My father, soon to be 91 and now totally blind is addicted to the 'Just have a think' output. Unable to read, this kind of resource is invaluable in keeping him refreshed, bright, alert and mentally active. Hearing about where modern technology is heading and all the amazing things that are happening helps give us all hope for the future in these troubling times. Thank you for taking the time and effort to broadcast this extremely interesting and informative content and allowing people like my father to engage & carry on living their best lives 👏
GO TO SETTINGS IN HIS COMPUTER IF IT IS MICROSOFT, CLICK ON THE "ACCESSABLE" KEY, THEN ACTIVATE "NARRATOR" IT WILL READ EVERYTHING OUTLOUD FOR YOUR DAD, YOU CAN SET THE VOICE TO FEMALE OR MALE SOUND OUTPUT AND EVEN CHANGE THE PITCH THAT ENHANCES LISTENING QUALITY. ON A LAPTOP USING GOOGLE THE "ACCESSABLE" KEY IS GENERALLY LOCATED AT THE BOTTOM RIGHT HAND CORNER, JUST CLICK AROUND AS IT SHOULD BE EASY TO SEE.
You are so correct that the entire concept of SMR's was fatally flawed from the start just on the economics alone; and the mass production dreams were only ever a fantasy. I'm an experienced nuclear plant engineer who is very pro-nuclear and has researched the history of nuclear power plants... and the fact is that the answers were known decades ago. For starters the concept of "mass produced" SMR's with main components transported to local sites with minimal field assembly was 1st proposed in 1955 in the annual conference on the potential of nuclear power plants (held in Europe that year - not sure which country). The 1st ever demonstration SMR was a 22 MWe thorium fuel cycle based BWR in Elk River Minnesota (USA) which many people were talking about could be erected in many small communities in the USA. Online 1964, Shutdown 3.5 years later in 1968 due to major design issues. However, it had already been deemed uneconomical as a power plant just due to staffing cost alone. For the record the USA built 17 commercial nuclear power plants in the 1960's - 1970's which would be considered SMR sized today. All of them were shut down decades ago as they were not economical to operate against the large nuclear power plants built at the same time (I am unsure of the details for the rest of the world; but, understand that the same pattern followed in other countries unless there were unique locations where building larger plants did not make any sense). As an aside: did you note that Elk River was a thorium fuel cycle (there is nothing new about thorium and the current proponents are not talking about its historical issues identified from the USA's failed attempts to develop it as a fuel source). The USA went whole hog into developing thorium as a nuclear fuel source in the 1960's - 1970's to see if it would work. Along with all the test reactors it was run in around the world the USA built and operated 2 test molten salt reactors and the Shippingport demo/test power plant (PWR 60 MWe) which showed a successful breeding thorium core could be designed and put into most of the existing PWRs in the world -). The USA then built 4 commercial thorium fuel cycle power plants of BWR, PWR, and HTGR designs. In all cases thorium did not work out (there were both technical and economic issues with thorium fuel cycle reactors) - and at least 3 of the reactors were converted to U235 fuel which worked better and was cheaper. Note if thorium is such a good choice now why are we not putting it into PWRs at this time - as at least we know that the reactor designs work well and we now have passively safe PWRs? Anyway back to SMRs (regardless of fuel source): By the end of the 1970's it was known that the concept of SMRs were dead unless it was for some kind of geologically isolated area where they only needed a small power plant and transmission line construction was impractical. If you double the size of a nuclear power plant it only takes about 40% more materials and in many cases the plant staff size does not even change. At some point the staffing size does increase modestly. As for the failed NuScale Idoho plant. 6 SMR reactors of 77 MWe output was the claimed plans (462 MWe). What is interesting is that only the 50 MWe version was licensed by the NRC and there was an expectation that the NRC would quickly license the 77 MWe version which they thought could be done during the early site preparation period: Utah Utilities & NuScale was well into the "Pre-License review" of the 77 MWe design and had received good feedback. But the License application was never submitted after they received the construction quote and the pre-licnese review was terminated. The quote came in at about $9.5 Billion to construct, with an estimated $1 Billion+ inflation adjustment during the construction period. In reality this would have been about the same price to build a single Westinghouse AP-1000 (about 1150 MWe) and the staffing for the plant would have been about the same. As for the $55 raising to $89 per MWhr for electricity cost. That was after $4 Billion from the US government for SMR development grants - so the real cost rose to well over $100 per MWhr (where a single unit AP-1000 could be built for significantly less than half of that). Note on AP-1000 construction cost: Yes a lot more was spent at VC Summer and Voglte. But the USA (and Europe with the EPR) had not built nuclear power plants in so long that no contractors and very few workers understood how to build them - and also a number of suppliers shipped fake certified components and materials to site that could not be used - or had to be tore out and replaced. Massive cost and schedule delays, and lots of lessons learned. The Idaho NuScale project used the same contractors to quote that had learned their lessons with the Vogtle AP-1000s which is why they could quote so much better (and if those contractors are used before they forget - the next USA nuclear plant will be built much cheaper and much more closer to schedule than Vogtle 3 & 4). By the way China built 4 AP-1000's with an average construction time of about 6 years. They had a delay and cost overrun on their 1st one as they were not used to working with the Westinghouse design - but once they understood it - no noticeable delays or cost overruns (and Chinese construction standards and contractors for nuclear are just as good - if not better - than their western counterparts. No shortcuts, no fake materials, and the workers understand high quality nuclear construction standards and practices). I did a consulting job for one of the Chines AP-1000 plants; and was impressed. China is now building 6 more AP-1000s (they have a licensed copy) and at least 2 other countries are starting construction on AP-1000s- and at least 15 more AP-1000s are in the planning stage worldwide. The Westinghouse AP-300 benefits from the fact that the controls and many smaller components are exactly the same ones being produced for the AP-1000's which provides a cost savings both up front and for repair parts and service down the road. No other SMR proposal can claim the same advantage. As for mass production - it will never happen for a nuclear power plant. 1) At a minimum you need a proven plant design that is known to work economically for many decades - and in the history of nuclear power plants most initial designs did not work very well at all. There is not a single SMR plant that has a proven plant design - and it will be many decades after one goes on line before we know (we only have great PWR designs now based on the lessons learned of over 4 decades of operation of about 100 unique PWR power plant designs worldwide (76 different light water designs in the USA alone). A lot of design ideas that looked good in concept did not work out and there are many early shutdown plants as it was too costly to modify the plant to a different design. Now we can pick out which design idea worked for each component, structure, and system. 2) The design of the components and overall plant must be identical for each plant. Never going to happen as each nuclear power plant site must be designed for "worst case" LOCAL earthquakes, flooding, storms, etc. No one wants to pay for a plant that is designed to handle all the worst case conditions that exist somewhere in the world. It would be massively overbuilt and expensive. 3) As for mass production. I put the number at a minimum of 500 identical units a year - for at least 10 years to make it economical to even build an automated plant. We don't need that many nuclear power plants (even if only 50 MWe each). 4) Those sketches and concepts of building skids in a frame and assembling them onsite has been tried at least twice for fossil plants. Total cost and schedule disaster. One of those ideas that looks good as a concept, but requires a level of quality and dimensional control that so far has not been demonstrated to exist. It's cheaper to just build a normal seismically designed metal framework for the site, bring in the preassembled major components (Like has always been done) and field built connecting piping and wiring. By the way, we disagree about the cost of solar and wind. I will post separately on that.
I think the SMR design makes more sense for producing heat for industrial use. Just go big for grid power. We also need to quit trying to build brand new design reactors for grid use. That is part of the problem. Instead of building what we already know we can build they always want something new and shiny. I live in Canada and would rather we just build the same CANDU reactors we built in the 70's. They are doing refurbs on them now and are currently 6 months ahead of schedule. The reactors have been extremely reliable yet the government wants to build SMRs. It makes no sense.
Actually one other thing I heard is there are a bunch of reactors in the US that are basically already built but were abandoned. They really should look at why and if it was just companies running out of money and the reactor can be saved the feds should throw some of that inflation reduction money at them to finish them. It would be interesting to know how many reactors like that are out there but it sounded like they are everywhere.
You missed quite a few SMR technologies. BWRX-300 for example, which is based off well established BWR technology has major backers like Ontario Power Generation. You missed the CAREM reactor under construction in Argentina. You miss KIROS and TerraPower. You missed the HALUE production rampup. I'm not sure why you think you need to make 10k of something before you start seeing cost reductions. Airplanes see cost reductions after the first 5-10. You're right that SMR economics is currently the biggest hurdle, but it isn't nearly as gloomy as you make it appear. It seems you might have been looking for failures rather than genuinely looking at the potential.
The glaring problem is that nuclear technologies don't live in a vacuum. In other words, while mass production and serialization may make SMRs cheaper, competing energy solutions will profit much more from the same principles of scale than nuclear. Batteries for example will drop in price spectacularly, vaporizing any cost reductions in nuclear.
Thank you for these updates. Excellent. I would love if you would do a deep dive into the economics of wind and/or solar plus requisite grid storage to be base-load ready. I believe we need something on the order of 3 weeks of storage to hit 98% availability with the low power factors of wind (40%) and solar (20%). I believe that wind/solar + storage will be far more expensive than nuclear or any other form of base-load ready power supply.
If you take into account the new Sodium-Ion battery technology, which addresses many of the problems Lithium has, and you look at historic price developments of batteries, you start to realize that battery prices likely may drop eight-fold in just 5 years, and a further eight-fold in the 5 years after that. So in ten years, LONG before you can deliver and start up even the first nuclear SMR reactor, battery prices will be 64 times cheaper than they are now. This will turn everything upside down. Cars will be able to drive 1000km on a single charge, or will cost no more than $7000. Home batteries capable of powering a typical home for a week will be affordable for anyone. Factories will install batteries that permit them to only grab power off the grid when supply is abundant/prices are lowest. And utility-scale battery parks will not be in the MWh scale but in the GWh scale.
Why three weeks? 12 hours of storage and x1.5 generation capacity will be enough for grid-based power plants for countries the size of the United States.
Always appreciate your carefully researched content presented in an eminently understandable manner. Fully Charged is fortunate to have your leading presentations in London.
This is the first video on the topic I've come across that talks about the issues with the scale factor. Using the factor I found in a recent AECL paper leads to the conclusion that a 300 MW SMR would produce 1/4 as much power as a modern large design, but only cost 1/2 as much. Given the cost of conventional designs is already too high for most customers, its difficult to imagine why they might want to consider an SMR.
As of August 2021, the US has 965 square miles of installed solar capacity, which is equivalent to 102.9 gigawatts during the 6 hours of the day the plant operates at peak efficiency. Of course they also don't work when it's raining, cloudy or snowing or of course, at night. This is roughly the size of Rhode Island, the smallest state in the country. A typical nuclear reactor produces about 1 gigawatt (GW) of electricity 24 hours a day. France has 58 nuclear power plants and they sell excess power to Europe. Many countries including Germany are switching back to coal because of the failure of renewables to actually generate usable power when needed.
The NuScale SMR situation is disappointing however for many experienced power engineers the materials issues associated with molten salt amongst other technology issues looked rather challenging. I am not suprised about the status of NuScales' solution. Nuclear plants as you note work very well once operational.A key issue is the 8-10 increase in costs since the 1970's.One of the key drivers of the cost (up to 50% of it) is the financing costs resulting from highly protracted construction times. SMR's an embryonic technology in aspects attempting to not just reduce equipment costs but also dramatically reduce construction times.In principle that should be achievable but should be far easier if we can leverage proven nuclear technology. You didn't mention the GE-Hitachi BWRX-300 which is a smaller version of their NRC-licensed ESBWR” . The BWRX-300 incorporates a range of cost-saving features, including natural circulation systems, smaller, dry containment, and more passive operational control systems. The estimated capital cost of a BWRX-300 is $2250/kWe for series production after initial units are built. The design aims to limit onsite operational staff numbers to 75 employees to achieve an estimated O&M cost of $16/MWh or ~1.6C/KwH. Westinghouse are following a similar track using a scaled down version of their AP1000 tech which is running well in China and I believe may be considered for UK sites in the 2030's. We're entitled to have some scepticism about the cost claims based on history however Ontario Power Group are installing four of the GE Hitachi units over the next few years at their Darlington site.OPG have a lot of experience in Nuclear power & have run a strong fleet of CANDU based reactors for many years.The current average cost of electricity in Ontario is C$0.141 per kWh which by global standards is highly competitive. I note your comment that Solar/Wind/Storage + Hydro are a complete energy solution however other proponents of this view such as Mark Jacobson have been thoroughly debunked by experienced engineers & scientists. I believe your comment about this being a low cost solution is questionable when full system (LSCOE costs vs LCOE) are considered as per this paper by Robert Idel. drive.google.com/file/d/1JB-x88wPQuKwWoFnxvkDAzbJ7hnM1-sj/view If the energy supply challenge is going to be solved its not going to be just one type of technology but its going to require everything we have today plus some emerging technologies including Enhanced Geothermal,Natural Hydrogen & even in some cases SMR's. I
I think the problem comes from projecting a possible future cost at scale, and applying it to what amounts to small scale technology demonstrations. Historically, nuclear reactor manufacturers have had their routine price increases viewed favourably since older generation reactors were always bespoke and therefore hard to predict. Now that SMR manufacturers need to compete on a level playing field with (mainly) wind and solar, they need to get better at cost control if they want to get funded. Rolls Royce for example, with all their experience of cost plus contracts for small reactors on submarines, are finding the commercial realities difficult. I also think flirting with molten salt and/or Thorium SMRs complicates the problem further.
Looking at the images of the Chinese SME reactors, it strikes me that "small" and "modular" are relative terms... They still look like they need a lot of work and materials to build and implement. It's not really like you can build a bunch of these and have them on the shelf for use in various locations! So, I tend to agree that perhaps larger reactors might still be the way to go, where nuclear power is the only real option for a country or location...
@@PaulG.x You can make lots of different things. The problem, as the video aptly points out, is economics. Submarines do not need to care about economics. Power plants do. So just because we can build small reactors, does not mean it is in any way financially viable or responsible to use those reactors to feed the grid. Hell, even conventional nuclear energy is close to 5 times as expensive and twice as slow to roll out as renewables. You get 10 times more bang for your bucks plopping down wind turbines and solar than you do building nuclear. And these economics are even worse for SMRs
So far we see a lot of tofu dreg Chinese built stuff (bridges, buildings, roads) falling apart in record time...I wouldn't wanna live nearby any Chinese built nuke reactor.
Small relative to convention reactors I can agree on, but theirs nothing modular about a reactor in the hundreds of MW range, your just giving up economy of scale to make a smaller footprint, smaller investment and possibly closer to load which if your utilizing waste heat for industrial processes is going to be a key.
As people dug into actually making them the scale of the projects to have any chance of being halfway economically viable grew. Pretty much the same as what happened to the current nuclear power-plants, bigger works better/more efficiently
I’ve heard other creators say that using the “a” word in your comments causes UA-cam to ignore the comment. I haven’t verified this, but if you want to help boost a channel, it might be wise to just comment that you “love all their videos” and leave it at that.
@@denismather5319 Maybe I'll hmm try to use various words but AI is going to find out, and many same-y comments are pain to user. Hmm, well, I'll try to comment on same-y thing I find in comments :)
Can you do an episode about infrastructure capacity problems in the energy transition? Here in NL there is trouble and companies and new projects can't get new power connections because the grid is full and it takes forever to expand it (because of environment, staff shortage everywhere etc).
It was clear from the beginning. Current reactors are behemoths exactly because they have to spread out the huge overhead costs. Making reactors 10 times smaller wouldn't cut it, a calculation any honest bookkeeper coud come up with. Adding exotic technology (molten salt, thorium, you name it) can only increase the financial risks. SMR work well only were cost is not a problem, e.g. US Navy.
The plans for the designs the navy is using are ultra top secret but we're pretty sure they use very highly enriched fuel, possibly even weapons grade and they run at super high temps and pressures, way above what is being proposed by all the civilian designs. And why not? Money is no object for the military.
I had a video recommended to me by the algorithm that was gung-ho on thorium, but pretended that the only thing standing in its way was those nasty Greenies, to which I say, demonstrate a commercially viable thorium reactor, just one, then we'll talk.
I disagree here. Capital cost are a major factor in overall nuclear power plant costs. So decreasing the cost of each individual unit and reducing the building time will do a lot, because the cost of finance is reduced. Even building a power-plant of 10 small units instead of 1 large would be better, because it can produce power as soon as the first unit is installed. Moving to a low-pressure technology such as molten salt, liquid metal or gas cooled will improve both safety overall and make every component cheaper as it should not be build to high-pressure specs. Of cause "new tech" will be more expensive initially, but in the long run can be constructed much cheaper than PWR. Molten Salt Reactors in particular are "president safe" and can be left without supervision in theory. In practice you would have a small staff.
@@migBdk You trade pressure resistance problems with corrosion resistance ones. The fact that MSR have been thoroughly tested in the '50 and '60 and then abandoned should at least be a reason of concern and doubt.
Thank you for the commentary. I have been reading about the time and cost overruns for nuclear power projects for several years. The Vogtle 3 and 4 are many years overdue and billions over budget.
Excuse my ignorance but werent SMR's were supposed to be truckable hence the name "Small". The "SMR's" illustrated today by yourself look huge, slightly smaller than a current large Nuclear power plants.
Yeah, that was the first wave of the idea. Thing is, it is just completely unviable economically (but also for safety-management, national security, etc) to do that. We do have reactors that could work at that scale - in military submarines - but they are no good for achieving the rest of the targets.
The cut off for SMR's is said to be 300MW. Anything below that has, one, never been built by any country, ever and is considered "micro." Only the smallest of the micro reactors (under about 13-14 MW) could possibly be considered modular and truckable. The popular image advanced and encouraged by the modular reactor investment industrial complex is an entire nuclear plant on several semi trailers. Drag them to your location, wire them in, throw the switch and sit back and enjoy nearly free electricity for close to eternity. The truth is that only THE REACTOR itself is going to be modular and truckable. All the rest of the very considerable infrastructure will have to be built on site and will be permanent, not moveable, just like the big reactors already in service. And rather than delivering power for nearly ever, the modular reactor designs I've seen have a projected life of between 9 and up to 20 years. Some scenarios have the life span down to 6 years but a reasonable across the board expectation would be around 10 years.
You've been huffing to much nuclear copium unfortunately. The reactor is small enough it might fit in a large house but a reactor isn't a nuclear plant nor a containment facility.
The reactor itself is small, but it still needs to live in a containment structure, and in most places, also needs a grid connection that can handle its output.
Whenever anyone tells me that modular reactors are the future and the only problem is that nobody has invested enough in them, I point to the worlds major navies. SMR's have been used in nuclear subs for nearly 70 years now. All the major powers have spent countless billions on trying to make cost effective small reactors for subs, aircraft carriers and other military ships - the military advantages of these are enormous. And yet virtually no progress has been made by any of them - the latest subs from all the major powers are still using the same basic technology as the original nautilus (apart from some experimental designs like the Soviet reactor for the Alfa subs), and if anything, they are falling behind to the latest generation of hybrid and AIP propulsion systems. And this is in an area where cost isn't much of a consideration.
@@stl1321I saw a comment on a wiki page that the Bechtel A1Bs in the Ford class carriers have 92 or 93% U235, which is highly enriched weapons grade stuff. That is nothing like the 5% in commercial nukes that need to be refueled every 2-3 years. Those things go like 25 years. I wonder if it wouldn't be worth sticking them in large container ships, and parking a couple of soldiers on it to guard it. You could save a lot of oil.
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Why would you compare them, they're not at all the same thing..? Different design, different fuel, different requirements. The only thing similar is size.
