Part of the problem in building conventional nuclear reactors is that an $11Bn project like the conventional build mentioned in the article is of such a scale that it’s inevitable that something will go wrong that causes the budget to explode. The sales pitch for small reactors is they’re not $11Bn projects, so there’s a possibility they could actually be completed on time and somewhat near budget.
The author is also clearly anti-nuclear - that’s not to say they’re not right, but they’re motivated.
> is of such a scale that it’s inevitable that something will go wrong that causes the budget to explode.
It's not just the scale, it's also how few there are in planning in the west. You work out the kink (both building and operational) by building more of the things, and that's also how your builders skill up. At the height of its buildup, France had half a dozen nuclear reactors being built concurrently.
Because SMRs are smaller and you need more for the same total output, more would be built, and thus there are more opportunities to work out the kinks in manufacturing and setting up.
An other theoretical advantage of SMRs is they could be built in factories and craned in, and when the fuel is expended they get craned out, a new reactor is dropped in, and the old reactor is moved to a refueling facility (which can be nearby a reprocessing plant), the site doesn't need to be offline for refueling, and it gives higher opportunity for automation.
Indeed, if SMRs can serve as a way to get the industrial learning loop of nuclear working again, it may be worth it. The size of the current power plants were defined exactly due to the need of scaling the energy output to a level worth the auxiliary costs of lower output temperatures than coal, combined with increasingly expensive safeguards.
Why being anti-nuclear is even a legitimate stand is a good indicator that people still don’t take climate change (and general over consumption) seriously.
It’s like being anti-chemicals because some of them can be toxic to ingest.
Why people are still pro-nuclear is a good indicator they don't take climate change seriously. CO2 emissions are reduced more quickly and more cheaply by going with renewables instead of pouring the money down the nuclear rathole. This is especially the case when experience effects on renewables and storage are included. The faster we spend on them, the faster they get cheaper, and the more quickly even existing fossil fuel capacity becomes cash flow negative.
If robust, affordable storage technologies that can smooth out the volatility inherent to solar/wind energy become available for a variety of topographies and climate zones, then we’ll be in great shape to reduce GHG from power generation without adding nuclear. Whether this will happen in the next 5-10 years is not clear (at least to me).
Robust, affordable storage at very large scale will be developed for vehicles, even if nuclear were to win. A Tesla might have 70 kWh of storage; there are 283 million motor vehicles in the US. That's about 20 TWh of storage right there, or about 40 hours of average US grid output. (This is not to say the vehicles' batteries themselves will be used for grid storage, although they could be.)
At this point nuclear is effectively dead; this SMR stuff is just the corpse twitching. Anyone investing in nuclear is making a bet that renewable/storage technologies are going to immediately run into a brick wall, or even get more expensive, while nuclear gets considerably cheaper.
This is already happening; Ørsted cancelled its two US Eastern seaboard windfarms in the US, saying that the cost of WE power needs to rise considerably for WE to become feasible again.
As for "nuclear being effectively dead"; the story you yourself posted in this thread says this:
quote: "By contrast, Russia, which now dominates the international market for new reactors, has 53 under construction, planned, or proposed within its own borders and another 50 in 19 countries. China is constructing, planning, or proposing to build 220 new domestic reactors, and 20 of its models are being built or are under consideration in 12 other countries."
And thats not even considering the agreement on tripling nuclear capacity before 2050, adopted by 20 nations at the COP28.
Can we stop with the ultra partisan claims, please?
Offshore wind is at the extreme of renewables. It may or may not make sense, but it's not needed to kill nuclear.
I will add that with natural gas still facing no CO2 tax in the US the impressive thing is how much renewable energy is still being installed. The environment is oppressive for anything but gas; it's absolutely lethal for nuclear, to the extent nuclear can count it as a victory if existing plants can remain operating.
I reject the argument that being against nuclear energy is "partisan". I suggest instead that new construction nuclear is just bad when examined objectively. Nuclear partisans (and there the epithet is warranted) do not exert quality control on their "arguments".
I believe that offshore wind formed a key part of the vision for the United Kingdom's net zero transition. They wanted to use the learning curve to become the "Saudi Arabia of wind power", manufacture hydrogen etc.
