Small modular nuclear reactors get a reality check in new report

- Nuclear technologies missed their window. The use cases where they are the best technical solution now are extremely limited, and that means you can get the investment going to improve them.
  It’s a curiosity now.
  There’s an alternative timeline where Chernobyl doesn’t happen and we decarbonize by leaning on nuclear in the nineties, then transition to renewables about now. But that’s not our timeline. And if it were, it would be in the past now.
  
  I disagree, a bit.
  Base load is still hard to get with renewables, unless you can get a somewhat consistent level of power from them. That's basically just hydro/tidal and geothermal at this point, and all of those have very limited areas where they can be used.
  Nuclear, on the other hand, can be built anywhere except my backyard.
  We have four choices:
  Discover/build another form of consistent renewable energy (what's left? Dyson sphere?)
  Up our storage game, big time (hydrostatic batteries, flywheel farms, lithium, hydrogen, whatever, just somewhere to put all this extra green energy)
  Embrace nuclear
  Clutch on to fossil fuels until we all boil/choke.
  We can do all of them concurrently, provided there's money for it, but we only give money to the last one.
  
  From where I stand you couldn't be further from the reality of the situation.
  Nuclear has a number of advantages from low carbon output per kilowatt over lifetime as well as being extremely cheap per kilowatt.
  But the real advantage being overlooked is the small foot print and land use compared to other forms power generation. A nuclear reactor is ideal for high density population areas, adding no pollution like fossil fuels and using a fraction of the land that renewables require. And there is room for overlap between renewables and nuclear as well, meaning days where wind or solar would produce more power than usual, its easy to scale back solar production to take advantage of cheaper power, and vice versa for times when renewables aren't going to generate enough to meet demand nuclear can increase their output relatively quickly and effectively.
  The future of nuclear is however one of the most important. We are eventually going to be spending humans to other planets, and having mature, efficient and compact forms of power generation with long lifetimes and minimal start up power from idle states is going to be important, solar gets less effective the further from the sun we get, you can't stick a wind turbine on a space craft and expect good results, and you're out of your mind if you want to burn fossil fuels in an oxygen limited environment.
  Treating nuclear as more than a curiosity but rather as the genuine lifeline and corner stone of our futures and future generations is significantly more important than fossil fuel profits today and all their propaganda.
  
  You are on a nuke loving platform and people are going to downvote anything that isn't hard pro nuke. But you are correct. I have had this exact same discussion before. The numbers you are looking for are called the LCOE, or the 'levelized cost of electricity' where the lifetime of the technology cost if factored in. Offshore wind is currently the lowest followed by solar. Nuke is clost to 10x the cost. There is even an international nuke consortium that has several reports agreeing with exactly what you are saying and basically sum it up as: if you invested in nuke early, then it is cost efficient to just keep upgrading. If you didn't invest in it early, then the cost to implement it so high that you are better off going wind/solar. Even if you add in the cost of battery systems, it is still cheaper than building a new nuke plant. And more than that, with these new nuke plants you have to upgrade all your infrastructure because your old wires can't handle the output loads. If you look at the 30+ billion Georgia spent on this plant, they could have simply given out a micro generation grant to everyone to add solar to their roofs, not needed to upgrade the lines, and been far better off. But hey, just like reddit, if you are commenting on lemmy you better be pro nuke only and ignore the other numbers.
  
  So, essentially, nuclear power is like airships, except with worse disasters?
  
  Are you German? That's standard German rethoric and the reason, they shut off their reactors prematurely. It's not how the world sees it though.

Does anyone know about the technology that nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers use? Why are they able to operate but we can't use the same technology on land?
- I was a nuclear operator in the Navy. Here are the actual reasons:
  The designs are classified US military assets
  They are not refuleable
  They only come in 2 “sizes”: aircraft carrier and submarine
  They are not scaleable. You can just make a reactor 2x as big
  They require as much down time as up time
  They are outdated
  The military won’t let you interrupt their supply chain to make civilian reactors
  New designs over promise and underdeliver
  They are optimized for erratic operations (combat) not steady state (normal power loads)
  They are engineered assuming they have infinite sea water available for everything
  There’s more but that’s just off the top of my head
- Because if the military wants something, budgets are big. And they do not need to make money.
  
