Sorensen has remained firmly convinced that his thorium reactor, fully named liquid fluoride thorium reactor, is short lftr (pronounced ‘lifter’), is the ultimate in clean, safe and abundant energy. //

A lftr in its full form will be a superb energy machine. This machine can burns thorium and may do so with 99% efficiency. This means a lftr-powered electricity plant will deliver a year of electricity for a western city of a million, with one single tonne (1000kgs) thorium. The resulting ‘waste’ can be worked up as precious (rare earth) metals or can simply be stored for about 500 years – nothing compared to a regular nuclear power plant. The Earth has plenty of thorium, enough to last us for tens of thousands of years.

This thorium reactor is very safe: the core consists of a vessel of a molten salt mixture at high temperature (650C) at nearly atmospheric pressure. There’s simply nothing that can explode, and the smart design makes sure that if anything goes wrong, the machine shuts itself down without human interference. In case of any malfunction, the hot melt drains away safely into passively cooled drainage tanks.

PORTLAND, Ore. – On January 1, 2023, NuScale Power Corporation (NYSE: SMR) completed submission of a Standard Design Approval (SDA) application to the U.S Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for its updated small modular reactor (SMR) design, which is based on a VOYGR™-6 (6-module) configuration powered by an uprated 250 MWt (77 MWe) module. The design features the same fundamental safety case and totally passive safety features approved by the NRC in 2020, with a power uprate and select design changes to support customers’ capacity needs and further improve economics.

Nuclear Newswire is back with the final #ThrowbackThursday post honoring the 80th anniversary of Chicago Pile-1 with offerings from past issues of Nuclear News. On November 17, we took a look at the lead-up to the first controlled nuclear chain reaction and on December 1, the events of December 2, 1942, the day a self-sustaining nuclear fission reaction was created and controlled inside a pile of graphite and uranium assembled on a squash court at the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field.

On December 16 the Department of Energy reversed a decision made nearly 70 years ago by leaders of its predecessor agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, to revoke the security clearance of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who led the first group of scientists and engineers at what would eventually become Los Alamos National Laboratory as they built the first atomic bomb. While it comes far too late for Oppenheimer, his family, and his colleagues to appreciate, the McCarthy-era campaign to discredit Oppenheimer is now itself officially discredited as “a flawed process that violated the Commission’s own regulations,” in the words of the DOE’s recent announcement.

Oppenheimer’s story has been told many times by biographers and chroniclers of the Manhattan Project; a new feature film is expected in July 2023. Today, we offer a #ThrowbackThursday post that examines the scant coverage of Oppenheimer’s life and work in the pages of Nuclear News to date and draws on other historical content—and the DOE’s recent move to correct the record—to fill a few of the gaps.

When it comes to choosing which types of energy technology to prioritize and build in order to address climate, we need to stay focused on low-carbon sources, or what we now call “clean” energy. Many people may not realize that all of what is “renewable” is not “clean.”

Renewable energy is defined to focus on types of energy that come from “sources that cannot be depleted or which naturally replenish,” an appealing concept but actually a red herring with respect to carbon emissions. Clearly, some types of renewables are low and non-carbon-emitting energy sources, such as wind and solar. But some renewables are highly emitting sources of energy, namely bioenergy, which includes burning ancient forests, also called biomass energy. //

Lately, the large and growing bioenergy industry has been seen as contributing massively to deforestation. Yet, bioenergy has the burnish of appearing to be “green” because it’s made the political cut and is included as “renewable.” This means that companies cutting down trees have benefitted from the subsidies and incentives intended to increase clean energy. Fortunately, many are starting to be more discerning and are specifically excluding ecologically-damaging types of bioenergy as unsustainable and not worthy of prioritization with climate-focused subsidies.

Politics, lobbying and powerful ideologic preferences are what have brought the term “renewable” into vogue in the first place. This also means that what’s included as renewable differs from place to place. California specifically excludes large hydro power but includes small hydropower stations. Not because large hydro emits more carbon or doesn’t rely on the renewing resource of rain but rather because California policymakers decided dams posed too great an ecologic impact and didn’t want to prioritize building more large dams. In other places, renewables includes large hydro. The fact that the definition of what’s renewable varies from place to place, contributes to confusion and lack of clarity. When folks in California hear that there are Canadian provinces running almost entirely on renewable energy, they may think that means they’ve succeeded in building out lots of wind and solar. In fact, it’s predominantly large hydro—which isn’t counted as “renewable” in California.

