We recently had an election in AU where "nuclear" was on the agenda as the (losing) party/coalition were promoting nuclear as a "solution" to our aging coal-generator fleet.
The trouble is that:
a) "baseload" is a misnomer, what is required is storage to cover periods when "the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow"
b) CSIRO (our government research organization) releases a regular report called "Gencost" [1]. It has shown regular decreases in solar and wind, with costs for other solutions (coal/gas/nuclear) growing during the same period
c) The problem for nuclear power in AU is doubled because there is no local infrastructure or engineering or industry for the nuclear fuel cycle
d) AU home solar is world leading, with now a government subsidy available for home battery storage to soak up the midday peak, one state (SA) regularly runs on 100% renewables
e) SMRs do NOT exist in a commercially deployable way. There are any number of research and demo-scale possible SMRs, but none that are immediately able to be deployed
f) SMRs are too SMALL to replace existing coal gen, especially compared to the capacity of solar and wind farms, with offshore wind only just being started in AU
> "baseload" is a misnomer, what is required is storage to cover periods when "the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow"
"Storage" can't do that for more than smoothing out daily peaks. The only longer-term storage that matters when you look at the numbers is pumped hydro, and that's built out. That's why "baseload" is in fact quite relevant; it's way better to supply those critical needs via a highly reliable source.
First, "providing baseload" is a privilege you enjoy if you are the unconditionally cheapest provider of electricity at all times, not something that anyone ever needs you to do.
If you only need power for short periods of time when renewables are unavailable, then "constant output" plants like coal or nuclear are the last thing you want to build-- they are simply not worth it for the the short periods of time when renewables are down.
You want simple, cheap powerplants instead that trade off higher fuel costs for low capex, and that is currently gas. You want cheap MW (max power) from those plants instead of cheap MWh (energy), basically.
But how often is it cloudy and windless for weeks at a time? And for those once-every-few-years scenarios, why shouldn't we build (far cheaper) carbon-captured natural gas peaker plants?
Besides, you've got to keep in mind that we aren't going to be building for yearly-average kWh consumption. Companies will be building overcapacity to take advantage of high-demand/low-supply peak pricing.
I don't think it is unlikely that we'll end up with a situation where PV on an overcast day is enough for "baseload", with the practically-free electricity on sunny/windy days opening up new economic opportunities.
"Storage" can synthesize hydrocarbons, i.e. fuel, which can then be stored forever, until energy is needed.
This was already possible by the time of WWII, but now there are many methods in development for reducing carbon dioxide by electrolysis, and then use the product to synthesize longer hydrocarbons, which have higher efficiency than the older methods.
The round-trip efficiency of this will always be worse than for batteries, which remain a better option for short time storage, but synthesizing fuel will be a valid method for storing energy for the winter during the summer, and also for applications where batteries are unsuitable, like aircraft and spacecraft.
Long term literally dirt cheap thermal storage coupled with extreme cost optimized PV that would provide 600 C heat 365/24/7 for as little as $3/GJ, on par with combustion of inexpensive natural gas. Complementary with diurnal storage from batteries, this would be a complete solution to the renewable intermittency problem.
Baseload is quite irrelevant, because baseload also doesn't supply those critical needs. "Baseload" is by definition power production that can't follow the demand curve, and thus can't provide the power to keep the grid stable. It's as bad as solar and wind in this way, it's just that instead of having a fixed but variable supply curve it has a fixed but flat supply curve.
What you want is dispatchable power. Gas peaker plants for instance. Or overbuilt solar + batteries. Not baseload.
A typical car battery stores 60 kWh (the average capacity of models is increasing), so, charged during the day using inexpensive renewable electricity (particularly solar), it can power a household during one of the rare winter nights with insufficient wind.
Case in point: France. A household consumes an average of 14 kWh of electricity per day. The capacity of electric cars will exceed 500 GWh before 2035 and 2000 GWh between 2040 and 2050.
Trucks, utility vehicles, and stationary batteries (domestic and industrial) will add to this. Batteries from retired vehicles will increasingly be converted into static batteries before being recycled (see "Redwood Materials" in the US).
In California, when the sun is at its peak (midday), solar power produces up to three-quarters of the electricity. Batteries are charged in the afternoon, when solar electricity is cheap, and released in the evening, when Californians return home. At their peak consumption, around 8 p.m., batteries can supply up to 30% of the state's electricity.
One would think people would learn from the disastrous results of the German Energiewende, where this has already been tried, but no.
The problem is that the issue of intermittent energy generation is unsolved. It is currently not feasible to use batteries for base load needs, it would be insanely expensive. Some day perhaps, but not yet.
There was never a technically solid plan to solve this issue by the German Greens, just wishful thinking. They undertook this massive project without having the faintest clue about the underlying physics and financials, which is hard to believe but true. The overwhelming majority of green party members are from the humanities, not STEM.
So you either have a lot of pumped hydro, in which case great, or you don’t, which is the case nearly everywhere but the nordics and perhaps Switzerland.
Solar is much better than wind btw, wind is simply a costly mistake as it is a lot more intermittent than solar. The math doesn’t add up.
There's another Australian state, Tasmania that also runs on 100% renewables, mostly hydro. There are plans to export more of that power to other states.
Hydro is pretty great with a few caveats. Flooding remain a massive problem if there is a failure, as the world most deadliest power plant accident was a hydro power plant with a death toll between 26,000 to 240,000 people. An other major issue is the extinction of species, as is currently occurring in Europe and especially in the northern parts. There are technologies to allow for migrating fish to bypass hydro power plants without chopping them to bits, through the effectiveness of the bypass tend to work against the power output of the plant.
100% renewable until the dams dried up and they flew in diesel generators (worse than coal) to prop up the state, reversing several years of environmental progress.
That event is illustrative of the fundamental problem here. Green energy proponents pretend it never happens and do not factor diesel emissions into the cost of hydro and other solutions.
Another common way they mislead is by pretending that emissions from gas peaking plants are not inherently associated with solar and wind generating, even though they would not exist without them.
It's a kind of sleight of hand or green washing that should be called out more frequently.
100% renewable does not exist. Not in '100% hydro' Tasmania or anywhere else.
g) AU is very well suited for solar, due to the confluence of abundant desert making land-use a non-issue, high irradiance per m^2, low seasonality of irradiance, and large landmass which generates statistical diversification due to lower temporal coupling between plants.
> AU home solar is world leading, with now a government subsidy available for home battery storage to soak up the midday peak, one state (SA) regularly runs on 100% renewables
I feel we're going to keep seeing "solar doesn't work" posts in decades to come, long past when many areas of the world will already be on 100% renewables. It turns out that incremental deployment is a superpower.
There's no longer any good reason for AU not to be at >100% solar at midday every single day.
> SMRs do NOT exist in a commercially deployable way
.. while this is more of a problem. I could jokingly say that SMRs are a conspiracy by Big Turbine to sell more turbines. Also don't forget the need for water cooling, which may be a critical problem in AU.
In Poland we're seeing government slowly taking actions against people owning solar. Turns out, people were paying a lot in taxes for electricity and this money is now not present in the budget. Recent development is an incoming ban on energy storage beyond certain size. They want you to give energy basically for free to the grid during the day (when you're at work) and buy the energy from the grid during the night (charging cars). Electricity prices are not even that high now, bills are mostly some transfer fees. I imagine the same will be/is the case in all countries.
