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Small modular nuclear reactors get a reality check in new report (newatlas.com)

submitted 5 months ago by machinin@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

145 comments fedilink hide all child comments

[T]he report's executive summary certainly gets to the heart of their findings.

"The rhetoric from small modular reactor (SMR) advocates is loud and persistent: This time will be different because the cost overruns and schedule delays that have plagued large reactor construction projects will not be repeated with the new designs," says the report. "But the few SMRs that have been built (or have been started) paint a different picture – one that looks startlingly similar to the past. Significant construction delays are still the norm and costs have continued to climb."

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[+] pyrflie@lemm.ee 86 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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[–] vzq@lemmy.world 32 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (19 children)

Nuclear technologies missed their window. The use cases where they are the best technical solution now are extremely limited, and that means you can get the investment going to improve them.

It’s a curiosity now.

There’s an alternative timeline where Chernobyl doesn’t happen and we decarbonize by leaning on nuclear in the nineties, then transition to renewables about now. But that’s not our timeline. And if it were, it would be in the past now.

[–] JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 51 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (6 children)

I disagree, a bit.

Base load is still hard to get with renewables, unless you can get a somewhat consistent level of power from them. That's basically just hydro/tidal and geothermal at this point, and all of those have very limited areas where they can be used.

Nuclear, on the other hand, can be built anywhere except my backyard.

We have four choices:

Discover/build another form of consistent renewable energy (what's left? Dyson sphere?)
Up our storage game, big time (hydrostatic batteries, flywheel farms, lithium, hydrogen, whatever, just somewhere to put all this extra green energy)
Embrace nuclear
Clutch on to fossil fuels until we all boil/choke.

We can do all of them concurrently, provided there's money for it, but we only give money to the last one.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 17 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (4 children)

Exactly. I live in Utah, which is perfect for nuclear:

desert close by with a mountain between the desert and dense population
lots of coal power, and unique air quality concerns due to inversion
perfectly set up for mass transit - about half (more than half?) of the population lives in a narrow corridor, so cars could be replaced with electric trains and buses
no access to the ocean, geothermal is probably expensive due to hard rock, no tides, hydro couldn't be done at scale, cold winters make battery storage hard, etc

So why don't we do it? FUD. We should have a nuclear base with solar and wind helping out, but instead we have a coal base and are transitioning to natural gas. That's dumb. And it's hilarious because we sell electricity to California when their backbone isn't sufficient.

It's probably not the best option everywhere, but it's a really good option in many areas.

[–] GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 6 points 5 months ago (4 children)

So why don't we do it? FUD.

A consortium of Utah's utilities (UAMPS) literally just pulled out of its commitment to backing NuScale's modular reactor in November 2023. It was a problem of cost, when the construction looked like it was going to become too expensive, at a time when new wind construction is dropping the price of wind power. It basically just couldn't compete on cost, in the specific environment of servicing Utah.

geothermal is probably expensive due to hard rock

I wouldn't sleep on geothermal as a future broad scale solution for dispatchable (that is, generation that can be dialed up and down on demand) electrical power. The oil and gas fracking industry has greatly improved their technology at imaging geological formations and finding places where water can flow and be pumped, in just the past decade. I expect to see over the next decade geothermal reach viability beyond just the places where geothermal heat is close to the surface.

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[–] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 7 points 5 months ago (6 children)

"Base load" is not that much. Off shore wind is almost always blowing, and all the other renewables can be stored via batteries or hydrogen (or tanks, in case of biogas). Yes, that's a whole lot of stuff, but the technology exists, can be produced on large scale and (most importantly) doesn't cause any path dependencies.

Nuclear is extremely expensive, as the article highlighted. And to be cost effective, power has to be produced more or less constantly. Having a nuclear power plant just for the few hours at night when wind and sun don't work is insane - and insanely expensive.

[–] jabjoe@feddit.uk 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Not to mention slow to build. Takes about a decade to get a nuclear plant going. If that is replacing coal, you are burning that coal during construction. The CO2 cost of that should be taken into account when comparing to much quicker renewables (approx 2 years). Also pouring all that concrete. Once it's build, sure it's green, but that is expensive, takes ages and comes with a big CO2 cost to get going.

Or you go renewable now, turn the filthy coal off about 8 years sooner and save a ton of money and CO2 right now.

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[–] frezik@midwest.social 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Base load is not necessary. It was made because you could build certain types of plants really cheap if they're run all the time at the same level. They aren't a requirement, but rather an economic convenience in an old way of doing things.

Renewables with storage are able to match demand more closely than traditional plants ever could. This results in less wasted power. That means we don't have to replace every GWh of traditional generation with a GWh of renewable.

Hydro and geothermal have both had some interesting breakthroughs the last few years. Small scale hydro can get useful amounts of power from smaller rivers than was feasible in the past. There are places to put them we didn't have before.

