[HN Gopher] Small modular reactors: Still too expensive, too slo...
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Small modular reactors: Still too expensive, too slow, and too
risky [pdf]
Author : gnabgib
Score : 39 points
Date : 2024-05-31 16:29 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (apo.org.au)
(TXT) w3m dump (apo.org.au)
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| After reading S. Levy's retrospective book on GE NE and ALWRs,
| SMRs were delayed for decades but came too little, too late.
|
| There's essentially no general purpose point for them given the
| costs of PV and onshore wind have become cheaper to deploy. This
| is good for everyone so long as politic including
| techno-"religious" preferences doesn't subsidize coal, oil, gas,
| or even nuclear when there are cleaner and cheaper solutions
| today.
| gravitywave wrote:
| It's worth keeping in mind that 'low cost' PV comes from China
| (which makes 80% of the global supply of PV cells) which is run
| predominantly on coal (60% of their electrical energy) and
| China continues to build a GW coal plant approximately weekly,
| and incidentally, a new GW nuclear plant about monthly.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The coal plants China are building are peaker plants run at a
| fairly low duty cycle, most of their new power comes from
| solar. IOW they're building solar+coal instead of
| solar+batteries.
| mnau wrote:
| Number of coal plants is irrelevant. It's a misinformation.
|
| What matters is how much coal they do burn. Their coal plants
| have capacity factor under 50%. Chinese consumption of coal
| is roughly as ~10 years ago (82EJ vs 88EJ). That is what
| matters.
|
| Coal plants are going to balance the grid, just like in
| Germany.
| p1mrx wrote:
| > the costs of PV and onshore wind have become cheaper to
| deploy
|
| What about the additional cost of storage/transmission to make
| those sources available 24/7?
|
| Perhaps you've done that analysis and they're still cheaper,
| but I would automatically reject any argument that excludes
| storage/transmission.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Still cheaper.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| nuclear has an opposite but related storage problem to solar
| and pv; whereas it's hard to reliably predict and line up
| solar and wind power, it is also generally hard to spin
| nuclear up and down quickly according to peak power demand as
| well. one of the first uses of pumped hydro was to store
| excess power at nuclear stations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
| ki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power...
|
| transmission is also an issue at nuclear stations, because no
| one wants to live near one, and they generate so much power
| you would probably need additional transmission capacity
| wherever one was sited anyways.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Nuclear still loses to PV/wind even with those
| considerations. And it loses massively if you project those
| (especially PV) down their historical experience curves.
|
| Seriously; do you really think the experts pushing PV/wind
| have not thought of this? It's been very well addressed.
| jes5199 wrote:
| I've seen that analysis - depending on how you model it,
| solar+wind+batteries is often still cheaper, plus batteries
| are solar are getting cheaper every year, while nuclear isn't
| (historically it's been getting slightly more expensive over
| time). So if it takes a decade to get a nuclear plant
| approved, even if it's competitive today, it probably won't
| be in 2034
| TheDudeMan wrote:
| "Too Expensive, Too Slow, and Too Risky"
|
| Because they are still too big. They must be very small. Fuel
| efficiency is less important than creating economies of scale in
| manufacturing.
| lven wrote:
| not when it's more expensive than diesel. Must find the
| balance.
| TheDudeMan wrote:
| Nuclear fuel is about 20x cheaper than diesel (per unit
| energy).
|
| https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/840500 (page 6, table VII)
| Arnt wrote:
| Can a nuclear reactor be small enough that it doesn't need an
| expensive fence with 24/7 guards, and an expensive evaluation
| of the site for disaster risk?
|
| I sort of suspect the answer to be no, but would like to hear
| arguments for yes.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > doesn't need an expensive fence with 24/7 guards
|
| You means, like most industrial plants anyway or even college
| campuses?
|
| An "expensive fence" and 24/7 security guard are still
| ridiculously cheap compared to the price of the thing itself.
| worik wrote:
| > like most industrial plants anyway or even college
| campuses?
|
| Nuclear power stations are an extreme, not typical, example
| consumer451 wrote:
| I believe that after 9/11, we required all new nuclear
| plants to be able to withstand the impact of a 737. So it's
| just a little more complicated.
