[HN Gopher] Westinghouse sees a tech disrupter in its eVinci mic...
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Westinghouse sees a tech disrupter in its eVinci microreactor
Author : akeck
Score : 331 points
Date : 2022-11-23 21:01 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.power-eng.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.power-eng.com)
| LatteLazy wrote:
| The advantage of small reactors is that you can make them in
| factories (mass production).
|
| The disadvantages are that you lose all on site scale and you are
| very vulnerable to a single part failure or design floor. Also
| miniaturising things is non-trivial.
|
| Then you still have all the other issues around nuclear (waste
| and perception)
|
| Given the cost of nuclear, you need that advantage to be much
| much bigger than the disadvantages. If someone can do that,
| they'll make (serious) money. But it's a >100bnUSD project. So I
| don't think there are many corps who will take that sort of risk
| given the uncertainty.
| keepquestioning wrote:
| Finally some real innovation on here.
| foundajob wrote:
| nwatson wrote:
| After ethics reviews, send some prototypes to Ukraine this
| winter.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| Sounds like something you don't want Russians to target
| thought.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Ukraine has multiple traditional nuclear power plants
| running.
| nuccy wrote:
| The attacks of russians on Ukraine's electricity grid
| revealed a safety feature of the convenient nuclear power
| plants (at least those operated in Ukraine) - they cannot
| produce electricity while being alone in the grid (or in
| isolated pieces of the grid). If inflow of electricity
| fails the nuclear power plant switches to diesel generators
| and gradually decreases its power output going effectively
| into hibernation. Attacks of November 23 caused exactly
| that, all three nuclear power plants (excluding ZPP which
| is on temporarily occupied territory) were shut down since
| they lost incoming power [1].
|
| 1. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/23/russia-
| ukraine...
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| > Commercial deployment is targeted for 2027.
|
| (Sounds like the new fuel might be available sooner, but
| probably not for this winter?)
| pfdietz wrote:
| A serious problem with this is scaling of operating costs.
|
| A 5 MWe reactor, operating at about 90% capacity factor and
| selling power at wholesale prices (maybe $0.03/kWh) will earn
| $1.2M/year. You need at least four employees to operate it (3
| shifts, with a spare), and probably many more.
| Accujack wrote:
| From the article, they're planning on the reactors being
| unmanned (but monitored). So, no employees watching it.
| pfdietz wrote:
| That's going to require changes in licensing in the US. I
| don't think even remotely operated reactors are legal in the
| US.
| ipdashc wrote:
| How are they planning to handle security? The rest of the
| thread mentions they intend to use these in very remote
| regions (northern Canada and such). While that makes a lot of
| sense practically, doesn't it make security kind of tricky? I
| get that they'd be carefully remotely monitored, but it seems
| like a realistic possibility that a team of people could
| break in (the renders show these in shipping containers
| surrounded by a simple double layer of barbed wire fencing),
| steal the radioactive material, and escape before security
| arrives.
|
| I get that we store actual nuclear bombs in unmanned remote
| sites (missile silos), but those are operated by the literal
| military and secure underground. These would realistically be
| operated by private companies, and are just shipping
| containers sitting on the surface.
| zizee wrote:
| Someone wrote in another thread:
|
| > It uses TRISO fuel, which are fissionable materials
| enclosed in a carbon and ceramic shell that's extremely
| tough and can handle far higher temperatures than are
| present in a reactor without melting.
|
| Each grain of fuel is about the size of a poppy seed, with
| the majority of the seed being the ceramic shell. It's not
| a dense fuel. This stops issues of radioactive material
| leaching into groundwater, and also makes it quite
| difficult to use the fuel for nefarious purposes (like a
| dirty bomb). Someone would need to separate the fuel from
| the shell, not a trivial thing to do. All this to say that
| it's not super attractive for terrorist types.
|
| Also, remember that whilst they talk about using them in
| remote areas, it's mostly about being "remote to other
| infrastructure", not "remote from all people". These things
| will be installed in small regional towns / mine sites etc.
| Places where a town sized number of people will be. So it's
| not like it will be hours away from any first responder.
|
| Finally, these can be secured pretty well physically. They
| won't be easy to move, or cut into, or siphon out the
| material, at least not in a smash-and-grab type scenario.
|
| https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/triso-particles-most-
| robu...
|
| edit: I wouldn't say they are risk free, just not as big a
| risk as it first sounds locating a nuclear reactor out in
| the middle of nowhere :-)
|
| edit2: I'm by no means an expert, but I really liked this
| video on the topic on the benefits of Small Modular
| Reactors (SMRs). I really love the concept, especially
| their mass produced, regularly rotated/retired nature:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYnqJ4VnRM8
| justatdotin wrote:
| > quite difficult to use the fuel for nefarious purposes
| (like a dirty bomb). Someone would need to separate the
| fuel from the shell, not a trivial thing to do. All this
| to say that it's not super attractive for terrorist
| types.
|
| Those grains are fine as-they-are for a dirty bomb. Sure,
| one of the safest, cleanest dirty bombs you could have
| the pleasure to meet, but still a dirty bomb. Maybe not
| attractive to someone looking to deny territory through
| contamination, but great for someone looking to incite
| fear.
| zizee wrote:
| I won't speculate on how much fear one can incite.
| Anything with the word nuclear in it could most lilely be
| enough to srir up feelings of panic. Hell, D&D was enough
| at one stage. So you're probably right.
|
| But I will say that if you spread this fuel over a large
| area with a bomb, it will ve orders of magnitude easoer
| to clean up, and result in far less long te issues. It
| wont leach into groundwater. If you swallowed/inhaled it,
| whilst it wpuldnt be gpod, it wont be absorbed ibto your
| tissue. Same with lifestock/crops. The cleanup problem
| goes from almost impossible, to pretty involved.
|
| Again, I'm no expert, so take whatever with a grain of
| radioactive salt :-)
| pfdietz wrote:
| The grains would also be fine for a terrorist reactor.
| Setting off an unshielded reactor in a dense city core
| could cause much exposure to radiation. The miscreants
| wouldn't even have to guarantee it wouldn't go prompt
| critical.
| zizee wrote:
| What is a terrorist reactor? And prompt critical?
| pfdietz wrote:
| A terrorist reactor would be a reactor used for terrorist
| purposes. Imagine something like the infamous demon core,
| but set off in a populated area.
|
| Prompt criticality is when a nuclear reactor is critical
| on prompt neutrons alone. This is to be avoided (in most
| cases) at all costs, as the doubling time of neutrons
| becomes very fast, a small fraction of a second. In a
| normally operating reactor, the core is subcritical on
| prompt neutrons, but critical on prompt + delayed
| neutrons. Delayed neutrons are emitted after the beta
| decay of certain fission products, and this slows the
| doubling of the neutron population enough that feedback
| control can keep the reactor's power steady.
|
| Prompt criticality is what happened at Chernobyl.
| ipdashc wrote:
| That makes sense. Thanks!
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| It's shit like this:
|
| > In 2009, this improved TRISO fuel set an international
| record by achieving a 19% maximum burnup during a three-
| year test at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). This is
| nearly double the previous mark set by the Germans in the
| 1980s and is three times the burnup that current light-
| water fuels can achieve--demonstrating its long-life
| capability.
|
| That makes the entire industry seem like a bunch of liars
| and grifters.
|
| Tripling the burnup when you're increasing the amount of
| U235 6x isn't an improvement, it's a step backwards. It
| uses 2x the uranium and almost 3x the enrichment.
|
| Just present the fuel honestly on its actual merits
| rather than telling five lies and half-truths and one
| real advantage.
| zizee wrote:
| Sorry, I'm not quite following you. Could you please
| ELIA5? (No snark intended)
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| They're implying it resulted in 3x the fuel economy (20%
| burnup) when in reality it is half by hiding the
| important figures (20% enrichment rather than 3.5%, and
| it adds a lot of other mass to the fuel that is difficult
| to remove when you need to store it). So that you'll
| assume that the bit they didn't mention is normal rather
| than very unusual.
|
| An analogue would be advertising a new car that gets
| 150mpg, but not mentioning the fuel it uses is a special
| exotic fuel not made in many existing refineries that
| requires 6x as much oil and you need 9 gallons of non-
| fuel to run through the engine for every gallon rather
| than 0.2.
|
| Every single statistic nuclear proponents cite that can
| be easily checked in a few minutes is either technically
| true but designed to mislead like this one, or an
| outright lie. It makes it very hard to believe the things
| that cannot be easily checked.
|
| In all likelihood one or more of the SMR concepts around
| is safe and economically viable enough to fill an
| important niche, but when all information they mention
| turns out to be lies it's kinda hard to trust.
| zizee wrote:
| Thank you. Yes, I think that there is still some ways to
| go with making these cost efficient vs other tech. I have
| heard people mention similar issues that you are rightly
| calling out. I believe the hope is the viability of these
| designs relies on cost reductions that would come from
| mass production/ economies of scale. I don't know how
| realistic that is, but it does tend to happen when things
| get produced in greater quantities, smart people find
| many optimisations to reduce cost.
| Faint wrote:
| You would still need big equipment to do that, you can't
| just break in and "take the fuel", it's deadly taken
| straight out of active reactor. Probably easier to just
| truck the whole container.
| imhoguy wrote:
| You may mix it with other public services which need some
| security already - remote airport, forest guard house,
| polar lab etc.
