Off the Siberian coast, not far from Alaska, a Russian ship has been docked at port for four years. The Akademik Lomonosov, the world’s first floating nuclear power plant, sends energy to around 200,000 people on land using next-wave nuclear technology: small modular reactors.
This technology is also being used below sea level. Dozens of US submarines lurking in the depths of the world’s oceans are propelled by SMRs, as the compact reactors are known.
SMRs — which are smaller and less costly to build than traditional, large-scale reactors — are fast becoming the next great hope for a nuclear renaissance as the world scrambles to cut fossil fuels. And the US, Russia and China are battling for dominance to build and sell them.
One of the less widely discussed issues with nuclear is that the bigger plants are all somewhat unique in their engineering particulars, which makes it more costly to maintain them. SMRs can be more readily standardised, which is expected to improve their economics as well as their cost to maintain.
This is only partially true, France for example has standardized its reactors in the past, with a lot of success, and is planning to do it again for the new projects which are planned in the 2030s. Now it was done in the past with little care for local populations and so on, so we’ll see how it goes. What is true though is that standardization also makes sense when there is a repetitive market foreseen. New nuclear project tend to be announced in small numbers, due to the difficulty of investing so much capital at a time, which makes standardization difficult. Smaller reactors may help, but I remain sceptical with the tech.
If I’m not mistaken SMRs also handle power demand shifts better and don’t have to just do a base load. Something very useful with the growth of renewables and how they are not always supplying power.
I doubt it. Unless they have power storage of some kind, like SSR designs where they use a thermal battery of some kind.
The fundamental issue with nuclear power is that it produces a fixed output (which falls over time) which cannot be managed. Aside from just deleting what would otherwise be power (which is where the power storage comes into play)
It’s not impossible though, but then again it’s not impossible for any nuclear plant to store energy.
The small reactors on submarines can maneuver very quickly without causing fuel damage. Less power per core = less heat generation. Large reactors are limited by flux rate because they can have such high localized heating during maneuvering which has the potential to damage fuel. In that sense, SMRs could raise and lower power to meet demand or even operate on full power/standby basis like what gas plants offer during peak load.
I can’t speak to the strategy of an electric utility using SMRs, but to your point, I would think the idea would still be base load. Build a site with the potential for more SMRs to be built to meet demand in the future.
ok so i get what you’re saying here.
But there is a fundamental thing with nuclear power, where the “burn up” of nuclear fuel doesnt change. In a submarine it doesn’t matter because you’re backed by a military force and you use 70-80% or 90+% enrichment, where as on land we have 3-5% upwards of 20% for the higher enrichment stuff these days i believe.
In the water its about safety and ensuring power production, on land it’s about ensuring reliable and efficient power production. The only beneficial way of doing this is electricity storage. If you’re nuclear reactor isn’t producing power and has fuel, you are quite literally burning money. Think about it like diverting gas/coal input into a gas/coal fired power plant when power demands lower, as opposed to just lessening the consumption.
But yes it would be about 100% baseload first and foremost, everything else is a future concern, eliminate as much static load as you can and then deal with the rest in other manners.
Yeah I’m with you. I have a senior license at a US nuclear plant just for some background as I don’t know yours. What I’m saying is that I can see value of multiple, say 300MW SMRs at a single site, that can go from 0-100% very quickly compared to current 900-1100MW reactors. So the idea would be you could have a plant in Mode 3 Hot Standby ready to raise power for peak loading. Ideally you’d have at least one reactor online at all times that provides its own in house loads and the standby in house loads that would be quite low. That is the value I see.
The issue at that point would be refueling and maintenance outages. It seems ideal that the design would need to support online refueling and enough loops/system availability to do the majority of plant maintenance online. In addition, the regulatory landscape has a lot of momentum to allowing plants to move to risk informed tech specs which allow for major equipment outages in modes of applicability. If the industry as a whole can agree on a handful of SMR designs with multiple capacity options, it really could be a stop gap to hopefully fingers crossed fusion power in, I don’t know, 50-100 years from now? My two cents.
