Nuclear 4.0 | The Small Modular Reactor Revolution
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 23 มี.ค. 2024
- Is this the Future Of Nuclear? Can Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) pave the way for nuclear energy's mainstream entry?
I want to explore whether these systems will fall into the same traps as conventional nuclear power, or finally offer the trinity of inexpensive, reliable and intrinsically safe energy.
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4:15 Supercriticality just means "reaction rate goes up", which is quite important when starting up a reactor. Increasing heat output is key for going from 'warm rock' to 'useful power plant'. It's just _uncontrolled_ supercriticality which is bad.
I'm surprised you even made it to 4:15, I can't make more than 3 to 5 seconds before I want to become "that" guy. It's like everyone gets their scripts from AI without any critical thinking.
Considering the sheer volume of easily fact-checked misinformation in this video, I'm starting to wonder if this guy actually has a PhD or if he just says he does online. It's not like there are doctorate cops or anything to prevent people from doing that.
Had to comment when he started talking about "more like a bomb then an energy generator". This is total lies. Bombs need much higher enrichment then even 20%. He should have said meltdown but he is just another one looking for drama. Not going to watch more of his stuff now.
@@olssonan lol I didn't even make it past a minute.
@@olssonan Completely agree! The ''uncontrolled nuclear reactor is like a bomb'' line gets repeated over and over and over and over....Might be one of the single most damaging myths about nuclear power, that it's just a nuclear bomb being 'babied' to not blow up. As a result of this, most people still think Chernobyl was a nuclear explosion.....Absolutely maddening!!
the fact that Yellow Cake is not just less expensive than Printer Ink, but it's a low single-digit percentage, seems to be bordering on something profound... 🤣
That really highlights how much printer companies are screwing the public.
3-mile island failure was not dmging, just widely broadcasted by media and blown out of proportion. You can actually look up a list of failures and only 2 out of over 100 were dmging, there are over 400 total plants in operation as over 2023, but there have also been at least 100 that have been shut down in the 10yrs earlier. Every modern navy ship is nuclear powered, not one failure on those since their start of use.
No failure for American ships, anyway. The Soviets kinda screwed the pooch on that one.
Three Mile Island was a 3 month old multi billion dollar nuclear plant that was TRASHED. Cost $1 billion i n 1996 dollars just to cleanup the melted fuel. The containment is so contaminated that it is not even SCHEDULED to be cleaned up until 2047....that is 67 years after the accident
That accident was no big deal
He's generalising from one example, Chernobyl. And even that one killed far fewer than the worst Hydroelectric dam failures. As for renewables being scaleable, they most assuredly are NOT. At least at grid scale anyway, because of their intermittent nature.
Yes Three Mile Island was really not such a problem in terms of radiation release. Weirdly Windscale is completely forgotten and it was awful, but it was the frst British reactor, and since then the British never had an event near that proportion. About Chernobyl we have a corrupt, bureaucratic government and a very bad design (not only the factors popularized by the TV series but A LOT of others and a complete mismanaged way they made the test like adding more refrigeration pumps causing cavitation, the misunderstanding of how it was unstable at lower power, etc). Fukushima is similar: The Magazine of Nuclear Scientists had published an article a few years before saying that the inspections of nuclear reactors in Japan were an empty ritual that was only to appease the bureaucracy gods without any capacity to prevent disasters. lets remember that the manager of the plant flew to Tokyo to explain to his bosses that they could not take the crew there and let the reactor on its own or the disaster would be of gigantic proportions (yes the executives of the company wanted to just abandon the plant). It was an heroic action specially if you consider that in Japan you are not supposed to do something like that saying to your bosses in their faces that they are basically...well. coward, stupid, and even corrupt when they are (see the Olympus scandal for a tiny example).
It is possible to build reactors in which the physics itself turn off the reactor when it goes awry (United Atomic had some of those in the 50s) but those reactors do not scale, as it is expensive to build reactors you need to build big ones to make the cost of the energy competitive with other energy sources: that is the real problem of nuclear energy, not the danger of reactors as the huge amount of carbon we put in the atmosphere are proving to be far more dangerous, and they can be made safe (other example wee the gas refrigerated reactors that are largely forgotten, again: cost).
When discussing Chernobyl, however, few seem to bother to note that the design was amazingly primitive -- *literally the exact same design as Fermi's very original nuclear pile in the early 40s, aside from the power generation aspects* -- and had absolutely nothing to do with modern nuclear power generation in the West. There were only something like 10 power generating plants in all of USA and Western Europe that used that design, and signs are that all of them had been decommissioned by *_1970_*
Grasping what the design was -- basically, a giant pile of *_Charcoal Briquettes_* -- should give you an idea how ridiculous it is as a safety concept. "Yes, we're going to take the same thing you use in your backyard grill and heat it to several hundred degrees and pull hot water out of it." 😕 As the Guinness commercial goes, "BRILLIANT!"
So the Chernobyl accident had absolutely nothing to do with First World power generation equipment, safeties, and dangers.
As for Fukashima, that required no less than THREE particularly unique and improbable failures to occur --
1 -- Massive earthquake nearby
2 -- Earthquake causes massive Tsunami
3 -- Previously unnoticed plug incompatibilities in emergency replacement pumps.
That last one, well, I'm betting there isn't a freaking plant anywhere in the West, now, that hasn't addressed that issue completely, so that they all can handle one single plug for powering emergency systems.
Reactors in the 250-500MW range would be useful. I worked as a consultant for a Canadian power utility, who could have replaced their entire generation fleet with a couple of big reactors. It was not practical to do so because a typical large reactor is down for maintenance about 12 days a year. Taking a small modular reactor offline can be much more easily scheduled, if you have a fleet of them.
There is not and never has been economies of SMALL scale in power production
@@clarkkent9080as always, advantages and disadvantages balancing...
The hell are you on about "Not a market"??? Did I imagine solar panels being invented? They dont produce gigawatts, but still is able to power a home, and even several cities are investing in roadside vertical wind turbines that produce 200 watts when a car passes by.
The more redundancy you have, the less down time, and in greater numbers you can even outperform large scale installations.
12 days time down is small change compared to the wind not blowing or too much cloud cover.
@@Suzuki_Hiakuratry it without base load, economically it makes absolutely no sense to put everything at the whim of the weather.
The Moltex Static Salt design does away with almost every hazard from traditional nuclear power. Its sheer simplicity and intrinsic safety should dramatically reduce costs. It’s also scaleable by building more reactors on the same site. It is naturally load following and and cannot over heat. Excessive temperature stops the nuclear reaction long before it becomes dangerous. It could be disconnected from load at full power and nothing nasty would happen. It has boron shut-down rods but they are not needed as an emergency tool.
There is no water or steam in the core so no pressure and considerably less corrosion than we get in PWR cores.
We should be moving heaven and earth to build these things. Instead we have an out of control nuclear regulator that completely stalled progress. Moltex is now getting the job done in Canada.
What are downsites of said system?
It might be good to have newer reactor designs that are safer than the older ones. But the problem of disposal of spent nuclear fuel continues regardless of safety of reactors themselves. And this problem has never been solved. Keeping spent uranium in water pools a few years, then outdoor dry storage in metal housings is insanity. There is no assurance that this extremely dangerous material will remain secure for thousands of years.
@@alesksander it's powered by pixie dust and unicorn farts.
