Georgia’s big new nuclear reactors could be the last built in the US

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/nuclear/georgias-big-new-nuclear-reactors-could-be-the-last-built-in-the-us

by epistasis • 3 years ago

111 227 3 years ago

canarymedia.com

ortusdux• 3 years ago

*could be the last of its kind built in the US

manfre• 3 years ago

Hard to tell if it's purely for the clickbait or leaning heavily on shortening the title.

wesoff2• 3 years ago

Headlines limited to ~70 characters.

_hcuq• 3 years ago

Thanks. Saved me a click.

nosianu• 3 years ago

The article further explains why that may not work out.

To quote:

the industry is betting on advanced nuclear reactors to save the day.
It’s a bad bet.

The main points:

The advanced and small modular reactors (SMRs) under development face a raft of economic, regulatory, technological and temporal risks.

and

The advanced reactor closest to market in the U.S. is being developed by NuScale, which has a nonbinding agreement to build a first-of-its-kind SMR project in Idaho. The company has already raised its projected power cost from $58 per megawatt-hour to $89, even though it’s still years away from even beginning construction.

and

Advanced reactors such as TerraPower’s Natrium, which are significantly different in design from existing light-water reactors, face an even steeper regulatory climb. And they’ll have to contend with broken or nonexistent supply chains because the more highly concentrated uranium fuels used by most advanced reactors are currently unavailable in large quantities outside of Russia.

Which leads to this summary at the end:

Regardless of rosy messaging from DOE and the industry, it’s almost certain that Vogtle 3 and 4 are going to be the last big nuclear reactors coming online in the U.S. for a long time.

wkat42424• 3 years ago

Yeah here in Holland they have the same pipe dream. They want to start new reactors rise should come online by 2040, delays obviously not included.

It's a big bullet point for the hard right party VVD that think this way they can continue business as usual. But it'll come way too late for that. All the hard choices will already have been made by that. I'm sure their buddy's corporations will have some nice pork from it though. Such prestige projects always tend to double their budget at least. And then we have the fuel, waste storage and the cleanup which are usually not even factored into the cost but absorbed by society.

Maursault4• 3 years ago

Wishful thinking. The problem with nuclear energy is not is not the risk of meltdown. It is not the waste, not directly. The problem is economics. Light water fission reactors are the least expensive nuclear reactors we know of, and even these can not break even. Every other design is even more expensive. For nuclear energy to work it must be profitable. Economics is nuclear energy's Achilles' heel, and its only hurdle.

Accujack• 3 years ago

The article further explains why that may not work out.

The article is basically anti-nuclear propaganda, with its conclusions based on the same lack of understanding and fear that's always been the problem.

I wouldn't be surprised to see the US extend the life of existing nuclear plants and potentially even build a few more of the old design when push comes to shove. In time climate change will force the government to act, and if the new reactor types aren't ready and the needed breakthroughs in energy storage plus the needed world wide smart grid to enable renewables, there won't be another choice.

megaman821• 3 years ago

It could easily be the last of its generation and its size built in the US. Is there any non-SMR on the horizon?

melling3• 3 years ago

Yes, next comes Gen-4 reactors

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor

Gwypaas16• 3 years ago

2040? 2050? Which problem are we solving?

_hypx3• 3 years ago

I'm going to come out and say, not even the last of its kind. Support for nuclear power is directly proportional to real, intellectually motivated support for clean energy (this is not related to the people that make dumb protests). And as that continues, we will see more conventional nuclear reactors being built.

joseph_grobbles• 3 years ago

Nuclear is catastrophically expensive. Nuclear stagnated not because of those "dumb protests", but because economically it turned out that they made very little sense. Projects always went massively over budget, and then had a lifespan cost multiples idealist notions.

Are they expensive because of overbearing safety requirements? Partly, sure. On the flip side, Fukushima has now cost hundreds and hundreds of billions in direct costs. If nuclear power plants didn't have a civil exemption where governments bore the potential liability of damage (which is almost infinite), they would be unbuildable.

Zigurd2• 3 years ago

i recently had a VC in a couple new gen reactor companies call me a Negative Nancy. I'm not. I follow the developments. There is one venture, TerraPower that isn't just making another run at fast or pebble bed reactors, generally at a smaller scale. Only TerraPower has the vast risk capital backing needed to try what they are doing, but even they might license a technology to get to market sooner than they can by developing their TWR.

It seems like PBRs have the most readily fixable problems, but even those are probably decades away from putting power on the grid.

