Rolls Royce Small Modular Reactor. Energy Revolution or delusional distraction?
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- Опубліковано 18 гру 2021
- Nuclear power has been around for decades but it's never achieved the global dominance of the energy sector that its creators envisioned. Now, as the world moves away from fossil fuels, the nuclear debate is firmly back in focus and Small Modular Reactors are being touted as the only zero carbon baseload solution to our climate crisis. Rolls Royce say they'll have their design operational within ten years. Can they do it, and do we want it?
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Research Links
Just Have a Think Videos on Nuclear Power
Thorium Molten Salt Reactors
• Thorium. Is it the fut...
SMR technology explained
• Small Modular Reactors...
Nuclear Fusion
• Nuclear Fusion: Revol...
Other Research
Rolls Royce
www.rolls-royce.com/innovatio...
www.rolls-royce.com/~/media/F...
BBC Article
www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-5...
Michael Barnard Article in Clean Technica
cleantechnica.com/2021/05/03/...
Lazard LCOE Charts
www.lazard.com/media/451086/l...
Our World in Data - Nuclear Safety
ourworldindata.org/nuclear-en...
What is SMR?
www.twi-global.com/technical-...
IAEA - Nuclear Waste
www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/...
to sum up: we have the safest, most reliable and least resource (and land) intensive energy source on the line and the main argument against it is "we shloud've invested in it sooner"
You got that right.
Yes, we need more wind and solar power plants, correct.
@@1982Pastro no, you are incorrect. Wind and solar are very expensive, unreliable and take up vast areas of fertile land that was farmland. The main cost of wind and solar is connecting to the grid and then backup is required anyway, so just invest in something that is reliable and long term investment.
@@seanworkman431 😂🤡 nuclear power plants work off the grid, right? 😂 they use WiFi or Bluetooth or satellites, I assume?
@@1982Pastro you can put an SMR in the complex of a coal power station and the grid connection is right there, not hundreds of kilometers of wires going to a connection point that was not designed to be a connection point. Please don't try to make out I am stupid, it will just prove that you are (a loser)
Let's not forget that there are designers touting the possibility of using alot of the currently stored waste as fuel for their MSR designs. Reducing the waste inventory volume by over 90% and reducing the half-life cycles to less than 500 years. Whatever happens in the electrical power generation industry, people need to realize that what adds the most time is regulatory delays. There are very few sites that are willing to allow the new, UNTESTED, reactors in their backyards. I for one like what is happening with the advances in Malaysia.
Kirk Sorenson has done a great video about what makes up nuclear waste . The really interesting thing about it is that all of the individual compounds are actually very valuable, but they're just not much use all mixed up together. One of the huge benefits of molten salt systems, be they fast or thermal, thorium or uranium, is that they can also support the separation of that nuclear 'waste' into it's high value components.
Thanks for your observations. Kirk Sorenson does give detailed and understandable presentations. Who else is in favor of Mr. Borlace interviewing Kirk Sorenson on molten salt systems?
Dr Kirk Sorensen is overoptimistic and unrealistic. Nuclear waste is not worth reprocessing, wherein reprocessing generates lots of secondary nuclear waste.
... costly business but who cares ?
They still produce radioactive waste all the time they generate.
@@grahambennett8151 Nukiller reactors are a terrible combination of toxic waste products and explosion risk. Molten salt reactors are not immune from fires (note: Lithium at high temperature is prone to combustion if inert atmosphere is lost) and radiologically toxic materials. Bad combination. If photovoltaics or wind turbines suffer an accident, it is just a load of mechanically mangled materials that are far less hazardous.
Excellent video. Some really good points that don't get talked about enough. I especially appreciate the link to the Barnard article.
As always, thankyou for your highly researched, civilised contents
Don't you wish you could say the same for the discussions that take place on YT? :-(
Cheers acasc cseea. Much appreciated
At least he's not preaching Fake-Green, sustainable junk power for a change - oh wait, he is, heavily now.. what a surprise...
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Wind and Solar are the tip of a fake-green iceberg that's not worth the natural resources its made off.. Russians has a WORKING Fast Neutron Test Reactor that uses the 100th the amount of Enriched Uranium 238 and creates much less radioactive waste.
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China is the only one building a Molten Salt / LFTR test reactor and Thorium Fast Neutron Reactor... This can potentially run on THOUSANDS OF TIMES LESS ENRICHED URANIUM, some only need it to first ignite the reactor.. There is NO WAY Fake-Green Tech. can compete, and Fusion is a con based on incomplete fundamental physics theories..
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THE WEST have been Pi$$ING in the Wind and this guy is pushing a SUSTAINABLE HYPERINFLATED ENERGY MARKET... Effing Liberals.... MENTAL CASE Wasters..
I thought his video was disingenuous. His comparing the Fukushima Daiichi's generation II reactors to a generation IV SMR is like saying no one should drive cars because Pintos blow up.
@@PrivateSi THIS!
In a previous job, 20 years ago or so, I saw Rolls Royce's proposal for the SIR reactor (Safe Integral Reactor) in partnership with the Americans. It had an oversized pressure vessel that contained all of the primary coolant (radioactive water) and heat exchangers on the inside. That means that if there was a primary coolant leak, it would be contained within the pressure vessel. No SIR reactor was ever built.
Christmas is comming up ... so I wish you all the best!
Thank you for all your work and effort!
All the best m
First time viewer, now a subscriber. Well done sir. Nice to see a reasoned, rational, fair minded take on any controversial subject these days. This type of treatment of any issue is worth supporting.
Here in Argentina we are in the assembly stage of one of these reactors. A small 25 Mw experimental design. Designed by our AEC and INVAP. If things turn out ok, the next step will be scaling up. The same idea, modular design, no runaway reactions, etc.
Your video raises some important points which are not debated around here. Thanks.
The CAREM 25 right?
We haven't got time to fool around with experimental designs. The climate change won't wait. Once we reach te point of no return it will be the end of us humans. On the other hand...maybe that's a good thing.
Yoiu are adding to climate change. How does it feel? All the energy released from atoms is extra to an already heating planet, which if you could do critical thinking you would already have discovered.
You are a great teacher, at the very least you are to me everytime I watch one of your videos.
Thankyou for investing your time that provides me with greater understandings.
If I ever have a livable income I promise to join your patreon, until then I am thankful for the free educations.
You rock Dude!
I'm poor too - but we have each other - that's more than the rich do
Cheers Darryl. I really appreciate that. I wish you well in 2022 :-)
@@JohnnyWednesday 🤍, that is a great thought, and I endorse it.
@@JustHaveaThink thankyou for that awesome reply. Back at you Sir.
@Jorn Paul Winkler why do you do this? Thankyou for your solicitations to every commenter, I'm sure you mean well, but when you look at the comment thread it appears less than necessary.
I recommend you look at this again, and consider the aesthetics if it were to be someone other than yourself doing that.
Oh, wow, ouch.
Merry Christmas or holiday of your choice, I prefer happy solstice.
Reconsider tact, and be well.
Thank you. Excellent content fairly and calmly presented. This is a fantastic resource.
Wow this was well done! Not biased just pure helpful information without being obtrusive, I wish I could impart my green position as kindly as you! Subbed to learn more!
Nice video on this topic is "Pandora's Promise". Worth checking out.
Also a UK startup Moltex Energy, has taken an old 1950's idea and turned it into a workable molten salt reactor (not Thorium). It can be adapted to run in the fast neutron spectrum, and therefore burn up transuranic waste from existing PWRs and AGRs .
I'm in the don't keep all your eggs in the same basket camp. I quite like SMR's and while I'm very supportive of renewables they do have their limitations.
how that argument stand if wind and solar "eggs" are not from the same chicken.
You have hundreds of companies on wind and solar competing.
If your arguments goes by "type" of technology.. it does not really apply unless you find a big drawback.
The intermittency issue does not apply anymore as drawback when you have technologies like hydrogen that not only solves the intermittency issue it also solve the all the co2 emissions that comes from the natural gas grid and the utility transport sector (ships, airplanes, trains, trucks, cars, etc), which there is no other way to clean that sector than using cheap renewable with hydrogen production (batteries does not work in any of those applications either, not now.. not never, unless the battery definition would change). So the storage issue already is solve by that need.
We are the only limitations.
I really appreciate how you present pro and con arguments for all of the technologies you cover here. So glad UA-cam suggested this channel. Keep it up.
Cheers James. Much appreciated :-)
Thanks for another informative wrap up.
As usual the biggest single issue with SMRs is *NOT BEING MENTIONED -> The fuel grade*
For Uranium to work in a standard fission (edit for typo) reactor the percentage of U235 has to be increased from the natural 80% U235). This came up during the recent AUKUS agreement discussions when it was pointed out the new reactors powering these types of subs used *weapons grade* uranium fuel to get the 25 year lifetime. And yes as an engineer I know the numbers and definitions vary depending on who's talking.
However the point is SMRs are being promoted as needing only to be refueled or being able to generate power for 25 years.
