Georgia just finished a reactor project recently. That project was 7 years late and over 20 billion dollars over budget for about 2GW of power. In the same period of time Georgia also added 4.5GW of solar at one fifth the cost of the nuclear project. Solar and grid storage get cheaper every year, so that gap between the two will continue to grow. Hence, nuclear is dead in the water. Swanson’s law will make solar inevitable.
@@andrasbiro3007 Red tape? Like, regulations that reduce the odds of them catastrophically melting down? Seems reasonable, given that TAXPAYERS are subsidizing every nuclear plant massively by covering their insurance! Ancient tech? Any guess how many billions of taxpayers dollars have gone into R & D for nuclear? Can’t afford insurance, can’t afford research, so expensive they try to bribe politicians for handouts, and actually obsolete now with solar and wind and battery based energy storage costing way less, being better for the environment, and having zero risk of disaster.
The bottom line is the bottom line. It appears wind/solar/battery will be the cheapest source of power. If that continues to be true, the argument is closed.
One key factor is that wind and solar extract energy from the troposphere, while nuclear creates new energy to release into the troposphere. Climate change "caused" by greenhouse gasses is only half the story. There is the heat in the troposphere as well. The heat is going up. Adding to it is not so great. You get about 1000 W per square meter at the equator from the sun. So if you take that up with wind and solar, you are removing heat from the air. If you made everything nuclear, you'd drive up the energy per meter by a few percentage points. It's not the right direction really. And the limits on how much nuclear you make can go pretty high. It's about 10,000 times more productive per input fuel mass vs chemical energy. So you could just drive up demand making datacenters and robots, etc etc. Maybe they'd make 10x the amount of power we consume now. That's even more heat created.
Live in Ontario Canada, one of the electronic surplus stores I visit (Toronto Surplus and Electronics), one of his biggest customers are the nuclear providers. They look for old instruments, switches relays and electronics, stuff thats no longer made. No upgrades to the plants are allowed everything must work and look like it did 30/40 years ago when them plant was built. No procedures are allowed to be changed. They also spent over 1billion dollars on a facility to make stuff that cannot be found as surplus. We talked about this, one of our thoughts is with the procedures the people that wrote them have retired or passed away, there is know one left that knows why the procedures were written, so they are scared to change anything.
Forty-plus years in the commercial nuclear power business has taught me skepticism. I believe safety is well in hand. Waste is a political problem, not technical. Economics of new plants remain doubtful, in my mind. The new SMR designs do not pass the cost estimating tests we were taught in engineering school: kWh-per-ton or kWh-per-piece or kWh-per-employee. All the USD-per-kWhr estimates are as unreliable as ever. (Paper plants are always cheap. Concrete and steel ones, not so much.) Significantly, nuclear economics count on very high (>90%) capacity factor. They are not economically dispatchable to match load changes - daily, weekly, or seasonally. Tesla-Texas is installing a 500 MW cooling system for FSD training. How many SMRs would be needed? Many.
I believe I've reached similar conclusions. Nuclear would be GREAT... IF plant could be built . ANYWHERE (Ref "Nimby" and "but not that country we don't like"!) . TODAY (Plenty of really great prototype coming in 5 years, then 5 more for the production version) . ON TIME (To say they tend to "overrun" seems an understatement) . *IN* TIME (Rule of thumb seems to be 3x that for a similar capacity of Offshore Wind, more for Solar?) . ON COST (Think of a number... Double it?) . WITH LOW COST ENERGY (Double the strike price of "green"??) . "BINARY" (No power before completion. Green solutions can ramp mid project, reducing the legacy build time pollution) . And other things...
You should know that the vast majority of cost is due to red tape and ancient tech. By far the biggest cost driver is that these reactors need cooling for a long time after shutdown. That requires layers upon layers of safety systems with triple-redundancy for anything active. If the reactor would be safe at the moment it shuts down, most of this wouldn't be necessary. And that's a solved problem, just use TRISO fuel. The next issue is water, when it boils it volume expands 1000x, or at least tries to. If it constrained, like in a reactor, pressure raises fast, and it will break free. And if you don't constrain it, you have radioactive stuff going out into the environment. That's why we have containment buildings, which are not cheap. Remove water, and and you can skip thousands of tons of reinforced concrete. That's also a solved problem, just use a gas cooled reactor. AFAIK CO2 doesn't get activated, and there are off-the-self turbines that work with it. If you remove all the safety systems, a nuclear reactor can actually be very simple and very cheap. The first every nuclear reactor was little more than a big pile of uranium and graphite blocks. Or check out the BORAX experiments.
@andresbiro That would make sense on cost if it was only one county that sees massive cost overruns. It's every country. It's just a complicated system to build safely.