I would bet a number of the venture funded reactors will die of a "liquidity mismatch" with their investors. Some appear to be leaning on developing technologies and patents in anticipation of encountering that problem.

systemvoltage• 3 years ago

I only hear about NuScale doing anything new in this space. Is there anyone else or the US is entirely dependent on one "startup" for it's energy future?

topkai22• 3 years ago

I don’t follow the industry that closely, but I know TerraPower (a Bill Gates vehicle) is actively doing things, including building out molten salt reactors.

pkaye• 3 years ago

TerraPower which is funded by Bill Gates.

charlieflowers• 3 years ago

Hope it wasn't keeping its payroll money in SVB.

loeg3• 3 years ago

The FDIC announced 100 cents on the dollar for depositors fully 48+ hours ago.

ed_balls• 3 years ago

nope. royce rolls SMR, Toshiba. Pretty much everybody invests in it.

There are others in US, but NuScale is the closest to a product.

credit_guy• 3 years ago

There are plenty of other startups and established players pursuing NRC approvals for other reactor types. Here's [1] a list put of reactors that the DoE is working on (together with private partners)

[1] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/infographic-advanced-reac...

jimnotgym• 3 years ago

What's this doing on hn? It doesn't even mention GPT-4 in this article? /s

wesoff2• 3 years ago

Funny.

throwayyy4790872• 3 years ago

Will be. Wind is the future of American energy. Every year it pulls farther ahead.

gambiting• 3 years ago

What's the American plan for baseline energy generation?

beisner• 3 years ago

parent would probably say, "grid-scale battery storage". or natural gas.

HWR_142• 3 years ago

Two very large grids. The wind is always blowing somewhere

ajross3• 3 years ago

In the immediate term? 70-80% wind/solar works just great. Fill the remainder with gas plants or whatever else you got. Pick the high hanging fruit once that's done. If nuclear wants to bid for that, then great. But it's gotta be an order of magnitude cheaper if it wants a piece. Right now, quite frankly, it's looking like it's going to be cheaper to store the wind in batteries and pumped hydro than it will be to break nuclei for that energy.

Everyone wants to have this fight on the fundamentals, but everything is about tradeoffs. Nuclear isn't losing because of out of control woke hippies or authoritarian regulators, it's losing because it costs too damn much.

ianburrell6• 3 years ago

What is the plan to deal with nuclear plants going bankrupt? These reactors will likely go bust trying to pay off their loans. The government will need to bail them out and run the reactors.

Solar makes baseline generation unprofitable. Baseline depends on making money during the daytime when there is high demand, but solar is cheaper and takes the load. Baseline is left with the evening peak and storage is going to wipe that out. Baseline is left with the off peak hours which isn't enough profit to survive.

That is why coal power plants keep closing. Nuclear doesn't have the fuel costs but has expensive maintenance. If solar keeps dropping, it will be cheaper than paid-off nuclear power plants.

pfdietz20• 3 years ago

You can do it with renewables + storage, and not expensively compared to nuclear.

https://model.energy/

0xDEF• 3 years ago

Entire industrialized European countries are running on pure wind for days at a time. In the renewable energy space it feels like wind is not getting enough attention and solar is getting too much attention.

Wind combined with a long-range continent scale HVDC grid and effective energy storage could be enough to solve the modern energy demand.

throwayyy4790872• 3 years ago

Agreed. Solar takes up too much land, is more fickle than wind, and the economies of scale seem to be tapering off. Wind is at the _beginning_ of the cost curve, requires much less land/kw, and can be installed offshore. It's also less susceptible to damage categories like hail, and can be installed close to large consumers like NYC or SF in a way that solar cannot.

Massive overprovisioning of wind + grid scale storage + hydro will get us to 100% renewable. Solar will likely remain the domain of off grid houses, campers, etc. Maybe it will be a bigger deal in MENA than the USA.

People should go to Coastal New England and Kansas if they want to see extremely strong, consistent wind.

rdevsrex3• 3 years ago

That's assuming we can keep up production in key materials, like copper, nickel, etc.

It takes a shit ton of water to process copper, often in places that don't have a lot of it like the Atacama region in Chile. To say nothing of the pollution that local residents face because of it.

PM_me_your_math• 3 years ago

Wind will never meet all of America's energy needs.

hospitalJail• 3 years ago

My nearest nuclear power plant closed. It lasted its full licensed length, plus a 20 year extension. (Due to a problem, they closed 11 days early)

I can't pretend to know why they need to be extended, but it seems like some sort of contract by either the government, the power companies, or some labor problem. I know this plant is in the middle of nowhere + near a lake that is only nice 2 months of the year. I imagine labor was not cheap.

Our governor asked for federal funding, but it doesnt seem like it will happen.