  Military expenses, the only socialism acceptable to Americans.
- Because military engineers overengineer these things from the most expensive materials available, and they also perform frequent maintenance on them, which is also expensive.
  
  To add to this: A certain type of Soviet submarine used a lead-bismuth alloy as coolant for their reactor. The coolant solidifies at ambient temperature so it had to be heated indefinitely by some way or another or else it solidified and trashed the reactor. I don't think any of them exist anymore since Russia wasn't able to afford sustaining the giant navy after the Soviet collapse.
  Just goes to show how insane nuclear submarine engineering is, or was at some point.
- Why are they able to operate but we can’t use the same technology on land?
  Military budgets. You can use the tech, but no civilian can afford it.
- They used pressurised water reactors with enriched uranium. Dunno how the costs run but there is no strategic alternative anyway. They also wouldn't want such highly enriched uranium to be commonplace.
  
  And cost isn't really an issue for militaries, while it absolutely is for civilians.
- I'm pretty sure they essentially are "one time use" only.
  Extremely simplified:
  They run for 20-30 years without refueling, which means the reactors/system could be built more compact, a higher level of safety and require less maintenance / monitoring / fine-tuning.
  All those parameters are connected in an equation which means if you want higher safety you have to make another parameter "worse". By making the system "one time use" you set the "refuelability" and "repairability" parameters to the lowest and can therefore up the other parameters.
  Also, military requirements are very different from civilian.
- It's expensive in subs too
- I’m pretty sure most military reactors use weapons grade uranium that’s enriched to mid 90%. Countries get sensitive when you start enriching uranium to the mid 90s.
- Because if the electricity produced on these vessels was ten times the normal price, it would still be peanuts in the grand scheme of things.

This was pretty much obvious for everyone from the beginning, except if you're a fanboy of this tech.
- Or a someone getting a bribe from them.

They are still going for big building size reactors that have site specific details even if the core is built in a "factory". This still doesn't scale well.
I wonder if it can be economical to go smaller still and ship a reactor and power generation (TRG maybe or a small turbine) that then doesn't require much other than connecting wiring and plumbing and its encased in at least one security layer covered in sensors if something goes wrong its all contained. Then its just a single lorry with a box you wire in. That has a chance of being scalable and easy to deploy and I can't help but think there is a market for ~0.5-10 KW reactors if they can get the lowest end down to about $20,000, it would compete OK with solar and wind price wise.
I suspect no one has bothered because the regulatory overhead means it has to be big enough to be worth it and like Wind power scales enormously with the size of the plant. But what I want is a tiny reactor in my basement, add a few batteries for dealing with the duck curve and you have something that will sit there producing power for 25 years and a contract for it be repaired and ultimately collected at end of life.
You can sort of do this today using the Tritium glow sticks and solar cells but it doesn't last long enough and the price is not competitive. Going more directly to the band gap in a silicon or something else semi-conductive and a long lived nuclear material could maybe get a little closer price wise.
- You want people to have their own private nuclear reactor in their basement?
  Nukeheads are insane
  
  That's some real 1950s futurism.
  Ford proposed a car with a nuclear reactor.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon
  
  I sympathized with your statement immediately, but then after thinking about it for a bit, most people basically have controlled pressure bombs (gas-water boilers) and buildings filled with gas pipes that can (and have) wiped out whole city blocks.
  It's still not a good idea, obviously, but localized fossil fuels are also ridiculous when you think about it.
  
