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First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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Like crap? Renewables are good in places where they work. Nuclear works everywhere and is more reliable.
Investors pulling out of a nuclear project like this just looks like a, really dumb kneejerk reaction. "Oh! New shiny thing!"
Nope, the writing was on the wall for almost a year on this one. The whole nuclear industry in general is a long history of cost and schedule overruns. This is more of the same. Investors are not dumb.
You can invest in a solar or wind deployment and have it running and producing revenue in six to twelve months. You can invest in nuclear with a stated schedule of five years, have it blow past that mark, needing more money to keep it going (or write the whole thing off), and then start actually getting revenue at the ten year mark. This isn't mere speculation, it's exactly what happens. Oh, and it's producing at least half the MWh per invested dollar as that solar or wind farm.
It's amazing anyone is putting any money into nuclear at this point. For the most part, they aren't. The federal government has shown willingness to sign new licenses for plants. Nobody is buying.
SMRs do not appear to change any of this.
Now, something I think we should do is subsidize reactors that process old waste. Lots better than the current plan of letting it sit around, and probably better than storing it in a cave for millenia, too.
Well the costs and schedule is a regulatory thing.
Even if that's true, what are you going to do about it?
Say you do a whole lot of research, and conclude that loosening regulations x, y, and z will not impact safety in any measurable way, and will substantially reduce costs. Even detractors with scientific credentials agree this research is solid. Best case scenario, here.
NIMBYs will still kill it. What you just did is hand them a way to say "they are cutting corners using unproven methods to let their investors line their pockets at the expense of the lives of their workers and everyone who lives around it".
They may be wrong, but their arguments in front of a government body can still be persuasive. They don't have to be right, just vaguely plausible to people who aren't experts. That will be enough to kill it.
You can't beat NIMBYs by having the best argument. You need to plan around them. Don't hand them a weapon before the fight begins.
So nimby will appose everything. Want to build a solar farm nimby, what to make a wind farm, nimby. I have people turn against a wind farm once they learned it would make electricity for their city but for the whole power grid. Simple because they learned other people would be able to use that electricity. How dare something they can see help the other. Making the build time and cost better helps build around them.
Sure. What is your plan for dealing with them?
I dont know. They are a problem for everything everywhere.
I've seen a major local building developer work around them. To be clear, I think this developer is an asshole for other reasons, but he knows how to get around NIMBYs.
He presents an apartment complex. A few people in the neighborhood don't like it, and act like they represent everyone. Some city meetings are setup to discuss it. What he'll then do is suggest a few things as compromises that aren't really compromises. They might be things he wanted to do in the first place, but didn't think the city would have allowed it otherwise. If the people complain about the height, he'll suggest cutting a section of the top floor to create a balcony for a "penthouse suite" (he'll rent that one out for a premium and lose nothing in the end). Compared to the NIMBYs, where 90% of their arguments are bullshit and they look like raving loons, he looks like the reasonable one. The city council nods sagely and approves the project, perhaps without any alterations at all.
What he doesn't do is give NIMBYs ammunition before this process starts. You can't loosen nuclear regulations and expect for this to work.
This. Green energy works best when complimented with nuclear energy. Then, we can ween away from big oil.
It’s the opposite. Nuclear outputs as close to 24/7 as possible, you can’t ramp it up and down to accommodate variable output from renewables for practical and economic reasons.
I mean you can vary it pretty significantly depending on the reactor type, but even if you couldn't you can still put the energy to work in alternative ways, such as pumping water up into reservoirs/damns to generate energy at other points, or using the excess energy to split water. There are many ways to use excess energy.
So your solution to excess nuclear is to store it. The solution to shortfalls of renewables is also to store it.
Why do we need nuclear?
But storage without inpacting available energy requires an excess, and the current shortfall of renewables is that there isn't enough energy produced for a significant excess (same goes for nuclear). Either way I was addressing the literal aspect of energy generation being 24/7 with nuclear.
Not to mention I could see viable uses for nuclear still, especially in processes that are effectively 24/7 hot water production via heat exchangers for providing heating to literal cities, energy production for large arc furnaces.