Nuclear’s Contributions to Clean Energy are Sidelined

The biggest problem by far with using the term renewable, however, is that it is invariably defined to exclude nuclear power. This causes the entire nuclear industry—which for decades has produced more clean energy than all other low-carbon sources combined—to be discounted and even sometimes excluded. Not surprising since nuclear has long been maligned and even demonized. Even so, the omission of nuclear as a renewable energy source, whether intentional or not, causes significant problems for those trying to use good data to address climate change.

We cannot make good decisions about how to invest in new energy generation if we don’t get good information about where our clean energy is coming from. Most energy agencies now include reports on levels of Renewables, because they are politically potent. They don’t create reports based on carbon intensity (such as by grouping the low-carbon energy technologies and the high-carbon energy technologies). Thus, people are not shown that their nuclear power plants are contributing to the clean energy being produced. This may induce them to think that nuclear is carbon-emitting—which it isn’t. They will think biofuels are a good thing for the climate—they aren’t. They will also think we have less clean energy than we actually do and agree to pay for more renewables. In certain areas, nuclear power plants are not even credited with producing carbon-free energy that counts towards the region’s clean energy goals! //

We need clear and accurate information on climate impacts as we make increasingly large investments in transitioning our energy systems, commiting us to energy projects that will have 20, 30, 50-year and longer life-spans. For this, we definitely should avoid anything that hints at ambiguity and stick with what we mean: clean energy. So, in 2023, let’s work to reject use of the word “renewable” and demand that we focus on the distinction that does matter: carbon intensity. Without clear language and understanding, neither the public nor those negotiating our future world agreements can be expected to make good decisions.

The cold blast this holiday weekend across the eastern half of the US exposed the fragility of power grids as soaring heating demand spiked peak total loads to record high in many areas while supplies were tight. Grid operators and utilities told tens of millions of Americans to conserve power -- some conservation efforts are still ongoing Christmas morning. Christmas Eve was a mess for many customers in the Southeast states, including North Carolina and Tennessee, as utilities implemented rolling blackouts.

Fossil fuels and nuclear power generation mix across the eastern US saved grids from collapse. Unreliable renewables, such as solar and wind, were just a tiny fraction of the power mix.

What's idiotic is the decarbonization campaign to decommission nuclear and fossil fuel generators for renewables. This weekend's grid chaos is a wake-up call. America has a severe grid problem sparked by the 'green' movement. Thank the climate alarmist, woke corporations, and progressive politicians for ushering in so-called green reforms that have transformed once-stable grids into a third-world country prone to rolling blackouts anytime temperatures fall below freezing.

Readers have been well informed of our view that advanced nuclear reactors will play a critical role in decarbonizing electricity in the US by providing carbon-free energy, and it is a much better form than solar and wind assets.

In terms of specifics, the lasers of the National Ignition Facility deposited 2.05 megajoules into their target in that experiment. Measurements of the energy released afterward indicate that the resulting fusion reactions set loose 3.15 megajoules, a factor of roughly 1.5. That's the highest output-to-input ratio yet achieved in a fusion experiment. //

Before we get to visions of fusion power plants dotting the landscape, however, there's the uncomfortable fact that producing the 2 megajoules of laser power that started the fusion reaction took about 300 megajoules of grid power, so the overall process is nowhere near the break-even point. So, while this was a real sign of progress in getting this form of fusion to work, we're still left with major questions about whether laser-driven fusion can be optimized enough to be useful. At least one DOE employee suggested that separating it from its nuclear-testing-focused roots may be needed to do so. //

Which gets into all the other problems that laser-driven fusion faces. Kim Budil, director of Lawrence Livermore National Lab, mentioned the other barriers. "This is one igniting capsule one time," Budil said. "To realize commercial fusion energy, you have to do many things; you have to be able to produce many, many fusion ignition events per minute. And you have to have a robust system of drivers to enable that." Drivers like consistent manufacturing of the targets, hardware that can survive repeated neutron exposures, and so on.

So, while laser-driven fusion may have reached major energy milestones, there's a huge list of unsolved problems that stand between it and commercialization. By contrast, magnetic confinement in tokamaks, an alternative approach, is thought to mostly face issues of scale and magnetic field strength and to be much closer to commercialization, accordingly.