More than that - read Admiral Hymen Rickover's retiring testimony to the Congress. The Admiral was the father of the US Nuclear Navy. The safest and best in the world and the finest experts in nuclear safety. And about the only group that actual understands and practices "Safety Culture". As he retired he told the Congress that every commercial nuclear reactor should be immediately shutdown. He went on to say that at the first moment that a workable alternative to nuclear reactors exists for submarines and naval vessels that they too should all be shutdown and decommissioned. That is from THE premiere expert on nuclear power.
At the end of the day we need something that works and can be deployed now. Like it or not, the pipeline for nuclear is strewn with bureaucracy and overwhelming cost and simply stating that nuclear is safe doesn’t change either that or the fact it’s safe precisely because of so much of that cost. As Dave said, solar and wind work and they’re ridiculously cheap; in Australia we have issues during the day because so much solar floods the grid. Keep working on nuclear research - sure - but we don’t have years to sit on our hands waiting for a pipe dream.
That solar flooding the grid thing is a real problem in California too. Unfortunately it has made us more reliant on short cycle natural gas plants, not less. Now CA is scrambling to revise net metering policies to deal with all the excess solar capacity. You could say it is a “good problem to have” but it really isn’t good for those who have no ability to shift load to cheaper times of the day (renters and low income).
@@mere_cat Same here on the USA east coast. They are making a lot of solar and wind but grid scale battery storage is non existent because of costs and grid demand. The coal plants are shutting down so combined cycle gas plants are springing up, but even those need around ten years of planning/permissions and construction to put up. The USA NRC realized this and are making a special regulatory process for SMR plants. NuScale stock almost doubled on this news a few days ago.
There isn't enough copper and Lithium in the world to provide the solar panels and batteries required. Plus there is the damage done by mining and disposal. The total cost of the impossible solution here is astronomical but typically left out of the calculation by proponents.
@@deaddocreallydeaddoc5244 "There isn't enough copper and Lithium in the world to provide the solar panels and batteries required." - Source/citation required! Plus there is the damage done by mining and disposal. - You mean just like open cut coal mines and crude oil cantamination on land and sea, including all the rehabilitation and clean up required. "The total cost of the impossible solution here is astronomical but typically left out of the calculation by proponents." - Source/citation rrequired!
You might be interested to know that down here in Australia our Conservitive Political Parties have adopted SMR as the corner stone of their climate action policy. While they were in government they spent years denying climate change, then delaying doing anything about it. Now that they are in opposition they have finally got on board and recognised that the public wants something done. So their new policy will be focused on the role out of SMR's, "good reliable base load energy not unreliable renewables". This is where SMR's big advantages over renewables comes through. This technology is not available yet, it is over the horizon, years away. So they can have a policy that looks like they are doing something about converting the grid away from coal and gas while all the time using more coal and gas and slowing down the roll out of renewables. SMR's rescue coal and gas by delaying their replacement.
The description of the party is a bit short on storage for time smearing aka base load. Nuclear is at least reasonable for low level base load. Can you address the storage issue? Not beyond daytime/overnight, but for a week of low wind and also low solar as we get in swing seasons. Tidal - yes that will keep on going and if the moon disappears we have other issues. But we don't have much tidal.
The general solution to this is a geographically dispersed generating system. Hydro, or pumped hydro are for some base and medium term fill, and gas peakers in there for emergencies. As has already been shown, Nuclear is just far too expensive when compared with the alternatives available today.
Interconnector cables are the solution, which we already have, are getting more of, and would have even more if NIMBYs were exiled from our shores as they rightfully should be.
Why is it that so many ' private ' companies seem to always want, or even demand, that the taxpayers need to underwrite their for profit business ? Subsidies and long-term tax abatement are the most popular of late and are often handed out like candy here in the USA. In the long term, when these businesses are making huge profits, they seem to forget that we even exist.
Well, if you could get someone else to pay the costs and you just pocket the profits... Why wouldn't you? And for the politicians it's an obvious win too. They get powerful friends and big donations, by using your money. The people who are at fault are the voters, never punishing the members of their own party who engage in those behaviours.
Because governments don't want to do this themselves like they have in the past, they want to rely on companies. Companies are for profit entities. They not gonna do it unless someone pays them to do it. It is that simple. I am not defending companies, but it is just another example of privatization of industry usually ends up this way - companies not really willing to take high risks for very long time.
@@tristanridley1601 "The people who are at fault are the voters, never punishing the members of their own party who engage in those behaviours." I would extrapolate that thought's direction to say it is the problem with the election laws and methods. Too often, punishing your own means rewarding those who would do far greater harm in your own opinion. Voting in all countries is the choosing of the lesser of evils which is still better than getting the most sadistic of evils via lack of real elections. I am all in favor of leaving our current forms of representative democracies and republics behind for something actually democratic.
@@tristanridley1601 plus look at the "if you don't" - someone else does EX with EV cars/batteries the "no brainer" option is to invest in CHINA and build them there for a LIST of reasons all economic and politicians KNOW they will loose elections if under there watch the "good jobs" all end up in CHINA and everything we buy comes from CHINA 40 years ago it was JAPAN so even if CHINA is NOT the economic hotness anymore the USA/UK/EUROPE is NOT GOING to be it
@@Pecisk even large companies NEED to borrow money for major projects and they will NOT find the money they need UNLESS they can prove they will make a profit AND pay the investments back and again a "safer" bet will pay out better and likely the "safer" one is NOT the one you want like another COAL plant is likely to be "safer" then a SMR plant
energy transitions are nothing new and will not just go away after 2050. Nuclear will always be a part of the energymix purely because of physics. when the US and Europe turned their back to nuclear in the late 80s the industry's dissapeared, the consequences of these decisions is what we're feeling right now.
they may not be "too late" as they might "arrive" to replace the hard to replace fossil plants that solar/wind are ill suited for without huge batteries AND long line transmission line likely running through "hostile" neighbours plus in our current geopolitical world there are few countries willing to rely on a foreign country for there "base load energy needs" also places like Canada that when the -40 winters hit there is NO WIND and short daylight making a high demand - low supply issue and SMR would be better then KEEPING a few COAL/GAS plants "on standby" as the temptation to "run" them is to great for there owners assuming it is NOT 100% public OR the whole network is ONE owner
Not as much as windmills, trust me, I have seen the logistics of transporting over ocean, roads and maintenace of windmills and until the blades that has to be changed every 2 years. The tons oil each windmills needs to be running. The diesel generator that is needed to get the windmill starting to turn.
Was in nuclear power for 18 years. When they were first being talked about I was asking questions about cost that no one was answering. SMRs totally go against the mantra of 'economies of scale'. Sure, make the reactor in a 'factory' but (as your graphics and video show quite nicely) the reactor vessel is only a vary small portion of the total size and cost. The cost per megawatt hour must be substantially higher than a 1100 megawatt unit. So, IMO, SMRs are being WILDLY oversold. But this does not mean there is no place for them. Bilibino and the Akademik Lomonosov have shown there is a place for them - when you need consistent power in the middle of nowhere. But you build them for reasons other than saving money. BTW, nice presentation and great references!
What I can't keep track of is whether or not there are new reactor generations that might be more economical in some way, and just haven't been built yet because of paranoia about everything under the sun. It's easy to see how the economies of scale can't work with these ones, but they might still fit niche use cases. Maybe even the next gen reactors won't work, and only fusion will be relevant in the distant future (I'm sorry, ten years from now...).
@@jonevansauthoras far as I can tell there are, and they're not being built as even pilot plants due to disinterest and skepticism powered by persistent public phobia, and pressure from 'Big Green.'
SMRs are intended to capture an 'economy of scale' the same way that Henry Ford did - by inventing the assembly line. See, he didn't invent the automobile, - Daimler was making autos a couple decades before Ford Motor Company ever got started - he invented a consistent, repetitive way of producing them; before roads, gas stations, or service shops were more than novelties just like the vehicles they serviced. Now the power output problem IS a problem - it has a serious impact on the profitability of such an operation. Which is why cost and QC controls are so important, for both safety and profitability. What we have that we didn't have before is reliable CAD/CAM processes that can reliably produce identical parts that will pass regulatory standards without needing redesign & refabrication.
7 місяців тому+1
At least you don't need to spend money on earthworks like large nuclear reactors need.
But there are not that many places in the world so geographically isolated that running powerlines to them is more expensive than building, shipping and operating an SMR. Which means the market is not big enough for mass production - the very way that SMR is supposed to become affordable. SMRs would be even dearer - much dearer - as a niche product.
I have similar views. It's hard to see how nuclear as a whole will make a dent in the electricity market before 2050. In fact, given the age of most of the fleet, it would be surprising if current output levels can be maintained till then. 30 years of non-investment can't just be ignored.
Yeah, we should just give up on it then... No need to better anything because we already stopped funding it. Seems like the most logical move for humanity. Oil forever! 💪
@@Robert_McGarry_Poems there is a third option, also mentioned in the video. More renewables plus storage. I mean, it has become clear over decades that the costs for nuclear won't come done. How many more decades does it take?
While we continue to develop new ways to generate electrical power it seems odd that the push to develop less power hungry devices gets less attention when that seems to be the best area to achieve power savings. For instance, addressing the power needs of cold storage facilities that use freezers, refrigerators, lighting, etc, all seem like an easier way to achieving the goal of using less power and making what we do generate, go further. V = I x R is a pretty simple math equation when you get down to brass tacks.
The counterexample is LED lighting, which has saved gigawatt•hours of energy rellacing incandescent, sodium, halogen lighting. Also heat pumps are far more efficient at moving heat around then simply burning fossil fuels; since they're not that's good at providing instantaneous heat, they may encourage better building insulation. Energy is cheap enough that people aren't highly incentivized to use a lot less of it, but that is also reflective of our highly consumptive lifestyles. Fly less, drive less, eat less meat, live in a smaller house, etc.
Energy demand is going to go up not down, I'm afraid. Even if chips are more efficient, they use more power for higher level stuff. We need to develop everything which offers more efficiency, reduced energy demand, better heating and cooling and so on, simultaneously. Some of which offer very minor advantages but scale well. But we can't solve future energy requirements, with a population rocketing to 11 billion at least, most of whom still need energy and have effectively, none, by reducing energy demand.
I thought two issues with SMRs were that the grid would need upgrading in multiple locations to cope and using uranium as fuel, cooling water needs to be securely sourced. The latter was a problem for France with conventional NPPs during a dry summer when rivers were depleted. Coastal plants are too much at risk from rising sea levels, and alternatives to Uranium, that may require less cooling, are still in the experimental stage of development. Are these concerns incorrect or valid?
The working Public pays for everything! They pay for the plant, security, fuel, personnel, Decommissioning and spent fuel storage. BUT the government owns the fuel! WHY, because they know that the BTU content of a "Spent Fuel Assembly" from a LWR is worth 3 to 4 times it's weight in GOLD! Don't think they don't intend to ultimately resale that to us also. THE GOVERNMENT CAN PRINT MOONEY, BUT THEY CAN NOT PRINT WEALTH! They use the money to take your wealth so that they can give it to someone else so that they can remain in POWER!
Perhaps it’s a bit off topic, but I fully expect that the development of fusion power plants is going to butt up against the same constraints of minimum economic scale as these SMRs, only on a scale that dwarfs even the largest, modern fission reactors now. My wild guess is that in a hundred years or more, there will be working fusion power plants, but they will be a scant few, mind bogglingly colossal constructs surrounded by the high energy demand industries that they will primarily feed. All the rest of us will be getting by just fine on renewables by then. That’s all assuming all the current negative trends get resolved without ending civilization as we know it. Wish I could be more confident of that.
That's just wishful thinking. I see no reason to expect any mind bogglingly colossal constructs because we will have alternatives that are vastly less expensive. We already have them. mind bogglingly colossal = colossally expensive. Think of the security needed to guard such a plant, which would represent a single point of failure for all or much of a country. That would fit nicely with a government that was far too powerful for the good of the citizens.
High energy demand Industries plug into an electrical grid. Besides fossil fuel refineries burning their own dirty product to power their operations, I can't think of industries that make their own electricity. At least continuous power generation from fission has been demonstrated and companies are worrying about manufacturing and operational costs. Continuously loading fantastically precise targets for laser ignition fusion seems insane, and maintaining a tokamak or stellarator containing plasma at zillions of degrees is "a problem to be solved later." R&D is fun, but no guarantee of commercially practical outcomes.
@@incognitotorpedo42in a century our grandchildren may have gotten sick of the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere that’s still creating havoc and decided to capture some. Without plating the planet in solar cells there would never be enough energy to do anything effective, but build enough giant continuously running fusion plants and maybe there will be enough energy to begin to actually do real carbon capture. Or our descendants may have something else to do with massive amounts of power that we haven’t even thought of.
I won't disagree with any of you video except to say that in remote and northern locations micro nuclear looks very attractive, being able to move from huge thirsty diesel generators that need to have fuel flown in to an installation that just runs for a couple decades makes for a LCOE equation unlike most areas.
Yes, at high latitudes solar is bad and snowy places are not so good for wind turbines either. But some of these places are just really unsuitable for people to live. Some of the towns are there to enable oil drilling and once that stops it may be more sensible to either abandon the town, or turn it into a tourist place where the population is low in the winter and higher in the summer when solar can work a bit. The high cost of an SMR to keep the town going in a post FF world may make it unviable.
Yes you can always point out some cases that solar, wind, hydro and storage can’t solve. We will get to these problems later. First we must address the overwhelming majority of the problem that we already know how to solve now. Also cheaper simple solutions exist for your example: biodiesel, E-fuels derived from green hydrogen, ect. But nuclear is a unrealistic option.
@@markbernier8434 true, large bit remote mining locations are probably the strongest case for SMRs. They would either need to be very small ones or perhaps the ore processing could be located onsite to share the reactor output. That reduces the weight of goods needing export. You would need to be sure the seam was going to last a long time to make it all worth it of course.
those places usually aren't that populated (because living there isn't really that nice), so they represent a LOW VOLUME market.. which is economically breaking things.
the installed cost of solar is under $1/W (only slighly higher for wind). the installed cost of new nuclear is $5.50-$8/W. you can literally build 5x more solar farm wattage than nuclear. if spread over a wide area, you only need to average 20% output from your solar farms to satisfy the same amount of load, which is guaranteed for 97% of days (during daylight hours). if it is particularly sunny and you're producing more than anyone can use, that's fine. it's still cheaper to "waste" capacity most of the time. over time, you'll have energy intensive industries co-locating with solar farms. clinker/cement production, for example, has the majority of operating cost in energy input. operating intermittently means they would need more kilns/hardware up front, but it would pay for itself in the long run due to near-free energy. and lets face it, the southwest US have so many heavy sun days that down days would actually be somewhat rare. the main thing we need is more high voltage transmission lines, which will be helpful no matter what energy technology winds out over the next decade. kettle bundled 765kv transmission lines lose about 5% over 1000mi. so you can get 500% more power per dollar by building solar, and lose
It might be overly optimistic but transatlantic and transcontinential superconductors similar to SMR are a practical technology but insanely expensive. However unlike SMR once you build these lines you can transmit an enormous amount of power over them.
@@Furiends That sounds like flying cars to me. Awesome idea, but completely unpractical, and something that will never happen. All for the same reason. It will always be cheaper to drive on land than to fly, and likewise it will always be cheaper to overproduce with renewables or to put tons of batteries, than to build such complex interconnections across the world.
Definitely an apples to oranges comparison. First, when you talk about installed cost of solar you are talking about the wattage of the panels. But the panels only produce when the sun shines, and are affected by whether the sun is shining perpendicular to the panels. Roughly, this means something like you need to derate by (5/24) for good solar locations or even more in Europe. Then you need to factor in storage to solar, and you have to commit to how many 9's of reliability that you will have. On small scale operations, like an off grid house, the battery and inverter costs are much higher than solar panels. Batteries don't last as long as solar panels, and are more likely to be damaged. You are focusing on the least important aspect of solar in the current technological environment. You need to talk about the installed cost of batteries
@@DrBernon "It will always be cheaper to drive on land than to fly" flying can easily be cheaper than driving a car somewhere. It's also technically more fuel efficient. But to address your point my comparison isn't to suggest superconductoring powerlines are anywhere near practical just that I think they have a much better chance than SMR does.
@@richdobbs6595 No. He has a point. Installed power being 5 times cheaper is a very big issue for nuclear. Because those panels will generate less in the real world, but not 5 times less. And the storage issue is also somewhat irrelevant, because we are now on a point of the renewable journey that we still don't need that, and also, batteries are getting cheap at such a rate, that maybe once we need that storage, the cost got so low, is also a no-brainer to simply use batteries.
From an ex Koeberg Nuclear Engineer and Shift Chemist I couldn't agree more that the economic model the SMR represents is still born especially so for the financial model assumed to its project implementation involving, as a matter of inevitability, to 'cost overrun' and almost predictable failure for indeterminable 'market pricing' to be borne by the end user for the profit modelling to be proven burdensome both in comparison to wind & solar and for the economic irrationality of private commercial electrical supply in general.
Obviously not ! Coal is the most contaminating fossil fuel. It releases CO2 but also mercury and other air contaminants. We don't need coal fired power stations, and yet China builds an enormous amount of them.
Real Green = most energy generated per square meter, FAKE-GREEN = least energy generate per square meter.. Don't be a fake green. We could have had 1000x more powerful BREEDER FISSION REACTORS, using much cheaper fuel (Thorium) decades ago if it wasn't for you Fake-Greens.. You've even thrown over a $Trillion globally at Fusion Power which although compact, produces NEGATIVE ENERGY PER METER SQUARED, Liberal Lefty Wasters!
China's certainly installed some impressive solar PV propaganda opportunities. One day, they may even connect some to a grid. Probably soon after they stop painting dry grass with green paint.
The reason MSR's were not implemented and Light Water Reactors (LWR's) were was a result of the Navy's need for Nuclear Submarines. It was a matter of national defense so cost was a secondary factor. Further, since the reactors were submerged, a ready heat sink was always available for free. That is not the case for terrestrial reactors with multiple trains of High Head injection, Accumulators, and Low head injection required to protect the core. Also because of economics, the fuel design for commercial reactors is very different than that of naval reactors which makes the naval reactor fuel much more accident tolerant. When Dr Weinberg made the statement that the public would become aware of the level of radioactive release that would result from a fuel failure event, they would require ever more stringent safety measures, and the reactors would become cost prohibited. He obviously saw 50 years into the future. Because of this and other statements, he was fired as Director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and funding for MSR's was halted. It is also important to note that the focus of the US at the time was the production of Plutonium, also for national defense. This required Heavy Water Reactors of which 6 were built a SRS. This was to be followed by Fast Breeder Reactors which were also capable of Plutonium production and would make LWR's sustainable. When Carter shut down reprocessing, Fast Breeder technology and the ultimate future of LWR's were put into doubt! It is not commonly known, but a commercial LWR can not operate with more than 1% fuel failure. If more than 10% of the fuel fails, the LWR is done! No one will likely enter containment for the next 10 years with the plant eventually decommissioned. At Three Mile Island around 1/3 to 1/2 of the fuel was damaged.
Very interesting fact about LWRs. I had been pulling for the Pebble-Bed design for a good while; hearing about the successful failure-mode demonstration in the UK was very encouraging. Alas, journalists who can't seem to get any technical subject right (except legal cases) are bound to send us back to the stone age, if not by malice then by incompetence.
The thing about Three-Mile Island was it was a commercial disaster, but never a public-health danger. Carter said so himself in a press briefing, and a 5-year gov't. study confirmed it. Once again, I blame an ignorant and sensationalist press for stunting support for the best renewable on the planet.