That is a particular type of reactor that is in testing.
Yes, Soviet/Russian technology, the posterchild for prudence and carefulness.
to be fair, it’s trivial to design a safe reactor, the RBMK just wasn’t a good design.
There is a paper out there on the presumed design of russian naval reactors if you want to have a read yourself. It’s decently informed.
SMRs are interesting.
Frankly i just think we need to take SMR tech and scale it up to stationary plant size. I realize thats a big ask, but it’s already a big enough ask to make SMRs a thing that exist and work. Plus a whole plant is more inline with existing regulations.
Also worst case scenario, it’s just normal nuclear plants. Instead of a bunch of small ones. We have a bunch of big ones, but with standardized designs.
Big Bespoke Reactors? Isn’t that what we do now?
I thought the entire advantage was to be small and use multiple.
- Construction is cheaper because you can gear up a factory to make many of the same thing
- Assembly is cheaper and more reliable because you have more complete modules shipped in for less site assembly
- Sizing is cheaper because instead of designing for the specific site and specific needs, design for how many standard modules you want
- Enhancing is cheaper because a smaller unit is easier to fit into whatever situation you have than to redesign the whole thing
- Maintenance is cheaper because taking one offline is less of a hit in total power generation
I think you’ll notice i never said bespoke. Realistically there will be minor differences from plant to plant, but you just design it in such a way that it’s modular and not super set in stone, which will help alleviate that problem.
Hey if you spiritual but not religious types could not fuck this up like the boomers did we would all appreciate it. I get it, you got pyramid power and The Secret. I don’t care. That is your concern. Once you start shilling for OPEC it becomes our concern.
“SMRs — which are smaller and less costly to build than traditional, large-scale reactors”
They somehow forgot to mention a few key things:
They don’t actually exist yet.
They may be cheaper but they generate way less power. If you added up the cost of enough SMRs to equal one conventional nuclear plant they would be even more expensive than an already prohibitively expensive method of generating power.
What a dumb article.
One significant benefit of these would be the lack of transmission losses that plague massive plants which have to send electricity sometimes hundreds of miles. Having smaller units maintained by municipalities would be cheaper for cities far from major electrical plants.
You could make the same argument for renewables though, and they’re much, much more inexpensive.
Depends on many factors. Solar would be useful if the area had extensive terrain that could serve the city, however, in northern latitudes winter would be challenging with short days and low angle sunlight. If the situation allows, wind power could be useful, when the wind is blowing. The fantastic thing about these units is that they’ll crank out the KW day, night, no matter the season or location. They are not restricted to large generator farms with the scale of upkeep and maintenance they require. A city could be isolated in challenging remote areas and be self sustaining for their energy needs. These aren’t meant to be a “fix-all” solution for every situation, but they make tremendous sense in many applications where current methods are not ideal.
I get what you’re saying but we really should move away from needing power to be generated locally. High voltage DC can move power across huge distances with minimal loss - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
We don’t need new nuclear in the US, we need the government to get off its ass and mandate an upgraded national grid so we can send power to wherever it’s needed. We already have the perfect conditions in the south for solar and the midwest prairies for wind, as well as offshore. Couple those with storage and there really is no case for SMRs outside of them being a way for fossil fuel companies to justify continuing to kill the planet while we wait for “the next big thing in nuclear power”.
ok so, minor addition here.
Both ac and HVDC are relatively efficient forms of power transfer.
The problem with AC is the skin effect (tl;dr is that the current is carried around the edge of the conductor, not the center, though you can cheat this as well) And the fact that AC running in a submarine cable is going to essentially act as a capacitor, and cause problems. (large losses)
AC traveling through the air doesn’t have this problem. The skin effect is less pronounced than you think because you can just use a higher voltage since it requires less current (transformers also have really good efficiencies when not saturated or undergoing other shenanigans) Also you can design the cabling to abuse this, using outer strand conductors, and then an inner structural strand, to strengthen the line.
