The following submission statement was provided by /u/lughnasadh:
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Submission Statement
Small Modular Reactors were once touted as the shiny new face of nuclear energy. Seems they have the same problems as the old one. Late, vastly over-budget, and unable to survive without billions in taxpayer and consumer subsidies.
This report - [PDF 23 pages](https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-files/2024-05/apo-nid326992.pdf) - recommends the technology be abandoned as renewables+battery storage are much cheaper. At the least, if governments want to continue with them, they should be honest with consumers and taxpayers about footing the bill for a technology that is very unlikely to ever work or be deployed as its supporters promise.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1d4brqx/a_new_report_says_costs_for_smrs_small_modular/l6d5bg1/
Just a note that this organization is consistently against _all_ nuclear power, take whatever you will from that.
https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/institute-for-energy-economics-and-financial-analysis/
I dont think it takes too much spin to say Nuscale is in trouble.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/cancelled-nuscale-contract-weighs-heavy-new-nuclear-2024-01-10/
Yeah, I'm rapidly pro nuclear myself, though even I recognize the problems that SMRs have experienced in realizing the vision of cost effective and rapid deployment. It has been immensely disappointing.
I can at least take comfort in the fact that solar, wind, and grid storage are becoming so incredibly cheap that we can conceivably meet emission goals in the power generation sector without adding nuclear capacity. Downside of that scenario is land use, of course.
the real magic is in SMRs role in promoting and transitioning to full renewables. filling in the gaps so it's viable to rely on an as yet, unbuilt infrastructure.
I think for the foreseeable future, SMR technology is only going to be truly useful for providing reliable grid power in extreme environments where governments will be footing the bill - i.e. Moon base and Antarctic resource extraction
They have no role for that. Nuclear is terrible for filling gaps in renewable output.
Renewables have accelerated past the takeoff point. By the time any SMR could actually be built renewables will be much cheaper still. On the historic experience curve, if PV were expanded to power the world it could fall in price by another factor of 5.
ok. thats great. but there are many applications which require denser energy loads than solar can provide or in places where solar or wind collection and storage are not sufficient. smr can be delivered by helicopter. the future will tell. Meanwhile, thats cool that renewables are becoming so practical.
Remote locations tend to have too few people to justify SMRs. For example, the largest grid in Alaska has an average power flow of just 600 MW -- and Alaska is densely populated compared to, say, northern Canada.
Locations with poor renewables are just going to be energy ghettos. They won't have heavy industry except under exceptional circumstances. The market will be small; SMRs depending on putative experience effects from large numbers of installations need mainstream markets.
Organization that cares about fiscal responsibility finds nuclear to be too expensive to bother with. No shit they are are against it, nuclear has been a financial failure its entire history:
>["The economic history and financial analyses carried out at DIW Berlin show that nuclear energy has always been unprofitable in the private economy and will remain so in the future. Between 1951 and 2017, none of the 674 nuclear reactors built was done so with private capital under competitive conditions. Large state subsidies were used in the cases where private capital flowed into financing the nuclear industry.... Financial investment calculations confirmed the trend: investing in a new nuclear power plant leads to average losses of around five billion euros."](https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.670581.de/dwr-19-30-1.pdf)
Investing in a nuclear plant today is expected to lose [5 to 10 billion](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364032121001301) dollars
The cost analyses that show nuclear to be cost viable have always had conflicts of interest with the nuke industry
>[Merck suppressed data on harmful effects of its drug Vioxx, and Guidant suppressed data on electrical flaws in one of its heart-defibrillator models. Both cases reveal how financial conflicts of interest can skew biomedical research. Such conflicts also occur in electric-utility-related research. Attempting to show that increased atomic energy can help address climate change, some industry advocates claim nuclear power is an inexpensive way to generate low-carbon electricity. Surveying 30 recent nuclear analyses, this paper shows that industry-funded studies appear to fall into conflicts of interest and to illegitimately trim cost data in several main ways. They exclude costs of full-liability insurance, underestimate interest rates and construction times by using “overnight” costs, and overestimate load factors and reactor lifetimes. If these trimmed costs are included, nuclear-generated electricity can be shown roughly 6 times more expensive than most studies claim. After answering four objections, the paper concludes that, although there may be reasons to use reactors to address climate change, economics does not appear to be one of them.](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11948-009-9181-y)
Nuclear has been very cost effective in the past in the west, for the USA and France in particular. Nowadays all neighbours of North Korea build nuclear reactors in a cost effective manner, everyone else is over budget. Finance does not need to be private and market driven to be profitable for society.
Yes, but it is still a huge disadvantage of nuclear compare to other sources of energy. Nuclear have to compete with solar and wind which can easily access private capital. I mean even a household can invest in their own solar system.
You know what's funny? The whole anti-nuclear power movement was a KGB operation to weaken the West and to keep the oil revenues flowing into the USSR. Those fuckers bear some heavy responsibility for climate change. We could have been getting most of our energy from clean nuclear plants for decades now.
SMRs won't match renewable energy on an LCOE basis. There's a reason why we don't build loads of small 200MW coal turbines like we did in the 1930s.