Probably much more important than fitting the category of Small Modular Reactor, are the numerous efforts to develop SMR's that are actually Gen IV designs, that get their cost reductions not from repacking Gen III fuel rods and control systems in smaller bundles, but from reexamining the way nuclear can be made to work and design walk away safe, cheaper more cost effective reactors. Three companies to follow are Terrestrial Energy, ThorCon, and Copenhagen Atomics.
Please show me a new "generation IV" design that was not developed many decades ago, and in many cases tested. Molten salt reactor designs were developed during the Manhattan Project in WW II - literally over 80 years ago. I've looked at about 30 "next generation Generation IV designs" on the internet in the last year or so - and all I see are old rehashed concepts most predating 1970; except that the people rarely even mention the history and what is known about those designs and possibly test reactors that failed.
There are no "walk way safe" designs. All require attention within a matter of days. None will survive neglect in case of war, or plague or economic collapse. There are no "cost effective" small reactors (nor big ones). The very best and biggest require massive subsidy. Nothing built this century will ever pay back the construction costs. All Smaller designs will be fundamentally inefficient due to the increased surface area to volume, hence poorer neutron economy. That seems to have already sunk the NuScale proposal. The simplest and most achievable SMR concept. Of the "fast" reactors: The SA vs Volume problem is greater. They depend purely on high levels of enrichment, and all the proposed fuels are at the limit of "civilian" operations, for lacklustre performance. Designs that depend upon breeding will be inefficient at power production. Designs that are dependent on "waste burning" will be inefficient at power production. Both of those above will have complex waste disposal or recycling requirements. Designs involving Molten Salts depend on reliable materials that do yet exist, and may not for decades. Expect all of them to flop.
Cheap and reliable storage of energy is a major roadblock for renewables, this means that carbon will remain for a further 100 years in the Worlds energy mix, even if it's not in Europe's (But I have a sneaky feeling it will be, they can't even give up Russian energy)! Solar is great in Northern Europe in the Summer but absolute rubbish in the winter, solve that problem and we will all have solar if it's an economical price, and getting better batteries than lithium ones for energy density and fire safety!?!
@@TomTomicMicI highly doubt that with the kind of money that's being thrown at renewables and battery technology. In fact, when you think about it, many modern countries are aiming for around 70% electrical generating in their countries by 2030, considering over that time, there's going to be a big push on EV cars and heat pumps, we are well on the way to a clean future in a lot of modern countries, especially in Europe. Energy storage is an issue that needs to be solved, but it doesn't seem to be holding back the renewable adoption much and with how cheap it's getting, already cheaper than fossil fuels and likely going to continue to get cheaper and better, I think it's safe to say that unless some other radical tech comes along, the path is looking like it's going to be renewable, and it's looking like it's going to be a big push on that over the next decade. Carbon won't last another 100 years, not at the current rate that things are changing, I think fossils have around 50 years left at the most, at least in most cases, because once we get close to not needing it, the rest will happen at a quicker pace, renewables is already cheap now, it's going to continue to get cheaper, and in the case of solar and looking at some of the new tech that's coming out, solar could be plastered everywhere and be done cheaply in the coming decades, that will only up a lot of avenues of energy generating beside rooftops. As for Europe and Russian oil, you have to remember that the EU is a big economy, you can't make that kind of transition overnight, but it's actually remarkable how much they've done in such a short space of time, a lot more can be done over the next decade. As for solar, it's not as good in winter, but it's not as bad as you suggest, especially if you have it setup to take advantage of the winter conditions, but regardless, with how cheap it's getting, we're going to end up plastering it all over the place that it's likely not going to be that big of an issue and at the end of the day, renewable energy like solar and wind are proven tech that works, we hear about many other promising tech, but until any hit the market, are safe and can be done cheap, renewable is the safe bet for the next few decades.
Thanks for the update Dave. It did look like a promising technology when it was first touted but it seems like it's chance to really shine has passed already. Perhaps it still makes sense in places where solar, wind etc is in short supply and the premium price is worth paying. It may not be the great saviour but perhaps we don't want to stop the research entirely just yet?
Since the late 1940's we've pissed away scores of billions of tax dollars on researching small and micro reactors and all that's happened is the problems keep getting bigger, a functioning design further away. It's time to stop wasting tax dollars on a science fiction fantasy.
Solar is so cheap now that places where solar is "bad" just means double the number of solar panels and it's still cheaper. There is also the possibility of making superconductoring transmission wire cheap enough to cross the ocean. That's a much more practical idea than tiny reactors everywhere yet doesn't have the kind of crazy money behind it that SMR does (or did).
@@Furiends Oceanic transmission lines are a bad idea. Any country relying on them is making itself subservient to the providing nation to decide the price and in turn national productivity. Should war break out it's simple for a single boat from the opposing nation to drag their anchor over the line cutting the power. You scale up the number of connections and provider countries but you'd also be scaling up the cost and complexity.
@@hurrdurrmurrgurr 1) you can already do this with internet cables 2) with abundant energy collection much less efficient energy storage (like hydrogen) can be used. 3) from a nationstates perspective "dragging an anchor" vs "pressing the nuclear button" are basically the same. Both would be acts of war. 4) we already have pipelines transporting fuel and are easier targets than a thin cable 5) transatlantic cables serve mutual economic benefits so both sides of the world so you'd be shooting yourself in the foot.
One thing very infrequently mentioned is that solar has now dropped below the cost of transmission, which will indentivize local production. Yes, batteries will add cost, but it can be even cheaper if that energy doesn't travel 1000+ km in the first place. Even if competitors got their energy for free, they would still be uncompetitive as long as they are operating on the national grid.
The good safety track record of nuclear is because of the huge effort made to make it safe. Inherently, what is being done is dangerous. And notice that wind and solar were even better on safety, with no worry about what would happen in a war or if society broke down to the point where the plant was not managed properly.
He's definitely not the first to say nuclear isn't an option because it takes too long. Maybe nuclear will fill a role we haven't thought of though. I'm not ready to ignore any option just yet.
eeeh.. maybe stop and think about it. The world record holder for building out windpower (that by the was was way faster than solar) was denmark. World recordholder for nuclear power is Sweden. During the period Sweden built out nuclear power. Sweden on avrage per capita, built the same capacity in nuclear for 2 years, as denmark did in Wind over 10 years
The need for SMR has passed. In the UK we just need 130% wind, supported by solar and battery. With the Morocco HVDC interconnector we will have stable, green abundance of cheap energy. Improving nuclear for big shipping is a valid spend of research money though.
The thing about NuScale's $89/MWh estimate is that without subsidies it's actually $119/MWh. The thing was the head of the Idaho member of UAMPS, an industry veteran, had calculated the cost to be $130/MWh. Compared to $82/MWh for both wind & solar with lithium based storage currently according to independent analysis by Lazard. The difference also being solar, wind, and storage have a proven track record of declining costs, with newer technologies hitting the market with even lower costs. Nuclear, on the other hand, has a proven track record of rising costs even with reduced regulation and newer, simpler designs that were supposed to be quicker and cheaper to build (AP 1000 & EPR). And as France found out the hard way, having most of your reactors being the same design means that a defect found in one, a 24mm deep crack found in a pipe, which carried radioactive water, with a wall thickness of 27mm meant that they had to shut down over half their fleet for inspections and repairs IN THE MIDDLE OF AN ENERGY CRISIS. That on top of having to operate some of the rest of their fleet at reduced capacity due to inadequate cooling as the rivers they relied on were too warm. Honestly with a track record like that, how could an objective, rational person think nuclear is a good option?
To be fair, a key argument for SMRs is that power costs for the "Nth of a Kind" would be substantially lower due to mass production techniques and shorter build times.
@@gibbonsdpSMRs have the potential for future cost reductions, if enough are made by any one manufacturer, and everything works as hoped. Whereas wind and solar have 20 years of proven consistent and rapid cost reduction with no sign of stopping in any time soon. When it comes to investing cold hard cash those two things are very different prospects
@@gibbonsdp which has to be taken with a BIG pinch of salt considering the nuclear industry's long history of substantial cost & schedule overruns. Even with France's much vaunted nuclear fleet, independent analysis has shown that their claims of low costs are due to heavy subsidies and very lowbal estimates of O&M costs. When the subsidies are factored out and realistic O&M costs based on real world experience are factored in, the claimed cost of $40/MWh ends up being $90/MWh. But that analysis was before the latest kerfufle. With the much reduced capacity factor due to the shutdowns and reduced production due to the cooling issues, along with the repair costs for the cracked pipes, are factored in the costs will be higher.
@@gibbonsdp Those mass production assumptions are asymptotic, and the kind of scale needed to hit competitive pricing with solar and wind (which also benefit from economies of scale) for any form of nuclear is into the hundreds of thousands or millions of units, even for ill-conceived radium dial watches. Which for any form of nuclear exceeds the materials available on Earth by hundreds of thousands or millions of units.
the cost of renewables is going down because theres constant investment in them and their infrastructure nuclear is going up in price because its just not being worked on at the same scale, theres no experienced operators, builders, designers, even in countries with a history of having those things nuclear has just been forgotten about and an entire advanced industry isnt something you can cheaply build over night as important as renewables are, having a base load of nuclear is always going to be a useful thing also something interesting to note, its weird how people always bring up the subsidized cost of renewables or nuclear and say its too expensive without subsidies, while conveniently ignoring that fossil fuels are subsidised 7 trillion dollars per year globally wonder how much fossil fuels would cost per mwh without those subsidies to get a more fair comparison
@ae Nope, these are just single reactor power plants and are way too big to really be considered SMR, the people calling them that are just desperatly goalpost moving in response to years of failure to bring anything like what they promised to market. To actually be the size of submarine reactors (which are the inspiration for the whole idea) they need to be down around 40-50 MWe.
Name one major city and industrial sector that is due to be powered by solar and batteries in the next two decades. I'm not talking about some backwater I'm referring to somewhere like Tokyo, Paris, LA, Hong Kong, London, NYC, Mexico City. Just name one. These cities are where SMRs will shine, renewables and batteries have their place also, it will take a mix to fix this CO2 mess we have gotten ourselves in.
@@anydaynow01 1. I generally agree with you. Commercial demand balancing can come from arrays of capacitors and fuel cells (Metal Hydride, not pressurized or cryogenic H2). Urban and industrial supply should be generated by Nuclear for baseline, and some NG to meet peak demand. 2. [CO2] increases near the earth's surface promote forest greening by a power law relationship, and themal insulation by only a linear relationship. Furthermore forest greening increases thermal absorbtion during daytime and reradiation at nighttime, since mature trees circulate water from the water table and act as heat exchangers. I have this on authority from NASA's own raw satellite data and an atmospheric chemist. The 'immanent anthropogenic crisis' and the 'Green New Deal' are a raw deal, a con job intended to hobble the West while Asia marches onward.
SNRs only make sense in a few isolated cases. Aircraft Carriers and other large naval ships make sense for nuclear reactors. The other possible places for SNRs are relatively isolated communities in the Arctic where you do not have sunlight for half of the year. However, with large scale sodium based battery systems and a few backup generators, that will still be much cheaper than a reactor. Don't forget that EVs with bidirectional charging are also part of the grid.
As usual, the devil is in the details. Your closing generalization that wind, solar and batteries can replace nuclear is fully in that category and is generally wrong for full dependence on those unreliables, particularly with the extremely limited amount of battery storage currently anticipated. One of those details is that supplying even a week of battery storage to withstand a storm of that duration would cost much more than equivalent nuclear capacity of any size or category. More specifically, provision of seasonal storage to firm up solar capacity in Winter would cost an order of magnitude more than nuclear. That is because annual solar capacity factor for provision of energy is very low - about 15% in New England, 10% in the UK. And that is allocated with about a ten to one ratio between Summer and Winter, so that Winter solar capacity factor may be about 3% while Summer could be 30%. That means to provide the equivalent amount of solar energy in Winter, without seasonal storage, would require about 10 times as much solar capacity as in Summer to serve the same load in Winter. Also remember that charging such large batteries will necessitate far more solar overbuilding than the 30:1 capacity ratio with nuclear in Winter just to be able to recharge the batteries while serving load. So much for kWh to kWh cost comparisons that neglect the nuclear kW to more than thirty solar kW ratio in Winter. Unfortunately with the anticipated transfer of heating from fossil fuels to electric, all northerly areas will become Winter peaking, meaning the system capacity will have to provide far more energy and capacity in Winter than in Summer. The electric heating load in northerly areas will be at least four times as large as Summer air conditioning loads and will occur at night - not during sunny hours. The extreme ratio will be at least four to one Winter to Summer because air conditioning needs to remedy only about 20-30 degrees F difference outside to inside, while heating needs to remedy 50-70 degrees F at a much lower COP in Winter than in Summer on at least a two to one COP ratio. (Heat pump COP can be more than 3 in Summer compared to 1 -1.5 in Winter. ) And as far as time to build nuclear is concerned, please note that recent EHV transmission lines to convey large amounts of solar and wind to where they would be needed have taken 15-20 years to construct for even short lines. Traversing multiple states in the US to connect favorable solar or wind areas to distant loads would likely take even longer to accomplish than building new nuclear more locally. A small amount of local solar, wind and batteries can be useful, but will never compete with nuclear on a net zero basis on either cost or time required to implement, disregarding the immense waste of land area for collecting and transmitting such diffuse sources of unreliable energy.
A running capacity of 90% is really really optimistic. Look at France. They had huge problems where during winter they had to shut down almost all their nuclear plants for corrosion tests and maintenance. And then during summer, the rivers got so hot they couldn't cool their plants and it had to be shut off again. People don't want to face up to the fact that in practice, nuclear plants are not always operational. They are down for maintenance, tests, inspections like 10 to 30% of the time. While for solar and wind that will be much lower. Additionally, the cooling water shows the biggest pollutant of nuclear power that is almost never talked about: hot cooling water. Nuclear plants, or any traditional power plant, consume an incredible amount of cooling water. Which when you build them near a river or an inlet can be quite problematic. People may say that heat can be used to heat houses. But who builds a nuclear reactor near a residential area that already has a district heating? As always with nuclear, it is all a pipe dream begging for government subsidies.
You do realize that the capacity factor of solar is 50% at best, under ideal conditions, right? And while France has had some recent issues, those issues are the exception and not the rule. Look at the United States. We have a far larger nuclear fleet, and 95%+ has been the trend for a couple of decades now.
@@rdormer Why would the capacity factor of solar matter at all? Even if it is 0.1%, so what? I don't get it. US has barely build any new nuclear plants in the last 30 years. And all attempts have been failures that led to cancellation of future plans. This despite our need to phase out fossil. Solar and wind are replacing fossil AND nuclear at the same time. Fossil is losing but nuclear is not able to get even 1% what fossil is losing because solar is just too cheap and wind is just too appealing to the free market.
@@Prometheus4096 My dude, you're the one who bought up capacity factor, I'm just responding to your incorrect statement about the capacity factor of nuclear. Since it occurs in the context of a discussion of alternatives, with solar one of the leading alternatives, then its fair game to compare their capacity factors. And sure, US construction is moribund - as long as you ignore Vogtle and Watts Bar. The thing about SMRs is, it was never really about the small size being an economic benefit, it was about trying to leverage standardized designs instead of making - and this was a brilliant way to describe it - each project a piece of bespoke engineering. SMR may not be the best way to do that, but France - since you brought them up - clearly shows the benefits of this approach at ANY scale. Throwing the nuclear baby out with the SMR bathwater is a really braindead idea. Go ahead and get your renewables - they're awesome. But there's more to a stable grid than just picking the lowest LCOE across the board. All those renewables are going to need baseload to back them up - that's a fact. So far that's invariably been natural gas, which kind of defeats the point, no? So, if not nuclear or natural gas, what baseload power source do YOU propose?
@@rdormer I was talking CORRECTLY about the capacity factor of nuclear. You were the one that brought up solar. Solar works independent of capacity factor. As does wind. Nuclear does not. Nuclear is already dead. So I don't know why you are trying to argue against throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
@@Prometheus4096 Friend, no power source works "independent" of capacity factor. It's a fundamental figure of merit that applies to all power sources. And again, I brought up solar because, if we're not going to use nuclear, what do you and your fellow critics propose that we use instead? And no, you were not correct, btw. Here, take a look at a primary source with actual data: www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-power-most-reliable-energy-source-and-its-not-even-close
There was a US General defending the high cost for nuclear power plants in Aircraftcarrier and Submarines to the congress. He explained scientist said it will be small, cheap and simple but in fact it was bigger, very complicated and far more expensive than expected so we should knew since the 60‘s 👍
@@hurrdurrmurrgurr He wasn't arguing against nuclear-powered submarines, aircraft carriers, or icebreakers, he was explaining why the military needed so much money for them when the original promise was "cheap, easy, simple."
I notice how you didn't mentioned that alot of "Green power projects" are not baseload, because their not consistent and for the final coup de gra. Many current renewable energy projects in the west are close to bankruptcy due to the increased rate hikes for the past year. You see "Green power" cost alot of green. Cause if it was all a bed of roses as you stated the governments of the world wouldn't be looking to Nuclear SMRs. Which by the way have been working wonderfully in UK and US nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers for decades!
If you buy anything from the US, you become a slave to them. Once I purchased a data acquisition card from the US (from a US company called IOTech), I had to guarantee that (i) I shall not sell it to another fellow (ii) I shall not use it for anything other than I have declared (iii) I shall not reverse engineer the hardware etc etc etc. And I was not technically the owner of the hardware that costed less than 1000 USD. It is better to buy from China or Russia.
The U.S. has HUNDREDS of TONS of Pu239 and not only has no need for more, is spending billions to dispose of that crazy excess. With a 24,100 year half life it is not going bad anytime soon.
This is an objectively misinformed statement. First of all, the number of nations with nuclear power far exceeds the number of nuclear armed militaries. Way more reactor nation states than bomb nation states. Second of all, power generating nuclear, especially the predominant pressurized or boiling water designs, are basically the worst possible way to go about building or supporting a nuclear arsenal. Third of all, once you have a nuclear arsenal, you don't need continued production to keep it going.
Michael Barnards has pointed out that Wrights Law only applies if a manufacturing process goes through 10s of 1000s of iterations, that's when 'learning' leads to savings at scale. Correct, and by the same token the entire "power block" of a plant where electricity is produced via steam can no longer expect any improvements as it is really mature tech. That reduces the percentage of possible innovation over the project volume considerably.
Yes, SMRs use steam - and steam is an extremely old technology with extremely well known economies of scale. It is not just the "nuclear" bit that is the big economic issue in SMRs.
We’re very fortunate that the solution is relatively low tech and extremely low risk - solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and battery plus other storage methods.
Yep. You lost me on renewables backed up by battery and hydro power. Given the variability of renewables and the immense power needed to stabilise the transmission frequency the scale of backup power and its durability makes this approach highly questionable particularly for Australia where transmission distances are much more profound than the UK. There are a multitude of issues involved around this proposed configuration making it a complex balancing act fraught with risks. The old saying is ... Keep it simple!!
Simply the direct opposite of the truth. No national electricity grid can be kept simple - they are often described as the most complex machine ever built. But the smart inverters on battery farms do a far better job of synching grid frequency than the traditional method of big hunks of spinning metal, either in steam turbines or syncons. That in fact is the reason the first large battery farm in Australia - Horndale in SA - was built, not for pure storage. Most current battery farms in Australia make some of their money from FCAS (Frequency Control Auxiliary Services) on top of selling power when the sun goes down; they are quickly putting syncons out of business.
At least in the U.S. your conclusion is spot on. Currently, long-term contracts for wind and solar with battery storage are in the $20 per Mwh range and dropping. A SMR at nearly $60 is a loser and when you bump that to $90 it's a massive loser.