  I wouldn't mind one in my basement... If I had a basement. But I do have a nice shed, where a 30MW reactor would fit nicely.
  Nukeheads are insane
  That's your opinion. My opinion is that we need distributed power generation that can handle baseload. And neither solar nor wind can do that. My personal experience is, that our wind turbine usually doesn't spin for several periods of up to 10 days in December through March. And energy storage with the required capacity still doesn't exist either. Thus the power plants will be burning LNG, biomass, garbage or oil and coal, for the foreseeable future.
  A centrally controlled, well regulated, network of small reactors will solve the problem.
- I think the ones small enough for a truck are called micro reactors and they top out at 30 MW

Nice source for tech stuff, apparently.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/new-atlas/

Why can't we switch to thorium and molten salt instead? Much cleaner, much safer, same idea.
- Because it is actually not that simple, especially on the "cleaner" and "safer" parts.
  
  Theoretically the main advantage of the thorium is precisely because its safer and cleaner. When removed from its neutron source thorium quickly ceases fission and decay.
- The technology doesn't exist in a commercially viable form. That's why.
- Containing it for a while seems to be super hard. It's really corrosive to most anything that can withstand the heat and pressure. Basically, they haven't managed to make plumbing that works for it. Liquid salt gets mad at shit all the time.
- And even more expensive, no?
- I didn’t think that was ready for commercialize yet. You have all the disadvantages of nuclear, but need additional development costs, need to implement a supply chain, then build out a new technology that is less efficient than existing nuclear, has unclear service life, may be supplanted by fusion or renewables, and you can still use it to make bomb material. Seems like a poor idea and a waste of money.
  From India’s perspective, they’d get to lead in a new technology, where they have huge reserves of fuel, and cheap labor to scale up to a billion energy-starved citizens …. And if it helped increase their nuclear weapons stock in the face of tight controls on plutonium, so much the better
  
  What makes you think it's less efficient. Normally high temperature reactor technology is more efficient not less.

So an interesting thing I've noticed people doing is basically claiming that whatever other side is being astroturfed by the "real evil", right. "Fossil fuel is funding renewable FUD of nuclear reactors!" or "Fossil fuels is funding nuclear FUD of renewables!". You can also see this with liberals claiming that anyone who disagrees with the DNC is a Russian bot, and with people who disagree with libs claiming that libs fund radical right-wing candidates as an election strategy and that this is one of the reasons why they are basically just as bad as those right-wingers.
The core thing you need to understand about this, as a claim, is that they can both be true. They can both be backed opposition, controlled opposition, astroturfing. Because it's not so much that they're funding one racehorse that they want to be their opposition, so much as they are going to fund both sides, plant bad faith actors among both sides, bad faith discourse and division, thought terminating cliches, logical fallacies, whatever, and then by fueling the division, they've successfully destroyed their opposition. The biggest help to the fossil fuels lobby isn't the fact that conversations about nuclear or renewables are happening when "we should be pushing, we should be in emergency mode, everyone should agree with me or get busted" right, as part of this "emergency mode" is us having these conversations. No, the biggest help to fossil fuels lobbies is the nature of the discourse, rather than the subjects of the discourse.
Also I find it stupid that people are arguing for all in on one of the other. That's dumb. Really, very incredibly dumb. Mostly as I see this discourse happening in a disconnected top-down vacuum separate from any real world concerns because everyone just wants to be "correct" in the largest sense of the word and then have that be it. Realistically, renewables and nuclear are contextually dependant. Renewables can be better supplemented by energy storage solutions to solve their not matching precisely the power usage curves and trends, but a lot of those proposed storage solutions require large amounts of concrete, careful consideration of environmental effects, and large amounts engineering, i.e. the same shit as nuclear. It can both be true that baseload doesn't matter so much as things like solar can more closely match the power usage curves naturally for desert climates where large amounts of sunlight and heat will create larger needs for A/C, and it can also be true that baseload is a reality in other cases where you can't as easily transition power needs or try to offset them without larger amounts of infrastructural investment or power losses. Can't exactly preheat homes in the day so they stay warm at night, in a cold climate, if the r-values for your homes are ass because everyone has a disconnected suburban shithovel that they're not recouping maintenance costs of when they pay taxes.
These calculations of cost offsets and efficiencies have to be made in context, they have to be based in reality, otherwise we're just arguing about fucking nothing at all. Maybe I will also hold water in the debates for money not being a great indicator of what's possible, probable, or what's the best long term solution for humanity, too, just to put that out there. But God damn this debate infuriates me to no end because people want to have their like, universal one size fits all top down kingly decree take of, well is this good or bad, instead of just understanding a greater, more nuanced take on the subject.
If you wanna have a top-down take on what's the best, you probably want global, big solar satellites, that beam energy down with microwave lasers.