> c) The problem for nuclear power in AU is doubled because there is no local infrastructure or engineering or industry for the nuclear fuel cycle
One might say this is an advantage, with no home industry asking for local supply chains to be built up (at significant cost and risk). Solar panels, batteries and wind turbines are not generally made in Australia, right? For the fuel cycle, Urenco for enrichment, and Westinghouse or Orano for the uranium processing and fuel fabrication would be possible deals with allies.
> e) SMRs do NOT exist in a commercially deployable way. There are any number of research and demo-scale possible SMRs, but none that are immediately able to be deployed
SMRs are not the entirety of nuclear, and were not the entirety of the Coalition nuclear plan. Large reactors do exist and are being built around the world. Rosatom are able to do so (Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh), KEPCO has done so in the UAE, and China is exporting to Pakistan. As an aside, a GE-Hitachi BWRX-300 first-of-a-kind (not demo-scale or research) is being built in Darlington Canada, so SMRs are being deployed.
> f) SMRs are too SMALL to replace existing coal gen, especially compared to the capacity of solar and wind farms, with offshore wind only just being started in AU
I'm baffled that anyone could propose this as a good thing. I've worked in industries that are supported - just smaller than the US and the price gouging is substantial. Parts will be designed for the US market, we need to adapt. Bonus points when buying incompatible European / US designs.
Solar panels, batteries, and wind turbine have all the necessary ancillary parts in warehouses close to where they are needed. They also have all the expertise, the cranes, the transport regulations nailed down.
It's interesting that this country with all the spare land is also a world leader in rooftop solar.
That rooftop solar is delivering the cheapest consumer electricity in history.
Amazingly, the hardware costs and labor costs for rooftop solar are the same as the USA and sensible regulations around permitting and training have dropped the cost by 2/3rds.
These are very long term bets. MS isn't betting much here, just staying involved just in case. Which is prudent but not much of a commitment. A big commitment for a trillion dollar company would have a big dollar value. Like billions of dollars. That's not what's happening here.
I like the idea of small reactors from a technical point of view. But I'm also a realist. To match current renewables growth (or even put a minor dent in it), many tens of thousands of these things are needed. They don't put out a lot of energy. In wind number of turbines it's something like 2-5 turbines per reactor. There already are tens of thousands of wind turbines. Plonking down a few hundred wind turbines is routine business. Getting the first small reactor online is still in progress.
In other words, small reactors are not happening anytime soon. Certainly not in the next decade. If there are a few hundred active small reactors in 15 years that would be really amazing. And if that happens at a reasonable cost (big if) relative to wind, solar, and batteries, that would be even better. But we'll be well into the second half of this century before these things are putting a dent into other sources of energy. And that's only if it all works out in terms of cost and technology. 25 years is not that long in nuclear. Long planning cycles are common. These things have a lot to prove.
I'm skeptical on especially the cost aspect. Nuclear proponents tend to gloss over the fact that nuclear has always been expensive. Things like waste handling and security add extra cost and small reactors just complicate that further. Small reactors have a lot to prove and the rosy projections tend to dodge the harder issues here. There's a lot of magical thinking around this topic.
In any case, a few hundred of these things would be a meaninglessly small drop in the ocean in terms of energy output. It's not coming even close to the yearly growth with solar, wind, and batteries. And MS needs data centers sooner than even those would be coming online. And the energy to power them. Wherever that's going to come from, it's (mostly) not going to be nuclear any time soon. Unless they drastically scale down their AI expansion plans. And long term this is a cost game. MS is going to need lots of cheap energy. Expensive energy just raises its cost. Unless small reactors fix the cost issue, MS won't be using a lot of small reactors.
This for me is the real crux. Safety, nuclear waste, land-use, etc, are all issues of relatively trivial concern. They're fixations on the wrong question. The dominant issue is delivering competitive unit economics.
For SMRs, all their work is still ahead of them. To get the learning rate going, you need to start mass production. Then you need to double that production again, and again, and again. Then, after 2-3 decades of doublings, you may be able to deliver $/Wh in the ballpark of where solar & storage is today.
Never mind that solar & storage will undergo multiple more doublings between now and then, and never mind that private industry will struggle to fund the required doublings for SMRs because it's not the maximally profitable choice on the margin.
It's just a very difficult pragmatic picture for nuclear.
> Then, after 2-3 decades of doublings, you may be able to deliver $/Wh in the ballpark of where solar & storage is today.
I highly doubt that will be the case. Even if solar and wind do not get better costwise (which is likely not true) the cost of maintaining and decommissioning SMRs is likely only to go up. This based on every other nuclear power plant to date, I have seen zero good arguments on why SMRs would be an exception to that rule.
> They're fixations on the wrong question. The dominant issue is delivering competitive unit economics.
The problem is. The regulation around safety, waste and land-use is what make the economics the problem.
But you are right, it is difficult, or just straight up impossible with the current state or regulation and policy.
Just for reference, since NRC was establish, basically new nuclear has been approved. During the AEC, innovation was rapid. Basically, no longer a balance between concerns, but simply all out focus on safety for a specific set of reactors. That's not the only factor, but its a big one.
Renewables can't meet the base energy needs. You can't only run your datacenters and factories when the wind blows or the sun shines.
They also have low power density, making them problematic at grid scale.
SMRs fix all the issues of modern nuclear reactors. SMR's are not 'small' in the absolute sense, they're on the scale of traditional power plants, not existing nuclear reactors.
They have a ton of advantages:
- They are inherently safe, no need to worry about meltdowns.
- They produce power comparable to existing power plants. Nuclear plants have huge issues with producing tons of power in a centralized manner, meaning the energy infrastructure needs to be designed around them, and probably you need a centralized infrastrucure for power distribution, which might not jive well with local politics. They also need huge concentrated cooling capacity, which might have negative ecological effects, and present a huge risk should they need to be shut down. The recent issues in France with global warming, where the rivers water level got lower and the water warmer, cutting down on cooling margins dramatically leading to shutdowns comes to mind.
- In contrast SMRs can be slotted into current energy infrastructure. Modern reactor designs can be throttled to match grid needs.
- SMRs are standardized, smaller and don't need to be built on site and can be built relatively quicker and cheaper. This is huge. If a traditional plant costs $20B and takes 20 years to build, the interest on the loans could mean it's never going to be financially viable. If you cound do something that makes quarter the power, but costs $5B and 5 years to build, it's an entirely different value proposition.
China is already building these, and they are the main country of origin for solar panels and equipment. Renewables make a ton of sense, but can't solve every issue.
> You can't only run your datacenters and factories when the wind blows or the sun shines.
This has been false in the real world. Factories that use a lot of energy do work with the power company and shutdown all the time based on demand. Large steel mills have their own power plant onsite, but smaller ones just buy grid energy and they want the cheapest. They arrange their factory maintenance schedules with the power company so that the power plants are maintained as the same time they are shutdown. They shutdown every December so the power company can sell the power they were using to run Christmas lights. They often run overnight shifts only because that is when power is cheapest. Even the large factories with their own power generation have shutdown for a couple weeks to sell power to the grid (this is very rare, but it has happened).
Wind and solar is a little more difficult because it isn't as predictable, but that is different from unpredictable. The power companies already are running models to predict the wind and solar cycles because it is important for many things they do. You can bet those smaller factories are already working with the power company to schedule shutdowns when power is predicted to be expensive - factories have to do regular maintenance anyway so it is just a matter of being ready (spare parts) when asked, and wind/solar is predictable enough for this.
