US regulators set the stage for small, local nuclear power stations The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission is set to approve the country's first ever small modular reactor (SMR) design, setting up a potential expansion of small-scale nuclear power stations across the country. The certification [PDF] was given to NuScale for its SMRs: 76-foot tall, 15-foot wide (23m x 4.6m) pressurized-water …
Plus, doesn't "more radioactive" equate to "is radioactive and dangerous for much less time"? IANANRE but that's my understanding - that generally, you can have waste that has a long half-life and is slightly radioactive for long, long periods, or you can have waste that has a short half-life and is very radioactive, but for a manageable length of time.
I think it's a case of yes but.....
You can also have stuff which is radioactive enough that all sorts of regulations apply and you have to store it but is long enough half-life that it realistically never gets any less radioactive.
The big problem is when this contaminates something big and inconveniently bulky to store. Dealing with hot short half-life fuel rods is in some ways a lot less of a problem than tonnes of concrete that is low level but has to be stored somewhere.
"more radioactive" is a vague term. It might simply mean that you have more of it - 2 tons as opposed to 1 ton. It might also mean, as you suggest, a short half-life. It could even mean higher energy or a more damaging form of radiation.
"More reactive" in the article is also vague. In what way? Does it mean a radioactive isotope that's chemically reactive or just something that's not radioactive but chemically aggressive? And why can't something that's "reactive" be neutralised by virtue of its reactivity; HF, for instance is very reactive but react it with Ca(OH)2 and you get calcium fluorite which isn't.
The stuff in the media is that wee nuclear produces thirty five times more waste per kilowatt.
That is not coming from anti-nukes like me, how would we know or even care, that must be big-nuke on wee-nuke propaganda.
Do you realise how cheap and quick wind and solar is now? The nuke cartels are no longer opponents. The oil cartels have just shot their load.
Please do come back when you have a risk free, cheap fission.
The stuff in the media is that wee nuclear produces thirty five times more waste per kilowatt
But again, is that 35x more waste by volume or by weight? Is it because it irradiates more of the parts so that you have stuff like a radioactive reactor vessel or is that 35x all spent fuel? Would any of that waste be useful for another purpose (other than making more bombs)
How long before that waste falls below standards for "nuclear waste"? If it is 35x more waste but almost all of it (i.e. if it is vessels and pipework) will stop being a problem in 20 years, then you can just store it on site and wait for it to no longer be a problem. On the other hand, if it is 35x more waste and it is also more radioactive than waste from a regular reactor, then it is a very serious issue.
There is a lot more to know to judge how much of an issue this really is than the deliberately scary "35x more waste" figure being trumpeted by those who simply want to kill the nuclear power industry.
If only there was a nuclear waste reprocessing facility somewhere still in operation.
Do you realise how cheap and quick wind and solar is now?
From a quick glance at my electricity bill and it's rate of increase over the last decade, nope. But this is typical of post-normal politics. Cognitive dissonance is the new norm, and cheap means 10x as expensive. We can reduce our dependency on all those evil fossil fuels, except for when it's dark and the wind isn't blowing.
The oil cartels have just shot their load.
Of champagne? Energy companies have been busily announcing record profits on the back of ecofreak's attempts to decarbonise our economies. Got wind? You're going to need gas..
Someday, our useless politicians may notice the correlation between the entities demanding 'green' energy, and those entities who're profiting from that lobbying. See also Octopus, and their generous offer to buy imPure using tax payers money!
My electric bill has stayed pretty much the same both in total and per kwh in the past decade, or at least within 1 or 2 cents of its nominal 9 cents/kwh range, so YMMV. Where I live a huge portion of the power is wind based, and almost all the rest is natural gas, which has replaced the remaining coal plants over the past 20 years.
My utility is smart about locking in long term price contracts so the recent surge in natural gas prices hasn't affected my bill (at least not yet, if the war drags into the winter I imagine it will eventually even here in the middle of the US) We didn't get the benefit of very low natural gas prices early in the pandemic but I'll trade in short term drops in price in exchange for avoiding short term spikes.
There is one nuclear plant, which is past the end of its expected life so they are planning on decommissioning it soon and putting up solar panels there (since it isn't as though they can tear it down and put in a park or build houses there I guess)
Where I live a huge portion of the power is wind based, and almost all the rest is natural gas, which has replaced the remaining coal plants over the past 20 years.