If someone can explain to me in layman’s terms how we can safely and economically store the waste we already have, then I’ll be happy to entertain the notion of a discussion on new facilities. Here in the UK we’re re storing waste materials with no idea of exactly what we have, what’s been somehow lost, and how we’re going to handle if for thousands of years. Seems kinda insane. If someone can lay out the path for that we can discuss the storage of the future waste fuel etc, and then we can discuss the cost of construction, operations, decommissioning, dismantling etc. I cannot see a need for more, if we can now generate our energy efficiently with solar, wind and other renewables.
We’re also faced with the security challenges of nuclear plants being located on the coasts to benefit from the ready supply of water for cooling. That location means they’re vulnerable to terrorist activity and acts of war. What solar farm needs 24/7 military protection as well as permanent police presence on the ground?
@@Dularr en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield Hardly a shining light of simplicity, excellence and safety. Just look at the total projected cost for this site, and its 100 year long program. UK public sector projects tend to triple in cost at least once a decade - give it ten decades and the mind boggles. And of course that spent fuel etc isn’t actually safe in 100 years, some of it won’t be safe for getting on for 100,000 years!
Could SMR's be added incrementally to existing large sites in anticipation of the decommissioning of the original reactors so that when the last of the big reactors is gone a bunch of SMR's have assumed the entire load.
FYI, an ex-SpaceX engineer has an SMR startup. He's Doug Bernauer and the company is Radiant. In general nuclear power is like rockets. Ancient tech made unnecessarily expensive by politics, cost plus contracts, and risk aversion. We need a SpaceX for nukes. Hopefully the aforementioned startup will be that. I don't have time to go through the entire list of issues. Just a few highlights. Thorium salt is not that corrosive. A prototype reactor worked flawlessly for years already in the 60's. And, again, it's similar to the space industry. Yes, corrosion is a problem if you are designing your reactor for a 100 years. But you only do that because it's stupid expensive to build, so you need time to recoup the investment. If it's cheap to build, then you don't need 100 years, just 20 or even 10. And then corrosion is not an issue. Another thing as you mentioned is mass production. Doesn't matter how complex a reactor is, mass production will always be orders of magnitude cheaper. ICE cars are stupid complicated too, with a vast supply chain, yet you can buy a new one under $20K. And reactors don't have to be complex. There are designs with no or very few moving parts. Some of these were designed for space probes and had to work reliably with zero maintenance for decades. For example the SNAP-10A reactor, that was actually built and launched in 1965, had one moving part. Molten salt reactors can work with zero moving parts.
Hi guys, from Australia. We've had an apolitical policy of No Nuclear, apart from one small reactor used to generate isotopes used in medicine. We do mine and export uranium though. Recently the right wing Opposition Liberal/National party announced a a policy to install reactors for power at 5 sites around the country as an alternative to renewables, to be owned by the government. I believe this is to support the fossil fuel industry and to diminish the renewables industry. None of the proposed reactors will be built before 2035. I, like the majority of us, think this a blatant attempt to change public opinion , to attempt to get elected at our next election. Hopefully they wont succeed !
Nuclear is a problem wishing there was a bigger problem for it to solve, but there isn’t one anymore. Wind and solar with utility scale battery based energy storage is cheaper, comes online way faster, causes less environmental damage, and has no risk of anything going wrong. Nuclear is an expensive jobs program, and definitely not something that will help us on climate change.
Many years ago I worked in the industry, if it could be done cheap and secure I'd love it. Problem is it's just to dam expensive, especially if all costs incurred are included. Keep the research up but don't push a massive tax bill to our children and their children and so on by building such things we have today. Here in Australia it's been pushed, only three reasons I can see for it. One it's hard to have a nuclear military without a civilian industry. Two to try and get fossil fuels thrown shed loads of tax payers money to keep going until in some far distant future we have the reactors up and running. Third, the country is run by angry old people that seem to hate the young and future generations and want to mess their life's up.
Ask residents of Fukushima how they feel about nuclear. If it goes wrong, it gets expensive for ALL TIME. If it goes right, the waste we create today has to be stored for 100,000 years without being disturbed and without contaminating ground water. It also has to be guarded against being used in a dirty bomb for the same period. In Ukraine, the Russians fired on and fought around a reactor. They have cut off cooling water to another reactor, so the reactor has been shut down and an emergency cooling pond is keeping the reactor safe for now. Also, a reactor is a prime target for a terrorist attack.