And don't mistake my view of nuclear as not seeing the benefits of renewable, my father lived on a boat where the heating and appliances were all run via solar panels and forklift batteries for more than 10 years of his life.
It's relatively easy to get to 95% renewables. We have tons of historical weather data on wind and sun patterns. You can then calculate the extent of the lull when you won't have either one. Pad that number, then put in enough storage to cover it. Natural gas may be needed for that last 5% (it's a lot more difficult to get renewables to 100% than 95%), but that's minimal.
This is all achievable by 2030, the time when we want to drastically cut emissions. In contrast, there is no plan that gets nuclear in place by 2030. If you had all the permits signed and dirt starting to be dug today, you couldn't make that time line.
Nuclear does not help us reach these goals. It takes too long, is too expensive, and doesn't synergize with renewables well at all.
You can do the same with excess power from renewables though. My point was that you need something to fill in the gaps when renewable output is low, whether that be from batteries, pumped storage, peaker plants, etc.
Nuclear doesn’t fit in here, there are no nuclear peaker plants.
The problem with solar is that the sun doesn't shine overnight. The good thing with that is that we use much less power overnight than we do during the day.
If you're relying a lot on solar, you need to build a big-ass battery that you charge during the day and use at night.
Alternatively, you build a nuclear or gas plant sized to overnight usage and run them 24/7. Then, you build way smaller batteries to handle dispatchability and smoothing demand over the course of a day. Nuclear is good for baseline power, and doesn't come with the environmental costs of a gas plant. It has a niche.
HOLY SHIT THE SUN DOESN'T SHINE AT NIGHT, WHY HAVEN'T WE THOUGHT OF THIS?
Peak load is during the day, so initially it's not really a problem. Going from a grid that's 0% solar to 10% solar is really easy. The solar is going to just displace peaker plants. You don't really have to worry about night.
Going from a grid that's 70% solar to 80% solar is way more expensive, because you're probably using all that power at night.
You don't go all in on solar, that's dumb and unnecessary. The wind blows when the sun doesn't shine. We have lots of historical data on how the two would perform and how long a lull would be when neither are performing. Pad that number, put in enough storage to cover that period, and there you go.
Getting to 95% solar/wind/storage is relatively easy. Nuclear does not help this mix. It just makes it more expensive.
Big if true. Winds tend to be stronger at night though.
Or pumped hydro, compressed gas, molten salt, green hydrogen, etc.
Base load. See here: https://cleantechnica.com/2022/06/28/we-dont-need-base-load-power/
3 people got killed by one of these like 60 years ago due to blatant design flaws that could've been solved. This means they can never exist again.
That is massively understating the damage Chernobyl did as well as the number of people who died from cancer and radiation poisoning, to the point of sheer dishonesty.
Also remember that time that they wanted to test a safety system so they disabled the other safety systems and the protocols said they should have shut down the reactor instead of doing the test due to other factors but they did the test anyways and it exploded? Oh and their "emergency off" button was actually an "emergency increase power then off" button. Clearly there's no way to do these things safely.
I was talking about the one that exploded in Idaho. It was a "small" reactor. The control rods had to be adjusted by hand. Clearly there was nothing they could have done instead to avoid human error /s
Lol I wasn't familiar with that one.
But my point was that even the big ones that have had big failures were caused by dumb shit that was entirely avoidable. All three of the famous ones could be designed away in new reactors.
The problem I have is these problems are all caused by corner cutting and yes we could live in fantasy world where corporations don't cut corners to save money and will just keep pouring money into a pit just to be safe even when they're already losing money hand over fist due to not being able to compete with kWh pricing from renewables - but we don't live in that world.
We'll end up with minimum wage staff working without proper training, safety systems turned off because they're too expensive to repair, and leaks not reported because company policy is broken. They're going to be run by the same companies the are dumping oil into the Niger Delta for the last however many decades simply because it's cheaper than fixing the issue - putting faith that 'we'll do it properly this time' is incredibly dumb based on the near limitless examples of that never happening.