Small Modular Reactors: The Model T Of Nuclear Energy | Answers With Joe
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- Опубліковано 28 вер 2024
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Small Modular Reactors are shipping container-sized reactors that can be scaled up to meet any energy need. And they may be the future of nuclear energy.
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France has the cheapest power in Europe and 80% of it is Nuclear power. They built the same type of reactor in 16 or 19 places and it is a great success story.
And they have the cleanest energy mix in europe too, and did it 40 years ago, but nucular is bad, so no, it is not an option... (and fun fact, they will not renew this system, so in the next decade or two they will either somehow can switch from 80% nuclear to 80% solar/wind, or just build a few nice coal/oil/gas plants, so they can stop using the bad nuclear ones.)
France has NOT the cheapest power in Europe before tax. But they have Low taxes on electricity, so consumer price is lower than other countries. Has Nothing to do with Nuclear and everything to do with taxation.
@@thorin1045 they also technology for recycling spent fuel for decreasing waste
France nuclear industry is in utter bankrupcy. The third largest operator entered in bankrupcy ~2012, the second one (Areva) was bought by the first one (EDF) in 2017 on the verge of bankrupcy and currently EDF (which is owned mostly by the French state) is over € 70,000 millions in debt due the huge operational cost of their fleet of 56 reactors, with one third of those facing the need of either invest massive amounts of money in upgrades (due they will exceed the 40 year lifespan for which they were designed) or even more costly retirement. Nuclear is so incredible expensive than even Bill Gates (one of the richest man in the world) choses to shill nuclear corporations and to try to lure public funds to their delusional projects instead of bursting his own money into them. In fact, I think that if you fill a can with 5 € bills, spraying gasoline over them and set it on fire you probably would get a more cost effective energy source than funding nuclear reactors, of any kind. If you read about the development of newer power plants and how they go in the last 20 years (from Hinkly point C to Flamanville to Oliklouto... ) you will probably reach the conclussion that nuclear power plants do work as a steam-powered locomotive but replacing coal with money bills.
If EDF, with over 60 years operating nuclear power plants and 56 reactors in line, is unable to make a dime with this technology you won't be able to convince me that all those star ups scammers begging funds from the states would be able to make it difference... There's a reason why private investment entirely fleed away from those projects. In my country (Spain) we had up to 14 reactors (now 7 in line) and they probably will be retired in this decade, because they are no longer competitive in the market. Thankfully we didn't put all eggs in the same basket (as France) and neither needed to make nuclear weapons, so for us transitioning to other energy sources is going relatively ok.
@@Buran01 can please provide link for edf bankruptcy, i found only one article and i didn't hear anything about edf bankruptcy. i am not criticising you i am just curious.
"uranium is dangerous"
*Laughs in thorium
Thorium works by creating Uranium as part of it's fuel cycle. #themoreyouknow
no please do not laugh in the thorium
that would be bad.
Did Joe do a vid on thorium reactors?
@@KingClovis yes
@@montex66 Though that Uranium isotope is far more stable than the one used in nuclear reactors. Still radioactive but not as dangerous for us.
Thank you for continuing to educate about the realities of nuclear safety, SMRs, and the progress being made in this area of technology!
"I'm leaving a lot out." Yeah, I would say so. Like anything actually related to the cause:
- Three Mile Island Reactor #2 was a brand new reactor (Like only a year or two old).
- There was no switch or valve accidentally thrown to drain the cooling pond. It had a known problem with one of the cooling pumps that the previous night's crew tried to address. And it was this pump that started the incident when it failed and then took down the entire second cooling system with it. The cooling pond never emptied.
- The reactor was known to have issues with heat that was scheduled to be addressed later that year.
- The system had an antiquated system of notifying the staff of issues, faults, and warnings, including a printer hooked up to a 300 baud modem that couldn't keep up with the faults and alerts being sent to it and an inadequately designed warning light board.
- A crew that was trained on a completely different type of reactor situations (All were former US Navy submariners trained on reactors for nuclear subs.) who...
- Did the exact opposite of what they needed to do... initially. This caused the group to stop water from going into the containment vesicle initially because they were protecting the wrong part of the reactors.
Basically, it was the perfect storm of things going wrong that ultimately caused Reactor Number 2 to overheat and partially melt. (Yes, the reactor vessel and the fuel in it are now slag, but nothing anywhere close to what Chernobyl's elephant's foot was.) And the team was able to stop the meltdown by the time they got a hold of a rep for the company who made the reactor. It was a perfect storm of a brand new reactor in it's shakeout phase with a few known issues and some bad design flaws that lead to some complacency with the teams running it combined with a crew relying on procedures for a completely different environment, where if any of the variables had been slightly different, this wouldn't have happened.
If you would like a good timeline of events and an excellent breakdown of first and second stories, check out this Lead Dev lecture by Nicolas Means "Who Destroyed Three Mile Island" ua-cam.com/video/hMk6rF4Tzsg/v-deo.html
Yes I was thinking the exact same thing. Even though that presentation isn’t made by a nuclear engineer nor is the point being made even about the incident itself it is one of the best thorough explanations of the incident to date in my opinion.
Vesicle?
And still the only thing that happened was that the reactor was broken and could not be repaired. That is safety!!!