You are sounding like Tesla Q just with a different topic spreading FUD like that. Every energy generation methods have its ups and downs and nuclear is one of better ones. Of course, Fukushima was an unfortunate event, but it could have been entirely prevented with better plant design and following the updated regulations. Also why does one even build a power plant in earthquake prone area directly on shore of an ocean. Still nuclear has favorable statistic when comparing the total human cost with the total amount of energy generated with all nuclear plants. Safe geological storage has already been solved. For example, Finland has the “Onkalo” site. Even better would be if the waste would be recycled, since it still has most of the energy left in it. But geological storage can be solved, it just a question of finding stable and NIMBY free area. Unless you are preparing for a civil war in the USA, Russia is a bad example on why no nuclear plants should not be build in the USA or stable part of the western Europe. Nuclear plants are one of the most secure places on earth and I do not know a single terrorist strike which has succeed targeted on a nuclear plant. Also new plants are built to extremely high standard it is one of the reasons why they cost so much.
@@therealagamer5329 Fukushima failed due to an unforeseen event. It was built where it could be built in a country with limited land, using the latest tech available at the time. Nuclear is already so expensive that there is little incentive to shut down and retrofit a working reactor with new technology. Advocates always have a preventable reason for the accidents which would never happen to the reactor they are thinking of. 9/11 demonstrated that it is possible to do a lot of damage to a building if you are committed. No, I am not American. You do what you like to your country. Take the Pepsi Challenge and review how much the last COMPLETED American nuclear power plant cost the American tax payer and then review how much renewable energy could have been bought with the same money. Now review the cost of Chernobyl and Fukushima (ongoing). These avoidable accidents nevertheless happened, and the tax payers paid and paid and paid. What budget is acceptable to you?
I suggest getting ahold of the 'Thorium Alliance' to discuss the difference and costs of the difference and size required of nukes. The Thorium Alliance has a TH-cam channel too. They can talk SMR's or possibly TSMRs. Oakridge Labs ran a thorium reactor in Tennessee for years. They shut it down for lack of continued funding. They would turn it on Monday mornings, shut it off Friday afternoon, and went home for the weekend, and keep going. For many of the solar farms and batteries, they should be built around or on decommissioned power plants of all kind.
If for no other reason, I think we absolutely need to have small nuclear reactors for use on the moon and Mars. I don't believe solar will be able to provide enough power economically to do what we want to do there.
Nuclear? Well, if you have one running, especially a thorium one, it could produce the essential base load. However, there are some catches: It takes many years to get through all the red tape before you can start building. With PV/wind + batteries, you can start in months. Other point is after life: right NOW in Europe we are spending billions on clearing up decommissioned nuclear power plants. How much will it cost to clear up those rows with PVs??? From a technical POV, nuclear is great, but economically it doesn’t make sense, at least here on earth. They still are the best solution for spacecrafts, on Luna, if on Mars…
It is not safe (ask the assurance companies!) It is expensive and not environmentally friendly..Furthermore there are only limited amounts of uranium (you could never produce enough electricity )and you will be again dependent of other country as Russia etc..
I just don’t see the need for SMNRs because renewable energy can cover the same small area. Maybe it might be good for remote areas. But in a large population areas one might just as well build a big one. However they are too expensive and take too long to build!
At 11:18 You say thar "these three put out something like one and a half terra watts or". This is (1000)**4 watts or (1000)**3 megawatts. A nuclear plant nàmeplate (design) rating is typically (1000)**1 megawatts, not (1000)**3 megawatts. You are off by a factor of a million.[(1000)**2]
People who are pro-nuclear (including fusion) don't discuss nuclear waste issues much. People who are pro-robotics don't talk about robots becoming conscious one day (due to "experimentation") and acquiring very disturbing personalities. I guess we'll worry about these things later.. 😉
Fusion produces very different nuclear waste than fission, far easier to deal with. There is masses of talk within the AI community about the dangers of it.
Everybody is still using GE first generation nuclear reactors. The third generation reactors made by general electric are much safer and the waste is so minute and inert that it would fit inside of a matchbox
That the same really old line about Thorium that will greatly benefit china 💰🇨🇳 they got a working Thorium reactor prototype already, and building a giant cargo ship powered by a Thorium Molten Salt Reactor, USA going to miss the boat on this one again. A sad fact is if the fuel your reactor uses is not cartel friendly expect lots of redtape and poor funding options along with a extra helping of FUD.
@@FutureAZA If you haven’t watch this video yet it might be helpful on this subject as it helps In understand political landscape at that time? th-cam.com/video/bbyr7jZOllI/w-d-xo.htmlsi=VolAOaZHBgl_5Ds1 SpaceX developed a reusable Methane&oxygen engine called the raptor, one of the primary concern was the highly corrosive nature of oxygen at those Extreme temperatures needed for the oxygen rich turbomotor, they developed A metal alloy to withstand those conditions. Thorium Molten Salt Reactors can’t make radioactive ghost towns at best maybe radioactive room. Mankind has a proven record of stewardship of properties and buildings for much more then 300 years or the lifespan of this reactors nuclear waste, mankind doesn’t have a record of stewardship of 20,000 years of anything. The efficiency difference between conventional reactors and this reactor is ridiculous. Putting water in a conventional reactor is similar to putting gasoline into a car is radiator, and then start adding safety systems and features until the tires burst on the poor little car.