Truth says:
November 26, 2022 at 1:50 am

there is zero plans for dealing with the fantastic amount radioactive waste
Watch a 2010 documentary film called “Into Eternity” about the Onkalo waste repository at the Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant on the island of Olkiluoto, Finland. It should have enough storage space for one hundred years of waste. The “hot” waste after it has been allowed to “cool” for 30 years stored under water will be stored using the Swedish KBS-3 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBS-3 ). The facility should start to store waste starting in 2023.

Or read “Deep Time Reckoning” (How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now) by Vincent Ialenti which uses Onkalo waste repository as a case study.

I’m not even pro-nuclear, but you have to admire when something is done right. And if you can’t admire that then you can at least admire the engineering and actual long-term thinking. //

Rybec Arethdar says:
November 26, 2022 at 6:46 pm
The big elephant in the room everyone seems to ignore though, is that pretty much all active nuclear power plants have sufficient space built into them to handle centuries of their own waste. The reason we don’t see much effort going into nuclear waste management technology is that it is a problem that is over 100 years out. And thus far every reactor commissioned has been decommissioned before running out of space for nuclear waste storage, so it’s just as far out as it was 50 years ago. Until and unless we start taking nuclear power seriously as a long term solution to our energy needs, nuclear waste disposal never will be a real problem. And countries that are taking long term nuclear energy seriously are already starting to work on solutions, despite the fact that they have at least a century to do it in. //

BrendaEM says:
November 26, 2022 at 8:40 am
SL-1/ Argonne Low Power Reactor Nuclear Accident, was a small reactor, that killed 3 people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1

One person was missing for days before they found him pinned to the ceiling. Here’s another rod: https://radiationworks.com/photos/sl1reactor2.htm

They used a C-clamp on a round control rod: https://www.osti.gov/sciencecinema/biblio/1122857

The entire building had to be dismantled: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0zT9ARfsT4

I believe that the area is still radioactive. “The primary remedy for SL-1 was to be containment by capping with an engineered barrier constructed primarily of native materials.”

Where in your neighborhood do you want the reactor?
https://radiationworks.com/photos/slreactor9.jpg

As far as small reactors being green, here an Indian video which shows tailings ponds from yellow-cake production, which is used to make the green-sand, which makes the nuclear metal for reactors.

https://youtu.be/MJ6667Noex0

Steven Naslund says:
November 29, 2022 at 8:10 am
Also fail to note that SL-1 was a research reactor which was built on a test range. The SL-1 was not really a failure of hardware as much as the incompetence of personnel (there is also rumor of a murderous love triangle underlying the story). The nuclear industry could be much safer but not if we keep using 50s-70s technology. Anyone who is really upset about the nuclear waste issue needs to go see a decommisioned reactor with fuel casks stored on site. It is amazing how little space is taken up. I am not sure about the desirability of burying encased waste, it seems much safer to me to have them stored in casks on pads above ground where they are easy to monitor and maintain. The reprocessing of this waste could reduce it tremendously.

Jack Devanney; CTX Press 2020

This book focuses on the Gordian knot of our time, the closely coupled problems of electricity poverty for billions of humans, and global warming for all humans. The central thesis of the book is that nuclear power is not only the only solution, it is a highly desirable solution, cheaper, safer, less intrusive on nature than all the alternatives.

Just about everybody, including most pro-nuclear folks, accept the fact that nuclear electricity is inherently expensive. Thanks to its remarkable energy density,
nuclear power is not inherently expensive. It is inherently cheap. This book argues that conventional nuclear power should cost less than three cents per kilowatt hour.

But nuclear power is expensive, prohibitively so in most parts of the planet. The reason why nuclear power is so expensive is a regulatory regime which by design is mandated to increase costs to the point where nuclear power is at least as expensive as coal. In such a system, any technological improvement which should lower cost simply provides regulators with more room to drive costs up. This same regime does an excellent job of stifling competition and technological progress by erecting multiple layers of barriers to entry.

Our goal is not just to make nuclear electricity as cheap as coal or gas fired electricity. The goal is to keep pushing the cost of nuclear power down and down, allowing us to replace fossil fuels almost everywhere. Imagine what we could do with 2 cents per kWh power in electrifying transportation and producing carbon neutral synfuels. This can only be done in a harshly competitive environment. We must force the providers of nuclear power to compete with everybody.

