Very excited to see some modern fast reactors happening!
Nuclear waste leaves me with such reservations, these fuel cycles where we use a % or two of the energy, create a bunch of tranuranic waste, and then deal with stuff for thousands of years.
Fasr reactors seem uneconomic, like something industry & capitalism would never ever do. The negative impact of everything else is so easy to externalize. The risk of doing anything new or well is so low.
It's enormously sad to find that military and military alone has the capacity to try new things, to invest better in the future. But here, I'll take it.
Nuclear is uneconomical because politics wants it to be.
Leading up to the 1980s, nuclear was poised to replace basically the whole power grid. "Too cheap to meter" they said. Fossil fuel energy companies and the petroleum exporting countries who had only recently gotten their cartel going were, shall we say, not happy with this. (Also Russians. Literally they got caught funding anti-nuclear "environmental groups"; someone published the documents after they went into Ukraine. Russia is another major petroleum exporter.)
So they ran a propaganda campaign centered around Chernobyl to paint the safest known method of power generation as one too dangerous to use, so it would be buried in safety rules the incumbents weren't subject to themselves. (If a nuclear power plant released as much radiation as every coal-fired one does, it would be shut down.)
And now they say "well, it would be nice, but we can't use it because it costs too much."
I'm frustrated by this argument. Yes, nuclear power gets unfairly maligned across several axes. Yes, fossil fuel is even more of a disaster. But what we have now is a situation where nuclear power has all of its negative externalities properly priced in, whereas fossil fuel doesn't, and yet we have people arguing to remove the forces that properly price in the externalities of nuclear rather than doing the right thing, which is properly pricing in the externalities of fossil fuels. This is counterproductive. Look around at our modern world and see everything enshittifying around us in the relentless pursuit of profit; now imagine that applied to nuclear power. What a nightmare.
We have a slew of safety regulations that apply to, for example, chemical plants that handle substances every bit as dangerous as anything in a nuclear reactor. They basically work. They increase the operating cost a little bit. But they're not purposely designed to make the operation prohibitively expensive, so they don't.
Pricing externalities is a cost/benefit calculation, because overhead and inefficiency are externalized harms too. If you can prevent a 1 in 100 chance of a million dollar loss for $100 then you do it. If you have the "opportunity" to prevent a 1 in 10,000 chance of a million dollar loss for $10,000, you don't, because the expected cost of preventing the loss is more than it is to incur it. Unless you're trying to destroy something, and then you insist on it.
My impression is that nuclear waste isnt dealt with hardly at all, especially in the US. https://www.energy.gov/em/cleanup-sites shows what seem like a dozen sites where negative externalities aren't at all priced in, where the government has had to cope. The US hasn't a single viable plan for nuclear waste, as far as I can tell.
And what of other nations? Setting this image out there that nuclear power is great & easy, even though so few have actually figured it out; that seems like a danger.
Virtually all of these are nuclear weapons sites, not civilian power sites. A quick skim shows that the contamination in many of them has to do with producing plutonium, which current power reactors do not even use.
"Nuclear waste" is only a problem because we don't build new reactor designs that use the "waste" of existing reactors as fuel. One of the best arguments for building new reactors is to get rid of it so nobody has to try to store it for thousands of years like a chump.
Ah yes, politics wants it to be uneconomical that is why NuScale's nuclear power plant has doubled its costs. It is certainly not the cost of input materials or changes in the interest rate, which makes long financing durations significantly more expensive. No way, it must be a political conspiracy against nuclear power (but somehow the nuclear hating politicians don't seem to mind paying the inflated bills).
"Remarkably, the new $89/MWh price of power would be much higher if it were not for more than $4 billion in subsidies NuScale and UAMPS expect to get from U.S. taxpayers through a $1.4 billion contribution from the Department of Energy and the estimated $30/MWh subsidy in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). "
> Ah yes, politics wants it to be uneconomical that is why NuScale's nuclear power plant has doubled its costs. It is certainly not the cost of input materials or changes in the interest rate, which makes long financing durations significantly more expensive.
You're talking about recent events that apply to any kind of large scale construction project. If that was the reason then why didn't anyone build a hundred nuclear plants during the decade+ of low interest rates when building materials were cheaper?
> but somehow the nuclear hating politicians don't seem to mind paying the inflated bills
They're not the same politicians. And subsidies aren't as effective as actual regulatory reform because they don't scale, which the opponents know so they don't fight them as hard. They can stand adding 3 GW of nuclear plants to the US grid; adding 300 GW would shut down a large fraction of existing fossil fuel generating plants. But the only way that happens is if you address regulatory inefficiency because large subsidies only fit in the budget when you're not building many new plants.