HVDC is particularly applicable in undersea cables, due to the capacitor thing just not existing. Making it actually viable. It’s applicable above ground, but the problem is transforming between AC to HVDC and then back to AC. There are reasons to do this, for instance you may be between two grids with two different frequencies, this is the only solution in that case. You may want the grids to be able to operate semi independently (again frequency related)
The big problem with HVDC is that it’s inevitably more complicated. Prior to micro electronics we would use vacuum tubes, or prior to that, two motors linked end to end, one run on AC the other generating DC, and then duplicate that in reverse on the other side (that was also how we used to do voltage conversion in DC systems IIRC)
These days we just use semiconductors, but carrying a lot of power is hard, and expensive. (and also not perfectly efficient) There’s a reason massive boxes of copper wire and mineral oil are the standard solution. Dead simple, easy to maintain, and they quite literally just work.
Thanks for the info, interesting!
I heard about a plan to use HVDC to move solar power from Morocco all the way to the UK.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/the-uks-wild-plan-to-use-a-giant-cable-to-catch-sun-from-the-sahara
If that’s feasible then moving solar power from Arizona to Minnesota or wind from North Dakota to New York seems feasible. One criticism of renewables is that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow but it’s always sunny and windy somewhere and we can move that electricity around with HVDC, lessening the need for storage.
but it’s always sunny and windy somewhere and we can move that electricity around with HVDC, lessening the need for storage.
this is true. But the technicalities present are immense and would require some significant mathematical modelling in order to optimally determine the solution.
The primary issue with long distance transmission is that unless it’s one singular line, it’s really difficult to know where power is going. It’s realistically going to take the path of least resistance, but what this path is, where it is, and where it goes is complicated. If you have a long distance transmission line from point A to point B it’s much much simpler and a lot easier to deal with.
A particular example would be alaska, particularly farther north, where the sun gets really bizarre in the winter. That’s a prime candidate for anything that isn’t solar basically. Wind might even be problematic with the temperatures there. Nuclear however? Great starting point.
It’s hard to phrase it, but basically. hyper local generation is going to be more important than long distance transmission with renewables, particularly wind, it’s just more efficient that way. Even if norther solar panels produce less power than more southern panels, it might actually make sense to have them there, due to transmission complexities, losses, and just general shenanigans. (if one significant transmission line goes down an entire grid can fail)
If you were to just plonk down a plant in arizona for instance, and hook it up to the local grid. That power is going places. Where exactly? Nobody knows! It could be literally anywhere within the grid! Heres a particularly good demo of this
You could very well export lots of solar and wind, but honestly, i think it’s just going to be more feasible to properly manufacture nuclear power, until we can get fusion power to be a thing that exists. It’s stable, flexible, and we know it’ll work. As anybody would in CS would tell you, it’s a heuristics problem, and heuristics suck. They’re relatively accurate, and give good information, but they are a pain in the ass to develop. Though i guess if solar manages to do that for cheaper it just doesnt matter lol.
(also in case you’re wondering, they’re using HVDC cuz it’s undersea transmission. They might also run at different frequencies? I dont know.)
Except long distance power transmission losses are not minimal. Depending on many factors, losses can easily be in the 5% - 10% range. With the amount of energy going through those wires, that’s HUGE. The additional complexity and inefficienies of relay stations, all add up. Having worked in the power sector for nearly a decade, I knew engineers who were celebrated in being able to squeeze an improvement of tiny fractions of % efficiency, as that resulted in millions of dollars saved throughout the year.
Are you referring to AC or HVDC?
They exist, what do you mean? We’ve been powering a fleet of submarines with them since the 1950s.
Yeah, it’s going to cost a lot upfront to get them commercially viable, but for the few places where renewables need assistance, I don’t see why this can’t make sense.
They exist, what do you mean? We’ve been powering a fleet of submarines with them since the 1950s.
I’m talking about methods of power generation that contribute to the grid. I thought that was obvious, my bad.
Yeah, it’s going to cost a lot upfront to get them commercially viable, but for the few places where renewables need assistance, I don’t see why this can’t make sense.
They will never be commercially viable. The reason we have always built the biggest nuclear plants feasible is because that was the only way that they made any financial sense.
