Large scale plant construction is hard, takes a long time and the knowhow is disappearing (see recent issues in France with their latest project).
With a miniaturized plant the time to market is quicker, which hopefully will start having a positive effect on peoples opinions sooner when it comes to nuclear power.
It may not be optimal, but it has the potential of changing things for the better.
However, if you move to a molten salt reactor (cooled or fueled) you can significantly reduce the scale while still doing a 0.5-1.5GW plant. And you can use CCGT as well. This totally transforms the economics and while it would still a large plant it would be much more comparable to a gas plant in terms of capx. And in terms of opex the fuel should be significantly cheaper, while the labor required should be less in a modern plant.
The PWR real cost are the gigantic heat pumps and the huge required containment system. A molten salt reactor can be air cooled even in the desert of Arizona.
Hopefully in the future we can replace the CCGT with even smaller turbines like Super-critical CO2 turbines.
So I prefer large plants 500MW+ but they need to be molten salt cooled at least. My favorite design (for what is achievable in a reasonable time) is by Moltex Energy, the Static Molten Salt Reactor. Its basically the idea of filling the fuel assemblies with molten salt fuel rather then pellets and to cool you use another molten salt. And with some small amount of repossessing you can use current 'waste' as fuel. I think that design is of a scale and complexity that if some real capital got behind and government were willing to invest in their 'waste' rather then to drop it into a cave it could solve both the 'waste' problem and the grid problem.
Smaller plants can be produced faster with lower overhead, because the consistent design reduces risks.
So as dumb as it sounds, just making the thing smaller might be enough to soften public opinion
Its really the cooling towers that make it clear what it is and those look absurdly big.
The second big use case would be Europe right now. If small PWR can be produced fast, like say within a year, those could be economical viable. The energy price for next winter is predicted (depending on which gloom and doom you read) to reach around 2x to 20x compared to the record prices of last year. Such prices can make a lot of technology economical viable, and a big factor will then be product availability.
However to think about it in the simplest way.. a cheapo space heater in every room is a crude way to do electric heat, that anyone “can” do.
The average operational cost of a nuclear power in the US is around 2.5 cent to 3.4 cent per kw/h, which is still higher than many other energy sources. The spot price in some locations in Europe is feared to reach $1 per kw/h this winter. Gas furnaces are part of the problem, but society is dependent on electricity for basic function. Voters only accept limited amount of pain before forcing governments to take action and bail people out.
It's not just factory production.
There's a lot of savings from just scaling down the design. Currently the pressure vessels for a typical large reactor (the AP1000) are build using forges that weigh (take a moment to appreciate the number) 15 thousand tons [1]. No such forges exist in the US.
Truth is, NuScale plans to source their pressure vessels from one of the existing vessel manufacturers, the South Korean Doosan [2]. However, it is very likely that their vessel can be produced with much smaller forges, and in time more manufacturers will have the capability to build it.
[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
[2] https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/doosan-to-make-pres...
If I were a poor remote county and I wanted to make sure that
1) my residents emergency needs were covered hospital, sanitation, water, emergency heating, etc
2) also had access to cheap power
Having one of these provide the base load for critical infra allows one to shop around for cheap renewable power wherever it may come from.
If the smaller reactors can take advantage of easier fabrication and logistics they might be cheaper, but that is an unknown.
Cubic volume increase vs. quadratic surface area increase means larger sizes are more effective.
Here's a simple argument about why that's true:
https://yarchive.net/space/launchers/fuel_tank_scaling_laws....
> Take any plane that slices through the pressure vessel, and consider the problem of trying to prevent the vessel from separating at that plane. The pressure load trying to cause such a separation is proportional to the surface area of the slice. The wall length available to resist it is the outer edge of the slice. The load scales with the square of size, the wall length only linearly... so as the size goes up, the wall thickness must grow as well. Chase it through the math, and wall mass is simply proportional to volume.
It's also a consequence of the virial theorem of mechanics.
Below a certain size you run into code minimums, but nuclear power plants will be well above that size.
If you have some gas stored at 100 psi, you need a wall thickness to withstand 100 psi. If you create a sphere with twice the radius you still need a wall thickness to withstand 100 psi. A bit more than that because the tank also needs to support itself, but that's minor relative to its contents. That's why methane storage tanks are big spheres, to minimize surface area: https://i0.wp.com/tmicoatings.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09...
I'm not sure how applicable rocket motors are to this comparison (maybe you missed that they were talking about rocket motors?). Rocket motors have a big bell and throttle at the end, which is analogous to a big load. And the bigger the rocket combustor the more thrust it needs to support. This is a whole different kind of load, it's not a simple pressure vessel.
In particular:
> The pressure load trying to cause such a separation is proportional to the surface area of the slice.