7:10 "Governments underwriting claims" means the financial side doesn't make any sense. SMRs cannot be insured because the foreseeable downside is not able to be covered financially in any market. Given production of many more units which may have defects in manufacture, the quality control, maintenance, monitoring, and failure potential go up exponentially. There has been great push back from the nuclear industry to reduce regulation, reclassify high level waste as low, etc. Combine reduced regulation, cheap production, and government insurance for profitable energy companies and you have horrific accidents in the making.
While watching the video I thought solar, wind and battery are increasing so quickly and the prices dropping so fast that it looks like small scale reactors might not be able to compete based on cost alone. Your similar observation at the end of the video seems to bear that out.
exactly. proponents are just salesmen hoping someone will commit before the hammer falls. Then, they will squeeze those few suckers on the basis of "sunk costs".
Wind and some aspects of Solar are established Technologies. Batteries, not yet. However wind and solar do not have the power density for a given footprint and are cyclical. So, all viable alternatives are worth exploring.
@@raoulberret3024 I think this video just demonstrated yet again that nuclear isn’t viable (anymore). Small-scale is too small. Large-scale is too late. And large-scale battery storage is not yet rolled-out at scale, but the tech is absolutely well-established
@@raoulberret3024 For a technology that is 'not yet' it should come as a bit of a surprise that they are being rolled out across the UK, to profitably take energy from the Grid overnight and sell it back at peak (Planning Permission being sought for a 180MW storage facility in the countryside, not 3 miles from where I sit) . Tesla developed this model for their EV Superchargers.
@@pauleast4372 Correct. However most people can rely on a variety of transportation options, especially in cities, and many have a ECE. Electricity on the other is a critical resource. Few would be OK to resort to coal or dear I say wood unless in an emergency. IMO, the British government is doing the right thing. Pursue any and all reasonable technologies. The energy mix should not be unipolar.
I think you've missed the point a bit here with SMR's. Sure economics are a hurdle. But they're the biggest hurdle to traditional to large scale nuclear also and the reason why there's been so few new projects. It takes an enormous amount of time and capital to build one and investors often don't see their money back for a long time when compared to other power generation. And SMR's are a new technology. All new technologies require more capital up front to get going. If you believe in climate change, you know the damage that can be caused by weather. Literal billions of dollars for every hurricane. How is that the cheaper alternative? We need to invest in technologies like this, regardless of the cost. Our negligence today is costing our future generations their livelihoods.
Nuclear power plants are extremely expensive and complicated machines requiring constant maintenance. In contrast, solar/battery is cheap, widely available and deployable by most able bodied homeowners. Nuclear is also a very centralized (controlled) distribution of energy compared to solar's decentralized self sovereignty model.
And solar has a much more scalable investment. However, as of yet solutions to energy storage are fairly centralized. This can be mitigated with houses that are very well insulated at least for residential but it's very expensive.
@@Furiends millions of EVs with Vehicle 2 Grid capability plugged into the grid form a fantastic GWh-scale distributed energy storage system. Companies will turn networks of EV owners who are willing to discharge a small part of their battery in times of need into a virtual power plant.
@@skierpage I'm curious to see whether owners of electric cars can really be convinced to let the battery discharge into the power grid. At least here in Germany there are many who are skeptical and expect a severe loss of battery capacity, so that it is not financially profitable for the owner. (Personally, I think the fears are exaggerated. I just want to point out that this is used to create political sentiment.)
@@skierpage I agree with this in part. But it's idealistic. There's two major problems. If EVs use battery switching you need at least twice as many batteries (thus V2G becomes more like standby batteries to grid) but is impractical just because of the huge amount of batteries needed. If you keep the batteries in the cars then they need to drag around all the extra weight all of the time and then need to fast charge on trips which practically speaking means mirroring the storage capacity of the grid at a high percent of passenger cars defeating the purpose of V2G. So in reality, I think it'd be a combination of semis using centenary wires, passenger EVs using removable supplemental batteries for trips, some amount of V2G mostly for stability rather than capacity and fast chargers that would cost a hecking lot more at night.
One other thing. Once viable nuclear plants are developed buildout can be quite fast. France nuclearfied it's whole electrical grid in ten years. If the US continued it's reactor buildout at the same pace as in the seventies it's electric grid would have been over 90% nuclear in the nineties. So all these naysayers saying that nuclear can't possibly be a contributor to a climate solution simply are not paying attention to history of nuclear.
I really appreciate your thoughtful and clearly well researched content. In relation to nuclear, while it may be that DC megavolt transmission is on it’s way and that this will allow countries with a lot of solar to export to those with less, i don’t think that this or the locally generated solar or wind is likely to fulfill the need resulting from the transition from gas and coal towards cleaner sources as the base load requirements for any country are likely to considerably increase with the evolution to EVs. I saw a piece from one of the congressional hearings where the energy companies were talking about the increase in load expected from just cars as EVs and if recollection serves the energy companies were indicating that not only could they only fulfill a % of the expected increase, they had no plan to get to where they need to be to serve the whole lad. I am sure the same situation exists here in the uk. I think it would be interesting to look at an analysis of what we have today, what plans there are for increases and what we think the overall load will look like come 2030/2035 when the EV transition really happens. I don’t know the answer but my guess is that we are also woefully underserved for power in the UK. To have a quick look at what might be needed, my house is reasonably average and I use around 15 kWh per day, and an electric car had a battery in the range of 35-70kw. I.e. 2-5 times the daily load of my house. Now it’s of course unlikely that I will need to fully charge an electric car with a 70 kw battery every day, but even if it’s every 3-4 days, that’s still a huge increase over today in terms of power generation needed on a house by house basis and in the UK where the weather is at best unreliable, I’d expect base load needs to be higher than in some other places with more reliable climates. It honestly doesn’t feel like our government (and potentially most governments) have a handle on the scale of what they are trying to commit to with the move to EVs.
EVs will need very little increase in grid size because a grid's capacity is set by PEAK demand only, not how much power is moved over a year. And EVs overwhelmingly charge off peak, and with proper ToU (Time of Use) electricity tariffs would do so even more. Not only tha, if EVs move to V2G (again, it just takes proper tariffs to incentivise that) they will actually REDUCE peak demand. Those utilities were, as so often with those who want any excuse to stay with fossil fuels, bullshitting.
@@kenoliver8913 While I appreciate your view, the point of my comment was to suggest that it might be an interesting topic to discuss in an episode as it’s not a topic that has been covered and I think it’s important. With that said the national grid currently has an article on impact of EVs and they are suggesting that it would represent around a 10% increase in overall load to move I think they quoted 80% of cars to EVs. As a country in the UK at least, we can see that we do not have lots of spare capacity in the grid and it is absolutely certain that the peak capacity of the grid includes all the sources of generation, we have seen a number of instances of the course of this winter where Octopus flux have offered payments for reducing load at peak times. While I agree that base load and peak load are not the same, the more that the base load approaches the peak load, the more we have risk in our generation. It’s very nice that we have upcoming technologies that will allow vehicle to grid scenarios and also I am sure we will have the ability to turn down or turn off EV charging at a central level in order to avoid load shedding issues, we don’t have what is needed today and so a conversation on the modelling of how the load will look is likely a good starting point for everyone. We need facts and figures to work with and not opinions.
@@grahamheath9957 I think we are in violent agreement here. Yes, it needs to be properly and formally modelled - and the estimates I've seen from that modelling suggest about 10% extra grid capacity from full electrification of transport. That is very, very different from what those self-interested US utilities were claiming - it is dreadfully unfortunate that AGW has become a tribal conservative versus liberal issue in the US.
I was honestly surprised when I discovered that renewables are new growing faster year over year (measured by net energy produced) than nuclear power ever did. Even if you compensate for the increased world population since the 1980s, when nuclear grew at its fastest, renewables are still growing faster. And the growth is still accelerating. So how can nuclear ever hope to catch up now? It’d take a miracle breakthrough (Helion maybe?) Some people seem to assume renewables will hit a brick wall when the need for energy storage becomes critical. But it seriously feels like the world is totally on track to handle that challenge. There are dozens of really good solutions out there, some already operating at large commercial scale, and some with really promising pilot plants. And then there’s advanced/deep geothermal kind of looming in the background. Threatening to offer all the benefits of nuclear with none of the downsides if the cost comes down further. And you just know a big portion of the oil and gas industry will jump on that opportunity in order to exploit the expertise they have.
I think at least for dissolved fuel molten salt reactors (which is what most people talk about), the two big problems are corrosion, because you have to use fluoride salts to dissolve the fuel, and proliferation risk because it tends to require high purity online chemical processing that would make producing weapons-grade Pu-239 or U-233 relatively easy. If you want a high temperature fast breeder reactor, sodium/potassium metal, supercritical water, or gas cooled seem like better bets because they don't have the corrosion issues. I'm personally a fan of sodium metal because then you can use magnetohydrodynamic circulation pumps to cut down on moving parts in the primary coolant loop and oak ridge had one for a while during the early nuclear reactor testing.
They need lots of research. They might be feasible, but they are not slam dunk or easy. Well, to be fair, nothing in nuclear power science is. I wouldn't be dismissive about their previous failures though, China and EU still invest quite a lot to find out if it is doable.
@@thamiordragonheart8682 molten salt is also used for CSP plants and has proven very problematic for corrosion. If that happened with radioactive molten salt that would be a mix larger problem. Though the automatic overheat shutdown of the freeze drain plug sounds awesome, what good is avoiding a meltdown if your already molten radioactive core material just leaks out because a pipe corroded!
Woo! Brave stance on SMR's! I could really use this information to persuade my province to go big on their nuclear reactor because they seem to gravitate towards SMRs. We might as well make a big reactor at the heart of our province and put batteries and renewables in the rural areas because they are easy to transport and there is more room to install them.
Good video Dave. Just a comment though with respect to nuclear safety. Nuclear is not inherently safe, but in the same way as aviation, it has a good safety record. This good safety record is because of safety systems, training and design. But this is costly to set up and maintain and vulnerable to natural events and war.
Excellent analysis, lot of valuable information. Showing - if this was necessary - that the hype from "start-ups" promise a lot and deliver little. Just applying to France, this is absolutely true, wind and solar need to ramp-up responding to the huge electrification needs. However with a large share of nuclear, there is a need for replacement and new "standard" nuclear may not be sufficient, SMR could be added quicker than additional traditional plants, adding heat to power generation with interesting efficiency, contributing to fill the gap due to decommissionning of reactors from the 70's. But given the urgency and technological uncertainties, it is critical to be ready to do without SMRs in the 20 coming years (which does not prevent working on it).
We will always need some technology for a reliable baseload, and wind/solar is not it. Batteries will never be it. Nuclear is the only viable option. So if you will have to build a nuke plant anyway, you might as well make it bigger and do away with large solar/wind installations.
Once again, great information and presentation. Nuclear and hydrogen may have niches that they can fill, but for right now, we need to continue full speed ahead with the technologies we can see are solving these problems.
I work in the utility-scale solar industry. Solar plus BESS currently costs around 6 cents/kWh. Recently, I completed a 490 MW solar plus 100 MW BESS project in Mississippi so my numbers are factual.
I think you missed the fact that the US, GB and a few other countries are already operating small modular nuclear reactors. They're just doing it as a military powers. I think you also misrepresented horizontal scale. Pressure vessels and other high value engineering systems can gain pretty significant cost reductions in series as low as 10 or 50 units. Will they ever replace that large massive economy of size scale? Of course not. But they maybe an excellent stop gap to take offline aging coal plants, or provide intermittent supply in disaster relief.
Sometimes time makes the final Verdict. I'm in Western Australia and many years ago it was floated to "drought proof the State by pumping water from the Ord River Dam. it has a storage capacity of 204,719,140,000 cubic feet (5,797,000,000 cubic m). So plenty to do just that, and it sounded good on paper. But recent studies have established that it would consume considerably more power to pump the water the 3,000+Km's to the area of need than to desalinate the sea water readily available off the coast.
Thank you. In Australia, the opposition has just announced that if they get elected, they'll build seven reactors, the first to be completed by 2035. In the meantime, I understand that they support the ongoing use of gas and coal. They actively campaign against wind and solar. The latest popular phrase is "loss of amenity." Farmers complain that onshore wind farms will spoil their view and residents in some coastal towns are worried that turbines located 20km offshore will also spoil their view.
Wrong take, firming cost of renewables is as or even more prohibitive than nuclear. Why so many companies and countries are returning to nuclear? Because with hydro it's the only technology that has proven capable of replacing meaningful amount of fossil fuel power plant on a grid. Look at what France did to respond to the oil shocks and what Ontario did during their coal phase out lately. Nuclear played a major role in both of these cases. Energy security is also a huge part of this equation, the sheer energy density of nuclear power allows countries to stock years of electricity production in just a few warehouses.
You forgot mineral resource consumption. Wind and Solar are cheap because metals are cheap for now (thanks for machines they are running with oil)… SMR is efficient in term of metals usage. It can become cheaper ecological energy in short future.
Well as the video pointed out a larger nuclear reactor is going to be more efficient in terms of materials usage then a smaller nuclear reactors, so in your imagined word of minerals shortages it would make sense to build a few large nuclear reactors rather then many small ones.
@@francesconicoletti2547Even the small ones are more efficient materials usage than battery, solar, and wind. Avantage SMR is the capacity to do faster deployment. We're running of out time.. end of oil is really soon. Nobody seems to realize. They're still counting money like we'll have infinite minerals and oil resources. No economic projection is pathetic.
Thanks for all your hard work and putting the info across in an easy to understand format. Im not surprised you’ve been invited to the everything electric show at London, did that invite stretch to the Harrogate show. 😊
Love your videos because you not only skeptical but dig deep and looking for some opportunities. Most of similar youtube channels just do hype and barely scratch the topic.
Great summation of the SMR story and I totally agree with your view that we probably don't need them. Seems to me that it is more of a niche issue pushed by those who might seek to profit from a few enthusiasts looking for the new and shiny solution. I have been a follower of SMR for some time and despite many claims of sorting it out, I actually wonder whether it would ever be in a position to compete with wind, solar etc, which has enormous scope for improvements to efficiency, thus costs. Loving your show.
I dont believe it NEEDS to "compete" with renewables BUT is a BETTER alternative where renewables FAIL and carbon fuelled plants are the other option but that makes the costs even WORSE as that would require LOW volume production so NO "horizontal scaling" and hard to build locations like FAR north Canada / Russia ETC
The extra grid capacity expansion construction costs are ignored in all these nuclear posts. Nobody does the calculations. Yes, I know the existing grid is available, but grid electricity is only 15% to 18% of all energy used.
Those calculations do exist. The EU for example has been pushing the members over the last two decade to significantly increase the interconnection capacity after a number of regional outages, including e.g. France end of 1999. The current goal 20% transmission capacity to the neighbors relative to the total capacity. As so often, the main problems are politicians and locals fighting against any new line or making ridiculous demands like underground high voltage lines.
@joergsonnenberger6836 What I am saying is 5 to 7 times more electricity generation is required if all electric world and fossil free future. So, every country has the same bigger electricity needs. Bigger grid capacity needs. THESE ARE THE NUMBERS THAT NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT. When you see many rows of transmission towers in long parallel lines, it is because more capacity was needed. People just do not know or see the amount of poles and wires and transmission lines. Asian cities often have a mass of wires in the streets in towns as more people want more electricity. Bigger capacity is expensive to every country, and 5 to 7 times bigger is bigger than the national debt. Now, if you are a government guaranteed private generator business, you will have a private monopoly.
@@stephenbrickwood1602 The numbers differ depending on the existing energy mix. Germany for example has been using a lot of gas for heating compared to France, where a lot of heating is done electrically (and no, not with heat pumps either). A factor of four for the growth of transmission capacity is quite reasonable. Now that's local and regional capacity foremost. The method of generation affects how much interregional capacity is necessary and that's what the high voltage lines are, e.g. anything 110kV and above. Nuclear power can be produced anywhere, so it would allow building fewer transmission lines. Of course, if the nuclear plants have problems (France cough cough), that can result in shortages as well. It's very complicated.
@joergsonnenberger6836 you don't understand. Nobody understands these transmission construction costs. Nobody understands the length of the national electrical grid. Millions and millions and millions of customers. In Australia, the national GDP is $1.5 trillion. Grid length 1 million klm. Grid construction costs 1 million $/klm 5 times more capacity $5 TRILLION. Plus, new generation plants construction costs. $2 BILLION each. × 400 SMRs Plus, staffing costs. Particularly nuclear quality staffing 3 shifts 24/7. But this is only little Australia. 25 million people. There is an answer, but you must see the problem first.
My father, soon to be 91 and now totally blind is addicted to the 'Just have a think' output. Unable to read, this kind of resource is invaluable in keeping him refreshed, bright, alert and mentally active. Hearing about where modern technology is heading and all the amazing things that are happening helps give us all hope for the future in these troubling times. Thank you for taking the time and effort to broadcast this extremely interesting and informative content and allowing people like my father to engage & carry on living their best lives 👏
GO TO SETTINGS IN HIS COMPUTER IF IT IS MICROSOFT, CLICK ON THE "ACCESSABLE" KEY, THEN ACTIVATE "NARRATOR" IT WILL READ EVERYTHING OUTLOUD FOR YOUR DAD, YOU CAN SET THE VOICE TO FEMALE OR MALE SOUND OUTPUT AND EVEN CHANGE THE PITCH THAT ENHANCES LISTENING QUALITY. ON A LAPTOP USING GOOGLE THE "ACCESSABLE" KEY IS GENERALLY LOCATED AT THE BOTTOM RIGHT HAND CORNER, JUST CLICK AROUND AS IT SHOULD BE EASY TO SEE.
You are so correct that the entire concept of SMR's was fatally flawed from the start just on the economics alone; and the mass production dreams were only ever a fantasy.
I'm an experienced nuclear plant engineer who is very pro-nuclear and has researched the history of nuclear power plants... and the fact is that the answers were known decades ago.
For starters the concept of "mass produced" SMR's with main components transported to local sites with minimal field assembly was 1st proposed in 1955 in the annual conference on the potential of nuclear power plants (held in Europe that year - not sure which country).
The 1st ever demonstration SMR was a 22 MWe thorium fuel cycle based BWR in Elk River Minnesota (USA) which many people were talking about could be erected in many small communities in the USA. Online 1964, Shutdown 3.5 years later in 1968 due to major design issues.
However, it had already been deemed uneconomical as a power plant just due to staffing cost alone.
For the record the USA built 17 commercial nuclear power plants in the 1960's - 1970's which would be considered SMR sized today. All of them were shut down decades ago as they were not economical to operate against the large nuclear power plants built at the same time (I am unsure of the details for the rest of the world; but, understand that the same pattern followed in other countries unless there were unique locations where building larger plants did not make any sense).
As an aside: did you note that Elk River was a thorium fuel cycle (there is nothing new about thorium and the current proponents are not talking about its historical issues identified from the USA's failed attempts to develop it as a fuel source). The USA went whole hog into developing thorium as a nuclear fuel source in the 1960's - 1970's to see if it would work. Along with all the test reactors it was run in around the world the USA built and operated 2 test molten salt reactors and the Shippingport demo/test power plant (PWR 60 MWe) which showed a successful breeding thorium core could be designed and put into most of the existing PWRs in the world -).
The USA then built 4 commercial thorium fuel cycle power plants of BWR, PWR, and HTGR designs. In all cases thorium did not work out (there were both technical and economic issues with thorium fuel cycle reactors) - and at least 3 of the reactors were converted to U235 fuel which worked better and was cheaper. Note if thorium is such a good choice now why are we not putting it into PWRs at this time - as at least we know that the reactor designs work well and we now have passively safe PWRs?
