Nuclear engineer dismisses claim that modular reactors could be viable soon

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jun/21/peter-dutton-coalition-nuclear-policy-engineer-small-modular-reactors-no-commercially-viable

by johnea • 2 years ago

45 86 2 years ago

theguardian.com

jdonaldson4• 2 years ago

Western Australia and Queensland have a good deal of Monazite sands that one can extract Thorium from. This would greatly reduce the need for more complex safety and disposal regulations necessary with larger fission reactors.

A small college in Texas was able to build and run a Thorium reactor, so it can't be that far out of reach for a small country : https://youtu.be/kCrrrmh-eMo?si=NChlWACDXajKm9hr

_aavaa_2• 2 years ago

There is a valley of death between something that works in a research lab and something that world in the real world.

A research reactor does not have to produce electricity at anything close to an economic price, just as the fusion reactors.

A Thorium reactor might work, and might be built in some future, and it might even not come super over budget or over time like more or less every fission reactor we've built. In the meantime, wind/solar/batteries are being continuously delivered on time, on budget, are getting continuously cheaper, and are available today.

jdonaldson4• 2 years ago

Wind/solar can’t make the order of magnitude jump we need in power.

arnaudsm4• 2 years ago

Technological moonshots are great. Modular reactors, renewable energy grids with large scale storage, are all very exciting.

But with the climate emergency and its potential tipping points being a decade away, we should immediately fix the problem with clean tech that already works.

Classical nuclear reactors are great, scalable, proven and clean. They just have bad public image from PR disasters of the past. We don't have time for fancy rebrands like SMRs, MSRs, fusion, and other stuff that could take half a century

greenthrow• 2 years ago

Renewables with grid scale storage are not a moonshot. It exists today in many places around the world, and has for years. Nuclear takes way too long and is too expensive. Wind and solar with storage are faster, cheaper and safer.

arnaudsm4• 2 years ago

Which places? Can you find a region with >10M people without hydro storage that reached <50 g CO2/kWh?

https://app.electricitymaps.com

France is the only one, has been 70% nuke for decades, and has competitive electrity prices

nine_k4• 2 years ago

Can you please give us a few examples of grid-scale storage installations that are not hydroelectric?

exe342• 2 years ago

I've been hearing that nuclear takes way too long all my life. I'm 37. we could have built two or three generations of them by now.

bruce5115• 2 years ago

I don't think the tipping points are a decade away. I think we've already surpassed them. In the sense that "hey let's just stop buying all oil today" is not feasible.

In other words there's no way we can ramp down fast enough to prevent another degree of warming. We are already past the point of no (practical) return.

Obviously that doesn't mean we give up, 2 degs of warming is better than 3. But we're long (long) past the point where we can pretend we can "avoid the oncoming train".

So get used to more extreme events every year. Hotter hot, wetter wet, drier dry. More energy in the atmosphere means more energetic weather.

exe342• 2 years ago

if 3 can make somebody richer than 2, we'll get 3.

mike_hearn2• 2 years ago

More energy in the atmosphere means more energetic weather.

Although that's tautologically true, please be aware that "accumulated cyclone energy" (i.e. storm energy) is a tracked metric and hasn't moved since records began 50 years ago:

https://tropical.atmos.colostate.edu/Realtime/index.php?arch...

In practice the climate is quite complex and datasets often don't neatly fall into line with each other. If you want to argue that there's a problem with energetic weather some other metric would be needed. Watch out though for economic indexes that don't control for population growth or apply deflators correctly.

kube-system• 2 years ago

I agree with your statement, but as a broader statement about "fixing the problem", I think that we also shouldn't discount the importance of political capital as a resource that is necessary for solving the problem.

At a local level, where carbon emissions actually happen, there's a wide variety of support for varying technologies depending on where you're at. Sometimes this is an existing technology and sometimes it might be a new technology. Solar wouldn't be where it is today if it weren't for moonshot projects just a few decades ago.

GolfPopper• 2 years ago

I believe Admiral Rickover made a very similar case with his "Paper Reactor" memo back in 1953[1]:"The academic-reactor designer is a dilettante. He has not had to assume any real responsibility in connection with his projects. He is free to luxuriate in elegant ideas, the practical shortcomings of which can be relegated to the category of “mere technical details.” The practical-reactor designer must live with these same technical details. Although recalcitrant and awkward, they must be solved and cannot be put off until tomorrow. Their solutions require man power, time, and money."

1. https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html

izacus2• 2 years ago

Maybe quoting the person which had to be forcefully retired to stop them from holding back development of nuclear navy (not to mention his tendency to settle political scores by holding back certifications) after 1970 isn't the best in given context.

ethbr13• 2 years ago

63 years of active duty service (1918 - 1982).

