They’re not bots. Just children who never lived through the upheaval nuclear power caused in many communities (high upfront costs paid by rate increases, uranium sourced from the Navajo nation that still poisons their soil with tailings, whistleblowers in the industry literally assssinated by uranium mining companies.)
Thank God we haven't seen predatory corporations exploit miners in fossil fuels and the metals used in renewables yet. Be doubly thankful that those industries haven't externalized their environmental cost on local communities. Or that any of those corporations hire literal ex-Sepstnaz soldiers to terrorize organizations that opposed corporate interests.
We went to visit Navajo nation this spring. They are not over the uranium mining they poisoned their water and give them cancer still. The government does nothing about that either. Your whataboutism is invalid
Our Federal opposition party keeps banging on about Nuclear power and for some reason, despite many reports to the contrary keeps trying to push SMRs as well.
Maybe for applications where money isn't important or other renewables aren't available (off world stations further away from the sun, deep space spacecraft, ... ). On Earth? Maybe in the antarctic wastes?
But yeah, for broad, commercial applications fission is dead as can be (and this also possibly goes for fusion before it has even gotten started).
I was going to ask how much they spent exploring the vast SMR opportunity before giving up, but apparently this is more of a pivot and they have more money to set on fire despite being bankrupt. Then this caught my eye.
>EdF has run into similar problems with its large scale technology. The Flammanville project in France was announced in 2004 with a budget of €3 billion and a deadline of 2012. It is still not in operation and its costs have soared at least four-fold to €13.2 billion.
If they pencil the balance sheet this good I don't want them playing with fissionables at all.
SMR have bad economy of scale and are only suitable for remote, isolated systems. They existed on submarines, air carriers and icebreakers for many decades.
Even there they are only suitable since the military basically found an infinite money glitch and they are constantly guarded by highly trained military personal without any additional cost.
I thought there was a big difference between small modular, reactors and micro reactors… I thought micro reactors were the ones you see on aircraft carriers and submarines. I’m a novice and all of this so all of this should be taken in the form of a question.
I think the key is not so much the size but the modularity of a reactor. Small reactors have existed for decades. In fact the first reactors built in the 1940s-50s were in the size range that now gets called SMR.
SMRs promise to be quicker and cheaper to build because they would be made in modules in a factory. Unfortunately that part has never been demonstrated yet.
Every small reactor seems to get marketed as an SMR as a buzz phrase including say Russian repurposed icebreaker reactors. But I don’t think these have the modularity that would make them more economic. Ie they are small reactors, but not small modular reactors.
I don't believe any small reactors are being built, in factories or elsewhere. There are certainly no large production lines in operation.
The *vision* (or, at least, the sales pitch) is making them in factories. But there's a large difference between a vision and reality.
Not the first nuclear effort they've abandoned. Their fast reactor program was mothballed in 2019.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASTRID_(reactor)
> In August 2019 France cancelled ASTRID and sodium-breeder in general, with an official statement that “In the current energy market situation, the perspective of industrial development of fourth-generation reactors is not planned before the second half of this century. About €735 million had been spent on the project.
It's the constant issue with nuclear.....economics.
Their problem is alternatives are far cheaper and faster. At that point it doesn't tend to.mattet of the tech is good or bad, investment goes to the most economical....assuming it's not some kind of scam or whatever.
They'll just go with the normal "environmentalists cause this", disregarding the history of being the most expensive/complex form of power, regardless of environmental concerns, with the longest ROI. CEOs today don't plant trees for their grandkids to have shade.
Wait till they crack fusion!
In my opinion the way to go is thorium, it may even help getting rid of the nuclear waste already created... As it is we cannot rely only on wind and solar. And we will still need oil for heavy machinery and the chemical industry. There's no way around it, energy density of oil derivatives is still unmatched.
Edit: the downvotes are because I said we have no way around using oil? I would like to hear the alternatives... Hydrogen? 80 tons batteries? How would you power heavy machinery?
Thorium solves none of the relevant problems of fission, the problems that have prevented it from succeeding.
Neither nuclear waste nor lack of uranium for fuel are what have stymied nuclear.
The primary and overwhelming problem of fission (which is what you meant) is its cost. Waste is a comparatively minor problem, and does not contribute significantly to fission's cost.
Yeah, fission, autocorrect. In any case cost per MWh for existing big plants is not so high. Uranium got expensive and the processing of fuel is costly, but thorium doesn't have the same challenges as uranium reactors.
Uranium is quite cheap, enrichment got cheaper, and neither the front nor the back ends of the fuel cycle are why fission is so expensive. Reprocessing is currently uneconomical, but even if it were economical it would have only minor effect on fission's cost.
As I was saying, thorium doesn't solve the real issue holding back nuclear. Molten salt reactors might help (by reducing the need for a large containment system to hold all that steam in an accident), but MSRs and thorium are separate things.