Anyway back to SMRs (regardless of fuel source): By the end of the 1970's it was known that the concept of SMRs were dead unless it was for some kind of geologically isolated area where they only needed a small power plant and transmission line construction was impractical.
If you double the size of a nuclear power plant it only takes about 40% more materials and in many cases the plant staff size does not even change. At some point the staffing size does increase modestly.
As for the failed NuScale Idoho plant. 6 SMR reactors of 77 MWe output was the claimed plans (462 MWe). What is interesting is that only the 50 MWe version was licensed by the NRC and there was an expectation that the NRC would quickly license the 77 MWe version which they thought could be done during the early site preparation period: Utah Utilities & NuScale was well into the "Pre-License review" of the 77 MWe design and had received good feedback. But the License application was never submitted after they received the construction quote and the pre-licnese review was terminated.
The quote came in at about $9.5 Billion to construct, with an estimated $1 Billion+ inflation adjustment during the construction period.
In reality this would have been about the same price to build a single Westinghouse AP-1000 (about 1150 MWe) and the staffing for the plant would have been about the same.
As for the $55 raising to $89 per MWhr for electricity cost. That was after $4 Billion from the US government for SMR development grants - so the real cost rose to well over $100 per MWhr (where a single unit AP-1000 could be built for significantly less than half of that).
Note on AP-1000 construction cost: Yes a lot more was spent at VC Summer and Voglte. But the USA (and Europe with the EPR) had not built nuclear power plants in so long that no contractors and very few workers understood how to build them - and also a number of suppliers shipped fake certified components and materials to site that could not be used - or had to be tore out and replaced. Massive cost and schedule delays, and lots of lessons learned. The Idaho NuScale project used the same contractors to quote that had learned their lessons with the Vogtle AP-1000s which is why they could quote so much better (and if those contractors are used before they forget - the next USA nuclear plant will be built much cheaper and much more closer to schedule than Vogtle 3 & 4).
By the way China built 4 AP-1000's with an average construction time of about 6 years. They had a delay and cost overrun on their 1st one as they were not used to working with the Westinghouse design - but once they understood it - no noticeable delays or cost overruns (and Chinese construction standards and contractors for nuclear are just as good - if not better - than their western counterparts. No shortcuts, no fake materials, and the workers understand high quality nuclear construction standards and practices). I did a consulting job for one of the Chines AP-1000 plants; and was impressed.
China is now building 6 more AP-1000s (they have a licensed copy) and at least 2 other countries are starting construction on AP-1000s- and at least 15 more AP-1000s are in the planning stage worldwide.
The Westinghouse AP-300 benefits from the fact that the controls and many smaller components are exactly the same ones being produced for the AP-1000's which provides a cost savings both up front and for repair parts and service down the road. No other SMR proposal can claim the same advantage.
As for mass production - it will never happen for a nuclear power plant.
1) At a minimum you need a proven plant design that is known to work economically for many decades - and in the history of nuclear power plants most initial designs did not work very well at all. There is not a single SMR plant that has a proven plant design - and it will be many decades after one goes on line before we know (we only have great PWR designs now based on the lessons learned of over 4 decades of operation of about 100 unique PWR power plant designs worldwide (76 different light water designs in the USA alone). A lot of design ideas that looked good in concept did not work out and there are many early shutdown plants as it was too costly to modify the plant to a different design. Now we can pick out which design idea worked for each component, structure, and system.
2) The design of the components and overall plant must be identical for each plant. Never going to happen as each nuclear power plant site must be designed for "worst case" LOCAL earthquakes, flooding, storms, etc. No one wants to pay for a plant that is designed to handle all the worst case conditions that exist somewhere in the world. It would be massively overbuilt and expensive.
3) As for mass production. I put the number at a minimum of 500 identical units a year - for at least 10 years to make it economical to even build an automated plant. We don't need that many nuclear power plants (even if only 50 MWe each).
4) Those sketches and concepts of building skids in a frame and assembling them onsite has been tried at least twice for fossil plants. Total cost and schedule disaster. One of those ideas that looks good as a concept, but requires a level of quality and dimensional control that so far has not been demonstrated to exist. It's cheaper to just build a normal seismically designed metal framework for the site, bring in the preassembled major components (Like has always been done) and field built connecting piping and wiring.
By the way, we disagree about the cost of solar and wind. I will post separately on that.
Possibly the greatest youtube comment ever.
That's the kind of insight I was hoping to find in the comments!
Holy crap, now THAT is a detailed comment!
I think the SMR design makes more sense for producing heat for industrial use. Just go big for grid power. We also need to quit trying to build brand new design reactors for grid use. That is part of the problem. Instead of building what we already know we can build they always want something new and shiny. I live in Canada and would rather we just build the same CANDU reactors we built in the 70's. They are doing refurbs on them now and are currently 6 months ahead of schedule. The reactors have been extremely reliable yet the government wants to build SMRs. It makes no sense.
Actually one other thing I heard is there are a bunch of reactors in the US that are basically already built but were abandoned. They really should look at why and if it was just companies running out of money and the reactor can be saved the feds should throw some of that inflation reduction money at them to finish them. It would be interesting to know how many reactors like that are out there but it sounded like they are everywhere.
Just love that you are updating all these techs. Thank you.
Glad you like them!
You missed quite a few SMR technologies. BWRX-300 for example, which is based off well established BWR technology has major backers like Ontario Power Generation. You missed the CAREM reactor under construction in Argentina. You miss KIROS and TerraPower. You missed the HALUE production rampup.
I'm not sure why you think you need to make 10k of something before you start seeing cost reductions. Airplanes see cost reductions after the first 5-10.
You're right that SMR economics is currently the biggest hurdle, but it isn't nearly as gloomy as you make it appear. It seems you might have been looking for failures rather than genuinely looking at the potential.
The glaring problem is that nuclear technologies don't live in a vacuum. In other words, while mass production and serialization may make SMRs cheaper, competing energy solutions will profit much more from the same principles of scale than nuclear. Batteries for example will drop in price spectacularly, vaporizing any cost reductions in nuclear.
Thank you for these updates. Excellent. I would love if you would do a deep dive into the economics of wind and/or solar plus requisite grid storage to be base-load ready. I believe we need something on the order of 3 weeks of storage to hit 98% availability with the low power factors of wind (40%) and solar (20%). I believe that wind/solar + storage will be far more expensive than nuclear or any other form of base-load ready power supply.
Thanks for your support.
If you take into account the new Sodium-Ion battery technology, which addresses many of the problems Lithium has, and you look at historic price developments of batteries, you start to realize that battery prices likely may drop eight-fold in just 5 years, and a further eight-fold in the 5 years after that. So in ten years, LONG before you can deliver and start up even the first nuclear SMR reactor, battery prices will be 64 times cheaper than they are now. This will turn everything upside down. Cars will be able to drive 1000km on a single charge, or will cost no more than $7000. Home batteries capable of powering a typical home for a week will be affordable for anyone. Factories will install batteries that permit them to only grab power off the grid when supply is abundant/prices are lowest. And utility-scale battery parks will not be in the MWh scale but in the GWh scale.
Why three weeks? 12 hours of storage and x1.5 generation capacity will be enough for grid-based power plants for countries the size of the United States.
Always appreciate your carefully researched content presented in an eminently understandable manner. Fully Charged is fortunate to have your leading presentations in London.
This is the first video on the topic I've come across that talks about the issues with the scale factor. Using the factor I found in a recent AECL paper leads to the conclusion that a 300 MW SMR would produce 1/4 as much power as a modern large design, but only cost 1/2 as much. Given the cost of conventional designs is already too high for most customers, its difficult to imagine why they might want to consider an SMR.
As someone who is small and modular himself, this technology has always appealed to me
Quality, not quantity! Lol. I'm turning into a unit myself after taking steroids for bronchitis, hahaha.
Hahaha!😂
I feel for you, bro.
Small is beautiful ...
But are you nuclear?
As of August 2021, the US has 965 square miles of installed solar capacity, which is equivalent to 102.9 gigawatts during the 6 hours of the day the plant operates at peak efficiency. Of course they also don't work when it's raining, cloudy or snowing or of course, at night. This is roughly the size of Rhode Island, the smallest state in the country. A typical nuclear reactor produces about 1 gigawatt (GW) of electricity 24 hours a day. France has 58 nuclear power plants and they sell excess power to Europe. Many countries including Germany are switching back to coal because of the failure of renewables to actually generate usable power when needed.
The NuScale SMR situation is disappointing however for many experienced power engineers the materials issues associated with molten salt amongst other technology issues looked rather challenging. I am not suprised about the status of NuScales' solution.
Nuclear plants as you note work very well once operational.A key issue is the 8-10 increase in costs since the 1970's.One of the key drivers of the cost (up to 50% of it) is the financing costs resulting from highly protracted construction times. SMR's an embryonic technology in aspects attempting to not just reduce equipment costs but also dramatically reduce construction times.In principle that should be achievable but should be far easier if we can leverage proven nuclear technology.
You didn't mention the GE-Hitachi BWRX-300 which is a smaller version of their NRC-licensed ESBWR” .
The BWRX-300 incorporates a range of cost-saving features, including natural circulation systems, smaller, dry containment, and more passive operational control systems. The estimated capital cost of a BWRX-300 is $2250/kWe for series production after initial units are built. The design aims to limit onsite operational staff numbers to 75 employees to achieve an estimated O&M cost of $16/MWh or ~1.6C/KwH.
Westinghouse are following a similar track using a scaled down version of their AP1000 tech which is running well in China and I believe may be considered for UK sites in the 2030's.
We're entitled to have some scepticism about the cost claims based on history however Ontario Power Group are installing four of the GE Hitachi units over the next few years at their Darlington site.OPG have a lot of experience in Nuclear power & have run a strong fleet of CANDU based reactors for many years.The current average cost of electricity in Ontario is C$0.141 per kWh which by global standards is highly competitive.
I note your comment that Solar/Wind/Storage + Hydro are a complete energy solution however other proponents of this view such as Mark Jacobson have been thoroughly debunked by experienced engineers & scientists. I believe your comment about this being a low cost solution is questionable when full system (LSCOE costs vs LCOE) are considered as per this paper by Robert Idel.
drive.google.com/file/d/1JB-x88wPQuKwWoFnxvkDAzbJ7hnM1-sj/view
If the energy supply challenge is going to be solved its not going to be just one type of technology but its going to require everything we have today plus some emerging technologies including Enhanced Geothermal,Natural Hydrogen & even in some cases SMR's.
I
I think the problem comes from projecting a possible future cost at scale, and applying it to what amounts to small scale technology demonstrations. Historically, nuclear reactor manufacturers have had their routine price increases viewed favourably since older generation reactors were always bespoke and therefore hard to predict.
Now that SMR manufacturers need to compete on a level playing field with (mainly) wind and solar, they need to get better at cost control if they want to get funded. Rolls Royce for example, with all their experience of cost plus contracts for small reactors on submarines, are finding the commercial realities difficult.
I also think flirting with molten salt and/or Thorium SMRs complicates the problem further.
Thanks for your continuing supply of things to think about.
Looking at the images of the Chinese SME reactors, it strikes me that "small" and "modular" are relative terms... They still look like they need a lot of work and materials to build and implement. It's not really like you can build a bunch of these and have them on the shelf for use in various locations! So, I tend to agree that perhaps larger reactors might still be the way to go, where nuclear power is the only real option for a country or location...
Well , you build them like that if there is a market for those.
I have heard you can build them small enough to put them in submarines
@@PaulG.x You can make lots of different things. The problem, as the video aptly points out, is economics. Submarines do not need to care about economics. Power plants do. So just because we can build small reactors, does not mean it is in any way financially viable or responsible to use those reactors to feed the grid. Hell, even conventional nuclear energy is close to 5 times as expensive and twice as slow to roll out as renewables. You get 10 times more bang for your bucks plopping down wind turbines and solar than you do building nuclear. And these economics are even worse for SMRs
So far we see a lot of tofu dreg Chinese built stuff (bridges, buildings, roads) falling apart in record time...I wouldn't wanna live nearby any Chinese built nuke reactor.
Small relative to convention reactors I can agree on, but theirs nothing modular about a reactor in the hundreds of MW range, your just giving up economy of scale to make a smaller footprint, smaller investment and possibly closer to load which if your utilizing waste heat for industrial processes is going to be a key.
As people dug into actually making them the scale of the projects to have any chance of being halfway economically viable grew. Pretty much the same as what happened to the current nuclear power-plants, bigger works better/more efficiently
Just giving this a boost for the algorithm. Thanks for the video as always.
Thank you too!
Yes.
y
I’ve heard other creators say that using the “a” word in your comments causes UA-cam to ignore the comment. I haven’t verified this, but if you want to help boost a channel, it might be wise to just comment that you “love all their videos” and leave it at that.
@@denismather5319 Maybe I'll hmm try to use various words but AI is going to find out, and many same-y comments are pain to user. Hmm, well, I'll try to comment on same-y thing I find in comments :)
Grazie.
Thanks for your support. Much appreciated!
Can you do an episode about infrastructure capacity problems in the energy transition? Here in NL there is trouble and companies and new projects can't get new power connections because the grid is full and it takes forever to expand it (because of environment, staff shortage everywhere etc).
Network connection capacity is the main problem holding back the transition in Australia too.
@@pixfromperth Same in US
It was clear from the beginning. Current reactors are behemoths exactly because they have to spread out the huge overhead costs. Making reactors 10 times smaller wouldn't cut it, a calculation any honest bookkeeper coud come up with. Adding exotic technology (molten salt, thorium, you name it) can only increase the financial risks. SMR work well only were cost is not a problem, e.g. US Navy.
The plans for the designs the navy is using are ultra top secret but we're pretty sure they use very highly enriched fuel, possibly even weapons grade and they run at super high temps and pressures, way above what is being proposed by all the civilian designs. And why not? Money is no object for the military.
I had a video recommended to me by the algorithm that was gung-ho on thorium, but pretended that the only thing standing in its way was those nasty Greenies, to which I say, demonstrate a commercially viable thorium reactor, just one, then we'll talk.
or "desperate" governments to meet "green" goals they can NOT make without a LOT OF PAIN on voters
I disagree here. Capital cost are a major factor in overall nuclear power plant costs. So decreasing the cost of each individual unit and reducing the building time will do a lot, because the cost of finance is reduced.
Even building a power-plant of 10 small units instead of 1 large would be better, because it can produce power as soon as the first unit is installed.
Moving to a low-pressure technology such as molten salt, liquid metal or gas cooled will improve both safety overall and make every component cheaper as it should not be build to high-pressure specs.
Of cause "new tech" will be more expensive initially, but in the long run can be constructed much cheaper than PWR.
Molten Salt Reactors in particular are "president safe" and can be left without supervision in theory. In practice you would have a small staff.
@@migBdk You trade pressure resistance problems with corrosion resistance ones. The fact that MSR have been thoroughly tested in the '50 and '60 and then abandoned should at least be a reason of concern and doubt.
Thank you for the commentary.
I have been reading about the time and cost overruns for nuclear power projects for several years.
The Vogtle 3 and 4 are many years overdue and billions over budget.
Thanks!
Thanks for your support. Much appreciated!
Excuse my ignorance but werent SMR's were supposed to be truckable hence the name "Small".
The "SMR's" illustrated today by yourself look huge, slightly smaller than a current large Nuclear power plants.
They might be different companies designs. But i also assume that some in place infrastructure would still be required.
Yeah, that was the first wave of the idea. Thing is, it is just completely unviable economically (but also for safety-management, national security, etc) to do that. We do have reactors that could work at that scale - in military submarines - but they are no good for achieving the rest of the targets.
The cut off for SMR's is said to be 300MW. Anything below that has, one, never been built by any country, ever and is considered "micro." Only the smallest of the micro reactors (under about 13-14 MW) could possibly be considered modular and truckable. The popular image advanced and encouraged by the modular reactor investment industrial complex is an entire nuclear plant on several semi trailers. Drag them to your location, wire them in, throw the switch and sit back and enjoy nearly free electricity for close to eternity. The truth is that only THE REACTOR itself is going to be modular and truckable. All the rest of the very considerable infrastructure will have to be built on site and will be permanent, not moveable, just like the big reactors already in service. And rather than delivering power for nearly ever, the modular reactor designs I've seen have a projected life of between 9 and up to 20 years. Some scenarios have the life span down to 6 years but a reasonable across the board expectation would be around 10 years.
You've been huffing to much nuclear copium unfortunately. The reactor is small enough it might fit in a large house but a reactor isn't a nuclear plant nor a containment facility.
The reactor itself is small, but it still needs to live in a containment structure, and in most places, also needs a grid connection that can handle its output.
Whenever anyone tells me that modular reactors are the future and the only problem is that nobody has invested enough in them, I point to the worlds major navies. SMR's have been used in nuclear subs for nearly 70 years now. All the major powers have spent countless billions on trying to make cost effective small reactors for subs, aircraft carriers and other military ships - the military advantages of these are enormous. And yet virtually no progress has been made by any of them - the latest subs from all the major powers are still using the same basic technology as the original nautilus (apart from some experimental designs like the Soviet reactor for the Alfa subs), and if anything, they are falling behind to the latest generation of hybrid and AIP propulsion systems. And this is in an area where cost isn't much of a consideration.
Exactly, there are a ton of nuclear submarines around, so it is not as the wheel is being reinvented.
Nuclear subs and SMRs are not the same thing.
@@stl1321I saw a comment on a wiki page that the Bechtel A1Bs in the Ford class carriers have 92 or 93% U235, which is highly enriched weapons grade stuff. That is nothing like the 5% in commercial nukes that need to be refueled every 2-3 years. Those things go like 25 years. I wonder if it wouldn't be worth sticking them in large container ships, and parking a couple of soldiers on it to guard it. You could save a lot of oil.
Why would you compare them, they're not at all the same thing..? Different design, different fuel, different requirements. The only thing similar is size.
More than that - read Admiral Hymen Rickover's retiring testimony to the Congress. The Admiral was the father of the US Nuclear Navy. The safest and best in the world and the finest experts in nuclear safety. And about the only group that actual understands and practices "Safety Culture".
As he retired he told the Congress that every commercial nuclear reactor should be immediately shutdown. He went on to say that at the first moment that a workable alternative to nuclear reactors exists for submarines and naval vessels that they too should all be shutdown and decommissioned.
That is from THE premiere expert on nuclear power.
At the end of the day we need something that works and can be deployed now. Like it or not, the pipeline for nuclear is strewn with bureaucracy and overwhelming cost and simply stating that nuclear is safe doesn’t change either that or the fact it’s safe precisely because of so much of that cost. As Dave said, solar and wind work and they’re ridiculously cheap; in Australia we have issues during the day because so much solar floods the grid.
Keep working on nuclear research - sure - but we don’t have years to sit on our hands waiting for a pipe dream.
That solar flooding the grid thing is a real problem in California too. Unfortunately it has made us more reliant on short cycle natural gas plants, not less. Now CA is scrambling to revise net metering policies to deal with all the excess solar capacity. You could say it is a “good problem to have” but it really isn’t good for those who have no ability to shift load to cheaper times of the day (renters and low income).
@@mere_cat Same here on the USA east coast. They are making a lot of solar and wind but grid scale battery storage is non existent because of costs and grid demand. The coal plants are shutting down so combined cycle gas plants are springing up, but even those need around ten years of planning/permissions and construction to put up. The USA NRC realized this and are making a special regulatory process for SMR plants. NuScale stock almost doubled on this news a few days ago.
There isn't enough copper and Lithium in the world to provide the solar panels and batteries required. Plus there is the damage done by mining and disposal. The total cost of the impossible solution here is astronomical but typically left out of the calculation by proponents.
