People have been hyping up small modular reactors for as long as I have been alive. They make total sense. And yet, there is not a single one is operation? I don't really care what tech gets us to cheap, abundant power, but given the cost curves of solar and batteries, it's hard to see anything competing.

Both are here, right now, and getting cheaper every year. Nuclear seems to be something climate skeptics points to as a way of doing nothing.

It is probably more productive to talk about why certain technologies have and have not been adopted than to "take sides" in an artificial debate that, for some reason, pits nuclear against wind and solar.

The first small modular civilian reactor in the United States in 2022. However, the United States has been producing small modular reactors for military use since the late 1950s.

Ignore dogma and consider cases why nuclear power might be beneficial even if the dollar cost for wind and solar is globally lower: - The power output variance for nuclear is not very correlated with solar, wind, and hydro. Given the issues related to supply and demand variance, adding power sources whose variance isn't correlated with other power sources stabilizes supply and reduces risks of blackouts. - Solar, wind, and hydro are very geographically-dependent sources. To a small degree, so is nuclear— it requires cooling— but it can be built in places that aren't great choices for wind and solar. This means it's very useful for some local markets. - Nuclear has a different set of mineral requirements from batteries. In many ways, they are more complicated (e.g., enriching Uranium for light water reactors), but they are nonetheless different. Using nuclear alongside batteries reduces risk from mineral supply chains being broken.

Most of these effects run in both directions. Relying entirely on one source of energy is more risky than utilizing an ensemble of sources.

Nukes just cost more. Always have, always will. Like geothermal, they depend on a steam turbine that is expensive to maintain. It is hard for anything with a steam turbine to compete with anything without.

Nukes have the extra ball-and-chain of huge capital cost to amortize over all the kWh they will produce over their lifetime. This means that if you end up operating only half time, there are half as many kWh to amortize over, and each kWh costs even more, making you even less competitive. (Operating a steam turbine less might reduce maintenance cost, but probably not if you are starting and stopping it every night, or if you keep it cycling to avoid that.)

So the expectation is that nukes will very quickly become unable to produce enough revenue to pay for continued operation. Then they are mothballed. Suddenly, all that capex is amortized over a much smaller lifetime kWh total, and the actual cost of every kWh ever produced jumps instantly to greater than you ever were able to charge for it. Then you go into receivership, or anyway write off that capex you thought you had invested, but really just poured down a hole.

In the context of CO2 emissions, money doesn't matter, only resources and physical units do.

Money matters in that you can spend it building and operating nukes, or building renewables. You can't spend the same dollar on both, but the dollar spent on renewables gets you more kW than the same dollar spent on nukes.

We will need every non-carbon kW we can muster.

what I meant is that you cannot only consider money when making choices about energy, you need to consider materials and their CO2 footprint.

prices change, physical units don't.

Zero CO2 footprint is hard to beat.

Why? OK. The reason why nuclear has not been adopted is that society has taken against it. Politicians respond to what people want, and create rules and roadblocks.

There are alternatives that can fill the same roles you envisage for nuclear. We'll get some of those instead.

Don't talk to us nerds, go knocking on doors and persuade soccer moms and instagram influencers that nuclear is safest, cheapest, best for their kiddies. That's who you need to convince.

The people you need to convince are the people with money making the decisions. They look at nuclear and see a loser technology that consistently overpromises and underdelivers, and blows throw its cost promises again and again. In comparison, utility scale renewable installations dependably come in with 10% of the contracted figures.

V.C. Summer and Vogtle 3/4 were the nails in the coffin for nuclear here in the US. Nuclear has no time now to rebuild a reputation for honesty.

Soccer moms and instagram influencers have nothing to do with this.

They have votes. Politicians do what they say.

Politicians have arranged to be well-insulated from what soccer moms want. Soccer moms, meanwhile, are what we call a "managed population". They vote as they are told to. Not just them, of course.

We are living in the world Edward Bernays built, where democracy holds vanishingly little sway as PR machinery reliably generates votes for whatever whoever pays it wants.

Sometimes opposing payers compete.

We shouldn't assume that pro-nuclear people are climate skeptics, anymore than we should assume that anti-nuclear people are fossil fuel advocates. German renewables politicians voted to get natural gas declared as green, and on the opposite side of the political debate we had nuclear politicians, both accusing the other side of being climate skeptics.