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| Perhaps it could be underground, either in an excavated
| area or a natural cave?
| bialpio wrote:
| How much (little?) radioactive material would there have
| to be inside the SMR for an impact of a 737 into the
| neighborhood to be more devastating than the release of
| the radioactive material?
| consumer451 wrote:
| Well, this doesn't answer your question, but there is
| also the issue of waste storage. In light water reactors,
| that's stored on-site for a long time. This research
| appears to indicate that with SMRs, this is actually a
| bigger issue.
|
| > Small modular reactors (SMRs), proposed as the future
| of nuclear energy, have purported cost and safety
| advantages over existing gigawatt-scale light water
| reactors (LWRs). However, few studies have assessed the
| implications of SMRs for the back end of the nuclear fuel
| cycle. The low-, intermediate-, and high-level waste
| stream characterization presented here reveals that SMRs
| will produce more voluminous and chemically/physically
| reactive waste than LWRs, which will impact options for
| the management and disposal of this waste. Although the
| analysis focuses on only three of dozens of proposed SMR
| designs, the intrinsically higher neutron leakage
| associated with SMRs suggests that most designs are
| inferior to LWRs with respect to the generation,
| management, and final disposal of key radionuclides in
| nuclear waste.
|
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2111833119
| amluto wrote:
| Off the top of my head, if I had to protect a shipping
| container sized object from a 737, I would bury it. Dig a
| hole maybe the size of a residential swimming pool, build
| some drainage and some concrete walls with enough space
| to allow the container to get back out, stick the
| container in, and backfill outside the walls. Put a lid
| on it and cover it with local soil. As a bonus: anyone
| trying to steal it would need an excavator of some sort.
|
| Or build an underground parking lot, park the SMR in it,
| put a serious door in front, and use the space above it
| for something else.
|
| Conventional construction underground, especially of
| something complex, is expensive. But much of the point of
| an SMR is that it's built off site and then installed.
| Driving a container down a ramp or lowering one off a
| crane is straightforward.
| consumer451 wrote:
| I was thinking underground as well, but don't forget
| about the waste storage area/infrastructure:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40540802
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You should be able to make a reactor with anything larger
| than a couple kg of material.
|
| Maybe you can avoid a thorium reactor if that size from being
| a valuable target. I have little idea about the social risks
| of somebody using the material as poison, instead of
| explosive, but I suspect it's incredibly overblown currently.
| (Wannabe thieves are probably way more effective going after
| something else.)
|
| But well, don't expect very small reactors to be efficient or
| cheap. They maybe could be cheap heat sources, but
| electricity generation and distribution are full of scale
| efficiencies.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > You should be able to make a reactor with anything larger
| than a couple kg of material.
|
| A reactor that small needs highly enriched fissionable
| material. Of course it would need guards, since it's a
| proliferation nightmare.
| throwup238 wrote:
| The lower limit is a nuclear lightbulb with ~20kg of
| uranium fuel, but that's a high pressure reactor chamber
| that would definitely need to be protected and it needs
| large centrifuges inline to separate the fuel back out from
| the gas.
| TheDudeMan wrote:
| You don't need distribution for a small enough reactor --
| you use the electricity on site.
| anothernewdude wrote:
| Small enough to be inserted into the human body to power a
| pacemaker.
| pfdietz wrote:
| That's not a nuclear reactor.
| TheDudeMan wrote:
| Ideally, the reactor would not need service until end-of-life
| (e.g. ~10 years). That way, it can be encased in concrete and
| buried.
| cyberax wrote:
| Yeah, so basically, you want to spam the world with nuclear
| waste.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _spam the world with nuclear waste_
|
| You may be vastly underestimating the amount of toxic
| waste produced by our energy production processes,
| renewable or not. (Wind, as I understand it, being the
| least nasty.)
| cyberax wrote:
| The proposal is:
|
| > Ideally, the reactor would not need service until end-
| of-life (e.g. ~10 years). That way, it can be encased in
| concrete and buried.
|
| This will blow up the level of radioactive waste that
| needs to be buried by about 1000x. Instead of a couple of
| kilos of long-lived isotopes after reprocessing, you'll
| need to bury THE WHOLE FREAKING REACTOR CORE.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _blow up the level of radioactive waste that needs to
| be buried by about 1000x. Instead of a couple of kilos of
| long-lived isotopes after reprocessing, you 'll need to
| bury THE WHOLE FREAKING REACTOR CORE_
|
| Why the scare caps? The first word in SMR is "small."
|
| We currently wash out the industrial waste from
| processing and manufacturing our energy inputs and
| infrastructure. Also, nothing stops reprocessing those
| cores in the future. Next to a spent-fuel tank or
| tailings pool, a buried core seems preferable.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| The argument about cost in this paper is complete bullshit
| anyway, since they are talking about one-shot reactors, of
| course it's going to be expensive, the main argument about SMR
| is that you're able to create multiple ones and improve the
| process to drive cost low as the learning curves kicks in (and
| without needing the kind of All-in France did in the 80s when
| they built 58 regular-sized reactor in 20 years, leading to
| very good economies of scale).
