NuScale will get the final approval nearly six years after starting the process.
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US regulators will certify first small nuclear reactor design
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I picked a fine week to quit sniffing glue read "Midnight In Chernobyl" by Adam Higginbotham.
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Not really. These NuScale reactors are small enough to use convective cooling rather than pumps. That's a tremendous improvement in safety and a lower cost. The only problem is getting regulatory approval, which they've now gotten.
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HVDC does indeed do a lot of work. And not just the 'transmission' role. It also makes the grid easier to manage and much, MUCH more robust. Studies have already been done on this issue and its largely a settled topic (outside of fossil-fuel lobbying circles). HVDC interconnects are worth far more than they cost at nearly any kind of scale relevant to the issue of renewable intermittency. Nothing you could spend those dollars on will do more for the grid and delivering electricity to businesses and homes. But it has same problem as solar and wind -- actual hardware production is woefully short of the power industry's demand. Lots of very, very long waiting lines.
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Yes, but we don't know how much power is being used to turn the screws. That 50-200 MWe output is only the electrical output, so we don't know what the total output is. I suppose we could compare the thermal output of a NuScale and a navy reactor, but then you have problems of the turbine's efficiency. Which could be significantly different.
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RMBK and Soviet management was the problem with that mess... great idea, hide from the plant management you changed the control rod design but keep the original in the documents you hand them... typical politicans playing engineer. Well, and making a politican a Engineer I suppose :/
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I think you might be confusing NuScale with Terrapower. Terrapower is the Gates backed nuclear effort.
Though it’s possible he is also funding NuScale, but if so he is less involved.
NuScale is mostly owned by the engineering firm Fluor
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This is outrageously wrong. NuScale's own cost estimate for an "nth-of-a-kind" reactor (i.e. after costs have come down due to scale effects) is 3,600 $/kW. This is about three times the current capital cost of a natural gas plant, which the US Energy Information Administration puts at 1,000-1,200 $/kW.
Sources:
https://www.nuscalepower.com/newsletter ... ompetitive
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/assump ... le_8.2.pdf
EDIT: I just realized what the error was in the post I quoted. He must have meant price per megawattHOUR, not price per MW. If so then the comparison is much closer, but he's still dead wrong. The target levelized cost of NuScale is 55 $/MWh. The EIA puts the levelized cost of a natural gas combined cycle plant at 37 $/MWh (see link below page 8).
Sources:
https://www.nucnet.org/news/first-custo ... r-4-4-2021
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/el ... ration.pdf
Despite his misinformation, OP is currently sitting comfortably on page 1 with an upvote/downvote ratio of +67 / -1, with me being the sole downvote. I wish it were easier to provide fact checking feedback on Ars forums.
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It actually is possible for LWR's to load follow within limits, they just can't afford to because their economics rely on 24/7 operation to pay off their loans and/or upgrades where they've been fully paid off but are older designs. I think that's likely to apply to just about any form of nuclear, whether LWR SMR's or molten salt or anything else.
The way to address this is probably to attach storage to the nuclear plant. This could be in the form of batteries or in some designs, thermal storage.
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Except traditional nuclear power plants *can* load follow (they do it in France and Canada), it just wastes energy, and no one’s *built* these new SMRs yet so we don’t know if they will be cheaper- I hope they will but even if they are they are cheaper they are still going to be very capital heavy versus there operations costs so using them to load follow is not going to be an easy thing to justify. I certainly hope the salt reactors we might see in the 2030s have even better load following and capital cost characteristics but we certainly don’t know that and they will definitely still cost a lot to make versus run.
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Just out of curiosity, what's the efficiency of a modern HVDC converter? It used to be pretty low, but a quick search turned up numbers above 90%, which seems pretty high.
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These look like cute little cylinders. But they're not. This is how they're described by the company:
Dimensions: 76' x 15' cylindrical containment vessel module containing reactor and steam generator
Weight ~700 tons in total are shipped from the factory in three segments
Still, it's not huge for its power output.
Dimensions: 76' x 15' cylindrical containment vessel module containing reactor and steam generator
Weight ~700 tons in total are shipped from the factory in three segments
Still, it's not huge for its power output.
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Also, while gas may be a bargain in the U.S. at present, they're doing all they can to build terminals and tankers so they can sell more LNG to Europe. If you don't think that will make gas more expensive here, then you don't understand the law of supply and demand.
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The big ones are >99% efficiency.
That said keep in mind that even with very high voltages you're looking at losses of ~3.5% per 1000 km.