That assertion is not something everyone agrees with. And baseload is hardly ever qualified with even a ballpark estimate in GW or GWH of capacity needed. So, it's a fairly hollow and meaningless term.
And the reality is that for every 100GW added to grids world wide, about 80% or more is renewable. Nuclear is only small portion of the remaining capacity. And SMRs are a rounding error on that. Most of the rest is gas based generation.
Besides, data centers are a great example of something that can easily scale up and down its energy consumption based on price signals, user demand, etc. So, it's actually ideal to pair with fluctuating supply and demand from renewables. Using e.g. spot instances makes it easy for data centers to scale down their demand if energy is scarce and expensive. Other things they could do is throttle CPUs/GPUs based on energy pricing or encourage people to time shift non critical jobs to when energy is plentiful.
SMRs won't have fixed anything until there are lots of them. Whether you believe this will happen or not, it won't be happening very soon. Realistically, SMRs will remain a niche solution for decades to come; even if they do work at reasonable cost levels.
> You can't only run your datacenters and factories when the wind blows or the sun shines.
You're going to need more work than a bare assertion to demonstrate this, given that storage exists, and given that gas peaking exists, and given that interconnects exist.
Throttling a reactor makes no sense when the fuel is dirt cheap, which it is for nuclear. It's not clear given the choice of providing the same amount of power with thousands of SMR's worth a few MW's each or a handful of traditional nuclear plants, that SMR's are inherently the better choice. SMR's make obvious sense as a distributed source in cases where power transmission is itself costly and the density of power use is low, but not obviously otherwise.
>- They are inherently safe, no need to worry about meltdowns.
I don't worry about designed meltdowns, I worry about someone bunker-busting it, crashing a plane into it, detonating a convoy of trucks filled with fertilizer inside it, someone deciding that an old mine close the the ground water is "good enough" to store the waste from it, that war, forest fires, floods or famine will leave the sites unmanned until the storage pools dry out and the waste starts burning, or any number of similar scenarios which become so much more likely the more of these things we have.
But mostly I worry that they are more expensive than anything else even in a best-case scenario.
Why should we invest in more expensive electricity, that also carries a significant risk for immense disasters, when we have solved cheap solar, cheap batteries and synthesized fuels? The path forward seems obvious, even though it's less traveled.
The Windows 98 license actually did forbid using Windows in nuclear power plants (along with other high risk areas). That was due to some interaction with the Java license and I always considered it a very fortunate fluke.
This is a big deal, not because Microsoft wants to build reactors but because it highlights the real bottleneck: nuclear fuel. There’s already a growing uranium deficit, conversion and enrichment capacity are thin and geopolitically fragile, and next-gen reactors need HALEU, which barely exists today. Building new reactors is the easy part — scaling the fuel supply chain takes years.
Yes, and ... restarting the fuel cycle under the current administration is, according to activity in the US uranium rich areas, kind of happening. I haven't seen anything "official" yet but driving around southern Utah shows signs of 'unexpected economic activity.' Speculation is that the USG is going to re-open a Uranium mine near Moab.
I think I should correct your statement slightly - its not wrong however we don't have a uranium shortage -- we have more uranium than we could possible use.
We do have a HALEU advanced nuclear fuel supply chain issue. Thats being currently tackled. To your advanced reactor point -- they are also still far away so it is plausible that the supply chain catches up before any of the new reactors get deployed - assuming they make it to the finish line.
I should hope they make it to the finish line - I think we could do well with more nuclear providing our backbone of energy.
Enriching uranium to 20% instead of 5% is easy. If reactors require it, the fuel will be found just fine. You already have hundreds of SMRs in submarines and aircraft carriers and what not. A1B reactors in your carriers run on 93% enriched uranium!
That really isn't the bottleneck by any means. If there's demand there will be supply.
The problem with nuclear energy is not the availability or the cost of the fuel but the capital cost of the reactor and the high level of financial and operational risk involved with the construction. For instance there is an unlimited amount of handwringing over a closed fuel cycle costing a little more than an open fuel cycle but nobody points out that the capital cost of the reactor dwarfs fuel cycle costs for any fuel cycle -- no nukes hate reprocessing so they won't point this out and nukes don't want to remind you of the capital cost problem.
For every NPP that's had a nuclear meltdown there have been 20 that had a financial meltdown before they've even turned it on.
It drives me up the wall that big tech companies want to buy "a reactor" or an unspecified "SMR" but never an AP1000 (reactor that's actually been built) or even a BWRX300 (an SMR that might actually get built.) If there wasn't any bullshit a new build AP1000 would probably have a 10 year lag at least but...
... in the current international tariff situation it's almost impossible that any full-size or even moderate-sized reactor will be built in the US in the forseeable future because the US has no super-heavy press that can forge a nuclear reactor vessel. Japan, China, Korea, the UK, and many other countries have them and in the neoliberal world of a year ago we could have just had one made for us and shipped in by boat. The BWRX300 is the only western SMR that is far along and the pressure vessel will be made in Canada -- it's going to cost plenty no matter what but put 35% on top of that and you're doing the no nukes job for them. Way to go.
I want to see it work but I am not seeing realistic plans from the likes of Microsoft and Google, just the hot air from a 100W lightbulb when we really need 10,000,000 times as much heat!
> The problem with nuclear energy is not the availability or the cost of the fuel but the capital cost of the reactor and the high level of financial and operational risk involved with the construction.
Yes, in US and western Europe it's been practically impossible to build new reactors since the 90's for capex and regulatory reasons (both are related). However, we used to be able to build reactors significantly cheaper and faster and I'd argue we're on the path to do it again later this decade. There's no technical reason we can't solve this problem: there's bipartisan support for nuclear, willing financial backers, and no demand shortage. We're going to see 100+ gigawatts of new nuclear in the western world in the next 20 years.
Nuclear proponents argue that renewables (solar, wind) are not base-load, and nuclear is. They are correct.
But the people building power generation are doing it on a for-profit basis. Since solar is cheaper to deploy, faster to deploy, simpler to maintain and so on, that's what for-profit people build.
In other words, on the one hand you have large generators, requiring years of planning & permitting, a decade of construction, endless court battles from the anti-nuclear folks, generating returns 15 years from now, competing with the exact opposite (cheap, quick to build, beloved by eco folks, easy to run and maintain, off the shelf parts etc).
From a capital point of view its a no brainer. Capital follows profit, and solar is very profitable.
Nuclear may be good policy. Base Load may be very desirable. But unless govt is putting up the capital it just won't get funded. (Nuclear plants are being built, like in China, but using govt capital, which sees a return in more than just cash terms.)
There are lots of strong arguments for Nuclear. But Nuclear proponents need to address the capital requirements above all. Until the capital problem is solved, every other argument is useless.
I believe Rolls Royce is pretty close as well. But both have yet to deploy a single working example. And it doesn't seem we are anywhere close to see one yet.
Very interesting, can you provide any more reading on this topic in particular? Curious about how the modern private market is approaching the fuel supply chain issue in creative ways.
If building nuclear reactors is the easy part, and we're barely building nuclear reactors (and when we do they go massively over estimates), this sounds all around kind of bad.