Typical SMRs are far more complex than nuclear needs to be. There are designs where both security, containment and moderation are built into a 6cm pebble structure. All that a nuclear pebble puts out is heat. When paired with a Sterling heat engine, continuos power can be deployed in a package small enough to power a car or individual home.
3:00 Nuclear is one of the safest sources of electric power (especially PWRs (pressurized water reactors) like Westinghouse's, I personally didn't like GE's BWRs (boiling water reactors) because they spun the turbines with steam from the water that had contact with the core and would eventually lead to the turbines becoming contaminated. Supposedly.) Once you make it past all the lawyers and regulators and lawyers and unions and lawyers, etc and actually get the units built, operating nuclear units is cheap and extremely clean. You visit a coal plant like Bowen in GA, and every single surface is coated in coal dust, and if one of the supercritical steam pipes springs a leak, I'm told you can actually be cut up, as well as cooked if you happen to wander through the invisible high-velocity stream of steam. And the noise.... better have some hearing protectors (granted, my tour at that plant was in 1979, but how much could have changed since then, I wonder, excepting the replacement of the parts of the plant that have exploded over the years ...) If you have a chance to visit a Nuclear plant like Vogtle, sure they'll give you a film strip to measure any radiation you might get into contact with (but you won't; safe, remember?), but everywhere you go, its cleaner than many hospitals, and certainly more so than my house (well, I have cats, only so much you can do, so why try?). It's quiet, too, because everything is contained. If I had to build a house near a power plant in America, I pick a Nuclear plant over any fossil or wind facility. Before the Rapidan Dam event, I might have considered a Dam for a neighbor, but the Nucs are quieter than the hydro plants, anyway, so I'm right back to where I've been for the last 40 years or so, I'd put my house next to the Nuke. Cleaner, Quieter, Safer.
@@rozonoemi9374 LOL Actually, I never watched the Simpson's much.... but I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have been let near any of our plants, except maybe one of the hydro dams saw once on a tour... He might have fit in there just fine.
Nuclear Carrier use the Aj4W Reactors---> One unit can power upto 91,813 homes a population of 213,000 This data is based on 2020. I was in the Navy so I did see nuclear power ships. These reactors are made by Westinghouse. The USS Enterprise no longer around was one huge carrier. I saw this ship in Dry Docks for repairs in Hunter Point Shipyard in San Francisco. So cool to see it on blocks of wood. We should find out what the military pay for their units. Maybe the best way is to float these ships far far away and send an extension cord to power a city. Maybe let the military run the nuclear power plant. Great training for those who want to join the service. A great career. Then these ships can double up as an emergency power supply when a natural disaster happens and power is needed. Multi purpose. France may be a good place for Brian to go. They do recyling of the waste nuclear material or spent fuel and reuse again by clean the stuff that reduces the effect of fresh nuclear supply
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Georgia just finished a reactor project recently. That project was 7 years late and over 20 billion dollars over budget for about 2GW of power. In the same period of time Georgia also added 4.5GW of solar at one fifth the cost of the nuclear project.
Solar and grid storage get cheaper every year, so that gap between the two will continue to grow. Hence, nuclear is dead in the water. Swanson’s law will make solar inevitable.
nuclear power is EXPENSIVE.
Only due to red tape and ancient tech. Done right it could be like going from SLS to Starship.
life is expensive but the cost of coal plants is a killer of the plant earth. You get what you pay for
@@andrasbiro3007 The red tape is needed, humans are dumb and mess up. I've seen it in the industry.
To expensive & the cost to retire them is even more!
@@andrasbiro3007 Red tape? Like, regulations that reduce the odds of them catastrophically melting down? Seems reasonable, given that TAXPAYERS are subsidizing every nuclear plant massively by covering their insurance!
Ancient tech? Any guess how many billions of taxpayers dollars have gone into R & D for nuclear?
Can’t afford insurance, can’t afford research, so expensive they try to bribe politicians for handouts, and actually obsolete now with solar and wind and battery based energy storage costing way less, being better for the environment, and having zero risk of disaster.
The bottom line is the bottom line. It appears wind/solar/battery will be the cheapest source of power. If that continues to be true, the argument is closed.
One key factor is that wind and solar extract energy from the troposphere, while nuclear creates new energy to release into the troposphere. Climate change "caused" by greenhouse gasses is only half the story. There is the heat in the troposphere as well. The heat is going up. Adding to it is not so great. You get about 1000 W per square meter at the equator from the sun. So if you take that up with wind and solar, you are removing heat from the air. If you made everything nuclear, you'd drive up the energy per meter by a few percentage points. It's not the right direction really. And the limits on how much nuclear you make can go pretty high. It's about 10,000 times more productive per input fuel mass vs chemical energy. So you could just drive up demand making datacenters and robots, etc etc. Maybe they'd make 10x the amount of power we consume now. That's even more heat created.
