
| price of about $200 per pound [1]. Raw fuel extraction is
| a small portion of nuclear's cost (enrichment is a much
| bigger portion) so this is not a significant cost
| increase.
|
| 1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/ura
| nium-s...
| parkingrift wrote:
| These "levelized" costs are always comically inept.
|
| - 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.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| This site is using a benchmark of 4 hours for storage. This
| is sufficient for California, but not really anywhere else.
| Here in Finland, it would be literally 3 orders of magnitude
| too low. This, er, has an impact on cost.
| SECProto wrote:
| Yep. SMR is a much better drop-in replacement for fossil
| sources than renewables (generally stable/controllable
| output, dense locating so no expansion/upgrading of grid
| required unlike solar and wind, and can provide large
| winter outputs in more northerly climes where solar
| efficiency fades in the winter).
| carderne wrote:
| The line you're presumably referencing is for four hours of
| storage.
|
| That's nowhere near enough to sensibly compare with a nuclear
| plant.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Wait, am I reading it correctly that your reference is saying
| that the cost of fuel and operation of a nuclear reactor
| alone are already around the same value as the total costs
| for PV solar?
|
| I didn't expect that.
| dv_dt wrote:
| It's the same as the most expensive residential rooftop
| solar. Nuclear is about 8-10x the total cost vs utility
| scale solar projects.
| adrianN wrote:
| Just the turbine part of any power plant that converts heat
| to electricity is expensive enough that it has problems
| competing with PV in sunny locations (if you only include a
| little bit of storage in your calculations)
| marcosdumay wrote:
| What I got is that if you had a perfectly fine already
| working nuclear plant, completely paid off, it's about as
| profitable to abandon it and build a solar plant as it is
| to run it.
| petre wrote:
| > I could never understand why we didn't build these for
| civilian use
|
| 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...
| vfclists wrote:
| What of the Integral Fast Reactor which has the waste disposal
| issue licked?
|
| 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.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I think this is an area where industrial policy should play a
| serious role.
|
| 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.
| annexrichmond wrote:
| > We need to be lucky every day, mother nature only needs to be
| lucky once.
|
| Sounds more like a slogan than an argument
| sgc wrote:
| It's also a terrible attitude to an engineering and
| operations challenge. What is this dark box of 'luck'? We
| know the potential concerns, and can design and act
| accordingly.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _I am firmly against a technology with such a unequal
| downside /upside ratio._
|
| I'm very curious what you're basing this opinion on.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
| [deleted]
| haroldp wrote:
| > it's just that every reactor needs to be playing it's A game
| every day.
|
| 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.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Many of the supposed guarantees are valid only in the absence
| of water and/or oxygen intrusion into the core, which are
| huge caveats here on planet Earth.
| sroussey wrote:
| This is the big difference between most of the large deployed
| reactors and the modern designs.
|
| 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.
| jeffbee wrote:
| "Deconstruct" is doing a _lot_ of work here. Nobody knows
| how to take apart fission reactors promptly after they are
| shut down at the end of their economic life. All we know
| how to do is wait many years for activity levels to
| decline, then incrementally remove materials starting with
| the least contaminated, which itself takes decades. The
| materials can only be recycled into other nuclear
| facilities, which means that essentially none of this
| material _has_ been recycled, because nobody is building.
| jefftk wrote:
| " _they 're structured in a way to allow passive safety, where
| no operator actions are necessary to shut the reactor down if
| problems occur._"
| p1mrx wrote:
| > it's just that every reactor needs to be playing it's A game
| every day.
|
| 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.
| wanderr wrote:
| Overall what I understand of NuScale's approach seems to
| account for most everything that can go wrong. But what
| happens if there is a natural disaster that causes much of
| that water to leak away quickly? Is there a failsafe for that
| as well?
| p1mrx wrote:
| What natural disaster could quickly drain a "lake" lined
| with stainless steel? All that water needs somewhere to go.
|
| I assume a straightforward geological study would prevent
| events like
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/22/man-dies-
| after...
| ncmncm wrote:
| Straightforward studies are often not done. And, often
| done then ignored.
|
| Dams collapse mainly for this reason, and those, while
| killing many people and destroying whole cities, do not
| leave the whole region uninhabitable.
| p1mrx wrote:
| It is much more difficult to build a dam than a water-
| filled hole.
| omginternets wrote:
| >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.
|
| 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?
| ncmncm wrote:
| Fully half the development cost, and _all_ of the construction
| and deployment cost of the first few placements, was picked up my
| US taxpayers. But Bill Gates and cronies retain 100% ownership.
| credit_guy wrote:
| > But Bill Gates and cronies retain 100% ownership.
|
| 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...
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| The state should still own a large chunk of it.
| kwere wrote:
| the (US) state is too (politically) biased/volatile to
| manage even something that isnt basic science. look at
| Nasa. And btw this is an investment wich could create more
| economic activities and down the line tax revenue.
| helloworld11 wrote:
| And 40 years later, after dozens of billions or more spent,
| someone might just be allowed to finally build an amazingly
| clunky, drastically bloated up version of it that has been
| finally approved by a myriad storm of shifting regulations and
| unhappy contrary interests.
| capableweb wrote:
| Which, hopefully, because of all these regulations and
| bureaucracy, won't have any issues that will cause (again) a
| meltdown of the public opinion about nuclear reactors. If some
| serious accident happens with something like this, be prepared
| to wait another 40 years before anyone dares to propose nuclear
| energy again.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Public opinion does not drive. Cost drives.
|
| Nukes have _only ever_ been built where the cost was
| substantially or completely absorbed off-budget, typically by
| taxpayers.
| epistasis wrote:
| Though public opinion and regulations might be a barrier too,
| there's a more elementary and fundamental problem around
| nuclear: cost and time.
|
| 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.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| It's not just the approval process. The late Admiral Rickover
| may have put it best,
|
| _"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."_
| raverbashing wrote:
| Could be. But I think reactors suffer from the same "NASA
| Problem" (and also some dose of second-system syndrome) as
| rockets
|
| > 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| SpaceX learns by building and failing. Learning to land was
| using the basically free discarded first stage from various
| launches paid for by other people. You can't really do that
| with reactors.
| p1mrx wrote:
| "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add,
| but when there is nothing left to take away."
|
| 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.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Some numbers.
|
| 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/
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Those numbers look excellent, but we'll need to see the
| pricetag for a dozen, and also if they can be rolled off the
| line rapidly.
| zbrozek wrote:
| I think siting challenges and getting permitting approvals
| are likely to drive costs to non-competitiveness even if the
| reactor is free. And that's a terrible shame since the
| factory-built approach makes so much sense and our need for
| clean, reliable base load is so dire. Europe could really use
| quite a few boatloads of these reactors _right now_.
| SnowHill9902 wrote:
| Generation is just part of that. High-power interconnection is
| a difficult and expensive problem.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| Part of NuScale's concept is that these can be installed at
| sites of decommissioned coal plants:
|
| 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.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| What's interesting is that these are actually getting used
| for solar and wind projects today for mostly the same
| reason (connection to the grid that exists; new
| transmission takes years to come online if it ever does)
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/15/climate/coal-plants-
| renew...
| benevol wrote:
| mkl wrote:
| Why do you keep spamming HN with this?
| sedatk wrote:
| Wow, the sarcastic and judgemental language in the FAQ for a
| perfectly legitimate question says it all. It's borderline "how
| can your little brain not understand that..." and yet fails to
| answer it. Another "magnets, but this time it works" perpetual
| motion BS.
|
| Quote:
|
| > But I've been told that free energy is impossible because of
| the Law of Thermodynamics.
|
| > Does your mental flexibility allow for the scenario where the
| KryonEngine doesn't actually break this law? Can you imagine
| that there actually is no energy "coming out of nowhere"? Can
| you imagine that this "new" energy has in reality always been
| there, and we simply haven't been able to perceive it, because
| we haven't been taught how and where to look and measure? Don't
| stay trapped inside mental prison cells somebody else has built
| for you.
| Tildey wrote:
| I was waiting for the part where it indicates that it's
| satire, but it never came
| goindeep wrote:
| Matt Ridley from The Rational Optimist opened my eyes to Nuclear
| and how the issues have been how we were almost too careful and
| too afraid to test and implement and so we are now decades behind
| nuclear reactor research and implementation.
| worik wrote:
| What could possibly go wrong?
| pfdietz wrote:
| This certifies NuScale's 50 MWe reactor. But the CFPP project has
| moved to the 77 MWe version, and as I understand it that has not
| been certified. UAMPS also has only 103 MWe of subscriptions out
| of 476 MWe (6 x 77 MWe).
| euroderf wrote:
| So, how much time and how many people (# trained/specialist, #
| non-specialist) do I need to steal the core and fence it to
| unnamed Eurasian wanna-be nuclear power ?
| kwere wrote:
| low enrichment grade (<5%) is there for this reason.
| Centrifuges to enrich fuel are really above wanna-be nuclear
| threat, and who can do it (NK,Iran) doesnt need to steal some
| bars here or there they have their own supply chain.
| euroderf wrote:
| OK so lower stakes - dirty bomb only.
| bogdanu wrote:
| NuScale is planning to install a few of them in Europe too.
| According to local news, the first EURO one will be installed in
| Romania.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| In Poland as well - there seems to be a strong geo-strategic
| incentive to switch up energy dependency.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Poland is in the sad position of being in one of the least
| favorable places for renewable energy in the world.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| Never thought about this actually.
|
| Any reason for this compared to say any of our neighboring
| countries?
| ncmncm wrote:
| That it is Romania should tell us something.
|
| Warn us, really.
| dqpb wrote:
| How long do they take to build?
| KETpXDDzR wrote:
| To worry some people, the commission certifying this also
| downplayed the three miles incident.
|
| "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
| mountainriver wrote:
| As a complete novice, this could be a game changer?
|
| 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?
| mapmeld wrote:
| Yes. When I attended an IAEA Safeguards conference in 2018,
| there were a number of these civilian nuclear battery designs
| but none had been built. A small nuclear battery can replace
| building-size diesel generators which remote communities and
| islands, data centers, etc. currently use as a primary or
| backup power source.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I learned on HN that we almost did this in the 1970s, albeit
| with large but modular reactors. The effort extended far into
| construction of the (very large!) factory facility.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31467070
| TheDudeMan wrote:
| Yes, this is huge, IMO.
| pydry wrote:
| Depends what it costs. Since the article neglected to give a
| figure, Im pretty skeptical it's going to be competitive.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| This video [1] talks about some of the potential cost savings
| and reduction in time to deployment. There is one being
| installed near me so I guess time will tell how realistic the
| projections are.
|
| [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxXlD4e-wTE
| ncmncm wrote:
| The most reliable output of the nuke industry has always
| been dishonesty. There is no reason to expect this will
| change suddenly, or that it has already.
| wjnc wrote:
| $ 3 billion for 720 MW of power (2019 figure) [1]. More
| recent figure of $ 5.5 cents per KW/h [2]. So about 4x cost
| overrun leeway to be competitive in Europe. That seems
| manageable?
|
| [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/smaller-safer-
| cheape...
|
| [2] https://www.nucnet.org/news/first-customer-has-set-lcoe-
| targ...
| ncmncm wrote:
| No. It is not.
|
| The US govt is massively subsidizing this whole venture,
| and none of that cost to taxpayers is figured in.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| You'd need to compare to the subsidies and externalities
| of other power sources then right?
| pydry wrote:
| Solar panel imports are even slapped with tarriffs. It's
| unlikely if you compared like for like it would come
| anywhere near the subsidies nuclear demands.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| > costs
|
| 1 Fukushima is too many, no?
| omginternets wrote:
| You should look up the cost (in whatever metric you like:
| dollars, lives, cancers, etc.) and compare it to coal.
| Don't forget to normalize, since coal is _much_ more common
| than nuclear power.
|
| The results will likely surprise you.
| luckylion wrote:
| No. Fukushima is a price I'd gladly pay and I expect every
| reasonable person to agree.
|
| The alternative isn't "no Fukushima", the alternative is
| hundreds of thousands deaths per year by burning coal. It's
| just not "one huge bang" so people don't realize it,
| because understanding abstract dangers is hard.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Nukes' competition is not coal. It is renewables.
| Comparing to coal is tendentious and disingenuous, not to
| say dishonest.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Not really m. Something has to provide power when the sun
| and wind aren't available. Right now that's natural gas,
| coal, hydro, or nuclear.
| pydry wrote:
| Pumped storage and grid scale batteries provide that at
| much cheaper cost overall.
|
| Nowhere near as much is needed as people think either.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Where are grid scale batteries doing that today?
| ncmncm wrote:
| "Right now". Right now all the nuke plants you are
| talking about don't exist, so produce exactly 0 watts.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| We'll there is a good deal in some places.
| Veedrac wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| The Fukushima disaster: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/F
| ukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_di...
|
| The earthquake: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5
| %8Dhoku_earthquake_...
|
| Zero known fatal injuries out of 20,000 were caused by
| the reactor.
|
| If I've done the math right, a _nominally operative_ coal
| plant over Fukishima 's 40 year lifetime would have
| caused 5ish deaths.
|
| Fukishima did cause a few cases of cancer, but so does
| nominally operative coal.
|
| People can gripe about tail risks from environmental
| pollution when it's not displacing a worse modal risk.
| Right now it's unreasonable to. Proliferation risk is
| concerning; most of the rest is just scale insensitivity.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| Just improve decentralized energy storage and micro-
| grids.
| panick21_ wrote:
| It cuts both ways. You lose the scale, but its more modular.
|
| 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.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| Interesting, Rolls Royce is doing the same in the UK and have
| been working on this since last year [0].
|
| 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...