| mjlawson wrote:
| I'm no expert here, but I wonder about the economics around the
| 13MW of heat that it outputs. There are certainly applications
| around the world where that could be hugely beneficial. Take
| Reykjavik[1] for example. How much are they paying for their
| system now on a yearly basis? How would they like an extra 5MW
| of energy along with it?
|
| [1] https://vahterus.com/resources/cases/10-mw-heat-pump-
| system-...
| Someone wrote:
| That Reykjavik doesn't use energy to make heat; it uses it to
| pump it from A to B.
|
| In addition, I guess the heat it pumps is geothermal (FTA:
| The new setup is expected to provide over 40 GWh/year of free
| ocean heat.)
|
| A benefit of using this kind of reactor might be that the
| source of heat could be moved closer to where it's needed, If
| so, but I don't expect that to offset the advantage of the
| current heat source giving you heat for free.
| danans wrote:
| > I wonder about the economics around the 13MW of heat that
| it outputs.
|
| I'll take a stab, if only to start a discussion:
|
| 13MW is about 450MBTU/hr.
|
| Natural gas is about $7/MBTU. Assuming 80% efficiency of gas
| to heat conversion, you would need 562MBTU/hr, or a cost of
| about $80/hour.
|
| If the heat from this nuclear device is sold at the same
| price per unit heat, it will make $80*8760=$700800/year.
|
| If read correctly, the reactor can make either 5MW of
| electricity or 13MW of heat, but not both, so it wouldn't
| make a lot of sense to sell the 13MW of heat. At best sell
| some of the waste 8MW to make a few extra marginal bucks.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| I imagine the heat could be captured and you do both, but
| you'd need a system to do that, which is probably more
| expensive.
| nine_k wrote:
| Natural gas is only $7 / BTU if you are near an LNG
| terminal. "Remote areas" usually are not. Think about a
| military base, a relief effort camp after a major natural
| disaster, of a mining site in the middle of Canada or
| Siberia, stuff like that.
| zeristor wrote:
| I'd guess they have enough geothermal power for the time
| being.
| jonstewart wrote:
| TFA even mentions Alaska and Saskatchewan...
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| I assume the intent is to have a bunch of them replacing the
| boilers in a large coal plant. Capex and security wise it seems
| pretty good, and I'd expect capacity factors going on 100% for
| the heat generating part as it's incredibly simple and you just
| swap the whole thing once a decade.
|
| But it's nuclear so there's always a scam if you look at the
| other hand instead of where they're directing your attention.
|
| The card in the other hand today is it uses TRISO fuel. This
| produces >10x the high level waste which can't be reprocessed.
| It uses twice as much uranium, triple the enrichment (at levels
| not possible with most current enrichment facilities). And it
| is fabricated using a process that is estimated to cost
| anywhere from $40 to $600 per MWh.
|
| More than likely it also needs a much higher quantity of
| hafnium or iridium or silver for control rods as well, and odds
| are you can't make the heat pipes out of non-exotic materials.
| pfdietz wrote:
| It uses reflectors instead of control rods.
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| Made of?
| rgmerk wrote:
| There is no way in the world this is going to be economically
| competitive to connect to big electricity grids any time soon.
|
| Even taking into account the cost of extra transmission and
| storage (and to a certain extent, building extra storage, which
| is politically easier, reduces the amount of transmission you
| have to build), wind and solar are ridiculously cheap and
| trending cheaper long term, and you don't really run into the
| requirements for massive amounts of storage until the fraction of
| your power from VRE gets very, very high.
|
| Remote parts of Alaska, Canada etc face very very high power
| costs and solar isn't viable there (though wind might be
| depending on the site), so I can absolutely see the initial
| applications there.
| jonstewart wrote:
| The article does not mention grid applications. In fact, it
| explicitly Alaska and Canada, and off-grid applications, like
| mines. So, don't think it's trying to promote the idea of cheap
| wholesale electricity in normal places, but, instead, reliable
| on-premise electricity in places where it's not so very easy to
| get.
| rgmerk wrote:
| Yep, absolutely. But there are plenty of other people,
| notably here on HN, who get very excited about grid-connected
| SMRs.
|
| It's also worth noting that the majority of people living
| without access to grid electricity are in sub-Saharan Africa
| and South Asia, places with much better (and much less
| seasonal) solar resources, and far less capacity to safely
| manage nuclear power.
|
| https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-billion-people-
| witho...
| masklinn wrote:
| > and far less capacity to safely manage nuclear power.
|
| A common point of design (or at least hope) for SMR is for
| the design itself to be sealed and fail-safe, no operators
| and no management, when fuel runs your you replace the
| reactor and send to to the factory for refurb.
|
| Think smartphone, not lamps-based computer.
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| Could it be safe even with actively malicious people?
| moogly wrote:
| AIUI, microreactors are not SMRs.
|
| The modularity of SMRs comes from being able to build the
| different modules in factories, but the SMR would still
| be assembled on-site inside a building/facility.
|
| Source: https://omegataupodcast.net/359-modern-fission-
| reactors/
|
| Westinghouse's current SMR design is IRIS, which is a
| PWR. They cancelled their previous design.
| Marsymars wrote:
| There are remote parts of Canada where solar is _viable_ , and
| can save on lots of diesel fuel, but doesn't do much in the
| winter.
|
| e.g. https://www.yukon-news.com/local-news/diesel-generators-
| go-q...
| ttul wrote:
| Not to mention a need for heating!
| jsight wrote:
| It would only take ~2 of those to power a decent sized charging
| site for electric semi trucks.
| sebmellen wrote:
| I love seeing innovative tech like this spring out of the
| Pittsburgh region... Once the nation's capitol of industry
| innovation, maybe it can be again.
| riffic wrote:
| the rust belt has _good bones_ , as they say.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I had a couple trips to the Google building in the converted
| Nabisco factory there.
|
| They'd refinished the hardwood floors, but they left in the
| giant gouges that the heavy machinery had put there, as a
| reminder of the past.
| nyokodo wrote:
| > maybe it can be again.
|
| If we can get the Jones Act repealed or heavily amended, maybe
| some long overdue riverine infrastructure maintenance and
| upgrades and we could watch the whole region flourish.
| kilolima wrote:
| This discussion has nothing to do with the Jones Act. Bot
| spam!
| halpmeh wrote:
| How would repealing the Jones Act help? By allowing more
| ships on the Allegheny River? If anything, I think Pittsburgh
| would have benefitted from a little protection before cheap
| foreign steel hollowed out the industrial base.
| nyokodo wrote:
| > How would repealing the Jones Act help?
|
| By removing the restrictions that make riverine transport
| uncompetitive in many cases with trains and trucks. Without
| those restrictions sending goods by boat is far cheaper
| (and less carbon intensive) than the alternatives which
| would give industry in the entire Mississippi River system
| a boost in competitiveness. There's a reason a lot of value
| add industries are located beside ports. The Jones Act
| effectively removed the likes of Pittsburgh from the list
| of port cities.
| halpmeh wrote:
| The Jones Act was passed in 1920?
| ngvrnd wrote:
| Wow... Walt's Mill. My mom worked there, I have a photo of her
| standing above a fuel storage well... It used to be a test
| reactor with a channel of water through the core that they would
| send boats through to test samples of materials for radiation
| exposure effects.
| tohnjitor wrote:
| I'm sure these boats were quite small yet I'm imagining an
| underground river with rafts crewed by technicians in mopp
| suits.
| hinkley wrote:
| Ever wonder why Oompa Loompas are orange?
| dtgriscom wrote:
| Anti-radioactive-tan spray.
| devy wrote:
| In 1960, there was a meltdown.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaGdJdXnagQ
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westinghouse_TR-2
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| Reminder: Microreactors mean more radioactive waste, not less. No
| country has solved the safe long term storage radioactive waste.
| No, not even Finland, even though they are close. Expanding
| nuclear power, especially through microreactors means expanding
| access to extremely toxic radioactive material. And make sure the
| government is stable (for the next few hundred years) and there's
| no war in the area.
| Orothrim wrote:
| Reminder: solid radioactive waste is many times more safe than
| pumping waste into the air we all breathe. Fossil fuels kill
| many people per year by their waste and radioactive waste is an
| easy to solve problem comparatively speaking. Additionally some
| SMRs are designed to be thrown out wholesale because they are
| already the container for the nuclear waste. Finally,
| radioactive waste can be used as a power source.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Yes, "and everybody clapped". The reality is that widespread
| nuclear reactors are not safely manageable in today's
| society.
|
| First find a solution to prevent all wars and social unrest
| now and it the future, then we can talk.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| The Russians found that when they put their artillery
| pieces near a nuclear power plant, the Ukrainians don't
| shoot back. Funny that.
|
| And almost every time there is a cruise missile attack the
| nuclear power plants have to go offline as a precaution
| (not even because of them getting targeted though, which
| also may happen in the future).