There's also high voltage DC lines. The longest deployed one is currently in Brazil, and is about 1500 miles. An equivalent run in the US would mean wind farms in Kansas could power New York, or solar in Arizona could power Chicago. When you can transmit that far, then the wind is always blowing somewhere, and it's sunny somewhere for the entire day, as well.

Nuclear lost its window of opportunity. It may already be cost competitive with putting solar panels in space.

Edit: fixing autocorrect's bad corrections

[–] Resonosity@lemmy.world 9 points 5 months ago

I agree with all of this as an electrical engineer in the field. Base load is only base load because of the load profile of devices connected to the grid having either an on or off switch. Most of the time this means motors/HVACs, but the world of electronics is coming to that equipment just like how inverters have changed how we export solar PV and wind to the grid. VFDs, soft starters, and the like will make our industrial processes that much more efficient. We just need to spread awareness and ramp up implementation, just as much as for renewables themselves.

[–] GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 6 points 5 months ago (4 children)

Up our storage game, big time

I think this can be expanded out a bit, to the more generalizable case of matching generation to demand. Yes, storage can be a big part of that.

But another solution along the same lines may be demand shifting, which in many ways, relies on storage (charging car batteries, reheating water tanks or even molten salt only when supply is plentiful. And some of that might not be storage, per se, but creating the useful output of something that actually requires a lot of power: timing out industrial processes or data center computational tasks based on the availability of excess electrical power.

Similarly, improvements in transmission across wide geographical areas can better match supply to demand. The energy can still be used in real time, but a robust enough transmission network can get the power from the place that happens to have good generation conditions at that time to the place that actually wants to use that power.

There's a lot of improvement to be made in simply better matching supply and demand. And improvements there might justify intentional overbuilding, where generators know that they'll need to curtail generation during periods where there's more supply than demand.

And with better transmission, then existing nuclear plants might be able to act as dispatchable backup power rather than the primary, and therefore serve a larger market.

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[–] Rakonat@lemmy.world 35 points 5 months ago (5 children)

From where I stand you couldn't be further from the reality of the situation.

Nuclear has a number of advantages from low carbon output per kilowatt over lifetime as well as being extremely cheap per kilowatt.

But the real advantage being overlooked is the small foot print and land use compared to other forms power generation. A nuclear reactor is ideal for high density population areas, adding no pollution like fossil fuels and using a fraction of the land that renewables require. And there is room for overlap between renewables and nuclear as well, meaning days where wind or solar would produce more power than usual, its easy to scale back solar production to take advantage of cheaper power, and vice versa for times when renewables aren't going to generate enough to meet demand nuclear can increase their output relatively quickly and effectively.

The future of nuclear is however one of the most important. We are eventually going to be spending humans to other planets, and having mature, efficient and compact forms of power generation with long lifetimes and minimal start up power from idle states is going to be important, solar gets less effective the further from the sun we get, you can't stick a wind turbine on a space craft and expect good results, and you're out of your mind if you want to burn fossil fuels in an oxygen limited environment.

Treating nuclear as more than a curiosity but rather as the genuine lifeline and corner stone of our futures and future generations is significantly more important than fossil fuel profits today and all their propaganda.

[–] MonkderDritte@feddit.de 39 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

as well as being extremely cheap per kilowatt.

What? How? Far as i know it's the most expensive, with a lot of hidden costs.

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[–] Lichtblitz@discuss.tchncs.de 26 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

Extremely cheap per kilowatt? Every statistic out there that I've seen and that includes government funding, as well as construction and deconstruction costs, paints a different picture. Nuclear is only competitive with coal or the relatively underdeveloped solar thermal.

In 2017 the US EIA published figures for the average levelized costs per unit of output (LCOE) for generating technologies to be brought online in 2022, as modelled for its Annual Energy Outlook. These show: advanced nuclear, 9.9 ¢/kWh; natural gas, 5.7-10.9 ¢/kWh (depending on technology); and coal with 90% carbon sequestration, 12.3 ¢/kWh (rising to 14 ¢/kWh at 30%). Among the non-dispatchable technologies, LCOE estimates vary widely: wind onshore, 5.2 ¢/kWh; solar PV, 6.7 ¢/kWh; offshore wind, 14.6 ¢/kWh; and solar thermal, 18.4 ¢/kWh.