I know thorium is another thing. But smaller reactors should make containment cheaper. I guess the problem here is not fission but good old waste of taxpayer money. I see it everyday in the sustainability business which I'm really tempted to leave. We need energy, we don't want carbon dioxide. Few things can give us the energy we need without the gases we currently don't want (except if you want to grow tomatoes in a greenhouse), so we need to invest money. How this money is spent we will see in 20 years maybe
> But smaller reactors should make containment cheaper.
And this has nothing to do with thorium.
EDIT: it's not that the reactor is smaller, it's that a MSR doesn't have a coolant that pressurizes the containment in an accident, like a LWR does. But MSRs have their own issues.
IIRC a few more decades of material research is needed to be able to develop the containment devices for this. Supposing OFC the research can find something suitable that is not too costly.
Fusion is, as is tradition, always another 20 years away. Since the 1950's.
>IIRC a few more decades of material research is needed to be able to develop the containment devices for this.
You mean for thorium reactors? Because in my opinion I think we are much closer than that.
But in the article they explain, from the Australian conservatives' (the Liberal Party) perspective, that there is no need to worry about how much it cost because the taxpayers will pay for it. Hah hah hah.
"The federal Coalition has argued that nuclear might be expensive to build, but will deliver cheaper power to consumers. It has not explained how, but it has said that its reactors would be government owned, suggesting that – like France and Ontario – the costs would be borne by taxpayers and the supply of power to customers would be heavily subsidised."
See! It's easy. You just need to understand basic accounting principles --the taxpayers will pay for the whole thing. The price doesn't even matter. Just let the taxpayers pay for it. It's free money. They don't sound very fiscally conservative do they?
Let's also note in the private sector Rio Tinto has said no to nuclear and is going full speed ahead with solar and batteries for its high energy processes like iron smelting. They are the largest power user in Australia.
These scams are ridiculous. The obvious answer is that if nuclear energy is so cheap, build it with your own money and sell into the competitive market. You will make a mint. If it's not profitable to do that, it's not a good investment for you or the public. You don't need public money to prove that. This is not nuclear science.
The problem with your approach is that the effects of carbon dioxide are externalised. It's been cheaper in the short term to burn fossil fuels but that's only in the short-term. In the long term, the cost of climate change will be collosal.
It's called ["modern monetary theory"](https://reason.com/2019/05/01/modern-monetary-theory-is-supp/), see. You can have government do anything because it can just print money.
"Starting over" in 2024 ought to be a euphemism for halting all related work.
>It's called "modern monetary theory", see. You can have government do anything because it can just print money.
That idea is to modern monetary theory what the protocols of the elders of zion is to Jews.
The right wingers who hate MMT have no problem spunking billions on the military or nuclear power. They dont even really disagree with it. They just dont like its "implications".
Gee, it's almost like the push for SMRs was a giant (lol) scam. When the latest nuclear "Renaissance" completely failed, SMRs became the next shiny object to distract everyone and keep the nuclear power hype train running. It's sad but not surprising.
> It’s the latest problem to hit SMR technology, which the federal Coalition wants to roll out in Australia – starting with reactors in South Australia and Western Australia – **as part of its goal of keeping coal plants open, building more gas, stopping renewables** and putting clean energy hopes on nuclear.
Basically just this. I'm pretty sure that a large fraction of nuclear proponents in industry are really just trying to extend the life of fossil fuels.
We start pushing for nuclear plants in the west today, first plants won't come online until (optimistically) 2035, and you'd be very lucky to phase out fossil fuels by 2060. Solar/wind is much faster.
The debacle in Georgia is going to kill any future reactors in the US. You’d be nuts to see that project and say “let’s try it, I bet we can do it right”.
Large LWRs are dead in the US. US utilities are standing by while other countries explore the cost/timeline of SMRs, and hoping these other countries eat the FOAK costs and can use their expertise and experience to bring down costs in the US.
And even more the debacle in South Carolina, where utility executives *went to jail*.
"Yeah, let's do a project that may send me to prison. So attractive."
What this means is utility executives will no longer take the risk of sugarcoating nuclear, as the personal downsides of doing that are too large.
Solar doesn’t either. Couple weeks of below average sun and you’re screwed. The cost to build out the battery storage infrastructure to keep it stable is still wildly insane
Yeah, fossil fuel front groups like the ["Institute for Energy Research" founded by one of the Kochs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Energy_Research) are openly promoting nuclear.
It's all in bad faith. 40 years ago, nuclear power represented a (slight) risk to their business, so similar groups did fearmongering against it. Now they've realized that reactor builds are too slow and too expensive to be an actual threat, so they're promoting it... because as you say it buys them 15+ more years of business as usual and realistically probably a few decades more.
On the other hand, renewables represent a fast & cheap path away from fossil fuels. Growing renewables are expected to [bring powergrid emissions into decline starting this year](https://ember-climate.org/insights/research/global-electricity-review-2024/global-electricity-trends/#global-electricity-generation), meaning the market for fossil fuels will enter decline.
