How do you make safe, cheap nuclear reactors? Bury them a mile deep

Re:How do you make safe, cheap nuclear reactors? Bury them a... by Retric on Tuesday August 27, 2024 @02:26PM (#41371008)

Construction costs really aren’t the issue, they are just harder to hide. If you could get someone to build you an absolutely free nuclear power plant it still wouldn’t be cheap power. Just fuel itself which is generally assumed to be ‘free’ runs nearly half the cost of solar power per kWh by the time you’re dealing with actual fuel rods you can stick in a reactor not just ore or 99.3% U235 0.7% U235 metal.

Then with that leftover margin, you need to cover everything from land costs to new equipment as thing break over 50+ years. Manned 24/7 operations take ~500 people per GW over the plants full lifetime, as are less obvious expenses like insurance and mandatory downtime for weeks at a time requires something to pick up the slack, etc.

Nuclear just ends up expensive even without any safety concerns.

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Re:How do you make safe, cheap nuclear reactors? Bury them a... by blacksmith_tb on Tuesday August 27, 2024 @05:10PM (#41373089)

Isn't that a chicken and egg problem? These small designs are supposed to be (more) automated, so they wouldn't need huge teams of people 24/7. My main response to the idea of sticking one so far underground is that you might as well just make a geothermal plant.

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Re:How do you make safe, cheap nuclear reactors? Bury them a... by Retric on Tuesday August 27, 2024 @05:50PM (#41373497)

Hard to say, but this could need a larger staff.

The physical bit of reactor where the fission happens is left alone in operation. All the pipes, steam turbines, pumps, plumbing, cooling towers, etc etc do and this wants all of that on the surface.

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Re:How do you make safe, cheap nuclear reactors? Bury them a... by Qem on Thursday August 29, 2024 @08:58AM (#41390345)

> by the time you’re dealing with actual fuel rods you can stick in a reactor not just ore or 99.3% U235 0.7% U235 metal.

It's actually possible to run a reactor on natural unenriched uranium. IIRC the first man-made reactor ever, the Chicago pile, used natural uranium. Why did we stop using natural uranium in reactors?

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Re:How do you make safe, cheap nuclear reactors? Bury them a... by Retric on Thursday August 29, 2024 @10:03AM (#41390937)

Read up on CANDU, it ends up being slightly more expensive and produces more high level nuclear waste. Currently they’re enriching uranium even if the design doesn’t need to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor

There’s a lot of different trade offs you can make with nuclear designs, but so far non of them have been demonstrated to actually be meaningfully cheaper.

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