If nuclear power is to be allowed to cleave the Gordian knot of electricity poverty and global warming,then we must completely change the way we regulate nuclear electricity. This book makes the case for this change and outlines what the replacement system needs to look like.

The author is the Chief Designer for ThorCon which is developing a molten salt reactor based nuclear power plant. Although the book makes no mention of ThorCon, he has a horse in this race and an obvious conflict of interest.

dedicated to the solution of the closely coupled problems of energy poverty

The Gordian Knot Group

The Gordian Knot Group (GKG) is dedicated to the solution of the closely coupled problems of energy poverty for nearly 2 billion humans, and global warming for all of us. The Group produces studies related to this Gordian Knot. Anyone can view or print the papers with no obligation. In order to download the PDF files, we ask viewers to log in first.

The GKG has published a book titled Why Nuclear Power has been a Flop. It can be purchased from Amazon and elsewhere. You may also download the PDF from here for free by logging in.

A panel of five experts and an experienced moderator addressed the progress being made in creating effective processes to license advanced and non-LWR (light water reactors) at an ANS Winter 2022 panel session titled “Licensing the Future: How the NRC is Approaching Advanced Reactors.” Four out of five of the panelists were cautiously positive and provided descriptions of actions being taken and objectives that are still aspirational. //

Nordhaus then noted that the NRC staff had recently released a Part 53 draft for public comments. He described how the document is 1200 pages long, contains many prescriptive requirements that were cut and pasted from existing regulations, moves ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Achievable) directly into the regulation from its current status as the subject of Regulatory Guide 8.10, and adds qualitative health objectives that are firmly rooted in the linear, no-threshold dose model for radiation health effects.

A survey of advanced reactor developers showed that the overwhelming majority of them do not intend to use Part 53, opting instead for either Part 50 or Part 52.

Aside: Though Nordhaus did not mention it, there were numerous critical comments submitted after the draft Part 53 was released. According to Mo Shams’s presentation, the staff had been operating for some time under the belief that they could produce a final rule by 2024, but they have pushed their stretch goal to 2025 as a result of the need to resolve the large number of comments. By the NEIMA law, the agency still has a 2027 deadline. End Aside.

From his point of view, establishing a burdensome licensing process that is not optimized for efficiently reviewing reactor safety results in “down selecting not on best designs or best business plans.” Instead it chooses winners that have the “most patient investors with the deepest pockets or the greatest talent for rent seeking and getting various sorts of federal or government support.”

Nordhaus concluded his remarks by explaining why he and his organization are so passionate about creating an effective licensing process that is focused on enabling regulators that allow radioactive material to be used to protect public health and safety, protect the environment and contribute to the common defense and security of the United States.

Every reactor that we don’t build, license or commercialize increases public health burdens associated with the electrical system. Further results in higher CO2 emissions intensity. It adds to climate risks and also increases economic and geopolitical risks by failing to commercialize economically viable advanced reactors. The result of that is increasing US and global vulnerability to price volatility associated with coal, oil and gas.
-- Ted Nordhaus, the Breakthrough Institute, ANS Winter Nov 15, 2022

Is there a way to say “Three Mile Island was scary, but perhaps overblown” without repeating condescendingly that nobody actually died? If so, Stone doesn’t know it. Is there a way to say, “Chernobyl was more a human error than a nuclear power error” without repeating with an implied sneer that no matter how many casualties it caused, it wasn’t as bad as you think it was? Dunno. Stone can’t resist the desire to both-sides his blaming for the political fight against nuclear power in the first place — conservatives are in the pocket of fossil fuel companies and liberals are easily scared hippies — nor to tear solar power and wind power to shreds, just for fun. Honestly, I have no objections to implications that low levels of nuclear radiation never hurt anybody and we should all be noshing on uranium rods like candy canes, but that’s the sort of suggestion — I made up the candy cane part — better delivered by a talking head with a medical degree than in affectless voiceover.

Actually, Stone’s voiceover isn’t affectless. It has the zealotry of a new convert, delivered with the same “I just had this explained to me in a meme!” combination of under-documentation and certainty you would expect from somebody arguing the long-term value of an ape NFT — not somebody telling you that if we don’t reduce emissions entirely by 2050 everybody will die.