*So what sort of fuel grade do you think that requires?*
Could they easily just make reactors that only need to be refueled every 10 years to keep the enrichment at military grade? It’s not like we need the reactor to be mobile for long periods of time like submarines so it should be easily replaceable I would think… especially if you’re using military grade uranium instead of weapons grade uranium. I would think the paperwork and cost would be far less. But I don’t know!
It would seem to me that producing uranium 233 from thorium would save a needed uranium 235 resource and resolve the enrichment issue.
@@Cspacecat Well no, then you're just adding an extra step and requiring a whole new unique fuel stream and manufacturing. Plus, reactors advertised to run on Thorium, are actually turning the Thorium into U-233 and burning that and using the derived neutrons to continuously turn more thorium into U-233.
To then take the extremely radioactive U-233 out of the reactor to try and jam it into fuel rods for SMRs just doesn't add up when all you have to do to make higher enrichment U-235 is run more centrifuges.
Uranium is not used in fusion reactors, you must mean fission reactors.
Good analysis the other factor is temperature. the higher the lower grade. Or am I missing something.
Some people are concerned about how long the waste from Gen 1-3 reactors remains dangerous - but they never mention how long regular industrial waste, like that created from the manufacture of solar cells, remains dangerous. As far as I know, many industrial wastes remain dangerous in perpetuity. Do eg lead or mercury oxides ever become harmless? I don't think so. I worked with some environmental engineers on a superfund site with tens of thousands of tons of PAH's. A scary site that gave me skin burns from working in the area - but out of site from the general public. IMHO the problem of industrial wastes dwarf the problem of spent fuel, which can be burned as fuel in the most modern reactor designs.
Solar cells can be completely recycled. Stop spreading fake news. Furthermore is the idea of burning nuclear trash a very childish idea. We followed this idea once with MOX-Fuel and its a damn complex story, which is far beyond such childish ideas. In nuclear reactors ABSOLUTELY NOTHING is handy!
@@muten861 A certain amount of caution is reasonable in those assertions of PV recyclability. Carbon Capture and Storage is also possible, yet those theoretical assertions have not panned out into practical use, yet. Similarly, PV's claimed recyclability has not been demonstrated; and the issue of waste _during production_ is separate anyhow. To the contrary, PV's aren't all that different from other electronic waste, and that's as yet not really a solved problem _in practice._ If waste prices are high enough, perhaps today's tech will finally be adopted, but let's keep an eye on those unsubstantiated hopes: even if recycling were technically possible and economically viable, that doesn't mean it would happen as long as it's cheaper to simply trash and replace old things and regulation is insufficient.
To be explicit: there's no reason to believe these issues are significant in comparison to fossil fuels, but just because some solutions are much worse doesn't make the PV alternative perfect in every way. A bit of healthy skepticism keeps big business at least a little more honest, and PV definitely is big business nowadays.
@@muten861 Cant recycle those kids lives that dug up those precious metals.
@@finscreenname have you "recycled those kids" when you bought your computer and smartphones? I think the digging kids do not actually know, if the actual showel filled with soil is used for computers or solar cells.
@@muten861 I was not the one preaching about the holiness of solar cells and how there is no waste from them. Their supply stream is full of it from environment to human. Also there is not enough sunny land to cover for power and still eat. Europe would need to cover all of N Africa with panels but they have no way to get the power to them or store it when it gets there.
Don't get me wrong. I love what solar has done the last few years for the privet market. A couple cells on your sailboat or remote cabin and you are watching TV and on the internet. But when talking about the masses and you want to be carbon free (and kill all the trees) nukes will have to be part of the equation. Royles Royce is working on small plants that about the size of the suburban house that could supply 2 to 3 hundred thousand homes.
The bottom line is there is no free rides. You want to live in the 21st century there will be waste. It's just what we do with it makes it good or bad.
You are in my opinion by far the best commentator on the climate and energy crisis. Clear concise comprehensive and balanced. Just have a think, sound North of England advice!
Also, thanks for the shout out for UHVDC electricity "it's always sunny somewhere"
Something that was not really discussed here in the comparison of nuclear to renewables is the efficient use of land. Over any given time span SMR plants will produce manyfold more electricity than solar or wind farms of the same size and not require the same supporting battery storage infrastructure.
I think that must be an important point of consideration especially for small population dense countries like the UK.
Yes. Moreover, a windmill park is utterly ugly.
Particularly since we have several existing sites about to become unproductive
In the middle of WWII, each side did a lot of weapons research to come up with solutions for battleground challenges. A lot of these projects were ultimately useless, but there was simply no time to have a committee analyse all the projects and choose the best. This 'inefficiency' was OK because the war was about the survival of 'our way of life'.
It's about time we all recognise that climate change is a truly existential threat to our way of life and start treating it with the same sense of urgency as WWII. So, by all means invest in both SMR and renewables. Losing £210 million on an SMR project that may ultimately fail is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. But a the same time: keep rolling out renewables + storage and keep decommissioning fossil power plants. We can finance it all with climate bonds.
Not a bad idea.
Agreed. The situation at hand is nothing short of a global emergency, made double so by the lack of action from everybody (either because they don't they they can make an impact, which is wrong seeing as there's millions of people on board, because they don't know, which is an issue we all need to work on, or because they flat out don't care.)
Germany wasted a lot of resources on wunder waffen that didn’t help them at all. Many times simple persistant incremental improvements over time are all you need to win.
Yes, I feel the same way. I want to see us go 100% renewable but I just don't think the tech will be around in time. Base loads are going to become more important as we move to 100% electric for heating, cooking and the like, nevermind aluminium or steel smelting. I think SMR is a good hedge bet for the next 30 years or so until we can sort out storage and grids.
@@chuckygobyebye We Don't Have 30 Years To Sort Things Out.
Thanks a bunch I've been looking for more information on SMR's. First time watching one of your videos enjoyed your analysis.
This was one of the better discussions of SMR's that I've seen.
This was a great UA-cam. I liked your UA-cam on molten salt nuclear reactors even better. Yes, advanced nuclear does have its downsides but so do renewables. Renewables take up huge amounts of real estate and they have to be replaced every 20 years. The U.S. will need about 18 billion square meters of solar panels and 500,000 5 MW wind turbines that are the height of a 50 story skyscraper. After 20 years, the U.S. will then have to replace 80 5 MW wind turbines each day and 1.23 million square meters of solar panels each day forever. All that material will need to be recycled or we will run out of atoms to make them. We will also have to build huge amounts of batteries and recycle them as well. The chemical energy in batteries and fossil fuels can only store about 2 eV of energy per atom. So just think of any battery as an equally-sized container of gasoline for energy content purposes. On the other hand, Uranium and Thorium atoms contain 200 million eV per atom or about 100 million times as much energy. That energy came from two neutron stars colliding to form a black hole maybe 6 billion years ago.
Again, from 1975 - 1979, I was an exploration geophysicist exploring for oil, first with Shell and then with Amoco. But in 1979, I made a career change and transitioned into IT partly out of concern for climate change. Things are much worse than people are willing to admit. We are now at 410 ppm of carbon dioxide and it looks like we have already ignited the positive feedback loops in the Arctic and Antarctic that will initiate a greenhouse gas mass extinction like the End-Permian greenhouse gas mass extinction 251 million years ago. The Sun is a main-sequence star and is getting 1% brighter every 100 million years, so the Sun is 2.5% brighter than it was at the end of the Permian. The Industrial Revolution just lit the fuse. It brought us up from 280 ppm to 410 ppm in just a few hundred years. But there are huge amounts of carbon up in the Arctic that the planet has been stockpiling for the past 2.5 million years in permafrost and methane clathrate during the Pleistocene Ice Ages. All of that carbon dioxide and methane are now beginning to enter the atmosphere as the Arctic defrosts. It seems that our Industrial Revolution burning fuse has already gotten to the dynamite stick. Things happen so slowly in geological time that people just don't see it happening.
It will not take a lot of energy to block the Sun with sulfate aerosols, but the real problem with greenhouse gas mass extinctions has always been ocean acidification. The carbon dioxide coming from the melting Arctic will lower the pH of the ocean to the point where marine life cannot make carbonate structures. The oceans will die shortly after that. We are going to need huge amounts of energy to geoengineer the planet back to a level of 350 ppm of carbon dioxide with 40,000 1-megaton/year Direct Air Capture plants running on advanced nuclear energy. The only solution I can see is to use molten salt nuclear reactors to burn the 250,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel, 1.2 million tons of depleted uranium, and the huge mounds of thorium waste from rare earth mines that we already have on hand.
I have been watching Plan A in action since 1979 and it does not seem to be working. We need a nuclear Plan B. I am now 70 years old, and my guess is that my grandchildren will be forced to use Plan B in about 50 years.
Regards,
Steve Johnston
An excellent comment. I fully agree. Nuclear power and internal combustion engines fueled with ammonia made from nuclear electricity for carbon free transportation works.
