[HN Gopher] Illinois Senate approves plan to allow new nuclear r...
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Illinois Senate approves plan to allow new nuclear reactors
Author : mattas
Score : 139 points
Date : 2023-11-09 20:15 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (apnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (apnews.com)
| mtillman wrote:
| Excellent news! Clinton should be receiving a second on the site
| as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Power_Station
| Krasnol wrote:
| Meanwhile, in Utah:
|
| > NuScale Power (SMR.N) said on Wednesday it has agreed with a
| power group in Utah to terminate the company's small modular
| reactor project, dealing a blow to U.S. ambitions for a wave of
| nuclear energy to fight climate change and sending NuScale's
| shares down 20%.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nuscale-power-uamps-...
| Animats wrote:
| Their cost estimates kept going up, and they hadn't even
| started construction.
| lnsru wrote:
| It can't go down with probably hundred levels of
| subcontractors. 80 of them are paid to manage their project
| plans and couple do actual job. I assume, that the real pay
| for the job done is a small fraction of the overall cost.
| Heck the solar panel 6 kW installation on the house near by
| took few weeks and there were 5 companies involved.
| outside1234 wrote:
| This is one of those things where you want a lot of people
| looking at everything in duplicate because it is six orders
| of magnitude less expensive than the alternative.
| bhhaskin wrote:
| Only way it makes sense is to do it all in house like SpaceX.
| But that is a tall order.
| Krasnol wrote:
| So like with everything nuclear?
| cyberax wrote:
| SMR never made any financial sense. They are far inferior to
| large-scale PWRs in almost all regards.
|
| The SMRs' _only_ advantage was the relative ease of
| construction. Only a handful of companies in the _world_ can
| construct reactor vessels for large-scale PWRs, and none of
| these companies are in the US. SMRs can be constructed
| domestically.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Russia has a floating nuclear power stations in the Far East:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov
|
| I was surprised they even had that, but they do have nuclear
| powered ice breakers, so I guess it makes sense.
| tiahura wrote:
| In the early 80s, the field trips to the station at Cordova
| included a tour of the control room. I'm guessing times have
| changed?
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| Illinois is the most nuclear state in the union, as well as the
| home of the first manmade nuclear reactor. I grew up very near
| the forests where they buried that reactor, and never got any
| powers from it. A high school friend was named after the Byron,
| Illinois nuclear plant, which his father had worked on.
| vidanay wrote:
| I lived in Hickory Hills for a while as a kid. We'd ride our
| bikes all the way out to Red Gate on a Saturday morning. No
| super powers here either.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Have you run a Geiger counter over yourself and your
| possessions?
| kunwon1 wrote:
| My father was a welding foreman on the Byron plant. He always
| took great pride in that. Later in life he was a lineman, he
| liked to point out the huge transmission towers that he built
| as we drove past them
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| My grandfather did sheet metal work at Zion. Was also proud
| of his work (kept the press he used in his garage after he
| retired). Was a different time I suppose.
| HankB99 wrote:
| We were camping at Illinois Beach SP. When we turned in,
| the plant was humming. In the morning it was silent. I
| wonder if we were there when it shut down for good.
| robohoe wrote:
| A lot of mountain bike and hiking trails in the area of that
| forest. We even have a race called Palos Meltdown because takes
| place in the vicinity :)
| bfrog wrote:
| Great, because we could really use some modern nuclear power
| plants here. We do not have the natural resources to provide
| power base with wind/solar alone and in all likelihood even with
| large storage banks it would be very hard to compete with what
| amounts to an atomic battery in nuclear fuel rods.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > We do not have the natural resources to provide power base
| with wind/solar alone
|
| Well, that's what you have a national grid for. China for
| example has links that go way more than 2.000km - that's more
| than enough distance to transfer power in times of low wind or
| whatever around.
| dsauerbrun wrote:
| I'm not an electrical engineer but it sounds implausible for
| power to be transferred that far without losing a bunch of it
| in the process, unless you have massive cables.
| jeffbee wrote:
| HVDC loses 3% in 1000 km, depending on the value of "HV".
| bb88 wrote:
| Maybe take some EE courses then? They're not that hard...
|
| From EE101: P=V * I. But power transmission losses are I^2
| * R.
|
| So one way to transmit large amounts of power with low
| losses is to, well, turn the voltage up and use a lower
| current.