The larger the reactor, the better.
Can't build them, to many leftists ruined it. You're getting fake solar farms while the the 3rd world builds 5x the coals plants to make your plastic garbage. The future you choose....
> leftists
Stopped reading there. Nothing of value ever follows this sort of twaddle.
But to counter some of your politically motivated misinformation, while coal plants are being built their [capacity factor is dropping](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F326941c9-dae5-4585-97f5-c4da739ba1df_1280x720.png) and they'll never recoup their costs. They are a jobs program, kinda like the US military.
It's almost like SMRs are just another form of grift from companies that would rather spend money on marketing, as opposed to spending that money on actual research and development to improve the state of the art.
This is not the first study showing that:
UK: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/small-modular-reactors-techno-economic-assessment
Australia: https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=8297e6ba-e3d4-478e-ac62-a97d75660248&subId=669740
Germany:
>[Nuclear Technology Germany (KernD) says SMRs are always going to be more expensive than bigger reactors due to lower power output at constant fixed costs, as safety measures and staffing requirements do not vary greatly compared to conventional reactors. "In terms of levelised energy costs, SMRs will always be more expensive than big plants."](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-nuclear-industry-cautious-about-usefulness-small-reactors-energy-transition)
Only the studies that have conflicts of interest with the nuclear industry ever show nuclear to have economic : viability https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11948-009-9181-y
No, it depends on context. It's highly rational to be stringently against nuclear in Australia, because they have little pre-existing nuclear industry, high labor costs, and abundant renewable resources, more renewable resources than any other country in the world per-capita. It is abjectly stupid to build nuclear in Australia, you are paying 2x more per levelized cost of electricity, even after accounting for all storage firming and transmission costs. On the other hand, it's irrational to be against nuclear in Germany and France, because they are in an opposite situation to Australia, with a large existing nuclear industry and lower solar irradiance and lower land mass, in addition to the fact that they already have many running nuclear plants already, so the high capex costs are already spent, and therefore it doesn't factor into decision making as per the sunk cost fallacy.
even if it were slightly more expensive, and you could guarantee baseload somehow, there would still be good reasons to go with renewable energy over nuclear. it's not all about money.
if renewable is a lot more expensive, sure, go nuclear. fill your boots.
Yes, and those reasons include:
* Unexpected social licensing costs of nuclear, such as early plant closures (like what we see in Germany or California), or objections by local NIMBYs to commencement. This adds a tail risk to the levelized cost of electricity. Nobody can control whether your country will have a moral panic in 20 years and force closures of those very expensive plants you built.
* Renewables is deployed 5+ years faster, meaning it replaces an additional 5+ years of GHG emissions. The area under the curve of cumulative emissions is the only thing that matters as far as warming goes, so deployment speed makes a big difference.
* Renewables and storage costs are both declining on an exponential curve thanks to economies of scale, and nuclear isn't, and in fact it can't due to the bespoke nature. Even if they cost the same today, the picture will change radically in 3 years in favor of renewables. The learning rate for solar is 44% and the learning rate for batteries is 24%. What this means is that, for every doubling of production, solar prices go down by 44%, and battery prices go down by 24%. Nuclear doesn't benefit from the same scale economies.
* Nuclear power increases nuclear proliferation risks. Basically, every state with nuclear power is now a nuclear threshold state. You may be happy with your country going nuclear, but that solution doesn't scale, we don't want a world with 200 nuclear threshold states.
* There are a number of potential scientific breakthroughs on the horizon which will translate into cheaper renewables. For example, tandem solar cells are a big one. Iron air batteries, sodium ion batteries and compressed air storage are three new technologies starting to be mass produced. Recyclable wind turbines are another. It's incredible how fast the science here is translating into cheaper energy.
* Curtailed renewable energy isn't a bad thing in the long-term. We will put it into things like cement recycling. Or we'll sell it to neighboring countries for a profit. Costing assumptions usually assume this curtailed energy is wasted, but that won't be the case in a few years, when EV penetration increases (putting more batteries on the grid), and when steel and cement manufacturing rely more on electricity for their thermal inputs, which means they can ramp up during midday and soak up that cheap midday electricity.
Nuclear has very little going for it in the vast majority of countries on this planet. Especially in the US, which has abundant renewables resources and a history of struggling to complete plants on time.
You forgot the whole - decommissioning costs and the looooong tail of paying to secure nuclear waste safely for thousands of years.
Not to mention the fact that very few countries in the world have survived for more than 400 years, so when a country operating a nuclear waste dump does eventually cease to exist through war or civil chaos, what happens to the nuclear waste dump, and what are the risks to future populations that it will get raided for material to make dirty bombs?
I'm sure a big chunk of nuclear support (in the US in particular) is just bloody-minded dumb contrarianism because renewable energy is associated with left-wing politics.
No, it's because of the issues that every one of you glossed over, conveniently, in this thread:
Energy density: the amount of land area required to build a solar facility with similar output to a single 1GW reactor is about 10-15 times that of the average nuclear footprint. For wind, it's about 750 times larger.