To add,: we could compare the massive surface area dedicated to wind farms and solar thermal to the land area that would be nuclear waste disposal sites…. I think that the nuclear disposal sites could at least be underground-with ecosystems living above - though possibly radiated beyond human safety
@@liamstacey419 For what it is worth I've eaten my lunch while leaning against a storage cask filled with high level spent fuel assemblies. As hot as you will get outside of spent fuel cooling pools. Some steel, a couple feet of reinforced concrete and natural air cooling equals no worries, though I would not eat lunch there every day. A good windbreak though. I assume in a few years we will be reprocessing spent fuel as about 97% of the energy is still there and we can fuel our electrical grid for a couple centuries with our current stock of high level "waste", the barriers, as shown by France, are political rather than technological, as are so many of the barriers in the nuclear industry.
@@liamstacey419 Good point. Remember, a lump of uranium or thorium the size of a golf ball can run an American lifestyle for 100 years. Molten salt nuclear reactors produce two golf balls of fission products from that and only have to be stored for 300 years. We already know how to do that with rare books and paintings. The nuclear waste from our current pressurized water reactors is 96% U-238, 1 % Pu-239 and Pu-240, and 3% fission products. Pu-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years and that is why we have to store our current waste for 200,000 years. But we do not know how to do that. Molten salt reactors can burn the U-238, Pu-239, and Pu-240 and turn them into fission products with a max half-life of 30 years. You only have to store waste for 10 half-lives and that is where the 300 years come from. The world would need about 50,000 molten salt reactors the size of a bus to run the whole world. The reactors could be built on assembly lines like commercial airliners and last about 50 years. The world currently has about 25,000 commercial aircraft. The decommissioned reactors would have low levels of radioactivity and would need to be stored on-site as we do with our current nuclear waste until we come up with some technology to recycle them. The bottom line is that a nuclear-run world would not require much real estate and would not produce as much waste as a solar-wind-battery-powered world. The good news is that if Plan A fails, a nuclear Plan B might be able to geoengineer the Earth back to a carbon dioxide level of 350 ppm and an ocean with a pH of 8.1. It all depends on what happens in the Arctic and what people can manage to do.
Regards,
Steve Johnston
Steve,
I'm with you on this one. Next Gen nuclear fission holds so much promise but until just a few years ago, nuclear energy has been foundering in the mire of ignorance.
For the last few days, here in the U.K, we have had virtually no wind and heavily overcast skies, a not especially unusual situation for this time of the year in this country. During this period wind and solar have struggled to produce barely 6% of the grids total generation requirement. SMRs will be a vital back up for such occasions if the lights are to be kept on when gas is turned off.
Oh and by the way, who knows how the grid will cope then when it has to take on the job of heating millions of our homes with electric powered heat pumps.
This is the thing. Interconnectors are all well and good but when we have dunkelflaute conditions, it often extends over much of the north sea, so we can't always rely on Denmark and Germany to help us out. Some combination of nuclear and floating offshore wind in the western approaches maybe, where capacity factors are higher?
All of europe is in an energy crisis created by german nuclear shutdown and the failure of renewables to steop into it's place. Being against nuclear always means in practicality using fossil fuels.
Don't forget the load on the grid when millions of cars are electric and only 1% of owners purchased them to be Green.
@@JohnnyWednesday The grid can be upgraded. No big problem there.
@@JohnnyWednesday a disproportionate amount of that demand would arise in the evening, no? When cars recharge overnight?
good luck Dave best of all the years to come geezer!
Good one, well put together.
The argument against SMRs not being ready before 2030 does not hold water. The mitigation for renewables intermittency drawback is storage but all of them suffer the same problem, either by not being ready or because they need an immense fabrication scale if they are to be realized. Both are necessary, because having base-load reduces the amount of storage you need, and then also reduces over-capacity you require to build to cover for the eventual weeks of no sun or no wind.
Exactly - if your argument is "it won't make any difference until after 2030 so we shouldn't do it" then, logically you should be against planting trees today because their CO2 absorption won't really start kicking in until the 2050's when they have reached maturity.
It's all getting much more realistic with more emphasis on efficiency. Especially for the huge space heating surge during winter. To have all that generation capacity bulid up for just 1 to 2 months of extra high load (whether additional wind or add. nuclear or add. gas combi; it's all not super-attractive if used only 2 months) ... we can avoid this; by simple technologies like MVHR, triple pane windows and insulation; there will still be some storage needed - but that will be within reasonable extent.
@@WolfgangFeist
And air conditioning needs to keep millions from being roasted by increasing temperatures.
I don't think people are taking into account that this total renewable estimates are to replace the power needs of today, but we have a massively increasing need for much greater industrial needs if we want to fix the things wrong with our economy today. Like our agriculture could be done hydroponically, we could get materials from recycling ... and all that costs more, and needs massive industrial processing. It's like everything we are doing today is wrong and toxic ... and we are aiming low to replace just what we need to ... who is going to accept that lower level of lifestyle? And what about remediating the planet to reverse the ecological damage we have done and are doing?
@@justgivemethetruth It could be an intersting discussion; but: you'd have to look into the efficiency potential first. You'd see, that it is the compliment to the renewable sources.
Storage is being fabricated at an immense scale already and growing exponentially.
Over capacity of renewables is also cheaper than "base load" generation to cover the gaps. Especially if you distribute your renewables as widely as possible. You'll never have zero wind and sun.across large geographical areas.
For safety it might be worth researching how nuclear submarines safely record is and how spent fuel is dealt with. I’m certainly with the middle ground and need a range of base load options like smaller modular nuclear and barrage tidewater and other options. We all know Uk weather is random and we can’t completely rely on solar and wind, even if limitless battery storage. Also fusion is always 20 years away.
...adding to fusion: fusion reactors can somehow be regarded as 'renewables'. But at the end of the day (just like with renewables) the cost or LCOE is important to see whether it can be a competitive option and I deem it as relatively unlikely that fusion which is so high tech can compete price-wise (mid-term). I mean connecting rotors to a generator surely seems less complicated then fusion and both generate energy 'out of nothing'. I think the major challenge is a cheap form of energy storage where then cost of production, coupled with storage costs have to be compared with other technologies but such as with renewables, R&D in this aspect is urgently needed and may be better invested than in nuclear energy which only seems to have an edge in the 'security of power generation' as compared to renewables.
You just can't be serrious..
Impresively clear and well presented as always. Thank you.
Cheers James. Much appreciated :-)
Excellent FOOD FOR THOUGHT...THANKS!
Anyone that has watched UK power generation stats over any period of time can see that renewables have the most enormous downside - intermittency. Until there are ENORMOUS energy storage solutions available wind and solar cannot be relied upon for "base-load". The only renewable that can is biomass, and that is frowned upon by people that do not understand that energy production is all about energy storage - either before you turn it in to electricity or afterwards....
EDIT Biomass can be relied upon for base-load in a very few locations - there is not enough (ethical / green) biomass production for it to be rolled out en mass for base-load production globally.
currently in Australia, the media landscape has lost all nuance when it comes to SMRs, they are either the only option, or literally as bad as a 24/7 Chernobyl. thankyou for showing that a reasonable middleground of "yeah, solar works, and we should swap coal for it as soon as possible, but a little bit of reliable base load is worth it.
Great video as always
Very interesting as always!
My hope is that SMRs can be made to run on existing waste to use it up. There are some proposed Gen IV designs that might do so. If they can get rid of some current waste in a few hundred years instead of us having to store it for longer than recorded human history that would be good, I think. I wonder if the Rolls Royce design might be capable of doing this.
Agreed, I would be 100% in favor of nuclear, if the waste can be recycled and transformed into something harmless.
I think it's important to have some perspective on waste. All forms of energy produce waste. Coal is the worst, the waste from coal kills millions every year in air pollution and is changing our climate. It also releases vast amounts (by nuclear standards) of toxic chemicals such as mercury, arsenic, cadmium, lead, chromium and others. These elements are extremely toxic and (unlike nuclear waste) will stay toxic forever. We don't store fossil fuel waste in geological repositories and worry about the fact they could (in theory) one day leak. Instead these toxic elements are simply pumped into the atmosphere and dumped into water ways. Even solar power has a large waste stream of very toxic elements and chemicals, many of which will also be toxic indefinitely. So why do people see nuclear waste as such a problem when stored nuclear waste has actually never harmed anyone? Well because we can .. nuclear produces a tiny amount of solid waste, which makes storing it possible. No one ever talks about "How are we going to safely store the coal waste, or the solar waste" because it's not a realistic proposition .. there's just too much of it. People's fixation on nuclear waste is exactly that: a fixation. Our society deals with much larger quantities of much more problematic waste all the time .. we just don't think about it.
Nevertheless, something that might help eliminate one kind of toxic waste while helping reduce the production of another kind of toxic waste would be a win win. Also, let us not forget the amount of naturally occurring radioactive material that remains in coal ash. Bottom line: If we can make SMRs work (especially if utilizing what was considered waste), it would reduce the amount of fossil fuels used.
Yes, TerraPower's Natrium reactor (Gen IV, salt-based coolant) is a fast neutron reactor that can use spent fuel from existing LWR plants as fuel, leaving no long-lived radioactive waste. Russia (BN-series, BREST), South Korea, Japan and China also have their own fast reactors that can be used for this same purpose.
