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  • hol up google wants 500MW? that's 1. one regular sized reactor that could be delivered in the same timeframe, and 2. google uses already almost 3GW on average (2023), this is compared to about 2.5GW for ms of which something in the ballpark of 700MW just for ai. they're gonna need much more, like five regular sized reactors if they want to use entire baseload (that's how NPPs work best. the french made load-following NPPs but i guess it'd be harder to make them small) or swing wildly with power consumption to conform to renewables

  • Of all the things that will never happen, this is the one that will never happen the most.

  • Honestly thank god they're vaporware. Somehow I don't think we should have startups building actual nuclear reactors.

  • I don't claim to be an expert on nuclear power, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but from what I've seen, smaller reactors don't seem to make much sense. The trend seems to be towards bigger reactors with bigger power output. Some of it thanks to the bureaucracy of getting permits per reactor, but also the physics, engineering, real estate and economics involved. Conventional (i.e. existent) reactors are typically a fairly small part of a nuclear power plant's footprint, so no matter how much you miniaturize them you will have the overhead of security, operations, cooling and electrical infrastucture.

    If someone can fill me in on the benefits of smaller, more modular nuclear reactors and how they might outweight those of large installations, I'm interested.

    • The hypothetical benefit is that prefabricated parts are a lot less dependent on the site. This will make the reactor cheaper to build.

      There's also a perception sleight of hand - "modular" doesn't mean the reactor is a module you ship in on a big truck, put some uranium in and away you go. You're building a power station in a fixed location.

      Also you still need a shitload of water.

    • square-cube law is in full force there

      one argument in favour of SMRs i've seen is that while less efficient than regular sized reactors, these are cheaper per unit (but not for MW) so some of them can be built earlier than bigger reactors. which doesn't matter because these things don't exist

  • BRING IT ON NITPICKY NUKE NERDS

    Well acthtually we prefer to be called fission/fusion nerds

    "greenwashing is cheaper than action" indeed. (edit2) On that note, storytime about the clownshow that is Dutch politics. So our radical right wing government is pro nuclear power, of course, and they want to build more powerplants. So what are they planning on doing? They are going to start a study on which locations are best. Which is maddening, as these studies have already been done before (so it prob is just an attempt to hopefully have the study finish when it isn't them in power anymore so they are not at risk of starting an too expensive megaproject). But it gets worse, the absolute clowns of our farmers party just went 'fuck the studies' and they just pointed at a province where there are a lot of farmers and went 'we will put a powerplant there'. And this is how they discovered nuclear powerplants need running water and they picked one of the areas without a major river. ('im ignoring the clownshow re 'the immigration crisis' (not a crisis) as this post is already too long, and there is a big risk of honk overdose if I go into that).

    • Our local Swedish right-wingers in gov have a chubby for nukes too[1], because their main motivation besides hating on brown people is pissing off Greens. But in the Swedish way they handed this off to a researcher ("utredning") who found out that to get the industry on board you need a) rock-solid political promises (so need to get the Social Democrats at least on board) and b) have a price guarantee for power for at least a decade, along with massive government loan guarantees.

      It's gonna be hard to get voters interested in 10 new reactor sites (NIMBY gets supercharged when it comes to nukes) if it slightly pushes up lending rates and power bills.

      [1] the right-wing part of the opposition social democrats like them too to be fair

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