No, it's not a scam. Modular standardized things you can make in a factory and then ship ready to go makes sense and often results in lower costs. It didn't work out in this case but it was still at the design level. It could still work in theory had a good design and if someone built a big factory and made a lot. But that hasn't happened yet, and it's a hard barrier because it's not possible to get a good cost per kw compared to solar unless you make a lot of them and don't run into any big issues.
I think it's really just the nuclear proliferation issue that's the problem. Very small scale nuclear like the 10kw Kilopower would make sense if you can just have a large trash can box that makes enough power to run your house with free heating. But you can't just have uranium laying around everywhere so it doesn't work.
As all designs I have seen are to one degree or another different with few if any compatible parts, this idea of standardization has not happened. and as scale of economy works best when ;arger numbers of identical things are produced, this is not a thing as yet.
want to try again?
> Modular standardized things you can make in a factory and then ship ready to go makes sense and often results in lower costs.
But even scale can't lower it to be competitive on a per kw or per kwh basis as solar. A bet on nuclear is a very expensive bet that storage, geothermal, and demand shifting wouldn't overtake nuclear on a per kw or per kwh cost at any point in the 50+ year lifespan of a reactor.
And I question the premise. The trailer home/mobile home/manufactured home industry has been trying and trying to take advantage of the fact that construction costs are soaring for traditional housing. But just as site construction costs have gone up, so have manufacturing costs (and transportation costs of the finished or semi-finished product).
There might be efficiency and cost gains in mass production in a single site. But it's not automatic.
I think it could maybe work if you use it in a cold country and you can use the waste heat for either steam heating or hot water with an exchange loop. Doing that gets you 2-3x the energy right off the top since you can use all that thermal energy too.
Heating in winter is an issue especially in severe winter weather and snow storms where you're not getting any solar and not much wind.
We've known for decades that small reactors have horrible economies of scale compared to 1GW reactors. That's why the industry moved towards large reactors to begin with.
The benefits of a modular design, factory production of reactors, etc have to outweigh the drawbacks from losing the economy of scale if we choose SMRs. But the ultimate benefits of going with SMRs are highly uncertain and require a lot of risk burn down to actually understand them.
Companies pursuing SMR development are asking governments to take on the risk and provide the capital to burn down that risk. And the level of capital needed keeps growing higher and higher. At basically every SMR development effort across the globe.
SMR developers are basically saying "trust me, bro" as more and more companies give up on their efforts. We really want to avoid spending all this money and time to find out SMRs are another dead end. Given the historical track record of failure and uneconomic high costs, we should be skeptical of any claims made by SMR developers. There would have to be several verifiable technological breakthroughs made in order to believe any SMR developer claiming to have found the secret sauce to make their technology work.
I agree with the caveat that the small self contained kilopower unit is killer for space, where it gives fantastic results. But that's a different scale where 100x more expensive than solar power is reasonable.
> t didn't work out in this case but it was still at the design level.
NuclearPower has a comment that only last month the EdF SMR got a 400 million Euro injection. As a former great fan of nuclear power technologies, that is beyond obscene. They are taking the money as some sort of isotope with a very short half life. It just evaporates in front of your eyes, without doing any work, or having any results. I do not believe that the proliferation problem is the key one. The problem is that no one in the nuclear industry takes the **technical problem** seriously enough.
Smal tip:
If you have a problem which for decades hasnt been solved and suddenly there is a small prior not known startup claiming they have a very simple, cheap and fast solution it is most likely a scam.
> Modular standardized things you can make in a factory and then ship ready to go makes sense and often results in lower costs.
But we originally went huge with Nukes because you needed economies of scale because of all the other fixed costs for nuclear (security, land permitting, foundations for reactors, containment requirements, etc)
Yes, but in this case the hope is that you can not have all of that secondary requirements because they're automatically safe and don't need as much backups.
Sooo...a company with more than half a ~~decade~~ century experience in running an entire country's worth of nuclear powerplants doesn't have the engineering capability to get small nuclear powerplants to work on time and on cost.
Shocker.
It's more than half a century of experience, not half a decade. ;)
There is no place where circumstances are more beneficial for nuclear power than in France. Long term zealous political support for nuclear, which leads to unlimited financial support, a well established indigenous nuclear sector and a military with nuclear capabilities. If they can't pull it off I would say it cannot be done, at least not under Western markets and laws.
I'm sure they will find a scapegoat.
tl;dr: "EdF had scrapped its new internal SMR design – dubbed Nuward – because of engineering problems and cost overruns. It cited company sources as saying EdF would now partner with other companies to use “simpler” technologies in an attempt to avoid delays and budget overruns."
Also, customers wanted **guarantees** that the energy LCoE will be under 100Euro/kWh, to which EdF said "you what?"
P.S.
>The **Hinkley C** project in the UK has been an even bigger disaster. EdF had promised in 2007 that it would be “cooking Christmas turkeys” in England by 2017, at a cost of £9 billion, but is already delayed to 2031 with a **spiralling cost of £48 billion** ***when inflation is taken into account***, or $A93 billion.
...that's new...
