Everyone is piling on about better designs or mythical future tech.<p>This is a win for clean energy. End of story.<p>Smaller reactors have maintenance and footprint wins that are hard to appreciate. I think this is one of a few key turning points that are coming up that will help us transition to a better carbon future.<p>But if not, at least now we have <i>more options</i> which means <i>more competition</i> and <i>more innovation</i>.
Again this story.<p>Ok, sure maybe it's smaller than a PWR behemoth. It's still solid fuel rod crap.<p>If you have solid fuel rods, you have meltdown danger, you can't use up all the fissile material, there's no breeding, extraction of fission products. It's under a lot of pressure, so besides meltdown you have other dangers. Solid fuel rods can only use the very tiny percentage of uranium that is naturally fissile.<p>This is simply not a good design for a nuclear reactor. The LFTR design has meltdown proof operation, no pressurized water, near 100% use of fuel, can burn/breed old solid fuel waste, can breed more fuel from plentiful thorium, and can scale down to closet-sized reactors.<p>Pebble bed also shares some of these aspects, and I assume there are other new generation designs with advantages.<p>But this is just more of the same bad design reactors. Oh great, it got spitshined and scaled down and passed approvals.<p>What nuclear needs to be relevant is to tackle meltdown danger and nuclear waste. LFTR addresses both and any future reactor needs to address both. Perhaps LFTR could be a "waste processor" if LFTR isn't economical enough, while other meltdown proof designs do more economical generation in a sort of large scale web.
Heavy discussion a week ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32282632" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32282632</a> (742 comments)
Can someone correct me if I'm wrong but I remember one of the reasons the RMBK reactor is so large was because there are efficiency gains with a large reactor (among other reasons you lose fast neutrons at a higher rate in a smaller volume right?). How do these small modular reactors get around this?
There is an in depth presentation about the reactor on youtube: <a href="https://youtu.be/JhrxFCtCPUo" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/JhrxFCtCPUo</a>
Let me try again, since I was snotty and got flagged.<p>This is not a kosher industry. It reaches its influence into the academic realm and has an epic PR budget. It can take advantage of the obscurity of the tech to promote talking points that seem quite reasonable, but generally mask a desire by energy suppliers to maintain the current means of distribution.<p>And a good part of that PR budget certain goes into negative marketing against wind and solar, specifically because they are disruptive to the distribution model. Profit. There's no conspiracy theory in profit. We know that's what industries want. And historically, industries are not invested in public safety to the extent that it cuts into profits.<p>So then, why does anyone TRUST the nuclear industry. And even if we do, why would we EVER trust governments to regulate that technology, given that history of absolutely clear about the likelihood of self-regulation?<p>All I see is billions spent to keep power generation out of our homes. Wind and solar are ready to deploy and yet people seem to suggest that tech in development, which might not be ready of commercial application for a decade, are the solution to our problems?<p>I don't see it.
I highly encourage you to look at this factsheet I only just found today [1]. Some highlights:<p>> - Levelized cost of energy (LCOE) includes the lifetime costs of building, operating, maintaining, and fueling a power plant. Estimated LCOE for plants built in the near future are: combined cycle natural gas: 3.71 ¢/kWh; advanced nuclear: 6.31 ¢/kWh; and biomass: 8.92 ¢/kWh<p>and<p>> - Spent fuel is placed in a storage pool of circulating cooled water to absorb heat and block the high radioactivity of fission products<p>> - Many U.S. spent fuel pools are reaching capacity, necessitating the use of dry cask storage.<p>This point is often overlooked. Nuclear waste generates heat. It needs to be actively cooled, possibly for a decade or longer, until it can be stored in dry storage. There's transportation risk there (for tens of thousands of tons per year at current rates) and facilities that need to be maintained to do that. Plus adding water increases the risk of site contamination.<p>Also consider:<p>> - ... Managing nuclear waste requires very long-term planning. U.S. EPA was required to set radiation exposure limits in permanent waste storage facilities over an unprecedented timeframe—one million years<p>> - The U.S. has no permanent storage site.<p>TIL:<p>> - The U.S. Price-Anderson Act limits the liability of nuclear plant owners if a radioactive release occurs to $450 million for individual plants and $13.5 billion across all plants.<p>WHY?<p>This is the big problem with nuclear: failure modes have incredibly high cost but relatively low likelihood. Companies have limited liability so they get to pocket the profits for under-maintaining plants and move the costs to the government.<p>In addition to being a bad idea this presents a falsely cheap picture of the true costs of nuclear power.<p>In this same vein:<p>> - The Nuclear Waste Policy Act required the U.S. federal government to begin taking control of spent nuclear fuel in 1998.<p>Another cost shifted to the government.<p>EDIT: over the years I've learned that the more rabid one side of an argument is, the more likely they are to simply downvote anything they disagree with, regardless of the merit. This, sadly, is my experience with nuclear on HN (which isn't plagued with downvote-as-disagreement like, say, Reddit is). It's not a reason to be anti-nuclear but it sure makes it hard to be swayed by pro-nuclear arguments.<p>[1]: <a href="https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/nuclear-energy-factsheet" rel="nofollow">https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/nuclear...</a>
>This is then used to drive a turbine that generates electricity.<p>We could have Nuclear Fusion but we will still using turbine to generate electricity. :P<p>>these smaller reactors are actually likely to produce more radioactive waste than conventional plants.<p>>nuclear power expert M.V. Ramana also points out that the cost of renewable energy like wind and solar is already lower than that of nuclear, and continuing to fall rapidly.<p>Why are we repeating these same questions when we already have an answer? Edit: Solar and Wind aren't constant, and nuclear waste is a solved problem.<p>>SMRs could cost more than bigger nuclear plants, he adds, because they don’t have the same economy of scale.<p>I thought the whole point of SMRs were economy of scale?<p>>Tellingly, some utilities have already backed out of NuScale’s first project over cost concerns.<p>Anyone could chime in here? Was it because NuScale is too expensive?<p>I was expecting SMRs, once approved could be built much more quickly. I was thinking in terms of 3 years with perfect project planning. But right now even the earliest ( and likely optimistic ) first SMRs site is 2030. Why does it take so long?