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| The idea that radioactive waste is safe is at best
| misleading, if not outright false. You ignore that fossil
| fuel is not the only alternative to nuclear and vice versa.
| Then you hand-wave over the amounts of waste and climate
| gases.
|
| If nuclear waste disposal is so easy to solve: Why has nobody
| ever solved it? You talk about some hypothetical SMR designs?
| Yeah, in theory, future nuclear technology is safe.
| Unfortunately even current technology, nuclear power projects
| always run over time and over budget on top of an already
| unwieldy upfront budget. Using radioactive waste as a
| powersource sounds nice and smart, but turns out to be
| unfeasible so far and at least one or two decades in the
| future.
|
| Next, the danger from nuclear power, both during and after
| the runtime is impossible to calculate. Which is were those
| "impossible accidents" come from, which happen a bit too
| often. Yeah, in the theory from the nuclear power lobby,
| nuclear power is totally safe. But reality has to deal with
| things unforeseen, and on top of that, with bad intentions.
| Just that nobody tried (or succeeded) yet in building dirty
| bombs or destroying another country's nuclear plants doesn't
| mean that won't ever happen. Very small risks with
| catastrophic consequences are impossible to calculate and
| should be approached about as carefully as radioactive
| material itself.
| throw827474737 wrote:
| Please don't spoil the party. We have been lazy for so long and
| absolutely don't want to cut back on luxury or use the cleaner
| solutions that producing nuclear waste with expensive subsidies
| and all the other downsides is now cool again and full green!
| Big innovaton here, that counts!
| jensenbox wrote:
| I get that it makes and moves heat... What process is it using to
| create the electricity?
| itsyaboi wrote:
| Heat water, make steam, spin turbine.
| avernon wrote:
| In this case it is boil sodium, condense sodium to heat air,
| run air through turbine.
| thelittleone wrote:
| "I want to start a business that builds garden lights, fridges
| and nuclear microreactors".
| UltraViolence wrote:
| This device is mostly aimed at the military and maybe the
| industrial market (think about a chemical plant or large
| factory).
|
| When our military invade yet another country they now don't need
| to haul diesel fuel to keep the lights on.
| Terretta wrote:
| Curiously, Russia has the largest number of small nuclear
| reactors in the world, albeit legacy tech.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_small_nuclear_...
|
| https://defense-arab.com/vb/attachments/10536/
|
| This boat is online and puts out ~70 MW of electricity gross:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| Only one of those is operating. Most are "conceptual design."
| Iwan-Zotow wrote:
| table is outdated
|
| Three kinds are operating - 3 EGP, 2 KLT-40 and I think 6
| RITM-200
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| Wow that's a lot of power and a lot of heat. The most
| unexpected thing is it can produce 240,000 cubic meters of
| freshwater a day as well!
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| What a bizarre title. Either it is, and then "sees" makes no
| sense, it's a proven disruptor, or it's not, and it's just
| armchair self-congratulatory PR speak.
| ddulaney wrote:
| Or it's indeterminate, which it is. They think it might be a
| disruptor, but they're not sure yet. They see that potential,
| but they don't have it yet.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Gets more clicks than "They designed this thing and made all
| these claims but hit us back in 5 years when they actually run
| one fueled-up with enriched uranium."
| joexner wrote:
| It makes sense if you substitute "recognizes" for "sees".
| Westinghouse (well, Cameco/Brookfield Renewable) recognizes
| what a disruptive tech this could be, whereas others have
| overlooked it, maybe?
| photochemsyn wrote:
| It's a liquid-sodium-cooled, graphite-core system with no need
| for pumps, aka 'passively cooled' via heat [edit] pipes. Output
| is:
|
| > "The microreactor can generate 5 MW of electricity or 13 MW of
| heat from a 15 MW thermal core. Exhaust heat from the power
| conversion system can be used for district heating applications
| or low-temperature steam."
|
| Control systems are kind of interesting:
|
| > "The only moving or mechanical parts in the reactor system are
| reactivity control drums, which manage the power level and allow
| absorber material to passively turn inward toward the core if
| power demand is reduced or lost, and turn a reflector material
| toward the core if demand increases automatically. Hence the term
| "nuclear battery.""
|
| I'm generally not a nuclear advocate but if they've really
| managed to eliminate the need for active cooling, and have a
| robust system that can safely shut down with concerns about
| meltdown even without external power, that's a pretty big
| advance. Looks remarkably promising... keep your fingers crossed.
| (New nuclear tech hasn't had the greatest track record over the
| past several decades, i.e. pebble beds didn't work out etc.)
| rob74 wrote:
| > _Westinghouse looks to off-grid applications like remote
| communities and mine sites as the entry market for eVinci._
|
| Yeah, install a nuclear reactor at a remote mining site,
| probably without sufficiently trained personnel to take care of
| it. What could go wrong?
| pharke wrote:
| Mines aren't run with pickaxes and donkeys anymore. Take some
| time to educate yourself.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I would be more concerned about security than trained
| personnel to run it. Obviously, there will be trained people
| on site. You don't put a small reactor onsite and tell Cletus
| and Bubba to press this button to start it and that button to
| stop it.
| function_seven wrote:
| Why would you assume untrained personnel? These would still
| be regulated by the DoE.
| goodpoint wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_acciden
| t...
| jimnotgym wrote:
| What about security? In the UK nuclear installations are
| under 24/7 armed guard from a special police force. That
| would be expensive to maintain in a remote region, although
| I guess they already have security at diamond mines, or
| instance
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Vastness of rural US is a security factor on its own.
| Plenty of military installations in the desert aren't
| even fenced.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| They're perhaps not fenced but presumably they're full of
| armed military personnel?
| bell-cot wrote:
| You've never really been out in the American West, have
| you?
|
| Just one example - the Nevada Test and Training Range
| alone is a bit over 4,500 square miles.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_Test_and_Training_
| Ran...
|
| Vs. Wikipedia says the entire U.S. Army (active duty) has
| ~485,000 personnel.
|
| Divide...and that's ~0.17 Army people per acre, even if
| the US Army had _NO_ job except holding down the NTTR.
| (Which is actually US Air Force, BTW.)
|
| [Edit: But +1 - because in the bigger picture you make a
| valid point. However vast the open spaces, at the spots
| where the cool & expensive stuff sits, there does have to
| be some sort of "real" security. If only so dodgy locals
| don't swing by with a pair of bolt cutters, and start
| helping themselves.]
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| Thanks for the perspective, you are indeed right that
| I've never been "out there".
| inglor_cz wrote:
| There was a German family once that might have paid with
| their lives for that presumption.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Valley_Germans
| bell-cot wrote:
| Reasonable Assumption: The "remote communities", "mining
| sites", etc. which both qualify for a nuclear power
| plant, and can afford it, will be fairly select & high-
| budget places.
| tecleandor wrote:
| I guess that comparing it to the cost of setting up a
| super long power line and maintaining it (sabotages,
| fires, whatever), maybe it's interesting.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Not trying to be a pedant, but I think you might have a typo in
| the core of your point:
|
| > ..., and have a robust system that can safely shut down
| _with_ concern about meltdown
|
| Do you mean 'without'?
| FrostKiwi wrote:
| I think it's 'with', as in 'regarding'. "With the rising
| concerns around orange peel ethics, we put focus on creating
| a humane peeling device for fruits."
| largbae wrote:
| I am intrigued by this concept and would like to learn
| more!
| photochemsyn wrote:
| oops left out a 'no' between with and concern.
| Accujack wrote:
| It uses TRISO fuel, which are fissionable materials enclosed in
| a carbon and ceramic shell that's extremely tough and can
| handle far higher temperatures than are present in a reactor
| without melting.
|
| The shell prevents the release of radioactive materials, so
| TRISO fuel encapsulation would turn a melt down into a reactor
| damaging event rather than an emergency/crisis. A runaway
| reactor would get hot, melt its structure, and maybe drop parts
| inside its containment, but the fuel wouldn't melt and wouldn't
| travel far. Most likely the reaction would stop as soon as the
| structure of the core fell apart.
| consumer451 wrote:
| > It uses TRISO fuel, which are fissionable materials
| enclosed in a carbon and ceramic shell that's extremely tough
| and can handle far higher temperatures than are present in a
| reactor without melting.
|
| I was going to make a top level comment along the lines of:
|
| "How thick/expensive a bunker would one need to build around
| one of these to prevent it from spreading radioactive
| materials about when hit by say, an airplane?
|
| As I understand it, large legacy reactors are hardened for
| this. Would the same level of safety still allow these
| smaller reactors to be economically viable?"
|
| But now that I have read your comment, would a kinetic event
| happening to a TRISO fueled reactor be more of a non-event?
| Follow up, would non-fuel components of the reactor become
| radioactive over time as well?
|
| Sorry if dumb questions, not very educated in this space.
| pharke wrote:
| I could be wrong, I'm not an expert on the matter by any
| means, but I think the reason traditional nuclear reactors
| are so heavily fortified against attack is specifically
| because of the threat of a catastrophic meltdown if their
| cooling and control systems are destroyed. If these nuclear
| batteries can't melt down and rely on passive safety
| measures then the need for fortification is drastically
| reduced. Placing them in a fairly standard concrete
| building either underground or bermed with earth on all
| sides would likely be sufficient. You'd probably still want
| security around to make sure no one tried to manually
| tamper with the equipment.
| bell-cot wrote:
| For small reactors, with minimal requirements for support
| equipment and ~no need for active cooling during emergency
| shutdown, the design trend I've seen is "put it
| underground". Which makes sense - bomb shelters, military
| bunkers, etc. have been put underground for centuries
| because that's a relatively quick & cheap way to make
| something that's very hard to destroy.
| HPsquared wrote:
| The small size is a serious advantage for this kind of
| thing.
| nine_k wrote:
| I wonder if that fuel is usable in a breeder after it's
| "spent". Usually "spent fuel" has spent a few percent of the
| usable fissionable material, but the products of decay (and
| partly synthesis) prevent it from working efficiently.
| UltraViolence wrote:
| Until an explosion damages the heat-pipes and you get a runaway
| meltdown and explosion of the core after hydrogen gas builds
| up.