| worik wrote:
| > the main argument about SMR is that you're able to create
| multiple ones and improve the process to drive cost low as
| the learning curves kicks in
|
| I was thinking that too. But they addressed that in the
| article
|
| Why will this time be different, when nowhere in the world
| has any nuclear industry succeeded in lowering costs over the
| life of a programme?
|
| The French, the article says, built 55 reactors,
| standardising the parts and processes but still could not
| control costs
| cyberax wrote:
| > Why will this time be different, when nowhere in the
| world has any nuclear industry succeeded in lowering costs
| over the life of a programme?
|
| Russia (Rosatom) did it with the exported reactors. China
| is on track as well, although their finances are not as
| transparent.
| morninglight wrote:
| Yes, it might be a hard sell.
|
| https://i.pinimg.com/originals/1b/52/bc/1b52bcb5c6d5488cd256...
| littlestymaar wrote:
| It's interesting to see a paper talking about how SMR are
| seemingly unfeasible in reasonable time when we already have
| plenty of small nuclear reactors being built somewhat in series:
| nuclear submarine and aircraft carrier engines.
| throwanem wrote:
| It's hard to imagine commercial SMRs being built to the same
| standard as marine propulsion reactors, or receiving the same
| level of investment in ongoing maintenance.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| And yet that's exactly what NavalGroup and EDF are working
| on: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUWARD_(r%C3%A9acteur)
|
| Of course it's not going to be the same "standards" though,
| because the safety authority is much more rigorous when
| dealing with civil nuclear their your own soil than for
| nuclear submarines.
|
| (and keep in mind that we're talking about French companies
| here, and France will need to replace 58 reactors in the next
| 30 years, so there will a huge need for mass production)
| pfdietz wrote:
| It should be noted that military naval reactors are still more
| expensive than propelling ships with liquid hydrocarbons. This
| is why most of the ships in the US Navy are not nuclear.
| worik wrote:
| I am really taken about the framing of the industrial risk, the
| risk of mistakes in design and implementation, as the "Boeing
| Problem"
|
| We know how finantialisation of Boeing created its problems, that
| is well documented. If a SMR industry develops how can we
| mitigate those risks?
|
| Boeing crashed two aeroplanes before it would even consider a
| problem existed. Then we saw the rot
|
| Boeing were, we thought, the best of the best. How do we stop the
| same thing in a nuclear programme?
| orson2077 wrote:
| (Background: I am an engineer that has spent most of their career
| in energy - fossil fuels, nuclear and renewables - the whole
| shebang. I care deeply about climate change, and recognise the
| non-negotiable need of humanity for ever-increasing amounts of
| energy.)
|
| Take it from me - I would absolutely love renewables to displace
| all other forms of energy. However, from an engineering point of
| view, I know this is simply not feasible without some strong
| developments in energy storage and distribution. With today's
| technology, nuclear is the only real threat to the hegemony of
| fossil fuels, and the only practical hope of reaching climate
| goals (let alone long-term energy security goals). I think the
| fossil fuel industry knows this, and so frame their anti-nuclear
| rhetoric as a renewables-vs-nuclear debate, backing renewables.
|
| If I wore a tinfoil hat, I would say that a lot of the support
| for renewables (and hostility towards nuclear) was
| encouraged/stoked/funded by the fossil fuel lobby.
|
| There's an interesting blog that catalogues cases where the
| fossil fuel industry has scratched on nuclear. If you're
| interested, I'll link it below.
|
| https://atomicinsights.com/smoking-gun/
|
| As for SMRs specifically, I think they have a lot of legs.
| Reactors that can be assembled (and serviced) in factories would
| go a long way to lowering the overall cost of the reactors (even
| accounting for the reduced energy-cost density of the individual
| reactors).
|
| Questions welcome. I created an account just to give my two cents
| on a field to which I have dedicated my career.
| julkali wrote:
| How would you then argue against the points listed in the
| article?
| orson2077 wrote:
| Regarding their main points:
|
| - Too expensive. Nuclear power plants usually operate for
| 40-80 years, making their ROI after the 20 year mark (greatly
| varies). The report's choice of "10-15 years" for a return on
| investment is suspicious, as it corresponds more to the life
| of PVs and wind turbines.
|
| - Too slow. The first instances of a new design always take
| longer than the mass production instances. It's madness to
| compare prospective factory-manufacturable reactors to the
| behemouth reactors we are used to today. (Also, from memory,
| I think Japan once made one of those behemoth reactors in 22
| months... delays are often not for technical reasons).