I hope they turn it into a museum, but that is probably too much to ask. I love looking at it from the beach, and I liked seeing the steam coming out of it.

hanniabu3• 3 years ago

They have an engineered lifespan and things start falling apart and becoming dangerous when you exceed that.

Many should never have been extended. They've had to change safety tests and infrastructure tests so the order plans would pass inspection.

This has always been my concern with nuclear. Yes we can make it safe, but the human greed factor is always the weak point. Regulations weakened, automated systems bypassed, skimping on design decisions, etc.

tekla• 3 years ago

Many should never have been extended.

Which ones.

belorn4• 3 years ago

The only way I see that the decision to exceed the expected life time was a bad decision is if they could have replaced it with an other non-fossil fuel solution.

The problem is indeed human greed. Even with the accidents that have occurred, I am still glad that people did historically run with the risk over burning even more fossil fuels. My concern over pollution, especially global warming, is far greater than my concerns over nuclear accidents.

wnevets• 3 years ago

This has always been my concern with nuclear. Yes we can make it safe, but the human greed factor is always the weak point. Regulations weakened, automated systems bypassed, skimping on design decisions, etc.

This is exactly my concern. Fukushima was only a problem because the company didn't want to spend money putting in backup generators in the correct place despite repeated warnings to do so.

_n_b_• 3 years ago

They've had to change safety tests and infrastructure tests so the order plans would pass inspection.

It's interesting to square this sentiment with the people a few comments away claiming that over-regulation is killing this industry.

(Working in nuclear, I find neither sentiment particularly true nor totally false.)

blooalien• 3 years ago

"Yes we can make it safe, but the human greed factor is always the weak point. Regulations weakened, automated systems bypassed, skimping on design decisions, etc."

This has always been my concern with "civilization" in general, especially now that we've passed the 8 billion people mark… Human greed is a dangerous enough factor on it's own, but at the scale it's practiced today? Just plain terrifying.

ThrowawayTestr• 3 years ago

That's fine, China can lead the world in nuclear power.

Gwypaas16• 3 years ago

China is investing a pittance in nuclear to keep the option open. That is the result of autocratic five-year plans in a huge economy.

mr_toad• 3 years ago

China’s building coal plants like there’s no tomorrow.

jmyeet• 3 years ago

The article mentions SMRs and other advanced nuclear power reactor designs that are still ridiculously far from commercial reality:

The advanced reactor closest to market in the U.S. is being developed by NuScale, which has a nonbinding agreement to build a first-of-its-kind SMR project in Idaho. The company has already raised its projected power cost from $58 per megawatt-hour to $89, even though it’s still years away from even beginning construction. The first module at the plant is set to begin commercial operation in December 2029, NuScale says, but nuclear project timelines are inevitably Pollyannaish and wildly off-base.

Compare the $/MWh costs to other power sources [1].

I am not yet convinced nuclear power will ever be economic but I'd like to be wrong.

For fission power in particular, I will point to one fact that turns me against it. And that is the Price-Anderson Act [2]. This is a Congressional limit on absolute liability (per-plant and total). It's a complex system of industry insurance not too dissimilar to the FDIC insurance premiums. Ultimately though the government limits liability and would ultimately have to pay anything in excess of that anyway.

And the more plants you have the more pressure and lobbying you'll get to further limit that liability and shift all potential accident costs to the taxpayer.

Companies are just terrible at managing long-term low-probability risk. We see this time and time again.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

[2] https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10821#:~:te....).

Zigurd2• 3 years ago

The "I am not yet convinced nuclear power will ever be economic but I'd like to be wrong." is the elephant in the room.

Renewables used to be exotic, expensive, and did not scale-up. Now they are the shortest distance from capital in to ROI out. They scale up and down. They are insurable. That last bit: insurability, deserves a lot more attention than it gets.

p1mrx• 3 years ago

The best way to eliminate the Price-Anderson Act is to design reactors that are orders of magnitude safer, so the insurance never needs to pay out. Some of the proposed SMRs seem in line with this goal.

pfdietz20• 3 years ago

The nuclear project for UAMPS is particularly absurd when you realize how enormous the potential for off river pumped hydro storage is in that area (Idaho and Utah). The west should be going with renewables, period.

fwlr10• 3 years ago

There’s a statistic that floats around the internet claiming more radioactivity harm from coal power than from nuclear power, based on the principle that coal power is essentially aerosolizing tons of particles with ever-so-slightly-higher-than-background radioactivity and there’s a lot more coal than nuclear.