We should not care what tech get us to cheap, abundant, emission-free power, and the current trends from nations around the world points in multiple directions. We don't see examples of cheap small modular reactors, but we also don't have national grids that operates exclusively on solar and batteries. Solar seem to have the best cost curve, while short duration batteries looks great in replacing natural gas when those are used in short (a few hours) duration. Battery technology is also looking great to replace grid stabilizers, ie something to temporary supply or take energy when energy plants on the grid boots up or goes winds down.

Skeptics of solar and batteries is generally directed towards the idea of replacing all worlds existing fossil fueled power plants. Replacing them all with nuclear looks conceptional feasible. Getting the solar capacity up to 100% seems also feasible, but batteries is generally were people start to have doubts.

> since it's faster and simpler to deploy

No it isn't, as demonstrated by all the solar being installed alongside the zero mini nuclear reactors.

> require a lot of copper wiring

Intuitively I'd expect the quantity of wiring to be roughly proportional to output power, regardless of method; how much do you need for the coils of reactor turbines, for example?

> panels generally generate much less power after 20 or 30 years.

Maybe? That's the expected lifetime, but the actual outcome will vary depending on how weather-beaten they are. Being entirely solid state with no moving parts larger than an electron-hole pair is quite an advantage.

> can probably be sold to less rich countries

We're just going to stop worrying about proliferation?

per energy output, nuclear reactors require less metal, concrete, steel, etc.

I used to be pro-nuclear. But the war in Ukraine stopped that. One does not need to be a president of Russia to bomb a nuclear reactor. A crazy guy at top of even small country can clearly manage to destroy reactors with modern conventional weapons releasing a lot of radioactivity. Smaller reactors increase that risk exponentially simply by having more targets closer to densely populated areas.

Fusion reactors in theory can be much safer in that regard, but until they are realized and shown to work I do not see any sensible alternative for building solar or wind while keeping coal and gas power stations running.

Fusion plants according to current projected designs would not, in fact, be appreciably safer. It is academic, because they would be 10s to 1000s of times as expensive as what they would be competing with, so will not be built.

D-3He reactors might someday find uses in the outer solar system, or in military rapid-deployment corps, if they turn out possible. But availability of 3He will always be a problem. Probably it will be bred by using solar power to accelerate protons.

Nuclear plants take too long to get up and running to help us with the climate crisis that is here now. We can meet all our needs with renewables and storage.

Who cares that the panels are mostly made in China? Most of the electronics that would control your hypothetical nuclear plant would be made in China too.

Why does the wiring of PV panels have to be copper? The wiring (aside from the contact wires actually on the cells themselves) is not volume constrained, so I'd expect aluminum to be used, not copper.

that's even more energy intensive and expensive, I guess

Aluminum is cheaper per mass than copper, and has higher conductivity/density. Aluminum is orders of magnitude more adundant in the Earth's crust than copper.

I'm pro-everything. From my flawed knowledge of economic history, energy rules all and is the single best thing to invest in for a country or civilisation's future. [1][2][3][4][5]

Any advantages individual technologies have in energy generation, transportation or storage is probably worth exploring.

I hope to have more insight in this when I get around to reading Vaclav Smil, or better yet work in the energy industry as it seems to be one of the few industries I've looked at that definitely needs to exist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution

[3] https://www.quora.com/Why-didnt-Hitler-try-to-capture-Moscow...

[4] https://www.history.com/news/why-did-japan-attack-pearl-harb...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

These are real issues. Saying nuclear is too hard/too dangerous/too expensive/takes too long is the real FUD, simply because it's a wide range of significantly different technologies each with vastly different properties (whereas solar panels are all pretty similar and the problems are not with one particular kind but external - caused by how the solar panels are used). We need both/all.

Are they though? A big fraction of those panels are made in countries other than China. The panels generally generate still more than 70% of their original power after 20 or 30 years.

They're hardend against hail, can be insured and do definitely not require a lot of copper wiring.

I wouldn't buy any stock related to mini nuclear reactors. It doesn't seem like a promising solution, since none of them have been actually deployed at all, they cannot be sold to less rich countries since they prefer solar in general, and the dangers to nuclear accidents, proliferation as well as the inevitable dismantling after their lifetimes.

We're good with solar, wind and hydrogen storage.

I'm not a nuclear engineer, but I wish there was more news about it.

Just yesterday my state (in Central EU) has incorporated a company that is going to deploy several SMRs here. One of the US ones got certified just few months ago (they are buying that one too) and we also have our local designs ready to certify and then build - this country is extremely pro-nuclear (over 80% support) and has significant nuclear engineering industry and world-class nuclear regulation authority. I really don't think you're right it's not happening.