If you include the cleanup costs the waist storage and the cost to the environment to the already high cost it ain’t going to happen .
Sunny/aB cleaned up its nuclear site that was on campus.
Now it's grass land.
West Valley is still contaminated.
Live in Ontario Canada, one of the electronic surplus stores I visit (Toronto Surplus and Electronics), one of his biggest customers are the nuclear providers. They look for old instruments, switches relays and electronics, stuff thats no longer made. No upgrades to the plants are allowed everything must work and look like it did 30/40 years ago when them plant was built. No procedures are allowed to be changed. They also spent over 1billion dollars on a facility to make stuff that cannot be found as surplus.
We talked about this, one of our thoughts is with the procedures the people that wrote them have retired or passed away, there is know one left that knows why the procedures were written, so they are scared to change anything.
Changes may require recertification. The Space Shuttle was using ancient tech because it still worked.
@@FutureAZA
But having to go to an electronic surplus store to keep your nuclear power plant running, that can be a bit iffy.
Forty-plus years in the commercial nuclear power business has taught me skepticism. I believe safety is well in hand. Waste is a political problem, not technical. Economics of new plants remain doubtful, in my mind. The new SMR designs do not pass the cost estimating tests we were taught in engineering school: kWh-per-ton or kWh-per-piece or kWh-per-employee. All the USD-per-kWhr estimates are as unreliable as ever. (Paper plants are always cheap. Concrete and steel ones, not so much.)
Significantly, nuclear economics count on very high (>90%) capacity factor. They are not economically dispatchable to match load changes - daily, weekly, or seasonally.
Tesla-Texas is installing a 500 MW cooling system for FSD training. How many SMRs would be needed? Many.
I believe I've reached similar conclusions.
Nuclear would be GREAT... IF plant could be built
.
ANYWHERE (Ref "Nimby" and "but not that country we don't like"!)
.
TODAY (Plenty of really great prototype coming in 5 years, then 5 more for the production version)
.
ON TIME (To say they tend to "overrun" seems an understatement)
.
*IN* TIME (Rule of thumb seems to be 3x that for a similar capacity of Offshore Wind, more for Solar?)
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ON COST (Think of a number... Double it?)
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WITH LOW COST ENERGY
(Double the strike price of "green"??)
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"BINARY" (No power before completion. Green solutions can ramp mid project, reducing the legacy build time pollution)
.
And other things...
Waste is a political problem? That's not good.. 🙂
You should know that the vast majority of cost is due to red tape and ancient tech.
By far the biggest cost driver is that these reactors need cooling for a long time after shutdown. That requires layers upon layers of safety systems with triple-redundancy for anything active. If the reactor would be safe at the moment it shuts down, most of this wouldn't be necessary. And that's a solved problem, just use TRISO fuel.
The next issue is water, when it boils it volume expands 1000x, or at least tries to. If it constrained, like in a reactor, pressure raises fast, and it will break free. And if you don't constrain it, you have radioactive stuff going out into the environment. That's why we have containment buildings, which are not cheap. Remove water, and and you can skip thousands of tons of reinforced concrete. That's also a solved problem, just use a gas cooled reactor. AFAIK CO2 doesn't get activated, and there are off-the-self turbines that work with it.
If you remove all the safety systems, a nuclear reactor can actually be very simple and very cheap. The first every nuclear reactor was little more than a big pile of uranium and graphite blocks. Or check out the BORAX experiments.
All of this fits with what I've been able to research, and the questions I was able to get answered.
@andresbiro That would make sense on cost if it was only one county that sees massive cost overruns. It's every country. It's just a complicated system to build safely.
If someone can explain to me in layman’s terms how we can safely and economically store the waste we already have, then I’ll be happy to entertain the notion of a discussion on new facilities.
Here in the UK we’re re storing waste materials with no idea of exactly what we have, what’s been somehow lost, and how we’re going to handle if for thousands of years. Seems kinda insane.
If someone can lay out the path for that we can discuss the storage of the future waste fuel etc, and then we can discuss the cost of construction, operations, decommissioning, dismantling etc.
I cannot see a need for more, if we can now generate our energy efficiently with solar, wind and other renewables.
We’re also faced with the security challenges of nuclear plants being located on the coasts to benefit from the ready supply of water for cooling. That location means they’re vulnerable to terrorist activity and acts of war. What solar farm needs 24/7 military protection as well as permanent police presence on the ground?
They seem to store in place.