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _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)
| lucidguppy wrote:
| The less operators have to worry about the better. Its harder to
| cut corners when there are less corners to cut.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| that's why i prefer that my nuclear reactors be spherical.
| MerelyMortal wrote:
| We're halfway there! On the horizontal plain, this one is
| spherical.
| [deleted]
| smolder wrote:
| Circular, I'm sure you meant.
| p10jkle wrote:
| 1-sphere
| projektfu wrote:
| These could be used to create a real "smart grid" where very
| local variations are smoothed out among various reactors, with
| some battery storage for peaking. So long as people are willing
| to live near them.
| pas wrote:
| People's attitude is quite plyable, it depends on what the
| group/party they currently follow (feel part of) tells them.
| lven wrote:
| Not exactly. Nuclear reactors have a difficult time following
| the load because of Xenon poisoning. Xenon generated during the
| fission reactions absorbs neutrons that could have been used
| for fissions. Luckily, it decays away over time. If you turn
| down the reactor power, you have to wait hours or day for for
| Xenon buildup to decay so that you can turn the reactor back
| on. Some reactors manage to load follow more easily by adding
| lots of excess reactivity (more potent control rods) which is
| less safe overall. Smaller reactors will have the exact same
| issue. The amount of Xenon poisoning is proportional to the
| power density. NuScale reactors run at even higher power
| density than normal light water reactors, so they will have
| even worse Xenon poisoning. They won't be load following. One
| exception where this isn't true is micro gas-cooled reactors
| that have so low a power density that they have negligible
| xenon poisoning and can follow loads easily if necessary. Even
| then, it's not a great idea because of thermal cycling issues.
| projektfu wrote:
| I mean that loads can be shared geographically and the
| reactors can maintain relatively consistent output.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| I may be missing something important here, but I'm not a
| nuclear fission SME. Please do correct me if I'm not making
| sense.
|
| 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?
| panick21_ wrote:
| Some reactors can also more effectively let xenon escape.
| That is one of the reasons why Alvin Weinberg wanted a liquid
| molten salt reactor, you can let the xenon bubble out like
| CO2 in a soft drink.
| pfdietz wrote:
| And if you do that, then the 137Cs ends up in the off gas
| storage rather than in the molten salt. A good fraction of
| the fission products escape the salt, which kind of shoots
| down one of the main selling points of MSRs.
|
| https://gain.inl.gov/SiteAssets/MoltenSaltReactor/Module2-O
| v... (see slide 23)
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Nuclear can modulate it's output by more aggressively cooling
| the water. There's no xenon poisoning since the reactors
| output is the same. This is undesirable because it's
| essentially wasting fuel, by deliberately reducing the
| efficiency of the steam turbine. But it can be done, and fuel
| is not a big driver of nuclear cost.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Modulating nukes' output make each kWh even more expensive,
| when they are already not competitive.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Most of a nuclear plants' cost is in construction. It
| doesn't really affect operating costs. Furthermore
| nuclear is the most competitive decarbonized energy
| source, because wind and solar rely on fossil fuels.
| ncmncm wrote:
| During the ten years it takes to build a nuke, 100% of
| the power it is hoped to displace is supplied by fossil
| fuel. The thousands of tons of concrete are produced by
| cooking limestone with, again, fossil fuel. And the
| thousands of tons of steel are refined and smelted with,
| again, fossil fuel.
|
| Most of a nuke plants' cost is in construction, but that
| is not because its operating cost is low. It is just
| insanely expensive to build. Then, its operating cost is
| high. Each moment it is not producing at 100% rated
| power, its per-kWh cost increases accordingly. Its
| operating cost does not decrease proportionally when it
| operates at below rated maximum power, so the operating
| cost per kWh is multiplied by the difference. And,
| operating at below rated capacity, the construction cost
| is amortized over fewer kWh, again making the per kWh
| cost greater.
|
| You already well understood all of the above, but
| evidently hope readers will not.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > During the ten years it takes to build a nuke, 100% of
| the power it is hoped to displace is supplied by fossil
| fuel.
|
| By comparison gas turbines will _always_ emit carbon
| dioxide, and there 's no realistic plan to run a solar
| and wind grid without fossil fuel backing. No, there is
| no realistic plan to store electricity despite your
| incessant insistence to the contrary.
|
| > The thousands of tons of concrete are produced by
| cooking limestone with, again, fossil fuel. And the
| thousands of tons of steel are refined and smelted with,
| again, fossil fuel.
|
| Both of these can be replaced with thermochemical
| processes powered by nuclear power.
|
| > Most of a nuke plants' cost is in construction, but
| that is not because its operating cost is low. It is just
| insanely expensive to build. Then, its operating cost is
| high.
|
| Incorrect, nuclear power is quite cheap once the plants
| are constructed.
| ncmncm wrote:
| No cement or steel process, over the 60+ years nukes have
| operated, has been switched over to nuke-powered. There
| is no reason to think any will be.
|
| Nuclear power operating cost is about commensurate with
| fossil fuels, which are not competitive. Operating at 50%
| rated power makes each kWh, marginally, twice as costly.
| Operating at 50% rated power long term makes each kWh
| absolutely twice as costly.
|
| At the time when their power cannot be sold at any price
| sufficient to continue operating, nukes not propped up by
| tax coercion will be mothballed. Their huge construction
| cost will end up amortized over only the kWh produced up
| to that time. So, the finally recognized cost per kWh
| will balloon to many times over what was promised at
| construction time.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > No cement or steel process, over the 60+ years nukes
| have operated, has been switched over to nuke-powered.
| There is no reason to think any will be.
|
| Isn't this also a barrier to building hydroelectric
| facilities? They're basically big dams.
|
| Also you believe we'll be able to create massive
| electrolysis plants to create energy storage for solar
| and wind? Interesting how you're so confident in massive
| changes to industrial processes when solar and wind
| require them, but totally dismissive when other solutions
| do.
|
| Regardless, metallurgy and cement just need a source of
| heat and unlike solar and wind which need to convert
| electricity to heat nuclear plants produce heat directly.
| adrianN wrote:
| You are correct, most of the cost is in construction.
| Buildings have finite lifetimes, so each second it
| doesn't run at 100% capacity you make the average kWh
| more expensive.
| mikece wrote:
| Outstanding! Instead of 300MW coal or gas-fired plants in metro
| areas we could have clusters of these. The shorter transmission
| distance will mean less line-loss, the factory-built design means
| economies of scale, and the passive-cooling post-scram ability
| means that it would be impossible to have a Fukushima type of
| accident due to loss of primary loop cooling. If every city
| acquire enough of these to cover 80% of their base load then we
| could cut carbon emissions so fast we it would astonish us all.
| kadonoishi wrote:
| Yeah. I'd note the need for a centralized fuel supplier, as you
| don't want hundreds of little municipal nuclear plants trying
| independently to dispose of the waste. Have a centralized
| "library" of nuclear fuel, where the plants "check out" the
| fuel and then turn it in when spent. The centralized authority
| can concentrate expertise on the issues of sourcing uranium,
| tracking where it is, then disposing of it safely. The small
| plants are then freed to focus on running the actual plant and
| providing reliable electricity to their cities.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| It's sad that we keep needing war and threats to advance in
| technology.
|
| War is an enabler of gate approvals to innovation and development
| panick21_ wrote:
| While this is an overall good development, and I wish the company
| luck. Its really not the solution.
|
| 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.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Is disposal of nuclear reactor waste products a solved problem
| yet?
|
| 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.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| It's pretty solved. There is very little of the dangerous
| stuff, and it is far less dangerous after a few decades. It
| can safely sit in casks for more than a thousand years. At
| which point there's a negligible amount of anything really
| nasty left. At any point we can basically just stick it all
| in a salt mine and call it a day.
|
| 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.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Nuclear reprocessing and breeder reactors would entirely
| solve the nuclear waste problem. The only reason we're not
| using them yet is that people think we'd use the output to
| make nuclear weapons with (even though we can already do that
| without them).
| p1mrx wrote:
| https://www.deepisolation.com/ looks like a reasonable
| solution, assuming we don't use the waste as fuel.
|
| Why would future generations have to worry about something
| buried deep underground? Just don't drill there.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| Why would they not be thinking that? It's inaccessible and
| geologically stable.
|
| Besides, if we don't tackle the global warming problem, there
| might not _be_ generations 300 years down the line to judge
| our actions.
| troyvit wrote:
| Yeah there will. We're like rats: easy to kill as
| individuals but pretty hard to stamp out en masse.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Many, many fewer rats, if it comes to that.
| gcanyon wrote:
| One thing to remember is that while the half-life of a very
| small portion of the waste from nuclear reactors is measured
| in thousands of years, so it's important not to release it
| into the environment, the half-life of the mercury that is
| absolutely released by coal mining is...infinite.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > " solution" was to stick it in sacred Native American
| mountains in Nevada
|
| Is your objection due to the sanctity of the mountain or
| another reason?
| antupis wrote:
| Here Finland Onkalo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_sp
| ent_nuclear_fuel_re... is going opetational 23 and it will
| basically solve it for us.
| panick21_ wrote:
| To be honest, I think this is mostly a bad idea. Like to be
| 1 billion $, for that price you could have developed a
| brand new advanced reactor and the required reprocessing
| facilities to create a circular fuel stream that could have
| changed the world.
|
| Yet instead of advanced technology to the next stage, we
| spent that money to dig a bit hole.
|
| And even worse, every country spends billions digging
| holes.
|
| Even a fraction of that money could have been used advanced
| humanity into the next nuclear age, rather then dumping the
| output of the last one into a hole.
| AareyBaba wrote:
| Dispelling the Myths of Nuclear Energy
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1QmB5bW_WQ
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| briandear wrote:
| There is no climate catastrophe. That's simply a modern
| version of the superstition you lament. The end of the
| world is always conveniently just 12 years away. I'm old
| enough to remember the Prophesy of Al Gore (peace be upon
| him) and how none of that came to pass. 2009: "the North
| Pole will be ice free by 2013." I also remember the dire
| predictions of acid rain, the ozone hole, and numerous
| other proclamations that stirred up the anti-capitalist
| faithful.
|
| There's always some sort of catastrophe just looming just
| over the horizon of the next election. Televangelists have
| made careers from warning the faithful that their doom is
| assured -- unless you reprint (and contribute.) The climate
| alarmist crowd has taken pages right out of the tent-
| revival handbook of the 19th century. Snake oil.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > 2009: "the North Pole will be ice free by 2013."
|
| I'll agree that was hyperbole, but interestingly this[1]
| article featured just the other day in the news here,
| about how a research vessel reached the north pole
| several days ahead of schedule because there was
| significantly less ice than expected. The scientists
| interviewed said conditions had changed drastically over
| the last 10 years. So maybe add 20 years to Gore's
| prediction?
|
| [1]: https://www.nrk.no/tromsogfinnmark/forskningsskipet-
| ff-_kron...