@@Kian139 Yeah, all my life, I kept hearing people talk about Three Mile Island like it was Chernobyl, and when I saw the video on it, I was like, "Um, there's worse accidents in US history than this." Sure, it was scary and was close to becoming a Chernobyl, but it didn't.
@@jackielinde7568, it was not close to becoming a Chernobyl. It was never even near but a lot of scary stories and wild speculation was reported and people believed it.
Comparing Nuclear and Solar on a /MWh basis is misleading, Solar needs storage to be usable.
Yeah , nuclear is base load energy.
There's a load of other assumptions that go into calculating the LOCE that can throw out the results to a huge degree so I dismiss that metric most of the time anyway unless I can see how it was calculated.
"Humans aren't very good and calculating risk."
The understatement of 2020/21
@Karl Zaraiva Plandemic
Humans are a domesticated species.
@Karl Zaraiva I think your understanding is exactly backward.
You misspelled "Governments"
"I made a calculated risk but man am I bad at math..."
Thanks for this. My husband works in nuclear. It's so good to see positive and informative videos on the subject
Hope he'll get to keep his job in the future as this new tech really starts to catch on.
I love nuclear power.
It has always been some kind of forbidden fruit. Something my parents never liked and didn't want to talk about.
Being a rebellious kid, I had to develop an interest in it.
how the tables have turned
@Rusto Autism and cancer were both on the rise over the last few decades due to the increase in people's life expectancy and the odds of poor formed fetuses actually surviving development. However due to better understandings of triggers for cancer has made it start to fall in the last 2 decades though autism is still just as common but more often is it noticed now due to now being publicly understood as an issue. Though obviously while in some cases it's actually a result of the parent's having poor habits during pregnancy that they don't willingly admit (my aunt for example has an autistic kid due to drinking and smoking during pregnancy).
Also I really question the claim you say there were spikes of radiation from the nuclear plant. They are screened 24/7 for leaks and environmental contamination on top of the government testing the buildings as well monthly. It could also be from radon gas which right now is something the US leaves to its citizens to deal with as that's an expensive problem to deal with and expensive to even test if your house has it. The US doesn't require testing for it due to lobbying by the realty businesses not wanting to pay for it themselves.
@Rusto Multiple places in the world have higher background radiation rates than would be *inside* the power plant control room. Yet, they don't have higher incidence of developmental problems or cancer.
@Rusto The big dumb reactors guaranteed those problems. SMRs are used in the navies of the world very safely. This video showed how these problems are solved by SMRs.
The problems of the past will be solved by Rolls Royce type quality with mass production of a proven high quality design.
Thank you for this video. Dispelling myths about the safety of nuclear is MUCH needed right now. How do we build The Foundation without Atomics?
Chernobyl, Fukishima, irradiated Northern Pacific, plants built on seismic faults. I guess those are all myths
Let's talk about reality. Carcinogenic, mutagenic, teratogenic, Destroys DNA, destroys immune systems making victims susceptible to every disease under the sun, bioaccumulation in the food chain, nuclear exclusion zones for thousands of years, causes miscarriages, shortens life cycles, destroys quality of life, catastrophies that destroy entire economies, irresolvable waste problems, waste radioactive, toxic ore tailings and radioactive reactors as far as the eye can see, contaminated groundwater, fuel fleas disintegrating like tiny time bombs destroying any living tissue they contact; fission by-products a million times more dangerous than the U-235 that went into the reactors which will be the most dangerous threat to life on earth for longer than mankind has been in existence. Easily the most expensive and dangerous form of energy ever created. But they make great weapons of mass destruction.
@@richardtucker5686 Chernobyl - A reactor built in communist country that had known fatal design defects and had absolutely zero containment structure like Western reactors.
Fukushima - Reactors that melted down because of sheer incompetence on the part of the Japanese government. They refused to follow the advice of engineers that told them to build the reactors on higher ground, refused to place the diesel generators further away from the ocean, and were notorious for relaxed regulation and operator training requirements. The reactor operators not only failed to recognize the the proper function of the PASSIVE COOLING system that would have prevented the meltdowns, they shut the passive cooling system down despite knowing that they did not have any other way to keep the reactors cooled. The accident happened out of complete negligence and ignorance.
Plants built on seismic faults? Amazing how out of all those plants, none of them have had a meltdown directly caused by an earthquake. Even in the case of Fukushima Daiichi, the reactors survived a MASSIVE earthquake without an issue. They had meltdowns due to poor training and regulatory negligence that ignored the advice of experienced engineers. Had the operators not shut down the passive cooling system, there wouldn't have been a meltdown. Had the Japanese government built the reactors at a higher elevation like they were told to do during construction, there would not have been a meltdown. Had the diesel generators been placed at a higher elevation further away from the ocean, there would not have been a meltdown.
@@jackfanning7952 So your answer to science facts is anti-science fear mongering. Great job little guy.
@@hochhaul We don't need no steenkin' science from Dr. Frankenstein. My favorite group is Breezi and the Sol Sisters.
4:18 That's a picture of the COSMO oil refinery fire in Chiba.
As an Irishman, I’m just glad that ‘small’ is becoming fashionable! 🌭
Joe might also bring 'Bejaysus' back into fashion.
???
Don't believe that stupid world map of regional penis sizes that does the rounds on twitter every few years ffs! haha
But is modular????