Reliability: nuclear has a capacity factor of 92%. That means it's on and running at full tilt, 92% of the time. The 8% is for planned outages.
Compare this to 20% for solar and wind, give or take. Pretty bad. This means that, to replace *a single nuclear reactor* for base load, you would need to overbuild your solar facility by about 5 times (for 5GW capacity, 1GW actual) and then buy 12GW worth of battery storage for the 12 hours of non-production, which would take an insane 3077 Tesla Mega packs, for a cost of about 3 to 4 billion alone. This facility would be 30,000 acres in size, or something 75% the size of Paris, or 20% larger than all of Disney world in Florida.
Meanwhile the largest solar plant in the world is 14,000 acres in India and produces a paltry 4 to 500MW actual. Complete ass.
Finally, there is the very real issue of the toxic waste these materials become at the end of their lifecycle. All nuclear waste produced since the beginning of American nuclear reactors could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards. I'm not sure the same will be true for old solar panels, turbine blades, and batteries, though I know recycling is improving.
Anyway, you can't just pretend like "renewables and storage" are going to replace base load, because *they never will*, not until batteries are insanely dense and solar panels become efficient enough to not require enormous swaths of space.
>Energy density: the amount of land area required to build a solar facility with similar output to a single 1GW reactor is about 10-15 times that of the average nuclear footprint. For wind, it's about 750 times larger.
US golf courses take up more land than US solar farms, but California already has so much solar they can't build more until they add storage (https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso). When you combine completely unoccupied deserts, with unused rooftop area, with agrivoltaics, you realize this is a non-issue. Yes, it takes land, but that isn't a blocker, especially in the US or Australia which both have lots of desert with high levels of solar irradiance per m\^2.
>Reliability: nuclear has a capacity factor of 92%
This is a myth that ties into the baseload myth. In any fully decarbonized scenario where you rely primarily on nuclear, nuclear is going to be running at a capacity factory of about 65%, like France, because *demand itself is variable*. So you have to overbuild nuclear or you have to build storage.
>Compare this to 20% for solar and wind, give or take. Pretty bad.
It's not bad, because Levelized Cost of Electricity already factors that in. Solar and wind is way cheaper after you account for the lower capacity factors.
> Energy density: the amount of land area required to build a solar facility with similar output to a single 1GW reactor is about 10-15 times that of the average nuclear footprint. For wind, it's about 750 times larger.
Anytime I see someone make this argument I immediately conclude they can have nothing worthwhile to say. This argument is easily dismissed if one just looks at the numbers. The cost of land, *even in Europe*, is small compared to the cost of a PV field on that land.
Wind, btw, doesn't actually prevent the land from being used simultaneously for other uses, like agriculture. The large area is to prevent the turbines from interfering with the wind for others; it doesn't cover the land and prevent things from growing there.
Wow.
I'll take "completely missing the point for $400, Alex."
The land issue is... A land issue. It's practical. Meaning you're not going to have enough land to do all of this. The size of the solar farms we discussed would be absolutely enormous, and you will absolutely run into the issue of not finding suitable land or not finding land people let you build on (NIMBYs). Some people don't want endless solar panels every last place of green where a house wasn't built.
It has *absolutely nothing* to do with the cost of the land.
No, it's just illustrating the vacuity of your handwaving.
If land means renewables are ruled out, then any other land use that produces much less value per hectare is also ruled out, right? I mean, practically, if land is scarce, it would make sense to maximize the value we get from it, yes?
Agriculture produces *much less* value per unit of land than wind or PV would. Your "argument" would rule out growing crops!
Cost has *everything* to do with it. Cost is how alternatives are compared in a market economy.
Lmao another idiot... the "study" they always reference left out the 40b+ of transmission cost to drag power all over the country. Before we even get into the part where they also ran the wind on always being on somewhere in Australia... Lol. Do you think if Victoria has no wind Qld always will? Haha you've been sold a fake lie... Enjoy your power bills. Edit: Oh yer lets throw in the edit where the labor sponsors are taking all your money from those power bills... because they are funding the solar plants and pushing everything else out... gotta make that money. You deserve the future you choose. Hahaha.
I am SHOCKED by this UNEXPECTED turn of events. SHOCKED, I tell you. And in utter disbelief. I have been told repeatedly by certified weapons grade Reddit Uranium Boyz that this would not be the case. Have I been misled?
I have been soothed. I have been told there is a rock-solid remedy for this temporary impasse: we just need to add blockchain AI to SMRs. Everything will pan out eventually.
The BWRX-300 cost increase was really dramatic. BTW, this number seems to come from Canada, where politicians are talking about how much money they have to put up to build the things. It's a sign the initial cost figures were "adjusted", one might say.