That's cause and effect. If you sup the kool aid, and build windmills, you also have to invest in gas to keep the lights on. If you're in a popular data centre destination like say, Virginia, you could keep running on coal instead. It's not really any suprise that power-hungry industries like the 'cloud' favor coal states where they can get cheap, reliable power. Even NOAA's latest supercomputer did that. Just buy some green indulgences, and you can pacify the EGS mob that don't look too closely.
But you're right about purchasing contracts. UK price gouging is mostly based on the spot prices, and not any actual forward contracts that may or may not exist. The differential though allows for the massive profits that are being reported, while the customers are screwed to the floor.
We've got large datacenters from Microsoft and Facebook in my state, and Google and Amazon are considering projects. They specifically cited the amount of wind generation as the reason they put them here.
You do realize that states have interconnected grids so on a day when the wind isn't blowing as much power can be imported from another state, right? My state doesn't have to spin up extra generation capacity for that. Likewise when the wind is blowing hard they don't need to shut down the gas turbines, the power will be exported to other states that need it. Within a few years over half my state's electrical capacity will be from wind, but electricity is fungible so they could go over 100% if they wanted and it would still work fine. You build that where the wind is blowing, you build hydro where the water flows, you build solar where the sun shines.
I just saw an article today where a $10 billion project to expand the grid in the midwest, and they showed where the new power lines will be running thoughout an 8 or 9 state area including mine.
We've got large datacenters from Microsoft and Facebook in my state, and Google and Amazon are considering projects. They specifically cited the amount of wind generation as the reason they put them here.
Which state? I have no plans to stalk you, I'm just genuinely curious and want to do some digging into how your state is actually powered.
But we're IT types. If you're building an energy intensive facility like a datacentre, you want cheap, reliable power given that's going to be one of your major opex items. You also have lobbyists who've created 'EGS' regulations, so you need to apply a bit of greenwash. Meanwhile, there's reality-
https://gridwatch.co.uk/Wind
minimum: 0.236 GW maximum: 12.751 GW average: 4.659 GW
Ok, so 'cloud' computing is 'elastic', so a variable load.. which could be problematic in itself for reliable power. But suppose your state has a demand of 10GW. Sure, you could add more wind, but you'd still have those periods where wind supply is <1GW. What then? You could couple supply and demand, so as wind speeds drop, the datacentres load shed and shut down servers, Which would be a tad inconvenient. Or you 'invest' in 10GW of CCGT to deal with lulls in wind speeds. Oh, and of course there's solar, but sunrise/sunset times are generally more predictable*
Obviously this is going to increase your costs because with a fundamentally unreliable and iintermittent primary generating source, you're going to need pretty much an equivalent amount of stand-by capacity. And energy from stand-by is going to be a lot more expensive because it's only being used intermittently. And ironically, gas is/was far cheaper than windmills.
Any engineer should know this, so announcing you're going to open massive datacentres in wind-powered states makes absolutely no engineering sense. But of course it doesn't really have to because locations for projects like that are often based on which state offers the biggest incentives to move there. And of course like London or Virginia, having large energy users is going to impact every energy user in that location. So if it's going to cost $10bn to upgrade the grid to support that datacentre, it's fine, just add it to all the population's energy bills. First law of capitalism, privatise profits, socialise costs.
You do realize that states have interconnected grids so on a day when the wind isn't blowing as much power can be imported from another state, right?
Sure. It's always windy somewhere in the world. So during the heat wave, for the UK that was Belgium. Blocking high, record temperatures, no wind, no power. So the UK spent over £9k per MWh to import power from Belgium to stop our grid collapsing. France had been a traditional exporter, but France has problems with it's nuclear fleet, which means problems for any state that previously relied on imports.
Plus there's the good'ol energy security chestnut. Biden closing KeystoneXL or Germany banning NordStream2 clearly demonstrated the problems with relying on politicians for energy. After those decisions, energy prices in the EU and US started to rocket. So our useless shower of shite blames Russia for using energy as a weapon, and restricting supplies through NordStream 1. Crazy idea. Turn on the other pipe..
I think it also demonstrates why natural monopolies need proper regulation to avoid price gouging. US has high oil & gas prices because it's a lot more profitable to export to the EU. That may be bad for US businesses and consumers, but extremely profitable for US gas producers and wholesalers. But wholesale reforms in the energy markets will be fiercely resisted. The UK's being warned we're facing more massive price increases because we're allowing gas to be exported to the EU rather than reducing UK inflation. HMG of course profits because oil & gas are massively taxed.