The current once-through uranium fuel cycle only exists because of the extremely low cost of uranium fuel, which has so far made it uneconomical to reprocess spent fuel, except in highly integrated systems such as that of France and Russia. The use of pyroprocessing and fast reactors is much more efficient, however, and doesn't require the use of chemical separation like with traditional reprocessing.
@@sporegnosis dry cask for short to long term storage of a decades with the option to recycle it if needed and glass vitrification to put it in a hole and forget about it.
I wasn't to keen on the "storage on site" bit for the waste in the RR information. Some of the more interesting implementations of molten salt SMRs have the reactor module being able to be swapped out and replaced with a "clean" unit. The old one would be brought back to the base plant for the more complicated job of re-refining the fuel and removing the unusable isotopes for disposal.
Wich will even create more radioactive waste, right ?
@@hansjorgkunde3772 - waste which is stored and while potentially deadly - isn't actually in the process of killing millions of people. Pollution is.
Molten salt reactors from every thing I have seen burn more fuel meaning there would be less waste and requires storing for a lot shorter time period until it becomes safe.
@@hansjorgkunde3772
The nuclear waste problem is greatly exaggerated .
@@remliqa Right, because we're not the ones living with faulty storage facilities leaking waste. That will be for those who come later. I guess we all feel better now!
I agree with you completely. I'll share this content as a suggestion to better understand the subject. It takes seriously into account many aspects of the overall topic, as in public opinion is perceived. Gently bringing to attention your balanced opinion, it was enlightening, Just as a Think.
Excellent, thought-provoking video!
I seem to recall one of the SMR projects advertising 20y run-time reactors that are not refueled during that time, but instead replaced entirely after 20 years, with refueling/scrapping of old units done back in a central facility. Not to mention how great it would be to have nuclear reactors with modern design, instead of reusing the 1970's designs...Also, I wonder if anyone looked into the eco footprint of an SMR vs the same generation capacity in solar/etc + required storage?
Elon musk has looked into exactly that. Says a solar plant with batteries to make the whole lot 'pilotable' generates more energy at equivalent footprint! That takes into account the no-go area around nuclear plants, that is quite large.
@@coguglielmi I would like to see a full write-up of it, with sources though. For one, what assumptions were made for solar output? I happen to live quite a bit north of the equator so both solar irradiation and weather patterns cut down on output not insignificantly.
@@GalvayraPHX you can, and I've seen, it slanted whichever way you want.
Put up solar, and when the next big thing comes along (say Mr Fusion) the land can be returned to its natural state. Nuclear you can't. After you've poured concrete over soil it's unusable for a thousand years. So in energy per acre-years, there's no comparison. Solar wins by a factor of 100 at least.
If you say the future can get stuffed, it's just the acres that matter, then nuclear wins.
If you say that the area under solar can still be used for other things, like living under, or grazing or cropping, then solar wins.
And so on...
To me, solar seems to win by a large margin, but that could be my bias, as I think solar is an elegant solution, and nuclear is just awful. Ugly, inefficient, expensive and dependant on vast vast vast hidden subsidies.
Yes and wind/solar backed by big dam storage always wins such competition.
@@GalvayraPHX
Read:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy
Oooh good title, gut reaction is were gonna end up with a load of these, let's see
Is that good or bad?
We should have done this like France did in 60s/70s instead the conservatives dragged their feet to this day.
@@buddha1736 they draged there feet because of money
Cracking video as ever, well balanced. Thanks
another excellent, well researched presentation, thanks!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Nice contribution. What I missed a bit was how the residual of coal and oil plants are disposed of. Especially the cinder is mostly still used for landfill, while it contains loads of heavy metals and other toxic substances, and is also radioactive. Applying the same rules, it would have to be disposed of the same way as other weakly radioactive waste, and that would exceed the radioactive waste by several magnitudes. So, it's also a political issue, not only a technical.
Well nobody really things that oil and coil is either good or really paying for all their externalities? I don't see how it would affect how we view nuclear. That old rubbish must be dealt with either way.
Renewables will just continue being deployed and getting slightly cheaper.
@@JohnBackstrand at some point in the future - maybe. But til then, there has to be a solution for providing sufficient power - also to produce the renewable ones. A good part of that is done in China, where they still heavily rely on coal plants. And this won't change within then next decade or two.
@@JohnBackstrand The main problem with renewables is that they require frequent renewal... What I mean is that we can build lots of wind turbines, or lots of solar panels... the problem is more about the scale needed... To power the world with wind and solar we will need literally tens of millions of wind turbines, and trillions of solar panels, and they need to be frequently replaced due to wear and tear. The average lifespan of a wind turbine today is 20 years... So we need to build tens of millions of them, and every 20 years we have to tear them down and replace them with tens of millions more? Nah man, never gonna work long term...
Most people don't realise that coal is radioactive. In fact this planet is naturally radioactive.
@@lesschorlemer5151 There are many turbines and panels going strong after 30 years. Technology has improved to the point that it's often better to replace than service the older tech, but that will not continue indefinitely. "Trillions" of solar panels is equal in power to Millions of SMRs. You're just trying to make things sound impractical by using scary-sounding numbers and other exaggerations.
Thank you for making this extremely balanced and informative video! I'm always impressed by how thoroughly you research and how clearly you present these topics, but this video is even more impressive than usual. I think you've changed my mind on small modular reactors.
Previously I really loved the idea of this technology, particularly as a supplement to renewable electricity sources in northern countries where we get less total sun. Small nuclear reactors also seem like a vital technology for any future space colonies, so why not develop them as soon as possible?
But you make a really good point about the urgency of the situation. We need alternative energy _right now_ , not decades from now. We need to start decommissioning coal and natural gas plants immediately (or at the very least when they reach the end of their operational lifetimes) and replace them with non C02 emitting alternatives. There's no time to wait for nuclear technology to be developed.
I still like nuclear technology and I think there's a case for public and private money being spent developing it, but it should be seen as a medium-future technology, not as a solution to the current climate crisis.
Excellent overview, thank you.
"Just Have A Think" Excellent Work- cast & crew - +380K subscribers
Nuclear powered ships are an interesting thing to think about and how that might scale up to fixed facilities
They're actually really expensive per megawatt, because they're built to standards that are unnecessary for land.
@@kevinrusch3627
And they are a disposal nightmare. The Russians just take their worn out "hot" vessels out to sea and sink them. Nice little present for generations to come.
@@bobwallace9753 Not any longer. They have, with German assistance, been disposing hot sections safely.
A surprisingly large number of commercial ships sink every year. An environmental disaster when the first one sinks.
Great point. Doesn’t each ship produce the same pollution as all the cars in Los Angeles? Seems pretty easy to drop in a modular reactor and an electric engine to power the ship. They can be pulled straight out when they need to be refueled in twenty years. Which also happens to be the lifespan of the hull. It’s a win win. Sorry for you doom and gloomers that are worried about the ship sinking. But since it has built in safeties the unit will stay sealed and brought back up by a salvage company. You really have no choice in this technology for ships.
What is needed is to develop a system that can make use of or recycle nuclear waste. To consentrate it, refine it, re-use it... something. Storing it for 100,000 years isn't a sustainable solution to our energy requirements, current or future.
awesome as always
Tha ks for this video. A key consideration is also the materials intensity per unit of energy delivered. And for that, nuclear really has an edge over renewables (which I strongly support), for construction, fuel and dismantling. Maybe a topic for a future video?
9:01 The next non-highlighted sentence gives much needed context. If you count the low level waste (which is orders of magnitude less radioactive than high-level) you obviously get a big scary number, which I suspect was the goal of the high-light. Hypothetically, removing the cladding and melting all spent nuclear fuel the US has accumulated though 60 years of commercial nuclear power (providing 25% of it's electrical demand) would give a 18m x 18m x 18m cube. Not that scary now, right?
By the way, it would be interesting to calculate the amount of industrial waste after equivalent TWh output of solar and wind, counting manufacture and disposal after decomission, just for comparison...
12:32 Well, I can think of one obvious reason; since the whole point of going small is to make everything easier, cheaper and faster to install, imagine what happens when is time to decomission a reactor that was transported by a truck. The same truck comes and take it to reprocess.
I personally feel lukewarm about that waves of SMRs, because they will begin to be built in the next decade, while we needed them to start producing baseload electricity two decades ago.... better late than never I suppose
Re: the 18 meter cube of nuclear waste, that's totally unrealistic. You have **purposely** left off all the shielding needed to protect life from high level radiation. That's the *whole point*. Grams of high level nuclear waste need kilograms of shielding!
As for industrial waste from wind and solar, some countries are mandating that solar and wind are recycled. Solar panels are valuable - 95% of each panel is recycled.
Exactly , not every fossil fuels plant can provide electricity to a 100,000 thousand homes , so therefore we should be doing the same with nuclear power .
imagine if everybody who wanted a fossil fuels plant only had the option to build a giant plant , that is the current state of nuclear power.
Re: "the same truck comes and takes [the spent reactor] to reprocess." Surely you're joking! High level radioactive waste cannot be transported by trucks or through population centers. They must be transported in special shielded containers on railroad cars and routed around cities.