Lemy has such a hard on against nuclear. I'm seeing reports by antinuclear think tank grifters shoved in my face almost daily...
- I've seen opinions very strongly in both directions on here. I'm very pro-nuclear, but the largest issues they face is always bureaucracy. It sucks that an artificial thing is what's stopping then usually, but it is true. We need some protections to keep things safe, but it seems too harsh for nuclear compared to the dangers it presents opposed to the dangers of other power sources.
  
  Absolutely, and it's by design by candid admission of environmentalist organizations and green parties. Their objective was over regulating the industry beyond any rationality and they succeeded.
- For this particular design, they could have powered the earth by connecting turbines to the eyes of every engineer and project manager from us all rolling them in the back of our heads upon hearing “no cost overruns or delays”.
- Lemy has such a hard on against nuclear
  Maybe you should spend more time outside. Every flavor of nuclear has worse approval ratings than most dirtbag politicians.
  I'm seeing reports by antinuclear think tank grifters shoved in my face almost daily...
  Why do you think you need to PAY people to oppose nuclear? After seven decades of cockamamie “this time it’s different” schemes most people just moved on.
  
  Woa bro I was saying hard on but this is a full on raging erection maybe you should deal with your frustrations

And yet, I remain bullish.

Nuclear fanboys are strange! The won't let it go.
- Because it’s really cool tech and unlike burning coal, oil and gas it’s CO2 neutral. And alternatives like fusion reactors are still decades away, at least, and we can’t build renewables fast enough either.
  In my opinion shutting down all nuclear powerplants was the stupidest thing the government here in Germany has ever done, especially since coal is still being subsidized and our planet isn’t getting any cooler.
  
  None of what you say is false.
  None of what you say is enough to make it the right path for the future.
  
  What is so cool about making some water boil?

It's not because of smr, it's just that all large projects have this level of corruption and grift.
- all large projects have this level of corruption and grift
  Skill issue. I can't even blame capitalism, since the french manage to get almost 90% of their power from nuclear.
  China has 53 GW installed, 25 GW under construction, and another 47 GW planned. Generally they're pretty clear-eyed when it comes to major projects like this, so I think we can infer the availability of cheap hydro and solar doesn't favor doing more than ~15% nuclear since they're only planning to increase it by 150% over the next couple decades.
  Maybe that will change when they set up long term storage/reprocessing.
  
  IIRC the French reactors are all nearing their end of service life and'll be decommissioned soon.
  
  Surely you made a typo? 50 MW is a tenth of the electrical yield of the smallest PWR you can profitably operate.