This is probably taking into account something like greater fuel combustion. Because otherwise it's blatantly wrong. A tank at 100 psi still has 100 psi of pressure whether it's got a volume of 1 cubic meter or 10 cubic meters.
Here's a simple online calculator for wall thickness of pressure vessels. Change the radius of the vessel and watch the wall thickness go up in proportion.
https://www.engineersedge.com/calculators/shell_internal_pre...
The sensible way to deploy these would be in groups close to existing infrastructure in places that can be easily secured. For example de-commissioned coal plants or nuclear plants. Security also raises the cost of operation of course. Just because it is small physically does not mean the risk is smaller. So, same level of security as with a big nuclear plant. Same level of cost. But less energy. Co-locating allows you to reduce that cost.
However that is not the backbone of your infrastructure. I makes much more sense to start with one large scale design 500MW+ and deploy that as many times as you can and then you can see the places where that is overkill and you develop smaller reactors for those regions.
But in most countries with ~500MW design you can reach 80-90%+ of the population and since the design would be so well known and so mass produced it might make sense to just build more of those rather then some 50MW reactor that might be only be 25% the cost but 10% the production.
Last I heard, the big "solution" was to stick it in sacred Native American mountains in Nevada and New Mexico and let future generations worry about it.
If that's all we can do, people in 100, 200, 300 years may not be thinking what you're thinking they will think.
Sorry, but given that the climate catastrophe is the most pressing concern for humanity, I think that gives more weight that religious superstition over the "sanctity" of a mountain in the middle of the desert miles from any humans.
Securing nuclear waste to decay at the bottom of a mountain is a pretty good solution, the only thing against it really is political nimbyism.
Actually, from what I've read in the local newspapers in the areas affected, the politicians are all for it, so you're making assumptions there.
The people who are against it are the people who actually have to live with the stuff for the next thousand years.
If it's so safe, so stable, so easily rendered harmless, why not bury it in the bedrock beneath Manhattan, or Boston, or Virginia? All places that are far more geologically stable than, for example, Yucca Mountain.
If nobody lives there, nobody has to live with it.
There’s always some sort of catastrophe just looming just over the horizon of the next election. Televangelists have made careers from warning the faithful that their doom is assured — unless you reprint (and contribute.) The climate alarmist crowd has taken pages right out of the tent-revival handbook of the 19th century. Snake oil.
Atmospheric CO2 has gone from about 280 ppm pre-Industrial Revolution to 415 today. Yes, figuring out all the impacts and feedback loops is incredibly difficult, but it requires only a passing understanding of physics to understand how being on track to doubling the primary greenhouse gas in the atmosphere will result in a massively warmer planet.
I'll agree that was hyperbole, but interestingly this[1] article featured just the other day in the news here, about how a research vessel reached the north pole several days ahead of schedule because there was significantly less ice than expected. The scientists interviewed said conditions had changed drastically over the last 10 years. So maybe add 20 years to Gore's prediction?
[1]: https://www.nrk.no/tromsogfinnmark/forskningsskipet-ff-_kron...
> the North Pole will be ice free by 2013
The tendency is unmissable if you look at the data[1]. People might have been wrong about the exact date at which it would happen, but you should not let the exactitude of the date distract you. It will eventually happen (unless something changes drastically).
And we honestly don't know how the weather will behave on an iceless Earth. Some people speculate that the arctic ice is a sort of heat shield. It makes some sense intuitively: all that white ice reflects a lot of heat back up. Once it is gone... the blue water will absorb and accumulate more heat.
> I also remember the dire predictions of acid rain, the ozone hole, and numerous other proclamations that stirred up the anti-capitalist faithful.
Everyone is starting to feel the change, it's no longer "just words". If you have not started yet you will start feeling it soon.
In my country (Spain), this summer we have had 3 heatwaves in a row, as well as two very unusual clouds of Sahara dust, the first of which reached Finland. I was born in the south of Spain, were's the hottest. When I was little the max summer temp used to be 41 degrees Celsius (105F). Now it's 47C(116F). Max temperatures have increased through the Iberian Peninsula, 41C is "the new normal" in all places except some coastal fortunates and some very northern regions. My options for escaping the summer heat are dwindling.
In the United States my understanding is that the most visible exponent is the extreme drought, in particular the water levels in the Colorado river basin seems worrisome. You might find more information about where you live in [2].
Herbert W. Armstrong predicted that 1936 would be doomsday, and then that 1943 would be doomsday after 1936 came and went, and then that 1972 would be doomsday after 1943 came and went, and then that 1975 would be doomsday after 1972 came and went. How would you rebut that sentence if he said it in 1973 or 1974? Or if Harold Camping, who did basically exactly the same thing, said it? Why wouldn't that rebuttal apply equally to your use of it?