As The Irishman, I thought you'd object to the suggestion that Jimmy Hoffa was already dead and buried in 1942.
What does your being an Irishman have to do with it?
Thank you for helping support these ideas. Despite their flaws I think SMR's or Nuclear power in general has a huge role to play in the future. Solar and Wind aren't suitable everywhere, and Nuclear should be everywhere they aren't and provide base load everywhere they are.
Or we could stop stealing from nature and skip the giant solar farms all together. Maybe only in the most utterly barren deserts.
@@jeremyO9F911O2 Low key, totally agree! I think Nuclear in all its facets and fuels should be used for essentially all energy needs. Even if that means synthesizing liquid fuels for mobile/offsite use.
But that take is a little to "radical" to get traction so i'll gladly compromise with more basic "renewable" advocates if they support investment and interest in nuclear power.
@Allen Janco solar and wind take up too much land that is usable for other things
@Allen Janco What I meant is that the efficiency and effectiveness of nuclear is basically independent of where it is deployed. Solar effectiveness is very dependent on your latitude and both wind and solar depend on weather to some degree. A solar farm in the arctic wont be very powerful even if given constant daylight
@@mattg8116 Exactly, energy production isn't a one size fits all solution. What may work in Norway or Iceland, may not be the best carbon free solution for Finland or Canada. Then you have places where storms are prevalent and wind turbines have to be shutdown and solar isn't as effective, the need for backup power and renewable repairs will make a modular fission plant's 24/7 power production a more attractive option, at the least for a base load.
Cool stuff, I worked in a nuclear power plant, FACT the natural background radiation OUTSIDE the plant was higher than INSIDE, plus safety protocols were so strict and enforced, chances of pile going critical was higher than you getting a pay raise, so big fan of nuclear power, at any scale, imagine a nuclear Tesla Model X...."whats your range? errr emmm 20 years I think..." .LOL
Yeah there were days where a poor worker who had a radioactive medical procedure done couldn't get out of the protected area because they were setting off the monitors so they had to get hand frisked out. Eventually it became a thing where you had to report any medical procedure where radiation was concerned, that's how sensitive the detection equipment is.
Nuclear car + car crash/poor maintenance = radioactive contamination
I'm a fan of nuclear as a stepping stone to something better/safer. While it has its place let's be real: nuclear waste is a serious problem we STILL haven't solved....so....yeah....
Hello fellow Bärner :)
@@yvanpajevic9680 We have solved the waste problem, deep underground storage for example. You basically put all the waste into a large concrete confinement and put it 100m underground. The concrete stops practically all of the radiation so you can stand right next to it with no significant radiation exposure. The confinement cannot break or something because it's made and tested to survive planes crashing into the vessel, drop from 20 meters onto a concrete floor, earthquakes etc. the solution is there. The main reason we don't dispose the waste yet is because storage sites are under construction and because the waste is still pretty young. Nuclear powerplants are a relatively new thing so most of the waste is not ready for long term storage yet. Young waste has a pretty high activity so it needs to be actively cooled for a few years first.
0:22 - I love how you can actually see somebody hurrying away from the epic nuclear blast, bottom left about a third of the way across to the right
I like it. Good for the majority. Personally, though, I still prefer having control over my own energy production. The grid isn't very dependable here in rural NB.
That's fair, but like most home solar advocates it misses the actual conversation. Having an off the grid home is perfectly fine and I wouldn't discourage any rural denizen from such investment. But being off the grid isn't being energy independent, not even remotely. Energy exists within every part of our lives, the tools we use, and the food/fuel we consume. SMRs aren't for powering homes, rather they are for powering everything else. If every home went off the grid for electricity, we still need something else to power commerce and industry.
It's easy to get caught up in finding "the best" form of energy, but it's all context dependant and the right tool should be used for each job. If you can power your own needs, brilliant! nothing should be off the table because it doesn't fit the right political picture.
@@contradictorycrow4327 hey, look, he's such a good pedant!
@@contradictorycrow4327
Might want to tell that to our ancestors. They seemed capable of it. Of course thier lives were not even remotely like our lives today.
But it does prove that you CAN be completely energy independant if you're willing to live a life quite a bit tougher than what most are used to.
It's basically the prequel of Fallout but with semiconductors invented.
a SMR sounds relaxing :3
LFTR/Thorium reactors Joe? Is this take going to be in this series?
There is a video on Thorium from several years ago. That's actually how I found this channel.
All the best
@@Nemo37K Yea, but there's been a lot of work done with the idea since then. Worth a revisit.
Personally, I'm more interested in using molten salt reactors to reprocess nuclear waste, as he alluded to at the end of the video, than using the Thorium cycle. Mostly because being a net consumer of nuclear waste is beneficial in its own right, producing electricity would simply be a side-benefit. It's not as efficient at producing energy as using Thorium would, but it could support consuming the waste of multiple SMR's and make nuclear more viable until someone finally cracks power-positive Fusion in a generation or two.
@@ShneekeyTheLost Ahh, gotcha. I did not know that. Thank you for the new info!
Perhaps that will be covered in the video on waste and its disposal?
@@ShneekeyTheLost I agree thorium is oversold, but molten salt reactors have a lot of potential. Especially fast spectrum MSRs which, as you say, can consume existing nuclear waste (e.g. Moltex Energ & Elysium Power).