Nuclear fuel, like lithium is a supply chain problem not an Erlich/Simons end-of-resources problem. Nuclear fuel UNLIKE lithium, has bizarre qualities that the waste stream from some kinds of reactors in turn, is valuable fuel. Not that we want prolifration from breeder reactors, but the point "fuel is the bottleneck" has some caveats. Supply chain logistics around fuel, including whole-of-life treatment of the outputs, is a problem.
There is more than enough uranium on the planet. This is more of a pork cycle problem. If there is a clear path towards an SMR industry supply will be there.
Fission fuel is so cheap that we currently don't even bother to fully recycle our nuclear waste. We could easily extract a lot of energy from that source that currently goes unexploited.
> We could easily extract a lot of energy from that source that currently goes unexploited.
> easily
That's and understatement. The PUREX process is a nightmare to get right, is expensive in both CAPEX and the specialized personell you need to pay, it produces much more deadly waste products, and you really don't want to proliferate it.
In the end, virgin uranium directly from ore is orders of magnitude cheaper for the foreseeable future.
Perhaps the bottleneck is public perception after the accident at Three Mile Island, and then everyone wasting time on alternate (insufficient) renewables. But now it's not about migrating from dirty to clean energy (which nuclear is), it's we need more power and it's time to get serious. Welcome back, nuclear. Microsoft entering an agreement with Three Mile Island nicely concludes a period in energy history. The next one should be most exciting.
Have we seen Microsoft actually put any skin in the game yet? All the pre-purchase announcements are virtually risk free for Microsoft. They've agreed to buy a certain amount of power at a certain price, if the counter-party can deliver it. But they're not pre-paying, they only pay when the electricity gets delivered. If they never deliver, Microsoft isn't out any money.
I'm intensely pro nuclear. But the tech is still in the stables. We need research into driving down costs. In the meantime, we need to think harder about where we're putting datacentres and how we can, if not make power cheaper for average Americans, at least not raise its real cost.
It’s a smart move on their part. It’s also a way for VC/investors to have some concrete value prop in their math. Aka if x works, I’d get at least y return (where y is guaranteed to not be zero)
Proponents of the SMR (small modular reactor) overlook the fundamental approach in industry: taking advantage of economies of scale to improve efficiency.
Financially, SMRs are efficient when they are mass-produced and then installed as is, which is difficult to imagine today given the abundance of specific requirements from national safety authorities and site-specific characteristics impacting the installation method. Reactors will therefore have to be adapted (before or, worse, after factory manufacture), which greatly reduces the value of mass production.
Furthermore, the underlying industrialization approach standardizes products and thus increases the risk associated with a generic defect: the discovery of a problem could force the rapid shutdown of a large proportion of the (identical) reactors in a fleet.
This necessary industrialization, and therefore mass production, makes it difficult to claim to only satisfy niche markets.
Even if the SMR becomes a reality, the NIMBY effect alone could wipe it out.
On the ground today, no SMR model is in operation in the West, not even at the industrial prototype stage.
Russia has an old, improved military reactor used on a barge (its load factor, as well as that of a recently launched Chinese model, is very poor).
Imitating it would be risky because the total cost of a military reactor (on board a submarine, aircraft carrier, icebreaker, etc.) is much higher than that of an equivalent civilian model. The Navy is willing to pay for features that are decisive for it (long battery life, reduced need for maintenance and surfacing, silence, compactness, etc.) but of no benefit in civilian applications.
Furthermore, a military reactor operates at sea, thus in a huge "cold source" facilitating its cooling, and in the event of an accident, it would likely be submerged far from any populated area. This is difficult to transpose to a national electricity system.
On the ground, the most advanced offering (NuScale) in the most favorable context (the USA) is withering away. Projects in Canada, a nation with expertise in nuclear power, are struggling to get off the ground. In Europe, Naarea, Newcleo, and Jimmy are reeling.
There's nothing new here, as these vain hopes correspond to what Admiral H. Rickover described as early as 1953...
You can also put my SMR onto one location with one control room.
The answer to generic defect is not to have a bunch of incompatible stuff with no commonality.
The NIMBY effect can kill literally anything, the issue with nuclear is cost, far more then NIMBY.
NuScale was always a bad idea. The PWR is the problem, making it smaller doesn't really solve the issues with them.
Project in Canada are struggling because the market in Canada is just to small. The reality is, you need massive amounts of funding, but with the way regulations work, even if Canada were literally perfect in every way, as long as large markets like the US, has unusable regulation, and Europe has wildly all over the place regulation, the needed money is just almost impossible to happen.
You are right that there is nothing new here, except maybe that large private institutions are starting to do some investing.
But the reality is, Rickover was right, Alvin M. Weinberg was even more right. An France did maybe the smart decision in their history when they embraced that philosophy. Sadly they only did so for 1-2 decades and then the next generation came in, was convinced that all those old people were idiots and now that the problem was solved for them they no longer had to pay attention to energy policy.
> You can also put my SMR onto one location with one control room.
I fail to understand which of the challenges I described it may relieve.
> The answer to generic defect is not to have a bunch of incompatible stuff with no commonality.
Having all brands of SMRs build interoperable parts is AFAIK beyond the most wild utopia. The very first step (convincing them to adopt the same architecture) is out of reach.
Yes, the NIMBY effect can kill literally anything, however it IMHO is way more powerful against nuclear than against solar and even wind energy, and as those last expand more and more people will understand that they don't have, in order to obtain electricity, to accept any nuclear-induced risk.
> The PWR is the problem
Which architecture seems more appropriate?
> the US, has unusable regulation, and Europe has wildly all over the place regulation, the needed money is just almost impossible to happen.
This is indeed a real challenge, however it mainly is because of past nuclear incidents and accidents.
> Alvin M. Weinberg was even more right
About the "Faustian bargain"?
> An France did maybe the smart decision in their history when they embraced that philosophy. Sadly they only did so for 1-2 decades and then the next generation came in, was convinced that all those old people were idiots and now that the problem was solved for them they no longer had to pay attention to energy policy.
I see a lot of skepticism in the comments, but if you’re going to gamble, SMRs seem like a pretty good bet. Nuclear is still in its mainframe era, where everything is bespoke and costly. Modularization enables repeatability, which is the heart of optimization. Doing something smaller, but more often, is how you get good at most things!
There’s a hundred and one “yes, but” objections to make, but our energy transition needs to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. I don’t think it’s a choice between nuclear and other renewables. We need them all.
I'm not anti-nuclear but I don't like the idea of proliferation of nuclear reactors on every corner because I don't believe that there are enough smart and trustworthy people to handle that many reactors. I'm all on for huge ones but they have obvious issues.
Have you been to a failed state? Bulgaria was in a state of disrepair when it comes to its industry, as kids we wandered to abandoned factories and I'm %100 sure that I don't wish a nuclear reactor to end up in a place like that. As 12-14 y/o kids we were going in, tear apart stuff the get interesting objects out like bearings, flat plastics etc. that we can use for games or making machines and if small reactors were a thing back then I'm certain that many disasters would have happened. AFAIK in Russia there are many lost RTGs, somehow nothing really bad happened but there are many instances of people getting exposed to radiation when working with recycling.
Nuclear reactors are very cool, they all have its place but please don't make it available to an average bozo that lucked on crypto or some greedy maniac in a failed state.
I'm sure in America it must feel inconceivable that states fail and things end up in wrong hands but where I grew up you can find remains of a few ancient empires + 1 quite recent ones with machinery and electronics unaccounted for.