4:05 Super critical doesn't automatically mean bomb or else it would be impossible to get the reactor to produce more than decay heat. The whole runaway melting/boom thing has to do with prompt criticality and a bunch of fun physics.
That was exactly what I was going to post. 👍
Also, to expound further, prompt critical is dependent on the neutron life cycle, which depends on a variety of factors to include fuel/poison loading, core geometry, moderator, and power history. The longer the neutron life cycle, the more controllable and safe the reactor is.
Great, we'll put them in YOUR backyard. 🤣
@@SciHeartJourney Anyone who understands fission and how these plants actually work (doesn't get their information about the fission industry from the media and movies) will have no problem with this. Put one in my backyard, way better than a giant noisy wind turbine or solar panels which are more toxic per kW (GW-hr really considering lifetime) to produce and recycle than fission fuel, then there are all the batteries required to make renewables viable. Don't get me wrong, renewables + batteries have their place on say powering farmland or a small township, but you're not going to run an entire industrial sector or a place like Tokyo, Paris, London or NYC on a giant solar field and battery the size of a small town.
That was a joke
Research reactors like at the University in Vienna even operate on prompt criticality, at multiple dollars for short pulses
A normal big reactor never would/should enter such high criticality, but the special inherently safe design allows this. That's why students are allowed to fuck around with the reactor, and why it's interesting for research (high neutron density and shit)
@20:50 The lunar night is between 1.5 and 3.5 days? I don't think so. More like 14 to 15 days.
Yeah I caught that one also
I think he meant no light at all being reflected. In the country w/no human activity you can see some of the Moon before it turns new, then the sliver of silver crescent. Takes usually between 2.3 days on average to go from some discernable light to just nothing then back to that curved line of light - waxing or waning, the amount of X depends on the position of the embraced orbits around the Sun.
@@nomadscavengerYeah but that doesn't work for a fixed spot on the Moon.
I'm no Astronaut but, wouldn't the lunar day/night cycle be shorter at the poles? Could that be the time-frame he's referring to?
@@cmac3530I was thinking that too, but without any specification, you have to assume the Moon as a whole... and then it just doesn't hold true. On the other hand, I remember the next NASA landing spot being on the South pole (correct me if I'm wrong), so maybe he got it from that, but the info is skewed.
10/10 for excitement 5/10 for technical knowledge, 2/10 for commercial application, 0/10 for future use of micro nuclear plants. We have major switchgear yards adjacent to previous nuclear plants. These are the ideal sites for re-siting without significant GRID restructuring. It is the GRID STRUCTURE that determines the future generation sites not the generator.
If they took everything they have in solar and wind and put it all into turning Coal Plants into Nuclear by installing a reactor and beefing up the power grid we would be at or near zero emissions from power generation.
The 3+gen European EPR reactor is producing 1600MW so the SMR mention in this video need 21 reactors to produce the same amount of power. EPR is buildt at 8-9M$ for each Megawatt, but the failed Nuscale/Utah project clocks in at 20M$/Mwat. Nuclear is ridiculously expensive both at small or large scale. Even before waste handeling is considered.
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20:18 "...in the northern hemisphere and so receive less sunlight."
I'll remind you that the northern hemisphere starts at the equator, and covers one-half of the Earth.
Cheers.
The northern hemisphere still receives less sunlight because it is tilted away from the sun when the sun is closest to the Earth
@@shanent5793 I admire your generosity.
Finding a friend to proofread your script is surprisingly difficult. 😂
Bro...I got through the whole video and then heard "Westinghouse is also announcing their lunar base nuclear reactor" and I just had a sudden flash of a realization that the sci fi future we envisioned is easily within our lifetimes if we just play our collective cards right (far more hopeful than certain, but still)
This is the first I have heard of Micro Nuclear Reactors. I like it! Additional to terrestrial use, I could see something like this deployed on the Moon and Mars. Well done!
In concept the idea is attractive, but imagine a booster exploding or veering off seconds or a minute after liftoff, carrying a 50mW plutonium core. That'd be a much larger ooooops.
@@frontiergeek4953 Then don't use plutonium. Use Thorium and molten salts as coolant. Or evden if you use plutonium, this has proven to work in the past. Do you know what powers some of the rovers in Mars? A Plutonium nuclear reactor.
I got 70% through this and still no mention of the Thorium Molten Salt Reactor (which we had working just fine over 50 years ago). Why is that?
Because that is off topic. Thorium reactors are not uranium reactors which he is covering and the big vs small uranium (or any) reactor is better in nuclear. Which is counterintuitive compared to the others.
He mentioned Molten salt at 4:56 as a type of coolant
The thorium reactor we had going was only a small scale research reactor. Scaling up to full production is a difficult game. There are some issues with thorium MSRs though they do seem like an interesting solution and I hope we chase that. I believe china has one MSR.
Thorium does not create plutonium which is needed for the weapons industry, that is why
@@jeroenvangastel9079 I don't need the weapons industry, do you?
It's also happening in Europe, a Polish, mostly government owned oil company called Orlen, which mostly makes gas stations, announced a year ago that they wil put SMRs near cities to power them, sadly I didn't hear anything about them for a long time other than them planning to do it before 2030 so I don't know if they will actually do it
I'm watching Poland very carefully, as are many others. They are the real test case to see whether it is possible to rapidly, cheaply decarbonise a grid with nuclear in the 21st century.
Very good presentation. Particularly impressive is your explanation of the accident at Chernobyl's Unit number 4. I have studied the event in detail, including perusing actual blueprints of the RBMK reactor. You are correct while being nicely concise. Thank you.
Dr. Miles ignored the single biggest use case for mobile SMRs in the 50-80 MW range: commercial shipping.
Riiight. I'm sure pirates would love getting their hands on nuclear material. Nuclear doesn't scale for these reasons. 1. Cost 2. Risk 3. Proliferation 4. Waste management. None of these have solutions on the horizon for fission based reactors. Those are the facts.
@@ultrastoat3298 proliferation? waste management? first of all the uranium used in nuclear reactors can't be used to make bombs. second, waste is usually stored on the reactor site these days in air cooled containers.
@@canepaper967 Of course the uranium can be used to make bombs, it's just not much easier than starting with natural uranium. Waste management is a choice; we could be reprocessing and separating waste to the point of near irrelevancy but we don't.
@@canepaper967Lol..... I'm sure the world wants the Taliban to have nuclear reactors 😆. Ever heard of a dirty bomb? Also any country using nuclear energy will seek to build their own centrifuges or they will absolutely be held hostage by countries that do have them. So swing and a miss there. And waste materials are stored on site today...🤣🤣😂. Another swing and miss. I'll let think about it for a while and see if you can figure out why that is a dumb statement.
@@ultrastoat3298 Any country using nuclear energy will seek to build their own centrifuges? I don't even know how to start addressing a statement this dumb. There are 9 countries with nuclear weapons and dozens upon dozens that operate nuclear reactors and have done so for decades. Maybe learn more about nuclear energy before criticizing it idk.
Nuclear power brings down electricity prices by 75% in Finland.
This is a bit misleading... Finnish energy prices had sharply increased after they banned energy imports from Russia in the wake of the Ukraine invasion (and other secondary causes, like the rise of coal and oil prices). Prices are about where they were back in 2019.
BUT... not saying energy independence isn't important.
@@KakashiInWinter : Easily debunked your rubbish by searching 2019 prices.