|
| - Too risky. Without storage and/or distribution solutions,
| renewables will inevitably depend on fossil fuels; this
| applies both to service economies and manufacturing
| economies. The difference is that nuclear captures is
| externalities, unlike fossil fuels.
|
| - A bad fit. I actually agree with this one in some cases.
| For example, Australia has abundant land and great weather;
| they could probably get by with pure renewables. However,
| countries like Germany (which has so-so weather and some
| heavy industry) would be hard-pressed to do the same. They
| could achieve 100% renewables by giving up certain
| industries, but I don't think that's reasonable to ask.
|
| - The Boeing Problem Boeing's fall from grace has everything
| to do with perverse incentives and regulatory failure. If the
| public is crucifying them for dodgy planes, I imagine they'd
| do even worse for making dodgy reactors. Regulation is a must
| for nuclear, and never has anyone serious thought otherwise.
| hamilyon2 wrote:
| What do you think about power plants apparently needing a lot
| of fresh, relatively cold, relatively clean water? A precious
| resource in future.
| orson2077 wrote:
| Modern powerplants are closed-loop and do not consume water,
| although they may dump heat into it. Water is not consumed
| (in any great quantity) or contaminated, except that which is
| recirculated inside.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > although maybe they may dump heat into it.
|
| Dumping heat into water is how they consume water. They
| either evaporate the water directly, or they heat a river,
| causing it to evaporate more later.
| cyberax wrote:
| Power plants can be designed to work in hot deserts. The
| largest nuclear power plant in the US (Palo Verde in AZ) gets
| cooled by evaporating treated wastewater.
|
| French nuclear power plants were just not designed for
| droughts.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| They need heat sinks, not fresh + cold + clean water. Even
| the heat sinks are only really necessary due to concentration
| of generating capacity rather than the amount of generating
| capacity. For example, photovoltaic usually has thermodynamic
| efficiency around 20% while steam plants (nuclear, fossil,
| geothermal, etc) are usually around 33%: solar panels will
| release considerably more heat into the environment per unit
| of energy generated, but since it's spread out nobody cares.
| Small Modular Reactors are a big step in the "spreading it
| out until it's easy to get rid of" direction.
|
| What _does_ need (and not just "need" but actually
| "consume") fresh, cold, clean water (and dry air) is swamp
| cooling, which for some reason seems to do the rounds as as
| environmental silver bullet every few years. But that's a
| different rant.
| DarkNova6 wrote:
| Any design which you are favoring in general?
|
| From an outsider's perspective, SFR based designs look like
| hellish machines which are begging to burst up in flames. In
| contrast, I love the design of the properties LFR, except the
| material problems of high temperature lead. And in German
| circles the Dual Fluid reactor gets a lot of buzz as well.
| orson2077 wrote:
| I have a tremendous love for the fast breeder reactors
| (particularly Superphenix); that we had that technology so
| long ago astounds me. However, I recognise that they are
| technically challenging.
|
| From a modern, pragmatic point of view, I'm very partial to
| SMRs and AMRs (advanced modular reactors). They are also
| easier to implement on non-technical grounds (e.g. site
| permissions).
| pfdietz wrote:
| France has basically abandoned their fast breeder effort.
| They defunded the next fast reactor.
| cyberax wrote:
| Lead-fueled reactors are definitely an interesting area, and
| Russia is in the process of building a 300MWe demonstrator
| (BREST-300-OD). That being said, they have their own share of
| problems.
|
| Startup and maintenance is going to be a beast, slowly
| heating up the reactor to working temperatures is going to
| take almost a year. The other problem is that it's still not
| clear if corrosion problems can be solved satisfactorily.
|
| Reactor construction steel is stainless because it has a
| protective film of oxides on its surface, and lead gradually
| rubs it away (and then rubs away the construction steel, at a
| much faster pace). BREST-OD reactor designers spent a decade
| perfecting a system that is supposed to manage the amount of
| dissolved oxygen in lead, but it needs to be tested in the
| actual reactor conditions. With all its crazy temperature
| gradients and flows.
|
| Another interesting area is light-water cooled breeders. Such
| reactors _are_ possible, but just marginally. And they have
| the nasty positive void coefficient, but it looks like it
| should be possible to compensate for it.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Sure. I have questions:
|
| 1. We need to be at net-zero by 2050 (and realistically based
| on the fast-moving temperature increases happening around us)
| maybe decades before that. SMRs haven't been practically
| deployed yet, and don't seem likely to be even minimally
| deployed until at least the 2030s if ever. How are we going to
| displace all forms of fossil fuel on the miniscule runway we'll
| have left?