> AFAIK in Russia there are many lost RTGs, somehow nothing really bad happened but there are many instances of people getting exposed to radiation when working with recycling.
If only you knew how deadly is average chemical factory that you probably do not know is just a few miles from your home, you would not worry about SMR-s that much :)
Seriously, you are concerned small nuclear reactors left behind? The main idea is, that you will be able to load them onto a truck and ship them back to the factory. So the chance of anything left behind is very small.
> There’s a hundred and one “yes, but” objections to make, but our energy transition needs to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. I don’t think it’s a choice between nuclear and other renewables. We need them all.
That is what we did 20 years ago when the renewable industry barely existed.
What has happened since is that the nuclear industry essentially collapsed given the outcome of Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinklkey Point C and can't build new plants while renewables and storage are delivering over 90% of new capacity in the US. Being the cheapest energy source in human history.
We've gone past the "throw stuff at the wall" phase, now we know what sticks and that is renewables and storage.
Thing is, traditional nuclear plants generate so much power that we only need a few "bespoke" plants to fill in all baseload demand and even provide enough redundancy. Renewable sources are quite a bit cheaper though wrt. to the sheer amount of bulk power that they supply over time, it's just unreliable and highly intermittent. Smaller reactors just aren't very useful in that kind of scenario - it's unlikely that they'll be cheaper per watt than a few large plants.
I technically agree, but modularity also works on large reactors. And they are generally cheaper to build and operate per energy produced than smaller reactors.
Modularity could work on mainframes too but it mostly didn’t. Mainframe cost per transaction can be very low, and yet here we are. Tech at scale always passes through a cheap/worse is better phase.
> Doing something smaller, but more often, is how you get good at most things!
And yet, for most things, we see the opposite trend. We build big factories, big ships, big warehouses and yes, big power plants. We tend to make things as big as physics lets us do, because of economies of scale. For power generation specifically, big things tend to be more efficient, thanks to the square-cube law. For example look at big ship engines, they use specialized piston engines with cylinders you can fit into, not dozens or truck engines, even though the truck engines would be a good example of modularity.
And speaking of the "mainframe era", in a sense, that era was more distributed/modular than today. Companies had their own mainframe, whereas nowadays, it is centralized in huge datacenters. The servers themselves are modular, because we can't make a datacenter on a chip, physics get in the way, but having big datacenters help make economies of scale on cooling, power generation, security, etc...
I am not against SMR, they are an option worth considering, but if I had to bet between SMR and conventional, large size nuclear reactors, I'd go conventional. Someone mentioned China as taking SMR seriously, and yes, they do, but they are also building lots of big nuclear power plants, and they are doing very well at it.
Depressing, but it shows the typical faults of most Canadian projects these days. Massive government spend on a project doomed to fail by economic analysis before it's even online; and no takeaways for the Canadian people to actually get momentum going.
If we wanted to do SMRs right, the goal should be to build one or more SMR production factories, here in Canada, where we manufacture N reactors per month, that fit onto train cars, and can be delivered to qualified, secure sites around the world. Instead, we're paying massive cash out to GE Hitachi, and so the end result will never be "the capability of building and deploying SMRs", it will be "4 unprofitable SMRs in a facility and $4.4 billion a unit if we want more of them to lose money on".
Obviously this is doomed to fail; the units should cost like $100M max so they have positive ROI within a few years. If the unit will never beat solar in $/megawatt for operating and fueling costs, and won't pay for its own construction cost before its lifetime ends, it should never have been constructed; the entire thing is catabolic, all of the work and carbon that goes into it is an utter waste. Everyone involved should just do something else with their lives if we're going to approach it this way.
What's the point? Why do such small-minded people get authority over grand projects?
It’s usually about well connected companies lobbying for free money. It’s the sort of thing that keeps Bell and others afloat and guarantees they never have to get competitive.
Not with the approach we are showing, but if solar was built like this, it would fail too: remember Solyndra? Treating it as a bespoke construction project instead of as a commodity manufacturing project is the fundamental mistake that continues to result in nuclear costing too much.
Fuck's sake, it's just some hot rocks boiling a kettle, we make it out to sound like it's magic but we had the technology for this ~80 years ago. By now we should have the cost of a standard issue nuclear plant down to way cheaper than anything else. Common layout, protocols, processes, software at all of them... could have been complete in 1989, honestly.
This is concern trolling. The key to nuclear economics is speed of construction, and controlling costs, and not caving to safety pearl-clutchers (that is, adding cost and delays for 'safety measures; meant to appease the public, not things deemed necessary by experts and regulators).
But the key is speed. If you tie up $20B for 20 years uselessly, there's no way you can make a profit on anything.
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The trouble is that:
a) "baseload" is a misnomer, what is required is storage to cover periods when "the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow"
b) CSIRO (our government research organization) releases a regular report called "Gencost" [1]. It has shown regular decreases in solar and wind, with costs for other solutions (coal/gas/nuclear) growing during the same period
c) The problem for nuclear power in AU is doubled because there is no local infrastructure or engineering or industry for the nuclear fuel cycle
d) AU home solar is world leading, with now a government subsidy available for home battery storage to soak up the midday peak, one state (SA) regularly runs on 100% renewables
e) SMRs do NOT exist in a commercially deployable way. There are any number of research and demo-scale possible SMRs, but none that are immediately able to be deployed
f) SMRs are too SMALL to replace existing coal gen, especially compared to the capacity of solar and wind farms, with offshore wind only just being started in AU
[1] https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/ele...
"Storage" can't do that for more than smoothing out daily peaks. The only longer-term storage that matters when you look at the numbers is pumped hydro, and that's built out. That's why "baseload" is in fact quite relevant; it's way better to supply those critical needs via a highly reliable source.
If you only need power for short periods of time when renewables are unavailable, then "constant output" plants like coal or nuclear are the last thing you want to build-- they are simply not worth it for the the short periods of time when renewables are down.
You want simple, cheap powerplants instead that trade off higher fuel costs for low capex, and that is currently gas. You want cheap MW (max power) from those plants instead of cheap MWh (energy), basically.
Besides, you've got to keep in mind that we aren't going to be building for yearly-average kWh consumption. Companies will be building overcapacity to take advantage of high-demand/low-supply peak pricing.
I don't think it is unlikely that we'll end up with a situation where PV on an overcast day is enough for "baseload", with the practically-free electricity on sunny/windy days opening up new economic opportunities.
This was already possible by the time of WWII, but now there are many methods in development for reducing carbon dioxide by electrolysis, and then use the product to synthesize longer hydrocarbons, which have higher efficiency than the older methods.
The round-trip efficiency of this will always be worse than for batteries, which remain a better option for short time storage, but synthesizing fuel will be a valid method for storing energy for the winter during the summer, and also for applications where batteries are unsuitable, like aircraft and spacecraft.
It's like pumped hydro with a very predictable rainstorm directly above it every day. You'd be able to get by with a much smaller reservoir.
See the system described in the OP link at this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45012942
Long term literally dirt cheap thermal storage coupled with extreme cost optimized PV that would provide 600 C heat 365/24/7 for as little as $3/GJ, on par with combustion of inexpensive natural gas. Complementary with diurnal storage from batteries, this would be a complete solution to the renewable intermittency problem.
What you want is dispatchable power. Gas peaker plants for instance. Or overbuilt solar + batteries. Not baseload.