Zero naval reactor accidents.

Finally forced to retire after refusing to agree to pay General Dynamics Electric Boat $634 million for mistakes they made in submarine construction.

... yeah, what an asshole.

cmdrk• 2 years ago

"Since they are innocently unaware of the real but hidden difficulties of their plans, they speak with great facility and confidence. Those involved with practical reactors, humbled by their experiences, speak less and worry more."

Replace 'reactors' with any sufficiently complex system and you'll find this resonates incredibly strongly even today.

Gibbon1• 2 years ago

My dad worked on the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes. Specifically the frame that held them to the rocket. It had to be light, strong, flexible enough to isolate them from the rockets vibration, and not resonate either.

Design, fabrication, and testing took 18 months. And he wasn't the only engineer working on it.

miketery• 2 years ago

It can't be done, until someone does it. There is nothing from a physics standpoint preventing modular reactors. Many advanced large US Navy vessels have reactors.

bagels• 2 years ago

While I agree with the sentiment, comparing to a navy ship reactor isn't useful, they don't have to turn a profit, nuclear is used to make the ships less dependent on refuelling.

toomuchtodo• 2 years ago

If it isn't cheaper than batteries and solar in Australia, it is dead on arrival, someone has to pay for it. As of this comment, Australia has 18.4GW of coal fired generation capacity and 20GW of solar [1] (very roughly, lots of behind the meter solar that is hard to suss out, ends up being reduced demand as seen by the grid operator). Even if you assume worst case capacity factor, the last of their fossil generation will be gone before any nuclear sees first kwh to grid (global solar deployment is on track for ~660GW this year, and rapidly approaching 1TW/pa [2]). Germany is routinely pumping out 40GW of solar [3] (with ~81GW of total capacity), and Australia has far more solar potential [4] (along with appetite to lean into batteries [5]).

[1] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/AU?wind=false&solar=fal... ("ElectricityMaps: Australia")

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40727619 ("HN: Global PV installations may hit 660 GW in 2024")

[3] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE?wind=false&solar=fal... ("ElectricityMaps: Germany")

[4] https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/energy/resources/oth... ("Australia receives an average of 58 million PJ of solar radiation per year, approximately 10,000 times larger than its total energy consumption. However, Australia's current use of solar energy is low with solar energy accounting for only about 0.1 per cent of Australia's total primary energy consumption.")

[5] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-07/end-of-co... | https://archive.today/2owbd ("Australia’s rapid shift from coal-fired power to cleaner alternatives is underwriting a boom in battery projects able to store solar and wind energy. The country has at least 250 planned battery developments with a potential capacity of almost 130,000 megawatt-hours, a pipeline that’s second only to China, data compiled by BloombergNEF show. While Australia still relies on coal for more than half of its electricity generation, many major plants are set to close in the next decade.")

locallost• 2 years ago

It can be done, the economics of it are questionable.

AlexErrant• 2 years ago

Discussed yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40762298

lispm9• 2 years ago

"viable" probably means some else then just "technically possible".

I would also see as requirements: It must be cost effective, it must be scalable in several dimensions: fast to plan and approve, fast to build, able to be build in massive numbers, able to be financed in large numbers, able to be operated in large numbers, able to cool in large numbers, able to operate in a secure environment, ...

pyrale5• 2 years ago

Many advanced large US Navy vessels have reactors.

They are not built to be cost-efficient. The Navy doesn't really care about cost per MWh, they're after other metrics.

The civilian energy sector is the opposite: we can afford to cut a few clients once in a while, but we can't afford to overspend.

xhkkffbf• 2 years ago

The cost of getting fossil fuels into the battle theater is very steep. This can make nuclear power look cheap in comparison.

151552• 2 years ago

A key feature of naval reactors is that they operate in an extremely large heatsink by design - you have unlimited cooling media at your disposal.

moralestapia• 2 years ago

Genuine curiosity, are they actually cooled like that? Physically transferring the heat to the hull?

stephen_g2• 2 years ago

It’s the economics - larger reactors produce relatively expensive power (per megawatt-hour), and that’s while still benefiting from economies of scale from their large size (as all thermal power tends to).

SMRs are technically fairly straightforward, but they need to be able to built and operated cheaply enough to produce power cheaper than existing large nuclear plants to be economically viable, given the price of competing power sources in most grids. And that’s not on the horizon at this point. Everything points to them producing more expensive power.

t43562• 2 years ago

Engineering with Rosie is a great channel with insights into the energy system in Australia - she worked in Denmark too and has lots of interesting things to say:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_47LWFAG6g

Roughly - why would you spend a dollar on a long term return risky nuclear venture when you could spend it on something certain and get a result tomorrow? Doubly so in a hot sunny country like Australia.

vertis• 2 years ago

Peter Dutton is not about to support wind and solar though. Yuck.

stephen_g2• 2 years ago

I very much hope it won’t matter and he proves unelectable.