Thank you, Dr. Miles for bringing all these great events to the screen for me to watch. I love you. I love your channel. Thank you.
Small modular reactors have a significant drawback: it is difficult to ensure their protection. For example, when the Zaporizhia NPP was attacked by cocaine рuhrer Zelensky, several air defense systems provided its protection and they successfully coped with this task. But still, several shells hit the roof of the station. However, it did not harm the station. It is difficult and impractical for small power plants to provide the same protection as for large ones. But in the case of nuclear reactors, this is a must.
Another market for micro-reactors, is for self-consumption industrial use (e.g., manufacturing and tech). Tech companies are little more open to risk taking, exploring new technologies, esp. if they are low carbon. They. also have deep pockets and can take the early adopter premium. The growth of data centers, increasing energy use from AI, presents another use case, guaranteed uptake, to jumpstart a new industry.
Didn't he say that the solar panel equivalent was only like 1% of the cost? price needs to come down to be viable
@@luka3174you have to remember that they don't have to pay for the batteries bc it's constant power instead of intermediate that is extremely important for factories
@@loganaurora of course, and batteries at the moment are the most expensive part. But still the efficiency difference is too big, we have seen solar efficency increase with massive global investment, is it possible nuclear can do the same?
I was going to write my own comment and say basically the same thing but you beat me to it. Factories, data centers, office parks, airports, military bases, sports arenas and other mega-structures are all great candidates for isolated SMRs which can either feed excess power to the grid or store the excess power in other forms (batteries, hydroelectric or thermal reservoirs, etc). The advantages over large solar arrays are the small footprint, easy installation and energy density.
@@brianmagner9220 The NA fission industry and Canada and USA regulators are actually meeting soon to discuss SMR regulations. A lot of it has to do with streamlining the cost model of submitting FSARs, since SMRs will be modular a lot of the cost can be handled by not modifying a standard FSAR for an SMR design. It's just the sight anaylsis (siesmic, heat sink and the like) which will be project specific. This will massively cut down on costs, especially if the SMR company can bring in their own tradesmen to complete the project and initial criticality. Then hand the keys over to the utility after they have established and certified their operator/maintenance qualification programs.
When every legal obstacle is thrown at a nuclear power plant project by green activists the price goes up. Since the activists don't have anything else to do it's cost effective for them and grossly expensive to the project. Time is money in construction. Every delay means compensation to contractors who should be working on building but can't proceed until the lawsuits are resolved. Green activists have gotten very savvy at timing litigation to increase costs to building projects as much as possible.
"green activists" aren't green activists, they're oil company workers in disguise!!
I had this discussion with some friends who live in a small town a few hours away from me. They were very enthusiastic about a small scale nuclear reactor that could be dropped off in their town, solving their energy problems forever. I asked them to have a look at their current lot of local councillors and council staff and choose somebody they could could trust to run the little plant, keep it safe for generations, and dispose of the waste. Nobody could put forward a name they would trust, which suggests to me that safety of these things depends on more than just good engineering.
The issue is not safety, it is cost. Ask your friends if they would be willing to pay 3 times or more for electricity in order to solve their energy problems? Vogtle (Ga.) just completed 2 new nuclear plants at a cost of $17 Billion EACH for a 1,000 Mw unit. SMRs cost more per Mw capacity. Can their town afford that in their budget?
Generally speaking, making things bigger and more centralized is the only economically viable solution… I have my doubts here.
Dr Ben: Please address Thorium Nuclear as an option for SMRs.
Germany started building a Thorium plant in 1970, took them about 17 years to finish it, then they shut it down within 15 months to cut their losses - the thing was costing way too much to run.
People have been saying "ooh, what about Thorium" for over 50 years. There's nothing special about Thorium - it's still an incredibly expensive way to boil water.
What is the risk if we don't use nuclear power ..? Answer: Being unable to defeat climate change! 2nd question: What risk is larger for mankind ... climate change or the use of nuclear power? Answer to reader ... please find out by yourself.
There are many new founded companies worldwide since Oak Ridge ...researching and investing in 4th generation Thorium MSRs:
Alpha Tech (2016) U.S.A.,
Copenhagen Atomics (2014) DK,
Clean Core Thorium U.S.A.,
Elysium Industries (2015) Canada,
Flibe Energy (2011) U.S.A.,
Kairos Power (2016) U.S.A.,
Moltex (2014) U.K.,
NAAREA (2020) F,
Seaborg Technologies (2014) DK,
Terra Power (2006) U.S.A.,
Terestrial Energy (2012) Canada,
Thor Energy (2006) NO,
ThorCon (2011) USA,
Thorium Power (2015) Canada,
Thorizon (2018) NL.
@@xcrockery8080
India is working on thorium breeder reactor,right now 2nd phase just concluded and third is underway because India is abundant in thorium. In the next decade whole system will be complete
Another use would be backup power for facilities like hospitals or military bases. Places that are connected to the grid, but need to be immune to broader power outages or shortages. Normally it just sits there, selling power to the grid to offset its own purchase price. But if the day ever comes when it's needed, you've got megawatts available for any length of time you might want. In that use case, the fact that it's potentially more expensive than the alternatives is irrelevant, because you're only paying the difference to have guaranteed power on demand.
The military tried this at Fort Greeley in Alaska in the late 50's and again 10 years later at McMurdo. Both were operational failures. Reciprocating piston diesel generators are an extraordinarily well developed technology with low acquisition costs, low storage costs and lower operational costs.
@@otm646But that doesn’t answer the carbon emissions.
That is rediculus, a SMR is not a back up disel generator, it contains highly enriched uranium and has to be guarded by armed men at all times behind a fortified limited access compund. Their is no way to just put that behind a hospital.
@@kennethferland5579 SMRs don’t use highly enriched uranium. Stop talking nonsense.
@@kennethferland5579 Ok, so stick it out front where it's always in plain view. Definitely not a smash & grab operation!
Insane how much I learned in one video. That was brilliant.
Amazing channel. Glad I found ya! Great video, brilliantly done.
Galen Winsor said for years nuclear power was safe. He drank the water and swam in the cooling ponds. Died at an old age.
'Baseload power' is an axiom that maybe needs to be challenged. I think you touched on this when you explored use cases for smr. For general use, renewables (+storage) can be sufficient for 100% load even through the dunkelflaute periods. If this isn't true, it's not actually clear that a baseload generator technology solves this because it would be overstretched during those dunkelflaute periods. Or else it has nothing to do for most of its lifetime, so it's uneconomic.
Yea the 'base load fallacy' is what it's called. Baseload is a BUISNESS MODEL for a powerplant, not a 'need' that the grid has as if it needs to eat a balanced diet of electric vegtables. The Baseload buisness model explicitly leaves large amounts of grids demand unmet as well so anyone claiming that we 'only' need it is lying their ass off.
Wonderful idea. I've been following these small (micro?) nuclear reactors (MNR) for several years. I really don't see any other feasible alternatives. Fusion is at least 10 to 15 years out. Well done - keep us posted.
There are actually several ways to enrich uranium. For many years we used gaseous diffusion. Currently the most efficient method is gaseous centrifuge enrichment. In the future there is high hopes for a process called laser enrichment.
Modular Nuclear Reactors should be using molten salt technology. This would allow use of safer fuel like thorium. Molten salt reactors can also be used for uranium 235 so it's "backwards compatible", but uranium creates a lot more nuclear waste.