|
| And with lower current, you can use smaller cables.
|
| And in fact, that's what we do.
|
| That's why your power lines to your house are thousands of
| volts and the transformer will convert it into 220V (but
| with higher current to run your hair dryer, say).
| SECProto wrote:
| > I'm not an electrical engineer but it sounds implausible
| for power to be transferred that far without losing a bunch
| of it in the process, unless you have massive cables.
|
| Read up about Hydro Quebec. They generate gigawatts in
| Northern Quebec and export large amounts to New England.
| HVDC is pretty efficient.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydro-
| Qu%C3%A9bec's_electricit...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The cables don't need to be massive, but the voltage has to
| be because the power loss is related to the current flowing
| - so the Chinese just raised the voltage to 1 million volts
| instead of the usual 220/380 kV, and used DC instead of AC
| to get rid of reactive power and skin effect issues. Their
| longest line transfers 12 gigawatts of power over almost
| 3.300km distance - that's not _that_ much that remains to
| cover the distance from the US East to West coast!
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-
| voltage_electricity...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Illinois has service with both MISO and PJM grids [1]. They're
| going to be pulling power over HVDC from wind in the central US
| [2]. NuScale wasn't cost competitive [3], so while nuclear
| approval is nice (because it is silly to prohibit it from being
| built if safely and responsibly operated), renewables,
| batteries, transmission, and demand response is cheaper
| (collectively) [4] [5] [6].
|
| [1] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-MIDW-
| MISO?wind=false...
|
| [2] https://soogreen.com/project-overview/
|
| [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38199061
|
| [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37502924
|
| [5] https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-
| Part-3.pdf
|
| [6] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/21/us-can-get-to-100percent-
| cle...
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| Illinois and other former industrial states badly need this
| having lost much of their manufacturing base to southern states,
| Mexico, etc. The exodus has been accompanied by migration from
| these states, elsewhere. Anything that creates an economic
| incentive for good paying manufacturing jobs to return to these
| states - even if its a decade away - needs to happen.
| bell-cot wrote:
| > Anything that creates an economic incentive for good paying
| manufacturing jobs to return to these states...
|
| The article talks a lot about carbon-free electricity by 2045,
| but I see nothing about where the SMR's might be manufactured.
| Between the Mississippi River and St. Lawrence Seaway - SMR's
| could easily be brought in from ~anywhere on earth.
| chasil wrote:
| I live in Illinois, and we have the exact same GE design that was
| used in Fukushima on the banks of the Mississippi.
|
| Anything that we build in the future _must_ be walk-away safe, a
| Gen4 reactor or better. There can 't be any question of exploding
| cooling ponds or other surprises with (design) flaws in safety
| systems. This obviously rules out diesel generators in the
| basement.
|
| Over the years, there have been nagging stories of drones that
| overfly reactors. We have no idea who is collecting this data or
| what they want with it. We have to reach _much_ higher safety
| standards than the elderly fleet of reactors that remains with
| us.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2020/09/07/dozens...
| vidanay wrote:
| With one major difference...the Mississippi River isn't subject
| to the same seismic (New Madrid notwithstanding) and tsunami
| events.
| lucb1e wrote:
| I would indeed be curious about the risk as estimated by
| Japan and Illinois about their respective reactors before and
| after the Fukushima disaster, before forming an opinion on
| whether this is actually a problem. As you say, there's
| likely fundamental differences not obvious from the provided
| rhetoric...
| chasil wrote:
| However, I don't know what these drones are doing.
|
| 36 hours. That's all it takes.
| methodical wrote:
| This. Having ongoing concerns from a once-in-a-lifetime
| perfect storm of an event such as Fukushima in application to
| a facility that is not vulnerable to nearly any of the series
| of worst-case scenario events is simply doomerism. This is
| exactly the kind of mindset that has prevented the US as a
| country from developing nuclear power in any substantial
| fashion for the last 50 or so years. In that timeframe, it's
| not unlikely to assume we could have a much more substantial
| amount of our energy produced by nuclear power; if not
| completely deprecating coal power plants.
