[T]he report’s executive summary certainly gets to the heart of their findings.
“The rhetoric from small modular reactor (SMR) advocates is loud and persistent: This time will be different because the cost overruns and schedule delays that have plagued large reactor construction projects will not be repeated with the new designs,” says the report. “But the few SMRs that have been built (or have been started) paint a different picture – one that looks startlingly similar to the past. Significant construction delays are still the norm and costs have continued to climb.”
deleted by creator
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.
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.
The real advantage of nuclear is it’s constant output of power compared to the variable output of solar and wind
The space based nukes paragraph is irrelevant. While I agree with the point thtat it may not only be useful for long term space habitation, it may be required, I don’t see what that has to do with earth based commercial power generation. They’re very different beasts with little overlap. That’s like saying you support corn based subsidies, because we’ll have to grow crops off world: true but not relevant.
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?
More people died in airship incidents than in civil nuclear power.
E: typo
Yeah, read it. Also the article with the discussion on the death toll. 31 immediate deaths 60 attributable in the following two decades
The official WHO estimate with 4000 more cancer deaths until 2050 is based on the disputed LNT model. Even UNSCEAR itself says:
The Scientific Committee does not recommend multiplying very low doses by large numbers of individuals to estimate numbers of radiation-induced health effects within a population exposed to incremental doses at levels equivalent to or lower than natural background levels.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/05/anti-nuclear-lobby-misled-world
Dr. Thomas shares that contrary to popular belief there is a scientific consensus that the Chernobyl accident has resulted in the deaths of less than 55 people as a result of radiation.
The two airship accidents with the most casualties count together 120 dead (USS Akron and Dixmude).
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.
No. I’m not German. We run our reactors as long as possible because free money is free money ;)
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 military engineers overengineer these things from the most expensive materials available, and they also perform frequent maintenance on them, which is also expensive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think the ones small enough for a truck are called micro reactors and they top out at 30 MW
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.
deleted by creator
Wikipedia has a good discussion, if you don’t need technical detail. They’re fairly optimistic, but do note difficulties. It actually looks more positive than I expected, with the number of demonstration reactors in the last decade or so. Note: “demonstration”. I don’t think there’s anything actually blocking use of Thorium, but some unresolved issues for commercialization, plus it’s not clear the actual results are better, or that nuclear is any longer a good place to invest. It’s more of: at this point, why would you go down that road?
Sorry, can’t find the stuff I read about it a while back when I was interested about it, or was it a YouTube video?
Anyway, here is what I remember: having the radioactive fuel as a liquid makes it easier to leak, and once that’s happened, the environment damage will spread faster to ground water. Also sodium salt is liquid at high temperature, at which it will spontaneously catch fire in contact with oxygen (air), so any leak will cause a catastrophic fire, and this is what caused the demise of the French prototype “Projet Phénix” in the 70s.
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.
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.
I’m not claiming to be any more knowledgeable than what I read here, but Wikipedia says
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
In 1973, however, the US government settled on uranium technology and largely discontinued thorium-related nuclear research. The reasons were that uranium-fuelled reactors were more efficient, the research was proven and thorium’s breeding ratio was thought insufficient to produce enough fuel to support development of a commercial nuclear industry
I didn’t say anything about thorium. Not all molten salt reactors are thorium though. In fact not all high temperature reactors are molten salt either. People keep mixing these technologies up.
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.
And yet, I remain bullish.
Lemy has such a hard on against nuclear. I’m seeing reports by antinuclear think tank grifters shoved in my face almost daily…
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
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.
Surely you made a typo? 50 MW is a tenth of the electrical yield of the smallest PWR you can profitably operate.
Off by a factor of 1000. That’s why I’m not a nuclear engineer.
So, there’s this thing called Java…
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.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.