Emphasis mine, source: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power

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[–] kameecoding@lemmy.world 8 points 5 months ago

The real advantage of nuclear is it's constant output of power compared to the variable output of solar and wind

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[–] MrEff@lemmy.world 23 points 5 months ago

You are on a nuke loving platform and people are going to downvote anything that isn't hard pro nuke. But you are correct. I have had this exact same discussion before. The numbers you are looking for are called the LCOE, or the 'levelized cost of electricity' where the lifetime of the technology cost if factored in. Offshore wind is currently the lowest followed by solar. Nuke is clost to 10x the cost. There is even an international nuke consortium that has several reports agreeing with exactly what you are saying and basically sum it up as: if you invested in nuke early, then it is cost efficient to just keep upgrading. If you didn't invest in it early, then the cost to implement it so high that you are better off going wind/solar. Even if you add in the cost of battery systems, it is still cheaper than building a new nuke plant. And more than that, with these new nuke plants you have to upgrade all your infrastructure because your old wires can't handle the output loads. If you look at the 30+ billion Georgia spent on this plant, they could have simply given out a micro generation grant to everyone to add solar to their roofs, not needed to upgrade the lines, and been far better off. But hey, just like reddit, if you are commenting on lemmy you better be pro nuke only and ignore the other numbers.

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[–] machinin@lemmy.world 27 points 5 months ago (9 children)

Does anyone know about the technology that nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers use? Why are they able to operate but we can't use the same technology on land?

[–] Poayjay@lemmy.world 57 points 5 months ago

I was a nuclear operator in the Navy. Here are the actual reasons:

The designs are classified US military assets
They are not refuleable
They only come in 2 “sizes”: aircraft carrier and submarine
They are not scaleable. You can just make a reactor 2x as big
They require as much down time as up time
They are outdated
The military won’t let you interrupt their supply chain to make civilian reactors
New designs over promise and underdeliver
They are optimized for erratic operations (combat) not steady state (normal power loads)
They are engineered assuming they have infinite sea water available for everything

There’s more but that’s just off the top of my head

[–] WhiteHotaru@feddit.de 40 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Because if the military wants something, budgets are big. And they do not need to make money.

[–] Dasus@lemmy.world 18 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Military expenses, the only socialism acceptable to Americans.

[–] Zron@lemmy.world 8 points 5 months ago (4 children)

Gotta love how the post office is legally required to show they can turn a profit, but the military has a history of building literal burn pits that essentially burn US tax dollars by lighting equipment on fire and giving soldiers cancer.

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[–] pelya@lemmy.world 28 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Because military engineers overengineer these things from the most expensive materials available, and they also perform frequent maintenance on them, which is also expensive.

[–] Nilz@sopuli.xyz 19 points 5 months ago

To add to this: A certain type of Soviet submarine used a lead-bismuth alloy as coolant for their reactor. The coolant solidifies at ambient temperature so it had to be heated indefinitely by some way or another or else it solidified and trashed the reactor. I don't think any of them exist anymore since Russia wasn't able to afford sustaining the giant navy after the Soviet collapse.

Just goes to show how insane nuclear submarine engineering is, or was at some point.

[–] SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 13 points 5 months ago

Why are they able to operate but we can’t use the same technology on land?

Military budgets. You can use the tech, but no civilian can afford it.

[–] mindlight@lemm.ee 11 points 5 months ago

I'm pretty sure they essentially are "one time use" only.

Extremely simplified:

They run for 20-30 years without refueling, which means the reactors/system could be built more compact, a higher level of safety and require less maintenance / monitoring / fine-tuning.

All those parameters are connected in an equation which means if you want higher safety you have to make another parameter "worse". By making the system "one time use" you set the "refuelability" and "repairability" parameters to the lowest and can therefore up the other parameters.

Also, military requirements are very different from civilian.

[–] wewbull@feddit.uk 9 points 5 months ago

It's expensive in subs too

[–] assassinatedbyCIA@lemmy.world 6 points 5 months ago

I’m pretty sure most military reactors use weapons grade uranium that’s enriched to mid 90%. Countries get sensitive when you start enriching uranium to the mid 90s.

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[–] Sniatch@lemmy.world 20 points 5 months ago (1 children)

This was pretty much obvious for everyone from the beginning, except if you're a fanboy of this tech.

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[–] BrightCandle@lemmy.world 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

They are still going for big building size reactors that have site specific details even if the core is built in a "factory". This still doesn't scale well.

I wonder if it can be economical to go smaller still and ship a reactor and power generation (TRG maybe or a small turbine) that then doesn't require much other than connecting wiring and plumbing and its encased in at least one security layer covered in sensors if something goes wrong its all contained. Then its just a single lorry with a box you wire in. That has a chance of being scalable and easy to deploy and I can't help but think there is a market for ~0.5-10 KW reactors if they can get the lowest end down to about $20,000, it would compete OK with solar and wind price wise.

I suspect no one has bothered because the regulatory overhead means it has to be big enough to be worth it and like Wind power scales enormously with the size of the plant. But what I want is a tiny reactor in my basement, add a few batteries for dealing with the duck curve and you have something that will sit there producing power for 25 years and a contract for it be repaired and ultimately collected at end of life.

You can sort of do this today using the Tritium glow sticks and solar cells but it doesn't last long enough and the price is not competitive. Going more directly to the band gap in a silicon or something else semi-conductive and a long lived nuclear material could maybe get a little closer price wise.