Quote "interesting to calculate the amount of industrial waste after equivalent TWh output of solar and wind, counting manufacture and disposal after decommission". The point to note is the difference between nuclear waste and waste from solar panels and wind turbines is that pretty much all of it can be recycled - including wind turbine blades. The nuclear waste can't be touched, so there's no comparison to be made there really.
I am not opposed to nuclear power but from a cost and safety point of view 21st century geothermal is the way to go. Eavor Technologies has a system which can go almost anywhere, provide the same base load, with none of the safety issues.
It being geography dependant doesn't make it a one-size-fits-all solution
Thank, I hadn't heard of Eavor Technologies until I saw it in your comment. I am familiarity with technology required to drill toe to toe connect horizontal wells, multilateral tie-back wells, downhole tools capable of operating at 175C, and a bare foot completion compared to running casing in the lateral section is a bloody brilliant money saver. That some one has put all these together geothermal energy will be economically viable in more locations.
Signed: Bert Eavor
I think geothermal needs exploring more. We live on a sphere which has a hot molten core with enough energy to power a dozen civilisations. We should try to exploit this, preferably without covering ourselves in magma.
Very well balanced discussion. Thankyou
Great video - thoughtful, neutral and looking for realistic positives
In 1995, if we had all been informed grown-ups about the reality of climate change and started developing the nuclear power generation technology that was within reach then, we wouldn't be walking on a knife edge of global catastrophe now. It'll be great if safer and cheaper renewables can take over more of our power generation now, but the misinformation and disbelief in climate change lost us 25 years of transition time.
It is cheaper than renewable, at least in my country (France), you just can't compare both directy it's non-sens, we can't compare the installation of a wind turbine that work 10% of the time with something you can control
@@nixx5490 I can assure you wind turbines work a lot more than 10% your talking nonsense.
@@buddha1736 Exaggeration but the point he makes is valid; wind cannot provide base-load
@@aiistyt Well that’s a load of nonsense, you could easily run the UK on wind alone, I suggest you do more research.
Remember, the reason everyone wasn't informed is because of active efforts by PR firms of oil/fossil fuel companies.
This was a positive, well presented anti nuclear video.
Moltex molten salt SMR-W which uses 'waste' as fuel, which simply cannot under any circumstances have a melt down.
I think your costs were off. SMR's are likely to generate at 3-7 p per KWh to the grid.
In the UK we've not have much wind or solar for about 4 days now. For just 4 days we'll need more than 1,920 GWh of storage.
Please can anyone suggest an energy storage solution to provide that and at what cost and what round trip efficiency?
Currently fossil fuels are making up for the lack of wind and solar.
>Please can anyone suggest an energy storage solution to provide that and at what cost and what round trip efficiency?
The solution proposed seems to be "just get energy from somewhere that has production", like Spain.... Oh. Yeah, Britain may be more then interested in developing self contained grid.
We build a dam across the strait of Gibraltar and use the Mediterranean as a head of water. We just need to teach every Greek citizen how to swim
@@Poctyk It seems that Western Europe also has little wind too. They'll need to get power from some other place too.
IIRC I heard that flywheels works well as a battery, there's also pumped storage, which is already being used across the world.
But yes, there always needs to be another form of power. Solar and wind are just too variable to be *economically* our only energy source, not to mention they don't provide short-term stability in the form of electric grid inertia (electricity has no inertia on it's own, but it's often provided by the inertia of those huge steam turbines in coal/geothermal/nuclear, [plus hydro, but it's no longer steam turbines and more of water turbines])
Of course, groundbreaking technologies such as mass-production of room-temperature superconductors could allow you to build a continent-spanning electric grid, but at that point you might as well talk about fusion.
TL:DR - You're always going to need some non-solar/wind sources to provide stability
PS: I agree with how you said this video was well presented
Tidal power needs no storage.
Another excellent presentation, thanks.👌👌👏👏👏🇦🇺
Thank you, Mr. Borlace, for your informed commentaries and questions. For me, your approaches to appraising both our personal and social choices in re climate and sustainable energy needs provide us with useful, collective choice-making resources. I don't know if, in other presentations of yours here, you've discussed the growing suspicion of technological innovation; you have pointed to widespread suspicion about nuclear power generation from the standpoints of operational safety and very long term environmental and public safety hazards. The real world 'fates' of applied technologies have always included unintended or not publicized risks and consequences; many people now ask what information is being withheld, how useful for the future is the in-hand information being used to do the evaluations of costs, benefits, and interests involved over the real world lifetime of any technology once applied, once up and running?
Can we apply lessons in this category experience in order to do diligent assessments, so that even the most productive and successful of technological corrections and innovations do, in fact, proceed from much improved 'fates' estimates that community members understand and trust?
Once again, I am grateful for your work presented on this channel.
Th only thing I point you towards is Devonport. Go there and see how many old rusting nuclear subs you can count. All have their reactors still on board. No one knows what to do with them.
I’m all in favour of nuclear, but let’s sort out our past before ruining more of the future.
It's incredible how much nuclear waste exists to date and the subs are just a drop in the bucket. And each drop counts! It's a huge mess that seems to just wait around...
Send them to the US. We've developed a lot of experience disposing of naval reactors.
I think we need to use 4 th gen nuclear to reduce our 1 & 2 gen waste. But the industry magnates should be made to pay for it.
Great video, thanks very much. All the best,. M
Cheers Michael
Goodness me... what an excellent video, and outstanding grown-up discussion. Such a contrast to Twitter triggers.
I do think that most places will need some form of nuclear to decarbonise the last 20% of their grids. This includes energy imports, not only domestic production. It does make sense to give some support to scalable methods of manufacturing nuclear power, and if they can produce and install SMRs in less than 5 years that could have a significant impact over the snail's pace of large nuclear. On the other hand, the world's renewable resources are truly enormous, and renewables have until 2030 to develop additional technologies to out-compete nuclear. That is quite a long time, and I think it is likely that that last 20% will shrink down to 5 or even 1% that renewables cannot handle easily.
If they sort their generation and investment out, countries like Morocco can become exporters of enormous quantities of energy and firm the grids of many nations while becoming very wealthy in the process. I think this is likely to become more important than nuclear power for most applications.
Either that or sufficiently deep energy storage, which is likely to be cheaper than nuclear. The last 1%? Hydrogen (or a combination of hydrogen and ammonia) gas turbines. Nuclear is and will be far too expensive to compete on an open market with these options.
Decarbonise their grids lol.
People are very casual about forgetting to add the electric mobility and heating thing. that's usually on the order of 60 to 70% extra power generation required in Western Europe.
@@dwwolf4636 If there is demand, there will be supply. That's what the electricity market is for.
This looks very promising. We still need to focus on energy efficiency and using less resources in the first place.
Have you never met people? that'll never happen. We've got to play devils advocate - nuclear reactors ARE safer than breathing pollution and WILL cause far less deaths. Do you want to win the game or do you want to die on a matter of principle?
And watch the video till the end.
So you think everyone is going to be happily crammed into tiny dark appartments with nothing to eat but tofu burgers? Ain't going to happen.
No we dont
excellent research! We need especially some fast SMRs able to reuse current spent nuclear fuel solving the waste problem!
Great stuff!
The Rolls Royce SMR will have problems competing on the cost of power. The ThorCon reactor complex in Indonesia is aiming for a cost of 3 cents per kW/h. If you are not in that cost area, you can't compete. This means that molten salt reactors will be built faster than coal plants due to needing less materials.
The Chinese say that their first molten salt reactor will take 2 years to build. The next will take 1 year.
Do you really think ThorCon can drop the cost of power by 80% over other current reactor builds?
Might ThorCon be using optimistic overnight costs and not installed costs? Might ThorCon be spreading costs over an unrealistic period of time? So far we haven't built reactors that lasted more than 40 years on average. Sixty or eighty years is a shaky assumption.
These plans fly in the face of the recommendations of the government’s own NIC, which advised against further investment in nuclear. Aside from the absurdly high cost of nuclear energy, the very notion of baseload power in a renewables dominated electricity grid is nonsensical, because such a grid will use distributed energy storage to load balance.
Sometimes I wonder if the Chinese are using their money and influence in the US to sway the least intelligent people to be the most vocal on this issue - thereby destroying the US opportunity to compete in reactor technology?
I cinesi dicono un sacco di cose
@@bobwallace9753The cost forecast is a function of the CAD model. The rest is standard industrial economics.
Reduction of cost is what happens when technology changes in a radical way. BTW. This is not new. This is 1960s technology with a modern twist.
The new technology means that the hot stuff is kept in a bucket. The bucket is swapped out of the reactor when they want to change the molten salt (they can refuel). That means that corrosion can be fixed off site. The bucket is shipped back to the vendor and refilled after any fixes to the bucket has been made.
Since molten salt is cheap, the cost of ownership is relatively low. ThorCon owns the reactors, so they don't need to fleece the customer through expensive fueld.
I'm liking the idea of consistent nuclear baseload for H2 generation and storage facilities. Or indeed, the opposite, nuclear for grid baseload, freeing up renewable intermittent assets for h2 generation at 100% capacity factor...if that is possible.