One could probably derive a similar statistic for how much harm nuclear over-regulation has caused. Perhaps of the form “Chernobyl killed 60 people directly through acute radiation, killed 60,000 indirectly through elevated cancer rates due to spread of radioactive material, and killed 6,000,000* with its second-order effects of supporting nuclear over-regulation that caused increased use of coal and gas energy”. (* This number is completely made up)

It seems to me that changing over-regulation is nearly impossible, as it requires making suicidally unpopular arguments: “we shouldn’t weigh the risks”, “we should care less about safety”, “don’t think of the children”, etc. The workable solution is to find or make a receptive regulatory environment (perhaps in a small country with large reserves of nuclear fuel and large unpopulated areas to isolate reactors in, like say Australia), use massive banks of nuclear power to power commensurately massive carbon capture plants that turn airborne CO2 back into synthetic coal and synthetic gasoline, and then export these “completely clean conventional fuels” to the rest of the world.

Using synthetic coal to run a coal power plant is essentially a zero-capital plant retrofit achieving guaranteed zero emissions. Putting synthetic gasoline in a gas station is essentially an over-the-air upgrade to any conventional ICE vehicle making it guaranteed zero emissions. It’s sort of like carbon offset credits except it bakes the carbon offset directly into the product instead of relying on fragile and game-able links like “we planted a tree to offset this pound of coal”. A potent offering and one that’s hopefully hard to regulate against as well.

Gwypaas16• 3 years ago

Why use nuclear energy when renewables do it without any radiation or 3rd party hazard for 1/5th the cost? That sounds awfully close to a solution looking for a problem.

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

scrlk• 3 years ago

Is it still a 1/5th of the cost if you have to factor in storage?

brutusborn2• 3 years ago

Because nuclear doesn’t require the development of extra storage on the grid, so ends up being cheaper in majority of locations.

devmor• 3 years ago

Because peak demand exists.

Renewables are cheaper and safer than nuclear power, that much is undeniable. The problem they do have is that their generation is sporadic. Until we solve the energy storage problem, there has to be something else on the grid that can be always online always delivering enough power to meet peak demand.

rdevsrex3• 3 years ago

Well the raw materials for renewables, like copper and rare earths, are quite dirty to produce, and often done in the global south, and a not insignificant amount was produced in Russia.

So there are a lot of costs that don't show up for the end user, and it's not a given that we'll be able to access the volume of material needed to transition to a clean energy future without nuclear energy in the mix.

mik1998• 3 years ago

What about everyone killed or exposed to radiation in the process of manufacturing the necessary so-called "renewables", which require an incomparable amount of resources relative to a nuclear power plant of similar output?

8note2• 3 years ago

Do we actually know that they do it without 3rd party hazard?

karaterobot• 3 years ago

Since the person you're responding to is talking about the legacy of nuclear protests, it's worth noting that all the time we spent between Chernobyl and today, when renewables are finally starting to become a viable alternative, we could have had cheap, clean energy from nuclear. That absolutely crucial forty year period, when we basically missed our chance to arrest global warming below 2 degrees, we slowed or halted building more, newer, better plants because of protests (and the second order effects of protests, like increased costs due to regulation, and loss of expertise, and so on).

And now we're saying "well heck, gosh, maybe we don't even need nuclear power!" and to me, this sounds like an extension of the same protests, just in another form. But maybe I'm wrong. My view is: why not build both? We can find a use for the extra energy, I'm sure.

At the very least, it would be nice for somebody to say "yeah, we were trying to help the earth by fighting every effort to build nuclear, but we just ended up causing more coal power plants to be built, and now we're all in a lot of trouble, and it's at least partly because of that."

rayiner3• 3 years ago

Looking at subsidized marginal cost of energy tells you pretty much nothing. You need a cost function that considers at least reliability and the cost of energy storage.

jimworm• 3 years ago

I understood the GP as focussing more on the missed opportunity. Those cheap renewables didn't exist 40 years in the past. There could've been lots of nuclear energy built since then, a lot of emissions not generated, and those hypothetical decades-old plants would now be considered for decommissioning over the coming decades, just in time to be replaced by the renewables that do exist.

AbrahamParangi• 3 years ago

Renewables cannot scale. If you want a 20th century level of power production in the 23rd century, renewables are your ticket.

fwlr10• 3 years ago

Pithy answer: You can’t pump solar panels into the gas tank of a 1998 Honda Civic and expect it to run.

Mathematically: 1.44 billion metric tons of coal were shipped by sea in 2019, representing a need for 4.2x10^13 megajoules, or 11,667 terawatt-hours. Total global power output by solar panels in 2019 was 681 terawatt-hours (pg 24 in this pdf https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/52f66a88-0b63-4ad2-...).