@@Dularr en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield
Hardly a shining light of simplicity, excellence and safety. Just look at the total projected cost for this site, and its 100 year long program. UK public sector projects tend to triple in cost at least once a decade - give it ten decades and the mind boggles. And of course that spent fuel etc isn’t actually safe in 100 years, some of it won’t be safe for getting on for 100,000 years!
Could SMR's be added incrementally to existing large sites in anticipation of the decommissioning of the original reactors so that when the last of the big reactors is gone a bunch of SMR's have assumed the entire load.
FYI, an ex-SpaceX engineer has an SMR startup. He's Doug Bernauer and the company is Radiant.
In general nuclear power is like rockets. Ancient tech made unnecessarily expensive by politics, cost plus contracts, and risk aversion. We need a SpaceX for nukes. Hopefully the aforementioned startup will be that.
I don't have time to go through the entire list of issues. Just a few highlights. Thorium salt is not that corrosive. A prototype reactor worked flawlessly for years already in the 60's. And, again, it's similar to the space industry. Yes, corrosion is a problem if you are designing your reactor for a 100 years. But you only do that because it's stupid expensive to build, so you need time to recoup the investment. If it's cheap to build, then you don't need 100 years, just 20 or even 10. And then corrosion is not an issue.
Another thing as you mentioned is mass production. Doesn't matter how complex a reactor is, mass production will always be orders of magnitude cheaper. ICE cars are stupid complicated too, with a vast supply chain, yet you can buy a new one under $20K.
And reactors don't have to be complex. There are designs with no or very few moving parts. Some of these were designed for space probes and had to work reliably with zero maintenance for decades. For example the SNAP-10A reactor, that was actually built and launched in 1965, had one moving part. Molten salt reactors can work with zero moving parts.
Hi guys, from Australia. We've had an apolitical policy of No Nuclear, apart from one small reactor used to generate isotopes used in medicine. We do mine and export uranium though. Recently the right wing Opposition Liberal/National party announced a a policy to install reactors for power at 5 sites around the country as an alternative to renewables, to be owned by the government. I believe this is to support the fossil fuel industry and to diminish the renewables industry. None of the proposed reactors will be built before 2035. I, like the majority of us, think this a blatant attempt to change public opinion , to attempt to get elected at our next election. Hopefully they wont succeed !
Nuclear is a problem wishing there was a bigger problem for it to solve, but there isn’t one anymore. Wind and solar with utility scale battery based energy storage is cheaper, comes online way faster, causes less environmental damage, and has no risk of anything going wrong. Nuclear is an expensive jobs program, and definitely not something that will help us on climate change.
Many years ago I worked in the industry, if it could be done cheap and secure I'd love it. Problem is it's just to dam expensive, especially if all costs incurred are included. Keep the research up but don't push a massive tax bill to our children and their children and so on by building such things we have today. Here in Australia it's been pushed, only three reasons I can see for it. One it's hard to have a nuclear military without a civilian industry. Two to try and get fossil fuels thrown shed loads of tax payers money to keep going until in some far distant future we have the reactors up and running. Third, the country is run by angry old people that seem to hate the young and future generations and want to mess their life's up.
Ask residents of Fukushima how they feel about nuclear. If it goes wrong, it gets expensive for ALL TIME. If it goes right, the waste we create today has to be stored for 100,000 years without being disturbed and without contaminating ground water. It also has to be guarded against being used in a dirty bomb for the same period. In Ukraine, the Russians fired on and fought around a reactor. They have cut off cooling water to another reactor, so the reactor has been shut down and an emergency cooling pond is keeping the reactor safe for now. Also, a reactor is a prime target for a terrorist attack.
You are sounding like Tesla Q just with a different topic spreading FUD like that. Every energy generation methods have its ups and downs and nuclear is one of better ones.
Of course, Fukushima was an unfortunate event, but it could have been entirely prevented with better plant design and following the updated regulations. Also why does one even build a power plant in earthquake prone area directly on shore of an ocean. Still nuclear has favorable statistic when comparing the total human cost with the total amount of energy generated with all nuclear plants.
Safe geological storage has already been solved. For example, Finland has the “Onkalo” site. Even better would be if the waste would be recycled, since it still has most of the energy left in it. But geological storage can be solved, it just a question of finding stable and NIMBY free area.
Unless you are preparing for a civil war in the USA, Russia is a bad example on why no nuclear plants should not be build in the USA or stable part of the western Europe. Nuclear plants are one of the most secure places on earth and I do not know a single terrorist strike which has succeed targeted on a nuclear plant. Also new plants are built to extremely high standard it is one of the reasons why they cost so much.