@@Nemo37K Yeah zi realised that after I posted this.. cheers.
Time for an update though perhaps Joe?
Hi Joe, It would have been good to briefly mention the base load problem. Otherwise most non-technical people would wonder why we would ever spend anything on nuclear power when solar PV is so much cheaper per MWH.
This is one of the most important issues overlooked by those who dismiss nuclear in favor of 100% solar and wind.
"The investors weren't wrong to be concerned about accidents..."
Bankers and institutional investors being the go-to source for deep knowledge on nuclear physics, nuclear chemistry and safe power operation. These are the guys that KNOW about atoms. /sarc
Not bankers no, but there are technology investors that _do_ know about these things - or at least know enough to make a call about whether or not the risk is worth their money.
Fusion power is a prime example of this: Aside from ITER and the NIH, almost all serious fusion research is being done by private investors, including everyone's favorite bogeyman Bill Gates. Now do you think Gates went ahead and got himself a degree in nuclear physics? Of course not. No more than he got himself a medical degree or a teacher's license before he started doing vaccine and education work in Africa (long before covid-19 and the magic microchips conspiracy theory).
But he doesn't have to be the guy actually designing a fusion reactor or genetically modifying bacteria in order to _invest_ in those things. He only needs to know enough to judge the risk of failure vs the chance of success and to be able to hire people who _do_ know those topics in depth.
Banks of course could do that as well if they wanted, but its not their priority. Their goal is to make _safe_ investments not gamble on potential future technology. Though a large part of that is simply the difference between being a bank (a large institution with their own investors to please and SEC reports to file and whatever else) vs an absurdly wealthy private individual who can do whatever the hell they want with their ridiculous fortunes. Institutions rarely have "pet" projects or any sort of interest/goals beyond "make more money". Personality isn't a strong driving factor in most cases.
I love hearing these things. In September I'm going to undertake my nuclear engineering master of science at Politecnico di Milano and I consider it was the best choice I could have ever made.
Hey, you wouldn't happen to know the guys who used those Italian satellites to change the votes for Biden, would ya?
Sadly that Italians vote against nuclear energy, even they import nuclear energy from France.
Is in fact the reason why France and UK are above Italy like GDP
There is a plan for a thorium molten salt reactor that supposedly can stop a meltdown by melting a heat sensitive core which will drain the fuel into a container of salt that will dilute the fuel. It also can supposedly burn nuclear waste and it's normal fuel at the same time
Thanks for covering this topic, very few people are covering let alone in a positive light.
I use to work in the nuclear industry, and construction and now currently health care. And the nuclear industry was the safest. In so many ways. I really liked you comparison of the reactors to airplanes lol
I think SMR and VSMRs have a role to play I powering our future, but I hope its shared with renewable as well.
I would be interested to hear thoughts on using VSMRs to power space stations ships and potentially Mars.
Ooh! I saw the subtle introduction! The blue flash in the center at 11 seconds in, just before the "cigarette burn" on the left of the screen 🤔🤔😅
So I will still be able to have my fission power armor by 2077. Nice.
War never changes.
Fission power? My heart has a hard-on for micro fusion cells. And stimpaks.
@@mikitz same here
It saddens me that the answer to 'why isn't nuclear energy more commonly used?' more or less boils down to 'We don't trust each other not to use the materials to try and blow each other up'.
It's been too long since I watched one of your videos
You always put so much effort in
Love the work and keep it up
I live across from windscale
When it has a problem they just rename the place.
A relative whent on a school trip there and got a badge saying "ive been to sellafield", he added to it, "and survived"
They say the cows and sheep in the fields surrounding it are concrete
Are you sure that’s more Joe? Haha. Great video as always!! Oh... and apparently first!
How are you 1 day ago on a video posted an hour ago?
@@אניבאמתיהודי Patreons.
Looks like you got an 18 hour head start
Hopefully, people will read further on this subject than they get out of this skim over the topic.
SMR'S or VSMR's can replace coal fired and then natural gas powered power plants and produce more power in the same footprint. If CO2 is used instead of water, efficiency goes up and danger goes down. If liquid salt is used in the reactor, fuel burn up goes from single digits up to almost 100 percent while producing more fuel as it burns because you are using the nonfissile parts of the salt bath as a neutron blanket from which more fuel is created.
Conceivably, these reactors could run for many decades without refueling and could be refueled on the fly without shutdown.
They are thermally safe because excess heat causes expansion of the salts and the expansion reduces and then shuts off the reaction. There are no rods to jam or be moved and the final safety is a plug that will melt and drain the liquid into safe cooling chambers.
Finally, no water is needed for cooling or for power production, so plants can be sited almost anywhere from Antarctica to the middle of the Gobi Desert.
The cream on the top is that old fuel rods can have the uranium dissolved from them and then used in liquid salt reactors, taking them up to close to 100 percent use and reducing the long lived waste by orders of magnitude.
Building reactors of any size with fuel rods and water is a sure way to have more disasters. Liquid salt reactors operate at normal atmospheric pressure and CO2 used as the secondary medium is no threat to anyone.
We already had a liquid salt reactor that ran for years with no troubles, but we threw it away for pressurized water reactors. Of course, we took the basic technology and have been powering ships and submarines all over the world for decades.