So you need to 20x global solar energy output and somehow spread most of that to countries that can’t afford or aren’t interested in building and maintaining huge solar plants. But they already have built and know how to maintain their coal plants. Zero-emission synthetic coal and gasoline are zero-friction drop-in upgrades that obviate the need for probably trillions of international investment and enormous political and diplomatic effort.

Alternatively, you could run the massive carbon capture plants on solar energy instead of nuclear, and still ship these “completely clean conventionals” worldwide. It would mean building 3x as many plants for the same output since they could only run during bright daylight hours. You could bring this 3x number down by instead building (once again commensurately massive) energy storage plants as an intermediary between the solar plants and the carbon capture plants, calculating the impact of all three in order to optimally balance generation, storage, and production.

There’s even a crude political/rhetorical argument: you don’t have to convince redneck hicks to sell their gas guzzling Hummer and buy a Prius. Likewise there’s no need to sanction holdout countries to force them to accept enormous globalist investments in order to build solar power plants in their country.

Finally, I would add this emphatically is a solution looking for a problem. I want to see nuclear power used because I believe it is currently being misrepresented by at least one or two orders magnitude due to regulation and subsidy differentials, and its usage at scale will reveal that discrepancy.

scythe2• 3 years ago

Nuclear power had the distinct advantage of existing 50 years ago. No renewable can match that! I don't think it's entirely useless to study the mistakes of the past, particularly since the same patterns may repeat themselves in the future — see e.g. the rhetoric comparing battery metal mining to the environmental impact of petrochemical extraction.

opo• 3 years ago

As your source shows, solar can be very cheap (utility grade solar providing power when it is sunny) to the most expensive form of electrical power in the world (residential solar on rooftops).

You can also see that if you also want power when it isn't sunny (or windy if using windmills) you need to add in the cost of utility grade storage which noticeably increases the costs.

Krasnol2• 3 years ago

I wonder how one measures "over-regulation" in a serious way here.

The examples I've seen either come from opinions of certain individuals and the accompanying lobby groups or by setting it next to other regulations from countries which are famous for infrastructural disasters (see China).

fwlr10• 3 years ago

It’s extraordinarily hard! Often in trying to analyze some complex system I have found it’s much more tractable to implement the system and analyze the results (e.g. a montecarlo sim of dice-rolling rather than trying to do the math). Likewise, a tractable way to measure over-regulation might be to simply do nuclear in a limited low-regulation area and draw conclusions from that.

nukeman• 3 years ago

Like fwir said, it’s difficult to determine what regulations are and aren’t needed. But one example: in the U.S., automatic load following equipment for nuclear power plants are prohibited, so load following needs to be done manually. Whereas in France, this equipment is allowed, and very important, given nuclear makes up a much larger proportion of their grid (and tends to load follow more).

jMyles3• 3 years ago

and then export these “completely clean conventional fuels” to the rest of the world.

...not where I thought you were going with this argument.

Aren't we looking for ways to take the CO2 out of the air? Rather than to sell it so that it gets put back in?

anon84873628• 3 years ago

Using synthetic hydrocarbons for energy storage seems inevitable to me. Can we really electrify all the vehicles on the planet? How many two stroke engines are in use throughout Southeast Asia alone? Batteries and electric motor technology is just so much more complicated than the internal combustion engine. Then you have airplanes, ocean vessels, military and emergency vehicles...

I'm not an expert in this. But swapping fossil fuels for synthetic petroleum made with nuclear or renewable energy seems like the cleanest refactor without rewriting the interface. If feasible. And we'd still want to optimize the whole stack and sequester carbon wherever possible.

fwlr10• 3 years ago

Think of the current coal power industry as essentially “digging a lot of pre-sequestered CO2 out of the ground and putting it into the air”. This plan limits the coal industry to only using what’s already in the air, while we build parallel systems to actively sequester air CO2. Building massive carbon capture plants for this purpose also brings economies of scale to other carbon sequestration projects. Finally, you can imagine making a commitment to permanently burying 5% of the output of the synthetic plants, so every round trip the CO2 makes reduces it by 5%.

whiddershins• 3 years ago

If changing over regulation is impossible, our civilization is likely doomed.

bitwize• 3 years ago

Renewables are cheap and pose zero risk of nuclear exposure. We should be looking at 100% renewable solutions.

hanniabu3• 3 years ago

nuclear over-regulation

Ah yes, the classic too much regulation.

I'll just leave you with this. There's too much to quote from here, but here's just one excerpt. The post has numerous examples of very concerning issues.