@@therealagamer5329 Fukushima failed due to an unforeseen event. It was built where it could be built in a country with limited land, using the latest tech available at the time. Nuclear is already so expensive that there is little incentive to shut down and retrofit a working reactor with new technology. Advocates always have a preventable reason for the accidents which would never happen to the reactor they are thinking of. 9/11 demonstrated that it is possible to do a lot of damage to a building if you are committed. No, I am not American. You do what you like to your country. Take the Pepsi Challenge and review how much the last COMPLETED American nuclear power plant cost the American tax payer and then review how much renewable energy could have been bought with the same money. Now review the cost of Chernobyl and Fukushima (ongoing). These avoidable accidents nevertheless happened, and the tax payers paid and paid and paid. What budget is acceptable to you?
THANKS BRIAN ,MARK …FOR A REALISTIC 🧐UPDATE ON NUCLEAR POWER 💚💚💚
I HAVE WONDERED 🤔ABOUT THIS FOR A LONG TIME
I'm a former Nuclear submariner😊
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I suggest getting ahold of the 'Thorium Alliance' to discuss the difference and costs of the difference and size required of nukes. The Thorium Alliance has a TH-cam channel too. They can talk SMR's or possibly TSMRs.
Oakridge Labs ran a thorium reactor in Tennessee for years. They shut it down for lack of continued funding. They would turn it on Monday mornings, shut it off Friday afternoon, and went home for the weekend, and keep going.
For many of the solar farms and batteries, they should be built around or on decommissioned power plants of all kind.
Thorium
Ya can't pretend you're smart if you say "nucular"... Bye Felicia...
The pedantics are seldom missed.
If for no other reason, I think we absolutely need to have small nuclear reactors for use on the moon and Mars. I don't believe solar will be able to provide enough power economically to do what we want to do there.
I imagine the military designs would work for that
NEW Cle Err
Not
NEW q Lur
(The guest)
All of the above
except not
thoughts and prayers
Nuclear?
Well, if you have one running, especially a thorium one, it could produce the essential base load.
However, there are some catches:
It takes many years to get through all the red tape before you can start building. With PV/wind + batteries, you can start in months.
Other point is after life: right NOW in Europe we are spending billions on clearing up decommissioned nuclear power plants. How much will it cost to clear up those rows with PVs???
From a technical POV, nuclear is great, but economically it doesn’t make sense, at least here on earth. They still are the best solution for spacecrafts, on Luna, if on Mars…
It is not safe (ask the assurance companies!) It is expensive and not environmentally friendly..Furthermore there are only limited amounts of uranium (you could never produce enough electricity )and you will be again dependent of other country as Russia etc..
CLICKBAIT THUMBNAIL! Watched entire video and not a single word about Steven Mark Ryan 😂
Seriously though, great vidro🙏
I figured since small modular reactors predate both his channel and lifespan I'd probably be okay.
Thanks for doing this. Too much garbage news out here. 😢
SMR taken to extreme = NDB (nano diamond batteries)...
I just don’t see the need for SMNRs because renewable energy can cover the same small area. Maybe it might be good for remote areas. But in a large population areas one might just as well build a big one. However they are too expensive and take too long to build!
"...good for remote areas": Like the Moon and Mars. Perfect solution.
Good in remote area, yes solar & wind can be used with free natural energy.
@@rays2506No good on mars & moon. Human are going to live there some day. Again solar & wind could be also good on moon & mars.
How many military bases do we have in the US?
$TSLA: 10-15x in 5 + 5x in 10 = 50-75x in 15.
At 11:18
You say thar "these three put out something like one and a half terra watts or".
This is (1000)**4 watts or (1000)**3 megawatts.
A nuclear plant nàmeplate (design) rating is typically (1000)**1 megawatts, not (1000)**3 megawatts.
You are off by a factor of a million.[(1000)**2]
www.google.com/search?query=Size+of+a+nuclear+power+plant&client=android-cricket-us-revc
People who are pro-nuclear (including fusion) don't discuss nuclear waste issues much. People who are pro-robotics don't talk about robots becoming conscious one day (due to "experimentation") and acquiring very disturbing personalities. I guess we'll worry about these things later.. 😉
Fusion produces very different nuclear waste than fission, far easier to deal with. There is masses of talk within the AI community about the dangers of it.
It’s the only solution off the surface of the earth. Moon base, extended space travel etc.
We already have Navy type reactors that can handle that application. This is more about what needs to happen to power earth.
Everybody is still using GE first generation nuclear reactors. The third generation reactors made by general electric are much safer and the waste is so minute and inert that it would fit inside of a matchbox
I can't find anything to support that claim.
Please Brian day on camera, helps me to appreciate the beautiful people more.👍
Deal!
That the same really old line about Thorium that will greatly benefit china 💰🇨🇳 they got a working Thorium reactor prototype already, and building a giant cargo ship powered by a Thorium Molten Salt Reactor, USA going to miss the boat on this one again.
A sad fact is if the fuel your reactor uses is not cartel friendly expect lots of redtape and poor funding options along with a extra helping of FUD.