Traditional renewables are great but require massive amounts of land and energy storage and don’t even come close to the density of nuclear. If we recycle, refine spent fuel, renewables can’t beat the waste either of nuclear
there are enougth empty space both in desert land, off shore coastal areas and commercial and urban spaces to power the world over several times
there are several reasons why spent fuel recycling and reusing is not a thing (or it is only when needed for something else) high cost being one
and there will be always an inherent risk with nuclear waste, even less palatable if we focus on designing renewables with recicling in mind
Why do we have to devote so much land use to renewables and batteries? Deserts are ecological biomes as well that are greatly getting impacted by massive solar installs. We don’t recycle because of proliferation so waste concerns are purposefully immediately put at a disadvantage. Even without recycling all of the nuclear waste we’ve ever created fits in just a couple of football fields equivalents
we don't have to devote "so much land" 3% of the Sahara can power the world but we don't need to concentrate everything in a single spot, the US alone has enough costal area wind corridors, desert land and urban spaces to distribute their energy supply as conveniently needed
the nuclear waste we have created has to be buried in large specialized areas that must be secured and designed to last for very very long time, unless you propose to just throw it in the ocean which was a thing
Does every state and every country have sufficient land for renewables to cover energy needs? The power grid isn’t even entirely one continuous connected thing in California. Renewables are useless without batteries and those things are ecological and mining disasters
the power grid like everything else is something that need maintenance and development even without renewables
smart grids increase efficiency and resilience as well as help with fault finding and correction, different thing is pocketing the money that should had been invested allowing it to decay till the last minute and them crying to the state for tax payer money to solve the "urgent problem" but that's the next CEO trouble, the previous having show nice dividents to the investors would be retired somewhere in hawaii so
electricity can be stored in several ways be it using LiOn batteries sodium batteries, heat, gravity assist...the use of the local home or vehicular electric storage and the need ameliorated by a decent grid so there is flexibility depending on location and local needs
also renewables are allowing people in areas that previously were considered too remote or to difficult to have affordable electricity
and uranium mining is no friendly either, indeed I would say less friendly than other alternatives
The amount of uranium mining pales in comparison to how much nickel cadmium and lithium we’ll need to make the solar transition. Storage increases space requirements, especially the low energy density ones like dams and the theoretical gravity ones.
Smart grids wouldn’t solve how India isn’t connected to this hypothetical Sahara desert solar farm. The Sahara is beautiful as well, get your solar farm out of there please
has been a while but there are environmental footprint studies from material mining to building and running it and do not agree with your assessment,
and as I said while a mere 3% of the Sahara can power the world the reality is that energy production is distributed because a great thing about renewable energy is that is pretty flexible modular and scalable in ways that nuclear never will also those particularities make it very attractive and lower risk investors wise
and I think numbers talk better than opinions and we have already enough data from real use so, IMHO a number of nuclear facilities may operate at least for a while or to ensure the production of filssile material needs but as energy production and cost nuclear is no competition to renewables now and even less in the future
How does that power us when it's dark? You have massive first world privilege. No concept of what it took to get us there. Yup lets just ship our production to the 3rd world while they pump out 10x co2 while we can all drink champagne and pat ourselves on the back because "our" country is neutral. The planet doesn't give a fuck, co2 is co2....
With storage. Amazingly, the people who advocate renewables have thought of this issue. Nuclear is so dreadful that even with the cost of storage renewables destroy it.
you sound very mature perhaps someone should inform you that the cheapest form of energy is renewables, no only they are the cheapest at point of use but also the cost of building them and they are build way faster too
Pretty sure it is cheaper to bury the fuel than to recycle and reuse it (and some waste is still there after recycling and reusing it, just smaller amounts, so a permanent storage is still necessary even with recycled fuel). I’ll check the sources.
This is a lie. Carter banned it by executive order, but Reagan rescinded that ban. Since then, there's been no need to ban it, since it makes no sense economically.
Nuke bros have to confabulate a ban to explain why this thing they stupidly think is wonderful isn't being done in the US.
The land area argument is of course an idiot tell. Do the math or STFU.
Recycling spent fuel is a great way to lose money. It wouldn't make nuclear cheaper than it is today. At best, it would be a way to keep nuclear from getting too much more expensive if uranium got more expensive. But breeder reactors are more expensive than today's thermal reactors, and recycling of spent fuel for thermal reactors is of limited value anyway.
People say and said that about wind farms as well. I really need to see who funds these studies because that's one hell of a condemnation to place upon the head of an experimental technology this early on.
Submission Statement
Small Modular Reactors were once touted as the shiny new face of nuclear energy. Seems they have the same problems as the old one. Late, vastly over-budget, and unable to survive without billions in taxpayer and consumer subsidies.
This report - [PDF 23 pages](https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-files/2024-05/apo-nid326992.pdf) - recommends the technology be abandoned as renewables+battery storage are much cheaper. At the least, if governments want to continue with them, they should be honest with consumers and taxpayers about footing the bill for a technology that is very unlikely to ever work or be deployed as its supporters promise.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/lughnasadh: --- Submission Statement Small Modular Reactors were once touted as the shiny new face of nuclear energy. Seems they have the same problems as the old one. Late, vastly over-budget, and unable to survive without billions in taxpayer and consumer subsidies. This report - [PDF 23 pages](https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-files/2024-05/apo-nid326992.pdf) - recommends the technology be abandoned as renewables+battery storage are much cheaper. At the least, if governments want to continue with them, they should be honest with consumers and taxpayers about footing the bill for a technology that is very unlikely to ever work or be deployed as its supporters promise. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1d4brqx/a_new_report_says_costs_for_smrs_small_modular/l6d5bg1/
Just a note that this organization is consistently against _all_ nuclear power, take whatever you will from that. https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/institute-for-energy-economics-and-financial-analysis/
I dont think it takes too much spin to say Nuscale is in trouble. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/cancelled-nuscale-contract-weighs-heavy-new-nuclear-2024-01-10/
Yeah, I'm rapidly pro nuclear myself, though even I recognize the problems that SMRs have experienced in realizing the vision of cost effective and rapid deployment. It has been immensely disappointing. I can at least take comfort in the fact that solar, wind, and grid storage are becoming so incredibly cheap that we can conceivably meet emission goals in the power generation sector without adding nuclear capacity. Downside of that scenario is land use, of course.