So it's strange that we're told our electricity bills are going to double again because of a notional spot-market rate for a 'global' commodity that doesn't really have a global market. UK produces oil and gas, but the market is really whoever's on the end of a pipeline, or has an LNG terminal. UK electricty costs could easily be reduced by breaking that meme. HMG should know how much it costs to produce oil & gas, it knows production levels, it could use a price cap to protect the UK market.. But obviously that might upset the donors.
Or, given the EU's threatening legal action over it's interference in UK sovereignty around Northern Ireland, the UK could simply reduce gas supplies to the EU.
*I saw a curious article that apparently the Earth's rotation has increased. Must be from all the spin coming out of our politicians. So our days are slightly shorter, which means there'll be less solar energy. Kinda weird though, especially given conflicts between solar time, and atomic time.
> *I saw a curious article that apparently the Earth's rotation has increased. Must be from all the spin
> coming out of our politicians. So our days are slightly shorter, which means there'll be less solar energy.
That's not how it works. If the earth spin increases we increase the frequency of days, but the proportion of day to night remains constant [*]
[*] Unless the Earth is speeding up and slowing during the day cycle [**]
[**] but that would only affect which part of the surface gets the light, not how much the Earth gets.
"You do realize that states have interconnected grids so on a day when the wind isn't blowing as much power can be imported from another state, right?"
Not always. I was just reading an article that was saying the issue wasn't with generation in a particular area, but interconnects being maxed out. The price per mile of transmission lines isn't cheap and it requires a whole bunch of environmental assessments and lawsuits to get done. The area is a hot spot for data centers and they can't put anymore in. I have no idea why all of these data centers have any need to all be in the same place to start with. The owners and sort of data they handled were pretty diverse.
The governments of these states were falling all over each other to win the right to lose money hosting those data centers. As chronicled in this fine publication in good detail at the time. They are in coal states because money talks and corruption is cheaper there, not out a love of coal. Their main sites were linked to hydropower like oregon for years, when they were operating on their own costs.
Instead the coal states sold their citizens on a lie where high paying jobs would rain from the sky if they lured tech giants to the south like they did the auto industry. Once the bribes and tax breaks ran out they were left with a few hundred people wandering around in dark buildings, and the auto plants started pulling stakes for Mexico. A migration that was slowed by political instability south of the border, not the local governments.
Wind and solar are great, cheap and not going anywhere, but as you do seem to grasp, can't make up a stable electrical grid by themselves. Coal is literally the worst of the widely deployed power sources, but we may need to give it a few more years to ease the pressure of the self inflicted supply issues from Russia for a bit. A final generation of nuclear plants might get us past all that, as well as retire the existing pre 80's era nightmares they keep giving 40 year extensions to.
Wind and solar are great, cheap and not going anywhere, but as you do seem to grasp, can't make up a stable electrical grid by themselves.
They're not great, and they're certainly not cheap. Hence our ever increasing energy costs. Here's a reason why-
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2022/08/03/national-grid-reveals-54bn-wind-power-network-upgrade-plan/
National Grid ESO, which runs the electricity network, said the plan it has laid out would enable the government to deliver 50GW of offshore wind power by 2030 – a third of the UK’s electricity demand..
It claimed the network could lead to more than £50bn of investments over the next eight years.
Quoting an article from the 'renewables' lobby's PR firm. So £54bn to enable part-time power generation and profits for National Grid ESO. Alternatively, we don't bother building any more off-shore bird & fish killers, and don't waste £54bn.
But it's not going to be NG Plc paying for this, or the windmill spinners, it'll be added to our bills. Which is also where SMRs have substantial cost advantages, namely no need to spend £54bn connecting power generation to demand centres.
But such is politics. If you own the grid, the ESO, and a gas distribution business, 'renewables' have been great for making money. Enough for the ex-CEGB to pay cash for utilities in the US and elsewhere!
Coal is literally the worst of the widely deployed power sources,
Why? It's cheap, it's reliable, and it's why we gave up on windmills the first time around a couple of hundred years ago.
"They're not great, and they're certainly not cheap. Hence our ever increasing energy costs."
Where do you go once you've banned the coal and nuclear power plants? That includes heaping on so many regulations and restrictions that they are effectively banned. Geothermal requires certain geography to be cost effective. Drilling tens of km to have enough delta T in some areas it too expensive up front. Just about every river that can can accommodate a dam has got them already. Dams aren't exactly ecologically benign and many groups are lobbying to have many removed.
