Converting coal power plants to nuclear gains steam

https://spectrum.ieee.org/nuclear-power-plant

by SongofEarth • 4 years ago

141 149 4 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

barney54• 4 years ago

Maybe, but not until the permitting gets fixed for small nuclear plants. It took NuScale over $1 billion dollars to get the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to okay its design. And it hasn’t built an small reactor that is even operating yet. Some of these have to get built before we can say whether they can go at old coal plants.

epistasis4• 4 years ago

$1B for the design of a power source that is going to scale, at a minimum level of success, to 10s to 100s of GW, isn't that much.

So IMHO the scale of power that nuclear needs to operate at in order to be efficient, $1B doesn't seem like much. Nonetheless, where did that cost come from? Does it really take that many hours of engineering? Is there a $950M payment to the regulators to evaluate the design?

zbrozek3• 4 years ago

The NRC bills hourly.

rmason• 4 years ago

I like the fact that the Greens are finally considering nuclear. One other option is geothermal. Most areas of the United States can reach geothermal by drilling 300-800 feet down. Using traditional drilling techniques this is not economically feasible. But there's a company using MIT research to drill using what's called millimeter waves to blast through the rock. The company commercializing the MIT research is called https://www.quaise.energy/

Quaise Energy doesn't sell drilling equipment but instead they sell the end product of steam. They plan on locating next to say a coal plant and then feeding steam to the plants turbines. The company raised a $52 million dollar Series A this summer.

https://news.mit.edu/2022/quaise-energy-geothermal-0628

The only negative from this type of drilling is localized small earthquakes similar to those created from fracking. So there will be opponents, but nowhere near the number of nuclear critics. There should also be a much quicker (and cheaper) approval process than nuclear.

chii• 4 years ago

I like the fact that the Greens are finally considering nuclear.

it's more likely that the electorate is now finally capable of accepting nuclear. The greens are merely trying to get votes and attempt to make their policies match what their electorates would vote for.

I think the previous fear about nuclear is mostly misinformed, and bad PR from high profile accidents isn't helping.

Nuclear is fairly clean, cheap, and available. We really should consider it as a viable source for the long term future.

mikeyouse2• 4 years ago

Except it’s not remotely cheap. Guaranteeing rates on new build nuclear is like 6x more expensive than wind resources and at least 4x higher than say combined cycle natural gas. If the new reactor at Hinkley is ever completed, it’s going to cost over $0.15/kWh wholesale which is more than I’m paying retail at the moment.

jeffbee• 4 years ago

The electorate does not support it. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/23/americans-c...

ako• 4 years ago

I doubt it that the entire elactorate is accepting nuclear, especially now that we see what is happening in Ukraine. It's pretty scary to see fighting and bombing happing at nuclear plants.

pjc502• 4 years ago

"Cheap" has never really delivered. When was the most recent nuclear plant built within its cost estimate?

misinformed, and bad PR from high profile accidents isn't helping

I'd say that people were fairly informed by the accidents. Nuclear has a "radioactive black swan" problem: the worst-case accidents have contaminated such huge areas that the tolerance for risk of any kind is low. If the Russians blow up Zaporizhzhia while the wind is blowing east-to-west Europe will have to throw away half its dairy production again, possibly for years.

(On the other hand, if Chernobyl had happened while the wind was prevailing west-to-east, would we have even heard about it?)

goodpoint4• 4 years ago

It was never cheap and it's getting even more expensive while renewables are much cheaper:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...

finikytou6• 4 years ago

well the green propaganda is a business al gore predicted we would be dead by now and the only outcome is that he is a millionaire now.

People love to live off the fear they instill onto other people.

Nuclear was the only way to transition to something cleaner later. but green party backed by lobbies ranging from russia, usa, oil and gas made the common people believe that there was a way to go full renewable in the 20's... to be honest those last years have been sickening, looking at youtube videos of charlatan commenting on green energy, co-workers, boss hell even blackrock/nasdaq virtue signaling and retweeting those crooks, pushing this narrative into our schools and our youth to build an army of evangelists of a green world where china-made solar panels with a shelf life of 10-20years would be a solution to global energy while at the same time undermining nuclear... it will be remembered as a dark age in mankind and when people in the future will reflect at our generation it will be with shame and I am pretty sure they wouldn't be able to understand why we made those choices and why they led to a global war.

moffkalast• 4 years ago

There's a town in Germany called Staufen that's literally sinking and crumbling apart because of geothermal drilling.

Practically geothermal's Chernobyl in terms of PR. I doubt there's much support for it.

adrianN9• 4 years ago

Afaik it's actually rising and crumbling because ground water got to places where it shouldn't be and reacts with the surrounding rock forcing it to expand.

jillesvangurp• 4 years ago

As the article mentions towards the end, just because it's technically feasible does not mean a lot of coal plants will be converted to nuclear. Fundamentally this is about reducing cost. The question is if it is enough. Nuclear plants are expensive and making them slightly less expensive helps. But they might still be too expensive overall to make it worth the trouble, Also, time is a factor. A lot of coal plants have already been decommissioned and more are going offline in the next few years. Mothballed/decommissioned coal plants are plentiful but their infrastructure is not going to maintain itself and is probably actively being decommissioned instead. And even if it's not, it's probably not getting any better just sitting there unmaintained. And if anything, nuclear is a very slow moving industry. Ten years is nothing. Ten years from now, a lot of these coal plants will be history.

epistasis4• 4 years ago

The expensive part of nuclear isn't the parts that coal plants provide, either. All those miles upon miles of precision welding made to withstand decades of harsh conditions with out a single leak? Coal doesn't need that. Large, high precision concrete pours? Coal doesn't need that. Containment structures? Coal doesn't need that.