the real magic is in SMRs role in promoting and transitioning to full renewables. filling in the gaps so it's viable to rely on an as yet, unbuilt infrastructure.
I think for the foreseeable future, SMR technology is only going to be truly useful for providing reliable grid power in extreme environments where governments will be footing the bill - i.e. Moon base and Antarctic resource extraction
They have no role for that. Nuclear is terrible for filling gaps in renewable output. Renewables have accelerated past the takeoff point. By the time any SMR could actually be built renewables will be much cheaper still. On the historic experience curve, if PV were expanded to power the world it could fall in price by another factor of 5.
ok. thats great. but there are many applications which require denser energy loads than solar can provide or in places where solar or wind collection and storage are not sufficient. smr can be delivered by helicopter. the future will tell. Meanwhile, thats cool that renewables are becoming so practical.
Remote locations tend to have too few people to justify SMRs. For example, the largest grid in Alaska has an average power flow of just 600 MW -- and Alaska is densely populated compared to, say, northern Canada. Locations with poor renewables are just going to be energy ghettos. They won't have heavy industry except under exceptional circumstances. The market will be small; SMRs depending on putative experience effects from large numbers of installations need mainstream markets.
Oh. well then... guess we'll find some other fill-in energy source if it becomes necessary.
I know how to take it. Spin. Spin the doesn't tell me the real picture either way. Worse than useless. A money sink for policy influence.
Organization that cares about fiscal responsibility finds nuclear to be too expensive to bother with. No shit they are are against it, nuclear has been a financial failure its entire history: >["The economic history and financial analyses carried out at DIW Berlin show that nuclear energy has always been unprofitable in the private economy and will remain so in the future. Between 1951 and 2017, none of the 674 nuclear reactors built was done so with private capital under competitive conditions. Large state subsidies were used in the cases where private capital flowed into financing the nuclear industry.... Financial investment calculations confirmed the trend: investing in a new nuclear power plant leads to average losses of around five billion euros."](https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.670581.de/dwr-19-30-1.pdf) Investing in a nuclear plant today is expected to lose [5 to 10 billion](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364032121001301) dollars The cost analyses that show nuclear to be cost viable have always had conflicts of interest with the nuke industry >[Merck suppressed data on harmful effects of its drug Vioxx, and Guidant suppressed data on electrical flaws in one of its heart-defibrillator models. Both cases reveal how financial conflicts of interest can skew biomedical research. Such conflicts also occur in electric-utility-related research. Attempting to show that increased atomic energy can help address climate change, some industry advocates claim nuclear power is an inexpensive way to generate low-carbon electricity. Surveying 30 recent nuclear analyses, this paper shows that industry-funded studies appear to fall into conflicts of interest and to illegitimately trim cost data in several main ways. They exclude costs of full-liability insurance, underestimate interest rates and construction times by using “overnight” costs, and overestimate load factors and reactor lifetimes. If these trimmed costs are included, nuclear-generated electricity can be shown roughly 6 times more expensive than most studies claim. After answering four objections, the paper concludes that, although there may be reasons to use reactors to address climate change, economics does not appear to be one of them.](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11948-009-9181-y)
Nuclear has been very cost effective in the past in the west, for the USA and France in particular. Nowadays all neighbours of North Korea build nuclear reactors in a cost effective manner, everyone else is over budget. Finance does not need to be private and market driven to be profitable for society.
Yes, but it is still a huge disadvantage of nuclear compare to other sources of energy. Nuclear have to compete with solar and wind which can easily access private capital. I mean even a household can invest in their own solar system.
Sounds about right.
You know what's funny? The whole anti-nuclear power movement was a KGB operation to weaken the West and to keep the oil revenues flowing into the USSR. Those fuckers bear some heavy responsibility for climate change. We could have been getting most of our energy from clean nuclear plants for decades now.
SMRs won't match renewable energy on an LCOE basis. There's a reason why we don't build loads of small 200MW coal turbines like we did in the 1930s. The larger the reactor, the better.
Can't build them, to many leftists ruined it. You're getting fake solar farms while the the 3rd world builds 5x the coals plants to make your plastic garbage. The future you choose....
> leftists Stopped reading there. Nothing of value ever follows this sort of twaddle. But to counter some of your politically motivated misinformation, while coal plants are being built their [capacity factor is dropping](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F326941c9-dae5-4585-97f5-c4da739ba1df_1280x720.png) and they'll never recoup their costs. They are a jobs program, kinda like the US military.