|
| Very realistic scenario if the thing is used in a war zone.
| this_steve_j wrote:
| It's good to see the designers absorbed a dose of inspiration
| from the pioneering excursions in US sodium reactors.
|
| Mechanical coolant pumps were the Achilles heel of the infamous
| Sodium Reactor Experiment (SRE) from 1957-64 at Santa Susana
| field laboratory. It had 50,000 lbs of liquid sodium in two
| coolant loops.
|
| When 4 pints of tetralin leaked from a pump seal into molten
| sodium surrounding the SRE reactor core (500-950F), it fouled
| the fuel cladding with "brown stuff" and various fission
| products from the melted rods were found on both sides of the
| fence. [1]
|
| A "small amount of sodium" in sealed heat pipes sounds pretty
| safe. But since Westinghouse filed all the eVinci's NRC pre-
| application materials as "proprietary", the actual design
| details aren't available to the public for review.
|
| "Disruption" I assume refers to hundreds of rule exemptions
| (licensing innovations) they filed as a non-LWR. Not judging,
| just stating the record. [2]
|
| 1.
| https://www.etec.energy.gov/Library/Main/Doc._No._1_SRE_Fuel...
|
| 2. https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-
| reactors/advanced/licensing...
| perihelions wrote:
| I don't know why people are enthused about "passive heat removal"
| for a reactor that's operating and generating electricity (as
| opposed to post-shutdown decay heat removal). That requirement
| rules out every possible type of fission reactor there is, other
| than extremely small ones with very low power densities (like
| OP).
|
| Forced convection is how you fit gigawatts of power in the volume
| of a small room; it's what makes nuclear fission practical at
| scale.
| titzer wrote:
| Gigawatt reactors do not fit in a small room. Even the reactor
| itself is the size of a _large_ room. Then there is a huge
| amount of infrastructure around them, then enormous cooling
| towers. Forget about power density when you have sites measured
| in tens or hundreds of acres with 300 foot towers--ultimately
| heat has to be dissipated to the environment, and that takes
| space.
| perihelions wrote:
| The entire heat source, the active part of the core, very
| easily fits in a small room (at a mean power density
| somewhere around 100 MW/m^3 for water-cooled reactors).
|
| I'm talking about the difficultly of heat removal, not trying
| to minimize size or complexity or anything.
| titzer wrote:
| Sure, but you gotta consider the entire system, so adding
| the heat pumping system actually may decrease the overall
| power generated per unit of volume; at least, certainly
| increase cost and decrease reliability. I wonder if
| thousands of SMRs spread over an area wouldn't actually
| generate more power per acre.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Really cool to see this close to completion
| ramshanker wrote:
| I guess Elon Musk will be interested in taking one of these
| things to Mars. He is almost getting the transport capability
| part done.
| system2 wrote:
| Probably after he is done jerking around with twitter.
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| Using TRISO fuel, which is (best case) half as fuel efficient as
| a PWR and costs $40-500/MWh just for the fuel
|
| https://web.mit.edu/nse/pdf/researchstaff/forsberg/FHR%20Poi...
| Gravityloss wrote:
| I feel that this reactor is _too small_ for actual usage. It 's
| about wind turbine sized. But better to err on this side, if you
| want the iteration speed up and start mass production. Future
| versions can always be scaled up.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| DARPA and NASA have some combined projects developing small
| reactors suitable for both mars and deep space exploration as
| well as replacing oil tanks for generators in remote military
| installations like in the arctic. This is almost certainly
| chasing that, not consumer generation.
| ripe wrote:
| From Robots In Plain English [1]:
|
| The Curiosity and Perseverance rovers each carry an old kind
| of power supply: a nuclear power generator that runs on
| radioactive plutonium dioxide.
|
| This generator has been used on many missions since the
| 1960s.
|
| It produces a steady 110 watts of electricity. The decay of
| the radioactive material also emits heat, which helps keep
| the electronics onboard warm through the freezing nights on
| Mars.
|
| Supplemented by rechargeable batteries, the generator
| provides enough power to let the rover pull all-nighters for
| years to come.
|
| [1] https://www.robotsinplainenglish.com/e/2020-08-09-nuclear
| .ht...
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| I know what a RTG is.
|
| I'm talking about this, a different topic entirely, as RTGs
| cannot practically meet these requirements:
| https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/26152/the-u-s-
| military...
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| "Project Dilithium", heh ! (A Star Trek reference.)
|
| Wide-ranging article, thanks !
| midoridensha wrote:
| RTGs are horrifically inefficient sources of power. They
| work well enough for providing a paltry 110W to a rover on
| another planet, but that's not going to scale up to
| providing power for millions of people. The amount of
| plutonium you'd need would be astronomical.
| Galaxeblaffer wrote:
| wind turbines only work when the wind blows.. not comparable
| pencilguin wrote:
| _trampeltier wrote:
| We all know thats for military camps.
| cjtrowbridge wrote:
| The keyword in Small Modular Reactor is Modular. 5mw is not
| "too small for actual usage." You can connect many of them
| together in one plant to produce however much power you want.
| Just like wind turbines, a typical design includes more than
| one.
| masklinn wrote:
| Seriously, 5MWe is what, a few thousand homes? Low thousand
| if you need to plug in local commons and you've got lots of
| EVs around maybe.
|
| Alongside a few MWt to shed into district heating, that seems
| pretty nice in a distributed grid context.
|
| > Just like wind turbines, a typical design includes more
| than one.
|
| Wind farms are a thing because location is an issue, and
| there's a lot of nimby-ism, so if you can plop down turbines
| you plop down a bunch.
|
| Though I guess nimby would also affect SMRs, location is way
| less of an issue, if you have space for a farm you might as
| well use a classical nuclear plant.
|
| Plus the capacity factor of nukes is way higher than
| turbines. Assuming SMRs follow the nuclear norm you don't
| need to overbuild to compensate.
| stubish wrote:
| One of the use cases for SMRs is to install them in
| decommissioned coal and gas power plants. They have a roof,
| and are already connected to the grid and roads, and near
| enough people to supply workers but not so close to supply
| protesters. The locals are much more supportive, because
| some of the jobs remain but the pollution they have first
| hand experience with will go.
|
| One of the major reasons for wind farms rather than
| isolated turbines is the economic and environmental cost of
| grid connections and roads needed for installation and
| maintenance.
| masklinn wrote:
| There are no jobs, one goal of SMR is to be completely
| enclosed and self-safe. When the fuel runs out, you swap
| the SMR.
| pencilguin wrote:
| Wind farms are a thing because a wind turbine can only be
| so big: for more power, you put up more of them. They are
| so cheap because all the costs are transparent, there is
| noplace to bury wholly-legal graft. A big farm amortizes
| fixed project management cost.
|
| Capacity factor of nukes is not so much more than of wind
| turbines, though if you have a bunch of nukes, it would be
| rare to have many of the nukes down at once other than for
| urgent retrofits. Steam turbines are down a lot, so nukes
| are always built with two or more.
|
| But the main thing is that nukes cost far, far more than
| the wind farm that produces as much; or, a wind farm at the
| same price produces many times the power, with near zero
| lead time and possibly negative decommissioning cost. After
| their contribution to the grid gets large enough, you build
| out storage, which incrementally reduces the fraction of
| time you spend burning NG or, later, ammonia.
|
| A farm of small nukes would cost quite a bit more to build
| than a big nuke of the same capacity, because all the
| systems are duplicated throughout. On the up side, the farm
| might be built incrementally with much less of the graft
| always attached to monster public works; you might save 75%
| vs a big nuke just on that basis. If you could get the
| first one going early, its revenue might help pay for
| subsequent units.
|
| But whatever the heat source, anything with a steam turbine
| is just not competitive anymore. That is another reason why
| fusion is a dead end: it is just very hard to compete with
| zero opex.
| derefr wrote:
| Compare/contrast this question: electric car batteries are
| just big volumetric arrays of 18650 cells. If you know you
| need that much wattage -- and you're manufacturing them
| yourself anyway -- then why not make bigger cells, to
| reduce per-cell fixed-cost overheads and inefficiencies?
|
| I assume there _is_ a good answer to "why not" here; and
| it's one that's probably related to the "why" for SMR.
| XorNot wrote:
| Cooling is one reason. Bigger batteries increase the
| surface area to volume ratio: heat produced in the active
| part of the battery has to be lost through the casing and
| into whatever cooling system you're system. Bigger have
| less surface area.
|
| You also have packing issues: cylindrical cells are
| basically optimal, because they distribute any internal
| pressure equally. If you play with something like the
| prismatic Prius batteries, then despite being larger you
| have far less options to pack them because you need to
| counter-pressure them horizontally or they swell and then
| fail.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Actually the capacity factor of offshore wind is around 60%
| that is similar to nuclear (~70%), not way higher. However
| the price of nuclear (in Germany) is 3x that of renewables,
| so it just does not make economic sense to build nuclear.
| c2h5oh wrote:
| > Seriously, 5MWe is what, a few thousand homes?
|
| Charging 20 teslas at maximum charge rate. Or 1k houses,
| provided it's general use and not electric heating. 5MW is
| 43.8GWh/year or an average annual power consumption of
| 8-12k people in the west (per capita consumption - so
| includes industry use). Accounting for peak vs average this
| is likely enough for 3-5k people.