Lazard's LCOE on nuclear is 6x as expensive as solar and wind.
I would like to think that regulatory issues are responsible for most of that. I would. I simply don't think it is all pencil pushers.
The real challenge is that any broad nuclear power push would result in reactors coming online in 8-10 years. That's 8-10 years of solar/wind benefiting from economies of scale, cheaper grid storage, perovskites, better wind designs, better engineering of offshore wind, etc. It's my very rough guess that solar/wind will drop by 50% in "real dollar" cost in the next 10 years, with only marginal increased cost for grid storage using sodium-ion or sodium-sulfur or pumped hydro or any manner of storage.
I think there is enormous potential still in nuclear, and I'm glad applications like this nuclear contract are keeping it afloat. I'm glad the Chinese are pursuing an MSR, and active "next-gen" nuclear startups are in action. I believe there is a design and regulatory framework and proven safety system that can result in competitive nuclear power against solar and wind prices when they stabilize.
It would be great if the air force reactor here and the various "next gen" reactors had examples in operation/production with numbers that substantially undercut the old solid-fuel PWRs monstrosities. But they aren't, and nuclear missed the train of having working substantive designs of these to compete head to head with low cost solar/wind or low-cost gas turbine for leveling. But ... the nuclear industry did not have these ready.
It really doesn't help when nuclear proponents brush safety under the rug, even if Chernobyl was symptomatic of Russian disregard for individual human life, and Fukushima didn't actually kill that many people.
Really, that doesn't send the message you think it does. It sends the message that all the pro-nuclear forces just roll their eyes at compliance and safety as this annoyance. That is a terrible terrible message, because that paints the pro-nuclear people as sloppy and careless. It doesn't matter than coal releases more radiation, or the technical death rate.
The message should be instead "we have learned from X and Y, let me explain to you why reactor design Z makes this and a vast array of other scenarios much safer". Of course for MSRs/LFTR, that's the inherent self-regulation of the fluid, "the plug"/cooling pool", it "burns" 99% of fuel practically eliminating waste transport risk. I know other newer designs are inherently more safe as well.
You should thank China for bringing new nuclear designs online, now the US's labs are starting projects in nuclear power generation again. It may take a decade, but I think a nuclear design will come out that governments can get behind.
But really I also see the modern day pro-nuclear crowd as "polluted" by the old guard that just wants the same old crappy solid fuel rod huge dome PWRs limped along (which I actually support) and to keep all the old guard manufacturers and fuel rod reprocessors as the main providers of nuclear reactors. This IMO is very bad, because those industries, which will not survive without subsidies, will hinder and undermine any newer reactors politically.
Nuclear needs a reboot. I like that this project seems like a step towards a reboot.
> The real challenge is that any broad nuclear power push would result in reactors coming online in 8-10 years. That's 8-10 years of solar/wind benefiting from economies of scale, cheaper grid storage, perovskites, better wind designs, better engineering of offshore wind, etc. It's my very rough guess that solar/wind will drop by 50% in "real dollar" cost in the next 10 years, with only marginal increased cost for grid storage using sodium-ion or sodium-sulfur or pumped hydro or any manner of storage.
This is not really a problem because there is little chance of replacing 100% of fossil fuel generating capacity on that timeframe. If some alternatives become cheaper and then it turns out to be 35% nuclear, 55% renewable and 15% fossil fuels instead of 35% nuclear, 35% renewable and 30% fossil fuels, either one of those is better than having less nuclear and more fossil fuels.
> It sends the message that all the pro-nuclear forces just roll their eyes at compliance and safety as this annoyance.
But this is why the propaganda has been effective. Because the assumption is that the compliance and safety rules are in good faith, when they're not.
It's not that safety doesn't matter, it's that nuclear reactors are safe and still would be if the safety regulations were reasonable instead of intentionally burdensome, which is what needs to happen.
> The message should be instead "we have learned from X and Y, let me explain to you why reactor design Z makes this and a vast array of other scenarios much safer".
Focusing on safer designs is like investing in platform shoes because someone you are three feet taller than keeps accusing you of being too short. They are not accusing you because you are actually too short.
And when they've had a rule instituted saying that anyone from your school has to fly to Alaska to have their height measured before each game or you can't play basketball, finding a way to make yourself taller doesn't get you back to the mainland before you miss the game.