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Case in point: France. A household consumes an average of 14 kWh of electricity per day. The capacity of electric cars will exceed 500 GWh before 2035 and 2000 GWh between 2040 and 2050.
Trucks, utility vehicles, and stationary batteries (domestic and industrial) will add to this. Batteries from retired vehicles will increasingly be converted into static batteries before being recycled (see "Redwood Materials" in the US).
In California, when the sun is at its peak (midday), solar power produces up to three-quarters of the electricity. Batteries are charged in the afternoon, when solar electricity is cheap, and released in the evening, when Californians return home. At their peak consumption, around 8 p.m., batteries can supply up to 30% of the state's electricity.
The problem is that the issue of intermittent energy generation is unsolved. It is currently not feasible to use batteries for base load needs, it would be insanely expensive. Some day perhaps, but not yet.
There was never a technically solid plan to solve this issue by the German Greens, just wishful thinking. They undertook this massive project without having the faintest clue about the underlying physics and financials, which is hard to believe but true. The overwhelming majority of green party members are from the humanities, not STEM.
So you either have a lot of pumped hydro, in which case great, or you don’t, which is the case nearly everywhere but the nordics and perhaps Switzerland.
Solar is much better than wind btw, wind is simply a costly mistake as it is a lot more intermittent than solar. The math doesn’t add up.
That event is illustrative of the fundamental problem here. Green energy proponents pretend it never happens and do not factor diesel emissions into the cost of hydro and other solutions.
Another common way they mislead is by pretending that emissions from gas peaking plants are not inherently associated with solar and wind generating, even though they would not exist without them.
It's a kind of sleight of hand or green washing that should be called out more frequently.
100% renewable does not exist. Not in '100% hydro' Tasmania or anywhere else.
People who don't live in such regions are likely to underestimate solutions that work well in these places.
I feel we're going to keep seeing "solar doesn't work" posts in decades to come, long past when many areas of the world will already be on 100% renewables. It turns out that incremental deployment is a superpower.
There's no longer any good reason for AU not to be at >100% solar at midday every single day.
> SMRs do NOT exist in a commercially deployable way
.. while this is more of a problem. I could jokingly say that SMRs are a conspiracy by Big Turbine to sell more turbines. Also don't forget the need for water cooling, which may be a critical problem in AU.
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One might say this is an advantage, with no home industry asking for local supply chains to be built up (at significant cost and risk). Solar panels, batteries and wind turbines are not generally made in Australia, right? For the fuel cycle, Urenco for enrichment, and Westinghouse or Orano for the uranium processing and fuel fabrication would be possible deals with allies.
> e) SMRs do NOT exist in a commercially deployable way. There are any number of research and demo-scale possible SMRs, but none that are immediately able to be deployed
SMRs are not the entirety of nuclear, and were not the entirety of the Coalition nuclear plan. Large reactors do exist and are being built around the world. Rosatom are able to do so (Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh), KEPCO has done so in the UAE, and China is exporting to Pakistan. As an aside, a GE-Hitachi BWRX-300 first-of-a-kind (not demo-scale or research) is being built in Darlington Canada, so SMRs are being deployed.
> f) SMRs are too SMALL to replace existing coal gen, especially compared to the capacity of solar and wind farms, with offshore wind only just being started in AU
This is why the Coalition plan proposed large reactors in addition to SMRs. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/feb/04/nucle...
I'm baffled that anyone could propose this as a good thing. I've worked in industries that are supported - just smaller than the US and the price gouging is substantial. Parts will be designed for the US market, we need to adapt. Bonus points when buying incompatible European / US designs.
Solar panels, batteries, and wind turbine have all the necessary ancillary parts in warehouses close to where they are needed. They also have all the expertise, the cranes, the transport regulations nailed down.
That rooftop solar is delivering the cheapest consumer electricity in history.
Amazingly, the hardware costs and labor costs for rooftop solar are the same as the USA and sensible regulations around permitting and training have dropped the cost by 2/3rds.
I like the idea of small reactors from a technical point of view. But I'm also a realist. To match current renewables growth (or even put a minor dent in it), many tens of thousands of these things are needed. They don't put out a lot of energy. In wind number of turbines it's something like 2-5 turbines per reactor. There already are tens of thousands of wind turbines. Plonking down a few hundred wind turbines is routine business. Getting the first small reactor online is still in progress.
In other words, small reactors are not happening anytime soon. Certainly not in the next decade. If there are a few hundred active small reactors in 15 years that would be really amazing. And if that happens at a reasonable cost (big if) relative to wind, solar, and batteries, that would be even better. But we'll be well into the second half of this century before these things are putting a dent into other sources of energy. And that's only if it all works out in terms of cost and technology. 25 years is not that long in nuclear. Long planning cycles are common. These things have a lot to prove.
I'm skeptical on especially the cost aspect. Nuclear proponents tend to gloss over the fact that nuclear has always been expensive. Things like waste handling and security add extra cost and small reactors just complicate that further. Small reactors have a lot to prove and the rosy projections tend to dodge the harder issues here. There's a lot of magical thinking around this topic.
In any case, a few hundred of these things would be a meaninglessly small drop in the ocean in terms of energy output. It's not coming even close to the yearly growth with solar, wind, and batteries. And MS needs data centers sooner than even those would be coming online. And the energy to power them. Wherever that's going to come from, it's (mostly) not going to be nuclear any time soon. Unless they drastically scale down their AI expansion plans. And long term this is a cost game. MS is going to need lots of cheap energy. Expensive energy just raises its cost. Unless small reactors fix the cost issue, MS won't be using a lot of small reactors.
For SMRs, all their work is still ahead of them. To get the learning rate going, you need to start mass production. Then you need to double that production again, and again, and again. Then, after 2-3 decades of doublings, you may be able to deliver $/Wh in the ballpark of where solar & storage is today.
Never mind that solar & storage will undergo multiple more doublings between now and then, and never mind that private industry will struggle to fund the required doublings for SMRs because it's not the maximally profitable choice on the margin.
It's just a very difficult pragmatic picture for nuclear.
I highly doubt that will be the case. Even if solar and wind do not get better costwise (which is likely not true) the cost of maintaining and decommissioning SMRs is likely only to go up. This based on every other nuclear power plant to date, I have seen zero good arguments on why SMRs would be an exception to that rule.
The problem is. The regulation around safety, waste and land-use is what make the economics the problem.
But you are right, it is difficult, or just straight up impossible with the current state or regulation and policy.
Just for reference, since NRC was establish, basically new nuclear has been approved. During the AEC, innovation was rapid. Basically, no longer a balance between concerns, but simply all out focus on safety for a specific set of reactors. That's not the only factor, but its a big one.
SMRs fix all the issues of modern nuclear reactors. SMR's are not 'small' in the absolute sense, they're on the scale of traditional power plants, not existing nuclear reactors.
They have a ton of advantages:
- They are inherently safe, no need to worry about meltdowns.
- They produce power comparable to existing power plants. Nuclear plants have huge issues with producing tons of power in a centralized manner, meaning the energy infrastructure needs to be designed around them, and probably you need a centralized infrastrucure for power distribution, which might not jive well with local politics. They also need huge concentrated cooling capacity, which might have negative ecological effects, and present a huge risk should they need to be shut down. The recent issues in France with global warming, where the rivers water level got lower and the water warmer, cutting down on cooling margins dramatically leading to shutdowns comes to mind.