In maybe the final 20 minutes, Nuclear finds a purpose. Stone talks to a number of intrepid American scientists and innovators who are trying to make inroads with SMRs — small modular reactors — and other evolutions of the technology. This is finally where Stone stops talking and starts listening, trying to illustrate the merits of what he’s being told. These pioneers are young, thoughtful and in desperate need of support from an energy community that needs its mind opened. Even if this segment of the documentary is a 20-minute commercial for both some small enterprises and some of the largest companies in the world, it feels worthy.

My instinct is that this closing section should be the film — 10-minute introduction and context, followed by 90 minutes of arguments looking to the future. My problem with Nuclear is less that it’s propaganda and more that it should have been better propaganda.

Legislature approves plan to give Diablo Canyon another five years. //

The heatwave itself is expected to be unusual in three ways: It's expected to last about a week, cover most of the West Coast and extend substantially inland to interior states, and it's coming in September, when temperatures usually start to moderate.

It's also coinciding with a 15 day watering ban in the LA area:
https://www.latimes.com/california/stor ... l-a-county

If there's also an earthquake and a forest fire I think they get a tsunami for free.

Resistance to nuclear power is starting to ebb around the world with support from a surprising group: environmentalists.

2020 Democratic Presidential candidate Andrew Yang voiced support of Advanced Nuclear, specifically for development of Thorium Molten-Salt Reactors.

Andrew Yang and Cory Booker's statements regarding regarding nuclear power remain true, and are still worth considering.

Now would be a great time for Senator Bernie Sanders to acknowledge that closing Vermont Yankee nuclear plant increased emissions.

Most people are unaware Nuclear Power is low-carbon... even lower than solar power. Nuclear power is incredibly low-carbon. Nuclear power is America's single largest source of low-carbon electricity. It is not even close.

In 2020, misleading "fact-checks" were created by some strongly anti-nuclear organizations. Because any candidate taking a pro-nuclear stance can expect to receive failling grades on the environment from anti-nuclear organizations such as Greanpeace, it is worth inspecting what a 2020 "fact-check" looked like, when it comes to Thorium Molten-Salt Reactors.

One of my friends participated in a nuclear air burst test in Nevada. He was flying an instrumented T-33 jet at about 40,000 feet, some miles away. He wrote: “I was flying the plane … I had put a patch over my left eye and was to be looking down, with my head down, into the cockpit. I can remember that I was holding my breath as I heard 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1! Then, everything went white. I mean it was so bright that you could not see the floor of the plane. Then a very odd thing happened, I could actually see through the floor of the cockpit and see the ground below us! Yes, I could see the ground THROUGH the floor of the plane. I could see a bright light even in the eye over which I had put the patch. I find it hard to describe the brightness of the bomb blast. It was not like anything I had ever seen. It was much like how I had envisioned the brightness one would experience if in the presence of God.” //

He told me that during debriefing he reported being able to see through the floor of the airplane. They told him that several other people had reported the same phenomena.’

Gordon concludes;

‘I think this may be related to the “Livermore Light” that has been reported — but only in a few cases, because not many people have been looking anywhere near the fireball. In the book, “You must be joking, Mr. Fineman”, he was at a nuclear test in the Pacific. He had misplaced his dark glasses, so he just looked away from the blast – at all the other people who were wearing the very dark glasses. He said he could see them as skeletons, with the bones showing. I think there is a lot more to the Livermore Light than we know now….’

While the exact set of phenomena that unfold to release energy remains unclear, what was not debated at all was whether the potential to release heat was real. It clearly is, despite the extended difficulty scientists have had pinning down theory and practice. This issue seems entirely settled. Decades of work by hundreds of researchers reporting on their experiments and experiences of heat release “anomalies” have begun to provide a far more nuanced picture of the dynamics and the parametric guideposts that will eventually enable those studying them to narrow in on the controlling aspects. //

Given the potential value of this technology, it is no wonder that dozens of cash-strapped researchers and venture teams have soldiered on for decades. Now that ARPA-e has chosen to continue the work initiated by Google to identify a proof-of-concept design, there is new-found scientific integrity and rebranding to be done. There is also a greater awareness that what set cold fusion back and derailed early efforts was not scientific fraud but rather its far more complex sub-atomic transmutations, its multibody interactions combined with environmental factors such as temperature, pressure and light that varied by selection of component materials. These complexities still need to be sorted out but could potentially provide many viable options for sourcing and construction of systems and thus help to reduce manufacturing costs.