Why can't we get this great, base load power generation technology in place before we destroy our planet with fossil fuels. The answer is regulations. The military has been doing it for over five decades, testing and documenting nearly every aspect of these liquid metal cooled reactors and yet this is apparently not enough for the NRC. They are making the civilian reactor companies redo all the testing and documentation while our military sits on their hands and keeps all their work under high classification.
The obstacle to progress here is the NRC. While they are dithering, India and especially China are going full speed. If they start turning out these reactors like little automobiles, they will own the world and we will be left in their dust.
Did anyone else notice the terrified Sasquatch at the bottom left of the screen around 0:19
Hello Mr. Scott. Thank you for creating an informative video about SMRs. The Canadian province (state) of Alberta, Canada where I live is working with several other provinces in our country to bring this technology into fruition as well. I have high hopes for this tech, and also the other modern nuclear fission technology that you mentioned on your video.
I think the people that dismiss these modern and much safer nuclear tech right now, do it because of misinformation. And they're as bad as the people that dismissed electric cars in the past because they couldn't see the potential.
11:40 I don't think solar LCOE will be half of nuclear's LCOE once you factor in storage. Intermittency is, and will probably remain, the reason wind and solar won't ever constitute 50+% of an industrialized nation grid
It isn't, not even close. Energy collectors like wind and solar cook the books when it comes to LCOE calculations by not including the costs of backups and/or storage required to cover for its intermittency. That intermittency also leads to subsynchonous resonance when scaled up to grid level, a multi-trillion dollar problem for the US alone.
Humans: we've done it!!! The first atomic bomb is complete and operational..
Aliens: Ah crap the children found the matches 😂😭
Either r/iamveryyoung or just unfunny
@@5Puff maybe you're both.
0:20 There's someone in the foreground of the footage (towards the bottom left). If comic books have taught us anything, they got super powers.
Well spotted!
Yep, they got the "super cancer power".
Look carefully , it looks like he falls over before running back towards the camera HAHAHAA
Theres 50-60 people standing at a fence. Couple camera's, 1 on top of a car...
More like flash blindness
Did I hear 'a ten mile containment zone' for a full scale plant? The now-shut-down Pilgrim nuclear plant in Plymouth USA is about 675 meters from the closest houses.
Hey there! I know it sounds surprising that Rolls-Royce would be making SMRs, but I would like to clarify that Rolls-Royce PLC has been providing and maintaining the nuclear power systems for the United Kingdom's nuclear submarines for many years, as well as maintaining a successful civil nuclear business, so there's plenty of institutional experience and expertise to build from. RR PLC is an aerospace company, not a car company (that part was split off a long time ago) for anyone wondering. :)
Wow that was subtle. I could barely see it
Another problem: showing a pic of NuScale while saying that refueling an SMR just means replacing one module with another. Not so with NuScale, at least: You pull one module at a time and refuel it just like in traditional PWR. It would be too expensive and time-consuming to replace the entire module. The advantage is that it means only shutting down 1/12 or 1/6 or 1/4 of the plant at a time.
nuclear is clearly the superior energy generation that we have at this moment and if the mob mentality had never stopped its development at this point it would be even more efficient in all aspects
Yeah maybe but as you said it is not developed enough and till it is ready we should reduce our carbon emission with other technologies. And then, the question can rise, if it is even economical to go with SMR. As Joe said, solar power would be much cheaper than nuclear power even in 2050.
Maybe it’s almost like political interests don’t align with what is best for its population, crazy
@@neodymidius lol this guy has one of the worst cases of cognitive dissonance.
Nuclear would be better if we worked on nuclear just as much as we've worked on solar and wind. But the investment isn't made because people have scared investors away and the "it's too early to invest" excuse is being thrown around.
I dare say, this would have been the solution for global warming 50 years ago. And it would have been keeping on getting cleaner with time.
If you calculate the nuclear waste in, it's far too expensive compared to renewable energ sources.
@@neodymidius It is, and we CAN make them safe, and able to deal with the waste without buried in a long term storage. The problem is as we all know, the breeder reactor makes everyone scared that they will be used to make more bombs.
There are a lot of nuclear technologies that are already developed, usable, and ready to go but the perception is, well exactly as you implied. The investments would even be there, but we have two huge hurtles.
One is we REALLY have to develope a truly effective oversight of where they are built, how they are maintained plus a very good emergency plans that can contain and diffuse if anything goes wrong. Even if they don't, it's best to act like it is inevitable.
The other thing needed to get nuclear technologies to really be a thing is to change public perception.
11:16 "By the time these SMRs get up and running would the cost of solar and wind gone down enough to make it unnecessary" The difference, of course, is that solar and wind are intermittent. What generates power when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing? The classic response is "batteries", but that is a very different cost equation. To store just 8 hours (i.e. overnight) of a 1 GW solar power station you would need 8GWh. 8GWh is about the same quantity of storage batteries as the amount installed in the *entire world* in 2018 [1]. Needless to say the LCOE estimates don't account for the cost of buying all the static storage batteries in the entire world. Indeed this is the problem with LCOE in general, it makes no accounting for the integration costs (such as batteries) that are needed to deliver the reliable power our modern world demands
[1] www.worldenergy.org/assets/downloads/ESM_Final_Report_05-Nov-2019.pdf
@Daniel Meyers Limited capacity, limited energy density, and limited duration respectively. 8 GWh of compressed air storage requires nearly 144000 cubic meters or 38 million gallons at 300 bar, assuming perfect conversion.