So far, there doesn't seem to be a cheap and easy drop in replacement for coal/nuclear while still trying to support the same usage. Processes that are the most energy dependent may wind up being only viable in regions that can supply steady and large amounts of power. Cycling a refinery on and off isn't a good idea. Processing and refining metals is also something that would be hard to stop and start. Producing ammonia might be something that can tolerate intermittent production if it isn't entirely banned. It's a big user of electricity. More than many people might realize.
Where I live a huge portion of the power is wind based
Where I live, we're at 100% daytime solar on average. But that's because we have low population density, not a lot of manufacturing, a lot of sunlight and a lot of space for PV farms, and the sunlight is predictable – rain almost always comes in the late afternoon, which makes planning for the battery installations and switchover easier.
I don't expect that to work everywhere.
There are places where solar works well for supplying a lot of the domestic power requirements. There are places where wind works well. It's conceivable that we could build really big solar-thermal plants in desert areas and ship power around using HVDC, or even reform carbon-rich waste into hydrocarbons (propane would be my choice – good existing infrastructure and easy to convert some ICEs to run on it – but whatever).
But today renewables aren't a drop-in replacement for other sources. If we want to cut down on fossil fuel consumption for electricity generation, I don't see how we'll do it without nuclear, at least in the short term.
It's conceivable that we could build really big solar-thermal plants in desert areas and ship power around using HVDC,
But long-distance HVDC cables are hugely expensive, especially the wet sections. But this idea has been proposed before, eg DeserTec. They suggested using Libya, but then we kinda did the regime change thing there. So now it's a good(?!) place to buy slaves, less so critical energy. Which is also a problem with some of it's neighbours. Our fault for dabbling in N.African politics. Again.
Plus the idea is national energy security, which could also be a UK problem. So Scotland goes all Indie, and dreams of exporting power to those hated English.. Except Scotland would be pretty much entirely dependent on it's windmills, and would need to import when the wind isn't blowing.. Which would be rather bad for Scots when there's a typical winter blocking high. Long periods of freezing weather = dead Scots.
Plus if you look at how much it cost to run relatively short HVDC cables along the UK's coastline (ie many billions), you'll get an idea of the economic challenges... Or Siemen's profit margins.
And of course practically, the UK would be at the end of any desert powerline, so would face paying high transit fees to cross the EU's borders. And it'd also be a problem for Ireland given they're pretty isolated.
or even reform carbon-rich waste into hydrocarbons (propane would be my choice – good existing infrastructure and easy to convert some ICEs to run on it – but whatever).
That's potentially a sensible thing to do, if anyone can ever get CCS (Carbon Capture & Storage) working economically. Then use Fischer-Tropsch and/or Sabatier reactions to make synfuels. But that's expensive, and needs a lot of energy.. But one of those fun things. If we have cheap, surplus energy, we don't really have to worry about 'peak oil'.. Except all the other products we depend on that get produced from a barrel of crude.
"we could build really big solar-thermal plants in desert areas"
That's been done at scale and it looks like it doesn't do very well. The big system on the California/Nevada border is offline and never met its promises. It did have the bad side effect of attracting and incinerating birds as the mirrors look much like a body of water from an angle. Other systems have faired pretty much the same.
> From a quick glance at my electricity bill and it's rate of increase over the last decade,
> nope. But this is typical of post-normal politics. Cognitive dissonance is the new norm,
> and cheap means 10x as expensive.
YMMV but in the UK there's a lot of financial engineering between the cost of wind generation and what you see on a consumer bill.
Early wind generation had contracts which tied the price they sold to the grid to the price being paid for conventional generation. So if the price of gas goes up, so does the price of wind.
The cost of manufacturing, installing and maintaining wind turbines has dropped significantly. Upcoming offshore wind projects have been agreed at prices that were below gas production (before the recent massive price hikes) - https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-record-low-uk-offshore-wind-cheaper-than-existing-gas-plants-by-2023/ - As more of these projects come on the average price of wind will drop.
It also makes a big regulatory difference.
If you burn radioactive material and pump it out of a smokestack then nobody cares, except in certain states where you get a subsidy.
if you leak a single radioactive particle from a nuclear power station you never hear the end of it.
Fairly upvoted as it appears you meant that burning it doesn't make it SAFE.
It does actually make quite a bit of difference, as burnt radioactive material is actually really bad news, as compared to say a solid fuel rod that can be re-manufactured or big chunks of stainless steel that don't release fumes or turn to dust very quickly. The radioactive heavies from coal get spread far and wide, though to be fair, burnt fuel Rods are REALLY REALLY bad.