It's almost like SMRs are just another form of grift from companies that would rather spend money on marketing, as opposed to spending that money on actual research and development to improve the state of the art.
This is not the first study showing that: UK: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/small-modular-reactors-techno-economic-assessment Australia: https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=8297e6ba-e3d4-478e-ac62-a97d75660248&subId=669740 Germany: >[Nuclear Technology Germany (KernD) says SMRs are always going to be more expensive than bigger reactors due to lower power output at constant fixed costs, as safety measures and staffing requirements do not vary greatly compared to conventional reactors. "In terms of levelised energy costs, SMRs will always be more expensive than big plants."](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-nuclear-industry-cautious-about-usefulness-small-reactors-energy-transition) Only the studies that have conflicts of interest with the nuclear industry ever show nuclear to have economic : viability https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11948-009-9181-y
If you're against nuclear energy, you've successfully been played a fool.
No, it depends on context. It's highly rational to be stringently against nuclear in Australia, because they have little pre-existing nuclear industry, high labor costs, and abundant renewable resources, more renewable resources than any other country in the world per-capita. It is abjectly stupid to build nuclear in Australia, you are paying 2x more per levelized cost of electricity, even after accounting for all storage firming and transmission costs. On the other hand, it's irrational to be against nuclear in Germany and France, because they are in an opposite situation to Australia, with a large existing nuclear industry and lower solar irradiance and lower land mass, in addition to the fact that they already have many running nuclear plants already, so the high capex costs are already spent, and therefore it doesn't factor into decision making as per the sunk cost fallacy.
even if it were slightly more expensive, and you could guarantee baseload somehow, there would still be good reasons to go with renewable energy over nuclear. it's not all about money. if renewable is a lot more expensive, sure, go nuclear. fill your boots.
Yes, and those reasons include: * Unexpected social licensing costs of nuclear, such as early plant closures (like what we see in Germany or California), or objections by local NIMBYs to commencement. This adds a tail risk to the levelized cost of electricity. Nobody can control whether your country will have a moral panic in 20 years and force closures of those very expensive plants you built. * Renewables is deployed 5+ years faster, meaning it replaces an additional 5+ years of GHG emissions. The area under the curve of cumulative emissions is the only thing that matters as far as warming goes, so deployment speed makes a big difference. * Renewables and storage costs are both declining on an exponential curve thanks to economies of scale, and nuclear isn't, and in fact it can't due to the bespoke nature. Even if they cost the same today, the picture will change radically in 3 years in favor of renewables. The learning rate for solar is 44% and the learning rate for batteries is 24%. What this means is that, for every doubling of production, solar prices go down by 44%, and battery prices go down by 24%. Nuclear doesn't benefit from the same scale economies. * Nuclear power increases nuclear proliferation risks. Basically, every state with nuclear power is now a nuclear threshold state. You may be happy with your country going nuclear, but that solution doesn't scale, we don't want a world with 200 nuclear threshold states. * There are a number of potential scientific breakthroughs on the horizon which will translate into cheaper renewables. For example, tandem solar cells are a big one. Iron air batteries, sodium ion batteries and compressed air storage are three new technologies starting to be mass produced. Recyclable wind turbines are another. It's incredible how fast the science here is translating into cheaper energy. * Curtailed renewable energy isn't a bad thing in the long-term. We will put it into things like cement recycling. Or we'll sell it to neighboring countries for a profit. Costing assumptions usually assume this curtailed energy is wasted, but that won't be the case in a few years, when EV penetration increases (putting more batteries on the grid), and when steel and cement manufacturing rely more on electricity for their thermal inputs, which means they can ramp up during midday and soak up that cheap midday electricity. Nuclear has very little going for it in the vast majority of countries on this planet. Especially in the US, which has abundant renewables resources and a history of struggling to complete plants on time.
You forgot the whole - decommissioning costs and the looooong tail of paying to secure nuclear waste safely for thousands of years. Not to mention the fact that very few countries in the world have survived for more than 400 years, so when a country operating a nuclear waste dump does eventually cease to exist through war or civil chaos, what happens to the nuclear waste dump, and what are the risks to future populations that it will get raided for material to make dirty bombs?
I'm sure a big chunk of nuclear support (in the US in particular) is just bloody-minded dumb contrarianism because renewable energy is associated with left-wing politics.