- In contrast SMRs can be slotted into current energy infrastructure. Modern reactor designs can be throttled to match grid needs.
- SMRs are standardized, smaller and don't need to be built on site and can be built relatively quicker and cheaper. This is huge. If a traditional plant costs $20B and takes 20 years to build, the interest on the loans could mean it's never going to be financially viable. If you cound do something that makes quarter the power, but costs $5B and 5 years to build, it's an entirely different value proposition.
China is already building these, and they are the main country of origin for solar panels and equipment. Renewables make a ton of sense, but can't solve every issue.
This has been false in the real world. Factories that use a lot of energy do work with the power company and shutdown all the time based on demand. Large steel mills have their own power plant onsite, but smaller ones just buy grid energy and they want the cheapest. They arrange their factory maintenance schedules with the power company so that the power plants are maintained as the same time they are shutdown. They shutdown every December so the power company can sell the power they were using to run Christmas lights. They often run overnight shifts only because that is when power is cheapest. Even the large factories with their own power generation have shutdown for a couple weeks to sell power to the grid (this is very rare, but it has happened).
Wind and solar is a little more difficult because it isn't as predictable, but that is different from unpredictable. The power companies already are running models to predict the wind and solar cycles because it is important for many things they do. You can bet those smaller factories are already working with the power company to schedule shutdowns when power is predicted to be expensive - factories have to do regular maintenance anyway so it is just a matter of being ready (spare parts) when asked, and wind/solar is predictable enough for this.
That assertion is not something everyone agrees with. And baseload is hardly ever qualified with even a ballpark estimate in GW or GWH of capacity needed. So, it's a fairly hollow and meaningless term.
And the reality is that for every 100GW added to grids world wide, about 80% or more is renewable. Nuclear is only small portion of the remaining capacity. And SMRs are a rounding error on that. Most of the rest is gas based generation.
Besides, data centers are a great example of something that can easily scale up and down its energy consumption based on price signals, user demand, etc. So, it's actually ideal to pair with fluctuating supply and demand from renewables. Using e.g. spot instances makes it easy for data centers to scale down their demand if energy is scarce and expensive. Other things they could do is throttle CPUs/GPUs based on energy pricing or encourage people to time shift non critical jobs to when energy is plentiful.
SMRs won't have fixed anything until there are lots of them. Whether you believe this will happen or not, it won't be happening very soon. Realistically, SMRs will remain a niche solution for decades to come; even if they do work at reasonable cost levels.
You're going to need more work than a bare assertion to demonstrate this, given that storage exists, and given that gas peaking exists, and given that interconnects exist.
Consider these:
- https://www.offgridai.us/
- https://sci-hub.se/10.1039/c7ee03029k
I don't worry about designed meltdowns, I worry about someone bunker-busting it, crashing a plane into it, detonating a convoy of trucks filled with fertilizer inside it, someone deciding that an old mine close the the ground water is "good enough" to store the waste from it, that war, forest fires, floods or famine will leave the sites unmanned until the storage pools dry out and the waste starts burning, or any number of similar scenarios which become so much more likely the more of these things we have.
But mostly I worry that they are more expensive than anything else even in a best-case scenario.
Why should we invest in more expensive electricity, that also carries a significant risk for immense disasters, when we have solved cheap solar, cheap batteries and synthesized fuels? The path forward seems obvious, even though it's less traveled.
China has a few under construction, but having reactors built is not proof of them being viable, e.g. remember the superphénix.
Ah, where did that carefree time go, where we had the time to read licenses...
We do have a HALEU advanced nuclear fuel supply chain issue. Thats being currently tackled. To your advanced reactor point -- they are also still far away so it is plausible that the supply chain catches up before any of the new reactors get deployed - assuming they make it to the finish line.
I should hope they make it to the finish line - I think we could do well with more nuclear providing our backbone of energy.
That really isn't the bottleneck by any means. If there's demand there will be supply.
The problem with nuclear energy is not the availability or the cost of the fuel but the capital cost of the reactor and the high level of financial and operational risk involved with the construction. For instance there is an unlimited amount of handwringing over a closed fuel cycle costing a little more than an open fuel cycle but nobody points out that the capital cost of the reactor dwarfs fuel cycle costs for any fuel cycle -- no nukes hate reprocessing so they won't point this out and nukes don't want to remind you of the capital cost problem.
For every NPP that's had a nuclear meltdown there have been 20 that had a financial meltdown before they've even turned it on.
It drives me up the wall that big tech companies want to buy "a reactor" or an unspecified "SMR" but never an AP1000 (reactor that's actually been built) or even a BWRX300 (an SMR that might actually get built.) If there wasn't any bullshit a new build AP1000 would probably have a 10 year lag at least but...
... in the current international tariff situation it's almost impossible that any full-size or even moderate-sized reactor will be built in the US in the forseeable future because the US has no super-heavy press that can forge a nuclear reactor vessel. Japan, China, Korea, the UK, and many other countries have them and in the neoliberal world of a year ago we could have just had one made for us and shipped in by boat. The BWRX300 is the only western SMR that is far along and the pressure vessel will be made in Canada -- it's going to cost plenty no matter what but put 35% on top of that and you're doing the no nukes job for them. Way to go.
I want to see it work but I am not seeing realistic plans from the likes of Microsoft and Google, just the hot air from a 100W lightbulb when we really need 10,000,000 times as much heat!
Yes, in US and western Europe it's been practically impossible to build new reactors since the 90's for capex and regulatory reasons (both are related). However, we used to be able to build reactors significantly cheaper and faster and I'd argue we're on the path to do it again later this decade. There's no technical reason we can't solve this problem: there's bipartisan support for nuclear, willing financial backers, and no demand shortage. We're going to see 100+ gigawatts of new nuclear in the western world in the next 20 years.
But the people building power generation are doing it on a for-profit basis. Since solar is cheaper to deploy, faster to deploy, simpler to maintain and so on, that's what for-profit people build.
In other words, on the one hand you have large generators, requiring years of planning & permitting, a decade of construction, endless court battles from the anti-nuclear folks, generating returns 15 years from now, competing with the exact opposite (cheap, quick to build, beloved by eco folks, easy to run and maintain, off the shelf parts etc).
From a capital point of view its a no brainer. Capital follows profit, and solar is very profitable.
Nuclear may be good policy. Base Load may be very desirable. But unless govt is putting up the capital it just won't get funded. (Nuclear plants are being built, like in China, but using govt capital, which sees a return in more than just cash terms.)
There are lots of strong arguments for Nuclear. But Nuclear proponents need to address the capital requirements above all. Until the capital problem is solved, every other argument is useless.
https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs/
I believe Rolls Royce is pretty close as well. But both have yet to deploy a single working example. And it doesn't seem we are anywhere close to see one yet.
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> easily
That's and understatement. The PUREX process is a nightmare to get right, is expensive in both CAPEX and the specialized personell you need to pay, it produces much more deadly waste products, and you really don't want to proliferate it.
In the end, virgin uranium directly from ore is orders of magnitude cheaper for the foreseeable future.
I'm intensely pro nuclear. But the tech is still in the stables. We need research into driving down costs. In the meantime, we need to think harder about where we're putting datacentres and how we can, if not make power cheaper for average Americans, at least not raise its real cost.