So in most cases burning radioactive material is worse.
I would suspect that Yet Another Anonymous coward might have been referring to coal burning. Coal - as most everything else that comse out of the earth - is not pure, and thus it alwsays contains some radioactive nuclei. The ash resulted from burning that coal can also be radioactive, see e.g.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
or
https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html
"The stuff in the media is that wee nuclear produces thirty five times more waste per kilowatt."
35 time more waste what?
The "what" matters. What are the characteristics: type of radiation, energy, half life, chemistry? Is this 35 times more bulk with traces of radioactivity or 35 time more radionuclides? Are we dealing wih elements that are easily immobilised or elements whose chemistry leads them to be leached out of whatever you might try to trap them in.
It's OMG 35 TIMES MORE RADIOACTIVE! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE! Makes for a great scare.
Wonder why they're not going with a breeder reactor, which reprocesses spent fuel into new fuel, and eventually converts 99 percent of the fissile material into electricity instead of 1 percent like the reactors to date. There's no reason they can't keep a few reactors going to generate nuke bomb material, or radioactive medical materials, but still generate the bulk of our energy with breeders.
For those supporting greenwashed power like wind and solar, remember all those panels that have been sold over the years? They are now reaching the end of life and as they are worn out, must be replaced. Only 80 percent recyclable. And all those windmills? The blades aren't recyclable at all, and being made of fiberglass must go straight to landfill. And yes, they do wear out. There's aot of flex stress on the blades, and bird strikes at 100+MPH cause damage. These two forms of generation may not make much pollution during actual use, but generate tons before and after especially when you consider that only over the last few years have solar panels reached a point where they make more power over their lifespan than it takes to make them to begin with.
Nuclear costs £92.50 per megawatt hour and was therefore decried as being a dreadful and unaffordable deal by the green critics. (eg https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c-dreadful-deal-behind-worlds-most-expensive-power-plant)
Do you realise how cheap and quick wind and solar is now? The nuke cartels are no longer opponents. The oil cartels have just shot their load.
Yes. We are currently paying 214.46p per MWh, which people with a keen sense of detail will notice is well over double the dreadful and unaffordable cost of nuclear power, precisely because of wind and solar don't actually producing anything like their supposed rated outputs even in the hottest (and brightest and therefore the most favourable conditions for Solar) summer we've had for decades.
By the end of July 2022, the UK had 11,104 wind turbines with a total installed capacity of over 24.6 gigawatts. The actual delivered output over the last week has been under a fifth of that, gusting to around a third of that output today. The shortfall between what green schemes are supposed to produce and what they actually produce is made up by gas turbines, and the faith that Wind and Solar would actually deliver the rated output (which has never been achieved) let to a decision to run down North Sea gas fields and import our gas from abroad since "obviously" we wouldn't need much gas.
The current electricity prices are entirely attributable to the green crowd pushing for solutions that cannot work, while sabotaging any solutions that do work and so reducing electricity supply as old power plants are closed. To make matters worse, you then demand additional electricity (for electric cooking, electric heating, electric vehicles) while still sabotaging any new generating capacity from being built. Demand rising above supply results in the price increasing which is why it's so bloody expensive.
Now you can try and deflect from your myopic incompetence all you want by screaming "biG oil11!!11!!" but this is a situation you campaigned for and sold to the public as deliverable. It wasn't, and isn't. You ignored concerns raised from people like me about sales brochures never bearing any resemblance to reality, about concerns about energy security and people concerned at importing everything were derided as being old fashioned dinosaurs that didn't understand the brotherhood of goodwill that exists between people in other nations who would never weaponize food or energy supplies against us.
My view is that you now own the consequences of our fears becoming a reality, having not taken any steps to safeguard against that possibility which before the lunatics took over the asylum used to be a basic required competence in statecraft and politics. These consequences are going to include severe and extreme economic damage as people stop spending money on anything other than subsistence which is going to cripple most companies and therefore economies as people stop spending and inevitably people who can't afford subsistence (especially the elderly) are going to freeze to death as a result of policies that you campaigned for.
Now you could actually do the grown up thing and rapidly pivot to some workable solutions while there is still time, or you could try and deflect blame and continue with unworkable solutions until the current situation looks like "the good old days" we fondly wish we could return to.
B- must try harder.
The "rated output" is *never* what has been suggested to be the output of wind/solar plants.
It's always been the peak, and the load factor is very well known in advance of construction, though it varies by location and generation technology.