Thorium prototypes date back to the 60's. They just can't seem to get out of the lab in any country.
@@FutureAZA
If you haven’t watch this video yet it might be helpful on this subject as it helps In understand political landscape at that time?
th-cam.com/video/bbyr7jZOllI/w-d-xo.htmlsi=VolAOaZHBgl_5Ds1
SpaceX developed a reusable Methane&oxygen engine called the raptor, one of the primary concern was the highly corrosive nature of oxygen at those Extreme temperatures needed for the oxygen rich turbomotor, they developed A metal alloy to withstand those conditions.
Thorium Molten Salt Reactors can’t make radioactive ghost towns at best maybe radioactive room.
Mankind has a proven record of stewardship of properties and buildings for much more then 300 years or the lifespan of this reactors nuclear waste, mankind doesn’t have a record of stewardship of 20,000 years of anything.
The efficiency difference between conventional reactors and this reactor is ridiculous.
Putting water in a conventional reactor is similar to putting gasoline into a car is radiator, and then start adding safety systems and features until the tires burst on the poor little car.
Typical SMRs are far more complex than nuclear needs to be. There are designs where both security, containment and moderation are built into a 6cm pebble structure. All that a nuclear pebble puts out is heat. When paired with a Sterling heat engine, continuos power can be deployed in a package small enough to power a car or individual home.
With a permitted design, it's not something that can be rolled out in a reasonable amount of time.
@@FutureAZA Did you intend that response for my comment? It doesn’t seem to apply.
The only place I can see this technology being financially competitive to be honest? Is in shipping. Its a perfect fit for it.
I've seen the way shipping companies cut corners, and I'm not sure that would be ideal.
It would make expensive shipping and the security would be a nightmare.
Texas is looking at small reactors.😢
FUD
You're supposed to say which part or people will think you're arguing against what nuclear engineers actually know.
@@FutureAZA the assumptions were weird
Didn't seem to know the difference between Kw and Kw hrs as I recall.
@@FutureAZA they know how to pronounce nuclear.
3:00 Nuclear is one of the safest sources of electric power (especially PWRs (pressurized water reactors) like Westinghouse's, I personally didn't like GE's BWRs (boiling water reactors) because they spun the turbines with steam from the water that had contact with the core and would eventually lead to the turbines becoming contaminated. Supposedly.) Once you make it past all the lawyers and regulators and lawyers and unions and lawyers, etc and actually get the units built, operating nuclear units is cheap and extremely clean. You visit a coal plant like Bowen in GA, and every single surface is coated in coal dust, and if one of the supercritical steam pipes springs a leak, I'm told you can actually be cut up, as well as cooked if you happen to wander through the invisible high-velocity stream of steam. And the noise.... better have some hearing protectors (granted, my tour at that plant was in 1979, but how much could have changed since then, I wonder, excepting the replacement of the parts of the plant that have exploded over the years ...)
If you have a chance to visit a Nuclear plant like Vogtle, sure they'll give you a film strip to measure any radiation you might get into contact with (but you won't; safe, remember?), but everywhere you go, its cleaner than many hospitals, and certainly more so than my house (well, I have cats, only so much you can do, so why try?). It's quiet, too, because everything is contained. If I had to build a house near a power plant in America, I pick a Nuclear plant over any fossil or wind facility. Before the Rapidan Dam event, I might have considered a Dam for a neighbor, but the Nucs are quieter than the hydro plants, anyway, so I'm right back to where I've been for the last 40 years or so, I'd put my house next to the Nuke. Cleaner, Quieter, Safer.
Are you Bart Simpson's nuclear plant Boss?😅
@@rozonoemi9374 LOL Actually, I never watched the Simpson's much.... but I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have been let near any of our plants, except maybe one of the hydro dams saw once on a tour... He might have fit in there just fine.
@@rozonoemi9374 And I was fortunately never in my 44 ish years at the company made a boss of anybody, except maybe for a couple of our interns.
Nuclear Carrier use the Aj4W Reactors---> One unit can power upto 91,813 homes a population of 213,000 This data is based on 2020. I was in the Navy so I did see nuclear power ships. These reactors are made by Westinghouse. The USS Enterprise no longer around was one huge carrier. I saw this ship in Dry Docks for repairs in Hunter Point Shipyard in San Francisco. So cool to see it on blocks of wood.
We should find out what the military pay for their units. Maybe the best way is to float these ships far far away and send an extension cord to power a city. Maybe let the military run the nuclear power plant. Great training for those who want to join the service. A great career. Then these ships can double up as an emergency power supply when a natural disaster happens and power is needed. Multi purpose. France may be a good place for Brian to go. They do recyling of the waste nuclear material or spent fuel and reuse again by clean the stuff that reduces the effect of fresh nuclear supply
The cost of the military reactors per kwh is even more crazy than civilian reactors.