Instead of trying to slap ludicrously expensive band-aids onto energy collectors, maybe just use technology that doesn't need them in the first place.
Game changer for space industrialization.
ASMR
A: Affordable
S: Small
M: Modular
R: Reactor
That! Whenever he said SMR, I heard an extra A
What we need is those reactors running those huge cargo ships. Those things burn millions of gallons of bunker fuel a day!
Exactly, people forget about just how hard the fossil fuel industry worked to demonize nuclear power since it's inception. Even fewer people know about bunker fuel and how awful the stuff is!
You do know that ships used to be powered by wind, right? But nuclear energy would be great to have when solar and wind can't cut it. In any case, it will be good for everyone when they stop burning that bunker fuel.
Yeah, not going to happen.
- cargo ships need access to ports and no port is going to risk going out of business due to an accident
- totally not economical
- regulators are not going to approve something which they can't inspect most of the time
@@jaroslavstava3704 Are you saying the US Navy is unable to dock in ports? lmao
@@davidbeppler3032 actually, yes. Google should give you enough results where nuclear vessels were refused.
For commercial operators it would be much worse. Those are known to be run as cheaply as possible.
I believe these are the most practical energy solution.
you may want to check out Stable Salt Reactors as well
7:25 France got around that problem by sticking with one standard layout
Hey, I'm okay with bulldozing Dallas and replacing it with solar panels.
Ohh gee, I wonder where that silicon is mined. I wonder where we will get that lithium and cobalt for the batteries necessary to save that energy for night time!
I hope the next video talks more about thorium-based reactors. Cheaper, cleaner, and safer than uranium, and was known about before uranium, but the government wanted the weapons-grade waste from uranium, so we ended up with uranium instead of cleaner, cheaper, safer throrium.
Kashiwazaki - 4.2km2? Did you include all exclusion area around it? Will be nice to add evacuation area.
This is my favorite channel thanks for great video and content.
You're a gatdamn genius joe !
Joe, you should have cut in a clip from Iron Man 1 - "William, here is the technology. I've asked you to simply make it smaller."
Without the subsidies for nuclear fuel production and the publicly funded removal and storage of nuclear waste, it ain't so cheap anymore. But SMRs are great for remote places.
These have great promise in so many applications!!
Ahem.... Mars... :)
Freeman Dyson has a great talk on UA-cam where he talks about small nuclear reactors he and others developed for hospitals . He said it was impossible to meltdown
While solar and wind will probably always be cheaper per MW, there are plenty of locations and applications where an SMR makes the most sense.
Just did some quick research... China's ACP100 small nuclear reactor is the first SMR design that's been approved by the International Atomic Energy Agency, while being the most powerful of the bunch at 125 MW capacity.
They've been approved for construction as well. I'd be interested to see what the total construction time is and contrast against conventional nuclear powerplants.
Excellent episode.
I am a big proponent of nuclear power but I think you missed the Church Rock uranium mill spill since that is considered to have released more nuclear material than Three Mile Island.
Did you ever do a vid about the difference between fission and fusion energy?
Here's something to think about: The most common concept of Franklin Chang Diaz' Ad Astra VASIMR rocket engine is solar-powered. But powering a VASIMR to produce a substantial velocity (like the notion of a VASIMR-propelled spacecraft reaching Mars in just several weeks, instead of over six months) would require a huge solar array to generate the electricity to power a VASIMR engine at that scale. But what if, instead of relying so heavily on a solar array, the VASIMR-propelled spacecraft simply carried a couple of relatively small, modular fission reactors to generate 100 megawatts or more? Then the ship would be well-powered even when not directly exposed to the Sun.
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa was built to strict earthquake-resistance standards. However, the 2007 earthquake caused the plant to leak radioactive substances into the air and water.
1/10 millionth of the legal limit is a nonissue.
Chernobyl disaster: I'm the worst nuclear power has to offer. I eventually killed 4000.
Banqiao Hydroelectric Dam failure: That's rookie numbers.
Three Mile Island is the most overblown nuclear disaster ever. Which seems a crazy thing to say, considering just how bad nuclear disasters can be, but I'm pretty sure that worst case scenario aspect that didn't come to pass is the main driver of people's perception of the event.
Still, you ignore the fact that even large scale GW level Molten Salt Thorium Reactors will have a NEGLIGIBLE nuclear waste PROBLEM, and its half life lasting only 300yrs.
Even if the design calls for water cooling, the reactor will not need to be under high pressure.
At 5:44 the area of a nuclear plant is given at 4.2 sq km. But later in the video (10:25), there's a 10 mile exclusion zone. 16 km x 16 km x pi, or 800 sq km (assuming the zone starts at the centre of the facility, if its the boundary then it's 900 sq km).
Which makes the energy per unit area over 4 times better for solar. .
People cannot live in next to a power plant but animals and plants can, rivers can flow... and if you put the power plant on the coast half (or more) of the exclusion zone is on the sea. Also the 10 miles depends on the safety regulations but he calls it protective zone, not exclusion zone; maybe you just need to have some iodine pills at home and know what to do in case of problems (close the windows and stay inside) if you live within 10 miles of the plant.
even if they don't economically work out here, they will be great for space, moon, and mars applications
We've had solutions for nuclear "waste" for decades. It is recyclable after all.