Energy storage has always been a challenge, and until recently we have generally used the renewables to reduce the usage of fossil fuel plants when we can. We are on the brink of the capacity to implement true distributed grid scale storage - BEVs, and home/workplace chargers, need to be mandated to support V2G.
Micro nuclear plants are, imho, an excellent component in the diversification of energy supply, both in terms of materials and in terms of supply points. If we put two of these at each motorway services (chosen because there are ~100 of them, they are generally a little way outside populated areas, and they have very good grid connections with the capacity to expand) - then we could be replacing one unit each week (that assumes a 4 year life, scale as appropriate) and have 100MW (plus some local heating) available at each services (excellent for all those EV fast chargers), with a grid connection capable of handling surplus output onto the grid... that's 10GW of distributed production - dropping 50MW for a couple of days each week as each unit is swapped out.
That's ~third of our current demand (bit more in summer, bit less in winter), and way more than the estimated electricity requirements for the entire UK car fleet to switch to BEV.
Combine a distributed solid baseload with a distributed grid scale storage and we are alot closer to being able to turn off the fossil fuels entirely.
It's a shame that new builds aren't required to be well insulated, or to have PV installed (cheaper at build, because the PV can be the roof), or to use heat pumps, or...
Because all of those things should be the bare minimum for new buildings.
well having actually studied "nukular" physics and operated a "nukular" reactor (on a sub) I probably have a *bit* of insight into the whole 'operation' thing and 'waste' thing and small vs large reactors, etc. etc. etc..
Small reactors require higher fuel enrichment, have higher neutron flux, and burn less percent of the fuel load before it has to be changed out. This means that there is more uranium in the waste, and operating radiation levels surrounding the reactor vessel are higher (particularly neutrons). That pretty much summarizes it.
But I do not get why 'they' apparently say "35 times as much" which sounds like a load of UNSCIENTIFIC B.S. to me. Higher amounts, yes (this also means it needs reprocessing to get the U235 out so it can go into another reactor). But the fission products themselves would have about the same yield as far as radioactive isotopes go - it's a physics thing. "Mae West Curve".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission_product_yield (it was called the 'Mae West Curve' due to its overall shape, originating during WW2 and the Manhattan Project)
That being said, small reactors tend to have negative temperature coefficients which is why they are used on ships (other than power requirements overall). LARGE reactors tend to have posiitive temperature coefficients. This makes them less stable (though still controllable) so they keep power levels at maximum all of the time, and control it using borates in the water (they absorb neutrons). The smaller reactors, however, respond well to rapid changes in demand (so it works really well for a ship) and the negative temperature coefficient is inherently stable. They tend to maintain temperature on their own even as power changes, without a lot of 'fiddling'.
Therefore you could theoretically use a small reactor as a 'peaker plant' to handle variable demand.
To me, this sounds EXTREMELY useful. Down side, LESS efficient than a large one (to operate, maintain, fuel, and so on). A small reactor would require nearly as many people to operate as a big one, for example, but only make 1/10 of the electricity (let's say) and require all of the same administrative regulatory compliance and so on. So it would have to be made PROFITABLE.
In any case there's already FUD (the "35 times" rectally extrapolated value with no clear source as to where it came from) getting in the way.
I seriously hope these business ventures succeed and ARE profitable. But unfortunately there are too many who operate by FEAR instead of by SCIENCE when it comes to nuclear power plants. And the usual roadblocks and red tape are the direct result.
How many people does it take to look after a small (ship sized) reactor?
My instinct tells me that they aren't exactly designed for lots of servicing to be done at sea - i.e. they're not exactly black boxes, but they shouldn't need a huge staff.
Real world experience... we can't be having any of that here, only unfounded opinions and things we heard on FaecesTwit.
On a more serious note.
How many people does it take to look after a small (ship sized) reactor?
My instinct tells me that they aren't exactly designed for lots of servicing to be done at sea - i.e. they're not exactly black boxes, but they shouldn't need a huge staff.
And the concentration of materials matters as well. So it may well be true in net, you have to actually crunch the numbers to see the projected impacts. Due to the small number of plants, the total volume of waste isn't the problem, we have literal hills of coal ash piling up, some of which are leaching acidic and toxic materials up to and including mercury.
The issue is that we still cant agree to haul off the existing waste and decommissioned plant parts because we can't get long term storage sites approved. While I agree with some of the concerns about the Yucca mountain site, they should be resolved through design changes not decades of inaction. Instead we leave high level waste sitting in casks at street level in the middle of densely populated areas for decades, and ignore that the yucca mountain site, in the middle of nowhere, is right next to the rest of the Nevada test site. The leftovers of the US nuclear weapons program have made Jackass flat much worse than Yucca is going to be, and are a problem on similar time scales.