Yeah, except nobody is investing in either of those two theoretical technologies because nothing to do with nuke plants is even remotely economically viable.
Ever since I learned about Thorium, MSRs, LFTRs, Kirk Sorensen.. It's just insanse how not a single nation actually looked into this and invested heavily to develop it. All because it doesn't produce nuclear weapons. I can only hope I will live long enough to witness humanity switch to generating power from Thorium decay cycle. Practically limitless and cheap energy. There is more than enough Thorium in earth's crust (and new ores are being constantly deposited by volcanic eruptions) to sustain (and excede) current energy consumption for literally millions of years.
But this technology is unproven. Despite what you may have heard the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Molten Salt Reactor was not a great success (apart from the pure scientific value of such an experiment of course). Working with molten salt is just insanely difficult, and if you look at modern startups their main innovations is trying to work around this inherent challenge.
Molten salt is probably over-hyped.. I've watched plenty of presentations on it, and it's super interesting, but seems unlikely that it's viable (should still continue research for the sake of science though, of course)
What is the risk if we don't use nuclear power ..? Answer: Being unable to defeat climate change! 2nd question: What risk is larger for mankind ... climate change or the use of nuclear power? Answer to reader ... please find out by yourself.
There are many new founded companies worldwide since Oak Ridge ...researching and investing in 4th generation Thorium MSRs:
Alpha Tech (2016) U.S.A.,
Copenhagen Atomics (2014) DK,
Clean Core Thorium U.S.A.,
Elysium Industries (2015) Canada,
Flibe Energy (2011) U.S.A.,
Kairos Power (2016) U.S.A.,
Moltex (2014) U.K.,
NAAREA (2020) F,
Seaborg Technologies (2014) DK,
Terra Power (2006) U.S.A.,
Terestrial Energy (2012) Canada,
Thor Energy (2006) NO,
ThorCon (2011) USA,
Thorium Power (2015) Canada,
Thorizon (2018) NL.
@@auspiciouslywild
@@auspiciouslywild Read the story of Monju in Japan - what a colossal waste of taxpayers' money that MSR reactor was.
It's a good thing these micro nuclear reactors fit on the back of a truck so we can easily transport them to the moon.
We can ship them though. In a starship.
Space is probably the best use for these kinds of technologies in the long term.
Fundamentally, there's more than enough energy in the form of solar, wind and geothermal to do anything we want here on earth. Energy is abundant here, we just need to pluck it out of the air. The sun is blasting us with a ridiculous amount of energy every day.
But in space, especially further from the sun, energy is far more scarce.
Well balanced views presented. On the SMR (or smaller) usage cases I remember reading a number of articles suggesting their use for marine propulsion. Clearly many hurdles to overcome here as well but this is an area which is much more difficult to address with renewables or batteries.
Well obviously it can be done reliably and relatively safely, we've got subs and carriers
Flammanville III in France was supposed to be online in 2012. So far it has not even had the fuel rods loaded. It was 5x over budget years ago.
And that one is a prototype - the same design was built in Finland and China and now is built in Hinkley Point (and Sizewell). The one in Finland was a little bit faster, the ones in China are online now for over 5 years.
You still need nuclear engineers to staff these reactors.
I love the idea,but the economics unfortunately don't make sense. Now what level of subsidy is justifiable for a diverse and healthy grid is a question I can't answer but might be worth looking into.
You don't need credentialed nuclear engineers to staff a nuclear power plant. Contrary to popular belief, it is quite possible to be well trained without ever attending college.
@@kevincrosby1760 Good ol' Homer Simpson.
@@footbru Actually, control room operators have spent almost as many hours in the classroom (not including simulator training) as the average person with an AA degree has. The difference is that their training is ALL job-related...no Psych/Soc, no English, no PE, etc.
Think of it this way, do you need to be an automotive engineer to be an excellent mechanic?
@@kevincrosby1760 "hmmm ... donuts"
"No matter how good you are at something, there's always about a million people better than you."
Hmmm nuclear reactors scale with size...there is literally no reason to make them smaller... making them modular and standardized is a great idea, but making them small means losing tons of efficiency!
manufacturing a large reactor containment vessel is a big hurdle for nuke power. there's only one or two foundries that can actually make them. making the containment requirement smaller really reduces the barrier to entry for other manufacturers, will reduce the timeline, and make assembly easier. Also, some of these SMR designs operate at much higher temperature, which claws back a decent amount of that lost efficiency that you're talking about.
Financing costs also scale with reactor size, and are currently a large hurdle. While smaller means more material and labor cost per unit electricity generated, it also would (hopefully) mean shorter build times and less financing cost.
@@RentableSocks The cost of making the reactor vessel is not the problem, nor is ANY part of the reactor which is fabricated offsite like turbines, generators are other heavy machinery (which btw ALL powerplants are made from). The steel and cement pouring to make the containment vessel (a protective bunker) is where the cost overruns and delays are coming from, and your not going to make that in a factory. The whole concept of factory production of SMR is ignorant of the fact that that's ALREADY how the innards are made.
@@kennethferland5579 the cost itself isn't necessarily a problem, it's the lead time which is what causes the cost to balloon over time. All of the basic mechanical components as you've just stated is not actually a pricing concern since other power plants are already installing those en masse.
The primary containment vessel (aka reactor vessel) has to be solid metal, and there are only a few foundries that can produce them. you are referring to the secondary containment vessel, which IS a concern, but that's not where the big delays are. in fact most of the unforeseen delays are caused by regulatory bodies or public interference with nuclear. The one major delay for building a plant is several years of lead time on the reactor vessel. I'm not sure how into manufacturing you are, but having a chosen few worldwide sources for something like that leads to production limits, especially when that particular item isn't the focus of their business.
Cement pouring is hard, but we've gotten very good at it. as far as I can remember, there has only been 1 reactor in the US that was delayed because of its steam containment vessel being of subpar quality concrete. You often see sites partially built with their containment vessels unfinished, but that's not the reason for the stoppages.
@@nelsonsnow75Financing a multi-billion dollar project that ends up barely profitable is hard but possible. Financing a somewhat cheaper project that gives even less energy per dollar invested, is almost impossible.
See, the thing about wind and solar is that there was a big market for very small installations, even if the cost was high. So you could build the market on these microscopic solutions.
But the scaling of nuclear means that you can't build a viable market for kWh-scale nuclear solutions (outside of space). It's just WAY too expensive and difficult.
So you can't scale from small solutions up to medium ones, like we saw with wind/solar. And you can't scale from huge solutions down to medium ones, because if you can already build huge, you don't have much if anything to gain by going smaller (in the short term).
This is what I came up with that should be considered:
1. With all of these large scale light water reactors, we need to get back into fuel reprocessing. Only 5% of the U-235 is used, so we have vast reserves of U-235 just sitting in cooling ponds for spent fuel rods right now. This U-235 is what also makes these fuel rods hazardous for eons, so consider below for how to solve this problem.
2. The Thorium MSR. You may say well we have Thorium to burn. Right. But do you understand how this all starts? Well you stuff in some U-235 starter fuel (look above for the proposed source of this U-235) and long story short, you breed Thorium-232 into Uranium-233 and then burn the highly fissile U-233. This all gets into neutron absorption and decay where the Thorium has to absorb neutrons and then have a decay to become Uranium. The thing is Thorium is stable, so we have enough to last us until the Sun turns into a red giant and swallows the Earth. We don't have enough Uranium, so we really need to focus this in as a starter fuel and then run off of Thorium bread into Uranium after this.