LCOE isn't the best parameter to judge, you need to look at the system cost: in solar/winds case, that's not just batteries (not to forget other flexibility cost required) , but also currently unavailable seasonal storage, which may be hydrogen. But yeah, none of that is cheap... and its also not going to happen soon enough. So our best bet is to invest in a wide energy portfolio.
a combo of those and traveling-wave reactors would work well together.
Thank you, Joe Scott; for an entertaining and informative overview of small nuclear reactor designs currently being thought of for a number of communities. The Price-Anderson Act which you sort of glazed over has a number of deficiencies when considering the liabilities arising from a nuclear incident. The concept of contingent liabilities incurred by vendors and sub-vendors to the reactor project is a Gordian Knot legal conundrum which has never really been worked out practically in any sense. Like you say; there have not been many commercial power accidents and the personnel injury/ lost time accident record for nuclear is phenomenal to say the very least. Many reactors in the commercial environment have had major maintenance costs incurred regarding the U-tube bundles in the water-to-steam heat exchange cycle causing the wholesale change-out of steam generators. The SMR designs currently under consideration by the DOE and others depict a system which would present difficulties when when replacement is needed for the water-to-steam heat exchanger elements and other components as well. The radiological and health physics problems do not shrink in comparison with the size of the machine and other costs seen in big plants [such as a staffed emergency operations center] are simply unscalable. As proposed as stand-alone units the new reactors will undoubtedly display the same heat-rejection characteristics that the large commercial PWR and BWR plants do currently. SMR's will be more salable and indeed practical if the vendors and contractors can use the rejected process heat for companion industrial purposes. An example would be a desalination plant using process heat from the nearby generating station and producing fresh water. Lastly; California renewable energy supplies that State's energy grid with over fifty-five percent of the power at peak and about twenty percent overnight. These numbers are way beyond anyone's expectations back at the turn of the Century when people thought that organic growth of solar and other renewables would never achieve the capacity factor[s] that we are seeing today. The central problem of tomorrow for the United States of America is not clean energy sources as much as it will be clean water supplies for its citizens.
Getting power generation closer to the consumer, heavy industry or high density population centers, reduces the need for really expensive vulnerable cross country power cables.
I have no idea what the cost of building a grid costs, or the cost of power outages when the grid fails but seems like it might be a significant amount🤔
you forgot to mention the ford nucleon.. the real game changer
As a Brit I have to warn you from experience that while wind and solar costs have come down and as scalable as they are they shouldn't be relied on as your primary source of power, there just too unreliable. When the wind isn't blowing and it's overcast to make up for the shortfall in electricity we have resort to turning back on old coal fired power plants to keep the national grid running which kind of defeats the purpose of going with clean renewables, it also results in higher electricity bills. If you want to clean electricity your energy mix should be based around nuclear power and supplemented by wind and solar with some gas plants in reserve.
LCOE of Solar doesn't account for storage, which increases its LCOE from $23-$39/MWh which brings it well above the cost of nuclear now and into the future.
If we strategically use daytime excess solar for powering enrichment and reprocessing of nuclear material (symbiosis) we negate the need for a significant quantity of chemical/mechanical storage.
One of the best presenters, for sure !
High temperature molten salt Reactors allow you to use spent nuclear fuel rods (the high-level nuclear waste Sierra Club has been going on about since the 1960’s). So some of the designs for MSR machines Primary job is to reduce the volume of nuclear waste by fissioning do uranium, fishing products, and transuranic’s. In the right machine the leftover from a run in these new machines only has to be tended for 300 years. And… You get electricity from the heat of the machines operation. You can also desalinate seawater for crops and people. You can synthesize agricultural fertilizers and liquid fuels for internal combustion engines with the extra heat.
Illinois EnergyProf covered this better. And everyone who goes on about solar.. misses the fact that the require those 'rare earths' and pretty nasty mining techniques.
Also, the top three SMR's are 'walkaway safe' (As are most gen 3 reactors)
Chernobyl, Three mile, and Fukashima are als oall covered in the professors channel - People tend to miss that the Fukashima palnt was hit by the most powerful earthquake on record, and then a tidal wave. And there was no meltdown - there was control release of radiation, and no casuaslties.
The Three Mile Island fearmongering was so successful that my stepdad _still_ believes that it was a major incident. Even after I pointed out that no significant radioactive material or radiation was released and, really, it was a story of failsafes and redundancy working as designed. He actually got angry at my statements. Forty years later and the media's fearmongering is still doing its work. I don't know what the reporting was like on the outcome of the Three Mile Island investigation, but I'm willing to bet that it was less than the reporting on the 9/11 investigation, and that was extremely minimal.
Yes, accidents happen, but those failsafes and redundancies stop them from becoming disasters (the lack of failsafes and redundancies was the reason Chernobyl became a disaster rather than merely an accident caused by incomplete training and information).
Joe, you Really should take a look at the work Tony Seba's ReThinkX foundation has done on how the declining cost of Solar over the next decade will affect all other forms of energy generation. You hit the nail on the head when you said economics will determine whether this technology will get adopted.
Did anyone else see the guy running away from the mushroom cloud in that vintage nuclear clip? Lol.