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Natural gas is by far the cheapest generation source by capital costs, which means most of the overall cost is fuel. That's why it gets along so well with renewable intermittency, it's the only kind of generation capacity anyone can afford to idle. On the other hand when natural gas is expensive it can be ruinously expensive, which can happen due to external events like war, or natural disasters like the Texas storm last year. Depending on your point of view you might not care about that, because a power plant operator can easily shut down when natural gas is too expensive for them to run profitable. But as we learned in Texas that can run into problems when the natural gas infrastructure needs electricity to keep the gas flowing. Seems to me from a societal perspective there's a lot of value in a generation source that's not subject to extremes of this kind, it's just a question of whether we can create the right signals that it's worth it for utilities to plan accordingly.
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By definition there is never a day that doesn't have sun. For PV solar you only need to store power overnight; most of which will be used in the first four hours of darkness.
I do this as an off-grid home owner, so I do have to have enough panels to produce sufficient energy during cloudy days in the height of winter.
Once you scale up to the continental level there is never a time when there are clouds over all panels. The challenge then is the underlying grid, and the politics around sharing power across a continent.
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*policies... you mean policies. The whole "full stop" "all in on X" mentality is causing chaos for everyone.
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People say this a lot, but if you look at the fuel cycle it is not so great.
Thorium 232 plus a neutron becomes Thorium 233, which decays into protactinium 233, which then decays into uranium 233. That is fissile, and the fuel you use.
Thorium 232 is nearly stable, thorium 233 has a half life in minutes, protactinium 233 has a half life of about a month, uranium 233 has a half life of hundreds of thousands of years.
While thorium 232 and uranium 233 are not very dangerous, and thorium 233 would decay quickly enough to be workable, protactinium 233 seems problematic.
You will have a lot of it waiting to decay into your fuel (for every day of uranium fuel, you also have a couple month equivalent to that in protactinium). It is also fairly radioactive, such that you cannot get near it, and if something goes wrong, you have a pretty good wait before you can deal with it.
You could design around that to some degree, but it does not seem overly safe compared to other options.
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Once you scale up to continental levels, I guess there's no such thing as a day without sunlight. But if you're more than 66 degrees from the equator, there are definitely days with no sunlight at your location.
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This pricing example is difficult to interpret nowadays.
If you have said this 5 years or so ago, I would have known exactly what price you meant since the price of natural gas was quite stable.
Now though, the price of gas can take ±50% swings from week to week.
On a more on topic note:
In addition to generation assets (nuclear, gas, coal, and anything, really), there also needs to be investment in transmission lines. Otherwise you end up with lots of fancy new generators tied to the consumers using pieces of string and some chewing gum.
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I think what you are looking for is a hydrogen fuel cell. That already exists, but I'm not sure how it compares to batteries at this point.
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I really wish that myth would die. The thorium fuel cycle does not use thorium as a reactive material. It uses 233U as the fuel. So uranium is the reactive material. The thorium cycle just lets you irradiate thorium to produce more 233U. That's easier than other sorts of breeder reactors, but it still requires processing of the irradiated thorium.
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...until you realize that's a standard 1m tall safety railing along the top.
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Also, a *LOT* of people have been working on those problems, for quite a few years. One of my undergrad lecturers back 20 odd years ago (oh god, that hurts to say) was working on metal hydrides as a storage tech for instance, and that wasn't something he'd just started on. The reason that there's still no good storage solutions for hydrogen is that it's a very hard problem, and there may simply not be any good solutions.
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Since the Union of Concerned Scientists is, by policy, against just about everything nuclear, I can't consider that tweet to be unbiased or reliable.
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60-70% each way, so <<50% round trip, compared to most decent battery chemistries at >85%.
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Like many modern breakthroughs I've heard about, it seems there's potential when using graphene. Too bad it's apparently about as cheap as unobtanium to get...
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By "contaminated by politics" you mean "has been opposed by climate change denialists" but that's not a good reason to avoid adopting solutions that are entirely practical.
Are you pretending that nuclear didn't also get billions of dollars of subsidies? https://www.gao.gov/products/emd-79-52
"The anti nuke group" is not exactly a homogeneous entity. Biden supports nuclear power it's not exactly unacceptable on the left. Opposition to nuclear energy is higher on the left, with only 39% support vs 60% of Republicans and 53% of independents, but as partisan splits go these days that's pretty mild. https://news.gallup.com/poll/392831/ame ... nergy.aspx
Support would likely be higher if we came up with an actual solution to the leftovers.
Plus, these won't care if the wind is blowing, night time, or rely on nonexistant battery tech which many places do care about... these are HERE, let's use them at least (until fusion in 20 years).
Except nukes do care about the weather when it gets too hot. https://meincmagazine.com/science/2022/07 ... stay-cool/
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Why? Passive safety means that, whatever happens, the reactor is safe. Even if the operators do nothing. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima all involved steps where the operators did act and made the problem worse. Mostly by not following procedures and because they thought they had a smart idea to ``save'' a core which was already a lost cause. So passive safety strikes me as a very desirable feature, not a problem.