I favor methane over hydrogen for such purposes. It's less energy efficient to produce (partially because it actually requires hydrogen as feed stock), and in energy vs mass it loses out, but on all other metrics (including it's chemical characteristics, and energy per volume) it beats hydrogen. And by the time that either hydrogen or artificial methane are meaningful players, batteries will be practical enough to take most ground transportation roles anyways, leaving only other tasks (shipping, flight, utility vehicles, generators, back-country operations, etc.) that won't pose as severe a burden on efficiency in the first place.
@@absalomdraconis I believe those applications are likely the best use case for any form P2G fuel source. I'm particularly interested in interseasonal storage capability from renewables, which this enables. Methane makes sense, if the direct use of hydrogen adds unnecessary complexity to the system
@@absalomdraconis So good to hear you guys arguing the toss about H2 vs CH4 presumably vs NH3 etc. These offer the possibility of synthesis of liquid fuels for aircraft, metals smelting, transoceanic green energy exports etc, which no amount of nuclear sourced electricity can provide. Oh, and they can solve the intermittency issues of renewables as well. Renewables have won the electricity generation debate. Time to move the focus onto how we turn that abundant renewable electricity into sustainable industrial processes.
Great to see this video turns around the argument against mass production of SMR s.
Great presentation.
Encore a great, informative, balanced video ! 👍
Yet, about renewable energy, I have read recently that the UK 2021 production of those has been very low because of adverse weather. Is it safe to count at 100% on them ?
On a cloudy day solar still produces half or so. Wind out at sea almost always blows.
@@michaelnurse9089 That's a common myth. There's always some wind somewhere, just not enough to generate useful power. In the 5 day period starting midnight on December 17th, wind energy provided 3.93% of UK generation, solar provided 0.45%. Coal produced 2.93%, Nuclear 16.3%, Gas 55.9%
I am certain we can halt the use of CO2 using almost all renewables, but I am not certain that we can't get rid of the elevated levels of CO2 without nuclear fission/fusion/orbital solar. Of those 3 fission is the most immediately available.
Germany and California are a clear refutation of your first point.
@Daniel Meyers Germany was planning on replacing their reactors with solar. They replaced them with brown coal. California is using more natural gas than ever and having blackouts.
@Daniel Meyers BDEW also said coal as a percentage of energy has increased this from last.
@@kokofan50 coal usage has increased from last year? Might that possibly be, because last year we halted most of the economy due to a global pandemic unlike this year and because the large north-south energy lines aren't finished yet, so it's impossible to get all the wind power produced up north down to the heavy industry in the south, so that the wind farms have to be turned off?
No, it has to be because renewables are failing!
sarcasm
@@midnight8341 Interestingly, how well are doing the germans this winter with heating based on renewables?
Thanks 🙏 great video
Part 2 Cont'd
There is one huge issue regarding thermal power plants: they use a huge amount of water. I've read that about 40% of total water draw is used by thermal power plants. This obviously is not environmentally friendly.
it would depend, if for cooling then most of it will return to the water way it was extracted from, just a bit warmer, some will be evaporated but the huge cooling towers of the older powerplants are a dieing breed. the modern powerplants tend to maximise the scavenging of heat in order to be more efficient. so no that figure isnt true. still if you live in an area with a water deficit then it might still be a problem.
@@zvezdaster
Said, "The cooling towers of old nuclear power plants are a dying breed."
The old thermal power plants including nuclear are a dying breed. The NPPs should be kept working as backup, but the utilities that are responsible are decommissioning them due to excessive ongoing costs. Security alone costs more than $50 million per reactor per year; that's a billion every 2 decades and $billions over the lifetime of the reactor. That alone would pay for a large, multi-hundred megawatt solar farm.
More reasons why SMRs are not the answer in this article.
A quote from this article...
>
cleantechnica.com/2021/05/03/small-modular-nuclear-reactors-are-mostly-bad-policy/
@@acmefixer1 Oh yeah, right - renewables 100%, 95% of the time....it's the 5% that will kill you, and the storage solution is more expensive than to outfit the whole country with nuclear power...
ua-cam.com/video/V2KNqluP8M0/v-deo.html
Thorium Molten-Salt Reactors, Small Modular Reactors, Stirling Engines, Flywheel Storage and improvements to Atomic Battery technologies would all go a long way to improving the robustness of our energy grid.
(The Atomic Battery technologies could theoretically be seamlessly merged with the reactors themselves so that they can still produce a tiny bit of power from spontaneous decay when they aren't fully online / critical.)
Solid-state battery supercapacitor hybrids would also be handy for energy storage...
Nuclear power plants could be constructed to double as Geothermal plants via closed cycle heat transfer...
And if we still aren't able to fulfill all of that remaining 20% demand, then we can try working to reduce our global energy consumption. Preferably by increasing the efficiency of our infrastructure and industrial sectors.
Or we just put the 1-2 years into various (flow) battery chemistries that are already commercially viable and are done.
No need for niche / fantasy technologies we'd wait decades on while genociding ourselves.
Modern renewables + energy storage and some grid maintenance make energy a solved problem, now move on to actual issues.
@@aenorist2431 - We invented the hamburger so I guess world hunger is a solved problem too?
I tend to welcome the Rolls Royce proposal. There is too much clean energy in nuclear power to ignore. The problem with nuclear is that the 60 year old technology used at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima is too dangerous. Surely with some new design approaches the risk of nuclear energy could be significantly reduced. We have seen obvious evidence that humans in the loop to oversee the operation of reactors doesn't really work.
Chernobyl was a Criminal act allowed by Socialist/Socialism dogma.
Three Mile Island, was only nearly catastrophic, NO one DIED :-) It was contained because of US Laws etc.
Fukishima is taken care of, certainly in UK by building the Reactors on Aseismic concrete bases.
And yes there are designs, safer than those used 50 years ago?
@@johnashtone7167 Ah yes. No one died. Just that little bite of the planet which will have to store the waste & decommissioned parts for the next - longer than a corporate or even government lifetime.
But that is likely to work out to be less than the effects of global warming!
the problem is, it will take another 20 years to start bringing online a significant number of new nuclear plants. so why do it? if solar, wind, and storage are already on par with nuclear LCOE and can be built up faster, there is no need for nuclear. MAYBE for the last 10-20%. but you have to think about how much better wind, solar and storage will be in 15-20 years.
@@weldonyoung1013 if something is radioactive for millions of years it is a very weak source, and not any more dangerous than the heavy metal byproducts from solar panels.
@@orkin2525 , I believe the "old" thinking was nuclear waste had to be controlled up to 250,000 years. What I heard in Dave' presentation (Just have a think) is the 'new' time scale is 100,000.yesrs, which is still longer than any form of civilization has existed.
A good explanation
Thank you!
I think these will be a useful addition to the UK energy mix. Today is a calm winters day and the National Grid website is showing very little renewable generation. Unless some new storage technology comes along then betting the farm on renewables is a joke. We are going to need a lot more electricity soon with electric cars and heat pumps becoming more and more popular.
As long as we can fill the gaps with cheap fossil fuel power no one is going to bother building more storage ... Financially it just didn't make any sense yet.
We've yet to deal with nuclear waste on geologic timescales, especially in the U.S.. Nuclear proliferation remains a serious problem. Better we invest those billions in storage technologies and correctly provisioning (oversizing) photovoltaic and wind generation.
exactly. we currently make transmission lines with less than 0.5% loss per 100 mi, and installing solar and wind is around 1/3rd the cost of nuclear and can come online decades faster. we would be better off building 3x more solar and wind than we need than waiting for nuclear to finish construction.
this is a myth. there are ways to deal with this radio active waste from storage ,to waste treatment, to reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel I suggest you to watch gordon mcdowell videos on this topic . Most of the myths around this topic are propagated by scaremongering "green" organisations who have an agenda or have no idea what are they talking about. Lots of them are straight lies. More radioactive waste is produced from coal and gas plants than from any nuclear power plant. Also batteries are long way to go for load power substitution and they are not clean by any standards. Wind and solar are not clean stuff either, just search for the amount of fuel , concrete, plastic or mercury they leave behind. Nuclear is not perfect but it is way better than what we currently have
I used to work as a technician in Grohnde PWR which was permanently shut down for political reasons after 38 years of reliable service on 31 December 2021. The build quality from Siemens was excellent and the plant repeatedly won global awards for maximum output. However, the inherent problem of a disaster unfolding due to cooling system failure is the Achilles heel of the PWR type cannot be denied. As soon as this risk can be eliminated in the design nuclear has a bright future as a supplier of reliable base load electricity.
As a nuclear engineer with more than 40 years experience in the UK electricity supply industry, I found this a very fair and comprehensive summary of the subject. I started my professional career working in the UK nationalized electricity supply business, and we took the view that a mix of power generation was necessary to provide resilience to the system. I'm still of that view, hence I strongly believe that we should aim for a baseload of nuclear, perhaps 20-30%, with the balance coming from renewables. Points raised in the video re security surrounding nuclear materials and waste are very valid, hence I doubt very much if SMRs would be deployed anywhere other than existing nuclear sites, where security and a skilled workforce already exist. Talk of SMRs springing up all over the country, including from our own prime minister, are just nonsense, and do great harm to our industry.