The Stokes Archives was awesome use that Joe and pull more cool info out oh yea this is just interesting but gotta go eat at joes
I have solar that was professionally installed on my house 2 years ago in south Louisiana. My system has an 8kW capacity (24 - 335W panels). The absolute highest single day production was 41.5kWh. My average daily production so far for this year is 14.4kWh. If you go by the "rated" output that would be 8kW x 24h/D = 192kWh/D. Solar ratings are an order of magnitude off from reality. On the other hand, my portable generator is also rated for 8kW. If I run it all day on fossil fuel, it actually produces the full advertised 192kWh. And that "optimistic" rating of solar is problematic when you are sizing a system for the real world.
You should include that nuclear is 100% 'dispatchable', renewable depends on environmental conditions.
Great information
What is Camp Century?
Two funny things about Chernobyl: first, the reactor was a bad design, prone to failure like the one it experienced; second, even despite that bad design, the other three Chernobyl reactors continued to operate without problems for decades (and yes, the Soviets continued to use Chernobyl, even after one of the reactors melted down).
Thanks
That map of solar panels over Dallas? "Roofs". It's what we do in Australia.
Do you keep your coal power plants on the roof? Isn't it dangerous?
www.electricitymap.org/zone/AUS-VIC
0:12 See if you can spot the guy trying to walk away from a nuclear explosion somehow 😅
That was me
@@bonesthegod585 Oof you must be OLD. And not having children 😅😅
He is ~30km away from explosion itself. Wouldn't even notice. (except for the flash of course)
Renewable power is not usually steady. Solar doesn't work all that well at night. Not a minor issue.
Thorium salt, thorium salt, thorium salt: Minimal waste and no meltdown plausible.
Are we not gonna talk about the fact that in the first clip we heard the explosion at the same time we saw the light from it?
Every time you mention SMR's I get "tingles"
permannent modular scale pms
Regarding NuScale, sounds good, according to the How To Save a Planet Podcast - on Nuclear -
Simon Holmes à Court, (senior adviser at the Energy Transition hub at Melbourne University) pointed out that the tech is more like 15 years from production. Nuscale said they were going to be ready in 9 years but that was 6 years ago and now they are still saying they're 9 years away - so with a 6 year slip it's hard to be confident it will be ready.
And recently a group of Australian energy providers signed up to get wind and solar, it's only 80% renewables the rest backed up by fossil fuels but it will be ready a year after the contract was signed at $36/mwh. Contrast that by Nuscale's estimated $65/mwh and 9 years away at the earliest.
I'm not saying it should not be built but we need to transition a lot faster.
We need a new Manhattan Project for nuclear. We have lots of really good models on the horizon, but because it's nuclear the build up time to installation is just so damn long. We need to warp speed nuclear. I can tell from your comment that you're big on renewables. I used to be big on renewables but after much thought on this subject I've come to the conclusion that they're just not worth it in the end. They're massive resource hogs.
For instance, I saw a video the other day on a tidal generator build in Scotland. Just one unit takes over 680 tons of steel to build, and only gets 2 MW of energy. That is abysmal, and wind turbines are worse when it comes to resource usage, and don't even get me started on solar...
The smaller size and reduced cost may provide an opportunity in related context - a possibility of safeguarding the environment*.
Scientists in Russia, (A.Sakharov), and in the US, (E.Teller), once suggested building nuclear reactors underground.
The plan was considered to be too expensive.
The smaller size microreactor might lend itself to being built on retractable supports, over a lined underground compartment.
In the event of catastrophic failure, the reactor could be dropped underground, and covered.
*The hot reactor might melt the underground compartment lining, encasing, and creating a barrier with respect to the water table.
*Once covered, the reactor would be more so the equivalent of an underground nuclear test, limiting damage to the atmosphere
What I would like to see is nuclear batteries that produce somewhere between 25kw and 100kw. Small enough to put on a farm or large house to be completely 'off grid' for decades and not be dependent on refueling every few days as with traditional generators.
The video of the house getting nuked. Is that real footage or simulated footage with a scale model?
Me during the Video:
"sounds great but what if something goes wrong?"
"Okay, that sounds good but what if something goes wrong?"
"wow, that sounds really great but what if something goes wrong?"
"HELLO!?!?!?!? WHAT IF SOMETHING GOES WRONG?!?!?!?!"
@@AndenMowe-hh5qk I get that. But the key point i was keeping in mind is that there is a difference between having few HIGHLY regulated facilities out in the middle of nowhere and this new proposal of basically giving everybody and their grandmother a small nuclear reactor. Because these new reactors will not be waaay out in the countryside. They will be less than one explosion distance away from YOUR house, under the control of the same people who can't figure out how to repair a road in a way that holds more than a year.
Even if solar remains cheaper, there will be a big market for these reactors. There are places where using solar on a large scale just isn't feasible such as in mining, the arctic regions and in deep space exploration. Also, solar becomes much more expensive when you don't use it right away and need to store it. These reactors (assuming their output can be adjusted at a reasonable speed) would be a great alternative to using grid scale batteries. You use you solar to power your grid when it's immediately available, then rev up the nuclear reactors only for what your solar can't cover, such as at night, winter, or a day when your grids load is abnormally high.
Another nice thing with small reactors like these is if something does go wrong, it can be much more easily contained and even removed to a specialized site where it can be better dealt with.