That said, I understand why people have trust issues with the atomic power industry. The decades of lies and shady behavior have a price. But since the mess isn't going away on it's own we are better off cleaning up the industry and making them clean up their mess, instead of meekly doing it for them.
Like submarine reactors they are not refuelled, but sealed for life, this makes the design much simpler.
AFAIK they could be de-fuelled, and I think the French naval reactors can be refuelled. But the cores aren't very large. Also if they're going to run off highly enriched fuel, there's potential to recycle and reprocess 'spent' naval fuel rods into rods for more conventional reactors. But fuel processing/reprocessing is kinda tricky, and the UK gave up on that idea.
Or one G.Brown esq flogged off Westinghouse and other UK interests to cripple any UK nuclear renaissance. His brother working for EDF had absolutely nothing to do with that decision I'm sure.
Shipping the End Of Life reactor to a disposal site, may not be as easy as it sounds. One of the many (largely specious IMO) concerns that sank the proposed Yucca Mountain disposal site in Nevada was that radioactive waste being shipped to the site might be released if there was an accident during transportation. That in a region where virtually no one lives and 100 atmospheric nuclear tests were conducted between 1952 and 1992.
Concerns about transportation may be specious. But that doesn't mean there won't be a constant drumbeat of doom and gloom if anyone tries to move that dead but genuinely at least a bit radioactive reactor.
So, if you can't move it, what do you do with it? Damned if I know.
I suspect that's the real plan behind these small reactors.
Small town gets reactor as a local source of non-polluting, green electricity. At end of life the regulations make it effectively impossible to move the reactor anywhere for disposal.
Small town now has a nuclear waste repository.
Central govt doesn't have to deal with a national disposal plan
Learn from our mistakes and don't let them build them till an independent and fully transparent agency has been set up and funded by the developers to pay for and oversee the decommissioning. Otherwise the business plan is to reap all the profits, transfer them to another business entity and then stick the tax payer with all the mess in bankruptcy court.
Clearly self regulation isn't an option here. The plants should either be fully government owned and operated or the money to pay for the cleanup needs to be out of the operators hands and where people can see it. Same for day to day plant operations.
Right, so let's hold the fossil fuel industry to the same standard... Oh, wait they're the ones suggesting that transport is difficult.
Even back in the early 1980s we were testing transport flasks by running trains into them at 100 miles an hour, and there was no loss in pressure at all.
In a sane world, most of it would be reprocessed for use in more reactors. The left over waste would be mixed with inert hardcore, until the combined bulk was close to the radiation level of the original ore from which the fuel was first refined, and then placed into a geologically stable location. Or perhaps dumped at the bottom of the Mariana trench.
A lot of the paranoia over nuclear waste comes from the belief that it needs to decay to ambient background levels to be truly safe, which takes tens of thousands of years. That's an unreasonable expectation, given there are numerous locations where highly radioactive mineral deposits can be found. Having it decay to close to its original radioactivity, in a location where it wouldn't be out of place with the existing ambient, would be a much saner and safer approach.
But this world is insane.
I think it's been the perfect example of the dangers of regulatory capture. Snag is, our clueless politicians have allowed it to the point where corrections will be painful. But if they don't, it could be even more painful, ie as 'inflation' and bills continue to rocket, more people seem to be realising what we've been told is 'sustainable' really isn't.
On the plus side, I think windmills would be perfect for public executions, or conversion into prison cells where the scumbags who've promoted 'renewables' could be left to rot. It wouldn't take much to add food hoists.
"regulatory capture"
You need to be a bit careful using that term together with nuclear. In the UK it has been shown beyond any doubt whatsoever that the nuclear industry has a very long ingrained history and culture of lying and withholding information. It happened way back with Windscale (before the fire), it has continued since.
...has a very long ingrained history and culture of lying and withholding information
Whereas the Green Blob has brought us 'renewable' energy that's practically too cheap to meter.
Again it's cognitive dissonance. We've been 'investing' in 'renewables', and our energy has become ever more expensive. With the prospect of much worse to come, if our useless shower of shite insist on pursuing 'Net Zero'.