> Some people speculate that the arctic ice is a sort of heat shield. It makes some sense intuitively: all that white ice reflects a lot of heat back up.
But isn't the reason that the ice is at the poles that hardly any of the Sun's heat gets there?
Imagine that without ice the ambient temperature is 5 degrees C. And that the area being ice rather than dark colored rock causes a drop of about 10 degrees C.
So the ambient temperature in the area is under 0. But as it melts for reasons then this cooling effects disappears and now the thing is basically gone forever.
Not commenting too much on the actual theory but you could easily imagine an ecosystem disappearing due to these kinds of changes
And that doesn't even account for securely transporting the waste across the country. Imagine scaling nuclear to the size of coal. What does waste transport look like then?
Maybe this waste belongs precisely in the back yards of those of us who create it. Then we'd be truly careful.
Electricity generation by source in the US in 2021:
Coal - 21.8%
Nuclear - 18.9%
No you actually don't. Even under the most absurdly bombastic delusional fantasy of nuclear-haters the amount of damage nuclear waste deep in a cave in a desert can do is about a billion times less then climate change.
And even based on the pessimistic assumptions, it would be save for 1000s of years.
Are you seriously gone tell me that we should worry about 1000+ years into the future. If we do not have massive technological decay, the people in the next 1000+ years will have the technology to reprocess the fuel if they feel like it.
And if you do assume massive technological decay then the nuclear fuel is in a cave in a desert that will be essentially uninhabited and will most likely never seriously impact humans.
Even further this whole debate is incredibly dumb since putting into a deep cave is terrible idea anyway. As a human society we can just store it above ground in a save location and in case some danger is identified, we just move it to another location. Moving a few tons of nuclear fuel around ever couple 100 years is really no big deal. And again, if society collapses to a point where this isn't possible, that nuclear fuel is the least thing to worry about.
And even all of that is totally irrelevant, because the real actual solution is to simply ut it into advanced reactors, burn it up to a point where it is only 300 years away from matching natural uranium and you simple put it back into the mine where it came from.
If you do it correctly, we can get every person in the world using US like energy and we can store the complete output of world nuclear waste on a single abandoned Walmark parking lot in Gary Indiana.
If we used basic rationality this would be a non issue. This is a cultural political issue, not really a technical one.
> What does waste transport look like then?
Mhhh well it would be an occasional train going along the train network that would never hurt anybody.
And nuclear isn't that far away from coal level of production.
> Maybe this waste belongs precisely in the back yards of those of us who create it. Then we'd be truly careful.
I'm totally fine with storing all nuclear waste around the Whitehouse if that gets people to stop bringing it up as a problem.
Yet instead of advanced technology to the next stage, we spent that money to dig a bit hole.
And even worse, every country spends billions digging holes.
Even a fraction of that money could have been used advanced humanity into the next nuclear age, rather then dumping the output of the last one into a hole.
Besides, if we don't tackle the global warming problem, there might not _be_ generations 300 years down the line to judge our actions.
Nukes are not in competition with them. Nukes are in competition with renewables, where they lose badly.
Renewables + storage + more transmission lines will require construction projects of magnitude much smaller than would be required for enough nukes.
Future people will be fine. Shit we discovered uranium because some guys wandered into a cave and it burned their skin. Locals avoided it afterwards and eventually it was studied by people who knew what radiation was. Any actual storage though would be deep underground, in casks, and behind concrete with lots of warning signs.
Solar and Wind require a backup for when there's no wind or it's cloudy. Their current default backup is burning fossil fuels.
Of those, coal plans are particularly salient because they do generate radioactive waste. Continuously. And pour it over the atmosphere. They contribute far more radiation to the environment than nuclear power stations.
> let future generations worry about it.
I think they will appreciate having to worry about that in exchange of not having to deal with not existing because of climate change.
Why would future generations have to worry about something buried deep underground? Just don't drill there.
Is your objection due to the sanctity of the mountain or another reason?
While scale is what killed nuclear, the people who initially decided on scale, did so for good reason. You lose a huge amount if you scale down, specially with PWRs.
These small PWRs try to get some of that efficiency back with factory production, but at best it just evens out. The advantage is the added flexibility. So I don't think that putting traditional PWR in a tube is really any kind of series solution to transform our energy system.
However there are good things coming out of this. For example, NuScale went threw a process managing multiple reactors from the same control room. That is the same thing that essentially all GenIV reactors want to do as well. Having managed to get that concept threw the regulator will make it massively easier for anybody that follows.
Its a damn shame that we don't have GenIV reactors since the 80s. We had the technology and every reason to use it. We could be living in a nuclear age right now, and I consider it the largest failure of humanity that we failed to do so. People in 100 years will look back and think we were insane that we did not use the technology we discovered.