This video struck me as mostly anti-nuclear, relegating it to a small fraction. In reality, nuclear has so much to offer, SMRs are a small (though exciting) part of it. Waste becomes far less of a concern if reprocessed and used in newer "breeder" reactors, as most of the "waste" of nuclear today (including SMRs) is unconsumed uranium 238 (which doesn't fission to produce energy until "bred"). Proliferation is a far lower concern and poor argument against nuclear. If a country wants nuclear weapons, they will build its own reactors to do it. If you want electric power, the "waste" is far too contaminated to build a bomb (mixed with Pu 240, etc isotopes, it can't explode in a nuclear reaction). As for the cost, I expect as building and acceptance of nuclear increases, it will get cheaper, just as has happened with other "renewables". However, those sources require backup, since the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine. That is a LOT of stored energy and added cost that is NOT factored into them today. Finally, new nuclear (Gen IV) reactors can run far hotter, which increases thermal efficiency and the overall higher temperature is directly useful for chemical reactions, such as producing ammonia for fertilizer (or fuel) or for creating carbon-neutral fuels, or perhaps for using the left-over energy for desalination or decarbonization. The possibilities are endless, we just have to get started again.
Just a few problems here:
1. The cost for nuclear power plants to build hasn't dropped a cent for the past 50 years or so, even during the times where everyone thought that nuclear would be the way to go. Why? Because every nuclear power plant is designed and build for itself. The reason why renewables have become so cheap meanwhile is the effect of mass production. Unless you can get that working for nuclear, it's not going to happen.
2. SMRs don't exist. Simple as that, there is not a single real world SMR that could be used to even reliably gather information on how expensive that stuff is going to be, so why on earth would anyone invest in it, if their returns are far safer with renewables?
3. Spent fuel isn't useful for nuclear weapons? Ever heard of a dirty bomb? It doesn't even need to explode a lot by it's nuclear fuel (which can be enriched regardless of contaminations, it's ultracentrifugation anyways), it only has to throw a few tons of highly radioactive waste into the atmosphere.
4. Aaah, yes, the reactors eating up the nuclear waste from other reactors. Do you know how many reactors currently exist that are able to do so? One. In Russia. And it's not even getting rid of nuclear waste, but only recycles Plutonium from old nuclear warheads, which were trashed due to denuclearization. And do you know the biggest hurdle? That reactor (which is the only one, mind you) only has enough potential capacity to go through the actinide waste from 1 other reactor. Which would mean that not only would you have to separate the waste into actinides and rest, but you also need an additional nuclear reactor per already existing reactor to burn your waste material. With ~10b$ per reactor, well, talk about recycling solar panels and wind turbines again...
5. The GenIV power plants are nice and all, but most of the project in construction or planned TODAY are still GenII (GenIII if you're lucky), because of the issues with getting a new type of nuclear power plant approved and the cost of the modern systems. So, you're argument is basically that we'd have cool, new, efficient power plants, although currently no one is building them in any meaningful capacity.
So, as long as the problems aren't adressed, like that no, we can't just use nuclear waste to generate electricity, or no, there is not a single funtioning, commercial SMR today, or the fact that a safety study just found that half of japanese nuclear power plants are not managed correctly (regarding safety concerns) because of cost or the fact that all major nuclear desasters to date were either due to human failure (Tschernobyl) or tremendiously stupid design choices (Fukushima)... we can safely say that nuclear as a large part of future energy production is and should rightfully remain a pipe dream.
We're 96% nuclear fission & hydroelectric in Ontario. At night when I use it 100%. I'm like a major Goodie Goodie.
@@midnight8341 Your argument boils down to if we aren't doing it now we had better not start. EspeciIly if it is an atomic power station.
@@midnight8341 Cost of nuclear power plants actually increased - because we use more and more concrete to pour on them,"to make them safer". Reactor designs actually advancing and cost less,and have smaller and more compact options. And nuclear fuel also costs less and less.
You know what's not getting cheaper? Gas,coal and metals. And all of them are major cost for processing materials and producing renewables. We need steel for Wind turbines,and we need to burn sand(SiO2) with coal (C240H90) to get --> Si,CO2,H2O, repeat process to increase purity of silicon,use more layers of chemical processing like Trichlorosilane evaporation and condensation,then put pure silicon into a crucible and heat it up to a melting point,add crystal seed which has higher melting point,use this difference in melting points to grow all silicon into crystal by keeping stable temperatures in that crucible for weeks. This requires insane amount of consistent energy,that comes 24/7 which is not what renewables are famous for.
Now what would happen to renewables cost if gas prices increase from 100$ to 1000$ for 1000m3(2k$ in Europe right now)? Because this is what happened this year. Also Steel got more than 2-3 times price increase depending on grade.
Do you see any of this reflected on "energy production cost by source" charts? No? Well then if those charts are printed on paper,they at least can be useful in toilet.
@@midnight8341 I'm sorry WHAT? Nuclear submarines exist they have small reactors,same goes for icebreakers. Nuclear waste reprocessing - France does this since 1976.
Did I miss it but are the RR reactors uranium or thorium? My understanding is that thorium reactors not only consume most of their fuel they can also ‘burn’ spent uranium waste thereby mitigating storage issues.
I doubt that these are thorium because they are the same technology in submarines.
This video really missed the mark not dicussing this. They will almost certianly be highly enriched uranium reactors. Which are a prolifferation risk and why small reactors never took off for power unlike the low enrichement commericial reactors.
I believe the RR SMR's are small conventional civil PWR's and would use similar uranium dioxide fuels to Sizewell B or Hinkley Point C.
@@derekp2674 You are correct. My bad. Most of the SMRs use other fuel. The RR ones are actually quite big.
I always love the insights you have on energy, but as I am currently residing in Singapore (which is 1/3 the size of London), I simply can't fathom a way for renewables to work.
So SMRs are indeed a boon for such small locations.
Even then you will still need significant numbers of SMRs, which brings back the point... Why not just make a full scale reactor instead?
Not one of the Rolls Royce powered nuclear submarines in the Royal Navy has been safely disposed of. All 21 submarines are still berthed in dockyards (Rosyth and Devonport), some have been there for 40 years. The hull of one is being removed as a pilot. No defuelling has happened for eight years. Regulators stopped it, too unsafe. If they do manage to defuel the reactors, deconstruct the hulls, dispose of the low and medium radioactive parts, the plans for the reactors are to bury them, leaving the problem for future generations. Much the same is the case for US nuclear subs. (The Russians appear to just dump theirs in the sea, especially when the money runs out to store them.)
Are we really going to do this to our great grandchildren and beyond? Just to keep a corporation in business? When we have more effective alternatives?
Yet another excellent presentation and video. I hope it's successful for Rolls Royce is a top class global British company, but I'm somewhat skeptical. I don't quite like the idea of another "windscale event" and due diligence not being taken with waste disposal. I'm more in tidal/wave projects, hydrogen transport/energy storage for the time being. I'm willing to be persuaded though. I would much prefer the peace of mind getting energy from cleaner renewable sources. UK has 10th largest coastline and obviously abundant wind wave/tidal potential, remember! ;-) Also I don't like the idea of getting too close with a French nuclear company, for being cut off in any dispute!! Furthermore I agree with your last quote from an expert saying there's no reason why we can't get the full 100% requirement from natural renewable resources. My last last point in this discussion is that 2 oil super majors(Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum) have infrastructure and interesting ambitions for their business. I think they hope will include hydrogen energy storage/transport solutions.
It's a big problem, IMHO, that these discussions leave out a couple of issues such as grid stability and scaling of alternative technologies. Just because wind and solar is cheaper doesn't mean there's no point in building stable, larger generators in the grid. And if you look at the numbers of wind and solar installations needed it's pretty clear that it can't be the only solution, it won't meet the demand by 2030 either, no matter how much money you throw at it, the scalability isn't there (and we don't have the luxury of extra time to wait for the next breakthrough). Just accept the fact that we have already failed to make the goal set out for 1.5 degrees. We need to look further ahead to 2050 or 2060 where we also need more energy, not only replace existing output. I say we build as many reactors as possible and if we survive the next 200 years as a species we can take care of the nuclear waste then, otherwise we're already dead and a little radiation won't be a problem 😊😊👍❤️🍀 #thinkpositive
Yes, because pushing problems into the future a few centuries has worked out so well for humanity until now... Wind and solar can be scaled up by a lot, still. We would be able to generate enough power for residential homes with rooftop solar arrays alone. The grid is also not a problem if every house gets a battery in its cellar, just like every house today has a tank for oil or gas somewhere. And we don't even need lithium or vanadium for that, as size or weight don't really matter in these applications.
Solar arrays will also become considerably cheaper and less energy intensive to produce once perovskite modules hit the mass market somewhere around 2025.
Then there's interconnectedness. The european energy grid now spans more than thirty countries on two continents and the arabian peninsula, connecting for example huge wind farms in the north sea to equally enormous hydropower storage systems in Norway, or the solar arrays in Spain. Somewhere, there's always the sun shining or the wind blowing, so intermittancy is also pretty much a problem of the past.