| ikrenji wrote:
| mega droughts, record heat waves, wildfires, more
| numerous and violent storms of all kind but sure there is
| no problem with the climate. shaping the climate doesn't
| happen overnight and if no action is taken now the world
| will be very different in 50-100 years. just because
| dinosaurs lived on a hotter earth doesn't mean than 10
| billion people can comfort at do so too ...
| puppable wrote:
| The only reason you're not hearing about the acid rain or
| the ozone hole anymore are because decisive international
| action was taken to stop both, and wouldn't you know it,
| it worked. And, are you really "old enough to remember" a
| single politician mis-stating a climate forecast during a
| speech, or are you just "old enough to remember" seeing
| it repackaged into a meme on social media a decade or so
| after the fact? Either way, it is an asinine basis for
| your leading claim.
| blibble wrote:
| acid rain and the ozone hole were fixed by regulation
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I think anyone with even a passing understanding of the
| data can summarily dismiss your "argument", which is full
| of logical fallacies.
|
| Atmospheric CO2 has gone from about 280 ppm pre-
| Industrial Revolution to 415 today. Yes, figuring out all
| the impacts and feedback loops is incredibly difficult,
| but it requires only a passing understanding of physics
| to understand how being on track to doubling the primary
| greenhouse gas in the atmosphere will result in a
| massively warmer planet.
| otikik wrote:
| The world is a very complex system and it is of course
| logical that people will not be completely accurate in
| their numbers and dates.
|
| > the North Pole will be ice free by 2013
|
| The tendency is unmissable if you look at the data[1].
| People might have been wrong about the exact date at
| which it would happen, but you should not let the
| exactitude of the date distract you. It will eventually
| happen (unless something changes drastically).
|
| And we honestly don't know how the weather will behave on
| an iceless Earth. Some people speculate that the arctic
| ice is a sort of heat shield. It makes some sense
| intuitively: all that white ice reflects a lot of heat
| back up. Once it is gone... the blue water will absorb
| and accumulate more heat.
|
| > I also remember the dire predictions of acid rain, the
| ozone hole, and numerous other proclamations that stirred
| up the anti-capitalist faithful.
|
| Everyone is starting to feel the change, it's no longer
| "just words". If you have not started yet you will start
| feeling it soon.
|
| In my country (Spain), this summer we have had 3
| heatwaves in a row, as well as two very unusual clouds of
| Sahara dust, the first of which reached Finland. I was
| born in the south of Spain, were's the hottest. When I
| was little the max summer temp used to be 41 degrees
| Celsius (105F). Now it's 47C(116F). Max temperatures have
| increased through the Iberian Peninsula, 41C is "the new
| normal" in all places except some coastal fortunates and
| some very northern regions. My options for escaping the
| summer heat are dwindling.
|
| In the United States my understanding is that the most
| visible exponent is the extreme drought, in particular
| the water levels in the Colorado river basin seems
| worrisome. You might find more information about where
| you live in [2].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline
|
| [2] https://www.drought.gov
| josephcsible wrote:
| > People might have been wrong about the exact date at
| which it would happen, but you should not let the
| exactitude of the date distract you.
|
| Herbert W. Armstrong predicted that 1936 would be
| doomsday, and then that 1943 would be doomsday after 1936
| came and went, and then that 1972 would be doomsday after
| 1943 came and went, and then that 1975 would be doomsday
| after 1972 came and went. How would you rebut that
| sentence if he said it in 1973 or 1974? Or if Harold
| Camping, who did basically exactly the same thing, said
| it? Why wouldn't that rebuttal apply equally to your use
| of it?
|
| > Some people speculate that the arctic ice is a sort of
| heat shield. It makes some sense intuitively: all that
| white ice reflects a lot of heat back up.
|
| But isn't the reason that the ice is at the poles that
| hardly any of the Sun's heat gets there?
| howenterprisey wrote:
| We aren't/weren't trending towards the doomsday mentioned
| in your examples in any measurable way. By contrast,
| climate trends are well-documented.
| rtpg wrote:
| I don't know the numbers, the thought experiment on the
| last point:
|
| Imagine that without ice the ambient temperature is 5
| degrees C. And that the area being ice rather than dark
| colored rock causes a drop of about 10 degrees C.
|
| So the ambient temperature in the area is under 0. But as
| it melts for reasons then this cooling effects disappears
| and now the thing is basically gone forever.
|
| Not commenting too much on the actual theory but you
| could easily imagine an ecosystem disappearing due to
| these kinds of changes
| reaperducer wrote:
| _the only thing against it really is political nimbyism_
|
| Actually, from what I've read in the local newspapers in
| the areas affected, the politicians are all for it, so
| you're making assumptions there.
|
| The people who are against it are the people who actually
| have to live with the stuff for the next thousand years.
|
| If it's so safe, so stable, so easily rendered harmless,
| why not bury it in the bedrock beneath Manhattan, or
| Boston, or Virginia? All places that are far more
| geologically stable than, for example, Yucca Mountain.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Because in major cities, it's more likely that you'll
| need to dig that area up again for something else.
| c1ccccc1 wrote:
| I haven't checked the geological suitability, but
| assuming you're right about that, putting the waste in
| those places seems perfectly fine to me.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Abundance of caution, defense in depth.
|
| If nobody lives there, nobody has to live with it.
| troyvit wrote:
| Political nimbyism is what put the waste where it is. It
| ended up in the back yard of the least powerful political
| force in America. Curating nuclear waste for longer than
| any human can actually comprehend isn't something to just
| brush off. You'd be trading one climate catastrophe for
| another.
|
| And that doesn't even account for securely transporting the
| waste across the country. Imagine scaling nuclear to the
| size of coal. What does waste transport look like then?
|
| Maybe this waste belongs precisely in the back yards of
| those of us who create it. Then we'd be truly careful.
| jfim wrote:
| Keep in mind that the US is generating about 20x the
| amount of high level nuclear waste than if it were to
| recycle spent fuel. The French do it, but Americans
| won't.
| panick21_ wrote:
| And the French use a very expensive wasteful method.
| There are much better ways to reprocess fuel if you can
| target modern advanced reactor designs.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The US doesn't recycle waste because it's economically
| pointless to do it right now. The separated plutonium has
| negative value.
| panick21_ wrote:
| > You'd be trading one climate catastrophe for another.
|
| No you actually don't. Even under the most absurdly
| bombastic delusional fantasy of nuclear-haters the amount
| of damage nuclear waste deep in a cave in a desert can do
| is about a billion times less then climate change.
|
| And even based on the pessimistic assumptions, it would
| be save for 1000s of years.
|
| Are you seriously gone tell me that we should worry about
| 1000+ years into the future. If we do not have massive
| technological decay, the people in the next 1000+ years
| will have the technology to reprocess the fuel if they
| feel like it.
|
| And if you do assume massive technological decay then the
| nuclear fuel is in a cave in a desert that will be
| essentially uninhabited and will most likely never
| seriously impact humans.
|
| Even further this whole debate is incredibly dumb since
| putting into a deep cave is terrible idea anyway. As a
| human society we can just store it above ground in a save
| location and in case some danger is identified, we just
| move it to another location. Moving a few tons of nuclear
| fuel around ever couple 100 years is really no big deal.
| And again, if society collapses to a point where this
| isn't possible, that nuclear fuel is the least thing to
| worry about.
|
| And even all of that is totally irrelevant, because the
| real actual solution is to simply ut it into advanced
| reactors, burn it up to a point where it is only 300
| years away from matching natural uranium and you simple
| put it back into the mine where it came from.
|
| If you do it correctly, we can get every person in the
| world using US like energy and we can store the complete
| output of world nuclear waste on a single abandoned
| Walmark parking lot in Gary Indiana.
|
| If we used basic rationality this would be a non issue.
| This is a cultural political issue, not really a
| technical one.
|
| > What does waste transport look like then?
|
| Mhhh well it would be an occasional train going along the
| train network that would never hurt anybody.
|
| And nuclear isn't that far away from coal level of
| production.
|
| > Maybe this waste belongs precisely in the back yards of
| those of us who create it. Then we'd be truly careful.
|
| I'm totally fine with storing all nuclear waste around
| the Whitehouse if that gets people to stop bringing it up
| as a problem.
| Brybry wrote:
| I think nuclear is already scaled to the size of coal.
|
| Electricity generation by source in the US in 2021:
|
| Coal - 21.8%
|
| Nuclear - 18.9%
|
| [1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
| lttlrck wrote:
| Whereas the emissions from fossil fuels are spread
| uncontained for everyone to enjoy?
| otikik wrote:
| All of the used fuel ever produced by the commercial nuclear
| industry since the late 1950s would cover a whole football
| field to a height of approximately 10 yards
|
| 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.
| omginternets wrote:
| Is the disposal of coal, gas and oil emissions a solved
| problem yet? At least nuclear waste is contained.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Coal, gas, and oil are being phased out in favor of
| renewables, just as fast as capital is allowed to be
| applied. They just cost too much to operate. (This is why
| the feds massively subsidize them.)
|
| Nukes are not in competition with them. Nukes are in
| competition with renewables, where they lose badly.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| No nuclear power competes with base load power like coal,
| natural gas, and eventually battery storage.
| omginternets wrote:
| Renewables literally require us to redesign the grid, and
| require supplementary sources of power for when they are
| unable to produce. I truly wonder what your assertion is
| based on.
| sitkack wrote:
| How is it "not the solution". Having 50MW of base load being
| able to be deployed anywhere could allow for everything else
| covered by renewables.
|
| 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.
| panick21_ wrote:
| I am not against that in general, but your never gone do that
| seriously with PWRs. There are designs where this does make
| some sense.
|
| 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.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Nuclear reactor output scales with volume but cost scales
| with surface area. So a larger plant is more efficient.
|
| If the smaller reactors can take advantage of easier
| fabrication and logistics they might be cheaper, but that is
| an unknown.
| sitkack wrote:
| Efficiency is only one dimension, these reactors can be
| distributed to the point of use. Efficiency should be
| measured in its local universe.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| You are forgetting about security. One of these things
| and some explosives could do a lot of damage. Think dirty
| bombs. Each and every one will need 24x7 security for the
| duration of it's life. They simply can't be left
| unattended. Not impossible to do but it adds a lot of
| cost One of these things falling into the hands of
| extremists would be very bad.
|
| The sensible way to deploy these would be in groups close
| to existing infrastructure in places that can be easily
| secured. For example de-commissioned coal plants or
| nuclear plants. Security also raises the cost of
| operation of course. Just because it is small physically
| does not mean the risk is smaller. So, same level of
| security as with a big nuclear plant. Same level of cost.
| But less energy. Co-locating allows you to reduce that
| cost.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Electricity is pretty easy to transport over 50-100
| miles. One big plant servicing a whole metro is as
| efficient as smaller reactors distributed around. It's
| only when you have to transport electricity over 300+
| miles where more exotic things like HVDC lines become
| necessary.
| pfdietz wrote:
| How could cost scale with surface area? The mass of a
| nuclear power plant scales proportionally to volume. The
| thickness of a pressure vessel or pipe increases as you
| scale it up, at constant pressure.
| [deleted]
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The pressure vessel is not a solid mass of steel, it's a
| hollow container. The thickness of the walls remains the
| same for the same pressure (it does need to increase
| slightly because it needs to support the weight of the
| pressure vessel itself) but the volume increase is cubic.
|
| Cubic volume increase vs. quadratic surface area increase
| means larger sizes are more effective.
| MrDresden wrote:
| Knowing nothing about the intricacies of building nuclear power
| plants, but agreeing whole heartedly with you that humanity
| dropped the ball when it came to advancing the tech and
| construction of large scale plants, I am hoping this will have
| a positive effect.
|
| 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.
| panick21_ wrote:
| I in general am in favor of scale to make the grid CO2 free.
| However, doing it with PWRs is just very sub-optimal. A 1.5GW
| plant is basically a gigantic civil engineering project and
| those are always late.
|
| 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.
| brundolf wrote:
| There's also, honestly, the fact that full-size nuclear
| plants _look_ threatening. They have an imposing size and
| shape, they dominate the horizon, they look like "if that
| thing blew up it would be catastrophic" (I know that's not
| exactly what happens, but still)
|
| So as dumb as it sounds, just making the thing smaller might
| be enough to soften public opinion
| panick21_ wrote:
| Another reason to move to GenIV reactors, because once you
| don't need cooling towers. So if you design it right, most
| people will not even get that it will be a nuclear plant.