When valves leaked, more leakage was allowed — up to 20 times the original limit. When rampant cracking caused radioactive leaks from steam generator tubing, an easier test of the tubes was devised, so plants could meet standards.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna43455859

The proposal comes as most of the nation’s nuclear power plants, which were designed and built in the 1960s or 1970s, are reaching the end of their original 40- to 50-year operating licenses. Many plant operators have sought licenses to extend the operating life of their plants past the original deadlines, even as experts have warned that aging plants come with heightened concerns about safety.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/climate/nrc-nuclear-inspe...

The nuclear industry is also pushing the NRC to cut down on safety inspections and rely instead on plants to police themselves. The NRC “is listening” to this advice, the Associated Press reported last month. “Annie Caputo, a former nuclear-energy lobbyist now serving as one of four board members appointed or reappointed by President Donald Trump, told an industry meeting this week that she was ‘open to self-assessments’ by nuclear plant operators, who are proposing that self-reporting by operators take the place of some NRC inspections.”

https://newrepublic.com/article/153465/its-not-just-pork-tru...

fwlr10• 3 years ago

De-regulation of existing 1960s era nuclear tech is bad and shouldn’t happen, I agree.

peteradio• 3 years ago

The workable solution is to find or make a receptive regulatory environment (perhaps in a small country with large reserves of nuclear fuel and large unpopulated areas to isolate reactors in, like say Australia), use massive banks of nuclear power to power commensurately massive carbon capture plants that turn airborne CO2 back into synthetic coal and synthetic gasoline, and then export these “completely clean conventional fuels” to the rest of the world.

Any idea how massively inefficient this would be?

A potent offering and one that’s hopefully hard to regulate against as well.

You don't need to regulate against something that cannot possibly turn a profit.

m4633• 3 years ago

One could probably derive a similar statistic for how much harm nuclear over-regulation has caused.

That reminds me of bicycle helmet regulation, which can deter exercising.

the paper that tries to figure out if helmet laws might deter people from exercising, which could inadvertently increase mortality:

https://nacto.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/2012_de-Jong_He...

bmitc4• 3 years ago

I read the abstract and first part of the introduction. It seems that it is accepted as a foregone conclusion that helmet laws reduce cycling. Is that true? If so, is it because cyclists are less excited about cycling or over worry of the dangers because someone said it's dangerous enough that they need a helmet?

I can't imagine making policy (such as removing helmet laws) due to such flighty sentiments.

As a motorcyclist, bicyclists remain a mystery to me in their approach to safety.

mullingitover• 3 years ago

There’s a statistic that floats around the internet claiming more radioactivity harm from coal power than from nuclear power, based on the principle that coal power is essentially aerosolizing tons of particles with ever-so-slightly-higher-than-background radioactivity and there’s a lot more coal than nuclear.

Fun fact, it would be a very easy engineering lift to convert coal plants to nuclear (you already have the steam turbines built and ready to go!). However, the moment they switch from a coal plant to a nuclear plant, the existing radioactivity left over from the coal burning operation would immediately get a nuclear plant shut down.

pfdietz20• 3 years ago

Nuclear liberates more uranium decay products into the environment than coal does per unit of electrical energy produced, if you include those liberated in uranium mining.

defrost2• 3 years ago

I think you'll find that vast tracts of granite across the planet relese more uranium decay products into the environment by several orders of magnitude than uranium mining does.

You can work this out for yourself by downloading and working through the raw 256 channel data of an entire continent aquired across 40 years and > 600 surveys.

https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/disciplines/geophysi...

https://www.publish.csiro.au/EG/EG09025

oatmeal1• 3 years ago

It seems to me that changing over-regulation is nearly impossible, as it requires making suicidally unpopular arguments: “we shouldn’t weigh the risks”, “we should care less about safety”, “don’t think of the children”, etc.

The arguments you list are straw man arguments, but doubtless they would be levied against nuclear energy supporters.

donny20182• 3 years ago

Putting synthetic gasoline in a gas station is essentially an over-the-air upgrade to any conventional ICE vehicle making it guaranteed zero emissions.

Prometheus (a startup) promises to deliver exactly on that. I believe something commercially viable should be coming in a year or so.

I like this overall idea of synthesizing coal and fuels out of atmospheric carbon instead of just burying it somewhere. This could be the easiest and even ROI-able way to implement carbon capture globally, without causing much technological friction and disruption to economies in developing countries.

fwlr10• 3 years ago

Yes. The case for synthesizing carbon fuels from atmospheric carbon is immensely strong - we need to do carbon capture of some kind, and investing in this method will also retrofit the entire world to zero emissions. Other plans for reaching zero emissions worldwide have multi-trillion-dollar price tags and require political pressure on sovereign nations. With this method you can forcibly zero out a recalcitrant country’s emissions by simply subsidising synthetic coal and fuel so that it’s cheaper than regular coal and crude oil, and they will go to zero emissions while getting an economic boost.

