As much as I am a proponent of nuclear, it's time has past.
It's already non-competitive with solar + battery for any new start builds. I doubt a single commercial installation would exist of these microreactors before battery and solar/battery costs drop another 50-80%.
Even hydro will have issues competing in 20 years.
And I agree that nuclear is not competitive with solar.
But we haven't really invested in nuclear for more than 4 decades now. Nuclear is just a technology. There is no reason to think nuclear capital costs need to be forever locked at the current levels. China has at least three times lower capital costs for nuclear power plants (judging by the cost of the Karachi units 2-3 at $9.5 BN [1] vs the Vogtle units 3-4 at $36.8 BN [2]).
I see it as an issue of path dependency - we had the option to invest in nuclear but did not. Instead we invested in solar, wind and battery. Because of this, the latter is now the better alternative, and it makes more sense to further capitalize on that path rather than "reviving" a previous path for untold billions and tens of years.
We invested massively in nuclear power in recent decades? Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer, Hinkley Point C, Olkiluoto, Flamanville were the west ensuring nuclear investment while at the same time investing in the nascent renewable sector.
In total something like a ~$100-200B investment in nuclear technology. The nuclear investment evidently did not pan out.
How much more should we have spent? Should we just push through no matter the cost even though we have cheaper alternatives?
I don't think you are trolling, as I see you answered along these lines before. But how exactly is "the West" reaping the benefits of scale, or climbing the learning curve, from 5 completely disparate projects, one of which failed? China is building more than that every single year, and has been doing that for a decade.
> Should we just push through no matter the cost even though we have cheaper alternatives?
This is a false dichotomy. I am not saying we should not build solar, or wind. And I am not even saying we should divert resources to nuclear. It should be the private sector. Are you saying even the private sector should not invest in nuclear? Why? Don't you think people are smart enough to decide for themselves what do to with their money? If Bill Gates wants to invest his money in Terrapower, why do you think this is a problem? He invests a lot of money in renewables too.
Nuclear power has had a negative learning curve since its inception. How many hundreds of billions in subsidies to "climb it"?
Personally I think nuclear costs are closely aligned with the Baumol effect. [0] It is construction and does not become more efficient while wages rise as an economy develops.
Therefore there is a small timespan to build nuclear power with acceptable costs right when the economy is advanced enough to manage the technology but wages haven't caught up yet. Like they have done in the west.
> Are you saying even the private sector should not invest in nuclear? Why?
The private sector can do what it wants. But that is not what is happening in the west, the few construction projects that get greenlit do it on the base of absolutely massive subsidies.
Rockets were extrordinarily expensive, and getting more expensive with every passing decade, until SpaceX showed up. The Baumol effect is not a law of nature.
Yes. SpaceX was experimenting with private money until something stuck with a few tiny pushes from the government buying risky launch contracts after they had already proven themselves.
Looking at the current crop of nuclear startups they are relying on government handouts until those run out and then they silently disappear. Making absolutely no progress on the economics of nuclear power.
Today no one talks about NuScale anymore, because they had to admit not solving the problem. Instead it is the latest PowerPoint reactor still being able to claim it is cheap, fast to build and ”by default safe”.
5-10 years earlier the name of the game was mPower. Until that became too expensive.
Bespoke behemoth power plants may have the advantage size in the ability to generate power but they seem to be impossible to bring in on schedule and under budget.
Small Modular Reactors should upend that hegemony through mass production but so far still can't compete. SMRs would be perfect for converting every single existing coal fired plant and allow our power generation to go carbon free in record time.
I'm pro-renewables but believe we need as many energy options as possible.
China has at least three times lower capital costs for nuclear power plants
Well, yes. When consider 'health and safety' as a 'down on the priority list' requirement, there are any number of cost cutting opportunities available to you.
Isn't that a power transfer problem? By that, I mean wouldn't the money spent to invent (they don't exist) these 'mini-reactors' be better spent optimizing the transfer and storage capability of solar, wind, geothermal and tidal power generation to non-optimal locations? I mean, sure, I probably want a nice chunk of fissionables at McMurdo Station, maybe someplace like Svalbard, but as a general solution it seems a poor investment.
Efficient transfer and storage of power from site of generation to site of use has been a topic of intense attention practically since the beginning of electrical generation, back to the Westinghouse v. Tesla AC/DC 'war'. I suspect reality of funding and attention are more complicated than you think.
That's an utterly ridiculous assertion (at least in the US). All one needs to do is claim "job creation" and "increase the tax base" and there will be thousands of small/mid sized town desperately courting your investment dollars, even if you're up front about "this will probably poison your town for centuries and turn your kids into zombies".
If that were enough, I think we'd have a lot more nuclear plants in construction.
