The argument of the article (“<future tech thing> will never work because there currently aren’t any of them”) is so weak it makes me wonder if it’s some kind of paid-for FUD campaign by whoever SMR tech’s rivals are. Presumably the oil industry, which sees nuclear taking away its energy-density USP.
Yes clearly an oil shill. Nowadays the lines are blurred because there are actually many oil companies that also "invest" in renewables, because they can make a decent amount of profit on that and it allows them to sell gas when the sun doesn't shine or wind doesn't blow.
It's hilarious all the bullshit coming out, the only reason nuclear cost so much is because it has been regulated into oblivion. And the only reason renewables are cost competitive is because we use China as the source with all their subsidies and deregulation (never mind that we don't ask anywhere near the same uptime/constant source from those solutions).
… and don’t forget the high capital cost of the steam turbine. It is no accident we quit building nuclear plants based on steam turbines at the same time we quit building coal burning power plants based on steam turbines.
Well sure but the capital costs is really an argument in its own. When you compete with a foreign industry that does not have the same rules for capital it's really hard to compare accurately.
This is a big problem in general with neoliberal thinking, that capital in itself has value and should create a profit.
If you consider that electricity should be a free market then it is a problem but the reality is that it isn't really a commodity that you can transport around freely. It needs to be generated locally and at the correct time to be useful, otherwise it's just wasted.
And this is the basis of the problem and why we fall in the capital argument. Electricity shouldn't be a free market and largely can't (which is exactly why problems are appearing all other the place in EU). If you consider that it is actually a necessity, just like water and sanitation, then the capital argument doesn't even apply.
Why are people betting on small modular reactors? Even given all the problems described. I don’t think it’s that policy officials are gullible to marketing.
I think the key reason is the promise of low price, high power, and fast deployment. PROMISE being the key word, because it should be obvious (not to the author) that you don’t get low prices on the first experimental units. You get them when you have factories efficiently building hundreds. And in this hopeful future, you can turn these things on much faster than setting up acreage of wind or solar plus supporting batteries. And do it in places where you don’t have natural supply of either.
It’s a bet that hasn’t proven itself yet. But given the severity of the crisis, I for one am glad somebody is taking it.
>Why are people betting on small modular reactors?
Because it's a bet on bad government(s) continuing to be bad.
There is immense value to utilities in being able to just park SMRs on top of semi trailers beside all the infrastructure they already own and "get ahead" of onerous governments who would be all over something like a solar farm say nothing of a real large scale power generation station looking to extract their pounds of flesh.
Being able to just "inject" base load power near where you need it on the grid saves nearly infinite money in otherwise necessary upgrades in transmission between the source and users of the power.
> And do it in places where you don’t have natural supply of either.
Exactly. Nobody’s investing in small nuclear to be competitive with absolute-cheapest grid-scale wind/solar/storage, the point is that there are a thousand and one niches all over the world where the density and (hopefully) reliability of nuclear makes it quite attractive.
Which means you don’t need to build up transmission capacity. The article was factually wrong on that point. Put an SMR next to a data center or an aluminum factory and the power is used right there.
Not needing transmission means you can leapfrog over a problematic jurisdictions that won't let you upgrade transmission capacity without a bunch of expensive concessions.
Umm, what's his point? Have you seen how many barriers there are to nuclear? One not running today has almost nothing to do with the feasibility of the technology.
That's self-fulfilling. Solar was expensive. Then they built a lot of them, they got cheaper (+ better tech obviously). We know basically nothing about the learning curve of nuclear because we haven't met the conditions for the learning curve to apply, except maybe in China, where it seems to hold.
I just don't understand why everyone is so confident that nuclear power is the one thing that doesn't get cheaper with better technology and scale. Everything that is built is old tech, and, except in China and south Korea, built so rarely that the workforce is basically brand new every time. Of course they're expensive(in the West), they're one-off large engineering projects. All evidence points toward China, south Korea being able to do it cheaper and faster, so we should look there when there's sufficient (trustworthiness and quantity) data to test scaling laws. All signs point to cheaper and faster, but even then, the numbers of builds are relatively small, so you'd expect scaling gains to be modest. One of the main points of SMRs is to harness the effects of large numbers.
Why not at least try? Why are we so confident it will fail before even trying with modern designs?
seems like a similar narrative to EV's back in the 90's - battery tech is not there, the economics don't work, no charging infra etc. Cut to now and that narrative has flipped. We might be in the same adoption curve cycle with nuclear.
You're judging a new technology on the cost of a damn pilot?
Again, no to the negative learning. The learning curve theory has requisite conditions. They aren't met, except maybe in China and south Korea, where it seems so far to apply, if modestly.
Thermal power cycle infrastructure has a pretty high lower bound on price even if you’re ignoring the cost of containing a fission reaction.
It’s not that there wouldn’t be learning curves, it’s that we’ve already seen the learning curve for the easiest part of the stack, and it’s not competitive.
I’m all in favor of continuing to throw VC money at small nuclear, to be clear. The regulatory situation everywhere outside of Texas is so bad that there will be niches where “power plant arrives on a semi, no external interconnect required” is a great business proposition.
But if we had a sane regulatory environment for building transmission and interconnect, nuclear wouldn’t get enough custom to ever climb the learning curve.
Building one every 50 years is horribly expensive. Because you have to relearn all the mistakes that become tribal knowledge with the construction hang.
Building 100 in a decade starts becoming very economically feasible as per recent Chinese examples.
And as we saw with the US ramp of military vehicles in WWII.
And even in China nuclear power is not competitive. As per recent construction starts they will land on 2-3% of the electricity mix.
Wholly insignificant.
We should we hand out trillions in subsidies to the nuclear industry when the alternative we also invested in: renewables and storage. Already deliver what we need to decarbonize society?
The US unfortunately has almost built no standardized / modular reactors. Everyone was custom. That is why they were so expansive to build.
SNUPPS and the AP-1000 are the only "standardized" nuclear power plant designs built in the US and there were only a small number of them built. Not enough to benefit from economies of scale benefits through standardization and modularization.