Uranium and thorium are two of nature’s most incredible clean energy storage assets. If completely fissioned, a handful of nuclear fuel weighing a kilogram contains more stored energy than 50 large tanker trucks filled with petroleum.

At the current diesel fuel price of $5.60 per gallon, 50 trucks can carry more than $3,000,000 worth of fuel. In contrast, nuclear power plant owners pay approximately $1,700 per kilogram of fuel in the form of finished assemblies.

The tiny waste production per unit energy released is an inherent aspect of concentrated fission reactions. Unlike combustion, all ingredients needed for fission are contained inside fission fuels. (Combustion needs an external source of oxygen in greater masses than the fuel itself.) The mass of fission wastes is slightly less than the mass of fission fuel; the mass of combustion wastes are about 2.5 times the mass of input fuel.

No fission product wastes need to be routinely removed to allow the reaction to continue operating for its design fuel cycle. None need to be discharged to the environment. Fission reactors are clean enough, safe enough and independent enough to operate inside sealed submarines carrying crews of several dozen people. Those submarines have gone to every part of every ocean on the planet.

Fission even works in the vacuum of deep space.

Those physical and economic facts almost beg power plant designers to think about building a wide variety of machines in order to use that amazing source of energy in as many parts of the diverse global energy markets as possible. Power systems using combustion fuels range in size from model trains to multi GWe power stations. Fission-based power systems need sufficient size to support a chain reaction, and to provide adequate shielding, but that still leaves a wide spectrum of potential applications and sizes. //

Larger units can successfully use the economy of scale to lower the cost per unit of output but it isn’t the only kind of scale that can drive down costs. Ever larger units can also run into diseconomies of scale that plague mega-projects in construction, mass transit, sports complexes, and airports.

The experience of the industry in building the Vogtle AP1000s shows that there is such a thing as too large. In contrast, the economies of scale that we believe will aid in the appeal of SMRs takes the form of mass production and is expected to enable the construction of SMRs to more closely follow the declining cost curves experienced by wind and solar projects.

One advantage of smaller systems is the improved ability to use factory manufacturing techniques. Of course, the components used in conventional large reactors are produced in factories, but then they are individually shipped to the site to be assembled into an operating plant. With reactors that have the size and complexity closer to that of large ships or commercial aircraft, it is possible to assemble and transport complete or nearly complete products.

Factory workforces have many advantages over site construction workforces. They can improve productivity by repeating similar tasks regularly, They can live and work in cities served by mass transit. They can implement quality assurance techniques and environmental consistence systems that are difficult to achieve at remote large plant assembly sites. //

…for a sodium-cooled reactor, for instance, that sodium coolant is likely to become low-level waste at the end of the reactor’s lifetime, because it becomes contaminated and activated during reactor operation. So, the “up to 30 times more waste” that’s been driving the headlines, it’s mostly the sodium coolant.

Diaz-Maurin,François Interview: Small modular reactors get a reality check about their waste, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Jun 17, 2022 //

NuScale will get the final approval nearly six years after starting the process.

On Friday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) announced that it would be issuing a certification to a new nuclear reactor design, making it just the seventh that has been approved for use in the US. But in some ways, it's a first: the design, from a company called NuScale, is a small modular reactor that can be constructed at a central facility and then moved to the site where it will be operated.

The move was expected after the design received an okay during its final safety evaluation in 2020. //

Small modular reactors have been promoted as avoiding many of the problems that have made large nuclear plants exceedingly expensive to build. They're small enough that they can be assembled on a factory floor and then shipped to the site where they will operate, eliminating many of the challenges of custom, on-site construction. In addition, they're structured in a way to allow passive safety, where no operator actions are necessary to shut the reactor down if problems occur. //

The NRC will still have to weigh in on the sites where any of these reactors are deployed. Currently, one such site is in the works: a project called the Carbon Free Power Project, which will be situated at Idaho National Lab. That's expected to be operational in 2030 but has been facing some financial uncertainty. Utilities that might use the power produced there have grown hesitant to commit money to the project. //

C.M. AllenArs Tribunus Militumreply2 days agoReader Favreportignore user
Wheels Of Confusion wrote:

Would have been even better 20 years ago. But then again, so would EVERY non-fossil fuel-based power source being rolled out at scale. We're just so late on everything, and most of the blame lies with politicians allergic to governing and rich, subsidized industry allergic to changing.