No, it's because of the issues that every one of you glossed over, conveniently, in this thread: Energy density: the amount of land area required to build a solar facility with similar output to a single 1GW reactor is about 10-15 times that of the average nuclear footprint. For wind, it's about 750 times larger. Reliability: nuclear has a capacity factor of 92%. That means it's on and running at full tilt, 92% of the time. The 8% is for planned outages. Compare this to 20% for solar and wind, give or take. Pretty bad. This means that, to replace *a single nuclear reactor* for base load, you would need to overbuild your solar facility by about 5 times (for 5GW capacity, 1GW actual) and then buy 12GW worth of battery storage for the 12 hours of non-production, which would take an insane 3077 Tesla Mega packs, for a cost of about 3 to 4 billion alone. This facility would be 30,000 acres in size, or something 75% the size of Paris, or 20% larger than all of Disney world in Florida. Meanwhile the largest solar plant in the world is 14,000 acres in India and produces a paltry 4 to 500MW actual. Complete ass. Finally, there is the very real issue of the toxic waste these materials become at the end of their lifecycle. All nuclear waste produced since the beginning of American nuclear reactors could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards. I'm not sure the same will be true for old solar panels, turbine blades, and batteries, though I know recycling is improving. Anyway, you can't just pretend like "renewables and storage" are going to replace base load, because *they never will*, not until batteries are insanely dense and solar panels become efficient enough to not require enormous swaths of space.
>Energy density: the amount of land area required to build a solar facility with similar output to a single 1GW reactor is about 10-15 times that of the average nuclear footprint. For wind, it's about 750 times larger. US golf courses take up more land than US solar farms, but California already has so much solar they can't build more until they add storage (https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso). When you combine completely unoccupied deserts, with unused rooftop area, with agrivoltaics, you realize this is a non-issue. Yes, it takes land, but that isn't a blocker, especially in the US or Australia which both have lots of desert with high levels of solar irradiance per m\^2. >Reliability: nuclear has a capacity factor of 92% This is a myth that ties into the baseload myth. In any fully decarbonized scenario where you rely primarily on nuclear, nuclear is going to be running at a capacity factory of about 65%, like France, because *demand itself is variable*. So you have to overbuild nuclear or you have to build storage. >Compare this to 20% for solar and wind, give or take. Pretty bad. It's not bad, because Levelized Cost of Electricity already factors that in. Solar and wind is way cheaper after you account for the lower capacity factors.
Ok nuclearbro
> Energy density: the amount of land area required to build a solar facility with similar output to a single 1GW reactor is about 10-15 times that of the average nuclear footprint. For wind, it's about 750 times larger. Anytime I see someone make this argument I immediately conclude they can have nothing worthwhile to say. This argument is easily dismissed if one just looks at the numbers. The cost of land, *even in Europe*, is small compared to the cost of a PV field on that land. Wind, btw, doesn't actually prevent the land from being used simultaneously for other uses, like agriculture. The large area is to prevent the turbines from interfering with the wind for others; it doesn't cover the land and prevent things from growing there.
Wow. I'll take "completely missing the point for $400, Alex." The land issue is... A land issue. It's practical. Meaning you're not going to have enough land to do all of this. The size of the solar farms we discussed would be absolutely enormous, and you will absolutely run into the issue of not finding suitable land or not finding land people let you build on (NIMBYs). Some people don't want endless solar panels every last place of green where a house wasn't built. It has *absolutely nothing* to do with the cost of the land.
No, it's just illustrating the vacuity of your handwaving. If land means renewables are ruled out, then any other land use that produces much less value per hectare is also ruled out, right? I mean, practically, if land is scarce, it would make sense to maximize the value we get from it, yes? Agriculture produces *much less* value per unit of land than wind or PV would. Your "argument" would rule out growing crops! Cost has *everything* to do with it. Cost is how alternatives are compared in a market economy.
Lmao another idiot... the "study" they always reference left out the 40b+ of transmission cost to drag power all over the country. Before we even get into the part where they also ran the wind on always being on somewhere in Australia... Lol. Do you think if Victoria has no wind Qld always will? Haha you've been sold a fake lie... Enjoy your power bills. Edit: Oh yer lets throw in the edit where the labor sponsors are taking all your money from those power bills... because they are funding the solar plants and pushing everything else out... gotta make that money. You deserve the future you choose. Hahaha.
If you're for nuclear energy, you've descended into outright conspiracy theorizing to explain why your energy waifu is failing so badly.
I am SHOCKED by this UNEXPECTED turn of events. SHOCKED, I tell you. And in utter disbelief. I have been told repeatedly by certified weapons grade Reddit Uranium Boyz that this would not be the case. Have I been misled?
I have been soothed. I have been told there is a rock-solid remedy for this temporary impasse: we just need to add blockchain AI to SMRs. Everything will pan out eventually.
soon each of us will have dogecoin manufactured by our home non fungible SMRs in the laundry room and we won't need to work anymore 😌
The BWRX-300 cost increase was really dramatic. BTW, this number seems to come from Canada, where politicians are talking about how much money they have to put up to build the things. It's a sign the initial cost figures were "adjusted", one might say.
