this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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This is awesome to see, but I wonder if an array of Small Modular Reactors would be the way to do it in the future. Nuclear is a fantastic and safe source of clean energy, so I hope it can compete better on the economic side.
I'm just guessing here, but due to the expensive safety, security, disposaal, and political requirements, big reactors are likely going to be the most cost effective for a long time.
SMR's are even worse than the big ones. With no breeding and small, lower temperature steam generators they'd be undsr half as efficient as a traditional LWR. The fuel costs (which will only go up as the easy uranium is tapped out) alone would exceed the current all-in cost of renewables (which are still dropping rapidly).
Ah well, it figures they have a tradeoff like that. Maybe they’ll be limited to remote locations then.
Like so many things, it will come down to cost. It’s fortunate that renewables are getting so much cheaper because we pretty much are betting on them by being so reluctant to expand nuclear. Hopefully batteries and other energy storage technologies keep advancing rapidly.
All thermal generation will cause direct global warming via waste heat if used to excess.
Fossil fuels have an order of magnitude or two more thermal forcing via GHG, so it's largely irrelevant there, but solar can produce a couple orders of magnitude more energy than the world uses now without significant land use. As such fusion (with the exception of p-B or He3 direct conversion with no steam engine which is a bit more scifi) hits thermal limits before solar hits land limits.
Intuitively you can frame this as "a small fraction of the amount of sunlight that hits the planet is the amount of energy that changes the planet's temperature" which is basically a tautology.