Which they probably will, because how better to signal your virtue than 'saving the planet'. Hence why I suspect politicians of a certain persuasion aren't really interested in doing anything to reduce high oil & gas prices.. Not that they really can in the short term anyway. It'd take a while for the UK to increase it's gas and coal production for example. Winter may change their minds a little, but I'm sure they'll find a why to blame Russia, or anyone else for excess mortality and energy poverty.
The cost of wind and solar is down, deployment is up, yet your bill is up? That missing money which isn't going to the the companies that made, delivered, or installed the power generation capacity your complaining about, where'd that go?
Profit. Waste, Fraud, and your local politicians unavowed children. Stop getting pissed at the people who are trying to lower your bill and start roasting the people who are screwing you over and jacking your bill up while their costs go down.
So what is your solution to the problem that fossil fuels are going to kill us? It's all very well to complain that renewables are cheaper but your bills are still going up (two things that are true) but whinging that energy generation that won't kill us exists seems like it's not really helping anybody. While the price of fossil fuels keeps rising and we're partially reliant on fossil fuels for energy, the price per unit of energy will rise regardless of how it's generated. That's capitalism.
If you give up on the cheaper part of power generation so you're only generating power the expensive way, how does that lower prices?
So what is your solution to the problem that fossil fuels are going to kill us?
Don't drink diesel, or stick your head in the oven and you'll be fine.
But the rest is the rather huge elephant. CO2 levels are rising! OhNoes! Greenhouse! Thermageddon! Doom! We're doomed I tell you!
Unless of course we're not, and climate sensitivity wrt CO2 is low. Science strongly suggests that this is true, ie the majority of 'predictions' using high ECS (Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity) have already been falsified. Best one is probably James Hansen's original congressional testimony where a simple model was used to scare politcians into wasting other people's money. Hansen made millions out of that gig.
But if you look at a climate 'science' site like the infamous SkS, it'll tell you that Hansen's projections were spot on. Except they lie, and use one of Hansen's emissions scenarios that doesn't at all reflect reality. So we've emitted more CO2, and there's been much less than predicted warming.. Which again suggests ECS is low.
And if it is low, and assumptions around ECS per doubling CO2 are correct, we don't have enough carbon to burn to hit the next temperature doubling anyway.
Was more like VEEGER in the movie, but fair. We don't have to worry about the space whales bringing them back to us at least, as opposed to the real RTGs in the real thing.
Strange end to the human race if the fallout from one of our probes crashing into an advanced alien habitat is what gets us purged. More likely they will come here and get sick from the wreckage we left at the end of the party. I sure as hell ain't staying to clean it up.
Why would building more reactors be simpler or cheaper? Each one of those would be subject to environmental assessments, anti-nuke protests, NIMBY lawsuits at the outset and more lawsuits for perceived injuries down the road after they've been built, etc, etc. The father of the Pressurized Water Reactor, Alvin Weinberg, was of the opinion that they weren't the best approach to take after further research into different types of reactors were theorized and work done on a few. We've been stuck with what we've always done because anything else is "unproven technology". The latest crop of computer processors was unproven just months ago. The same thing happens with everything from transportation to medical therapies.
The only reason I can see for zero progress building new reactors is the political election cycle. Anything proposed has to be completed within a 4-6 year timeframe from start to finish. This relegates anything new to the dust bin if it has a governmental aspect to it. It won't get any support unless it has the possibility of buying votes before the next election. For publicly traded companies, most things have to be done in 3 months or less so the quarterly report looks good when published to the stockholders (ie, the C-level execs). Gone are the days of a Bell Labs where the goal was to pursue novel new technologies on a continuous basis so there was a possibility of new products that aren't just a rehash of an old product.
If people are going to continue adding to the world population at an unsustainable rate, how and when power is used will have to change alongside how it's generated.
>Think building a whole estate of identical houses versus building a millionaires mansion.<
Building a whole bunch of homes doesn't often cause years of very expensive lawsuits. If the cost of a nuclear reactor was down to mostly the construction cost, you'd be right that building them in a factory would be the best move. The problem is that construction costs are less than 50%. There haven't been new designs put into commercial service as they center around fuel assembly availability. A design that needed new fuel configurations would need a plant that could make that fuel and there isn't the demand to build and operate that new fuel fabrication facility on a full time basis. It's another downside of continuing with the old way of doing nuclear reactors and a really good reason to be looking much harder at liquid fuel designs.
The article does NOT say "more radioactive" as many commentards above seem to have assumed.
The article says "more reactive" which is a different thing entirely.
Perhaps the article has repeated a typo, or maybe it means what it says: more likely to react with, say, oxygen or some other common reactant.
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