If it can bring the cost of nuclear power down by an order of magnitude and reduce the lagtime between facility approval and initial production, it might have a legitimate place in the effort to eliminate CO2 pollution. A nuclear plant coming online start producing electricity in a couple years, while still scaling up to its full production levels as more reactors get built, also gives it a serious edge against other nuclear technologies in addition to fossil fuel plants, which are more or less 'all or nothing' projects //

raxx7Ars Legatus Legioniset Subscriptorreply2 days agoReader Favreportignore user
itfa wrote:

Initial estimates have it within a few percentage points of natural gas in price per megawatt, both from the manufacturer and the operator of the first project these are supposed to go into.
Personally, I think this type of design has a far better chance of being on budget than traditional nuclear construction.
MegalodonArs Legatus Legioniset Subscriptorreply2 days agoReader Favreportignore user
quamquam quid loquor wrote:
SMNRs are a fundamentally flawed technology. They don't benefit from efficiencies of scale and can't benefit from manufacturing economies of scale, because an SMNR is still more expensive than natural gas.

I don't follow this argument. Economies of scale come from regularizing construction by doing more in the factory rather than on-site, and from shrinking the size of a unit of generation until you're building enough of them to get good at it. We can see this from the fact that nobody builds gigawatt natural gas turbines, they build them to a smaller size and when they want a gigawatt they order a larger number of them. But as far as nuclear reactors are concerned, a gigawatt is about the smallest you can get. That seems like the wrong way to get good economics.

You need to build about 12 of the NuScale reactor to get a gigawatt, and it seems to me you're going to be a lot better at building them by the 12th unit than you will be with the 3rd or 4th larger reactor. But an entire country would be lucky to build 4 full size reactors reactors per decade so nobody gets good at it. //

ORcoderSmack-Fu Master, in traininget Subscriptorreply2 days agoreportignore user
ZenBeam wrote:
Here's hoping this pans out, and gives us one more low-carbon power source knob to turn, to use to replace higher carbon sources.

Do these have any capability to vary their power generation, trading lower output for a longer lifetime? If so, how much can they vary it?

They probably won’t be great at it- likely can bypass the turbines to load follow as necessary (like many current nuclear plants can), but it won’t help fuel life. Even if they load follow by lowering the power of the reactor, which is possible but slower, thanks to fuel damage it also probably won’t save much uranium.

Designs that will be better at this are Natrium, which incorporates thermal storage for load following, and molten salt reactors, which don’t have to worry about fuel damage.

Per megawatt (power) or per megawatt·hour?

The first would be pure fantasy.
There's no way the cost per MW of a pure steam cycle plant can get within a factor 3 of a combined cycle gas turbine plant no matter what heat source we use to boil the water.

The second I'm willing to hold my judgement. //

The European Union voted on Wednesday to keep some specific uses of natural gas and nuclear energy in its taxonomy of sustainable sources of energy.

Europe’s taxonomy is its classification system for defining “environmentally sustainable economic activities” for investors, policymakers and companies. This official opinion of the EU matters because it affects funding for projects as the region charts its path to address climate change. In theory, the taxonomy “aims to boost green investments and prevent ‘greenwashing,’” according to the EU’s parliament.

The vote on natural gas and nuclear energy follows one that was passed in February, which amounted to a referendum on what had been a particularly controversial piece of the ruling. Natural gas emits 58.5% as much carbon dioxide as coal, according to the U.S. Energy Information Association. Nuclear power does not generate any emissions, though it draws criticism surrounding the problem of storing radioactive waste. //

The U.K., Poland, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands have all announced plans to build new reactors, adding to Europe’s decades-old reactor fleet. France, which already generates 70% of its electricity from nuclear power plants, is beginning to train thousands of workers in the rigorous requirements of nuclear engineering and construction as part of a plan to build up to 14 new full-size reactors and other smaller ones. //

The International Energy Agency says it expects global nuclear power capacity will have to double by 2050 for the world to reach so-called net zero, in which greenhouse gas emissions are so low that they can be completely offset by forests and other natural means of absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.