And talking about nuclear in general, we are building several standard big reactors too (expanding older power plants), with no sign of insurmountable problems - ever since we stopped letting the greens affect the projects with their FUD and fake "studies" it's going more than well enough, unfortunately they backtracked us for a decade before we were able to change the law otherwise we would have the new reactors running today (the local Green party went from 30% to literally 0 over this, lol).

The nukes will all be mothballed by 2040, as they find it impossible to compete.

That is, provided global society does not collapse first. If it does, they will be mothballed as unmaintainable, instead, if they don't blow up for the same reason.

Right, it is significant that the only places shelling out for SMR are the US and Romania. Only the latter is actually planning to deploy them. (The US hands over tax money to people making them, but US utility operators don't want any.) Corruption suffices to account for both.

Renewables+storage is just too obviously a better place to invest, if you care about investing wisely.

If you have so much free space as US or Romania, maybe. There are much smaller states without enough sunshine though, and people hate having wind turbines visible near their houses (also, if you care about ecology then the blades are a big problem). Both wouldn't be nearly enough to replace fossil fuels anyways - only nuclear allows us to ditch natural gas and benzin/diesel entirely.

Romania by itself has the land area for 3.5 TW of electricity average over a year, even assuming 15% efficient PV and a 10% capacity factor; the actual capacity factor given Romanian climate would be more like 5.5 TW; current global electricity use is only 2.7 TW.

Cyprus (the island) has a better climate, so despite its small size, it could produce 137% of the entire EU's current annual demand from PV.

Land use just isn't close to being a limiting factor, so even though PV does indeed need more land than some other things, it just doesn't matter.

You're talking about electricity, I am talking about replacing the entire energetic demand. That means fuel for ICE vehicles, ships, etc in addition to all the fossil fuels used purely for heating.

What Cyprus, Romania and other states do internally is not so interesting - every state is selling electricity for outrageous prices internationally, so it's not really something we'd want to rely on.

My point remains valid even if you want to replace all energy and not just what is already electrified, and also boost global energy use to the per-capita rate of Qatar (I think the highest in the world at about 2.5 times the average of the USA), and also boost world population to 10 billion, and also the PV is placed slightly worse than if it was randomly scattered.

Simultaneously. And by a large margin.

There's a lot of land on this planet of ours.

(The reason I chose Cyprus as an example is because of how small it is, and yet could supply so much if it wanted to. Any single one of Bavaria, Lombardy, Brussels, Lubusz, Aragón, Île-de-France could individually supply the entire EU just from PV, not merely meet their own needs, but again this is just to give a sense of scale — the correct placement of PV is seldom "all in one place").

Land use, even if, would not matter, because solar coexists with existing uses. Float solar on reservoirs and canals, post it in fence-rows on pasture and cropland, lay it out on industrial and warehouse roofing.

Wishing doesn't make it so.

I don't know what you're talking about, we're building and the reactors we built previously work cheaper than any renewable/gas/coal/whatever, the only problem is that we don't have enough, but we will have more soon. You're the one wishing for renewables - and indeed, wishing won't make it happen.

The Greens slowed us down for two election intervals but they're gone and the building is resumed. Don't let Greens decide your policy and you can build too - and when you take them out of the equation it suddenly becomes cheap. We will happily build for you if your nuclear industry is not up to it, all it takes is ask.

> the reactors we built previously work cheaper than any renewable

This is generally false, depending on region PV is the single cheapest source of electricity right now by a significant margin.

Don't get me wrong, I value nuclear even if only for diversity of supply, but it isn't cheap.

If you're comparing only solar panels, then maybe. I'm comparing the whole system - batteries, transmission, gas usage when it's not enough sunshine for a third of the year here, etc. Our electricity got more expensive mostly thanks to renewables, not cheaper. Now we're building reactors to have it cheap again.

Your electricity got more expensive because of an artificial NG shortage. Failing to build out solar will leave you buying from neighboring countries that didn't, at prices less than it costs to operate your reactors.

I am not talking about the current situation, I am talking about the times when gas was cheapest ever around 10 years ago. People were building resistive electric heating because it still came out cheaper than using gas.

Currently our state is net-exporter and probably always will be since the states around us are refusing nuclear altogether. And Germany nor Austria has never ever offered electricity cheaper than our own.