|
| 2. We have to deploy vast numbers of SMRs to the entire planet,
| including places with much worse security guarantees than first
| world nations. How do we propose to secure the huge amounts of
| fissile material and waste these reactors will use/produce. I'm
| not worried about fission bombs necessarily, but I am worried
| about pollution and dirty bombs.
|
| 3. "Without major improvements in storage" is doing a lot of
| heavy lifting. We're seeing massive declines in storage prices
| and huge increases in production. If storage follows a curve
| similar to Solar PV, a huge fraction of the profitable
| applications for nuclear will be gone to cheap renewables and
| storage. Even if it doesn't, renewables and today's batteries
| are already driving fossil sources off the grid. How do we pay
| for a technology that will only have a few use-cases left after
| all the low hanging fruit has been eaten?
|
| PS The last question is not a troll. It's very obvious that
| renewables are going to generate something like 80-90% of our
| power. I'm open to the possibility that nuclear could make up
| the remaining 10-20%. But the economics of that chunk will be
| messy, since SMRs will have to compete with dirt cheap
| electricity when the sun/wind are available (even if storage
| stays expensive.) I highly doubt that SMRs are going to
| outcompete Solar PV _when the sun is shining._ What do the
| economics of the mostly-renewables-and-storage-with-SMRs-as-
| backstop world look like?
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| > I'm not worried about fission bombs necessarily, but I am
| worried about pollution and dirty bombs.
|
| Realistically, the nuclear industry will just decide in a few
| years that it's too hard to properly dispose of waste and
| they'll dump it unsafely somewhere that it harms humans. This
| will be easier to do in countries that already have large
| hazardous waste problems. In the US it will require a great
| deal of lobbying, but at least 1/3 of the population will
| support it if they think it makes the economy stronger and
| sticks it to their enemies.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| > We're seeing massive declines in storage prices and huge
| increases in production.
|
| Just in the last 9 months I've seen LFP prismatic cells from
| China drop 50% in price (and about 10% in pack volume). Add
| to that the variety of grid scale storage tech emerging out
| of R&D into the real world, by the time a nuclear reactor
| built today is coming online, it will be obsolete. More
| importantly, as renewables reach overcapacity, we need fast
| dispatch 'peaker' plants, not baseload, which makes gas a
| better transitional power source than nuclear, and batteries
| the end game
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _I've seen LFP prismatic cells from China drop 50% in
| price_
|
| The comp would be the Nth-run cost of an SMR. It's not
| something being produced anywhere close to utility scale to
| be topical over the next 20 years.
|
| The world is bifurcating along renewables + gas (peaker),
| mostly the West, and renewables + coal (peaker-ish) and
| nukes (base), more Asia. Batteries may eventually replace
| some of that. But there are higher-value uses for them than
| grid storage for the foreseeable future (most obviously
| transport).
|
| Globally, we are investing $1.5tn into new gas pipelines
| and terminals [1]. Anyone thinking those are transitional
| investments that will be written off in the next 20 years
| is deluding themselves.
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/climate/greece-
| europe-nat...
| monkaiju wrote:
| Wild to me how someone can open with something as ridiculous as
| recognising "the non-negotiable need of humanity for ever-
| increasing amounts of energy" and then be taken seriously. Its
| not only negotiable, its a requirement that we do not maintain
| such consumptive expansion.
| orson2077 wrote:
| Hey, I'd love to live like the elves in Lord of the Rings,
| but it's not gonna happen. The first world offloads its
| manufacturing burden to the third world, then criticises them
| for polluting the atmosphere with fossil fuels. Also, the
| majority of the world do not enjoy the standard of living we
| do in the first world, and they will want to. Like it or not,
| energy demand will increase. It is non-negotiable unless you
| think there'll be some great die-off.
| fragmede wrote:
| What would you do with a billion dollars?
| fragmede wrote:
| Do you think we'll crack fusion?
| cyberax wrote:
| SMRs never made any sense. They have all the same issue as
| "large" PWRs but they don't have the advantage of scale. Classic
| PWRs are big, but they produce a lot.
|
| SMRs end up requiring exactly the same infrastructure as large-
| scale reactors, but they produce only a fraction of power. The
| largest PWRs will produce 1.6GW, but SMRs are designed for
| <100MW. So you need around 20 SMRs to replace _one_ large PWR.
|
| The math just doesn't work out.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Now do it with economies of scale and transmission losses.
| RobLach wrote:
| Point of note that David A. Schlissel is the goto anti-nuclear
| guy for the natural gas industry.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| When I look at the Ukraine situation I get very nervous thinking
| about having a large number of nuclear reactors spread out over a
| country. They would be perfect bombing targets and could
| contaminate wide areas.
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