@@deaddocreallydeaddoc5244 "There isn't enough copper and Lithium in the world to provide the solar panels and batteries required." - Source/citation required!
Plus there is the damage done by mining and disposal. - You mean just like open cut coal mines and crude oil cantamination on land and sea, including all the rehabilitation and clean up required.
"The total cost of the impossible solution here is astronomical but typically left out of the calculation by proponents." - Source/citation rrequired!
Good luck hosting the panel, Dave. As ever love your point of view
You might be interested to know that down here in Australia our Conservitive Political Parties have adopted SMR as the corner stone of their climate action policy. While they were in government they spent years denying climate change, then delaying doing anything about it. Now that they are in opposition they have finally got on board and recognised that the public wants something done. So their new policy will be focused on the role out of SMR's, "good reliable base load energy not unreliable renewables".
This is where SMR's big advantages over renewables comes through. This technology is not available yet, it is over the horizon, years away. So they can have a policy that looks like they are doing something about converting the grid away from coal and gas while all the time using more coal and gas and slowing down the roll out of renewables. SMR's rescue coal and gas by delaying their replacement.
Intermittent energy
The description of the party is a bit short on storage for time smearing aka base load. Nuclear is at least reasonable for low level base load. Can you address the storage issue? Not beyond daytime/overnight, but for a week of low wind and also low solar as we get in swing seasons. Tidal - yes that will keep on going and if the moon disappears we have other issues. But we don't have much tidal.
The general solution to this is a geographically dispersed generating system. Hydro, or pumped hydro are for some base and medium term fill, and gas peakers in there for emergencies.
As has already been shown, Nuclear is just far too expensive when compared with the alternatives available today.
Interconnector cables are the solution, which we already have, are getting more of, and would have even more if NIMBYs were exiled from our shores as they rightfully should be.
Why is it that so many ' private ' companies seem to always want, or even demand, that the taxpayers need to underwrite their for profit business ? Subsidies and long-term tax abatement are the most popular of late and are often handed out like candy here in the USA. In the long term, when these businesses are making huge profits, they seem to forget that we even exist.
Well, if you could get someone else to pay the costs and you just pocket the profits... Why wouldn't you? And for the politicians it's an obvious win too. They get powerful friends and big donations, by using your money. The people who are at fault are the voters, never punishing the members of their own party who engage in those behaviours.
Because governments don't want to do this themselves like they have in the past, they want to rely on companies. Companies are for profit entities. They not gonna do it unless someone pays them to do it. It is that simple. I am not defending companies, but it is just another example of privatization of industry usually ends up this way - companies not really willing to take high risks for very long time.
@@tristanridley1601 "The people who are at fault are the voters, never punishing the members of their own party who engage in those behaviours."
I would extrapolate that thought's direction to say it is the problem with the election laws and methods. Too often, punishing your own means rewarding those who would do far greater harm in your own opinion. Voting in all countries is the choosing of the lesser of evils which is still better than getting the most sadistic of evils via lack of real elections.
I am all in favor of leaving our current forms of representative democracies and republics behind for something actually democratic.
@@tristanridley1601 plus look at the "if you don't" - someone else does
EX with EV cars/batteries the "no brainer" option is to invest in CHINA and build them there for a LIST of reasons all economic
and politicians KNOW they will loose elections if under there watch the "good jobs" all end up in CHINA and everything we buy comes from CHINA
40 years ago it was JAPAN so even if CHINA is NOT the economic hotness anymore the USA/UK/EUROPE is NOT GOING to be it
@@Pecisk even large companies NEED to borrow money for major projects and they will NOT find the money they need UNLESS they can prove they will make a profit AND pay the investments back and again a "safer" bet will pay out better and likely the "safer" one is NOT the one you want like another COAL plant is likely to be "safer" then a SMR plant
I think you're exactly right about small modular nukes arriving too late to the party to be part of the solution.
And they havent actually arrived to the party yet, they are still just 5 years away, like they have been since the late 1940's.
energy transitions are nothing new and will not just go away after 2050. Nuclear will always be a part of the energymix purely because of physics.
when the US and Europe turned their back to nuclear in the late 80s the industry's dissapeared, the consequences of these decisions is what we're feeling right now.
they may not be "too late" as they might "arrive" to replace the hard to replace fossil plants that solar/wind are ill suited for without huge batteries AND long line transmission line likely running through "hostile" neighbours
plus in our current geopolitical world there are few countries willing to rely on a foreign country for there "base load energy needs"
also places like Canada that when the -40 winters hit there is NO WIND and short daylight making a high demand - low supply issue and SMR would be better then KEEPING a few COAL/GAS plants "on standby" as the temptation to "run" them is to great for there owners assuming it is NOT 100% public OR the whole network is ONE owner
@@itsmatt2105 Yeah but the billionaires want them for their bunkers
Late to the party or still ahead of their time?
ありがとうございます！
Thanks for your support. Much appreciated
i'd like to see the complete "carbon footprint" of the total Nuclear Plant- mining, transport, construction, operation, maintenance and disposal!!!
definately NOT carbon-free, clean or renewable
nukes has negative emisson.
@@leighford341Nothing is.
Not as much as windmills, trust me, I have seen the logistics of transporting over ocean, roads and maintenace of windmills and until the blades that has to be changed every 2 years. The tons oil each windmills needs to be running. The diesel generator that is needed to get the windmill starting to turn.
@@Jazzmaster71 does wind create radioactive waste that's lethal for ten thousand years plus? Is solar a terror target? I think not.
Was in nuclear power for 18 years. When they were first being talked about I was asking questions about cost that no one was answering. SMRs totally go against the mantra of 'economies of scale'. Sure, make the reactor in a 'factory' but (as your graphics and video show quite nicely) the reactor vessel is only a vary small portion of the total size and cost. The cost per megawatt hour must be substantially higher than a 1100 megawatt unit. So, IMO, SMRs are being WILDLY oversold.
But this does not mean there is no place for them. Bilibino and the Akademik Lomonosov have shown there is a place for them - when you need consistent power in the middle of nowhere. But you build them for reasons other than saving money.
BTW, nice presentation and great references!
What I can't keep track of is whether or not there are new reactor generations that might be more economical in some way, and just haven't been built yet because of paranoia about everything under the sun. It's easy to see how the economies of scale can't work with these ones, but they might still fit niche use cases. Maybe even the next gen reactors won't work, and only fusion will be relevant in the distant future (I'm sorry, ten years from now...).
@@jonevansauthoras far as I can tell there are, and they're not being built as even pilot plants due to disinterest and skepticism powered by persistent public phobia, and pressure from 'Big Green.'
SMRs are intended to capture an 'economy of scale' the same way that Henry Ford did - by inventing the assembly line. See, he didn't invent the automobile, - Daimler was making autos a couple decades before Ford Motor Company ever got started - he invented a consistent, repetitive way of producing them; before roads, gas stations, or service shops were more than novelties just like the vehicles they serviced.
Now the power output problem IS a problem - it has a serious impact on the profitability of such an operation. Which is why cost and QC controls are so important, for both safety and profitability. What we have that we didn't have before is reliable CAD/CAM processes that can reliably produce identical parts that will pass regulatory standards without needing redesign & refabrication.
At least you don't need to spend money on earthworks like large nuclear reactors need.
But there are not that many places in the world so geographically isolated that running powerlines to them is more expensive than building, shipping and operating an SMR. Which means the market is not big enough for mass production - the very way that SMR is supposed to become affordable. SMRs would be even dearer - much dearer - as a niche product.
I have similar views. It's hard to see how nuclear as a whole will make a dent in the electricity market before 2050.
In fact, given the age of most of the fleet, it would be surprising if current output levels can be maintained till then. 30 years of non-investment can't just be ignored.
Yes, from what I've learned, due to labor shortages alone it is impossible to even replace those aging reactors still in use.
Yeah, we should just give up on it then... No need to better anything because we already stopped funding it. Seems like the most logical move for humanity. Oil forever! 💪
@@Robert_McGarry_Poems there is a third option, also mentioned in the video. More renewables plus storage.
I mean, it has become clear over decades that the costs for nuclear won't come done. How many more decades does it take?
Lol, I can tell you from France : we are not stoping Nuc any time !
@@akaikiseki9346 yeah, and I can tell you from Germany, we already have! 😄
And we will have a future of cheap and clean energy ahead. 😊
While we continue to develop new ways to generate electrical power it seems odd that the push to develop less power hungry devices gets less attention when that seems to be the best area to achieve power savings. For instance, addressing the power needs of cold storage facilities that use freezers, refrigerators, lighting, etc, all seem like an easier way to achieving the goal of using less power and making what we do generate, go further. V = I x R is a pretty simple math equation when you get down to brass tacks.
The counterexample is LED lighting, which has saved gigawatt•hours of energy rellacing incandescent, sodium, halogen lighting. Also heat pumps are far more efficient at moving heat around then simply burning fossil fuels; since they're not that's good at providing instantaneous heat, they may encourage better building insulation. Energy is cheap enough that people aren't highly incentivized to use a lot less of it, but that is also reflective of our highly consumptive lifestyles. Fly less, drive less, eat less meat, live in a smaller house, etc.
Energy demand is going to go up not down, I'm afraid. Even if chips are more efficient, they use more power for higher level stuff. We need to develop everything which offers more efficiency, reduced energy demand, better heating and cooling and so on, simultaneously. Some of which offer very minor advantages but scale well. But we can't solve future energy requirements, with a population rocketing to 11 billion at least, most of whom still need energy and have effectively, none, by reducing energy demand.
I thought two issues with SMRs were that the grid would need upgrading in multiple locations to cope and using uranium as fuel, cooling water needs to be securely sourced. The latter was a problem for France with conventional NPPs during a dry summer when rivers were depleted. Coastal plants are too much at risk from rising sea levels, and alternatives to Uranium, that may require less cooling, are still in the experimental stage of development. Are these concerns incorrect or valid?
The working Public pays for everything! They pay for the plant, security, fuel, personnel, Decommissioning and spent fuel storage. BUT the government owns the fuel!
WHY, because they know that the BTU content of a "Spent Fuel Assembly" from a LWR is worth 3 to 4 times it's weight in GOLD! Don't think they don't intend to ultimately resale that to us also.
THE GOVERNMENT CAN PRINT MOONEY, BUT THEY CAN NOT PRINT WEALTH! They use the money to take your wealth so that they can give it to someone else so that they can remain in POWER!
Perhaps it’s a bit off topic, but I fully expect that the development of fusion power plants is going to butt up against the same constraints of minimum economic scale as these SMRs, only on a scale that dwarfs even the largest, modern fission reactors now. My wild guess is that in a hundred years or more, there will be working fusion power plants, but they will be a scant few, mind bogglingly colossal constructs surrounded by the high energy demand industries that they will primarily feed. All the rest of us will be getting by just fine on renewables by then.
That’s all assuming all the current negative trends get resolved without ending civilization as we know it. Wish I could be more confident of that.
That's just wishful thinking. I see no reason to expect any mind bogglingly colossal constructs because we will have alternatives that are vastly less expensive. We already have them. mind bogglingly colossal = colossally expensive. Think of the security needed to guard such a plant, which would represent a single point of failure for all or much of a country. That would fit nicely with a government that was far too powerful for the good of the citizens.
High energy demand Industries plug into an electrical grid. Besides fossil fuel refineries burning their own dirty product to power their operations, I can't think of industries that make their own electricity.
At least continuous power generation from fission has been demonstrated and companies are worrying about manufacturing and operational costs. Continuously loading fantastically precise targets for laser ignition fusion seems insane, and maintaining a tokamak or stellarator containing plasma at zillions of degrees is "a problem to be solved later."
R&D is fun, but no guarantee of commercially practical outcomes.
@@incognitotorpedo42in a century our grandchildren may have gotten sick of the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere that’s still creating havoc and decided to capture some. Without plating the planet in solar cells there would never be enough energy to do anything effective, but build enough giant continuously running fusion plants and maybe there will be enough energy to begin to actually do real carbon capture. Or our descendants may have something else to do with massive amounts of power that we haven’t even thought of.
I won't disagree with any of you video except to say that in remote and northern locations micro nuclear looks very attractive, being able to move from huge thirsty diesel generators that need to have fuel flown in to an installation that just runs for a couple decades makes for a LCOE equation unlike most areas.
Yes, at high latitudes solar is bad and snowy places are not so good for wind turbines either. But some of these places are just really unsuitable for people to live. Some of the towns are there to enable oil drilling and once that stops it may be more sensible to either abandon the town, or turn it into a tourist place where the population is low in the winter and higher in the summer when solar can work a bit. The high cost of an SMR to keep the town going in a post FF world may make it unviable.
@@adrianthoroughgood1191 Lots of resources other than oil. Nickel seems popular these days.
Yes you can always point out some cases that solar, wind, hydro and storage can’t solve. We will get to these problems later. First we must address the overwhelming majority of the problem that we already know how to solve now. Also cheaper simple solutions exist for your example: biodiesel, E-fuels derived from green hydrogen, ect. But nuclear is a unrealistic option.
@@markbernier8434 true, large bit remote mining locations are probably the strongest case for SMRs. They would either need to be very small ones or perhaps the ore processing could be located onsite to share the reactor output. That reduces the weight of goods needing export. You would need to be sure the seam was going to last a long time to make it all worth it of course.
those places usually aren't that populated (because living there isn't really that nice), so they represent a LOW VOLUME market.. which is economically breaking things.
the installed cost of solar is under $1/W (only slighly higher for wind).
the installed cost of new nuclear is $5.50-$8/W.
you can literally build 5x more solar farm wattage than nuclear. if spread over a wide area, you only need to average 20% output from your solar farms to satisfy the same amount of load, which is guaranteed for 97% of days (during daylight hours). if it is particularly sunny and you're producing more than anyone can use, that's fine. it's still cheaper to "waste" capacity most of the time.
over time, you'll have energy intensive industries co-locating with solar farms. clinker/cement production, for example, has the majority of operating cost in energy input. operating intermittently means they would need more kilns/hardware up front, but it would pay for itself in the long run due to near-free energy. and lets face it, the southwest US have so many heavy sun days that down days would actually be somewhat rare.
the main thing we need is more high voltage transmission lines, which will be helpful no matter what energy technology winds out over the next decade. kettle bundled 765kv transmission lines lose about 5% over 1000mi. so you can get 500% more power per dollar by building solar, and lose
It might be overly optimistic but transatlantic and transcontinential superconductors similar to SMR are a practical technology but insanely expensive. However unlike SMR once you build these lines you can transmit an enormous amount of power over them.
@@Furiends That sounds like flying cars to me. Awesome idea, but completely unpractical, and something that will never happen. All for the same reason. It will always be cheaper to drive on land than to fly, and likewise it will always be cheaper to overproduce with renewables or to put tons of batteries, than to build such complex interconnections across the world.
Definitely an apples to oranges comparison. First, when you talk about installed cost of solar you are talking about the wattage of the panels. But the panels only produce when the sun shines, and are affected by whether the sun is shining perpendicular to the panels. Roughly, this means something like you need to derate by (5/24) for good solar locations or even more in Europe. Then you need to factor in storage to solar, and you have to commit to how many 9's of reliability that you will have. On small scale operations, like an off grid house, the battery and inverter costs are much higher than solar panels. Batteries don't last as long as solar panels, and are more likely to be damaged. You are focusing on the least important aspect of solar in the current technological environment. You need to talk about the installed cost of batteries
@@DrBernon "It will always be cheaper to drive on land than to fly" flying can easily be cheaper than driving a car somewhere. It's also technically more fuel efficient.
But to address your point my comparison isn't to suggest superconductoring powerlines are anywhere near practical just that I think they have a much better chance than SMR does.
@@richdobbs6595 No. He has a point. Installed power being 5 times cheaper is a very big issue for nuclear. Because those panels will generate less in the real world, but not 5 times less. And the storage issue is also somewhat irrelevant, because we are now on a point of the renewable journey that we still don't need that, and also, batteries are getting cheap at such a rate, that maybe once we need that storage, the cost got so low, is also a no-brainer to simply use batteries.
From an ex Koeberg Nuclear Engineer and Shift Chemist I couldn't agree more that the economic model the SMR represents is still born especially so for the financial model assumed to its project implementation involving, as a matter of inevitability, to 'cost overrun' and almost predictable failure for indeterminable 'market pricing' to be borne by the end user for the profit modelling to be proven burdensome both in comparison to wind & solar and for the economic irrationality of private commercial electrical supply in general.
This channel has more valuable common sense understandable and can do information than any other on UA-cam.
This sounded so promising.
No it didn't if you use first principle thinking or if you know a bit of history of nuclear energy.
You may have noticed in 2023 China installed 216GW of solar PV power which is more than the US installed in its entire US history.
As well as a record number of coal fired power stations ! It's not that simple.
Solar and coal go hand in hand very well. But is it really the future you wish to see?
Obviously not ! Coal is the most contaminating fossil fuel. It releases CO2 but also mercury and other air contaminants. We don't need coal fired power stations, and yet China builds an enormous amount of them.
Real Green = most energy generated per square meter, FAKE-GREEN = least energy generate per square meter.. Don't be a fake green. We could have had 1000x more powerful BREEDER FISSION REACTORS, using much cheaper fuel (Thorium) decades ago if it wasn't for you Fake-Greens.. You've even thrown over a $Trillion globally at Fusion Power which although compact, produces NEGATIVE ENERGY PER METER SQUARED, Liberal Lefty Wasters!
China's certainly installed some impressive solar PV propaganda opportunities. One day, they may even connect some to a grid. Probably soon after they stop painting dry grass with green paint.
When you asked to guess which country built an SMR I guessed wrong. As far as nuclear reactors go, I figured an SMR would be rather kawaii.
The reason MSR's were not implemented and Light Water Reactors (LWR's) were was a result of the Navy's need for Nuclear Submarines. It was a matter of national defense so cost was a secondary factor. Further, since the reactors were submerged, a ready heat sink was always available for free.
That is not the case for terrestrial reactors with multiple trains of High Head injection, Accumulators, and Low head injection required to protect the core. Also because of economics, the fuel design for commercial reactors is very different than that of naval reactors which makes the naval reactor fuel much more accident tolerant.
When Dr Weinberg made the statement that the public would become aware of the level of radioactive release that would result from a fuel failure event, they would require ever more stringent safety measures, and the reactors would become cost prohibited. He obviously saw 50 years into the future. Because of this and other statements, he was fired as Director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and funding for MSR's was halted.
It is also important to note that the focus of the US at the time was the production of Plutonium, also for national defense. This required Heavy Water Reactors of which 6 were built a SRS. This was to be followed by Fast Breeder Reactors which were also capable of Plutonium production and would make LWR's sustainable. When Carter shut down reprocessing, Fast Breeder technology and the ultimate future of LWR's were put into doubt!
It is not commonly known, but a commercial LWR can not operate with more than 1% fuel failure. If more than 10% of the fuel fails, the LWR is done! No one will likely enter containment for the next 10 years with the plant eventually decommissioned. At Three Mile Island around 1/3 to 1/2 of the fuel was damaged.
You need to look at the time line as nuclear subs predated the ORNL MSR demo by at least 10 years.
Very interesting fact about LWRs.
I had been pulling for the Pebble-Bed design for a good while; hearing about the successful failure-mode demonstration in the UK was very encouraging. Alas, journalists who can't seem to get any technical subject right (except legal cases) are bound to send us back to the stone age, if not by malice then by incompetence.
The thing about Three-Mile Island was it was a commercial disaster, but never a public-health danger. Carter said so himself in a press briefing, and a 5-year gov't. study confirmed it.
Once again, I blame an ignorant and sensationalist press for stunting support for the best renewable on the planet.