|
| Its really the cooling towers that make it clear what it is
| and those look absurdly big.
| zdragnar wrote:
| The bigger the plant, the more customization it needs, to the
| point of every individual plant needing independent design
| certification.
|
| Smaller plants can be produced faster with lower overhead,
| because the consistent design reduces risks.
| pas wrote:
| Large scale is not inherently hard, the problem is lack of
| industrialization (lack of economies of scale). The "West"
| after the Cold War went all in on short-term-ism (both fueled
| by market liberalization, financialization of everything,
| globalization, plus as a consequence of all this the
| political gridlock that ensued).
| ip26 wrote:
| They are so big and complex they have paradoxically lost
| advantages of scale. Allegedly, if you build two of the same
| nuke, it's actually more expensive to build the second one
| because you have to do a whole bunch of change orders to adapt
| the existing design to a completely different site.
| [deleted]
| belorn wrote:
| I can see two large use cases for small PWR at this point in
| time even if the price per watt is similar/higher than large
| reactors. One is the exact same argument for why small PWR was
| installed in submarines, that is replacing diesel generators
| that operate 24/7. Those still exist in some locations and
| situations, and diesel generators that operate 24/7 are very
| dirty and require a lot of fuel to be transported. They could
| in theory also displace backup generators if multiple locations
| require uninterruptible power and each has an expensive diesel
| generators that require testing every week/month or so. Not
| sure if there exist studies done on emissions from backup
| generators at hospitals, but I am pretty sure I read about the
| problem somewhere.
|
| 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.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Could Europe even use electricity to heat? I assumed the gas
| was mostly being used directly in gas furnaces. Heat pumps
| are only just getting to where they can work in extreme cold
| right?
| wbl wrote:
| We can make more heat pumps and Europe is pretty warm
| compared to the Midwest in winter.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| But making and installing a significant number of them
| before winter temperatures hit seems extremely hard.
| belorn wrote:
| There are already plans being made for next winter, where
| if the shortage of power hit expected levels then some
| places in northern Europe will have to be disconnected from
| the grid in order to save the grid as a whole. It is times
| like that when government will borrow or even print money
| in order to fix the situation regardless of how expensive
| the answer is.
|
| The average operational cost of a nuclear power in the US
| is around 2.5 cent to 3.4 cent per kw/h, which is still
| higher than many other energy sources. The spot price in
| some locations in Europe is feared to reach $1 per kw/h
| this winter. Gas furnaces are part of the problem, but
| society is dependent on electricity for basic function.
| Voters only accept limited amount of pain before forcing
| governments to take action and bail people out.
| mmaurizi wrote:
| Being able to shut down existing gas power plants should
| free up a lot of gas for home heating.
| 29083011397778 wrote:
| Heat pumps are between 2 (worst case scenario) and 5
| times more efficient for heating than burning the natural
| gas directly - and that includes transmission and
| generation losses. Unless natural gas, due to the reduced
| demand, falls to between 20 and 50% of the price of
| electricity, heat pumps are still cheaper long-term - and
| provide AC in the summer!
| Manuel_D wrote:
| France uses electricity for most of its heating, thanks to
| it's extensive nuclear power.
| brtkdotse wrote:
| At least in Sweden the vast majority of single family homes
| are heated via geothermal/air-to-water heat pumps (which
| run on electricity)
| thehappypm wrote:
| The gold standard is Mitsubishi's Hyper Heat, which
| operates efficiently down to -17F, and below that the BTUs
| are reduced.
|
| However to think about it in the simplest way.. a cheapo
| space heater in every room is a crude way to do electric
| heat, that anyone "can" do.
| credit_guy wrote:
| > try to get some of that efficiency back with factory
| production, but at best it just evens out.
|
| 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...
| panick21_ wrote:
| That's a good point but again, you will just need more of
| those pressure vessels as a trade off.
| datatrashfire wrote:
| My problem with nuclear is the lack of a solution for waste.
| Geologic sequestration sounds like it could work, but it has been
| politically dead in water in the US. There are few success
| stories in this category internationally and lots of little
| nuclear waste depots. Some pose catastrophic risks to the
| communities they are stored in. The clean up efforts at these
| sites are often endless feast for government contractors way
| behind, insanely over budget.
|
| 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.
| kwere wrote:
| nuclear waste is a non problem, expecially after fast breeding
| recycling. geologic sequestration is a long term solution, but
| these wastes are potential fuel due to their "heavy weight", we
| just need the tecnology to fissile them or break their
| radioactive isotopes. Today we can recicle over 90% of waste in
| new fuel and turn the rest in low to medium radioactive waste
| to store for few centuries on general.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
| shlant wrote:
| > My problem with nuclear is the lack of a solution for waste
|
| 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...
|
| 3. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
| locallost wrote:
| It's so much a solved problem that no country other than
| France has a permanent solution. Meanwhile it will cost
| hundreds of billions if not trillions to get it done for the
| existing waste alone, all funded by the tax payer because the
| nuclear industry would just declare bankruptcy if they had to
| deal with it. You know you're in a world of pain when stating
| facts sounds like a rant.
| shlant wrote:
| > It's so much a solved problem that no country other than
| France has a permanent solution
|
| I think it's reasonable to acknowledge the difference
| between "we have a solution that has been implemented in
| the real world" and "the solution we have has been
| implemented everywhere it's needed". Yes, not every country
| who needs proper waste management has implemented it, but I
| don't think that means we haven't solved the problem of
| what to do with waste.
|
| Also while France has La Hague, the Netherlands also has
| COVRA :)
|
| > Meanwhile it will cost hundreds of billions if not
| trillions to get it done for the existing waste alone
|
| Yes, we will have to face the consequences of past choices,
| but I don't think that should preclude us from pushing for
| more modern implementations.
| datatrashfire wrote:
| I think you misunderstand my criticism. It's not that
| vitrification can't be done, its that efforts in the US to
| perform it are behind schedule and woefully inadequate to
| process the existing waste in US in a timely manner, let
| alone the waste from numerous additional plants. Despite
| decades of pubic debate, billions spent, we still cannot
| agree on where to put it.
|
| 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.
| shlant wrote:
| My apologies if I misunderstood. When you said "My problem
| with nuclear is the lack of a solution for waste" you meant
| "My problem with nuclear in the US is the lack of a
| currently implemented solution for waste"? And the "our" in
| "It hardly seems like a solved problem when we our concrete
| implementation of a solution has yet to arrive." is
| referring to Americans?
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| I remember during my undergraduate physics years at the
| University of Otago, we had a visiting guest speaker - I think it
| was Dale Bridenbaugh around 1976 when he had resigned as a
| manager in GE's nuclear division worried that their plants were
| not safe [0]. He had just also toured Australia as a guest
| speaker toward the anti-uranium effort [1].
|
| 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...
|
| [1] https://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/82alternatives.html
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_Three
| yellow_lead wrote:
| The design maybe? This quote from the article may be a part of
| it
|
| > 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.
| peteradio wrote:
| I wonder what strategies need to be employed to feel
| confident that you have even surfaced all the problems.
| Presumably there is a list of unmitigatable problems or worst
| defended attack vectors. But that is probably the hidden
| success of our last century, that and tight machine
| tolerances it's everywhere.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Well, to some extent it is a simple calculation. Depending
| on the amount and radioactivity of an isotope, you get a
| certain amount of heating.
|
| If you go past some amount, you start requiring active
| cooling to stop it from increasing faster and faster in
| temperature and reacting more violently - this may happen
| in traditional power plants. If instead you limit the
| reactor to a much smaller amount of fuel, it starts losing
| more heat to air than it produces from radioactivity, and
| this problem goes away.
|
| Of course, the problem is then to obtain that heating while
| the reactor is operational, but I understand the solutions
| are known.
|
| This is similar to why fusion reactors are not a risk of
| becoming nuclear weapons: the system requires external
| power input just to keep the reaction going. So, in the
| event of a problem, you'll lose the reaction, instead of it
| running away uncontrollably.
|
| Of course, there are other risks. For example, a fusion
| plant may suffer a breach of the reaction chamber, and all
| that energy will violently explode, releasing radioactive
| tritium and bits of radioactivated materials from the
| reactor structure around. I would guess MMRs have similar
| bad-but-not-catastophic failure modes.
| aunty_helen wrote:
| To be fair, if they did go ahead we would've had decades less
| coal burning and potentially could've provided electricity
| cheap enough in combination with hydro and renewables that
| would've seen some big industry shift away from burning coal.
|
| 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%)
| h0l0cube wrote:
| > if they did go ahead we would've had decades less coal
| burning
|
| 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
| deevolution wrote:
| The natural disaster was responsible for killing people,
| not the nuclear meltdown... maybe if we had been
| consistently building nuclear since the 60s we wouldn't be
| in this global warming catastrophe? Obviously speculation,
| but I'm curious what our global CO2 levels would be if all
| the major industrialized nations transitioned to 100%
| nuclear Over the last 60 years. Anyone happen to have some
| charts?
| ant6n wrote:
| The plant couldn't deal with an electricity outage for
| 24h.
| spfzero wrote:
| An outage that was caused by something that, through a
| rare confluence of events, also destroyed their outage-
| backup-plan. The plant could have easily dealt with most
| power outages.
|
| Not to say there isn't a lesson to be learned, obviously,
| but to say the plant couldn't deal with an outage is
| ingenuous at minimum.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > but to say the plant couldn't deal with an outage is
| ingenuous at minimum.
|
| Did you mean "disingenuous"? "Ingenuous" means lacking in
| guile or craftiness. "Disingenuous" means having the
| intent to deceive, and is used much more often.
| ant6n wrote:
| Battery backup was good for 8h. Seems pretty risky to me,
| there are many scenarios thinkable where a power outage
| for more than 8h could occur.
|
| For example some natural disaster, which across
| ubiquitously deployed nuclear would occur every day
| somewhere on earth.
| spfzero wrote:
| >there are many scenarios thinkable where a power outage
| for more than 8h could occur.
|
| Sure, and they thought of them, which is why they had
| generators as well as batteries.
| spfzero wrote:
| The majority of the man-made CO2 in the atmosphere today
| comes from power generation IIRC. A lot also comes from
| transportation, but less than power generation.
|
| If what you say took place, along with the solar and wind
| power advances that happened, we'd at least be looking at
| a lot longer warming runway than we are today.
| bb88 wrote:
| > If they did go ahead without safety measures, and had an
| incident, the plant would likely be shut down
|
| Three Mile Island had two close calls. The first was the
| reactor was only 30-60 minutes from going into complete
| meltdown. The second was potentially using a faulty crane
| to remove the lid of the reactor vessel. Either one of
| those would have made large areas of dense urban area
| unlivable.
| actinium226 wrote:
| Why is nuclear judged by near misses while coal pollutes
| like crazy daily and causes real lung damage and no one
| bats an eye?
| dillondoyle wrote:
| * real death.
|
| Quick googling shows wildly different numbers, but the
| lowest study in top results says 1 million per year from
| coal alone.
|
| All global warming + pollution is way higher. One study
| estimated 1 in 5 deaths. https://www.sciencedirect.com/sc
| ience/article/abs/pii/S00139...
| Gwypaas wrote:
| Because coal is not an alternative today, renewables are
| and they have miniscule external pollution in relation to
| everything else.
| kortilla wrote:
| No, renewables are not an alternative to fossil fuels.
| That's why natural gas and coal fire plants are still
| being cranked out today.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| Seems to work just fine? This will of course penetrate
| down to less ideal locations as costs continue to
| decline.
|
| > South Australia is at the vanguard of the global energy
| transition, having transformed its energy system from 1%
| to over 60% renewable energy in just over 15 years.
|
| > By 2025/2026, the Australian Energy Market Operator
| forecasts this could rise to approximately 85%.
|
| > South Australia's aspiration is to achieve 100% net
| renewables by 2030. In 2021, South Australia met 100% of
| its operational demand from renewable resources on 180
| days (49%).
|
| https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/industry/modern-
| energy/le...
| pfdietz wrote:
| When was this crane thing? It would have been long after
| the reactor had reached cold shutdown, so what exactly
| was the accident it was supposed to have almost caused?