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Um... You know, normally I'd agree, but in this case, the reason why we went with the current design is because of the Arms Race. Non-modular and custom designs were required because of the locations and using the local means of cooling the plants (plus water table issues, and stuff in case of a meltdown).
The spend fuel could be refined to make weapons-grade plutonium, which the other radioactive salt reactors didn't provide.
So it was more of a military/national security decision than it was an economic one.
THEN the politicians and subsidized money to contractors ballooned the costs to astronomical levels, adding to the misery of building a nuclear plant.
Personally, I'm an advocate of radioactive salt plants vs U/Pu plants. The latter still suffers from the waste issues, while non-plutonium reactor fuels tend to have a half-life of months, rather than millennia, making the waste problem much more manageable.
But this idea - factory assembled, modular parts, scalable and presumably lower costs and less environmental impact in construction - isn't an entirely unreasonable middle ground between the two (though molten salt reactors could be scaled, modular, lower costs and less environmental impact especially with respect to dealing with the fuel, which could be, in part, recycled, so they're a step up from the traditional U/Pu reactors).
I do have a question about this, though:
One of the reasons why Chernobyl exploded was that the control rods wouldn't go back into the pile as the reaction began to run away. The sleeves for them had been compromised by the heat, so they couldn't even be forced back into the pile to dampen the reaction. Had they gone back in, the odds favor that the reactor wouldn't have exploded.
That begs the question, does anyone know what the designs are that compensates for the issues Chernobyl suffered from? Are they using a ceramic that doesn't warp or shatter or something like that in extreme heat? If not, then I'd be concerned about these things could, at least in theory, suffer from the same fate as Chernobyl, even if on a smaller scale.
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Renewables are intermittent and natural gas produces CO2. They don’t have to be cheaper than that, just cheaper than building a grid to import power from five states away or telling people that they go without power a few days a year. It’s a much easier hurdle to clear.
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That's not true. The fuel cycles used in power reactors are useless for weapons grade materials. The reason for this is that while they do generate Plutonium 239, they also run on long fueling cycles which makes a fraction of the Plutonium absorb another neutron to become Plutonium 240 which has a high spontaneous neutron rate and therefore causes a bomb to "fizzle" rather than do an efficient nuclear detonation. Weapons reactors have fuel channels that allow them to constantly rotate fuel through the core to avoid this. Some civilian designs have the theoretical possibility of being abused for weapons breeders, like CANDU, but anything where the core is bolted closed and run for 18+ months on the same fuel load will produce unacceptably high Pu-240. The two isotopes are extremely difficult to separate from each other, much more difficult than U235 and U238, so if you have the centrifuges etc to do it, you'll just skip the reactor and make a Uranium bomb.
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It was also an economic decision. In the 1950s, there was a mistaken belief that usable, uranium-rich ores were very rare. So using just mining more and using it once didn't make sense. So the designs favored breeder reactors which could, after processing the used fuel, provide more fuel than they had started with. The scarcity of uranium turned out to be wrong, so that advantage of those designs went away.
That's incorrect. The rods stuck part way in because heating warped the tracks. The real problem was that the control rods had a carbon layer at their lower end, which was supposed to make them slide in more smoothly. But that meant that, until they were all the way in, the carbon was acting as a moderator and increasing the reactor's reaction rate. Which, actually, was known from a previous and less serious incident. But not communicated because a very senior official had been one of the inventors of that reactor design, one of its long-standing proponents, and in the Soviet Union, you didn't distribute information which said a very senior official was wrong.
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In most designs, the control rods are neutron absorbers. You lower them into the reactor, they absorb neutrons, and the reaction slows. In RBMKs, the control rods were dual purpose and promoted reactivity. Water in the cooling channels itself absorbed neutrons, and the control rods had a section of carbon that displaced the water. At Chernobyl, the act of re-inserting the control rods significantly accelerated the reaction.
In a pressurized water design, the pressurized water is a neutron moderator. If the reactor gets too hot and the water starts to boil off, you lose your moderator and the reaction slows. By contrast, in an RBMK like Chernobyl, you lose your absorber and the reaction accelerates. It's inherently self regulating with an upper limit on thermal output, so long as you can reject the heat fast enough to prevent the vessel from over-pressurizing and bursting. Or you can just vent it. That's how you get TMI.
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You're speaking of the reactors of today.
I'm talking about reactors that were first built in the 1950's.
The rationale at the time was that U/Pu reactors could be used to produce power, and provide a source for refining weapons-grade plutonium. Perhaps breeder reactors were supposed to be built more than they were. But the current type of conventional nuclear reactor we have today was derived directly from nuclear weapons testing programs.
So the U/Pu cycle was preferred for its potential to produce or facilitate the production of weapons grade plutonium, howsoever that worked out over the long term.
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