Nuclear is inherently an extremely complex technology that requires construction techniques that are advanced and expensive. The steam turbines and cooling towers are the only parts that are easy and standard construction with well-contained costs.

Schroedingersat11• 4 years ago

If it's a functioning economically viable steam turbine, why not put a gas turbine in front of it and burn hydrogen (or no change if it is already a pulverised coal turbine)?

Turing_Machine4• 4 years ago

Hydrogen is not an energy source as such. You have to use energy to make it, incurring losses, then incur still more losses when you burn it.

It is, at best, an energy storage mechanism, not a source.

stjohnswarts2• 4 years ago

Where are you going to get that hydrogen?

BurningFrog• 4 years ago

This is the core of how the system is broken:

A specific challenge would-be-conversions must face is that the NRC’s standards—both for atmospheric pollution and for the amount of radiological material a reactor can release—are much tighter than federal standards for coal plants.

credit_guy• 4 years ago

But that's not such a challenge. Nuclear power plants don't release atmospheric pollution. As for the radiological material they release, that is generally Tritium; that's in minute quantities, and they have experience dealing with the NRC in this regard.

Godel_unicode• 4 years ago

I read that as saying this is why coal plants are so popular, we’ve been grading on a curve.

ars• 4 years ago

He's saying that a coal plant is permitted to (and actually does) release more radiation than a nuclear plant is.

Either tighten the standards for coal, or loosen them for nuclear, but the current situation is not logical.

chasil• 4 years ago

Regardless of the brokenness, the fact remains:

https://xkcd.com/1162/

This is everything we need.

Harnessing this maturely, appropriately, means that we don't burn < 10% of the power before disposal.

This means that we use molten salt, not pressurized water, and we leave the technology of the 1950’s behind.

hedora3• 4 years ago

One conversion the article mentions is this molten salt technology:

https://www.terrapower.com/our-work/natriumpower/

downrightmike• 4 years ago

That's good, The engineers are good people, the energy owners are the worst humans on earth and don't care if a melt down is likely, because they are bleeding money when it isn't running. No time to do it right. Instead: Make energy all public, sure pay out the leaches to get rid of them, and run things correctly.

AIrtemis2• 4 years ago

Could the coal steam turbine system also be reused for deep geothermal? Seems less a regulated space than Nuclear

DeWilde• 4 years ago

Deep geothermal isn't practical as it seems due to the small conductivity of heat for rocks that are cooled off to produce steam.

ZeroGravitas13• 4 years ago

This is the pitch of Quaise Energy.

https://www.quaise.energy/

Like the nuclear plan, it doesn't really save any money as you can already reuse the transmission lines for solar/battery/energy-intensive-industry.

Schroedingersat11• 4 years ago

Why not use the much cheaper option of a H2 or ammonia first stage turbine and somesolar panels?

AIrtemis2• 4 years ago

could you link to the research on that? I am really curious in mapping out all the energy alternatives we could have available (since fusion is not coming anytime )

viksit• 4 years ago

here to say how much i love that headline :))

kiawe_fire• 4 years ago

I’ll admit, I read the article solely to see if they acknowledge the pun. They don’t, leaving me to wonder if the pun was even intended. Had to be, right?

elevaet• 4 years ago

Definitely!

radu_floricica• 4 years ago

Either option will be an uphill battle. In the United States, any new reactor must gain the blessing of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), a process that can take up to five years and drive up costs in a sector already facing rising prices. Only one nuclear power plant is currently under construction in the United States, in eastern Georgia.

Which is why building in US is not the best option. There's a deal made last year to build small modular reactors in Romania (by a US company). I think they may actually have been talking about using old coal plants as well.

I'm normally skeptical about my country being used in this kind of experiments (I still remember you, Pepsi, with your reusable plastic bottle!), but I'm very much on board with this one.

qikInNdOutReply• 4 years ago

I still have yet to hear a solution to the problem of nuclear with human nature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Pla...

And its still better then coal.

LatteLazy• 4 years ago

The real advantage to this is that it bypasses discussion about where to put the plant. It's a nice way of sneaking nuclear into peoples back yards, and likely into the sort of areas that couldn't stop a coal power plant, so wont be able to stop a nuclear one...

weberer• 4 years ago

If there were a coal plant in my back yard, I'd be a lot happier if it were converted to nuclear. The small risk of a nuclear accident is much more preferable to the guaranteed constant mercury and sulfide pollution in the air from coal.

a3w2• 4 years ago

"Fast sodium", a.k.a not the safest way to build a fission reactor. But a good way to build a conventional, water/sodium-based bomb.

a3w2• 4 years ago

If you want nuclear: Bill Gates says small reactors will be safer soon. Wait for those. I do hope they use pebble-beds, and are not just "sealed" to be more secure.

huijzer• 4 years ago

"But in the future, not all reactors might be so large. Many still-speculative small modular reactor designs might deliver just a few hundred megawatts. (In Hainan, China, Linglong One—the world’s first small modular reactor plant—is now under construction.) Depending on the design, these could be cooled with less water or even air, making them far more feasible fits for coal sites."
"Either option will be an uphill battle. In the United States, any new reactor must gain the blessing of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), a process that can take up to five years and drive up costs in a sector already facing rising prices. Only one nuclear power plant is currently under construction in the United States, in eastern Georgia."

The article completely seems to miss the existence of NuScale. NuScale SMRs design has already been approved by the NRC [1, 2].

[1] https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/news/2022/22-...

[2] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/nrc-certifies-nuscale-small...

jollyllama• 4 years ago

There have been nuclear power plants going offline in my state in recent years, due to age and cheap fossil fuels. Which is better, retrofitting old nuke plants, or converting old coal plants? I would imagine the former.

sul_tasto• 4 years ago

no pun intended

Converting coal power plants to nuclear gains steam

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