| CHY872 wrote:
| Charging 20 Teslas at maximum rate sure, but that could
| also be viewed as fully charging 1600 Teslas per day, or
| steady state providing the energy for about 12k Teslas
| (assuming 10-15k miles per year per car). Likewise, based
| on my own electricity bills, 1k houses is closer to
| 3000-5000.
|
| Obviously, peak load vs average load is very important so
| I wouldn't expect the energy to go that far, but
| connected to a big battery... probably, right?
| mcbits wrote:
| Speaking of farms, 5 MW is enough to power LED grow lights
| equivalent to 5-10 acres of sunlight (napkin/google math)
| that could be packed in small-footprint building with
| hundreds of layers of hydroponics.
|
| It still wouldn't be economical in the short term due to
| construction, water, nutrients, etc. But it's something
| solar can't possibly provide because there's only so much
| sunlight per acre. Long term, we could stop trying to farm
| every square inch of arable land on the planet, of which
| we're already farming about half.
| [deleted]
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| The idea of reducing the farm footprint is pretty
| exciting to me.
| titzer wrote:
| > we could stop trying to farm every square inch of
| arable land on the planet,
|
| It'll still be cheaper, thus it will still be done.
|
| Mark my words, we're giving nothing back to nature.
| midoridensha wrote:
| >It'll still be cheaper,
|
| No, it won't. One problem with arable land (i.e., land
| that's really good for growing crops) is that it's also
| usually land where people really want to live. Non-arable
| land is places like deserts and tundra, and almost no one
| wants to live there, for obvious reasons. So farmers are
| in competition with developers (and eventually property
| buyers) for using the best land.
| titzer wrote:
| I see you have not been to Iowa.
| midoridensha wrote:
| The other factor here is that there just isn't that much
| arable land in many places, so places that need to import
| food could instead grow their own using the facilities
| you mention here. For instance, here in Japan there
| really isn't much land for growing crops, for obvious
| reasons (plus there's a lot of typhoons which can be
| problematic for outdoor farming). But some big nuclear-
| powered hydroponic farms could very well be economically
| viable if the government provides some incentives because
| it wants to be more self-sufficient with food.
| azinman2 wrote:
| The use case for these nuclear batteries isn't to power
| NYC. It's to be able to replace industrial needs for energy
| and heat at the source. A glass or cement factory could
| have its own power source that's carbon free. It also means
| that hydrogen production can be considered green. It's also
| great for rural communities that might otherwise have
| expensive/dirty electricity.
|
| The goal is for them to be autonomous for this reason:
| install it at some industrial site without any nuclear
| expertise. Have it shipped in fueled, and then shipped out
| to maintain or refuel.
|
| These are absolutely the future.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Wind turbines strive to be as big as they can, and they have
| grown a lot. Yet they are limited by physics and transport
| issues. Now you need to install thousands of turbines.
|
| Engineering With Rosie has a truly excellent video that
| analyzes many of the scaling laws:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze-zaW3au9Q
|
| GE gas turbines for example are 35 to 570 MW.
| https://www.ge.com/gas-power. They have stopped making
| smaller ones. There probably are even 100 kW gas turbines
| made by some companies but that's not used for major power
| generation (maybe as an airplane APU).
|
| You probably won't have these small reactors in towns of 5000
| people run by some local operators, because nuclear
| technology requires so much special training and is so risky
| because of the potential radiation hazard.
|
| You might have 20 in one powerplant in a city, to provide 100
| MW, as part of the energy mix (it's always good to have
| multiple sources).
|
| There is a certain threshold for nuclear technology. It's not
| the same as a diesel generator that anyone can put in their
| back yard. The risks are too high.
|
| Yet, the current reactors like the Olkiluoto 3 EPR in Finland
| at 1600 MW electrical power are too big and unwieldy and
| risky. When it turns on or off, it causes some problems to
| the rest of the grid. One reason for such a huge plant was
| there was a legal process to provide permission for one
| reactor. So if you can only build one, of course you try to
| make it as big as possible. This doesn't make sense from
| engineering sense - it probably would make more sense to
| build something like power plants of 4x400 MW reactors (the
| seventies plants are 2x400 MW reactors).
|
| So all in all, probably more optimal size for "small"
| reactors would be 20 to 200 MW. They're big enough that the
| radiation protection doesn't eat all the budget, yet they're
| small enough that you get to build many and can build a
| production line.
| perihelions wrote:
| - _" the power conversion unit (an open-air Brayton Cycle
| system)"_
|
| Isn't that essentially a jet engine?
| locallost wrote:
| The decisive thing is always going to be cost. Thus far, reducing
| capacity has made nuclear plants faster to build, but the outcome
| was more expensive per MWh [1]. This then forced future plants to
| again increase in scale, but it again made them too slow and
| expensive to build, with huge budget overruns. We're now back to
| small modular, but if the electricity they produce is again even
| more expensive, it will offset any other benefit.
|
| [1]
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275673955_The_forgo...
| system2 wrote:
| I am not very knowledgeable about nuclear reactors but wouldn't
| it be concerning to have tiny nuclear reactors everywhere in the
| city? Doesn't this increase the potential dangers?
| wmf wrote:
| These are not for cities and the "danger" of nuclear power is
| overstated.
| rswail wrote:
| The "danger" of nuclear power is not their day-to-day
| operations, it is the nature of the waste product (both in
| terms of its decay to safe levels and the ongoing storage
| requirements) and the use of said waste materials in the
| relatively simple production of "dirty bombs" that just
| require standard explosives to distribute said radioactive
| waste around a large area.
|
| So the danger is not overstated, it's that the promoters of
| nuclear energy refuse to accept the complete lifecycle of
| nuclear power, including both the fuel generation (uranium
| mining is environmentally damaging, leaving tailings and
| polluted water), fuel management (moving radioactive fuel
| around the community/environment), and fuel disposal
| (unsolved).
| threads2 wrote:
| how micro is micro? how big is this thing?
| Empact wrote:
| 4 shipping containers
|
| > They envision the plant being delivered in four truckloads:
| the reactor container, the power conversion unit (an open-air
| Brayton Cycle system), an instrumentation and controls
| container and miscellaneous support and equipment (like a heat
| exchanger to capture waste heat for district heating).
| jakuboboza wrote:
| Passive cooling sounds super turbo safe which is what we always
| seek in reactors. Yeah that would disrupt the market.
| naeq wrote:
| At 2:34 camera captured reactor failure
| multiplegeorges wrote:
| Northern communities in Canada are a perfect application of this
| tech. Currently, they mostly burn diesel for power.
| fatneckbeardz wrote:
| all the communities that survive by selling diesel will see it
| as negative.
| bboygravity wrote:
| All communities in the world except maybe France (already
| nuclear) and some hydro-electric countries are a perfect
| application of this tech. Currently, most of the world burns
| diesel/coal/gas for most of their energy needs and politicians
| are actively preventing that from changing.
|
| PS: oh hello Germany, looking at you specifically.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Can we stop this rubbish? German by percentage uses as much
| natural gas as France (they use more in absolute numbers), so
| calling out Germany is just rubbish nuclear propaganda. The
| reliability of nuclear is a myth, France had to shut down
| >60% of their nuclear power plants this summer. If nuclear
| cost 3x as much as renewables why would I not buy 3 times the
| capacity in renewables. And consider g that this is
| completely unproven tech I seriously doubt it will be even
| within the same order of magnitude of current nuclear prices.
| bboygravity wrote:
| >> German by percentage uses as much natural gas as France
|
| False. France uses around 28% non-nuclear (2018 numbers).
|
| Germany uses on average ~65% non-"green" (last I checked)
| of which the vast majority is gas (especially recently now
| that they shut down their nuclear). There's no way that
| France is using equal or more. Not in relative numbers nor
| in absolute numbers. Source please?
|
| Just to be clear: we're not talking installed potential
| energy conversion capacity. We're talking actually produced
| electricity.
|
| >> The reliability of nuclear is a myth, France had to shut
| down >60% of their nuclear power plants this summer.
|
| So because France fails to do proper maintenance for
| decades, that suddenly means that nuclear in general is
| unreliable?
|
| France has had serious nuclear conversion running non-stop
| for over 40 years and because a lot of that is down for a
| few months (due to dumb delayed maintenance), that means
| nuclear is suddenly "unreliable"?
|
| >> If nuclear cost 3x as much as renewables why would I not
| buy 3 times the capacity in renewables.
|
| Because even with 10.000x the required capacity in
| renewables you would still need something for base-load.
| And that something needs to be able to convert ~100% of
| your energy need for the entire country when your
| renewables are doing ~0% (exaggerating to make a point).
| Which is the root-cause of the EU energy crisis (German
| base load = mostly gas).
|
| Another reason is that "renewables" are not actually
| renewable at all and have a limited operational life,
| economic life and huge recycling problems (most solar
| panels installed now cannot be recycled. At all. Just to
| give an example).
|
| >> I seriously doubt it will be even within the same order
| of magnitude of current nuclear prices.
|
| Speculation.
| njs12345 wrote:
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-
| electric...
|
| With an ageing nuclear fleet built mostly in the 70s and
| 80s France has the cleanest electricity of any country in
| Europe (except those with abundant hydro).
| kuschku wrote:
| Sure, if you want to scrap all renewable energy and run your
| entire grid solely on nuclear, that can work.
|
| But what you can't do is mix them, as you can't regulate the
| output from nuclear reactors fast enough to work together
| with renewable energy plants.
| Orothrim wrote:
| I recommend looking into base vs peak loading for the
| energy grid. Nuclear is good as base load power, batteries
| are good for peak loading and renewables are good for
| charging batteries.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| It's fairly easy to mix nuclear and renewables technically,
| it just doesn't make much financial sense in most places,
| particularly if you have to build new nuclear or if you're
| not too near the poles.
| [deleted]
| jbm wrote:
| This sort of technology is something the provincial governments
| are interested in.