| keneda7 wrote:
| Not the OP but the crane incident was shortly after the
| first incident. The higher ups wanted to use the polar
| crane to lift a bunch of radioactive debris out of the
| core that almost melted down. At least one of the workers
| (Rick Parks) ended up whistleblowing over it because the
| crane was the same one that was there during the incident
| and most likely had taken damage. He was concerned the
| crane would fail while lifting the radioactive debris out
| (around 1000 lbs of it) and fall back onto the core.
| Check out the Netflix document Meltdown: Three mile
| Island for more info.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Yeah, that "shortly after"... the reactor top wasn't
| lifted off until FIVE YEARS after the accident.
|
| So I ask again: just what horrible public-relevant
| accident is supposed to have nearly happened here? I
| can't imagine anything that would have caused anything
| catastrophic. The lid falling back onto the reactor
| vessel wouldn't be that.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| This is also in Moral Mazes somewhere, if you prefer a
| written summary.
| cormacrelf wrote:
| I feel like the biggest benefit of small nuclear is that it
| can be put anywhere and you don't have to build extremely
| costly transmission infrastructure. Just dot these things
| around. It surely isn't cost-effective enough for the first
| 85% or whatever of a state's needs, but for that last mile
| problem? Sounds good.
| WatchDog wrote:
| I don't think dotting nuclear reactors around everywhere
| would be politically very acceptable. Each plant will also
| require some level of staffing, operational and security
| staff. Seems more likely that small modular reactors would
| just be deployed in large batches to lower the fixed costs,
| and accept the transmission losses.
| petre wrote:
| The NuScale design requires 3 people on shifts to operate
| a 12 reactor fleet.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| I would be a bit worried about physical security with
| lots of small plants. What do you think? I suppose in
| theory there is nothing preventing having similar levels
| of physical security from today's large plants.
| petre wrote:
| Up to 12 x 60 MWe per station reactors means 720 MWe, as
| much as a CANDU plant. Yet it looks like a bunch of
| warehouses on the outside because the reactors are stored
| in underground water pools. I guess you'd need similar
| security as for any power plant. The NRC also requires
| that all new reactors designs post-9/11 are able to
| withstand impact with a commercial airplane.
|
| https://www.ans.org/news/article-1913/first-steps-into-a-
| new...
| Balgair wrote:
| Bit of an aside: Nuclear plant security should not be
| comparable to fossil fuel plant security, it should be
| much much tighter.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Yes agreed, given the risks of meltdown or the theft of
| radioactive material I would think security should be
| much more important.
| petre wrote:
| Radiation alone provides security. The plant diagram
| already has two fences with coresponding checkpoints. One
| needs to stop potential looters, so basically checkpoits
| with a guard each and a patrol vehicle with a team of
| two. Make it armed guards if you're in the US where
| everyone and their grandmother owns not one but several
| firearms. That plus the usual access cards and CCTV. This
| isn't a military nuclear weapons lab, it's a civilian
| power facility.
| 7952 wrote:
| The electricity grid does not have a last mile problem for
| supply. And just putting them anywhere will just raise
| costs. Better to put multiple units next to an existing
| substation on the backbone. Then those units can supply
| electricity to potentially millions, not just the city at
| the end of the last mile.
| fatcat500 wrote:
| Safetyism in regards to nuclear power is nothing more than the
| environmental lobby attempting to derail the only viable
| solution to climate change. They will lose an excellent source
| of political capital if climate change is solved, so they will
| always fearmonger nuclear power.
|
| 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...
| baq wrote:
| the environment doesn't have any money to lobby with. we make
| money out of it.
|
| 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.
| namdnay wrote:
| Ah yes, it's a sinister plot by the evil "environmental
| lobby"...
|
| 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
| :(
| spfzero wrote:
| This is an important point. The green movement agenda is
| obviously mixed with something other than environmental
| concerns, or they would embrace nuclear.
| petre wrote:
| > nothing more than the environmental lobby attempting to
| derail the only viable solution to climate change
|
| How about the oil and gas lobby?
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f.
| ..
| polotics wrote:
| I wish there were a way to both upvote and downvote your
| post:
|
| 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...
| _dain_ wrote:
| >The environmental lobby does not exist,
|
| does the renewable industry magically not have the same
| politico-economic incentives to lobby politicians like
| every other industry?
| basilgohar wrote:
| The renewable industry is still incredibly nascent and
| does not wield (much) power (yet). In the future, that
| may not be the case, but to compare this with the
| existing fossil fuel industries is really quite
| disingenuous. There's orders of magnitude difference
| between the two as of yet. Will they become similarly
| corrupt? Perhaps. Likely, even. But it will shift the
| profit from massive, world-changing effects to something
| different, and we're already more tuned into the issue
| that energy production, consumption, and use has serious
| side effects.
| _dain_ wrote:
| they already conspired with the fossil industry to kill
| nuclear power in germany. their minister for energy is
| "Green" and they're busy reopening coal plants and
| opening new coal mines to make up for the shortfall of
| russian gas. they wield immense, malign power.
| nmeofthestate wrote:
| Does political lobbying have to be done by business, or
| do the efforts of religious groups to influence policy
| count as lobbying? If there is a Green lobby then it has
| more in common with the, I dunno, "Christian lobby" than
| lobbying from big business.
| [deleted]
| nightski wrote:
| Cost always comes up around nuclear, and maybe justifiably so,
| but I think it shouldn't be such a large factor. The U.S. for
| example could easily afford this. We just passed a $700B bill
| for clean energy and heavily subsidize oil & gas.
|
| 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.
| ncmncm wrote:
| _Money is fungible_.
|
| 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.
| brianwawok wrote:
| 100% renewable isn't enough right now. Batteries cost too
| much. 70% renewable and 30% nuke isn't a bad mix though.
| ncmncm wrote:
| The overwhelming majority of utility storage will not be
| in batteries, so battery cost is immaterial. Batteries
| will be useful for load-smoothing, and short-term storage
| in smaller grids.
| pfdietz wrote:
| In comparison against renewables and storage, new nuclear
| isn't competing against batteries and storage right now,
| it's competing against batteries and renewables that
| could be installed during the operating lifetime of the
| power plant (earlier in the life more so than later.) So
| the question is what will renewables and storage will
| cost in (say) 2030 or later.
|
| Batteries have been falling in price by 27%/year
| recently, and PV by nearly that much, so it's a bold
| position to assert this will suddenly stop.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Past advancement is not necessarily an indication of
| future advancement. Battery tech is still exploring ways
| to improve Li batteries, but capacities have stopped
| increasing dramatically as far as I know. Even worse,
| even at the theoretical maximum capacity for these types
| of chemical batteries, there just aren't enough resources
| on Earth to build enough to cover the storage
| requirements of a huge grid.
|
| Now, is it possible that a new type of battery will
| appear and take over the market by 2030? Yes. Will there
| be enough of them to compete with the stabilizing power
| of a nuclear power plant? Maybe. Will there be enough
| nuclear + storage so that the best use of that storage
| will be to shut down the nuclear plant? Absolutely not.
|
| Basically, we need massive amounts of new electrical
| power (so we can transition transportation to
| electrical), and we need to shut down all fossil fuel
| power generation yesterday. Since we can't have enough
| storage yet for an exclusively green grid, nuclear
| shouldn't be competing with green energy in this
| discussion. Our choices are not "all green by 2030 VS
| green by 2030 + nuclear", they are "green + coal/gas by
| 2030 vs green + nuclear + less coal/gas". If we're
| instead talking about 2100, or 2200, then yeah, well
| probably be able to shut down nuclear as well.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Lithium batteries are adapted for cars, where weight
| matters. Anything happening with lithium has no relevance
| to utility power.
|
| The best use of a nuclear power plant is _not to build it
| at all_. Having not built it, the storage built instead
| at a tiny fraction of the cost will certainly be more
| than enough to replace it.
|
| Building any nukes means, for each, building several
| times less new renewable generating capacity than could
| otherwise be.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Then what storage of some good few hundreds of megawatts
| would you build for a tiny fraction of the cost of a
| nuclear power plant, that also fits where a nuclear power
| plant could be built?
| viernullvier wrote:
| Thermal storage, for instance:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage
| pfdietz wrote:
| Let's look at simulation/optimization results as to what
| it would cost to use renewables + storage to produce
| "synthetic baseload" to compete with nuclear, using real
| historical weather data.
|
| (The "synthetic baseload" comparison is favorable to
| nuclear, as dealing with variable demand can only help
| renewables as it already requires storage, and that
| storage can serve double duty in the variable demand
| case. Similarly dispatchable demand and transmission
| between countries also only helps renewables.)
|
| https://model.energy/
|
| It's difficult to get nuclear to compete with
| wind+solar+batteries+hydrogen in the 2030 cost scenarios.
| Nuclear does least worse in places like Poland then.
| Balgair wrote:
| It's striking to me about the US's fuel 'dole' and
| comparisons to the Roman's grain dole. Not the same at all,
| but the similarities and how different governments through
| time prioritize the goods and services to achieve their ends
| is fascinating.
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| The problem with all these costs is that we only get to know
| the real costs in hindsight.
|
| 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_c
| ont...
|
| [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiCvGQnweAg
| concordDance wrote:
| > With nuclear, the hidden cost is both long-term storage
| of waste and the cost of nuclear accidents.
|
| Long term storage is actually trivial, just requires
| actually storing it.
|
| Counterintuitively, best way is glassing it and dumping it
| on the abyssal plane in the sea.
|
| This controls the temperature and acts as a radiation
| shield and there's more a hundred times more life on the
| surface than in the abyss. Also, no humans who get prissy
| about 1 in 100 chances of cancer than animals don't fare
| about. The ocean's also big enough that a your case
| corroding and some material being dissolved and spreading
| in the water is irrelevant (unless all your nuclear waste
| you ever dump manages to escape and spread throughout the
| ocean rather than just sit in a sullen pile you'll be under
| EPA limits).
| bb88 wrote:
| > best way is glassing it and dumping it on the abyssal
| plane in the sea.
|
| You say as if it's a done deal. Hanford is 14 years
| behind schedule on this, and now it looks as if it will
| off-gas toxic chemicals. Original budget was $4B and now
| is $17B.
|
| The chemical they're using easily ignites and turns into
| hydrogen cyanide.
|
| https://crosscut.com/environment/2022/04/hanford-report-
| reve...
| visarga wrote:
| > Counterintuitively, best way is glassing it and dumping
| it on the abyssal plane in the sea.
|
| That's how you make Godzilla!
| agentwiggles wrote:
| I, for one, welcome our new anglerfish overlords.
| panick21_ wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Actually they do. The US has been collecting money from
| nuclear plants for disposal for literally 50 years.
|
| In fact, they have an absurd amount of money since this
| money has been collecting interest. It it political
| deadlock and systematic incompetence that prevents the
| solving of this problem.
|
| And in addition, long term storage is an incredibly dumb
| solution for most of this 'waste' and is a fundamentally
| flawed policy that again, is simply systematic
| incompetence.
|
| > I still have not met anyone who is prepared to have
| nuclear waste stored in their "neighborhood"
|
| Disagree, put it in my garden. I don't care. You can leave
| it there for the next 100 years. Seriously, its not hard to
| store, it just stands there and does nothing and is 100%
| harmless unless you come up with some plot of Armageddon
| style logic.
|
| > So it accumulates on-site, where there was no real
| planned long-term storage accommodation.
|
| Its accumulates on-site because of systematic incompetence
| in the federal government.
|
| > and the cost of nuclear accidents
|
| The likely hood of such accidents is incredibly small, even
| if you assume 100 years of nuclear power for 100% of the
| population the chance of really series accidents is very
| low. And even lower if we consider next generation nuclear.
| ncmncm wrote:
| The US is not, _in fact_ , collecting money for disposal,
| and has not been for years.
|
| The US is, instead, _handing back_ all the money that
| _was_ collected to the remaining nuke operators.
|
| _Not, notably_ , to the ratepayers it was collected
| from.
|
| This is fallout from a court case where nuke operators
| argued that disposal was flimflam, so the money was
| collected fraudulently. The court agreed, and ordered the
| money returned. _Not_ to those it came from, but just to
| whoever was still operating.
| basilgohar wrote:
| These are important points you're raising that change the
| course of the conversation significantly, so please also
| add citations so that folks can see them, otherwise, the
| argument falls flat and gets dismissed.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Wikipedia is right there, if you care.
| BuckRogers wrote:
| I went to research this for you and couldn't find the
| sources. I've dismissed the original argument outright.