Look at his record - doctors voted him the “worst Minister for Health in Australian History” when he was in that position. Later in Home Affairs as minister there was massive grift (massive, corrupt looking contracts to dodgy companies to run detention camps) and internal staff surveys in the public service consistently rated his department as the worst managed across the whole Government…

He does not has any record of good policy or any kind of effective executive management.

ninininino• 2 years ago

Probably because you consider redundancy and emergency preparation important, sunlight is not guaranteed in event of supervolcanic eruption, asteroid impact, nuclear winter, and other similar events.

ethbr13• 2 years ago

not guaranteed in event of supervolcanic eruption, asteroid impact, nuclear winter, and other similar events

Are these the standards we're building to, now?

rjsw• 2 years ago

... in Australia.

Likely to be viable a lot sooner in countries that already have a nuclear industry.

Symmetry• 2 years ago

Or that have very limited land, or don't have much sunlight. Australia is not the place I would try them, but they may or may not work somewhere else.

cjbgkagh• 2 years ago

Cynically I think the intent of this push is to stimy the lefts push for Solar / Wind without evoking 'climate change denialism.' I.e. the liberals are acquiescing on the point of need for green energy and proposing this as an alternative solution. That nuclear is unpopular with the left helps stake the ground for the boarder culture war.

The problem is that it's likely that tariffs will be raised on cheap solar imports from China so either way, nuclear or solar, there will be no cheap electricity for Australians.

In my view, either a corrupt nuclear firm syphons off a bunch of public money, or another bunch of money will be wasted trying to get Australian solar manufacturing competitive with China. Sadly not wasting a bunch of money is not an option. That's the problem with the government funded ventures, trying and failing makes more money than trying and succeeding.

At least they're not pushing clean coal anymore.

lukan• 2 years ago

I think modular reactors certainly could be build with some investment and in a different world it might make sense to build lots of them (and if possible underground, to contain the worst in the worst case).

But the required security alone, to prevent the spread of material to all kind of terrorist organisations or rougue states, will likely not make them a economical alternative.

aurizon• 2 years ago

Australia can deal with all energy needs with wind/solar. In 5 years Perovskite/Silicon solar cells will get to 35% efficiency, perhaps more, and Australia has huge useable areas with the needed insolation as well as temperate weather. lithium cells are not economic or suitable - they need to build Vanadium Flow cells. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery. Flow cells are made with 2 liquid vats - one for charged liquid and the other for discharged. Operational parameters are vat size(how many megawatt-hours stored) and the charge/discharge cell between the vats which determines the rate at which used fluid is charged and charge fluid is discharged to the grid. Commercial Vanadium redox cells are made now and are being ramped up steadily. So you need vat space for the time you need to store the power, and you need enough charge/discharge cells for the max rate of charge/discharge. And, of course, enough wind/solar to achieve load needed. Land is cheap in Australia and large cheap fields of vats and the needed conversion cells can be laid out as solar cell field first story - it is just a large building, and in that climate, could even be built outside with the right cladding, all piping can be surface runs as nothing in Australia will damage them, but I suppose fences against 'roos/rabbits/snakes ight come in handy. Stats on operational Vanadium cells are out there, as this search shows. https://www.google.com/search?q=Vanadium+redox+cells&rlz=1C1...

kortex• 2 years ago

Regardless of your stance on nuclear energy, can we all agree that articles of the form of "Person X of Authority Y dismisses Z as unviable" is a non-headline? It's basically "Person of vaguely adjacent qualification has opinion". I see it everywhere and it's the "cures cancer (in vitro)" of engineering articles.

RVuRnvbM2e• 2 years ago

The background here is that Peter Dutton, the conservative opposition leader in Australia, has recently announced a plan to switch to nuclear energy instead of renewables. However it isn't a serious policy. Instead it's just political cover to kick the climate change can down the road and allow the existing highly subsidised fossil fuel industry in Australia to continue operating for a few more decades.

For example here is Dutton just a few days ago using the old trope that taking action on climate change would destroy the economy https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2024/jun/12/...

yfw• 2 years ago

This, he never talked about how much would be produced, promising figures after the election.

He revealed sites where he wants to build with zero effort getting approval or buy in from the owners or even the state.

Stop wasting time pretending this is a serious policy

Nuclear engineer dismisses claim that modular reactors could be viable soon

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