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/nuclear-energy-albert...
| Nomentatus wrote:
| There will be surplus power, but that's not a bad thing - make
| bricks for housing with it; breakage (power not yet strictly
| needed) can go to indoor greenhouses, etc.
| nine_k wrote:
| Desalinating seawater can consume huge amounts of surplus
| power, not necessarily stable.
|
| (Extracting lithium, uranium, thorium, gold from the brine
| could be a bonus step.)
| Nomentatus wrote:
| There aren't a lot of places in the north where you'd need
| desalination; streams suffice for thin populations.
| Elsewhere in the world, I can see that.
| nine_k wrote:
| Indeed so! Closer to tropics, such places abound though.
| "Excess" solar generation can go there.
|
| Unlike in the north, where there's no excess.
| Nomentatus wrote:
| Honestly, I've been looking at just that in combination
| with agricultural/reforestation techs for a couple years
| now. Australia is way bigger than the maps make it look,
| Africa too. Find an area near a volcano you can rob and
| grind for soil and you'll do very well once energy is
| cheap enough. Due to climate change - esp in future -
| many locations will require heat control via shade (not
| too dense solar farms) and evaporation (of sea water on
| cardboard in one trial.) No doubt the current food
| shortage is temporary, the solutions emerge inevitably
| from cheaper energy (and AI farm equipment.)
| yabones wrote:
| Might also be good for concrete production, perhaps. Most
| cement plants burn loads of coal to heat up the limestone,
| producing loads of CO2 in the process. Not sure if this reactor
| could heat up the kiln to >1,000C. Seems like there's some
| interest in the UK, so perhaps this could be a good solution
| for on-site production in remote areas...
|
| https://www.theconstructionindex.co.uk/news/view/hinkley-poi...
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Science writer David Roberts had a long conversation with
| Rebecca Dell from ClimateWorks about decarbonizing heavy
| industry back in February. Lots more detail here if that's of
| interest to you: https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-
| rebecca-dell-on-decarb...
|
| (n.b. copy and paste of my comment from 24 days ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33396422)
| reverendbedford wrote:
| Sodium reactor outlet temperatures are around 550 C. There
| are other reactor concepts that come close to 1000 C, but
| it's a huge technical challenge.
| drjasonharrison wrote:
| Electric heating?
| reverendbedford wrote:
| That works for some processes (making aluminum and more
| recently steel) but I'm not aware of any electrically
| heated processes for making concrete. Cheap, clean
| electricity could unlock a lot of things though.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Probably, like for steel production, it would involve
| producing hydrogen then using that as a heat source.
| nine_k wrote:
| Heating by electricity is not a problem. But both
| production and setting of concrete chemically produce
| CO2.
| bbojan wrote:
| Hydraulic cement does not produce CO2 during setting.
| Non-hydraulic cement actually _consumes_ CO2 while
| setting.
| wiml wrote:
| Doesn't it essentially just re-absorb the same co2 it
| emitted when it was made?
| tetrep wrote:
| I read an article about this recently and there's at
| least one company working on exactly such a process:
|
| > Swedish green-tech firm SaltX Technology demonstrated
| that it can produce clinker with its Electric Arc
| Calciner: a proprietary system similar to the plasma
| torches widely used by automakers and other manufacturers
| for cutting metal. Plasma torches pass an electric
| current through a jet of inert gas, typically nitrogen or
| argon, which ionizes the gas and heats it to temperatures
| over 20,000 degrees Celsius. In June, SaltX announced a
| partnership with the Swedish limestone supplier SMA
| Mineral to accelerate commercialization of its
| technology.
|
| Article: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/11/the-
| road-to-low-carb...
| vagrantJin wrote:
| A bit off topic but Factorio buffs will find this microreactor
| eerily familiar.
| rx_tx wrote:
| > The microreactor can generate 5 MW of electricity or 13 MW of
| heat from a 15 MW thermal core. Exhaust heat from the power
| conversion system can be used for district heating applications
| or low-temperature steam.
|
| They are aiming 8 years planned service life, and one novel thing
| is the use of heatpipes (like your CPU cooler) using liquid metal
| as a working fluid.
|
| They actually don't say how big it is, I guess still quite
| sizeable given the heat output. Definitely not a single-family
| home device.
| cjtrowbridge wrote:
| It's a shipping container, same type of footprint and install
| as the tesla battery packs. They have pictures and videos if
| you google it.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| 4 trucks for the whole setup
| jansan wrote:
| Just imagine the ragne of those trucks running on that
| "battery".
| [deleted]
| masklinn wrote:
| > I guess still quite sizeable given the heat output.
| Definitely not a single-family home device.
|
| I'd think the 5MWe would be a hint. Standard residential
| service drop is like 40kW.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| "Big" there might be referring to physical size.
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| If you can get the heat out, no reason it couldn't be tiny. A
| hayabusa motorcycle engine can be tortured into producing 1MW
| mechanical from about 5MW thermal.
|
| The heat engine required to meet efficiency would likely be the
| limit (although I think TEGs might be getting cheaper).
|
| The main issue is unless you have a big pile of them, you need
| 1% of your population to be nuclear engineers and security.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| I'm wondering, they say using sodium, and having tested heat
| pipes up to 800degC... but their schema shows sodium vapor...
| but sodium only boils at 900degC ??
|
| So I guess they underpressurize these pipes ?
|
| That would make sense, since in a traditional liquid metal
| reactor, the boiling of the working fluid is instead a failure
| mode to be avoided at all costs (since boiling dramatically
| increases the pressure resulting in burst pipes), _especially_
| with sodium that burns on contact with the air, explodes on
| contact with water, oh and also is highly radioactive at that
| point (for a short time).
|
| They seem very sure of themselves, but I still wonder what kind
| of stresses are involved, and what does this mean for heat pipe
| longevity ? (and calling heat pipes with a phase changing
| working fluid "passive" still seems kind of wrong ?)
|
| EDIT : The relatively small amount of sodium probably matters a
| lot here ?
| jonstewart wrote:
| Heat pipes are used in CPU coolers and work on the same
| principle. A small amount of liquid is in the pipe, at
| reduced pressure, which makes heat transfer very efficient.
|
| I suck at chemistry, but wiki clearly discusses advantages of
| sodium for heat transfer in nuclear reactors:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-cooled_fast_reactor
| (tl;dr: safety margin from the large range of temps at which
| sodium is liquid; doesn't like to absorb neutrons, and
| isotopes aren't that problematic when it does).
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Yes, but they use water. (Also reduced pressure means
| reduced density, which should in theory make heat transfer
| _less_ efficient... except when phase changes are involved
| !)
|
| That reactor is a radically different design, operating at
| a much lower temperature, where sodium doesn't evaporate.
| jonstewart wrote:
| But the whole point of a heat pipe is that phase changes
| -are- involved! So, water's fine for temperatures in a
| "normal" range, like a CPU, but perhaps not great for
| higher temperature ranges.
|
| And then, this is a nuclear reactor. Whatever's in the
| heat pipe in a reactor will be bombarded with neutrons.
| Water is a neutron moderator, so you wind up with heavy
| water in the heat pipes and not-very-nice fission
| products in the reactor due to slower neutrons.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| I never said they _should_ use water, I 'm just wondering
| what kinds of stresses (including chemical ones ?) are
| involved here...
| thinkmcfly wrote:
| Static vs passive cooling, I think is what you're looking for
| here.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| My understanding is on-shore windmills cost about ~$1.5M and
| $50k in maintenance per year - last for 20 years - for 1MW.
|
| I'm skeptical this can come anywhere close to that.
|
| But if it's within an order of magnitude - it could replace old
| coal powerplants as they're decommissioned.
| thinkmcfly wrote:
| Uh, you can't run life saving medical equipment or
| refrigerator service on wind turbines. That means that all
| the bodies of people that die without ventilators etc, during
| no wind days would have no chilled morgue to sit in, and
| would rot
| bobkazamakis wrote:
| >Uh, you can't run life saving medical equipment or
| refrigerator service on wind turbines
|
| Man! If only there was some device that stored energy for
| later use!
| loeg wrote:
| You gotta include it in the cost figures, though.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Wind has the distinct advantage compared to this tech in
| that it actually exists. I can buy a turbine tomorrow and
| have it online in a month or two.
| joebob42 wrote:
| Sure, but that's a different and unrelated argument to
| the question of theoretical cost which is what was being
| discussed.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Sure. This costs infinity because it doesn't exist and
| 100% wind based power generation would cost less than
| that, but more than a wind turbine by itself to include
| storage.
| ok_dad wrote:
| There's such a thing as energy storage and long distance DC
| transmission. Why does the old "intermittent power"
| argument crop up every time when there's clear engineering
| solutions to those problems? Next thing you know you'll be
| blaming regulations on lack of new nuclear and talking
| about how we're running out of lithium, both of which are
| false arguments as well.
| parkingrift wrote:
| It crops up because people give these absurdly misleading
| cost estimates for adding incremental wind power to the
| grid. You can't have wind power without spending money on
| an equivalent amount of reliable power, and no one wants
| to include those required costs in their estimates. This
| tends to dramatically understate the actual economics of
| wind.