Arguably, it’s such a strong case that I’m trying to hitch my pet project of nuclear power to its wagon.

patientplatypus2• 3 years ago

Yeah, except...your Australian idea of putting massive power plants in the Outback and de-carbonizing the atmosphere by shipping fossil fuels into the atmosphere is incredibly inefficient. Just put in small scale nuclear power plants at all the limiting bandwidth areas of every nations' power grids. From there electricity would be essentially be free and you could power cars, trains, buses and everything else from electricity. You could have nuclear powered cargo container vessels. There wouldn't be any need for coal or oil. Why do half measures that would be worse for the environment, when you could just stop using goal and gas entirely? By the time all of the useful plutonium and uranium runs out for making power plants we'll have fusion power (within the next 100-200 years). You're not wrong, and the market may mandate doing this anyway, but if you were going to play benevolent dictator and find the most utilitarian way to maximize the world's happiness you would just make energy free.

fwlr10• 3 years ago

Unfortunately we cannot simply play dictator and insist people who don’t like or trust nuclear power must put up with “a Chernobyl next door to every school” (or similar charged rhetoric). The Outback is one of the few places I can imagine just enough people tolerating for it to happen, where there’s also enough infrastructure and capability to keep it running. The fact that Australia also has the largest reserves of nuclear fuel in the world and a significant investment in mining capability certainly doesn’t hurt either.

So that’s kinda where it has to be. Once it’s there, how do you make it affect the rest of the world? The longest HVDC cable in operation is 750km at 1.4GW, and the longest being built is 4 x 3,800km cables at 1.8GW each. The undersea internet cable that connects Australia to America goes through Hawaii and is 14,000km long. And you need to get something like 60GW through to power the western region of the US grid, even assuming big advances it’s still like 12 x 14,000km. Impractical. You need to make it transportable. Batteries don’t have energy density to make it work shipping them en masse, especially since they need a return trip. You know what does have high enough energy density to make it worth transporting? Coal and oil, we already do it. Added benefit: it’s a drop-in replacement for existing power systems, no need to rebuild any power systems anywhere. How can we turn nuclear power into coal and oil? Carbon capture synthesis of hydrocarbons. Another added bonus: fights climate change.

The previous two bonuses synergise immensely well: they take existing ICE engines and coal power plants and make them zero emissions. The drawback of inefficiency sucks, but it’s more than outweighed by all those benefits. I’m not trying to use nuclear as efficiently as possible. I’m trying to find a place for nuclear in the energy economy.

Overtonwindow• 3 years ago

Regulations have killed the nuclear industry, which I think is a direct results of environmentalists and carbon energy producers. We know we can make safer reactors but like high speed rail, more housing, and pretty much every major infrastructure project, red tape will stop it every time.

bjourne2• 3 years ago

What regulations have killed the nuclear industry? Because every US administration since George W. Bush have supported and promised subsidies to the nuclear industry. For example, construction of Vogtle 3 and 4 only began after Obama promised federal loan guarantees.

loeg3• 3 years ago

The NRC's entire function is to kill the nuclear industry.

Schroedingersat5• 3 years ago

Yeah. Free unlimited insurance, government backed loans, and being allowed to charge ratepayers whatever you want for reactors no matter whether they are built are real industry killers.

pfdietz20• 3 years ago

Nuclear isn't succeeding, therefore by definition it's the government's fault. Because axiomatically nuclear is the best.

It's conspiracy theoretic cognition, what you get when someone firmly believes a falsehood.

mixdup• 3 years ago

What was the last commercial power reactor that was built in the US that didn't result in a bankruptcy of some kind? I think Westinghouse and Toshiba have been through bankruptcy court enough times they have their own wing at the courthouse

PaulHoule5• 3 years ago

What's funny about it is that a lot of delay was because it was one of the first AP1000 reactors and had to wait in line for the first AP1000 to get built in China and, thus, for a factory in China to figure out how to build a main coolant pump that was supposed to be easier to build.

It's not so clear that more AP1000's would be delayed so long but China has definitely moved on to the Hualong One.

rdevsrex3• 3 years ago

Everybody is talking about how expensive nuclear is, and how wind and solar is a much better option.

But that assumes we can actually mine all the copper, nickel, etc that we need. And do so without destroying fragile ecosystems and polluting regions where the mining is being done.