| panick21_ wrote:
| I did not know of this development. I have researched
| these topics quite a while ago.
|
| Its truly sad that these resources were not used to
| actually develop the advanced reactors and technologies
| needed to solved the problem.
| eric-hu wrote:
| Firstly, I applaud your YIMBYism.
|
| Secondly, regarding waste, I share your view, and I think
| there's an additional travesty that we've had breeder
| reactor technology for decades. That can significantly
| shorten the volume and half life of waste while also
| producing new nuclear fuel. Non proliferation concerns
| are cited for why it's not used, but I don't see why
| America can't operate them within its own borders.
| panick21_ wrote:
| > Non proliferation concerns are cited for why it's not
| used, but I don't see why America can't operate them
| within its own borders.
|
| Yes, its insane to suggest the US in its own boarders
| can't handle it. They do a lot of things much more
| dangerous in every way to build nukes.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I believe most waste isn't spent fuel but rather other
| contaminated stuff, which isn't going to be helped by
| breeder reactors.
| jtc331 wrote:
| My understanding is most of this waste also isn't as
| dangerous or as long-lasting.
| spfzero wrote:
| One thing to remember about nuclear waste, or radioactive
| material in general, is that the high-level waste has the
| shortest half-life, and the longer half-life waste is
| low-level radioactive.
|
| With waste with a half-life of 10,000 years for example,
| each 2 atoms will on average emit one particle or photon
| in that time. Many generations of people could eat or
| drink those atoms safely. You could live your life next
| to a pile of it, and get very little radiation over your
| lifetime from long half-life radioactive atoms.
|
| The long term storage of this waste is a concern, for
| sure. But it is a concern for the far future, and we can
| delay addressing it for decades with impunity (which we
| have been doing, actually). But we are facing a climate
| emergency that must be addressed right now. Nuclear waste
| is the least of our worries at the moment.
| schoen wrote:
| I appreciate your overall point, but it's probably also
| worth considering the concentration or dilution of that
| waste. When you mention eating or drinking the atoms, or
| living next to a pile of them, the radiation dose will
| obviously depend both on the atoms' half-lives and on the
| overall number of atoms.
|
| There's an extra Avogadro factor of around 23 orders of
| magnitude when going between atoms and grams, so those
| atoms really add up -- if they are highly pure and
| concentrated, at least.
| amelius wrote:
| Ok, but you could dilute the waste to make this problem
| go away (which sort of happens automatically if the waste
| is not contained).
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Waste is an incredibly easy problem to solve: bury it in
| impermeable bedrock. That said, there's no real point in
| storing existing nuclear waste since we don't reprocess our
| fuel. So the existing waste is a source of fuel in the
| future.
|
| Solar and wind should also be transparent in the fact they
| require fossil fuels to fill in gaps in production. Thus,
| they do not represent a solution to climate change but
| merely delay it. Thus the cost of solar and wind includes
| the cost of climate disaster.
| 7952 wrote:
| You can't adequately model energy with a single price per
| MWh. There is more to it than that and that is true of
| all energy types. But the low cost of renewables is still
| a feature that grids can exploit. It will make storage
| viable when it otherwise wouldn't have been.
|
| No source of energy is a silver bullet for climate
| change. Wind and solar aren't. And neither is the nuclear
| industry. There just isn't a serious plan for scaling up
| quickly enough. The supply chain and expertise just
| doesn't exist and will take years. And moaning about
| mistakes in the past is irrelevant to the present.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Solar and wind currently use fossil fuels to fill in
| gaps, but they don't _require_ that. It 's just that
| while we're still burning fossil fuels without CO2
| charges, using them for gap filling is the cheapest thing
| that will do it.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| They will continue to require fossil fuels until energy
| storage comes along and we have no idea when that will
| occur. So far, all of our storage systems have proven
| inadequate.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| It does until we achieve many times cheaper storage
| technology. Existing storage solutions don't provide
| nearly enough capacity to scale (especially since Li is
| very scarce, and is also required for cars and other
| modes of transport).
| adrianN wrote:
| Hydrogen (or Methane) are an existing storage solution
| that scales very easily. The truth is that currently we
| have so little renewable generation capacity that we save
| more CO2 by building more wind turbines and PV per dollar
| than by building storage.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Yes, because we can rely on fossil, nuclear, or hydro to
| give us reliability and pick up the slack when renewables
| falter. Just look at Germany, which just approved new
| _coal plants_ because it needs more energy, and they are
| stuck to their demented plan of decommissioning nuclear
| plants.
|
| It's also worth noting that France is producing less than
| half the greenhouse gases of Germany, despite having
| significantly less renewables, because it has a serious
| nuclear infrastructure.
| adrianN wrote:
| It is also worth noting that a sizeable fraction of
| France's reactors are currently offline and France is
| dependent on imports to cover the gaps.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| No, hydrogen and methane storage do not scale easily.
| Almost all hydrogen production is done through steam
| reformation, which emits carbon dioxide. Electrolysis has
| continued to be difficult to do at scale, due to
| inefficiency and difficulty in getting reliable
| electrolysis sytems. Then there's the issue of storing
| and transporting that hydrogen, which is mostly handwaved
| by assuming there's a salt cavern handy wherever people
| need to store hydrogen.
|
| Synthetic methane requires hydrogen as an input, so all
| of the above applies to it, too. It also requires as
| source of carbon dioxide. Extracting carbon dioxide from
| the atmosphere is not viable, which leaves either
| scavenging CO2 byproducts from industrial processes and
| biofuels. Both of those are not in sufficient
| availability to produce synthetic methane at grid scale.
|
| We already have excess renewable generation in several
| energy markets. And it's been the case for years, but the
| promised energy storage revolution has not come to pass.
| adrianN wrote:
| Electrolysis can easily be done at scale. A couple of
| megawatts of electrolysis equipment is about the size of
| a shipping container. Many such systems are in operations
| right now and have been for a decade. The technology is
| fairly mature and reaches efficiencies of 70-80%. You
| also don't need salt caverns to store the hydrogen. You
| can store it underground without a salt cavern. Sure,
| there are losses, but they're not unmanageable.
|
| We're also not going to run out of industrial processes
| that produce large amounts of carbon dioxide, at least as
| long as we still build things out of concrete, so if for
| some reason hydrogen is too hard to transport or store,
| we can pay the extra price of turning it into methane and
| use all the infrastructure that we already have for
| natural gas. We can even recapture most of the carbon
| when we burn the methane again.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| This really doesn't scale to the level of a whole
| country, or continent, having to contend with low power
| output for months, as recently happened with wind in
| Europe. And even if it can in principle scale, it's
| unproven and requires much more complex ops than a
| nuclear plant, which has been a well understood solution
| for decades.
|
| Not to mention, this requires huge over-production, which
| is a problem in areas with already high land usage, such
| as Europe. It is probably much less of a problem in the
| USA, so maybe there the calculations are different.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Nothing can ever happen for the first time. If something
| hasn't been done now, it can't ever happen.
|
| I just love reactionary conservative nuclear logic.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| I'd you're going to be the future of the planet on
| something, getting on a solution that has worked for over
| half a century is a lot safer than something that has
| never been done outside of prototypes.
|
| "Let's just use fusion for all our energy needs. We don't
| need fission, nor do we need wind and solar. Just because
| it hasn't been done now, doesn't mean it'll never happen.
| If you don't support this you're just an anti-fusion
| conservative reactionary!"
| pfdietz wrote:
| But you see, going with renewables is not betting the
| future of the planet. We absolutely know that renewables
| can do it. The technologies all exist now. All that we're
| doing is quibbling over how much it would cost.
|
| The worst case for renewables would be that costs stop
| declining. Stack the deck just right and nuclear might
| end up a bit cheaper. But this is just a financial risk,
| not a risk of the planet. And if one is looking at
| financial risks, one must also look at the risk of cost
| overruns in nuclear. Unlike with renewables, which
| typically come in within 10% of the contracted cost,
| nuclear plants are famously subject to enormous cost
| overruns. Factors of 2, 3, or even more.
|
| Pretending that the promises of nuclear will absolutely
| come true, but that renewables haven't absolutely
| demonstrated their cost declines will continue, is a
| blatant double standard and not how one does proper
| analysis. That's why utilities and financiers have walked
| away from new nuclear, especially in markets where
| they're not allowed to foist overruns off on the
| ratepayers.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > But you see, going with renewables is not betting the
| future of the planet. We absolutely know that renewables
| can do it. The technologies all exist now. All that we're
| doing is quibbling over how much it would cost.
|
| We have lots of experience with hydroelectricity. So we
| can just build more dams, it's all just a question of
| cost right? With more money we can just build more dams
| until we reach 100% hydroelectric generation right? This
| is the kind of logic you're using.
|
| Possibility and feasibility are two different things.
| Lithium ion batteries exist, but we'll never deploy a
| day's worth of battery storage. The scale just isn't
| there. No amount of money thrown at the problem is going
| to make it possible.
|
| Sure things like hydroelectricity and electrolysis exist,
| but they have significant barriers to feasibility. The
| likely path for an attempt at solar and wind grid is to
| build a bunch of solar and wind, try to build storage,
| fail, and keep using fossil fuels. Nobody, and I mean
| _nobody_ has _ever_ built grid scale storage for more
| than an hour 's worth of electricity use (let alone total
| energy use). Energy storage remains an unsolved problem,
| and it's not just a question of cost. There's no telling
| if it can be done even with unlimited financial
| resources.
|
| By comparison we just need to build 4 nuclear plants for
| every existing one in the US. No massive 10,000x increase
| in storage capacity required. No reliance on technology
| that's never been deployed at scale.
| adrianN wrote:
| No continent currently runs on nuclear power, not even a
| single country currently runs on nuclear power. Nuclear
| power is hence unproven at scale by your logic.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| France generates over 70% of it's power from nuclear
| energy. At it's peak it was over 80%, with the remainder
| fulfilled by preexisting hydroelectricity.
| adrianN wrote:
| France gets 70% ef its electricity from nuclear. It only
| gets about a third of its primary power from nuclear.
| Clearly, the technology can't handle the task if the
| country can't even run its electric grid on 100% nuclear.
| /s
| Manuel_D wrote:
| By comparison, the largest share of wind and solar in any
| country is only 43% in Denmark. Germany comes in second
| only 33%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries
| _by_renewable...
|
| So if 70% is insufficient to demonstrate feasibility,
| then solar and wind are even worse off.
| pfdietz wrote:
| That hydrogen is currently produced by SMR is irrelevant.
| Electrolysis is of course trivial to scale, you just
| build more electrolyzers. There is nothing that prevents
| arbitrary numbers of them from being operated in
| parallel.
|
| Would this cost money? Yes. But it would likely cost less
| than a grid based on nuclear power plants. The key
| insight is that hydrogen can feed combined cycle power
| plants, which cost a factor of 10 less than a nuclear
| power plant of the same power output. So, one could (if
| necessary) back up the entire grid with CC plants at a
| fraction of the cost of powering the same grid with
| nukes. If desired, one could use simple cycle power
| plants, which (while less efficient) are even cheaper by
| another factor of about 2, or 20x cheaper than the nukes.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| What? How on earth is it irrelevant that almost all of
| our hydrogen comes from steam reformation? We have very
| little experience with large scale electrolysis, and its
| proven to be difficult and expensive to do at scale.
|
| Those gas plants may be cheaper build, but if the
| electrolyzed hydrogen is expensive the total operating
| cost is higher since the fuel is too expensive. If you're
| using single cycle gas plants you'll need even more of
| this hydrogen, and thus driving up costs. Are you really
| just comparing cost of construction and ignoring the cost
| of electrolyzed hydrogen fuel? And remember this is on
| top of the solar and wind that needs to power this
| electeolysis in the first place.
|
| Also again, to convert hydrogen to methane you need a
| large source of carbon dioxide.
|
| A summary of this comment is, "it's cheaper if we just
| ignore all the technical challenges of synthetic
| methane."
| adrianN wrote:
| It is irrelevant because the proposition is to use
| hydrogen to store surplus electricity, not to use
| hydrogen made from natural gas.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| This is exactly the point I'm making: storing hydrogen
| for electricity storage has to be done through
| electrolysis, because steam reformation emits carbon
| dioxide. But we _don 't_ currently use electrolysis for
| our hydrogen production, because it's not cost
| competitive with steam reformation. It's not cost
| competitive with existing energy storage either.