| rgmerk wrote:
| There are plenty of studies of near-100% renewable energy
| grids and the electricity comes out similar to long-term
| wholesale trends (pre-Ukraine), even taking
| storage/transmission into account.
| parkingrift wrote:
| Let's see one for wind power, then. OP implies wind is an
| order of magnitude cheaper.
| thinkmcfly wrote:
| With those 2 things combined into a solution, you're
| gambling that we will always have average good wind
| conditions long enough to keep the grid batteries from
| going empty. Sadly, under your proposed regime, as time
| approaches infinity the chance that the grid will run out
| of power approaches 100%.
|
| If you could avoid straw-manning me about nuclear and
| lithium in the future that would be super cool. I've
| played enough factorio to know that green power and
| batteries are part of the best solution, but you need
| high energy density generation systems for fast
| advancement too! If we turn our backs on that tech we
| know works we will lose future opportunities, or at least
| delay them
| stubish wrote:
| If your local energy storage or grid isn't reliable
| enough, you can always have a backup diesel generator. Or
| hydrogen powered generator if you insist this is green.
| Or some solar cells on your roof. And as much fuel as
| your risk analysis demands. But the reality is, hospitals
| can rely on local emergency services for support, and it
| is likely more cost effective run the risk of spoilage in
| the rare event of a multi-day power outage than invest in
| local generation for your refrigeration. My guess would
| be local equipment failure is more of a risk than a
| multi-day renewable energy outage, even in latitudes
| where solar is useless.
| pmoleri wrote:
| > you can't run life saving medical equipment or
| refrigerator service on wind turbines
|
| There are countries running on 95%+ renewable electricity
| right now[1]. Including wind, hydro, solar, geothermal and
| biomass. Humanity keeps neglecting what is already proved
| to work. Because politics? Coal and gas are cheaper
| options? Environment is not considered in the equation?
|
| Edit: source [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c
| ountries_by_renewab...
| JuettnerDistrib wrote:
| > There are countries running on 95%+ renewable
| electricity right now[1].
|
| That list ignores that countries trade electricity. If,
| say, Germany produces a lot of electricity by renewables
| it can sell the excess to France (which has lots of
| nuclear). If Germany is low on electricity, it can buy
| from is neighbors. The system as a whole is nowhere near
| 90%.
|
| The one exception are probably countries that have all
| hydro and biomass.
| pmoleri wrote:
| You created a straw man. There are 10 countries that fit
| the 95%+ criteria, all of them probably have excess of
| production and have 0 interest in buying power. But yeah,
| what you say could theorically happen.
| justatdotin wrote:
| you can run life saving medical equipment or refrigerator
| service on batteries.
|
| I think it's a standard thing for vital infrastructure to
| be backed by generators.
|
| big industrial consumers can factor their own specialised
| requirements for storage, backup.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| All large hospitals have emergency generators. Of course
| they are supposed to be for emergencies, not for dealing
| with regularly intermittent power. _That_ is typically
| dealt with advertised in advance power shutdowns to
| residential areas, and in richest countries, by not sending
| the signal that remotely turns on your water balloon heater
| during cheap hours.
| beambot wrote:
| Apples & oranges: wind is an intermittent generator versus
| eVinci for base generation
| Galaxeblaffer wrote:
| bingo! it's crazy that people keep comparing this to wind
| turbines.
| c2h5oh wrote:
| Current wholesale price of electricity in EU is 110-120 USD /
| MWh.
|
| 5 * 110 Euro * 24 hours * 365 days * 8 years planned service
| life = $38,533,000. If they can offer a price under 5M USD
| per MW they won't have problem finding buyers.
|
| This doesn't even account for savings for businesses that can
| consume most of that output - they save another 20-30% on
| transmission fees + there are several MW of waste heat as low
| temperature steam that can be used directly or indirectly in
| many industrial processes.
| [deleted]
| Retric wrote:
| This thing only outputs hot water, you need a lot more
| equipment and people to turn that into useful power on the
| grid.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Fuel costs, maintenance, and operation would be over $2M.
|
| Normal energy prices are about half of what you quoted.
| It's TBD if they come back down to normal in the near
| future in the EU.
|
| You're looking at $18M in revenue. This thing will probably
| cost more than $10M to purchase, and then you need land, a
| grid-tie in, and permits.
|
| It would still work - but the numbers aren't going to look
| as good as wind & especially solar.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Comparing the price of unreliable energy to reliable
| energy is like comparing the price of a junk bond with a
| treasury and wondering why the latter costs so much more.
| It costs more because when you turn it on you get a known
| and reliable source of power, day or night, cloudy or
| sunny, windy or quiet. That's why it costs more.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| I wonder what the cost of decommissioning is. That's easy
| to ignore just like it's easy to ignore the cost of
| mitigating the CO2 emissions from gas...
| wolfwyrd wrote:
| If they're modular then they'll be intended to run more
| than one. You get the land, grid tie-in, permits and
| staff and then... stack 4 of these instead of 1. You use
| the same benefits from economies of scale to have as many
| of these as can be safely crammed into your building and
| go from there.
| XorNot wrote:
| Yeah dedicated units for large industry would be a huge
| buyer here: if you can hit the right price point, aluminium
| smelters in particular would be very interested customers I
| suspect.
| aeyes wrote:
| A problem with on-shore wind is that it is already getting
| hard to find more space for it in some European countries.
| You also can't put windmills in densely populated areas where
| most power is needed so you have to take energy transmission
| cost into account as well.
|
| If it can be demonstrated that these reactors are safe, you
| could put them almost anywhere.
| pifm_guy wrote:
| Nobody in the developed world will allow a nuclear reactor
| to be built anywhere near their house...
|
| So, however safe these are, they'll still be relegated to
| 100+ miles from any big city. So the transmission costs
| will be similar to wind/solar.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| While the operational safety sounds excellent, I am worried
| about what a generalization of this kind of reactor would
| entail. Your typical reactor is under heavy surveillance
| and 200 (67?) times more powerful : we are very unlikely to
| "lose track" of the fuel.
|
| Let's say this becomes moderately popular and we soon have
| a million of them across the world (enough for about 10% of
| our _today 's_ energy needs)... who is going to keep track
| of all of them ?!
|
| The High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium required here is
| enriched between 5% and 20% compared to a conventional
| reactor using between 3% and 5% fuel. Because enriching
| from the natural 0.7% to 20% is 90% of the effort, 20% is
| considered to be the line separating civilian and military
| uses. And we're much closer to that limit with these
| reactors. I am baffled that this is not being even
| mentioned in the article, nor the pdf ? (I guess they are
| not particularly willing to disclose just how many of those
| would need to be gathered for the minimum 25 kg of 90%
| enriched Uranium for a bomb ?)
|
| And as safe as these might be under normal operation, how
| many decades for a forgotten abandoned one, exposed to the
| weather, to leak ? How much and what kind of radiation
| release can we expect ? (Carried by water to the closest
| steam I assume?)
| XorNot wrote:
| You need over 90% enriched for practical nuclear weapon
| use. It is not "most of the effort" to get to 20%: in
| fact, if you're _stealing it_ then it 's none of the
| effort: you don't have a centrifuge operation, so whether
| it's natural or 20% or 70% it is all equally useless.
|
| The difficulty of enrichment is the plant and logistics
| of doing it, none of which you can steal.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| I should have been more clear that I am assuming an
| hostile nation-state with some minimal capabilities : the
| biggest difficulty is probably to be able to _deliver_
| the bomb to a target once you have one, which gets even
| worse if you want to use it as an open threat for
| deterrence rather than a (frankly suicidal) surprise
| attack : you pretty much need an ICBM (see all the North
| Korean failures before they (supposedly) stole SSR-
| Ukrainian tech).
|
| Difficulty of enrichment seems to be heavily proportional
| to time : the whole "game" around Iran's enrichment seems
| to be about not letting them get it high enough that they
| can go from weapons-useless uranium to a ready bomb in a
| short enough amount of time for the other countries not
| being able to react.
|
| (There's also a possibility of a much smaller actor to
| make a dirty bomb from that mildly enriched uranium, but
| I have even less ideas about how likely that is.)
| Galaxeblaffer wrote:
| the number one problem with onshore wind is a capacity
| factor around 30% and on top of that you could have long
| periods with no wind at all.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Periods where wind operates below 5% capacity in Poland
| are really common. I've seen it once below 1%. When I
| write this it's 7,5% - below 10% for 14 hours already.
| rgmerk wrote:
| They say they envisage delivery of the whole system on four
| trucks.
|
| Not single family home (unsurprisingly, the economics of very
| small scale nuclear are awful even ignoring the safety
| concerns), but night and day compared with conventional large
| nuclear reactors.
| amluto wrote:
| If the price is right and medium size communities could get their
| acts together, something like this could potentially disrupt the
| entire grid model. In California, regardless of what wholesale
| electricity costs, the _retail_ cost is something like $200 /MWh
| more than could be considered reasonable. Put another way, the
| utility (PG&E) is charging an immense premium. Normally,
| displacing PG&E would be impractical:
|
| a. The actual transmission system is a phenomenally large capital
| investment developed over many decades. You can't just VC up a
| new electric grid in a developed area. And the incumbent mostly
| owns the existing infrastructure.
|
| b. Regulation, good and bad.
|
| It's possible to sell power _to the utility_ for a reasonable
| price per MWh. But one can't easily sell to the utility's
| customers.