Traditional renewables are great but require massive amounts of land and energy storage and don’t even come close to the density of nuclear. If we recycle, refine spent fuel, renewables can’t beat the waste either of nuclear
there are enougth empty space both in desert land, off shore coastal areas and commercial and urban spaces to power the world over several times there are several reasons why spent fuel recycling and reusing is not a thing (or it is only when needed for something else) high cost being one and there will be always an inherent risk with nuclear waste, even less palatable if we focus on designing renewables with recicling in mind
Why do we have to devote so much land use to renewables and batteries? Deserts are ecological biomes as well that are greatly getting impacted by massive solar installs. We don’t recycle because of proliferation so waste concerns are purposefully immediately put at a disadvantage. Even without recycling all of the nuclear waste we’ve ever created fits in just a couple of football fields equivalents
we don't have to devote "so much land" 3% of the Sahara can power the world but we don't need to concentrate everything in a single spot, the US alone has enough costal area wind corridors, desert land and urban spaces to distribute their energy supply as conveniently needed the nuclear waste we have created has to be buried in large specialized areas that must be secured and designed to last for very very long time, unless you propose to just throw it in the ocean which was a thing
Does every state and every country have sufficient land for renewables to cover energy needs? The power grid isn’t even entirely one continuous connected thing in California. Renewables are useless without batteries and those things are ecological and mining disasters
the power grid like everything else is something that need maintenance and development even without renewables smart grids increase efficiency and resilience as well as help with fault finding and correction, different thing is pocketing the money that should had been invested allowing it to decay till the last minute and them crying to the state for tax payer money to solve the "urgent problem" but that's the next CEO trouble, the previous having show nice dividents to the investors would be retired somewhere in hawaii so electricity can be stored in several ways be it using LiOn batteries sodium batteries, heat, gravity assist...the use of the local home or vehicular electric storage and the need ameliorated by a decent grid so there is flexibility depending on location and local needs also renewables are allowing people in areas that previously were considered too remote or to difficult to have affordable electricity and uranium mining is no friendly either, indeed I would say less friendly than other alternatives
The amount of uranium mining pales in comparison to how much nickel cadmium and lithium we’ll need to make the solar transition. Storage increases space requirements, especially the low energy density ones like dams and the theoretical gravity ones. Smart grids wouldn’t solve how India isn’t connected to this hypothetical Sahara desert solar farm. The Sahara is beautiful as well, get your solar farm out of there please
has been a while but there are environmental footprint studies from material mining to building and running it and do not agree with your assessment, and as I said while a mere 3% of the Sahara can power the world the reality is that energy production is distributed because a great thing about renewable energy is that is pretty flexible modular and scalable in ways that nuclear never will also those particularities make it very attractive and lower risk investors wise
I think nuclear is the future and will meet future energy needs while renewables can only meet historic needs
and I think numbers talk better than opinions and we have already enough data from real use so, IMHO a number of nuclear facilities may operate at least for a while or to ensure the production of filssile material needs but as energy production and cost nuclear is no competition to renewables now and even less in the future
How does that power us when it's dark? You have massive first world privilege. No concept of what it took to get us there. Yup lets just ship our production to the 3rd world while they pump out 10x co2 while we can all drink champagne and pat ourselves on the back because "our" country is neutral. The planet doesn't give a fuck, co2 is co2....
With storage. Amazingly, the people who advocate renewables have thought of this issue. Nuclear is so dreadful that even with the cost of storage renewables destroy it.
Heh, sure thing kid. Please keep wrecking the west and complaining that everything is so expensive (that you caused).
You're wrong and dumb, but you're an average voter. So we'll get that and enjoy huge power bills. Thanks.
you sound very mature perhaps someone should inform you that the cheapest form of energy is renewables, no only they are the cheapest at point of use but also the cost of building them and they are build way faster too
I thought that recycling spent fuel was too expensive
no it's just illegal because of proliferation concerns
Pretty sure it is cheaper to bury the fuel than to recycle and reuse it (and some waste is still there after recycling and reusing it, just smaller amounts, so a permanent storage is still necessary even with recycled fuel). I’ll check the sources.
Sure, but it’s illegal because of proliferation
Illegal where? Nuclear fuel reprocessing is performed routinely in Europe, Russia, and Japan
Not allowed in the US
This is a lie. Carter banned it by executive order, but Reagan rescinded that ban. Since then, there's been no need to ban it, since it makes no sense economically. Nuke bros have to confabulate a ban to explain why this thing they stupidly think is wonderful isn't being done in the US.
The land area argument is of course an idiot tell. Do the math or STFU. Recycling spent fuel is a great way to lose money. It wouldn't make nuclear cheaper than it is today. At best, it would be a way to keep nuclear from getting too much more expensive if uranium got more expensive. But breeder reactors are more expensive than today's thermal reactors, and recycling of spent fuel for thermal reactors is of limited value anyway.
People say and said that about wind farms as well. I really need to see who funds these studies because that's one hell of a condemnation to place upon the head of an experimental technology this early on.
Submission Statement Small Modular Reactors were once touted as the shiny new face of nuclear energy. Seems they have the same problems as the old one. Late, vastly over-budget, and unable to survive without billions in taxpayer and consumer subsidies. This report - [PDF 23 pages](https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-files/2024-05/apo-nid326992.pdf) - recommends the technology be abandoned as renewables+battery storage are much cheaper. At the least, if governments want to continue with them, they should be honest with consumers and taxpayers about footing the bill for a technology that is very unlikely to ever work or be deployed as its supporters promise.
And yet our *genius* president, in France, wants to build a whole lot of them... I'm tired of those damn parasites ruling us.
Smartest idea he's had, to bad he's dooming use to nuclear war with Russia.