|
| At the moment, barring magical energy sources that haven't
| been proven in any meaningful sense, nuclear technology has
| shown itself to have the fewest long-term consequences and
| the highest efficiency. However, it is unfortunately also the
| easiest to point to a few events in history and easily make
| the layman cast doubt on its safety. It's worth pointing out
| that the most significant nuclear accident in history took
| place in the USSR (which wasn't particularly notorious for
| its safety protocols), on a reactor that had several known
| design flaws that were ignored, and the only other major
| accident representing a one in a thousand years perfect-storm
| that overcame several redundancies.
|
| This concern about "drones" in relation to nuclear power
| plants is borderline paranoia. Are you concerned about drones
| dropping bombs or somehow disabling safety systems on a
| nuclear reactor? Every single nuclear power in the world has
| nuclear power plants, so they're all equally susceptible to
| the same attack in the same way that they're all equally
| capable of responding to said attack- mutually assured
| destruction as it goes.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Having ongoing concerns from a once-in-a-lifetime perfect
| storm of an event such as Fukushima
|
| A lot of the world's living population lived through
| Chernobyl, the various incidents at Sellafield and then
| Fukushima. All events that "statistically" should not have
| happened nearly as close together as they did - and that's
| without taking the risk of 9/11-style terrorism, actual
| acts of war (see Zaporizhzhia NPP) or catastrophic
| earthquakes into account.
|
| There are only two kinds of power generation that have a
| mass-casualty potential: nuclear power plants and dammed
| hydro power (as evidenced by what went on at Kakhovka Dam).
| We should, as a species, get rid of these. The sooner, the
| better.
| vidanay wrote:
| There are more deaths directly attributable to coal fired
| power plants than to nuclear energy in all forms
| (including Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
|
| https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/archive/2013_kh
| are...
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-
| worldw...
|
| http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2019/ph241/marshall2/
|
| https://www.engineering.com/story/whats-the-death-toll-
| of-nu...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Fly a plane into a coal plant and nothing much (besides
| the death of everyone involved) will happen.
|
| Fly a plane into an NPP and you're looking at a massive
| contamination issue.
|
| Hell, I live in Bavaria, and _to this day_ you have to
| inspect shrooms and wild game meat for radiation - and it
| 's likely to exceed safety thresholds, even decades after
| Chernobyl.
| skeaker wrote:
| While we're at it, when airplanes were invented there
| were dozens of crashes relatively close to each other
| that killed almost a hundred thousand people (almost 100x
| that of all nuclear power accidents combined). Better get
| rid of the airplanes too. And let's not even mention cars
| or boats or horses. Best to just stay indoors.
| chasil wrote:
| No, it's not paranoia.
|
| The people at the Nova music festival in Israel would have
| said exactly the same thing as you in the hours before the
| event.
|
| Black Swans can and do appear.
| elil17 wrote:
| One person died and six people got cancer from the Fukushima
| incident - which of course is very sad.
|
| In contrast, a single coal plant in Illinois, Prairie State,
| kills about 75 people every year with coal soot:
| https://www.sierraclub.org/illinois/blog/2023/02/prairie-sta...
|
| For coal plants, murder is business as usual. That's why we
| need nuclear power.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Nuclear energy is so economically inefficient that the biggest
| political scandal in Illinois this decade is about the nuclear
| company bribing political leaders for subsidies. Their former CEO
| is going to jail over it. The long time political boss was
| finally indicted over it. Hard to comprehend how blatant bribes
| have to be in this state to be prosecuted.
|
| I'd love to see expanded nuclear, but if that requires corruption
| it's a tough pill for me.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Their economic inefficiency are mostly due to high capital
| costs needed to build a plant and high insurance costs.
| Renewables provide much greater bang for buck now, although you
| need to build them in the right locations that Illinois may
| lack (and getting transmission in from the great plains might
| not be viable?).
|
| Maybe China will finally deliver some cheap reactors to work
| with, although I assume they are running into the same problems
| that we did (and corruption is a bit problematic with nuclear
| power plants).
| jeffbee wrote:
| Illinois already has tons of wind and just-offshore wind in
| the Great Lakes has a LCOE of $60/MWh which is less than half
| the claimed cost of new nuclear and roughly 10x less than the
| actual cost of recent nuclear.
| tw04 wrote:
| >Nuclear energy is so economically inefficient
|
| They're only economically inefficient when you ignore the costs
| of burning fossil fuels. Would you rather spend a couple (tens
| of) billion on a nuclear power plant, or face global
| starvation?
|
| Everything looks expensive when you externalize the cost of
| status quo.
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