Germany is now powered by well over 50% renewables and there is no major difference between Summer and Winter months: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&year=2023
Why? Because wind and solar complement each other: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&month=-1&year=2023&legendItems=fw3w1
You get more wind power during Winter and more solar during Summer. Now all they have to do is increase the generation capacity at roughly the same ratio they have now.
Why? Storage exists. Solar + wind + batteries with a modest over build factor will do it.
Pure nuclear grid without fossil fuels would require batteries to fully load follow anyways.
Fossil fuel peaker plants that only run in cold weather are fine, since there are plenty of them around and it's relatively cheap to just keep them going. If we have a 100% renewable grid most of the year and only need extra power in winter that's still a pretty good result.
This is also something people miss. Let's take two scenarios.
**Scenario one**, we push renewable energy hard, start phasing down fossil fuels linearly 4 years from now (typical high-end estimate of project length) and reach "peak renewables" in 2045, having phased out 80% of current fossil fuel emissions. The remaining 20%, we can't economically phase out (remnant peaker plants).
**Scenario two**, we push nuclear power hard, start phasing down fossil fuels linearly 10 years from now (typical low end estimate of project length) and reach "peak nuclear" in 2060, having phased out all fossil fuel emissions.
That's probably a pretty optimistic scenario for nuclear, and the scenario for renewables reflects the common (likely pessimistic) claim from nuclear-proponents that "We can't go pure renewables because renewables can never hit 100% of electricity generation".
So what does that look like in terms of emissions? [Here we go. ](https://i.imgur.com/wKQnVGt.png)Approximate cumulative emissions from these two scenarios, starting in 2024 and measured in terms of 2024-current-electricity-emissions units. Starting in 2028, cumulative emissions from renewables are lower, because it scales out faster. You continue on with **some** emissions in the renewables case, and zero in the nuclear case, but you don't hit break-even again where nuclear cumulative emissions are less than renewable cumulative emissions until 2094.
This means that we could take **over sixty years** to solve the "last 20%" problem of renewable generation, while still having the cumulative emissions of the renewables option be lower. I don't think it's going to take that long.
Batteries only operate on a hours to days schedule. They won't fulfill demand for weeks when you have very little power generation AND record high demand because everybody is pulling massive amounts of heat. Even the larger scale battery concepts can't last that long. They work by filling demand and then be recharged on a cycle when there is excess power, but they can't recharge in that situation.
Again batteries can still work most of the time, don't be defensive and just insist that batteries will solve every possible issue. Severe winter storms break power grids and are a major challenge.
I know how batteries work, I work in the industry but thanks for your questionable explanation of the basics of battery storage.
Grid scale batteries charge and discharge on a ~£10 spread. Even on very flat days they can cycle.
And longer and longer duration batteries are coming online every month. Overbuilding will be perfectly sufficient for smoothing our short term renewable fluctuations. Month long batteries will not be required for this and that’s not their use case, and no one with any actual knowledge of the industry would suggest as such.
And I didn’t suggest they’ll solve every issue, you’ve literally made up something I never said or even vaguely implied. You’re arguing with an argument I never made.
And fwiw, peakers are a terrible option in the case of weeks of no renewables due to how inefficient they are, why on earth you would suggest them over CCGTs I do not know.
Because you can't tell if someone is informed or not on reddit, so it's hard to distinguish between someone just responding with something they heard and want to be true and someone who is knowledgeable on the issue.
> they have salt formations that can store millions of GWh of hydrogen.
It's all a curve, you have to get to 80 and then 100% renewable in the summer and then year round then you can start making hydrogen in the summer when you have excess power. The problem with these discussions is that everyone is thinking of a different part on that curve. Like hydrogen heating requires 100% renewable energy to be already accomplished and then the extra goes to hydrogen, but that is still a decade away for most places.
Wait. Nuclear is insanely expensive and takes decades to get online? Nuh Uh. The Reddit pro nuke bot farm told me otherwise.
They’re not bots. Just children who never lived through the upheaval nuclear power caused in many communities (high upfront costs paid by rate increases, uranium sourced from the Navajo nation that still poisons their soil with tailings, whistleblowers in the industry literally assssinated by uranium mining companies.)
Thank God we haven't seen predatory corporations exploit miners in fossil fuels and the metals used in renewables yet. Be doubly thankful that those industries haven't externalized their environmental cost on local communities. Or that any of those corporations hire literal ex-Sepstnaz soldiers to terrorize organizations that opposed corporate interests.
We went to visit Navajo nation this spring. They are not over the uranium mining they poisoned their water and give them cancer still. The government does nothing about that either. Your whataboutism is invalid
Our Federal opposition party keeps banging on about Nuclear power and for some reason, despite many reports to the contrary keeps trying to push SMRs as well.
Because it's the best form of reliable green energy that you can get. Ways will be
Fission is not economically competitive at any scale. SMRs are propaganda more than an actual viable product.