3. A Thorium MSR can run a jet engine directly. No water needed for this power generator. Maybe even focus in on desalination as a second stage as in use the hot exhaust of the jet engine to make fresh water.
4. A Thorium MSR can be mass produced as an SMR. The thing is Thorium MSRs are very energy dense while maintaining inherent safety. Water just can't be all that hot and is inherently unsafe, so you end up with a large, low density design trying to compensate for these pitfalls. The MSR is high heat, non-reactive chemically, and inherently safe, so can be made energy dense. Energy dense can be made a lot more cheaply. So doing this at scale would be cheap and thus you solve the cost issue.
5. A liquid core MSR can have a continuous chemical process applied to it to separate out waste products and introduce more fuel. No need to stop the reactor to swap out spent fuel rods or even fuel spheres that have cracked from the gaseous waste products building up in them as atoms get split up into smaller atoms.
6. We can make chemical fuel with electricity. The reason we don't really do this at scale today is electricity is just too expensive. Mass produced Thorium MSR SMR reactors should get into extremely cheap power. So now you have this cheap electricity where ever you need it, you can get into mass producing hydrogen and methane. Methane (natural gas) is already used everywhere. Methane can be turned into propane and propane is used everywhere. Consider when you make methane and propane, you can capture CO2 from the atmosphere / before it enters the atmosphere from say a smoke stack. So you use CO2 in a circular fashion, making it net zero emissions wise.
Especially if you get into making the propellant for SpaceX's Starship, you could have a major propellant producing facility powered by Thorium MSR SMR reactors pulling in sea water and air and outputting liquid methane, liquid oxygen, and liquid nitrogen, all of the things needed to make Starship work, and then just pipe it into the launch site from a safe distance away. As Starship launch cadence increases, just modularly add more reactors and other equipment to the facility.
7. SMRs can be used for giant commercial ships. Especially if the ship has say 250 MWs of SMR(s) onboard, it can fast steam around the world, slashing trip times. As for risk of hijacking / attack, well just fast sail around Africa, avoiding the main hot spot in the world where this kind of stuff happens.
8. As for space, especially if you help out Starship in #6, you want to fan out into the solar system and do resource gathering and processing in space. After all, everything on Earth fell in from space and space has all of the raw materials in its more pure and elemental form to start out with, so much better in a lot of ways than getting it from Earth. You just need nuclear to efficiently get around space and nuclear to also supply regular electrical power for everything as in deep space the Sun is too diffuse to be all that effective as an energy source. The Sun is only really all that useful as a power source in the inner solar system. And you are wrong about the Moon. It is 2 weeks in darkness and 2 weeks in the light. Need nuclear power to cover 2 weeks in darkness at a time.
Once you have all of this resource gathering going on in space, something like Starship will be more focused on moving people around and less on moving material around. Starship as a shuttle to infrastructure in LEO has more interior space than a Boeing 747, a plane that can potentially hold more than 500 people. It is just if you kit it out for say a whole trip to Mars, it is filled with stuff for the trip and so very little capacity left to stuff humans inside. At this chemical is a very inefficient and ineffective way to get around the solar system where everything nuclear, and there are many possibilities around this, has a lot more kick and so can make it trivial to go anywhere in the solar system, turn around, and come back to Earth. Even going out to say Pluto, nuclear could make that a weeks to months long trip that you can then turn around from and make it back to Earth. So of course closer places like the resource rich and easy to mine asteroid belt are easy peasy to get to with nuclear.
As an Aussie SMRs, modular or micro, always fascinating to me.
Now with the AUKUS sub deal, and talk of nuclear energy back due to it, the opportunity to have a unit that fits both uses made here in Australia, be awesome
Agreed. But the problem is the pollies because the're stupid and the industry because the're greedy will put them in your backyard instead of away from population centres with 50-100km very very low population density buffers and an emergency water source with fail-safe unpowered cooling but longer transmission lines. I think they should be built below the water line of lakes with sufficient water for emergency passive cooling without power: only need to turn the flood valves by hand. Even then they could be self-contained with batteries to switch em and human hands as backup. Near nil meltdown risk!
Don’t forget that LCoE is calculated over 20 years. A big nuclear plant can last up to 60 or even more than 80 in some cases. If you look at the lifecycle costs of energy, nuclear is considerably cheaper than renewables. LCoE is an indicator made by and for the financial markets. When it shows the price of renewables, it excludes many externalities such as energy storage and grid updates. What LCoE tells us is that nuclear plants are capital intensive, and therefore too expensive for private investors who want a quick return on investment. But governments can afford such investments, which become very profitable after 20 or 30 years of amortization, depending on the funding model used…
No the astronomical costs of Nuclear assumed 40 years, the original licensed age of reactors. Some reactors have gotten extensions to their licenes but reactor is even close to 60 years old and many shutdown early because they are having ESCALATING operating and maintence costs. Nuclear reactors are not like renewables which have effectivly zero maintence cost.
LCOE is calculated over the economic lifetime of the generator. An economic life of 60-80 years for a new nuclear plant is unrealistic in a competitive generation market, as are the customary industry assumptions of 90% capacity factors and 7% cost of capital. Put in more realistic assumptions and the economics quickly go out the window.
@@gibbonsdp LCoE is not calculated over the lifetime of a generator. Look at Lazard’s LCoE+ annual report: it’s 20 years, like most LCoE estimates. If you want lifecycle costs, you need to look at IEA’s world energy outlook. The numbers are very different.
@@kennethferland5579 the licensed time of an EPR is 60, and can be renewed after that. Most French PWRs have seen their license renewed after 40 years. Licensed time is not the same as lifecycle. Look at IEA’s reports for an accurate lifecycle cost of energy.
@@salahidin The French nuclear fleet had an extended period where 50% of it was out of commission last year. They're getting old, unreliable and are costing a bomb to maintain.
The main reason for nuclear cost is restrictions fueled by politicians that have been bought and paid for by the gas, coal, and oil companies that have big deep pockets making sure that alternatives to not overrun them.
No nuclear Industry is hold by the same rich people,as oil and gas and we pay pay the Bill,wake up and Study the Business data.
Project fear on nuclear was going strong since the 1970s so it is assumed by Western populations not used to nuclear on their doorstep. So the NIMBY reaction is real and goes beyond and amplifies lobbying by anti-nucleur forces. Hopefully sanity will prevail and we will see that having at least a small amount of nuclear in the power mix is good.
What's ironic is that the experimental reactors back in the 60s and early 70s were >400 KW reactors.
Ahh one of the few videos Ive seen that addresses the real issues with nuclear. I do think its good that people like Kyle Hill tackle the myths of the dangers of nuclear power, but the problem of the enormous amounts of time, cost, and politics (Within which erroneous fears are only one part.) just to get each reactor online is rarely addressed by advocates.
I believe it takes the better part of a decade or even longer to get a reactor up, when you contrast that to how far renewables have come in the same time, and even without the support they should have been receiving from many governments, its a stark contrast.
As mentioned, the base load issue is the biggest flaw in this rapid growth, but Ive seen the rise of grid level storage solutions that are well proven, scale well, and are already coming online. (Flow batteries are one of my favourites, but there are others, and new far more efficient generations of the tech already on the horizon.)