|
| But this reactor is small! 5 MW could serve maybe 1000 expensive
| homes in an expensive area without an enormous transmission
| system. Anyone trying to disrupt the incumbent utility with
| something like this has $200/MWh of inefficiency to exploit. $24k
| per _day_ of operation will offset a decent amount of capital
| cost and regulatory effort to get the electricity to customers.
|
| Put another way, a wealthy community could buy a few of these,
| figure out local distribution, and ditch the incumbent utility.
| This could be fantastic.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| There is the small issue of transmission and maintaining that.
| But surely it is better to also use the grid for when you peak
| over 5MW at dinner time when people turn on their ovens, lights
| and other appliances and also to be able to sell back to the
| grid at other times. Unless you have batteries.
|
| But your argument is solid for a factory with constant 24/7
| load where a single building might consume all that power.
| amluto wrote:
| The spreads are egregious, though. You can buy from PG&E for
| several hundred dollars per MWH. You can likely sell to them
| for a couple dollars per MWH. No, you do not get NEM for your
| neighborhood nuclear plant.
|
| Or you can overprovision, discard unused output (or try to do
| something useful -- even just heating up a big heat reservoir
| is useful for district heating if you feel like building out
| a system to deliver the heat), and still potentially win on
| overall price.
|
| Large grids are economical when reasonably run. They are not
| economical when poorly run.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| That is horrendous. Battery it is!
|
| Residential solar plans in Sydney would buy power back for
| about 5c US / kwh so $50 / mwh
|
| Although I think their hand might be forced to encourage
| solar. They used to pay crazy high amounts.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| What you're looking for is just a very small utility company.
| At 5MW of load you'll be needing distribution, substations,
| maintenance for all the above, planning, etc. The overhead
| you'd need at such a small scale of sales would probably
| surprise you.
| amluto wrote:
| And yet most of the world, and even most of the US, does
| this, _including generation_ , for some $200/MWH less than
| PG&E. I'm not saying it's cheap. I'm saying that the amount
| of money on the table is very large.
|
| (Distribution cost really ought to scale roughly linearly in
| the length of the system. I don't know if it does in
| practice. As a data point, Palo Alto manages to run their
| entire system for considerably less money than PG&E, and Palo
| Alto is not an inexpensive place to do anything.)
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Could these be viable for shipping containers??
|
| IIUC, 18,000 TEU ships have engines that generate ~60 mW - and
| use about 66,000 gallons of diesel per day.
|
| That's ~$90M in fuel per year, which could be replaced by ~12
| of there reactors.
|
| That's $7.5M per year. If these can be purchased for less than
| $20M - with an 8-year life-span and $2M for fuel and operation
| per year - then maybe it could work??
| jononomo wrote:
| Would these reactors take up less physical space than the
| fuel system they would displace?
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Almost certainly. See picture [1]. According to Wikipedia,
| they're ~87 ft x ~87 ft x ~44 ft = 333k cuft [2]
|
| These reactors are supposed to be a max of 4 containers in
| size.
|
| So ~12 of them would be ~48 containers = 4x6x2 = ~80 ft x
| ~60 ft x ~30 ft = 144k cuft.
|
| Though, I doubt you'd want to stack them like that, and I
| imagine you'd need more than just the reactors to replace
| the engine.
|
| But more importantly - container ships need space and
| weight for ~66k gallons of diesel per day - about ~3M
| gallons total. That's an additional ~401k cuft for diesel,
| and ~13,500 tons... Each TEU is 22 tons - so you could
| probably carry an additional 600 TEU (or ~3.5% more).
|
| [1] https://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/03/the-largest-and-
| most-p...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%A4rtsil%C3%A4-Sulzer
| _RTA9...
| bboygravity wrote:
| If you do that the ships would go (dangerously ?) fast.
|
| 60 MW output from a combustion engine means rougly 3x the
| mechanical energy output for the same amount of Joules input
| with an electric engine.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| You'd get surprisingly little additional speed. An old rule
| of thumb is that if you double the power of a large ship,
| you get 4 additional knots of speed. Current average laden
| container ship speed is ~15 knots, down from about 20 knots
| from back before they cared about fuel costs and emissions.
| So you'd only get speeds up to what they were before.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| I think the 60MW output is shaft horsepower so it already
| takes into account the low efficiency of converting fuel
| oil to movement (so in reality it's burning about 150MW of
| fuel oil).
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| On the plus side, container ship drag races would now be a
| thing.
| malandrew wrote:
| Imagine how far they travel when trying to stop. I guess
| you would have the power to run the engines in reverse at
| full power too.
| porker wrote:
| Power isn't the problem; vibration, the stress on the
| ship's hull, and risk of losing a propellor are the real
| problems with sustained running in reverse at full power.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Stop ? Just drift with all your cargo.
| rurounijones wrote:
| It would require changes in regulations around the world.
| Many ports do not allow nuclear powered vessels to dock.
| Those regs were written with traditional nuclear power plants
| in mind but I think there would still have to be a lot of
| work to get acceptance.
| m463 wrote:
| I recall some California communities without PG&E have somewhat
| reasonable electric costs. Santa Clara has silicon valley power
| with rates of .11-.13/kwh which are significantly lower than
| PG&E at .28-.51/kwh
|
| PG&E is expensive.
| nicwilson wrote:
| a. Yes, but you can easily put up solar+batteries such that the
| cost of retail energy to the consumer is entirely transmission
| line rental, at which point disruption is worth whatever the
| cost of line rental is minus the capital cost of grid
| construction.
|
| > It's possible to sell power to the utility for a reasonable
| price per MWh. But one can't easily sell to the utility's
| customers.
|
| You might not be able to sell energy directly to them, but you
| can sell/lease energy generation to them which is essentially
| the same thing. You won't be able to charge the line rental
| that makes up the majority of the retail cost post installation
| of solar, but you can start with some fraction of the
| difference between they save with the solar system, which is
| probably at a better price point than wholesale cost of
| electricity.
| nine_k wrote:
| Good thing everybody lives in Arizona and Sahara, and nobody
| lives in Sweden, Canada, or even in Seattle! /s
|
| Sadly, sun is not universally abundant.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| But HVDC lines are. The longest one in operation today is
| ~2200 km.
| nine_k wrote:
| I wonder how their upkeep and bulging expense (especially
| across difficult terrain) compares to that of the small
| nuclear power plant described here. We could determine
| the distance when the HVDC line still makes more sense.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| For true "wilderness" your total addressable market is
| like a million people. Sweden and Norway have abundant
| hydro power so they actually export power from north to
| south. So reduce that to tens of thousands.
|
| For southern scandinavia it is already connected through
| HVDC to Central Europe and more are being built.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumpolar_peoples
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Circle
| pjc50 wrote:
| Nobody knows what this reactor is going to cost yet, the
| first one has not been completed ..
| nicwilson wrote:
| True, but consider that most of southern Asia, Oceania,
| Africa and central America the sun is abundant. That covers
| a lot of people.
| cplusplusfellow wrote:
| Now we just need a bunch of these reactors to power the
| desalination plants to support all the folks living in
| the desert.
| jmopp wrote:
| The Netherlands is about as sunny as Seattle, and it's
| possible to break even after a few years with a decent-
| sized solar array on your roof.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Jeesh, how expensive is power there? It would take me
| almost 15 years to get my money back on a solar/battery
| combo that is big enough to generally supply my
| electricity needs if I was at 100%.
| jmopp wrote:
| Currently paying around EUR90 for ~250KWh per month. That
| is about 4 times what I used to pay in South Africa 5
| years ago.
| jphsnsir wrote:
| In Belgium we're at EUR0,50/kwh We're ordering 36 panels
| and 10kw battery tomorrow.
|
| The only sad thing is that we can't utlize the battery
| when we lose netpower. Huawei has an addition, but it
| only gives an outlet on the battery. I wanted inline,
| like my ups.
| Someone wrote:
| > In California, regardless of what wholesale electricity
| costs, the retail cost is something like $200/MWh more than
| could be considered reasonable.
|
| $200/MWh is $2/kWh. California electricity prices are around
| $0,27/kWh (https://www.energysage.com/local-data/electricity-
| cost/ca/). I guess you mean $200/GWh?
|
| Also, why do you find PG&Ek's pricing unreasonable, given that
| it required a "phenomenally large capital investment" (and, I
| expect, quite a bit of ongoing maintenance) to be able to
| provide customers with electricity?
| qilo wrote:
| > $200/MWh is $2/kWh.
|
| $200/MWh is $0.20/kWh.
| Someone wrote:
| Oops. Thanks
| [deleted]
| zbrozek wrote:
| PG&E pricing is higher than that, ranging from 37 to 49 cents
| per kWh on their default residential plan. That's more than
| three times the national average. It's unclear why the state
| expects folks to electrify when electricity is outrageously
| expensive.
|
| https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED.
| ..
| voldacar wrote:
| expensive houses require a lot more than 5 kw
| psadri wrote:
| I like the idea but not sure if wealthy homeowners would want
| to a nuclear reactor in the vicinity of their homes. It would
| have to be proven out over a couple of decades of incident-free
| operation before it becomes acceptable.
| zbrozek wrote:
| Los Altos Hills resident here. Sign me up for one in my yard.
| There's an empty lower acre begging to do something useful.
| kuschku wrote:
| > There's an empty lower acre begging to do something
| useful.
|
| How about building housing there? As long as house prices
| are as high as they are today, that should be the main
| priority.
| zbrozek wrote:
| Local zoning regulations don't allow it. But backup power
| systems? No problem.
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