Small modular reactors: Still too expensive, too slow, and too risky [pdf]

Re:Small modular reactors: Still too expensive, too slow, an... by hi-v-rocknroll on Friday May 31, 2024 @03:25PM (#40539260)

After reading S. Levy's retrospective book on GE NE and ALWRs, SMRs were delayed for decades but came too little, too late.

There's essentially no general purpose point for them given the costs of PV and onshore wind have become cheaper to deploy. This is good for everyone so long as politic including techno-"religious" preferences doesn't subsidize coal, oil, gas, or even nuclear when there are cleaner and cheaper solutions today.

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Re:Small modular reactors: Still too expensive, too slow, an... by gravitywave on Friday May 31, 2024 @04:42PM (#40540019)

It's worth keeping in mind that 'low cost' PV comes from China (which makes 80% of the global supply of PV cells) which is run predominantly on coal (60% of their electrical energy) and China continues to build a GW coal plant approximately weekly, and incidentally, a new GW nuclear plant about monthly.

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Re:Small modular reactors: Still too expensive, too slow, an... by bryanlarsen on Friday May 31, 2024 @05:09PM (#40540282)

The coal plants China are building are peaker plants run at a fairly low duty cycle, most of their new power comes from solar. IOW they're building solar+coal instead of solar+batteries.

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Re:Small modular reactors: Still too expensive, too slow, an... by mnau on Friday May 31, 2024 @05:15PM (#40540334)

Number of coal plants is irrelevant. It's a misinformation.

What matters is how much coal they do burn. Their coal plants have capacity factor under 50%. Chinese consumption of coal is roughly as ~10 years ago (82EJ vs 88EJ). That is what matters.

Coal plants are going to balance the grid, just like in Germany.

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Re:Small modular reactors: Still too expensive, too slow, an... by p1mrx on Friday May 31, 2024 @05:09PM (#40540274)

> the costs of PV and onshore wind have become cheaper to deploy

What about the additional cost of storage/transmission to make those sources available 24/7?

Perhaps you've done that analysis and they're still cheaper, but I would automatically reject any argument that excludes storage/transmission.

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Re:Small modular reactors: Still too expensive, too slow, an... by bobthepanda on Friday May 31, 2024 @05:21PM (#40540396)

nuclear has an opposite but related storage problem to solar and pv; whereas it's hard to reliably predict and line up solar and wind power, it is also generally hard to spin nuclear up and down quickly according to peak power demand as well. one of the first uses of pumped hydro was to store excess power at nuclear stations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power...

transmission is also an issue at nuclear stations, because no one wants to live near one, and they generate so much power you would probably need additional transmission capacity wherever one was sited anyways.

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Re:Small modular reactors: Still too expensive, too slow, an... by jes5199 on Friday May 31, 2024 @05:26PM (#40540437)

I've seen that analysis - depending on how you model it, solar+wind+batteries is often still cheaper, plus batteries are solar are getting cheaper every year, while nuclear isn't (historically it's been getting slightly more expensive over time). So if it takes a decade to get a nuclear plant approved, even if it's competitive today, it probably won't be in 2034

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Re:Small modular reactors: Still too expensive, too slow, an... by pfdietz on Friday May 31, 2024 @05:24PM (#40540421)

Nuclear still loses to PV/wind even with those considerations. And it loses massively if you project those (especially PV) down their historical experience curves.

Seriously; do you really think the experts pushing PV/wind have not thought of this? It's been very well addressed.

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Re:Small modular reactors: Still too expensive, too slow, an... by p1mrx on Friday May 31, 2024 @07:34PM (#40541357)

The experts pushing PV/wind generally expect fossil methane to remain on the grid, or significant upgrades to long-distance transmission.

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Re:Small modular reactors: Still too expensive, too slow, an... by pfdietz on Saturday June 01, 2024 @07:07AM (#40544652)

Or substitution of e-fuels for the last residual gas use on the grid.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910

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