> But really I also see the modern day pro-nuclear crowd as "polluted" by the old guard that just wants the same old crappy solid fuel rod huge dome PWRs limped along (which I actually support) and to keep all the old guard manufacturers and fuel rod reprocessors as the main providers of nuclear reactors. This IMO is very bad, because those industries, which will not survive without subsidies, will hinder and undermine any newer reactors politically.
They should only do so if the new nuclear reactors came at the expense of the existing ones, but why would they do that? The whole idea is for them to come at the expense of fossil fuels.
Clearly these numbers add up to 105% because if renewables become cheaper it will cause the total installed generating capacity to increase relative to the alternative and definitely not because I can't count to 100.
> The real challenge is that any broad nuclear power push would result in reactors coming online in 8-10 years.
I see this argument a lot. It seems to be based on the assumption that grid-scale solar and wind plants can be built overnight which is... not the case.
Grid scale solar plants barely even exist, and I believe all of them are heavily subsidized.
1) Come on, you can build windmill farms and solar farms in stages and start getting generation far faster than the time to get a nuke plant up. They can be easily upgraded/replaced without worrying about nuclear fuel. Nuclear reactors are 8-10 year projects with no payoff until the switch is turned, until the holy grail of the cheap shipping container sized reactor is realized. A windmill farm can start with one or two windmills and grow from there.
2) Lazards has specific categories for unsubsidized and subsidized, and NO WAY subsidies are responsible for nuclear being SIX TIMES more expensive. The nuclear industry shouldn't complain about subsidies, it's the only way they stay relevant. And the subsidies that really matter are the subsidies for fossil fuels.
"One or two windmills" aren't going to replace an 8 GW nuclear power plant, and by the time you could "grow from there" you'd have had enough time to build a nuclear plant. Which, you know, still works even when the wind isn't blowing.
Are you familiar with the expression "hope is not a plan"?
What the person was referring to is the fact that you will have an incremental increase in production with wind. With nuclear you will have to wait until the reactor is done.
Looking at my country there will most certainly be no nuclear reactors in place before 2035, whereas there is almost 70TWh/yr of sea based wind power waiting for permission to start building (expected to be operational in 5 years), and another 300TWh/yr on track to submit proposals for consideration.
It is hard to feel positive about nuclear power when everybody talks a lot, but nothing seems to happen. SMRs are mentioned everywhere but the economics make them seem like a crazy bet currently.
The fact that it takes 10 years is the thing we need to address.
For example, one of the problems has been that the government will change the construction requirements during construction. If the reactor was completed it would be allowed to continue using what it was licensed to use initially, but if it's half completed they will change the requirements and require them to start over. This could be solved by using the requirements in place on the day construction begins rather than the day construction ends, which is what would have been permitted if construction had taken less time, which in turn allows construction to take less time.
You might also consider the nature of an issue to determine whether it should prevent the plant from being commissioned. If two pipes are too close together and it would cause the material to fatigue in 15 years instead of the expected 30, this is a problem that needs to be fixed, but it is one that could reasonably be fixed two years after operations begin instead of holding up the start of operations for two years.
The US alone has performed 520+ atmospheric nuclear weapons tests. I'm not suggesting adding to that number, but perhaps there is a method to get nuclear waste off-planet.
The difference is large. If you blow up a nuke without contact to soil and stuff there is very little left for dangerous long term contamination. Hiroshima isn't dangerous to live in. Chernobyl is.
If a rocket blows up and spreads whatever is left when we removed it from a nuclear power plant that would be bad.
If nuclear waste is radioactive, it means that it can be refined into usable products for power production.
The dangerous stuff that's left over is dangerous because it was formally cheaper to bury it and mine more than to refine it .
Not to mention the majority of nuclear reactors were designed to create weapons grade materials which was an equally wasteful activity creative even more waste that needed refinement back to usable fuel.
Now that's coming to an end since power production is far more important. There may be a point Where we will see ourselves digging up nuclear waste sites to recover the left over refuel.
Nuclear waste leaves me with such reservations, these fuel cycles where we use a % or two of the energy, create a bunch of tranuranic waste, and then deal with stuff for thousands of years.
Fasr reactors seem uneconomic, like something industry & capitalism would never ever do. The negative impact of everything else is so easy to externalize. The risk of doing anything new or well is so low.
It's enormously sad to find that military and military alone has the capacity to try new things, to invest better in the future. But here, I'll take it.