This was a great video about how dirty the copper mining in Chile is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNUbroQ2XZ4.

All I'm saying is, I don't think there are any free lunches to be had. To get off fossil fuels is going to be expensive whatever our energy mix is.

epistasis3• 3 years ago

This is some extremely muddled thinking. If, at some point, we run out of a mineral to mine, it's not like all our existing turbines stop working. They keep on working! And as they age out, critical materials can be recycled, because they don't consume fuel.

As for copper mining being dirty, you has best stop participating in any part of modern society if a dirty mine means a tech isn't acceptable, because guess what your entire life is built upon? Which is your choice, please check out and join a commune if you prefer to! But the damage there is not permanent destruction of species, it's a transformation of some finite amount of land, excluding native species, which is what communes and suburban homes and cities also do.

There is no free lunch, but there are economics lunches and there are wasteful lunches, and we should at least think clearly about these things rather than trying to make up arguments against choosing a cheaper lunch.

scythe2• 3 years ago

Grid energy storage doesn't require nickel at all. Lithium iron phosphate batteries produced at scale today do away with nickel, but they just aren't ideal for cars. There are technologies that do away with the lithium part too, but it seems like there's a new lithium discovery every few months now that we're looking, so the future is uncertain.

Copper, sure. You need copper for practically everything, though. The world has run on copper since the dawn of power generation. We may see more aluminum in power transmission at some point, but barring a breakthrough in graphene composites [1], copper will be central to the electricity sector and widely extracted regardless of technology choice.

1: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/admi.2019004...

Schroedingersat5• 3 years ago

Good thing wind and solar needs no more mining than nuclear then.

https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2022/07/the-material-fo...

We could also massively reduce energy consumption, most of the same people who like wind and solar are for that too.

acidburnNSA• 3 years ago

Not to be ad hominem or anything, but I think it's useful context to point out that the author of this is a long-time anti-nuclear campaigner.

DennisP2• 3 years ago

It shouldn't be surprising that the US can't build nuclear reactors in a reasonable time or budget. We can't do it for subways or high-speed rail either.

Meanwhile, as of May 2022 there were 53 nuclear reactors under construction worldwide.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/513671/number-of-under-c...

2OEH8eoCRo0• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A1B_reactor

pfdietz20• 3 years ago

We can build solar or wind fields just fine though. They typically come in with 10% of the projected cost.

DennisP2• 3 years ago

Yes, and we should do a lot of that, though bearing in mind that we're also terrible at building long-distance transmission. Some projects have languished for decades.

For countries with worse wind/solar resources and better ability to build large infrastructure, nuclear is a decent option, which is why 53 reactors are under construction.

Schroedingersat5• 3 years ago

Even if all of those reactors were on time and on budget (23 are behind schedule), that's still less net generating capacity each year than just the wind power of just the US (who are almost as bad at building wind as they are nuclear).

It's not a US problem. It's just that nuclear reactors are not a good way of making electricity.

TheRealPomax• 3 years ago

Title's lacking "because the US wants to go back to living in the 20th century, until the current generation of wealthy white men are all dead".

patientplatypus2• 3 years ago

This is frustrating.

ChatGPT that everyone is so fond of is run with electricity. So are cryptocurrencies. So is <insert new toy>. Passively safe nuclear power plants!

From a note I sent to another person

I would like us to have free energy though. I think that perhaps the point of life is to make the necessities of life so cheap as to be free so we can all sit around thinking deep thoughts and staring at the clouds. If you have any pull with the NRC I might mention (https://www.nuscalepower.com/en), base grid load capacity (https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Baseload_power), this (https://archy.deberker.com/the-uk-is-wasting-a-lot-of-wind-p...), and Djikstra's algorithm.

In essence, each small scale passive power plant reactor, if optimally placed along the power grid, would produce much higher returns of energy to the grid than just their energy production rating.

You can also make nuclear power plants shippable around the world by putting small charges around the core that would fragment the radioactive material and release a mixture of boron and concrete if the containment unit is opened. Which means that third world countries could have energy independence. The geometries and physics involved is a minor engineering problem, as opposed to fusion reactors that require theoretical physics.

And people think that a search box that talks to you like the person sitting next to you on the subway (who you'd like to interact with as little as possible) does is important.

Free energy is both possible and necessary and we're not building it.

Schroedingersat5• 3 years ago

Second law says no.

Work out the waste heat budget.

First law says no.

Work out the U235 budget.

Not having cancer says no.

Work out the Kr-85 budget.

The closest thing to free energy is solar, but even then this exponential growth nonsense needs to stop.

Georgia’s big new nuclear reactors could be the last built in the US

Related Stories