Probably much more important than fitting the category of Small Modular Reactor, are the numerous efforts to develop SMR's that are actually Gen IV designs, that get their cost reductions not from repacking Gen III fuel rods and control systems in smaller bundles, but from reexamining the way nuclear can be made to work and design walk away safe, cheaper more cost effective reactors. Three companies to follow are Terrestrial Energy, ThorCon, and Copenhagen Atomics.
Please show me a new "generation IV" design that was not developed many decades ago, and in many cases tested. Molten salt reactor designs were developed during the Manhattan Project in WW II - literally over 80 years ago.
I've looked at about 30 "next generation Generation IV designs" on the internet in the last year or so - and all I see are old rehashed concepts most predating 1970; except that the people rarely even mention the history and what is known about those designs and possibly test reactors that failed.
There are no "walk way safe" designs.
All require attention within a matter of days. None will survive neglect in case of war, or plague or economic collapse.
There are no "cost effective" small reactors (nor big ones). The very best and biggest require massive subsidy. Nothing built this century will ever pay back the construction costs.
All Smaller designs will be fundamentally inefficient due to the increased surface area to volume, hence poorer neutron economy.
That seems to have already sunk the NuScale proposal. The simplest and most achievable SMR concept.
Of the "fast" reactors:
The SA vs Volume problem is greater. They depend purely on high levels of enrichment, and all the proposed fuels are at the limit of "civilian" operations, for lacklustre performance.
Designs that depend upon breeding will be inefficient at power production.
Designs that are dependent on "waste burning" will be inefficient at power production.
Both of those above will have complex waste disposal or recycling requirements.
Designs involving Molten Salts depend on reliable materials that do yet exist, and may not for decades.
Expect all of them to flop.
The best fusion power is the one you can see with your own eyes whenever the sun is out.
Don't look at the sun people..
@@antonyjh1234 I guess jansenart has done that too much lately
But it also only works when the sun is out. And horrible energy density compared to fission and fossil fuels.
We need more solar and storage!
Cheap and reliable storage of energy is a major roadblock for renewables, this means that carbon will remain for a further 100 years in the Worlds energy mix, even if it's not in Europe's (But I have a sneaky feeling it will be, they can't even give up Russian energy)! Solar is great in Northern Europe in the Summer but absolute rubbish in the winter, solve that problem and we will all have solar if it's an economical price, and getting better batteries than lithium ones for energy density and fire safety!?!
@@TomTomicMicI highly doubt that with the kind of money that's being thrown at renewables and battery technology.
In fact, when you think about it, many modern countries are aiming for around 70% electrical generating in their countries by 2030, considering over that time, there's going to be a big push on EV cars and heat pumps, we are well on the way to a clean future in a lot of modern countries, especially in Europe.
Energy storage is an issue that needs to be solved, but it doesn't seem to be holding back the renewable adoption much and with how cheap it's getting, already cheaper than fossil fuels and likely going to continue to get cheaper and better, I think it's safe to say that unless some other radical tech comes along, the path is looking like it's going to be renewable, and it's looking like it's going to be a big push on that over the next decade.
Carbon won't last another 100 years, not at the current rate that things are changing, I think fossils have around 50 years left at the most, at least in most cases, because once we get close to not needing it, the rest will happen at a quicker pace, renewables is already cheap now, it's going to continue to get cheaper, and in the case of solar and looking at some of the new tech that's coming out, solar could be plastered everywhere and be done cheaply in the coming decades, that will only up a lot of avenues of energy generating beside rooftops.
As for Europe and Russian oil, you have to remember that the EU is a big economy, you can't make that kind of transition overnight, but it's actually remarkable how much they've done in such a short space of time, a lot more can be done over the next decade.
As for solar, it's not as good in winter, but it's not as bad as you suggest, especially if you have it setup to take advantage of the winter conditions, but regardless, with how cheap it's getting, we're going to end up plastering it all over the place that it's likely not going to be that big of an issue and at the end of the day, renewable energy like solar and wind are proven tech that works, we hear about many other promising tech, but until any hit the market, are safe and can be done cheap, renewable is the safe bet for the next few decades.
Thanks for the update Dave. It did look like a promising technology when it was first touted but it seems like it's chance to really shine has passed already. Perhaps it still makes sense in places where solar, wind etc is in short supply and the premium price is worth paying. It may not be the great saviour but perhaps we don't want to stop the research entirely just yet?
Since the late 1940's we've pissed away scores of billions of tax dollars on researching small and micro reactors and all that's happened is the problems keep getting bigger, a functioning design further away. It's time to stop wasting tax dollars on a science fiction fantasy.
Solar is so cheap now that places where solar is "bad" just means double the number of solar panels and it's still cheaper. There is also the possibility of making superconductoring transmission wire cheap enough to cross the ocean. That's a much more practical idea than tiny reactors everywhere yet doesn't have the kind of crazy money behind it that SMR does (or did).
@@Furiends Oceanic transmission lines are a bad idea. Any country relying on them is making itself subservient to the providing nation to decide the price and in turn national productivity. Should war break out it's simple for a single boat from the opposing nation to drag their anchor over the line cutting the power. You scale up the number of connections and provider countries but you'd also be scaling up the cost and complexity.
@@hurrdurrmurrgurr 1) you can already do this with internet cables 2) with abundant energy collection much less efficient energy storage (like hydrogen) can be used. 3) from a nationstates perspective "dragging an anchor" vs "pressing the nuclear button" are basically the same. Both would be acts of war. 4) we already have pipelines transporting fuel and are easier targets than a thin cable 5) transatlantic cables serve mutual economic benefits so both sides of the world so you'd be shooting yourself in the foot.
@@hurrdurrmurrgurr So, just as they already are for oil, refined fuels, gas, metallurgical coal, chemically specified ores, stuff like that?
One thing very infrequently mentioned is that solar has now dropped below the cost of transmission, which will indentivize local production. Yes, batteries will add cost, but it can be even cheaper if that energy doesn't travel 1000+ km in the first place. Even if competitors got their energy for free, they would still be uncompetitive as long as they are operating on the national grid.
The good safety track record of nuclear is because of the huge effort made to make it safe. Inherently, what is being done is dangerous. And notice that wind and solar were even better on safety, with no worry about what would happen in a war or if society broke down to the point where the plant was not managed properly.
Fascinating as always
This is a very astute analysis. Well done. Many thanks.
Many thanks :-)
He's definitely not the first to say nuclear isn't an option because it takes too long. Maybe nuclear will fill a role we haven't thought of though. I'm not ready to ignore any option just yet.
eeeh.. maybe stop and think about it.
The world record holder for building out windpower (that by the was was way faster than solar) was denmark.
World recordholder for nuclear power is Sweden.
During the period Sweden built out nuclear power. Sweden on avrage per capita, built the same capacity in nuclear for 2 years, as denmark did in Wind over 10 years
Just submitting this for a boost for the algorithm thingies. Thanks for the video as always.
The need for SMR has passed. In the UK we just need 130% wind, supported by solar and battery. With the Morocco HVDC interconnector we will have stable, green abundance of cheap energy. Improving nuclear for big shipping is a valid spend of research money though.
The thing about NuScale's $89/MWh estimate is that without subsidies it's actually $119/MWh. The thing was the head of the Idaho member of UAMPS, an industry veteran, had calculated the cost to be $130/MWh.
Compared to $82/MWh for both wind & solar with lithium based storage currently according to independent analysis by Lazard.
The difference also being solar, wind, and storage have a proven track record of declining costs, with newer technologies hitting the market with even lower costs. Nuclear, on the other hand, has a proven track record of rising costs even with reduced regulation and newer, simpler designs that were supposed to be quicker and cheaper to build (AP 1000 & EPR).
And as France found out the hard way, having most of your reactors being the same design means that a defect found in one, a 24mm deep crack found in a pipe, which carried radioactive water, with a wall thickness of 27mm meant that they had to shut down over half their fleet for inspections and repairs IN THE MIDDLE OF AN ENERGY CRISIS.
That on top of having to operate some of the rest of their fleet at reduced capacity due to inadequate cooling as the rivers they relied on were too warm.
Honestly with a track record like that, how could an objective, rational person think nuclear is a good option?
To be fair, a key argument for SMRs is that power costs for the "Nth of a Kind" would be substantially lower due to mass production techniques and shorter build times.
@@gibbonsdpSMRs have the potential for future cost reductions, if enough are made by any one manufacturer, and everything works as hoped. Whereas wind and solar have 20 years of proven consistent and rapid cost reduction with no sign of stopping in any time soon. When it comes to investing cold hard cash those two things are very different prospects
@@gibbonsdp which has to be taken with a BIG pinch of salt considering the nuclear industry's long history of substantial cost & schedule overruns.
Even with France's much vaunted nuclear fleet, independent analysis has shown that their claims of low costs are due to heavy subsidies and very lowbal estimates of O&M costs. When the subsidies are factored out and realistic O&M costs based on real world experience are factored in, the claimed cost of $40/MWh ends up being $90/MWh.
But that analysis was before the latest kerfufle. With the much reduced capacity factor due to the shutdowns and reduced production due to the cooling issues, along with the repair costs for the cracked pipes, are factored in the costs will be higher.
@@gibbonsdp Those mass production assumptions are asymptotic, and the kind of scale needed to hit competitive pricing with solar and wind (which also benefit from economies of scale) for any form of nuclear is into the hundreds of thousands or millions of units, even for ill-conceived radium dial watches. Which for any form of nuclear exceeds the materials available on Earth by hundreds of thousands or millions of units.
the cost of renewables is going down because theres constant investment in them and their infrastructure
nuclear is going up in price because its just not being worked on at the same scale, theres no experienced operators, builders, designers, even in countries with a history of having those things nuclear has just been forgotten about and an entire advanced industry isnt something you can cheaply build over night
as important as renewables are, having a base load of nuclear is always going to be a useful thing
also something interesting to note, its weird how people always bring up the subsidized cost of renewables or nuclear and say its too expensive without subsidies, while conveniently ignoring that fossil fuels are subsidised 7 trillion dollars per year globally
wonder how much fossil fuels would cost per mwh without those subsidies to get a more fair comparison
Small?
Interesting how all these SMRs have grown big.
It seems that we are just seeing 1950s and 60s sized projects being rebadged as 'small'.
Supposedly they are modular... so their should be multiple modules in those buildings... I have no idea if that's correct though.
@ae Nope, these are just single reactor power plants and are way too big to really be considered SMR, the people calling them that are just desperatly goalpost moving in response to years of failure to bring anything like what they promised to market. To actually be the size of submarine reactors (which are the inspiration for the whole idea) they need to be down around 40-50 MWe.
Don't forget "modular." it's techno babble by tech bros.
@@Furiends Module and template are favorite words of non technical people in every industry xD
You're absolutely right - SMRs are already too expensive; meanwhile solar wind and battery costs continue to come down.
Name one major city and industrial sector that is due to be powered by solar and batteries in the next two decades. I'm not talking about some backwater I'm referring to somewhere like Tokyo, Paris, LA, Hong Kong, London, NYC, Mexico City. Just name one. These cities are where SMRs will shine, renewables and batteries have their place also, it will take a mix to fix this CO2 mess we have gotten ourselves in.
@@anydaynow01 1. I generally agree with you. Commercial demand balancing can come from arrays of capacitors and fuel cells (Metal Hydride, not pressurized or cryogenic H2). Urban and industrial supply should be generated by Nuclear for baseline, and some NG to meet peak demand.
2. [CO2] increases near the earth's surface promote forest greening by a power law relationship, and themal insulation by only a linear relationship. Furthermore forest greening increases thermal absorbtion during daytime and reradiation at nighttime, since mature trees circulate water from the water table and act as heat exchangers. I have this on authority from NASA's own raw satellite data and an atmospheric chemist.
The 'immanent anthropogenic crisis' and the 'Green New Deal' are a raw deal, a con job intended to hobble the West while Asia marches onward.
SNRs only make sense in a few isolated cases. Aircraft Carriers and other large naval ships make sense for nuclear reactors. The other possible places for SNRs are relatively isolated communities in the Arctic where you do not have sunlight for half of the year. However, with large scale sodium based battery systems and a few backup generators, that will still be much cheaper than a reactor. Don't forget that EVs with bidirectional charging are also part of the grid.
SMRs only make sense when cost is not a priority
As usual, the devil is in the details. Your closing generalization that wind, solar and batteries can replace nuclear is fully in that category and is generally wrong for full dependence on those unreliables, particularly with the extremely limited amount of battery storage currently anticipated.
One of those details is that supplying even a week of battery storage to withstand a storm of that duration would cost much more than equivalent nuclear capacity of any size or category. More specifically, provision of seasonal storage to firm up solar capacity in Winter would cost an order of magnitude more than nuclear. That is because annual solar capacity factor for provision of energy is very low - about 15% in New England, 10% in the UK. And that is allocated with about a ten to one ratio between Summer and Winter, so that Winter solar capacity factor may be about 3% while Summer could be 30%. That means to provide the equivalent amount of solar energy in Winter, without seasonal storage, would require about 10 times as much solar capacity as in Summer to serve the same load in Winter. Also remember that charging such large batteries will necessitate far more solar overbuilding than the 30:1 capacity ratio with nuclear in Winter just to be able to recharge the batteries while serving load. So much for kWh to kWh cost comparisons that neglect the nuclear kW to more than thirty solar kW ratio in Winter.
Unfortunately with the anticipated transfer of heating from fossil fuels to electric, all northerly areas will become Winter peaking, meaning the system capacity will have to provide far more energy and capacity in Winter than in Summer. The electric heating load in northerly areas will be at least four times as large as Summer air conditioning loads and will occur at night - not during sunny hours. The extreme ratio will be at least four to one Winter to Summer because air conditioning needs to remedy only about 20-30 degrees F difference outside to inside, while heating needs to remedy 50-70 degrees F at a much lower COP in Winter than in Summer on at least a two to one COP ratio. (Heat pump COP can be more than 3 in Summer compared to 1 -1.5 in Winter. )
And as far as time to build nuclear is concerned, please note that recent EHV transmission lines to convey large amounts of solar and wind to where they would be needed have taken 15-20 years to construct for even short lines. Traversing multiple states in the US to connect favorable solar or wind areas to distant loads would likely take even longer to accomplish than building new nuclear more locally.
A small amount of local solar, wind and batteries can be useful, but will never compete with nuclear on a net zero basis on either cost or time required to implement, disregarding the immense waste of land area for collecting and transmitting such diffuse sources of unreliable energy.
A running capacity of 90% is really really optimistic. Look at France. They had huge problems where during winter they had to shut down almost all their nuclear plants for corrosion tests and maintenance. And then during summer, the rivers got so hot they couldn't cool their plants and it had to be shut off again. People don't want to face up to the fact that in practice, nuclear plants are not always operational. They are down for maintenance, tests, inspections like 10 to 30% of the time. While for solar and wind that will be much lower. Additionally, the cooling water shows the biggest pollutant of nuclear power that is almost never talked about: hot cooling water. Nuclear plants, or any traditional power plant, consume an incredible amount of cooling water. Which when you build them near a river or an inlet can be quite problematic. People may say that heat can be used to heat houses. But who builds a nuclear reactor near a residential area that already has a district heating? As always with nuclear, it is all a pipe dream begging for government subsidies.
You do realize that the capacity factor of solar is 50% at best, under ideal conditions, right? And while France has had some recent issues, those issues are the exception and not the rule. Look at the United States. We have a far larger nuclear fleet, and 95%+ has been the trend for a couple of decades now.
@@rdormer Why would the capacity factor of solar matter at all? Even if it is 0.1%, so what? I don't get it. US has barely build any new nuclear plants in the last 30 years. And all attempts have been failures that led to cancellation of future plans. This despite our need to phase out fossil. Solar and wind are replacing fossil AND nuclear at the same time. Fossil is losing but nuclear is not able to get even 1% what fossil is losing because solar is just too cheap and wind is just too appealing to the free market.
@@Prometheus4096 My dude, you're the one who bought up capacity factor, I'm just responding to your incorrect statement about the capacity factor of nuclear. Since it occurs in the context of a discussion of alternatives, with solar one of the leading alternatives, then its fair game to compare their capacity factors. And sure, US construction is moribund - as long as you ignore Vogtle and Watts Bar. The thing about SMRs is, it was never really about the small size being an economic benefit, it was about trying to leverage standardized designs instead of making - and this was a brilliant way to describe it - each project a piece of bespoke engineering. SMR may not be the best way to do that, but France - since you brought them up - clearly shows the benefits of this approach at ANY scale. Throwing the nuclear baby out with the SMR bathwater is a really braindead idea. Go ahead and get your renewables - they're awesome. But there's more to a stable grid than just picking the lowest LCOE across the board. All those renewables are going to need baseload to back them up - that's a fact. So far that's invariably been natural gas, which kind of defeats the point, no? So, if not nuclear or natural gas, what baseload power source do YOU propose?
@@rdormer I was talking CORRECTLY about the capacity factor of nuclear. You were the one that brought up solar. Solar works independent of capacity factor. As does wind. Nuclear does not. Nuclear is already dead. So I don't know why you are trying to argue against throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
@@Prometheus4096 Friend, no power source works "independent" of capacity factor. It's a fundamental figure of merit that applies to all power sources. And again, I brought up solar because, if we're not going to use nuclear, what do you and your fellow critics propose that we use instead? And no, you were not correct, btw. Here, take a look at a primary source with actual data:
www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-power-most-reliable-energy-source-and-its-not-even-close
There was a US General defending the high cost for nuclear power plants in Aircraftcarrier and Submarines to the congress. He explained scientist said it will be small, cheap and simple but in fact it was bigger, very complicated and far more expensive than expected so we should knew since the 60‘s 👍
I think the costs are still kept secret to this day.
What was he arguing against? Solar powered submarines and wind farm carriers?
@@hurrdurrmurrgurr He wasn't arguing against nuclear-powered submarines, aircraft carriers, or icebreakers, he was explaining why the military needed so much money for them when the original promise was "cheap, easy, simple."
We have solutions but they want solutions with continues profits and endless subsidies.🥵
I notice how you didn't mentioned that alot of "Green power projects" are not baseload, because their not consistent and for the final coup de gra. Many current renewable energy projects in the west are close to bankruptcy due to the increased rate hikes for the past year. You see "Green power" cost alot of green. Cause if it was all a bed of roses as you stated the governments of the world wouldn't be looking to Nuclear SMRs. Which by the way have been working wonderfully in UK and US nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers for decades!
Most Nations that have existing Nuclear are still promoting/ maintaining this technology as a way of safeguarding their own aging arsenal.
If you buy anything from the US, you become a slave to them. Once I purchased a data acquisition card from the US (from a US company called IOTech), I had to guarantee that (i) I shall not sell it to another fellow (ii) I shall not use it for anything other than I have declared (iii) I shall not reverse engineer the hardware etc etc etc. And I was not technically the owner of the hardware that costed less than 1000 USD. It is better to buy from China or Russia.
The U.S. has HUNDREDS of TONS of Pu239 and not only has no need for more, is spending billions to dispose of that crazy excess. With a 24,100 year half life it is not going bad anytime soon.
Nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons have few things in common beside the name.
This is an objectively misinformed statement. First of all, the number of nations with nuclear power far exceeds the number of nuclear armed militaries. Way more reactor nation states than bomb nation states. Second of all, power generating nuclear, especially the predominant pressurized or boiling water designs, are basically the worst possible way to go about building or supporting a nuclear arsenal. Third of all, once you have a nuclear arsenal, you don't need continued production to keep it going.
Michael Barnards has pointed out that Wrights Law only applies if a manufacturing process goes through 10s of 1000s of iterations, that's when 'learning' leads to savings at scale. Correct, and by the same token the entire "power block" of a plant where electricity is produced via steam can no longer expect any improvements as it is really mature tech. That reduces the percentage of possible innovation over the project volume considerably.