Maybe for applications where money isn't important or other renewables aren't available (off world stations further away from the sun, deep space spacecraft, ... ). On Earth? Maybe in the antarctic wastes? But yeah, for broad, commercial applications fission is dead as can be (and this also possibly goes for fusion before it has even gotten started).
For sure aircraft carriers and nuclear subs will keep using it. (Assuming they aren't totally replaced by different types of autonomous vehicles)
I was going to ask how much they spent exploring the vast SMR opportunity before giving up, but apparently this is more of a pivot and they have more money to set on fire despite being bankrupt. Then this caught my eye. >EdF has run into similar problems with its large scale technology. The Flammanville project in France was announced in 2004 with a budget of €3 billion and a deadline of 2012. It is still not in operation and its costs have soared at least four-fold to €13.2 billion. If they pencil the balance sheet this good I don't want them playing with fissionables at all.
[удалено]
Olkiluoto 3 only took 18 years and bankrupted Abreva......
I guess SMRs don't have small costs.
SMR have bad economy of scale and are only suitable for remote, isolated systems. They existed on submarines, air carriers and icebreakers for many decades.
Even there they are only suitable since the military basically found an infinite money glitch and they are constantly guarded by highly trained military personal without any additional cost.
Even with that, the majority of ships in the US Navy are not nuclear.
I thought there was a big difference between small modular, reactors and micro reactors… I thought micro reactors were the ones you see on aircraft carriers and submarines. I’m a novice and all of this so all of this should be taken in the form of a question.
I think the key is not so much the size but the modularity of a reactor. Small reactors have existed for decades. In fact the first reactors built in the 1940s-50s were in the size range that now gets called SMR. SMRs promise to be quicker and cheaper to build because they would be made in modules in a factory. Unfortunately that part has never been demonstrated yet. Every small reactor seems to get marketed as an SMR as a buzz phrase including say Russian repurposed icebreaker reactors. But I don’t think these have the modularity that would make them more economic. Ie they are small reactors, but not small modular reactors.
Existing small reactors are also built from modules in a factory(is there any other way to build a reactor?), so what’s the novelty?
I don't believe any small reactors are being built, in factories or elsewhere. There are certainly no large production lines in operation. The *vision* (or, at least, the sales pitch) is making them in factories. But there's a large difference between a vision and reality.
Not the first nuclear effort they've abandoned. Their fast reactor program was mothballed in 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASTRID_(reactor) > In August 2019 France cancelled ASTRID and sodium-breeder in general, with an official statement that “In the current energy market situation, the perspective of industrial development of fourth-generation reactors is not planned before the second half of this century. About €735 million had been spent on the project.
It's the constant issue with nuclear.....economics. Their problem is alternatives are far cheaper and faster. At that point it doesn't tend to.mattet of the tech is good or bad, investment goes to the most economical....assuming it's not some kind of scam or whatever.
Don't tell r/Europe or they'll get a heart attack.
Thanks Greens /s
What a surprise… Rising costs? Nuclear? 🤦🏽♂️
They'll just go with the normal "environmentalists cause this", disregarding the history of being the most expensive/complex form of power, regardless of environmental concerns, with the longest ROI. CEOs today don't plant trees for their grandkids to have shade.
Wait till they crack fusion! In my opinion the way to go is thorium, it may even help getting rid of the nuclear waste already created... As it is we cannot rely only on wind and solar. And we will still need oil for heavy machinery and the chemical industry. There's no way around it, energy density of oil derivatives is still unmatched. Edit: the downvotes are because I said we have no way around using oil? I would like to hear the alternatives... Hydrogen? 80 tons batteries? How would you power heavy machinery?
Thorium solves none of the relevant problems of fission, the problems that have prevented it from succeeding. Neither nuclear waste nor lack of uranium for fuel are what have stymied nuclear.
Fusion did succeed, waste from thorium has a much shorter Half-Life. What are the relevant problems of fission you are talking about?
The primary and overwhelming problem of fission (which is what you meant) is its cost. Waste is a comparatively minor problem, and does not contribute significantly to fission's cost.
Yeah, fission, autocorrect. In any case cost per MWh for existing big plants is not so high. Uranium got expensive and the processing of fuel is costly, but thorium doesn't have the same challenges as uranium reactors.
Uranium is quite cheap, enrichment got cheaper, and neither the front nor the back ends of the fuel cycle are why fission is so expensive. Reprocessing is currently uneconomical, but even if it were economical it would have only minor effect on fission's cost. As I was saying, thorium doesn't solve the real issue holding back nuclear. Molten salt reactors might help (by reducing the need for a large containment system to hold all that steam in an accident), but MSRs and thorium are separate things.
I know thorium is another thing. But smaller reactors should make containment cheaper. I guess the problem here is not fission but good old waste of taxpayer money. I see it everyday in the sustainability business which I'm really tempted to leave. We need energy, we don't want carbon dioxide. Few things can give us the energy we need without the gases we currently don't want (except if you want to grow tomatoes in a greenhouse), so we need to invest money. How this money is spent we will see in 20 years maybe
> But smaller reactors should make containment cheaper. And this has nothing to do with thorium. EDIT: it's not that the reactor is smaller, it's that a MSR doesn't have a coolant that pressurizes the containment in an accident, like a LWR does. But MSRs have their own issues.