It would be nice for the nuclear boffins to come up with something, and Im sure there will always be niche uses, but as a broader player, with each passing year, nuclear fission just seems to get closer and closer to becoming redundant. (Which may not be so bad a thing, Im not scared of the technology but what little highly dangerous waste it does produce is still a pain to deal with.)
With the high profits from big oil blinding the politicians who allegedly have the people's best interest in mind when governing... It's exceedingly difficult to get anything even remotely healthy done when it comes to the people. Serfs paying income tax just don't have the same clout as a oil company exec lobbyist...
When it comes to SMRs becoming economically competitive because of mass production, I have doubts. I'm no manufacturing expert, but my amateur understanding of mass production is that its benefits kick in when you achieve massive scale. For example, billions of kitchen spoons being produced. Each spoon becomes cheap. With SMRs, how many will we really need? If each one produces, for example 50 MW, and the world only needs 20 TW of power production, then that means we'd only need 400,000 SMRs. Will that be enough for economies of scale to kick in?
@@seanhewitt603you have no idea how much subsidies have changed that equation. Now its all abnout lobbying for wind, and rich politicans who might own some farmland might be more than happy to stick a turbine up and farm subsidies instead. Big oil, BTW, are all getting onto the renewables bandwagon too.
SMRs will likely never be a "thing", too many dangers and drawbacks associated with them and pretty much is better, unless you are trying to power a very remote scientific outpost or something like that where other power sources would be impractical, also there is no way to make those cheap enough to be practical on a mass scale.
I think the micro reactor model would be good for small rural towns, and not just ones that are very remote. This could reduce the need for large distribution centers that transport the power great distances. This would also have the advantage of being less susceptible to widespread outages because the grid could be segmented into smaller units.
That depends on how controllable the output is, traditionally nuclear reactors only function well with a steady output.
It is unbelievable that people still think nuclear is 24/7 for 60 years.
The manufacturers of SMRs state clearly on their websites that
you need to power it down for 30 days every 18 months to replace fuel rods
you need to power it down for 6 months at 10 years to replace the coolant (which is by then radioactive)
you need to power it down for at least 6 months at 20 years to replace coolant, turbines and reactor module.
You also need to budget for at least one "unscheduled outage per year.
Wouldn't it be easy enough to plan around that? Put in redundancies so you just need to temporarily drop to half operation during maintenance times?
Why would it be down for 18 months to replace fuel rods? There's no way to design it to have robots replace them in a way that requires no downtime?
We know things are radioactive and have ways to deal with it.
These technical challenges you cite don't seem too hard to deal with in a way that requires no downtime in newly built power plants.
Buy two and run them on split shifts. Not only do you double your life expectancies from them, downtime is a non issue. Or if the whole point is to not run them at full capacity ever, buy three and run them in redundant pairs. Always maintaining and cycling which core is on downtime.
There are reactors designed and maintained with full power refueling. Just the most popular are sealed PWR using light water, which do need to be shutdown.
The Navy uses reactors that don't have those limitations. The Nimitz class carriers need refueling every 25 years, and newer submarines are being built to go their entire lifespan without refueling. Those limitations are design choices, not absolute requirements.
Isnt there a thorium fueled smr?, I'm pretty sure theres thorium in North America.
Yeah, and didn’t these use molten salt to convey power?
I believe China is working on one. Or.. Possibly both things separately..
No that is just a pipedream on the internet.
My bets are on small molten fluoride salt reactors using thorium as the fuel, these are able to consume the nuclear waste deposits from LW reactors, and are inherently safe (self extinguishing upon cooling system failure). That means cheap fuel (waste) and they are also purported to do a 95% fuel conversion to energy rather than the 0.5% that most LW reactors achieve. Also they can be bolted into the ground sufficiently that you can't just drive away with it. They can also be continually refuelled so there is no actual down time as with most LW reactors except some maintenance.
The difficulty with the molten fluoride salt reactors is highly corrosive aspect of the salts in question. These salts corrode the metal pipes they come in contact with overtime.
One company has found an innovative solution to this chemistry problem. Apparently corrosion occurs when impurities in the salt chemically react with the metals in the pipe. So get around this the company has developed an ultrapure rock salt with non corrosive properties.
That eVInci microreactor looks really intriguing. Mining is going to electrify eventually and a system like this seems ideal. I live in a remote region and I know of fly-in communities that could benefit from this as well.
I am not a nuclear scientist, but I am a scientist and to be honest I usually get bored when every video starts with the basics of fission. I must admit that yours was different because you went beyond the basics and explained what is usually hidden behind the math of controlled fission reaction.
This is the fascinating part of nuclear power, isn't it? The mathematics of the process promises incredible energy gain and anyone who doesn't follow through would be like to pass on the greatest gift nature has hidden from view.
The question I often ask myself is how come nuclear energy is used in military and space applications so readily, for so many years and yet we are stuck when it comes to using them for providing energy for widespread use.
Why can't we just rip one out of an old nuclear submarine and stick it in a hole in the ground and turn it on? Either the military as an indispensable arm of governments has authorities beyond what we know or when it comes to defence the price per kw is not constraint by the competitive math used in the Energy market. Given the lack of exposure of failed submarines or people dying of radiation sickness, it makes the possibility of the latter remote. Therefore, by the old, trusted process of eliminating the possible reasons for this disparity the conclusion must be how we value defence compared to the general energy market.
Renewable energy of wind and sun is currently viewed more like a gold rush. As usual the market is short-sighted and is blind to long-term problems of recycling wind blades on wind turbines or the problems of lithium-ion batteries. The cost of recycling them hasn't been included in the math.
The market creates its own narrative and like any narrator is biased and the results are what we see. I don't know if the long-term price of widespread use of SMR technology has been calculated or even exists.
Whether it exists or not is irrelevant, what matters in the end is always our perception and the power of stories we conjure and spread like a game of Chinese whisper where it gets reinforced by yet another more biased (as the result of being more committed) player in the market.
A company who has committed a large investment to manufacturing lithium-ion battery cannot afford to be truthful when it suddenly becomes apparent that hydrogen can be obtained through use of the chemical reaction between aluminium like in tin foils and an oxidation agent like hydrogen peroxide that can be manufactured a lot easier anywhere in the world independent of a of petrochemical industry which is the last excuse supporters of lithium-ion batteries or Elon Musk's devotees resort to in an argument before the channel owner hides the dissidents' voices can reach too many people.
Finally there is a more sinister factor to consider which is the necessity of centralization of power. If anyone could produce its own energy totally off grid who would be able to control them? Who could turn off their supply if they didn't follow some other rule? We long passed of sending heavies round the door and resort to such measures except maybe in extreme circumstances like when defence of the government is involved. As a real example of what I am trying to explain conceptually without sounding like tin foil wearing conspiracy theorist is the recent case in California where the trade off between the central supplier and those customers who also produced their own electricity and feedback the excess to the grid started to tilt in favour of these type of customers that gave rise to a new law to rebalance the trade off.
Given the above does anyone need to be a nuclear scientist to explain why nuclear energy sector has found it so hard to enable humanity to benefit from the hidden treasure in nature?