And with ever better grid-scale energy storage solutions, like sodium metal or iron air batteries, we will be able to this without nuclear.
@@midnight8341 "The grid is also not a problem if every house gets a battery in its cellar, just like every house today has a tank for oil or gas somewhere"
Most of the houses here get everything by pipe. Electricity and water. No tanks in the house.
If the grid goes down, my solar panels are useless.
For dense populations like here, grid scale power storage should be created, because then we can actually store the energy instead of negative energy prices.
My new house however has plenty of space for hot water tank, batteries and a lot of land to store heat for the winter. So I assume that in my new house I will almost be able to be self sufficient. Someone still needs to collect my shit.
@@bloepje water? No one talked about water. Even with 100% nuclear, if your power goes out (because they cut the line or whatnot) your water is also out anyways. Water is not a question of energy mix.
What you usually have a tank for though, is domestic fuel oil for heating and hot water, which is nice, but also doesn't work without external power, because you still need pumps for both applications. If you just replaced those tanks (~4m³ in case of my parents home) by energy storage, you'd have days worth of power stored and you could use it for your appliances like refridgerators and security systems as well as for network connections (in case of fibre optic connections), heating and hot water.
But that only applies if your house was build somewhere around the last 60 years.
@@midnight8341 Focussing on home solutions is a red herring. To maintain our society immense power is needed by industry. Solar and wind, for example, is entirely impractical for an aluminum smelter and likely to remain so. Smelters and many industries simply cannot function on intermittent power, such a loss of power requires an extended shutdown for repairs and restarting equipment that is not meant to be shut off. EG if metal solidifies during smelting prematurely it will cripple production for quite some time and cost lots to repair and restart. Even steel mills, in the US, are largely melting their metal in arc furnaces.
@@deandeann1541 producing aluminium takes about 17.5MWh per ton of metal. For raw aluminium. Recycelt one takes only 875kWh. And yes, they need to run 24/7 or the machinery will take damage due to the solidifying metal. But aluminium with a melting point of 650°C can be held molten by solar thermal energy which can already produce temperatures ~800°C and if used with molten salt energy storage, can also be held hot enough over night. And arc furnaces make up only about 28% of furnaces in steel mills globally, which also are only used for either recycling scrap metals or high purity steels. The entire rest can be substituted for hydrogen blast furnaces, which can run on wind or solar by electrolysis or thermolysis.
And it's not me saying that, experts already confirmed that the entire industry can both be electrified and run on renewables. We can't keep going like we do now, but we can keep our living standards without having to rely on dirty energy.
Thanks for emphasising in every video that you can stay independent and ad-free because of donations through Patreon. I shake my head every time I see some youtube creator deliberately mutilate their video to make way for some sponsored message just to get some money.
Thanks Marcel. So do I!
Thank you.
I suspect this is too little, too late.
I often think that a single mismanaged nuclear plant isn't restrained to being someone else's problem, but is rather a potential threat to the entire biosphere. Now couple that with the fact that maintenance and waste management require a high level of technological commitment that will span millenia. It's a lot to ask/demand of our descendants.
Yes that is true as can be seen by the events of Fukushima and Chernobyl. But it is worth noting that reactor accidents that bad need a lot to go wrong which makes the statistical case favourable. Also, with those two incidents in particular, there were poor design elements that made the accidents feasible in the first place. Design elements that are no longer used. We don't build reactors with positive void coefficients or positive temperature coefficients, we don't tip control rods in moderator material, we don't skip building containment structures to save money, we don't place emergency generators below sea level and so on...
Then there's Rolls Royce's track record to consider. In the 50-60 years they have been building nuclear reactors and the Royal Navy have been operating them, how many accidents have there been?
I'm sure our descendants would rather we ask of them that they are educated enough to operate nuclear power plants/waste facilities and research & develop future technologies than we leave them trying to figure out what to do with a scorched earth. We/they can deal with a bit of nuclear waste but they can't deal with a wet bulb temperature in excess of 36 degrees C
Google things about Chernobyl exclusion zone and you will find, that nature actually really prospers there (and no I am not saying that Chernobly disaster was a good thing). Google things like fast neutron reactor and realize, that there is a technological solution for nuclear waste, which could be implemented decades ago, if the green fools like author of this video did not throw a wrench into works (because it is not solar and wind...) But I think that current energy crisis in Europe will be rude awakening for greens like him, who think we can carry on without nuclear power - 2 maybe 3 greater blackouts in Germany and I think, He ( The Guardian fools really) will change the tune really fast.
@@AB8511 are you sure with these accusations? A leftist minority blocked real progress many years ago?
Funny that the UK has been under Tory ruling most of this time. Should’ve been no problem whatsoever to have these groundbreaking world saving policies implemented.
Why, oh why didn’t they?
@@66BranDo I was not speaking specifically about UK, but about green movement and their relation to the nuclear energy in the West in general (like Greenpeace, German Green party etc...). And their protest was not necesarily peaceful one. Google for example fate of French fast neutron reactor Superphénix, which was attacked by RPG rocket by members of Swiss green party while still under construction...
@@AB8511 then why even accuse the author and the Guardian crowd this way? You undermine the validity of what you mean to purvey. Take care.
Nice work
Don;t forget also that the LCO of wind does not account for storage or any measures to make it useful when we need it, so its not comparing like-for-like. Nuclear works 24/7, wind and solar.. not so much. Once you add in the storage costs to make comparable, the numbers are significantly higher for renewables.
Costs for base load buffering and correction should be factored into the MWh cost of renewables. In exactly the same manner, perpetuated storage of radioactive waste should be factored into the MWh cost of nuclear. That will allow for fair comparisons.
I don’t see it being favorable for nuclear power though, 10000 years is a rather long write-off horizon.
> 10000 years is a rather long write-off horizon
Only a tiny fraction of the waste is that long-lived. And there's a simply solution, let me give you a hint: where did we get the fuel in the first place? By drilling holes in the ground. Now hear me out, because I'm going to blow your mind: we can drill holes in the ground ... to put stuff in instead of pulling it out! And seriously, we can make sure it won't come back up or interact with aquifers by using deep core drilling. Stuff 2 km down stays down. The tech is here, it's already used for oil.
There's no need to store for 10.000 years, that's only because of the actinides, and just the Pu239 and it's energy potential ironically would pay for it's reprocessing.... We do it this way because spent nuclear fuel is a small amount, easy to contain and guard, and way less headache than reprocessing. New fuel from the mine is really cheap, even after enrichment. Humans are really good at kicking the can, specially in highly controversial stuff like reprocessing.
Yeah I’d have to agree with the folks above…recycling spent fuel is getting easier and cheaper with time, molten salt technologies with fluoride and chloride chemistries are coming into fruition, and then there are companies like Oklo working on breeder reactors that would essentially consume any waste left over. Even with all of those counter measures, high grade waste can be considered a product as well - for medical therapies and other tech. There’s even the possibility of beta-voltaic cells and the like in the future as that technology progresses. We’ve got enough uranium and thorium on earth to virtually last us through the death of our star. I do however worry about nuclear proliferation, but that’s extremely difficult with fluoride and chloride salt reactors due to the high levels of gamma radiation surrounding the U-235 solutions (it would fry circuitry, bad news for missiles and bombs). Given radioactive waste is considered a product for the given markets, and sold, that would radically change the price overall.
I have wondered how much the electricity produced by Chernobyl has actually cost?
@@robertprice9595 Comparing the Fukushima Daiichi's generation II reactors or Chernobyl to a generation IV SMR is like saying no one should drive cars because Pintos blow up.
Slight nit-pick: whilst we can add up the number of deaths for coal and brown coal, we can't directly add their death *rates* (to get "over 50"). The combined rate will be somewhere between 24.62 (if there's more coal) and 32.72 (if there's more brown coal); the precise figure depends on the proportion of power generated by each, but it can never reach 50 (or indeed 33!)
Well spotted.
two percentages of the same total CAN be added together - don't be stupid.
@UC3TXQc7HGjVyorKL7sxw87A not percentage .they are deaths per terawatt hour generated power
@@jeffreystarits2783 thank you for keeping your comment civil and clarifying. It’s one of the things I really appreciate about this particular UA-cam community. Have a great day!
Fair point. Well spotted.
Interesting piece of work.
I think that the SMR sizing and scaling is more to address the financing issues rather than technical issues, i.e. large up front costs (got to include construction risk contingency) with long build periods leading to significant interest payments prior to realising any commercial benefits - see the Regulated Asset Base funding model for that one. There's also the Funded Decommissioning Plan financial angle which demands early investment.
The key for me is what is going to replace oil and gas (coal has nearly gone in the UK - apart from Canal Boats and heritage railways) bearing in mind that we use significantly more Kwh of gas for heating and fuel for driving than for lights, ovens and TVs. So any discussion has to consider the huge increase in electricity demand and not think of the current scale of grid production.
Just mentioning that renewables can cover 100% of energy demand is totally ridiculous. Especially with no regard to the huge CO2 impact of manufacturing of solar panels and windmills, and the huge problem of their disposal after a relatively short service life. All in all, a flawed comparison.