Edit: Changed introductory wording to be less belligerent. I am sorry if I have caused a significant level of offense.
~~Just wait for the nuclear shills to flood in and claim that nuclear fission is a sustainable and necessary form of power generation.~~ Some people claim that nuclear fission is a sustainable and necessary form of power generation. It is not. Uranium extraction devastates entire landscapes, the construction of nuclear power plants is too expensive (even for SMRs, as the article explains), ergo electricity prices will climb, it is a hugely wasteful use of so many tonnes of concrete (concrete manufacturing is heavy on the environment too), it creates waste that will still haunt us for hundreds of thousands of years (finding geological structures that are guaranteed to be stable that long is difficult), and relative to the initial construction and set-up effort, they don't provide that much energy. We already have methods that can provide us plenty enough electricity that are entirely sustainable by leveraging large-scale atmospheric aerodynamics as well as the largest nuclear fusion reactor at our disposal (the sun). There's simply no need to go nuclear.
- I hate that the conversation is happening on these terms. I hate that we have a bunch of opinionated online "teams" on this issue.
  Hey, you know what we need? All of it. Any sort of energy generation that lowers atmospheric emissions in any way we do need. The concept of "nuclear shills" shouldn't exist, the concept of "solar shills" or "hydrogen shills" or "fossil fuel shills" shouldn't exist. The entire conversation is a PR battle by energy corps to get people to buy into marketing so they can get governments to back popular choices so they can get expensive contracts for large infrastructure work.
  I hate that we have online keyboard warriors overrepresenting the challenges of one of the contributors to lowering emissions while underrepresenting the challenges of others. Hey, do you think nighttime generation and storage is an issue? Maybe installation costs for domestic solar generation, the state of the grid or the uneven distribution of solar power yields on different territories? Because I do.
  And I do think cost and build times for nuclear generators are a problem (which makes it confusing that some countries are dismantling plants that seem to be working safely and are within their expected lifespan, but I digress).
  And I do think the impact of hydroelectric power in nearby areas is a problem.
  And I do think the open questions for geothermal are a problem.
  And I do think the issues with cost, storage and dirty generation of hydrogen are a problem.
  And I do think we should be working on all of that. At once. This isn't kids arguing about which game console is better on the backyard, this is a massive existential issue, and would be even if we weren't dealing with a climate change ticking bomb. This report? It's bad news. Any report that tells us any of the ideas we have for weaning off fossil fuels is not working as well as we expected is bad news. Can we all get with that program?
  
  The problem is that "both" isn't a valid option unless a country has unlimited finances.
  Otherwise you have to decide on what's the most feasible option and then renewables win big time
  I sometimes feel as if the current push for atomic is from the fossil-lobby as they are aware that it either works and they get 10-20 more years to sell oil until the reactors are built - and even if it doesn't work out it still will slow down rollout of renewables
  If you have 100 billion to spend on energy producing you have to choose if you want to go all-in with one source or split it up which would move the end of fossil fuels Back further
  Not to mention having to buy the radioactive materials from dictatorships and having problems to cool down the reactors with rising temperatures and rivers running dry
  I just don't see how atomic isn't a huge gamble that can backfire hard (and I'm not even talking about catastrophic events like Fukushima)
  
  All good points, and I’m all for pretty much any technological research, but
  And I do think cost and build times for nuclear generators are a problem
  Thorium is another form of fission generation that has not been commercialized yet. In the real world, maybe it will be better, or maybe it won’t. But fission generation already takes too long to build out, so why switch lanes to a different form of fission generation that also needs more time and money to be commercialized? Nuclear uranium fission generation had its growing pains over the years, as the technology found challenges to address and areas to improve, but thorium has not yet gotten far enough to run into those so there will be additional challenges requiring time, money, further development
  If those were decades ago when the future was bright for fission technology, I’d be all over this. However the future is dark and cloudy for fission generation, nightfall may be approaching. The advantages of thorium are not enough to shine a new light, there’s not enough room for improvement to save fission generation, this is just an expensive detour.
- ricdeh 4 points 58 minutes ago* (last edited 56 minutes ago)
  Just wait for the nuclear shills to flood in and claim that nuclear fission is a sustainable and necessary form of power generation. No, it is not. Uranium extraction devastates entire landscapes, the construction of nuclear power plants is too expensive (even for SMRs, as the article explains), ergo electricity prices will climb, it is a hugely wasteful use of so many tonnes of concrete (concrete manufacturing is heavy on the environment too), it creates waste that will still haunt us for hundreds of thousands of years (finding geological structures that are guaranteed to be stable that long is difficult), and relative to the initial construction and set-up effort, they don't provide that much energy. We already have methods that can provide us plenty enough electricity that are entirely sustainable by leveraging large-scale atmospheric aerodynamics as well as the largest nuclear fusion reactor at our disposal (the sun). There's simply no need to go nuclear.
  Brought to you by fossil fuel propaganda filtered through renewable resource advocates who would also lose out to nuclear energy.