"Helium doesn't explode if ignited"
You might want to put an asterisk on that line lol XD
Explosions involve the release or movement of other gasses. If theres no atmosphere surrounding helium, it is only flammable, not explosive. Helium shouldnt be able to ah.. expand explosively? Idk its 5 am i might not even be right but ima shoot my shot. Id love to be corrected cleanly. But helium is elemental weight 1. When burned it should dissappear or idk.
@@LolWutMikehSM No sir. Helium can't be ignited. It's a noble gas. That's why I say it needs an asterisk. Maybe he meant to say that it doesn't ignite if exploded?
@@LolWutMikehSM The bigger problem with helium is that it's bloody near impossible to 100% contain and you're constantly having to top the thing up. AGRs have the same issue to a smaller extent. Molten metal coolants (sodium and lead) have a tendency to get bearing lubricants into the loop, which react chemically and then clog the core (Santa Susannah accident) or in the case of soduim - burn furiously if exposed to air (Monju)
I'm sure someone's goign to bring up the issue of salts and metals freezing solid as they cool. This is a good thing and prevents widespread contamination in a worst case scenario (sodium is problematic for reasons above, lead vapours are quite literaly brain eating. if you're going to use alternative coolants/moderators to water then one which isn't dangerous, doesn't easily leak and is negligabily corrosive seems like a good idea) The MSR design pipework is wrapped in electric heaters to bring it up to temperarure before going critical and the 4 inch plumbing had over a foot of insulation around it in the MSRE. Because the salt isn't electrically conductive, bearings can use it as circulating pump lubricant and use magnetic coupling to stay fully sealed
Flibe is not sea salt (and sea salt is only corrosive in the presence of water or other ionic contaminants. At 400C, water doesn't hang around for long in a molten salt) Tests at MSRE showed no detectable corrosion after 9000 full power hours
Time will tell, but Kurt Sorenson and friends have the right idea - however CHina has beaten everyone to first working 21st century prototype and that's a lead that developed countries will have a hell of a time recapturing - particularly as molten salt liquid fuelled systems were made illegal in the USA in 1972 (Nixon) as a near direct reaction to Weinberg advocating them as an anti-proliferation technology and that ban hasn't (yet) been walked back
"back of a lorry, delivered to site, plug in, off you go" was literally the cartoon concept of a late 60's "small boy's science book" I inherited from my older brother. This concept was really popular in the pre-internet days of in your face, establishment (pseudo) science propaganda. Although of course, this is an engineering problem. All the science is known and has been for nearly a century.
In the water treatment industry, we are moving away from centralised infrastructure for various reasons. Some of these reasons likely apply to energy generation as well. I can see a use case for SMNRs in large new builds.
20:16 Remote Communities in the Northern Hemisphere are more likely (statistically) to be near the equator. Perhaps you meant to say "remote communities in the far northern latitudes". Obviously, I understood what you meant, but with the caliber of your execution on these videos, and you script writing, I would have expected this to have been caught and corrected by your editing team. Thanks Ben ! Let's go Nuclear ! !
Micro's make a lot of sense when you consider a grid approach. If every town has their own generator, they can cross feed each other as needed and there isn't a single point of failure. It also means that simple coordination of maintenance windows is all that's needed during upgrades. It also somewhat simplifies the whole electrical grid infrastructure since there aren't a few huge producers, which also means it's easier to merge solar and wind into the total equasion, because varying the output of a micro reactor is much easier than a huge one. The overall cost to build is close to the one huge installation, but it's more incremental and can more easily benefit from improvements in technology when the lifespan is a less than decade compared to half a century.
Small Modular Reactors remind me of science fiction spaceships.
And these discussions are like a bunch of science fiction writers speculating on how to travel between stars, what colour the ships will be and what adventures the crew and passengers will have.
One day ....
Thank you Dr. Strange for this detailed explanation
Wow how cool, great video
Amazing subject, love those micros
Very interesting info. I’m sure there are a lot of great use cases for nuclear power in whatever capacity, but there always a number of potential & real issues that make it a hard sell also like, acts of terrorism, war, natural disasters, meteorite strike, earthquakes, maintenance oversights and toxic waste to name a few.
I would like to see more R&D on geothermal power plants. In Australia, (& many other countries) I would have thought we have a huge potential here for tapping into decent heat sources for this type of scalable & reasonably green power source.
Without regard to the many hot surface springs we have, the Artesian Basin is only 3 kms down with a footprint that covers 4 major states, surely it is not that hard to dig, drill, blast &/or bore tunnels to this vast resource of over an estimated 1.7 million square kms with around 65,000 cubic kms of hot water (up to 100 degree C) for geothermal power generation when I see all the huge tunnelling projects that are being done locally and globally.
I know there has been some disasters created from geothermal exploration around the world, but the idea of radioactive contamination probably scares people more than the idea of pumping coal, fuel, deisel & gas fumes into the atmosphere or creating a mountain of hot mud with a geothermal stuff up.
Very good analysis; and for what it's worth, thank you for pronouncing "nuclear" correctly.
Nice video! Curious. Would micro nuclear reactors, like those built into trailers, be able to combine power output by having several joined to some sort of trailer hub? Would it make sense to include a series of trailers outfitted with batteries to ensure continuous power. That way a single trailer could be disconnected from the setup without having to shut anything down. Just plug a new trailer into the hub, or add additional ones as needed.
That’s a great idea, at that point I think it becomes an electrical engineering task to link multiple reactors together, from a nuclear standpoint there’s no issue aside from maybe some external event type regulations
There are a few companies seriously looking at deep (20km-ish) geothermal electricity generation using syncrotron drilling. If that's viable, then they will need a few megawatts for a couple of years to melt bedrock into gas. SMRs make a lot of sense if you need that kind of load in the middle of nowhere for a limited period, and it would be an almost magical pairing of nuclear and true renewables.
Small modular reactors should be easy, but they seem to be taking as long as nuclear fusion reactors to develop.
Probably will be in the next 50 years but a small module per house is when the tech will become practical/useful enough.
I think energy independence will be recognized as more important in the future. Especially for vital services such as hospitals and military installations. I really think there is a niche for truck portable ready to go micro nuclear reactors. Especially in disaster recovery and relief situations.
Brilliant ! Keep at It.
0:26 agile and nuclear power are words I would never expect to hear in the same sentence
I haven't watched this yet... But is the new reactor just steam with extra steps?
3:30
Yup it's just a steam engine.
It's almost always a steam engine
I've long had an idea for how an SMR might be used.. In a new construction development, they could use an SMR to provide not only electricity but district hot water to every home in the development. I ran the numbers real quick, 120M divided by 300 homes, that's about 400,000$ per home. With inflation, that's about what new homes go for anyways, so you've just doubled the cost (If it costs 120M for the reactor, I'm using a random number I saw you mention).
But, every one of those homes has all their energy needs met forever. If people don't use all the electricity it can be sold to the grid and paid out to homeowners.
This doesn't account for re-fueling, 8 years, let's say $8M for ease of calculation, each of those 300 homes would have an annual fuel cost of about $3,300 or $280/month. That's really competitive. Someone check my numbers? Are they totally off? High? Low?
Reactor sizing also.. 6KW/home (electricity plus hot water) that's... Hold on. Only 1.8 Megawatts? Okay, that reactor can be waaaay cheaper than 120M or we're doing something very very wrong.
What are we doing???? Why is this not happening??