Yes, SMRs use steam - and steam is an extremely old technology with extremely well known economies of scale. It is not just the "nuclear" bit that is the big economic issue in SMRs.
We’re very fortunate that the solution is relatively low tech and extremely low risk - solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and battery plus other storage methods.
Yep. You lost me on renewables backed up by battery and hydro power. Given the variability of renewables and the immense power needed to stabilise the transmission frequency the scale of backup power and its durability makes this approach highly questionable particularly for Australia where transmission distances are much more profound than the UK. There are a multitude of issues involved around this proposed configuration making it a complex balancing act fraught with risks. The old saying is ... Keep it simple!!
Simply the direct opposite of the truth. No national electricity grid can be kept simple - they are often described as the most complex machine ever built. But the smart inverters on battery farms do a far better job of synching grid frequency than the traditional method of big hunks of spinning metal, either in steam turbines or syncons. That in fact is the reason the first large battery farm in Australia - Horndale in SA - was built, not for pure storage. Most current battery farms in Australia make some of their money from FCAS (Frequency Control Auxiliary Services) on top of selling power when the sun goes down; they are quickly putting syncons out of business.
At least in the U.S. your conclusion is spot on. Currently, long-term contracts for wind and solar with battery storage are in the $20 per Mwh range and dropping. A SMR at nearly $60 is a loser and when you bump that to $90 it's a massive loser.
7:10 "Governments underwriting claims" means the financial side doesn't make any sense. SMRs cannot be insured because the foreseeable downside is not able to be covered financially in any market. Given production of many more units which may have defects in manufacture, the quality control, maintenance, monitoring, and failure potential go up exponentially. There has been great push back from the nuclear industry to reduce regulation, reclassify high level waste as low, etc. Combine reduced regulation, cheap production, and government insurance for profitable energy companies and you have horrific accidents in the making.
I totally agree, we need more wind, solar, wave, tidal, hydro, geothermal power as well as more energy storage capacity.
While watching the video I thought solar, wind and battery are increasing so quickly and the prices dropping so fast that it looks like small scale reactors might not be able to compete based on cost alone. Your similar observation at the end of the video seems to bear that out.
exactly.
proponents are just salesmen hoping someone will commit before the hammer falls. Then, they will squeeze those few suckers on the basis of "sunk costs".
Imagine if all that money would have been spent on solar, wind and battery storage. 🤷♀️
Wind and some aspects of Solar are established Technologies. Batteries, not yet. However wind and solar do not have the power density for a given footprint and are cyclical. So, all viable alternatives are worth exploring.
@@raoulberret3024 I think this video just demonstrated yet again that nuclear isn’t viable (anymore). Small-scale is too small. Large-scale is too late.
And large-scale battery storage is not yet rolled-out at scale, but the tech is absolutely well-established
@@raoulberret3024 For a technology that is 'not yet' it should come as a bit of a surprise that they are being rolled out across the UK, to profitably take energy from the Grid overnight and sell it back at peak (Planning Permission being sought for a 180MW storage facility in the countryside, not 3 miles from where I sit) . Tesla developed this model for their EV Superchargers.
@@raoulberret3024 Then Pumped Hydro, Europe has been building plenty of it as their energy storage solution.
@@pauleast4372 Correct. However most people can rely on a variety of transportation options, especially in cities, and many have a ECE. Electricity on the other is a critical resource. Few would be OK to resort to coal or dear I say wood unless in an emergency. IMO, the British government is doing the right thing. Pursue any and all reasonable technologies. The energy mix should not be unipolar.
I think you've missed the point a bit here with SMR's. Sure economics are a hurdle. But they're the biggest hurdle to traditional to large scale nuclear also and the reason why there's been so few new projects. It takes an enormous amount of time and capital to build one and investors often don't see their money back for a long time when compared to other power generation. And SMR's are a new technology. All new technologies require more capital up front to get going. If you believe in climate change, you know the damage that can be caused by weather. Literal billions of dollars for every hurricane. How is that the cheaper alternative? We need to invest in technologies like this, regardless of the cost. Our negligence today is costing our future generations their livelihoods.
Nuclear power plants are extremely expensive and complicated machines requiring constant maintenance.
In contrast, solar/battery is cheap, widely available and deployable by most able bodied homeowners.
Nuclear is also a very centralized (controlled) distribution of energy compared to solar's decentralized self sovereignty model.
And solar has a much more scalable investment. However, as of yet solutions to energy storage are fairly centralized. This can be mitigated with houses that are very well insulated at least for residential but it's very expensive.
@@Furiends millions of EVs with Vehicle 2 Grid capability plugged into the grid form a fantastic GWh-scale distributed energy storage system. Companies will turn networks of EV owners who are willing to discharge a small part of their battery in times of need into a virtual power plant.
@@skierpage I'm curious to see whether owners of electric cars can really be convinced to let the battery discharge into the power grid. At least here in Germany there are many who are skeptical and expect a severe loss of battery capacity, so that it is not financially profitable for the owner. (Personally, I think the fears are exaggerated. I just want to point out that this is used to create political sentiment.)
@@skierpage I agree with this in part. But it's idealistic. There's two major problems. If EVs use battery switching you need at least twice as many batteries (thus V2G becomes more like standby batteries to grid) but is impractical just because of the huge amount of batteries needed.
If you keep the batteries in the cars then they need to drag around all the extra weight all of the time and then need to fast charge on trips which practically speaking means mirroring the storage capacity of the grid at a high percent of passenger cars defeating the purpose of V2G.
So in reality, I think it'd be a combination of semis using centenary wires, passenger EVs using removable supplemental batteries for trips, some amount of V2G mostly for stability rather than capacity and fast chargers that would cost a hecking lot more at night.
I think Tesla has sold 900.000 power wall units alone so far.
One other thing. Once viable nuclear plants are developed buildout can be quite fast. France nuclearfied it's whole electrical grid in ten years. If the US continued it's reactor buildout at the same pace as in the seventies it's electric grid would have been over 90% nuclear in the nineties. So all these naysayers saying that nuclear can't possibly be a contributor to a climate solution simply are not paying attention to history of nuclear.
Nuclear is one of those case examples of attractive horrible unworkable ideas that simply refuse to die.
I really appreciate your thoughtful and clearly well researched content. In relation to nuclear, while it may be that DC megavolt transmission is on it’s way and that this will allow countries with a lot of solar to export to those with less, i don’t think that this or the locally generated solar or wind is likely to fulfill the need resulting from the transition from gas and coal towards cleaner sources as the base load requirements for any country are likely to considerably increase with the evolution to EVs. I saw a piece from one of the congressional hearings where the energy companies were talking about the increase in load expected from just cars as EVs and if recollection serves the energy companies were indicating that not only could they only fulfill a % of the expected increase, they had no plan to get to where they need to be to serve the whole lad. I am sure the same situation exists here in the uk. I think it would be interesting to look at an analysis of what we have today, what plans there are for increases and what we think the overall load will look like come 2030/2035 when the EV transition really happens. I don’t know the answer but my guess is that we are also woefully underserved for power in the UK.
To have a quick look at what might be needed, my house is reasonably average and I use around 15 kWh per day, and an electric car had a battery in the range of 35-70kw. I.e. 2-5 times the daily load of my house. Now it’s of course unlikely that I will need to fully charge an electric car with a 70 kw battery every day, but even if it’s every 3-4 days, that’s still a huge increase over today in terms of power generation needed on a house by house basis and in the UK where the weather is at best unreliable, I’d expect base load needs to be higher than in some other places with more reliable climates. It honestly doesn’t feel like our government (and potentially most governments) have a handle on the scale of what they are trying to commit to with the move to EVs.
EVs will need very little increase in grid size because a grid's capacity is set by PEAK demand only, not how much power is moved over a year. And EVs overwhelmingly charge off peak, and with proper ToU (Time of Use) electricity tariffs would do so even more. Not only tha, if EVs move to V2G (again, it just takes proper tariffs to incentivise that) they will actually REDUCE peak demand. Those utilities were, as so often with those who want any excuse to stay with fossil fuels, bullshitting.
@@kenoliver8913 While I appreciate your view, the point of my comment was to suggest that it might be an interesting topic to discuss in an episode as it’s not a topic that has been covered and I think it’s important. With that said the national grid currently has an article on impact of EVs and they are suggesting that it would represent around a 10% increase in overall load to move I think they quoted 80% of cars to EVs. As a country in the UK at least, we can see that we do not have lots of spare capacity in the grid and it is absolutely certain that the peak capacity of the grid includes all the sources of generation, we have seen a number of instances of the course of this winter where Octopus flux have offered payments for reducing load at peak times. While I agree that base load and peak load are not the same, the more that the base load approaches the peak load, the more we have risk in our generation. It’s very nice that we have upcoming technologies that will allow vehicle to grid scenarios and also I am sure we will have the ability to turn down or turn off EV charging at a central level in order to avoid load shedding issues, we don’t have what is needed today and so a conversation on the modelling of how the load will look is likely a good starting point for everyone. We need facts and figures to work with and not opinions.
@@grahamheath9957 I think we are in violent agreement here. Yes, it needs to be properly and formally modelled - and the estimates I've seen from that modelling suggest about 10% extra grid capacity from full electrification of transport. That is very, very different from what those self-interested US utilities were claiming - it is dreadfully unfortunate that AGW has become a tribal conservative versus liberal issue in the US.
I was honestly surprised when I discovered that renewables are new growing faster year over year (measured by net energy produced) than nuclear power ever did. Even if you compensate for the increased world population since the 1980s, when nuclear grew at its fastest, renewables are still growing faster. And the growth is still accelerating.
So how can nuclear ever hope to catch up now? It’d take a miracle breakthrough (Helion maybe?)
Some people seem to assume renewables will hit a brick wall when the need for energy storage becomes critical. But it seriously feels like the world is totally on track to handle that challenge. There are dozens of really good solutions out there, some already operating at large commercial scale, and some with really promising pilot plants.
And then there’s advanced/deep geothermal kind of looming in the background. Threatening to offer all the benefits of nuclear with none of the downsides if the cost comes down further. And you just know a big portion of the oil and gas industry will jump on that opportunity in order to exploit the expertise they have.
I'm curious about molten salt reactors. Moltex Energy's Stable Salt Reactor technology looks really promising.
It ALL looks really promising but none have done more than piss away a bunch of investment dollars since the late 1940's.
@@itsmatt2105 I have one word for you, lobbyist! There is a very good reason this technology hasn't taken off like it should have.
I think at least for dissolved fuel molten salt reactors (which is what most people talk about), the two big problems are corrosion, because you have to use fluoride salts to dissolve the fuel, and proliferation risk because it tends to require high purity online chemical processing that would make producing weapons-grade Pu-239 or U-233 relatively easy.
If you want a high temperature fast breeder reactor, sodium/potassium metal, supercritical water, or gas cooled seem like better bets because they don't have the corrosion issues. I'm personally a fan of sodium metal because then you can use magnetohydrodynamic circulation pumps to cut down on moving parts in the primary coolant loop and oak ridge had one for a while during the early nuclear reactor testing.
They need lots of research. They might be feasible, but they are not slam dunk or easy. Well, to be fair, nothing in nuclear power science is. I wouldn't be dismissive about their previous failures though, China and EU still invest quite a lot to find out if it is doable.
@@thamiordragonheart8682 molten salt is also used for CSP plants and has proven very problematic for corrosion. If that happened with radioactive molten salt that would be a mix larger problem. Though the automatic overheat shutdown of the freeze drain plug sounds awesome, what good is avoiding a meltdown if your already molten radioactive core material just leaks out because a pipe corroded!
Woo! Brave stance on SMR's! I could really use this information to persuade my province to go big on their nuclear reactor because they seem to gravitate towards SMRs. We might as well make a big reactor at the heart of our province and put batteries and renewables in the rural areas because they are easy to transport and there is more room to install them.
Where does the smr fuel come from? Are we shifting emissions to the fuel procurement phase.
Good video Dave. Just a comment though with respect to nuclear safety. Nuclear is not inherently safe, but in the same way as aviation, it has a good safety record. This good safety record is because of safety systems, training and design. But this is costly to set up and maintain and vulnerable to natural events and war.
Or buying your product from Boeing, apparently. ;)
Excellent analysis, lot of valuable information. Showing - if this was necessary - that the hype from "start-ups" promise a lot and deliver little. Just applying to France, this is absolutely true, wind and solar need to ramp-up responding to the huge electrification needs. However with a large share of nuclear, there is a need for replacement and new "standard" nuclear may not be sufficient, SMR could be added quicker than additional traditional plants, adding heat to power generation with interesting efficiency, contributing to fill the gap due to decommissionning of reactors from the 70's. But given the urgency and technological uncertainties, it is critical to be ready to do without SMRs in the 20 coming years (which does not prevent working on it).
We will always need some technology for a reliable baseload, and wind/solar is not it. Batteries will never be it. Nuclear is the only viable option. So if you will have to build a nuke plant anyway, you might as well make it bigger and do away with large solar/wind installations.
Once again, great information and presentation.
Nuclear and hydrogen may have niches that they can fill, but for right now, we need to continue full speed ahead with the technologies we can see are solving these problems.
Current PPAs for solar is just under 3¢/kwh. Add in storage which is not as cheap, and it still beats SMR's 9¢/kwh.
I work in the utility-scale solar industry. Solar plus BESS currently costs around 6 cents/kWh. Recently, I completed a 490 MW solar plus 100 MW BESS project in Mississippi so my numbers are factual.
I think you missed the fact that the US, GB and a few other countries are already operating small modular nuclear reactors. They're just doing it as a military powers. I think you also misrepresented horizontal scale. Pressure vessels and other high value engineering systems can gain pretty significant cost reductions in series as low as 10 or 50 units. Will they ever replace that large massive economy of size scale? Of course not. But they maybe an excellent stop gap to take offline aging coal plants, or provide intermittent supply in disaster relief.
This quote fits nicely Dave
Firefly
Episode: War Stories
Jayne Cobb: "Smellin' a lot of "if" comin' off this plan."
Why dont they use the same reactors that they use on aircraft carriers and submarines?
Sometimes time makes the final Verdict. I'm in Western Australia and many years ago it was floated to "drought proof the State by pumping water from the Ord River Dam. it has a storage capacity of 204,719,140,000 cubic feet (5,797,000,000 cubic m). So plenty to do just that, and it sounded good on paper.
But recent studies have established that it would consume considerably more power to pump the water the 3,000+Km's to the area of need than to desalinate the sea water readily available off the coast.
Thank you. In Australia, the opposition has just announced that if they get elected, they'll build seven reactors, the first to be completed by 2035. In the meantime, I understand that they support the ongoing use of gas and coal. They actively campaign against wind and solar. The latest popular phrase is "loss of amenity." Farmers complain that onshore wind farms will spoil their view and residents in some coastal towns are worried that turbines located 20km offshore will also spoil their view.
Wrong take, firming cost of renewables is as or even more prohibitive than nuclear. Why so many companies and countries are returning to nuclear? Because with hydro it's the only technology that has proven capable of replacing meaningful amount of fossil fuel power plant on a grid. Look at what France did to respond to the oil shocks and what Ontario did during their coal phase out lately. Nuclear played a major role in both of these cases. Energy security is also a huge part of this equation, the sheer energy density of nuclear power allows countries to stock years of electricity production in just a few warehouses.
You forgot mineral resource consumption. Wind and Solar are cheap because metals are cheap for now (thanks for machines they are running with oil)… SMR is efficient in term of metals usage. It can become cheaper ecological energy in short future.
Well as the video pointed out a larger nuclear reactor is going to be more efficient in terms of materials usage then a smaller nuclear reactors, so in your imagined word of minerals shortages it would make sense to build a few large nuclear reactors rather then many small ones.
@@francesconicoletti2547Even the small ones are more efficient materials usage than battery, solar, and wind. Avantage SMR is the capacity to do faster deployment. We're running of out time.. end of oil is really soon. Nobody seems to realize. They're still counting money like we'll have infinite minerals and oil resources. No economic projection is pathetic.
Thanks for all your hard work and putting the info across in an easy to understand format. Im not surprised you’ve been invited to the everything electric show at London, did that invite stretch to the Harrogate show. 😊
5 - 10 years for RR to produce one 400mw SMR. In that time, we could have another 40GW of offshore wind.
Love your videos because you not only skeptical but dig deep and looking for some opportunities. Most of similar youtube channels just do hype and barely scratch the topic.
Great summation of the SMR story and I totally agree with your view that we probably don't need them. Seems to me that it is more of a niche issue pushed by those who might seek to profit from a few enthusiasts looking for the new and shiny solution. I have been a follower of SMR for some time and despite many claims of sorting it out, I actually wonder whether it would ever be in a position to compete with wind, solar etc, which has enormous scope for improvements to efficiency, thus costs. Loving your show.
I dont believe it NEEDS to "compete" with renewables BUT is a BETTER alternative where renewables FAIL and carbon fuelled plants are the other option but that makes the costs even WORSE as that would require LOW volume production so NO "horizontal scaling" and hard to build locations like FAR north Canada / Russia ETC
Excellent episode. Telling truth to power on SMR's
I love Mr Thinkman but he's wrong on this one. Look closer. M
Great video as usual 👌
8 months later 10/31/24 SMR is trading at $19.00. Just goes to show, you never know.
The extra grid capacity expansion construction costs are ignored in all these nuclear posts.
Nobody does the calculations.
Yes, I know the existing grid is available, but grid electricity is only 15% to 18% of all energy used.
Those calculations do exist. The EU for example has been pushing the members over the last two decade to significantly increase the interconnection capacity after a number of regional outages, including e.g. France end of 1999. The current goal 20% transmission capacity to the neighbors relative to the total capacity. As so often, the main problems are politicians and locals fighting against any new line or making ridiculous demands like underground high voltage lines.
@joergsonnenberger6836 What I am saying is 5 to 7 times more electricity generation is required if all electric world and fossil free future.
So, every country has the same bigger electricity needs.
Bigger grid capacity needs.
THESE ARE THE NUMBERS THAT NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT.
When you see many rows of transmission towers in long parallel lines, it is because more capacity was needed.
People just do not know or see the amount of poles and wires and transmission lines.
Asian cities often have a mass of wires in the streets in towns as more people want more electricity.
Bigger capacity is expensive to every country, and 5 to 7 times bigger is bigger than the national debt.
Now, if you are a government guaranteed private generator business, you will have a private monopoly.
@@stephenbrickwood1602 The numbers differ depending on the existing energy mix. Germany for example has been using a lot of gas for heating compared to France, where a lot of heating is done electrically (and no, not with heat pumps either). A factor of four for the growth of transmission capacity is quite reasonable. Now that's local and regional capacity foremost. The method of generation affects how much interregional capacity is necessary and that's what the high voltage lines are, e.g. anything 110kV and above. Nuclear power can be produced anywhere, so it would allow building fewer transmission lines. Of course, if the nuclear plants have problems (France cough cough), that can result in shortages as well. It's very complicated.
@joergsonnenberger6836 you don't understand.
Nobody understands these transmission construction costs.
Nobody understands the length of the national electrical grid.
Millions and millions and millions of customers.
In Australia, the national GDP is $1.5 trillion.
Grid length 1 million klm.
Grid construction costs 1 million $/klm
5 times more capacity $5 TRILLION.
Plus, new generation plants construction costs. $2 BILLION each. × 400 SMRs
Plus, staffing costs. Particularly nuclear quality staffing 3 shifts 24/7.
But this is only little Australia. 25 million people.
There is an answer, but you must see the problem first.
Here's a strong reaction to this superb summary of the state of the art and sensible recommendations. THANK YOU!!!