| adrianN wrote:
| Dude, we use natural gas because that is cheap. Why is it
| cheap? Because we externalize the costs of climate
| change. By that argument we should ditch nuclear and burn
| lignite. It's a lot cheaper and proven technology.
|
| Nobody claimed electrolysis is cheaper than using natural
| gas. Nobody even claimed that electrolysis is cheaper
| than batteries at small scales. The claim is that
| electrolysis is proven technology that is a lot simpler
| to scale that lithium batteries.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| I agree we should include the cost of climate change.
| That's why nuclear is cheaper than solar and wind:
| because solar and wind require either energy storage or
| fossil fuels. And since energy storage at grid scale does
| not exist, solar and wind contains the cost of climate
| change.
|
| > The claim is that electrolysis is proven technology
| that is a lot simpler to scale that lithium batteries.
|
| And my point is that this is false. Electrolysis is _not_
| proven technology at scale, almost all hydrogen is
| produced through steam reformation. No, it does not scale
| better than lithium ion batteries. If we try to build it
| at scale it 'll make solar and wind more expensive than
| nuclear power.
| 7952 wrote:
| Does not scale, I hear that a lot about everything that
| isn't nuclear. Maybe people said that to the
| semiconductor industry before the explosion in person
| computers or smart phones.
|
| Nuclear has got to have the worse scalability story of
| any hyped technology ever. Very monolithic system with
| tight integration between components. Hazardous
| materials. Complex science and engineering that needs
| lots of different highly trained people. Exotic
| materials. High temperatures. Enabling works with
| quantities in the millions of square metres. Processes
| that are difficult to model. Endless secrecy for national
| security. Very strong buildings. Harsh design margins.
| Sites in remote areas with absolutely no night life.
|
| We should be optimistic about nuclear. But also apply
| optimism to other technologies and industries. If the
| petro-chemical industry want to make hydrogen work they
| will succeed. So will the battery industry and solar. If
| nuclear can scale than so can they.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| And yet for all the complaints about nuclear, France
| powers over 75% of it's grid with nuclear. Several other
| countries have it at around 40-50%. Nuclear continues to
| produce more electricity than wind and solar combined.
| anonporridge wrote:
| There's some kind of logical fallacy in this line of argument,
| but I can't put my finger on a name for it.
|
| 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.
| woodruffw wrote:
| The key distinction here is that the (low!) long-term risk of
| nuclear power is well quantified, while COVID represents an
| unknown long-term risk.
| sdsaga12 wrote:
| Isn't this true of all new strains of all contagious
| pathogens? They are constantly undergoing change. We
| estimate low probability that mutated viruses or bacteria
| descended from strains we are familiar with will have
| dramatically more harmful long-term effects, but we don't
| actually know for certain that any given year's new strains
| won't have very different risk profiles until much later.
| We can make probabilistic models based on historical data,
| but they are unavoidably vulnerable to underestimating the
| risk of black swan events.
|
| One could argue that certain features of covid make it
| riskier with regard to long-term effects, but that is not a
| proposition that is well developed in the public
| conversation, especially by proponents of the zoonosis
| hypothesis. The lab origin hypothesis with its accompanying
| assumptions of serial passage and direct gene modification
| would in my eyes strengthen the case that covid's long-term
| effects were less likely to conform to historical data on
| other viral infections, though interestingly the
| intersection of those who find the lab origin more
| convincing with those who have serious concerns about long-
| term harms is a pretty small set.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > Isn't this true of all new strains of all contagious
| pathogens?
|
| Yes. The distinguishing factor there is that most new
| strains do not kill millions of people within the first
| year or two of discovery. Compare, for example, the H1N1
| variant that caused the 2009 flu pandemic, which killed
| "only" around 300,000 people (based on best excess death
| estimates).
|
| > One could argue that certain features of covid make it
| riskier with regard to long-term effects, but that is not
| a proposition that is well developed in the public
| conversation, especially by proponents of the zoonosis
| hypothesis.
|
| This has _long_ been an established part of the
| messaging: we 're more or less confident that short term
| effects to young, otherwise healthy individuals are
| minor. The guidance has _still_ been to avoid infection,
| because we 're not confident that mild short term
| guarantee or protect against serious long term effects.
| Chickenpox (and subsequently shingles) exemplify this.
|
| I understand the intuition that a non-zoonotic origin
| would lend credence to the possibility of long term
| risks, but I don't think the epidemiology actually
| supports the intuition: my understanding is that viruses
| that jump the species gap tend to have higher
| _variability_ in terms of their harm to the new species.
| peteradio wrote:
| I've noticed the same strange misaligned covid
| explanation/behavior. Lab leak would make me more fearful
| of the virus itself, pure zoonotic origin and I say Jesus
| take the wheel and by that I mean countless generations
| of evolution tuning my immune system against similar
| virus for familial survival take the wheel.
| woodruffw wrote:
| This mis-states the relationship between your immune
| system and novel viruses, especially ones that cross
| species boundaries. Viruses adapt to _avoid_ the
| adjustments the immune system makes, and zoonotic
| transmission means that your immune system is "seeing"
| all kinds of novel adaptations for the first time.
| glogla wrote:
| Why did you have to derail nuclear discussion with covid
| denier/antivaxx nonsense? Sigh.
|
| Why replace one type of antiscience/antiintelectualism (anti
| nuclear people) with another (antivax)?
| anonporridge wrote:
| How did you make the leap to covid denial/antivax from my
| comment? I am extremely pro vax and consider covid to be a
| very serious problem.
|
| People aren't black and white in their beliefs, despite
| what the political duopoly would like you to believe.
| elurg wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| pydry wrote:
| >You're terrified of a nuclear meltdown, so instead you
| subject global civilization to decades of unnecessary fossil
| fuel burning.
|
| 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...
| p1mrx wrote:
| > chances of meltdown projected at 1/3704 reactor years
|
| That is for _existing_ reactors. The point of new designs
| is to do better:
|
| "The likelihood of core damage due to NuScale reactor
| equipment failures while at full power conditions is 1
| event per module every ~3 Billion Years."
|
| https://www.nuscalepower.com/benefits/safety-
| features/emerge...
| pydry wrote:
| And I'll _believe_ it once the price-anderson cap is
| eliminated and they can still buy insurance.
|
| Otherwise it's all talk. Manufacturers will _always_
| claim on that their product is 99.9% safe.
|
| The closest realistic measure is how much financial
| liability their insurer is willing to shoulder and at
| what cost.
|
| Which is _still_ capped at 0.03% of 1 fukushima in the US
| because the government thinks pushing it any higher would
| spook them.
| p1mrx wrote:
| That would be progress, but I don't think we'll get there
| until the new reactors have a proven operational safety
| record, and enough are built to retire the old reactors.
| serf wrote:
| to be clear : the events of 9/11 were the _impetus_ for war;
| not the motivation.
|
| 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.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| I mean, a trillion spent is a trillion spent: it'll trickle
| down regardless of how you spend it, the question is if you
| could have spent it some other way that would have given
| more jobs?
| namdnay wrote:
| It was Bush - if it hadn't been spent on Iraq it would
| have gone straight to tax cuts for the upper brackets.
|
| We're talking about the guy who managed to tank the
| worlds healthiest budget
| MisterMower wrote:
| I thought we were talking a miniature nuclear reactor...
| patmcc wrote:
| A trillion spent building factories, highways, public
| housing, schools, etc. may employ exactly as many people
| as a trillion spent building weapons, dropping bombs, and
| killing people.
|
| What you end up with after spending that trillion is a
| bit different though.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > it'll trickle down regardless of how you spend it
|
| That's an article of conservative dogma dating from the
| Reagan and Bush eras, and it's pretty-much discredited
| now. For most major capital expenditure programmes, the
| majority of the money trickling down stops trickling once
| it reaches shareholders and executives.
| Jenk wrote:
| Not if it is stashed away secretly avoiding tax and other
| contributions to society.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2012/07/23/su
| per...
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Seems like a close cousin of the effect described here, the
| "drip drip drip" effect, where problems that arise as a
| sequence of discrete events and that are easy to solve with a
| simple top down approach get solved, while problems that are
| more serious in total, but that are continuous is nature and
| require a more distributed bottom up approach to solve,
| don't.
|
| https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/7/5/heres-why-we-
| re...
| majormajor wrote:
| > * 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.
|
| 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?
| MisterMower wrote:
| Show your work, do the cost justification, and make your
| assumptions explicit. Until either of you do that, you're
| just guessing.
| kelnos wrote:
| I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect someone to do that
| work, or even have the tools or data sources to do that
| work.
|
| Sure, I think it's reasonable to expect people to provide
| sources to support ideas when possible, but it's a little
| unreasonable to expect people to do extensive first-party
| research to support their opinions.
|
| I think there's value in the discussion either way. Most
| of the time I don't think we're going to change people's
| minds with this sort of discussion, but I do enjoy seeing
| what people's positions are on these sorts of topics, and
| find that I learn things from it.
| MisterMower wrote:
| If they're unwilling to do the work, then they should
| stop pretending to be certain that their opinion is
| correct.
| someguydave wrote:
| Amen
| delecti wrote:
| Why do you require sources from majormajor and not
| anonporridge? Neither presented supporting data for their
| opinions, but majormajor was simultaneously pointing out
| that anonporridge didn't. You seem to be showing your
| bias in favor of anonporridge's positions by who you
| choose to demand evidence from.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Just like the comment that he was replying to did?
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| So, instead of nuclear waste we can package up and store
| away where it won't hurt anyone, we have plenty of coal and
| gas plants, whose waste goes into the atmosphere where it
| hurts everyone.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| But we can't! There have been several issues with stored
| nuclear waste already, and we only had to do it for like
| what, 70 years? How can you project that to even just a
| couple hundred years and not expect total desaster?
| nuclear would be great if every single person involved
| were reliable, diligent engineers and scientists. But at
| the end of the day, the most important decisions always
| get made by greedy managers and CEOs, and clueless
| politicians.
| e63f67dd-065b wrote:
| I've never understood why just storing them in a big pool
| next to the power plant is a bad idea. The radiation is
| not a concern because the water filters it all out, it's
| stable for long periods of time with very little
| maintenance, what's the downside exactly?
|
| As in literally dig a hole the size of an Olympic
| swimming pool, store literally all the nuclear waste that
| has ever been produced (maybe you'll need a few pools, I
| haven't checked), and spend a few million a year
| maintaining it for the next century or so.
| [deleted]
| Jenk wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| peteradio wrote:
| Why so offended to suggest that some people could have
| overdone it to the overall negative? Parent isn't
| necessarily suggesting that the reaction was the typical
| one.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| This is a complex topic, mostly emotional ones (since cold
| hard facts can be presented on both sides but they don't
| sway most people at this point).
|
| I was all for various covid measures, did all the vaccines,
| didn't travel, practiced social distancing meticulously...
| to no avail, we caught it 3x by now, all the times through
| our small kids. At this point its milder/similar than
| common cold for us, unlike those being hit for the first
| time.
|
| Looking back, many governments around the world applied
| ridiculously strict restrictions, which just highlighted
| how badly incompetent in the best headless chicken form
| they are in SHTF scenarios. You couldn't travel more than
| 1km from your home (ie France), you couldn't be out after
| 6/7/8 pm even if you just want to go for a stroll or run in
| the forest, alone (which I do a lot). Things like these
| were completely needless and heavily infringed on common
| folks basic rights, not even going into the topic of
| fucking up population physical health massively down the
| road. Not surprisingly population's overall mental health
| decreased significantly too.
|
| Forcing education of kids from home is seen as failure of
| even greater proportions. Not only was the system utterly
| unprepared in first months, but this form just doesn't work
| as well as direct physical contact. Kids missing tons of
| societal development that will never work well in digital
| form. We should have just put extra care into protecting
| vulnerable and otherwise move on with our lives. If I would
| be an old fart and somebody would give me choice of fucking
| up my grandkids lives for some potential extra safety for
| me, I would choose my grandkids anytime, everytime.
|
| When we could have handled it ie like Sweden (from what
| I've heard), without any significant basic rights
| restrictions, and with resulting covid numbers very much
| the same. Next winter will show how missing 2 cold/flu
| seasons will bode for us, I suspect mortality stats will
| jump through the roof (within these diseases number ranges
| of course). Diabetes, cardiovascular and mental issues are
| already up.