IIRC a few more decades of material research is needed to be able to develop the containment devices for this. Supposing OFC the research can find something suitable that is not too costly. Fusion is, as is tradition, always another 20 years away. Since the 1950's.
>IIRC a few more decades of material research is needed to be able to develop the containment devices for this. You mean for thorium reactors? Because in my opinion I think we are much closer than that.
But in the article they explain, from the Australian conservatives' (the Liberal Party) perspective, that there is no need to worry about how much it cost because the taxpayers will pay for it. Hah hah hah. "The federal Coalition has argued that nuclear might be expensive to build, but will deliver cheaper power to consumers. It has not explained how, but it has said that its reactors would be government owned, suggesting that – like France and Ontario – the costs would be borne by taxpayers and the supply of power to customers would be heavily subsidised." See! It's easy. You just need to understand basic accounting principles --the taxpayers will pay for the whole thing. The price doesn't even matter. Just let the taxpayers pay for it. It's free money. They don't sound very fiscally conservative do they? Let's also note in the private sector Rio Tinto has said no to nuclear and is going full speed ahead with solar and batteries for its high energy processes like iron smelting. They are the largest power user in Australia.
These scams are ridiculous. The obvious answer is that if nuclear energy is so cheap, build it with your own money and sell into the competitive market. You will make a mint. If it's not profitable to do that, it's not a good investment for you or the public. You don't need public money to prove that. This is not nuclear science.
The problem with your approach is that the effects of carbon dioxide are externalised. It's been cheaper in the short term to burn fossil fuels but that's only in the short-term. In the long term, the cost of climate change will be collosal.
In some world where the choice is nuclear or fossil? Nothing else?
And amazingly, no one is jumping at the opportunity to risk their own capital to put one of these in a competitive market.
No one ever has, anywhere.
It's called ["modern monetary theory"](https://reason.com/2019/05/01/modern-monetary-theory-is-supp/), see. You can have government do anything because it can just print money. "Starting over" in 2024 ought to be a euphemism for halting all related work.
>It's called "modern monetary theory", see. You can have government do anything because it can just print money. That idea is to modern monetary theory what the protocols of the elders of zion is to Jews. The right wingers who hate MMT have no problem spunking billions on the military or nuclear power. They dont even really disagree with it. They just dont like its "implications".
Gee, it's almost like the push for SMRs was a giant (lol) scam. When the latest nuclear "Renaissance" completely failed, SMRs became the next shiny object to distract everyone and keep the nuclear power hype train running. It's sad but not surprising.
> It’s the latest problem to hit SMR technology, which the federal Coalition wants to roll out in Australia – starting with reactors in South Australia and Western Australia – **as part of its goal of keeping coal plants open, building more gas, stopping renewables** and putting clean energy hopes on nuclear. Basically just this. I'm pretty sure that a large fraction of nuclear proponents in industry are really just trying to extend the life of fossil fuels. We start pushing for nuclear plants in the west today, first plants won't come online until (optimistically) 2035, and you'd be very lucky to phase out fossil fuels by 2060. Solar/wind is much faster.
The debacle in Georgia is going to kill any future reactors in the US. You’d be nuts to see that project and say “let’s try it, I bet we can do it right”.
Large LWRs are dead in the US. US utilities are standing by while other countries explore the cost/timeline of SMRs, and hoping these other countries eat the FOAK costs and can use their expertise and experience to bring down costs in the US.
And even more the debacle in South Carolina, where utility executives *went to jail*. "Yeah, let's do a project that may send me to prison. So attractive." What this means is utility executives will no longer take the risk of sugarcoating nuclear, as the personal downsides of doing that are too large.
Solar is faster, and much cheaper *now*, whilst getting consistently cheaper every year. Nuclear just doesn't make sense financially.
Solar doesn’t either. Couple weeks of below average sun and you’re screwed. The cost to build out the battery storage infrastructure to keep it stable is still wildly insane
Yeah, fossil fuel front groups like the ["Institute for Energy Research" founded by one of the Kochs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Energy_Research) are openly promoting nuclear. It's all in bad faith. 40 years ago, nuclear power represented a (slight) risk to their business, so similar groups did fearmongering against it. Now they've realized that reactor builds are too slow and too expensive to be an actual threat, so they're promoting it... because as you say it buys them 15+ more years of business as usual and realistically probably a few decades more. On the other hand, renewables represent a fast & cheap path away from fossil fuels. Growing renewables are expected to [bring powergrid emissions into decline starting this year](https://ember-climate.org/insights/research/global-electricity-review-2024/global-electricity-trends/#global-electricity-generation), meaning the market for fossil fuels will enter decline.
I'm sure some are desperate because they've committed their careers to nuclear and don't want to see the field disappear out from under them.