Financially, SMRs are efficient when they are mass-produced and then installed as is, which is difficult to imagine today given the abundance of specific requirements from national safety authorities and site-specific characteristics impacting the installation method. Reactors will therefore have to be adapted (before or, worse, after factory manufacture), which greatly reduces the value of mass production.
Furthermore, the underlying industrialization approach standardizes products and thus increases the risk associated with a generic defect: the discovery of a problem could force the rapid shutdown of a large proportion of the (identical) reactors in a fleet.
This necessary industrialization, and therefore mass production, makes it difficult to claim to only satisfy niche markets.
Even if the SMR becomes a reality, the NIMBY effect alone could wipe it out.
On the ground today, no SMR model is in operation in the West, not even at the industrial prototype stage. Russia has an old, improved military reactor used on a barge (its load factor, as well as that of a recently launched Chinese model, is very poor).
Imitating it would be risky because the total cost of a military reactor (on board a submarine, aircraft carrier, icebreaker, etc.) is much higher than that of an equivalent civilian model. The Navy is willing to pay for features that are decisive for it (long battery life, reduced need for maintenance and surfacing, silence, compactness, etc.) but of no benefit in civilian applications.
Furthermore, a military reactor operates at sea, thus in a huge "cold source" facilitating its cooling, and in the event of an accident, it would likely be submerged far from any populated area. This is difficult to transpose to a national electricity system.
On the ground, the most advanced offering (NuScale) in the most favorable context (the USA) is withering away. Projects in Canada, a nation with expertise in nuclear power, are struggling to get off the ground. In Europe, Naarea, Newcleo, and Jimmy are reeling.
There's nothing new here, as these vain hopes correspond to what Admiral H. Rickover described as early as 1953...
The answer to generic defect is not to have a bunch of incompatible stuff with no commonality.
The NIMBY effect can kill literally anything, the issue with nuclear is cost, far more then NIMBY.
NuScale was always a bad idea. The PWR is the problem, making it smaller doesn't really solve the issues with them.
Project in Canada are struggling because the market in Canada is just to small. The reality is, you need massive amounts of funding, but with the way regulations work, even if Canada were literally perfect in every way, as long as large markets like the US, has unusable regulation, and Europe has wildly all over the place regulation, the needed money is just almost impossible to happen.
You are right that there is nothing new here, except maybe that large private institutions are starting to do some investing.
But the reality is, Rickover was right, Alvin M. Weinberg was even more right. An France did maybe the smart decision in their history when they embraced that philosophy. Sadly they only did so for 1-2 decades and then the next generation came in, was convinced that all those old people were idiots and now that the problem was solved for them they no longer had to pay attention to energy policy.
I fail to understand which of the challenges I described it may relieve.
> The answer to generic defect is not to have a bunch of incompatible stuff with no commonality.
Having all brands of SMRs build interoperable parts is AFAIK beyond the most wild utopia. The very first step (convincing them to adopt the same architecture) is out of reach.
Yes, the NIMBY effect can kill literally anything, however it IMHO is way more powerful against nuclear than against solar and even wind energy, and as those last expand more and more people will understand that they don't have, in order to obtain electricity, to accept any nuclear-induced risk.
> The PWR is the problem
Which architecture seems more appropriate?
> the US, has unusable regulation, and Europe has wildly all over the place regulation, the needed money is just almost impossible to happen.
This is indeed a real challenge, however it mainly is because of past nuclear incidents and accidents.
> Alvin M. Weinberg was even more right
About the "Faustian bargain"?
> An France did maybe the smart decision in their history when they embraced that philosophy. Sadly they only did so for 1-2 decades and then the next generation came in, was convinced that all those old people were idiots and now that the problem was solved for them they no longer had to pay attention to energy policy.
As a French I doubt so. Details: https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/messmer-pl...
China invests way, way more on renewable than on nuclear.
There’s a hundred and one “yes, but” objections to make, but our energy transition needs to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. I don’t think it’s a choice between nuclear and other renewables. We need them all.
Have you been to a failed state? Bulgaria was in a state of disrepair when it comes to its industry, as kids we wandered to abandoned factories and I'm %100 sure that I don't wish a nuclear reactor to end up in a place like that. As 12-14 y/o kids we were going in, tear apart stuff the get interesting objects out like bearings, flat plastics etc. that we can use for games or making machines and if small reactors were a thing back then I'm certain that many disasters would have happened. AFAIK in Russia there are many lost RTGs, somehow nothing really bad happened but there are many instances of people getting exposed to radiation when working with recycling.
Nuclear reactors are very cool, they all have its place but please don't make it available to an average bozo that lucked on crypto or some greedy maniac in a failed state.
I'm sure in America it must feel inconceivable that states fail and things end up in wrong hands but where I grew up you can find remains of a few ancient empires + 1 quite recent ones with machinery and electronics unaccounted for.
People did actually die because of abandoned RTGs, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident
Anybody that still feels like that right now in America is not paying attention.
That is what we did 20 years ago when the renewable industry barely existed.
What has happened since is that the nuclear industry essentially collapsed given the outcome of Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinklkey Point C and can't build new plants while renewables and storage are delivering over 90% of new capacity in the US. Being the cheapest energy source in human history.
We've gone past the "throw stuff at the wall" phase, now we know what sticks and that is renewables and storage.
And yet, for most things, we see the opposite trend. We build big factories, big ships, big warehouses and yes, big power plants. We tend to make things as big as physics lets us do, because of economies of scale. For power generation specifically, big things tend to be more efficient, thanks to the square-cube law. For example look at big ship engines, they use specialized piston engines with cylinders you can fit into, not dozens or truck engines, even though the truck engines would be a good example of modularity.
And speaking of the "mainframe era", in a sense, that era was more distributed/modular than today. Companies had their own mainframe, whereas nowadays, it is centralized in huge datacenters. The servers themselves are modular, because we can't make a datacenter on a chip, physics get in the way, but having big datacenters help make economies of scale on cooling, power generation, security, etc...
I am not against SMR, they are an option worth considering, but if I had to bet between SMR and conventional, large size nuclear reactors, I'd go conventional. Someone mentioned China as taking SMR seriously, and yes, they do, but they are also building lots of big nuclear power plants, and they are doing very well at it.
If we wanted to do SMRs right, the goal should be to build one or more SMR production factories, here in Canada, where we manufacture N reactors per month, that fit onto train cars, and can be delivered to qualified, secure sites around the world. Instead, we're paying massive cash out to GE Hitachi, and so the end result will never be "the capability of building and deploying SMRs", it will be "4 unprofitable SMRs in a facility and $4.4 billion a unit if we want more of them to lose money on".
Obviously this is doomed to fail; the units should cost like $100M max so they have positive ROI within a few years. If the unit will never beat solar in $/megawatt for operating and fueling costs, and won't pay for its own construction cost before its lifetime ends, it should never have been constructed; the entire thing is catabolic, all of the work and carbon that goes into it is an utter waste. Everyone involved should just do something else with their lives if we're going to approach it this way.
What's the point? Why do such small-minded people get authority over grand projects?
The gross thing is seeing the public cheer it on.
Fuck's sake, it's just some hot rocks boiling a kettle, we make it out to sound like it's magic but we had the technology for this ~80 years ago. By now we should have the cost of a standard issue nuclear plant down to way cheaper than anything else. Common layout, protocols, processes, software at all of them... could have been complete in 1989, honestly.
But the key is speed. If you tie up $20B for 20 years uselessly, there's no way you can make a profit on anything.