|
| And one more point I haven't seen much mentioned - society
| as a whole completely fucked up its approach to healthcare
| workers. Yes there were evening claps for few months. While
| a nice gesture, they won't fix the burnout many had. So
| anywhere I look, health systems have much less medical
| personnel, mainly nurses simply left their jobs. The
| situation ie in France is so bad some big cities have to
| close emergencies through the weekend (!!!). Some emergency
| doctors left too. There is no quick fix for this. An
| example - I've recently spent 4 hours to get 1 blood test
| done (something taking 15 mins before) - and that is
| already optimized for timing and location since my wife is
| a doctor.
|
| This period won't be judged nicely by our descendants.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| > to no avail, we caught it 3x by now, all the times
| through our small kids. At this point its milder/similar
| than common cold for us, unlike those being hit for the
| first time.
|
| That parahraph seems to contradict itself. By locking
| down we slowed down transmission, until treatments and
| vaccines were available. That is why the effects were so
| mild for you vs the people who caught it in the earlier
| waves. How was it to 'no avail', when you state the
| benefit right afterwards?
| Jenk wrote:
| > This is a complex topic
|
| It really, really, isn't.
|
| Hospitals the world over were completely and wholly
| overwhelmed with patients sick with COVID-19. Lockdowns
| reduced transmissions, hospitalisations dropped.
|
| That's it. That's all that needs understanding.
| Retric wrote:
| It's worth remembering that the US and many other
| healthcare systems around the world got absolutely
| slammed by COVID and stayed that way throughout most of
| the pandemic. Restrictions kept being tightened and
| loosened not out of incompetence but in response to
| actual hospitalizations and deaths.
|
| In the end, US casualties only being ~1 million was
| actually a positive outcome, things could have been a lot
| worse even if exactly the same people got sick but they
| did so even slightly faster. Worse suffering 5+ times as
| many casualties in 2020 would not have prevented the
| variants which would happily reinfect people.
|
| There wasn't any great options, but many of them where
| far worse.
| wizofaus wrote:
| I wouldn't speak about it in the past tense personally!
| roenxi wrote:
| This really annoys me, because I see the following chain.
|
| 1) Healthcare is too important for light touch regulation
| =>
|
| 2) Big political fight over regulation =>
|
| 3) Competition in healthcare largely disappears =>
|
| 4) Oh no something went wrong, now we have to adjust what
| human rights are available based on how prepared the
| government is for a rather predictable crisis (COVID
| wasn't/isn't even the bad-case for a highly contagious
| respiratory disease).
|
| There are people seriously trying to argue that walking
| more than single-digit kilometres from a body's home
| depends on what the government's hospital policy was 5
| years ago. In complete seriousness, this is crazy. I
| thought we'd agreed that basic rights were a thing but it
| turns out large segments of the population and
| bureaucrats seriously don't believe that.
|
| And exactly what we got to show for this is questionable.
| Border controls are the only government tool that I have
| faith in after that pandemic. Even the vaccine we only
| managed because people agreed that the usual safety
| procedures would take to long and that we could skip them
| because the economic damage caused by fearful people was
| too great. The governments of the world caused a lot of
| problems these last few years.
| Retric wrote:
| Curtailing freedoms due to disease is a very old thing
| and it works with COVID being no exception.
|
| Mary Mallon was forcibly quarantined, let go resulting in
| 2 additional deaths, and then permanently quarantined in
| the US because she was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid
| fever in the early 1900's.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon The most common
| versions historically was locking people in their homes
| or isolating a community from the outside.
|
| As to your complaint, walking outside does carry the risk
| of infecting others as people demonstrably have gotten
| COVID from walking past each other. It's a low risk which
| why it was generally acceptable, but officials where
| balancing even this vs more people dying.
| peyton wrote:
| > Curtailing freedoms due to disease is a very old thing
| and it works with COVID being no exception.
|
| If you look at agency budgets you'd think our money
| would've bought a better plan.
| Retric wrote:
| It's all trade offs, there isn't an objectively better
| plan.
|
| The US for example encouraged but didn't mandate the
| general public get vaccinated. It's easy to say that's
| the wrong choice, but people would have seriously
| objected.
| wizofaus wrote:
| Off topic I know but I can't let the idea that Sweden's
| death rate wasn't significantly different to other
| similar nations with stricter restrictions slide - that
| was true only for people under 70. I don't know about you
| but I intend to be fully fit & healthy and living a
| meaningful existence at 70 that I don't wish to have cut
| short because public health measures in a crisis are
| insufficient. Further, talk to some frontline healthcare
| workers about the extreme case load they had to deal
| with.
| woweoe wrote:
| The death rate for elderly people was attributed to poor
| safeguards in care homes by the Swedish Health Authority.
| wizofaus wrote:
| What % of people over 70 are in care homes (in Australia
| it's about 6% and we apparently have one of the highest
| rates in the world)? Pretty sure if it were just those in
| care homes dying from COVID it would barely show up in
| the stats.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Sweden's total COVID death rate per unit population is
| three times that of neighbouring Norway. 190 per 100k
| versus 65 per 100k It wasn't just the over 70s in Sweden
| who were dying.
|
| See https://www.vg.no/spesial/corona/verden/
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| That's death attributed to Covid. If you look at total
| excess mortality you will see that Sweden mostly did fine
| and it's probably be even better if you look at long term
| trend. Obviously no country wants to talk too much about
| it. Who wants to tell their population than the sacrifice
| they made were useless?
|
| I don't know about the situation in the USA where
| everything seemed very political and what was done was
| far less stringent than in my own country but here in
| France it was pretty obvious that most of the measures
| were taken haphazardly mostly to placate an ageing
| population. It was very funny. The media kept blaming the
| young socialising for cases when it was painfully obvious
| that most contaminations came from schools.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Got some numbers and a reference?
| wizofaus wrote:
| I can only assume your Norwegian is a lot better than
| mine. But I had read from a reliable source that
| excluding those over 70 the excess death rate (all
| causes) in Sweden wasn't notably higher than other Nordic
| countries.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| I can't say anything about the excess death rate. My
| source is the VG webpage I included. It seems unlikely
| that there are enough people over 70 to make a 3 to 1
| difference between the two countries. Perhaps someone can
| provide a reference to correct me.
| wizofaus wrote:
| It's likely to be somewhere in the order of 20% (that's
| the figure for over 65s for Europe as a whole). Excess
| deaths is definitely a better measure than those
| attributed to Covid - e.g. it was reported in Australia
| deaths were recorded as due to covid in any case that a
| hospital patient tested +ve even if the immediate cause
| of death was unrelated - i.e. they almost certainly would
| have died anyway regardless of Covid.
| hmlongco wrote:
| Yeah, let's exclude the numbers for those over 70. Not
| like they're actually people or anything...
| evgen wrote:
| So if you exclude the largest category of deaths and
| cherry-pick from the remaining data you think a point is
| being made? Sweden and Norway has similar covid death
| rates for children aged 6-8, therefore the public health
| policy differences between the two countries had no
| effect? Do you know what actually was the same among the
| various Scandinavian countries? The economic impact of
| covid. Swedish policy failures that ended up killing more
| people did not provide the expected economic benefit.
| Sweden fucked up and their population paid the price.
| wizofaus wrote:
| I think you need to go back and re-read what I wrote. I
| quite clearly objected to omitting deaths of those over
| 70.
| delecti wrote:
| > Next winter will show how missing 2 cold/flu seasons
| will bode for us, I suspect mortality stats will jump
| through the roof
|
| The reason we have annual flu shots is because influenza
| mutates so readily, so it's not like most people have a
| highly developed immunity to whatever common influenza
| strain is going around anyway. And fun fact (truly, it's
| awesome), at least one strain of influenza appears to
| have gone extinct. It seems possible that your prediction
| is completely backwards, and that our scattershot
| headless chicken COVID mitigation policies have managed
| to _permanently_ improve flu season.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2021/06/03/1003020235/certain-
| strains-of...
| ttfkam wrote:
| Sweden did not fare as well as you appear to think it did
| compared to its closest neighbors and cultural analogs,
| either by number of infections or per capita death rate.
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8807990/
| kadonoishi wrote:
| > There's some kind of logical fallacy in this line of
| argument, but I can't put my finger on a name for it.
|
| "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]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowardice
| YarickR2 wrote:
| Foundation is closer by a day. Bring it on, independent traders,
| we need walnut-sized reactors
| tomohawk wrote:
| > just the seventh that has been approved for use in the US
|
| 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.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Nukes are inherently expensive. The NRC has saved us from
| enormous needless expense. We can spent all that on renewables
| now.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| For those who are interested in the size (will it fit in my
| garage/car port?)
|
| 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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuScale_Power
| tbihl wrote:
| The tallness is pretty important to the design and is pretty
| much antithetical to everything about home design.
| quantumwannabe wrote:
| Or people will just have a nuclear tower on their lawn. If it
| can be buried (or partially buried), the tower need not be
| taller than the house. With some decorations similar to the
| ones on cell phone towers, it could even look reasonably
| attractive.
| titzer wrote:
| Back of the envelope, 60MW is 30,000 homes. So a small city
| or very large town could install just a couple of these and
| be completely set.
| p1mrx wrote:
| Except for Lord Farquaad's castle.
| aperson_hello wrote:
| The 60MW seems a bit more antithetical to home design than
| the height! That's a not-small amount of power.
| titzer wrote:
| Those dogecoins aren't going to mine themselves.
| plasticchris wrote:
| No but it sounds about right to supply a large parking
| garage (or three!) of charging EVs.
| oittaa wrote:
| Average American drives 14,263 miles per year. Tesla
| Model 3 consumes 0.27 kWh/mi. Average American driving a
| Tesla uses 3851.01 kWh / year.
|
| 60MW reactor produces 525,600,000 kWh / year.
|
| So a single NuScale reactor could power a garage with
| 136,483 electric cars.
| plasticchris wrote:
| Sure, but there are a couple of things to consider like
| peak consumption (everyone gets home from work and plugs
| in) or potentially much better utilization of electric
| vehicles from av adoption which might happen in the
| timeframes needed to get this tech out.
| pnw wrote:
| The Nuscale design requires that the reactors are submerged
| in a below ground pool.
| spacehunt wrote:
| Perhaps for individual detached houses; 20m can easily fit
| inside apartment buildings...
| hypersoar wrote:
| Note that the reactor vessel doesn't generate electricity, but
| _steam_. You need a turbine to make it useful. Once you include
| that, it doesn 't look quite as miniature[0]. As far as I can
| tell, these aren't targeted at anything other than utility-
| scale power.
|
| [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU-IlqiP4sU&t=63s
| h0l0cube wrote:
| I wonder if TPV could be used instead of a turbine?
|
| 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.
| credit_guy wrote:
| Unfortunately, it can't. Nuclear reactor cores can
| obviously get very hot, but for safety reasons they are not
| allowed to. They work at about 300 degrees Celsius. The
| linked heat engine has the high efficiency quoted only when
| the hot element is extremely hot, a few thousand degrees
| Celsius.
| glogla wrote:
| I think you could use these to "upgrade" coal power plants to
| nuclear power plants, no? Those already have turbines,
| cooling towers, transformers, grid connection, etc.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| It also need to sit in a giant pool of water, not sure if you
| can share the pool if you install more than one to save
| volume and concrete.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| Could it be moved via a standard tractor trailer?
| aperson_hello wrote:
| This suggests it can be shipped by truck (though probably not
| a standard trailer, as it's not light):
| https://www.nuscalepower.com/technology/technology-overview
| WheatM wrote:
| kgilpin wrote:
| Who are these people who want a nuclear reactor in their
| garage? Folks, you may be getting a bit carried away!
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| This may be for the best. The size alone would make it a no-go
| for average homeowner. I am saying this, because while I am
| sure there are plenty that know what they are doing on their
| property, there is a substantial non-zero amount of those that
| do not. And, separately, can you even begin to imagine that
| non-zero amount demanding that they have remote access to it
| via their favorite app?
|
| All I can think of is Snowcrash and multiple sovereigns.
| DisjointedHunt wrote:
| This thing could power a small town, it doesn't need to fit
| in your lawn.
|
| Micro grids with multiple redundancies make the size perfect
| for a community project.
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