The problem with this theory is it takes too long between the step where the boosters sell the town with job creation and when the plant can't be cancelled. If you get a city on board today, chances are you won't have a permit in 10 years, and you need to keep them on board the whole time until the permit is issued or they'll derail the permit. It's better to keep them on board at least until the reactor is fueled... but once it's fueled, the jobs engine will probably sustain itself.
My dad was a civil engineer with a specialty in hazardous waste handling. 10 years was not at unreasonable to get a landfill permitted, built and operational, and there's little new technology involved (unlike hypothetical micro-reactors). And yet, they always had a line of small towns lined up hoping to get one. I think you underestimate how long it takes getting anything substantial and potentially hazardous built in a municipal context.
Giga datacenters plopped down in unincorporated areas and small towns will bribe local officials, suck up all the water, raise local electricity rates, pollute the air with on-site natural gas generators, and given the opportunity, play Russian roulette with SMRs.
Actually, these datacenters are much, much worse in different ways if you'd consider they are much bigger, louder, and resource-intensive. While hypermarts put local business out of business and take up comparatively less land including parking lots (while still being huge), their effects are bad but in different ways, especially given they abuse low wage workers who require government subsidies (indirect corporate welfare) and when they leave suddenly they create food deserts.
I was thinking more of how Wallmart also has a history of 'influencing' local officials to overlook the damage being done, as well as getting small towns to take on huge debt loads for 'required' infrastructure upgrades, all in the hopes that there will be a windfall when they set up shop. But sure, they suck in other ways and if you need some relative shittyness metric then ok I guess.
Yea, micro reactors sound like a great idea for pollution control. But, given how many ships get seized every year trying to fake inspections and a dozen other things- the only way this works out is a modern version of Clipper ships (with less sinkings). Large premiums for getting your cargo across the ocean faster.
How much faster, is for somebody more knowledgeable than me to answer.
And now politics comes into play: these ships would have to not only have significant permanent armament, but given significant latitude to use lethal force.
The president's executive order requires what appears to be a completely overhaul of the NRC by November of next year. I guess we'll see how that goes.
Solar, wind, and battery tech are getting so cheap so fast, it's hard to know whether this will be enough to make nuclear economical.
Perhaps they'd like another Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or Fukushima instead.
It's ignorant people who complain about "regulations" as a monolithic, monochromatic evil MacGuffin that exist merely to stop progress rather than encompassing health and safety regulations written in blood and graves.
I remember my coworker who had to destructively flame test half of the wire nuts he sold to a nuclear energy concern by verifying they self-extinguished within X seconds. Rigor might be expensive, but lives, health, and peace of mind are worth more even if techbros and billionaires don't think so.
The biggest risk of these kind of micro reactors is what happens when they are abandoned and / or receive no investment, maintenance, repairs, etc. for years or decades. What is a catastrophic failure like in that case?
For example, a water and sewer utility near me, serving a similar scale customer base as one of these reactors (a few hundred to a thousand or so), just had to get put into receivership. All the infrastructure has been falling apart for years and the utility had not been investing anything into upkeep, putting its own customers in danger. What if they had owned one of these reactors?
Dear Public
We need cheerfull support for something you will pay for but never see.The military just gave us that tiny little head shake that means NO, and just wont share there nukes, and the accountants said trill something, so we are reaching out for your involvement.
Community input is nice, but we first need working small reactors. Until we see that there is no need to talk about community input. And so far small reactors keep taking longer to get built than estimates.
When we need to power things on the moon, we'll put them there, too. For now, we need to generate the power near (within a few tens of miles) where it must be used. The reason for this is that as we transmit power, we lose some as heat. The further we transmit, the more we lose.
There’s a 50k km difference between the shortest and longest answer to “how far is the moon?”, depending on orbit and phase. The distance can change by about 75m per second.
I don’t know of a reel that can spool up a cable at 270 km/h.
Our current longest power cable is 5376 m long. So we’re only 406k km short of bridging the gap (our longest is only 0.0013% the length required).
Maybe we can offload all bitcoin mining to the moon instead, and just transmit the winning blocks to the earth via radio instead. That way, we can outsource the tremendous emissions caused by bitcoin mining, and use the extra capacity on earth to cut down on fossil fuels.
Which means I’m adding exactly as much to the world as “there will be a semi-truck sized semi-portable nuclear reactor that will somehow work, be politically viable outside of totalitarian regimes, and provide meaningful amounts of localized grid power within our lifetimes”
Zip fucking zero percent chance, forever. Move on.
It's already non-competitive with solar + battery for any new start builds. I doubt a single commercial installation would exist of these microreactors before battery and solar/battery costs drop another 50-80%.
Even hydro will have issues competing in 20 years.
reply