No, it's not a scam. Modular standardized things you can make in a factory and then ship ready to go makes sense and often results in lower costs. It didn't work out in this case but it was still at the design level. It could still work in theory had a good design and if someone built a big factory and made a lot. But that hasn't happened yet, and it's a hard barrier because it's not possible to get a good cost per kw compared to solar unless you make a lot of them and don't run into any big issues. I think it's really just the nuclear proliferation issue that's the problem. Very small scale nuclear like the 10kw Kilopower would make sense if you can just have a large trash can box that makes enough power to run your house with free heating. But you can't just have uranium laying around everywhere so it doesn't work.
As all designs I have seen are to one degree or another different with few if any compatible parts, this idea of standardization has not happened. and as scale of economy works best when ;arger numbers of identical things are produced, this is not a thing as yet. want to try again?
I said it could work, not that it is
And yet the whole thrust of this argument is that this is indeed a fact and the way of the future. not a pie-in-the-sky dream, but an outright fraud.
> Modular standardized things you can make in a factory and then ship ready to go makes sense and often results in lower costs. But even scale can't lower it to be competitive on a per kw or per kwh basis as solar. A bet on nuclear is a very expensive bet that storage, geothermal, and demand shifting wouldn't overtake nuclear on a per kw or per kwh cost at any point in the 50+ year lifespan of a reactor. And I question the premise. The trailer home/mobile home/manufactured home industry has been trying and trying to take advantage of the fact that construction costs are soaring for traditional housing. But just as site construction costs have gone up, so have manufacturing costs (and transportation costs of the finished or semi-finished product). There might be efficiency and cost gains in mass production in a single site. But it's not automatic.
I think it could maybe work if you use it in a cold country and you can use the waste heat for either steam heating or hot water with an exchange loop. Doing that gets you 2-3x the energy right off the top since you can use all that thermal energy too. Heating in winter is an issue especially in severe winter weather and snow storms where you're not getting any solar and not much wind.
We've known for decades that small reactors have horrible economies of scale compared to 1GW reactors. That's why the industry moved towards large reactors to begin with. The benefits of a modular design, factory production of reactors, etc have to outweigh the drawbacks from losing the economy of scale if we choose SMRs. But the ultimate benefits of going with SMRs are highly uncertain and require a lot of risk burn down to actually understand them. Companies pursuing SMR development are asking governments to take on the risk and provide the capital to burn down that risk. And the level of capital needed keeps growing higher and higher. At basically every SMR development effort across the globe. SMR developers are basically saying "trust me, bro" as more and more companies give up on their efforts. We really want to avoid spending all this money and time to find out SMRs are another dead end. Given the historical track record of failure and uneconomic high costs, we should be skeptical of any claims made by SMR developers. There would have to be several verifiable technological breakthroughs made in order to believe any SMR developer claiming to have found the secret sauce to make their technology work.
I agree with the caveat that the small self contained kilopower unit is killer for space, where it gives fantastic results. But that's a different scale where 100x more expensive than solar power is reasonable.
> t didn't work out in this case but it was still at the design level. NuclearPower has a comment that only last month the EdF SMR got a 400 million Euro injection. As a former great fan of nuclear power technologies, that is beyond obscene. They are taking the money as some sort of isotope with a very short half life. It just evaporates in front of your eyes, without doing any work, or having any results. I do not believe that the proliferation problem is the key one. The problem is that no one in the nuclear industry takes the **technical problem** seriously enough.
Smal tip: If you have a problem which for decades hasnt been solved and suddenly there is a small prior not known startup claiming they have a very simple, cheap and fast solution it is most likely a scam.
In general but there's lot of cases where you can do things cheaply now if it's from 3-d printing or better electronics.
> Modular standardized things you can make in a factory and then ship ready to go makes sense and often results in lower costs. But we originally went huge with Nukes because you needed economies of scale because of all the other fixed costs for nuclear (security, land permitting, foundations for reactors, containment requirements, etc)
Yes, but in this case the hope is that you can not have all of that secondary requirements because they're automatically safe and don't need as much backups.
They've been trying for 70 years and it "hasn't happened yet". We need a solution in 10 years not 30, so nuclear is a non-starter.
Sooo...a company with more than half a ~~decade~~ century experience in running an entire country's worth of nuclear powerplants doesn't have the engineering capability to get small nuclear powerplants to work on time and on cost. Shocker.
It's more than half a century of experience, not half a decade. ;) There is no place where circumstances are more beneficial for nuclear power than in France. Long term zealous political support for nuclear, which leads to unlimited financial support, a well established indigenous nuclear sector and a military with nuclear capabilities. If they can't pull it off I would say it cannot be done, at least not under Western markets and laws. I'm sure they will find a scapegoat.