>I reject the argument that being against nuclear energy is "partisan".
I'm specifically referring to your extreme rhetoric in this thread. Despite your continued claims, nuclear is experiencing a renaissance these years, and I see that it's purposeless to argue the point further with you, so I'll let you observe the developments yourself in the coming 10 years as they will speak for themselves. End.
1) Have we built enough reactors consistently enough over time to say for sure the experience effects don’t build? I know we effectively stopped in the 80s, but I’m curious if there’s evidence from elsewhere to say nuclear’s indeed different here.
2. Hypothetically, if SMRs lead to a 10-100x increase in volume building, would we see experience effects? At what volume would you expect to see genuine experience effects, or again is nuclear fundamentally different for some reason?
I’ll say my biases are: I’m not surprised we’ve seen limited learning over time for various reasons, I think the size of nuclear projects almost precludes repeat learning, and I do expect if we lower the project size and increase the volume we’d see efficiencies of scale, but I could be convinced that either nuclear is sufficiently different or that even with the SMRs we’re not going to see enough scale to actually recognize efficiencies or learning.
If I had to guess, it's because nuclear power plants take so long to build.
Experience effects occur when an individual or a cohesive group gains experience. But with NPPs taking a long time to build, any individual doesn't go through many iterations in their career. Experience also decays, so if the learning rate is low enough decay should cancel it out.
In contrast, the facilities for building renewable technologies iterate much faster, both on production of individual modules, and in design updates. Installation and planning also have similar high rates of activity.
SMRs might provide a solution, but if they're so fast we have to ask why none of the SMR companies have built any yet.
> The climate crisis is urgent. The world has neither the financial resources nor the luxury of time to expand nuclear power. As physicist and energy analyst Amory Lovins argued: “… to protect the climate, we must save the most carbon at the least cost and in the least time.”
> Expanding nuclear energy only makes the climate problem worse.
> The money invested in nuclear energy would save far more carbon dioxide if it were instead invested in renewables.
> And the reduction in emissions from investing in renewables would be far quicker.
These statements may wind up being correct, but they’re speculative, and they’re anti-nuclear.
To the point of the Wikipedia page, a couple selected publications - although in fairness I haven’t read the publications and am just judging from the titles:
> Nuclear power: Economic, safety, health, and environmental issues of near-term technologies, Annual Review of Environment and Resources 34, 2009, 127-152
> Beyond our imagination: Fukushima and the problem of assessing risk, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2011, 19 April
> Nuclear Power in India: Failed Past, Dubious Future, 2007, Available at www. npec-web. org/Frameset. asp
Again, all of these could be entirely factual and well defended, but the author is clearly not a disinterested observer.
I’m more pro-nuclear than the author, and mostly I’m skeptical about good scalable solutions to the storage problem. I’d prefer renewables + storage to be the answer, but I think we made a mistake when we halted nuclear development and I don’t think we’re doing ourselves any favors by not pursuing the technology.
I’m not saying anti-nuclear as a slander, but that’s clearly their position. Given their resume, I believe they came by it honestly, via years of experience and study. I don’t think I’m besmirching them by saying they’re anti-nuclear, and I think given the tenor of the article, they’d agree with me.
It is, however, something to be aware of when reading an article they wrote: they are not a fully disinterested observer, they have a pre-existing belief about nuclear, and their arguments for this article agree with those beliefs. That’s a thing to be aware of when one evaluates the set of facts they’ve chosen to present.
It isn't, because I don't think it's possible. Because of that, I think it's relevant to know what an author's preexisting opinions and beliefs were when writing the article. If, for instance, the author had been strongly pro-nuclear, then their conclusion that SMRs are a dead end would carry more weight, as they would have had to overcome their own biases. Articles that confirm an author's beliefs, on the other hand, are much easier to write.
You made this claim before, I asked you to elaborate. To me it seems that the article describes a career doing research and applying it to public policy.
Yes, you are accurately describing the pro-nuclear side there. The nuclear skeptics, we can point to objective market evidence. The pro-nukes have to invent conspiracy theories to stave off cognitive dissonance.
The author is also clearly anti-nuclear - that’s not to say they’re not right, but they’re motivated.