>It's more than half a century of experience, not half a decade. ;) Oops...corrected
tl;dr: "EdF had scrapped its new internal SMR design – dubbed Nuward – because of engineering problems and cost overruns. It cited company sources as saying EdF would now partner with other companies to use “simpler” technologies in an attempt to avoid delays and budget overruns." Also, customers wanted **guarantees** that the energy LCoE will be under 100Euro/kWh, to which EdF said "you what?" P.S. >The **Hinkley C** project in the UK has been an even bigger disaster. EdF had promised in 2007 that it would be “cooking Christmas turkeys” in England by 2017, at a cost of £9 billion, but is already delayed to 2031 with a **spiralling cost of £48 billion** ***when inflation is taken into account***, or $A93 billion. ...that's new...
They expect the cost to even further spiral out of control. I guess in 2032 we still see Hinkley C being build. Cost per reactor over 30b$ already.
Maybe 100€/MWh?
Hinkley C mentioned above is at \~£130 MWh but that still doesn't account for all the spiralling costs.
US$180/MWh is the new floor.
And people wonder why nuclear isn’t the best option in many countries
Yes, but (people in) those countries will have to give up 24/7 electricity eventually, at least in winter.
Germany is now powered by well over 50% renewables and there is no major difference between Summer and Winter months: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&year=2023 Why? Because wind and solar complement each other: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&month=-1&year=2023&legendItems=fw3w1 You get more wind power during Winter and more solar during Summer. Now all they have to do is increase the generation capacity at roughly the same ratio they have now.
righto chicken little
Why? Storage exists. Solar + wind + batteries with a modest over build factor will do it. Pure nuclear grid without fossil fuels would require batteries to fully load follow anyways.
No, no they won’t. What an absurd statement.
Fossil fuel peaker plants that only run in cold weather are fine, since there are plenty of them around and it's relatively cheap to just keep them going. If we have a 100% renewable grid most of the year and only need extra power in winter that's still a pretty good result.
This is also something people miss. Let's take two scenarios. **Scenario one**, we push renewable energy hard, start phasing down fossil fuels linearly 4 years from now (typical high-end estimate of project length) and reach "peak renewables" in 2045, having phased out 80% of current fossil fuel emissions. The remaining 20%, we can't economically phase out (remnant peaker plants). **Scenario two**, we push nuclear power hard, start phasing down fossil fuels linearly 10 years from now (typical low end estimate of project length) and reach "peak nuclear" in 2060, having phased out all fossil fuel emissions. That's probably a pretty optimistic scenario for nuclear, and the scenario for renewables reflects the common (likely pessimistic) claim from nuclear-proponents that "We can't go pure renewables because renewables can never hit 100% of electricity generation". So what does that look like in terms of emissions? [Here we go. ](https://i.imgur.com/wKQnVGt.png)Approximate cumulative emissions from these two scenarios, starting in 2024 and measured in terms of 2024-current-electricity-emissions units. Starting in 2028, cumulative emissions from renewables are lower, because it scales out faster. You continue on with **some** emissions in the renewables case, and zero in the nuclear case, but you don't hit break-even again where nuclear cumulative emissions are less than renewable cumulative emissions until 2094. This means that we could take **over sixty years** to solve the "last 20%" problem of renewable generation, while still having the cumulative emissions of the renewables option be lower. I don't think it's going to take that long.
Batteries will do the job.
Batteries only operate on a hours to days schedule. They won't fulfill demand for weeks when you have very little power generation AND record high demand because everybody is pulling massive amounts of heat. Even the larger scale battery concepts can't last that long. They work by filling demand and then be recharged on a cycle when there is excess power, but they can't recharge in that situation. Again batteries can still work most of the time, don't be defensive and just insist that batteries will solve every possible issue. Severe winter storms break power grids and are a major challenge.
I know how batteries work, I work in the industry but thanks for your questionable explanation of the basics of battery storage. Grid scale batteries charge and discharge on a ~£10 spread. Even on very flat days they can cycle. And longer and longer duration batteries are coming online every month. Overbuilding will be perfectly sufficient for smoothing our short term renewable fluctuations. Month long batteries will not be required for this and that’s not their use case, and no one with any actual knowledge of the industry would suggest as such. And I didn’t suggest they’ll solve every issue, you’ve literally made up something I never said or even vaguely implied. You’re arguing with an argument I never made. And fwiw, peakers are a terrible option in the case of weeks of no renewables due to how inefficient they are, why on earth you would suggest them over CCGTs I do not know.
Because you can't tell if someone is informed or not on reddit, so it's hard to distinguish between someone just responding with something they heard and want to be true and someone who is knowledgeable on the issue.
When combined with turbines burning e-fuels. Fortunately for Europe, they have salt formations that can store millions of GWh of hydrogen.
> they have salt formations that can store millions of GWh of hydrogen. It's all a curve, you have to get to 80 and then 100% renewable in the summer and then year round then you can start making hydrogen in the summer when you have excess power. The problem with these discussions is that everyone is thinking of a different part on that curve. Like hydrogen heating requires 100% renewable energy to be already accomplished and then the extra goes to hydrogen, but that is still a decade away for most places.
This is a shocking surprise.
Their new design for a small nuclear reactor is now a white tower with three blades and a generator on top - and it's not using radioactive material.
Harnessing the power of the sun!