Micro installations could also help shore up deficiencies in the grid, be they long-term or short-term as a result of recent events, even if they aren't full blown disasters.
These are revolutionary.
One correction, boron in the rods capturing neutrons DOES decay, specifically into Lithium-7 via alpha decay (Boron-10 + n -> Lithium-7 and an alpha particle)
So technically the control rods even get "used", but idk how relevant that is in practice. But it definitely decays.
Re base load: An ex-leader of the UK's Green Party in a recent interview stated (which is also I believe in her recent book) that base load demand could be satisfied by interconnects between regions producing renewable energy. With PV energy I have also seen references to interconnects following lines of latitude; power is always available because the sun is always up somewhere. I haven't been able to assess for myself the practicalities of these ideas in any meaningful detail, though. Over to you, Ben!
Other than that, I tend to hold Green politics responsible for the lack of nuclear power in the UK, in stark contrast to the situation in france. This I think means I am prejudiced, perhaps wrongly, against any assertions made by Greens on nuclear energy. Nevertheless it is hard to assail their arguments on the cost and speed of deployment of wind and solar as compared with nuclear!
Also, the wind is always blowing somewhere, and probably not very far away. And finally: we could store energy (hydrogen, synthetic fuels and so on). Let's face it, the great fusion reactor at the center of the Solar System is all we'll ever need. Even the ancient people knew it: the Sun is truly our God 🌞
Part of the challenge is competition with dropping renewable costs for sure. But longer term, I feel that EGS might have a larger impact and I wonder if that isn’t on the mind of some SMR investors, as it would deliver continuous power, i.e. a more direct competitor to SMRs. EGS seems very promising as drilling expertise and technology shifts from a fossil fuel focus.
All SMRs mentioned in this (very good) video still need custom steam plant turbines to turn low temperature steam into electricity. Heavy nitrogen (N15) cooled reactors with direct cycle turbines based on open cycle turbine designs from natural gas plants might be a solution. I'd also like to see these nitrogen gas cooled reactors borrow Moltex Energy's idea of putting a molten fuel salt in fuel pins. This eliminates the real hazard of nuclear reactors - release of radioactive gases in an accident. It would also surely lead to much lower fuel costs than using TRISO fuel.
Having operated a nuclear reactor on a US Navy submarine, I have a few things for this video.
The term Super Critical gets an overcharged negative connotation associated with it. During a reactor start up, we actually need the reactor to go super critical to get everything to full operating parameters. Once we are operating where we need to be we control the state of criticality with the control rods and the demand of the steam being produced. The more steam that is used, the cooler the coolant is leaving the heat exchanger. The colder the water, the closer the atoms are to each other. The closer they are to each other when they get to the reactor, the more reactions you get which in turn makes the reactor super critical for a moment, but everything will eventually even out back to a critical state. It was only when the steam demand was dramatically increased that we had to take actions with the control rods to prevent an uncontrolled super criticality. Just because a reactor goes super critical does not mean it will end in a failure of some sort.
The other point I have is I did not realize our reactor would have been considered a micro reactor as I do not think it would fit on a truck (or lorry), so I was imagining the small modular reactors to be smaller than what we had on the sub.
Great info, excellent video, thanks for everything!
One aspect not discussed here is the concept distributed generation versus central generation, and its impact on infrastructure stability.
Blackouts aren't usually caused by a failure at the generator, but rather something within the distribution grid. These small failures can cascade when the load transferring nature of a grid activates a sequence of self protective features.
The current power grid relies on a few HUGE generation points, and massive distribution networks. If it were feasible to build smaller generation facilities efficient and clean enough to place throughout a region, then the amount of distribution serving each generator would be much smaller and the ability to contain any particular loss of power to a small area would be dramatically improved. SMRs are the only technology likely to meet this challenge.
As much as this would benefit wealthy nations with extensive and aging grids, it would be an absolute game changer for countries with less overall power and little grid stability.
We need MMRs and SMRs for deployment on a distributed basis, giving us back a lot of wire and steel for use in other endeavours. We just don't need the high price tags. Maybe puny humans can get it done before micro and small fusion plants deprive fission of all usefulness. When replacement time rolls around, fusion slots right in.
That's never going to happen. Fusion energy is too advanced for our civilisation this century. The economics of fission don't even stack up, and that is orders of magnitude simpler than a tokamak.
The neutron actually interacts with the nucleus and if the neutron is too fast it won't interact with the nucleus. In Chernobyl when the rods started to re-enter they slowed down the neutrons and the reaction increased.
The guy who invented the type of reactor first put in civilian use was against such big reactors. His reactor was for nuclear submarines and at that level of power generation the core can be contained in case of a meltdown. There are a few sunk nuclear submarines and afaik none has leaked to this day.
Thorium would be a better source honestly. Little to no run-away meltdown risk, and far less toxic waste.
As for "clean" ... Nuclear is cleaner and safer than "green" energy statistically speaking.
what actual operating reactor are you basing your comments on?
Was the cost vs time plots around 8:08 adjusted for inflation? If not, there was rampant inflation during that same time period.
You should interview Dr. Robert Zubrin on this matter. He wrote a book The Case For Nukes.
The Rolls Royce UK SMR is planned to be operational by the end of this decade. The economy of scale in SMRs is in the multiple units coming off a production line all to the same design. The obvious locations for initial SMRs are any existing nuclear facility with spare grid connection capacity, recently decommissioned nuclear power plant sites which could host multiple SMRs, and then decommissioned coal (or even gas) power plants. A ship to shore power plant is also an obvious choice for emergency restoration of power following disasters - just need the port to have the power connection facilities. A SMR powered water desalination plant could also be a game-changer in some locations.
There has never been and there is not economies of small scale in power generation. Every nuclear power plant uses standard components built in a factory and system modules are built in factories and shipped to the site. The build it in a factory cost savings will never happen because it has already been used.
One application MNR could be useful in is a situation we have here in Kansas. Panasonic is building a large battery factory in a near by city. This requires a huge upgrade to the areas power grid. This is being done via a special tax and a rate increase for the customers of the local power company. However, neither of these apply to the county this plant is being built in. The local residents that are going to benefit from the large amount of high paying jobs are not footing any of the bill for this. If instead this plant could have its own MNR or two to power itself the grid upgrades wouldn't be necessary thus meaning no cost being spread out to surrounding communities that aren't getting the benefits of the site to begin with.
What if office workers get angry and decide to take it out on the SMR in the parking lot in the same way as the truly brilliant use of the office space clip?
(Also, thank you for a good laugh!)
I liked this video over all. But please be careful when using the term "base load".
9:44 base load power does not complement renewable sources. What you need is balancing power (capacity).
Yes, there is "base load" in the electricity demand on the grid, but you really care about is meeting demand.
(Currently) Base load power plants are not that flexible and most cost effective if they run continuously. If you use them to complement renewable electricity production, the price per kWh rises too.
I can however see SMR being used to directly produce Hydrogen, using thermochemical water splitting due to the higher temperatures compared to traditional nuclear power, which than can be used in to complement renewable sources, if still cost effective.
I think the term "base load" has been spun around. People use it now, when describing power production, to mean "good" in a way that renewables apparently aren't good. But if a power plant can only produce electricity when it runs continuously at max capacity, that isn't good. That's bad. Because demand isn't continuous. If such a plant didn't produce enough electricity to match demand peaks, you'd still need other sources of production. And if you overbuild it to account for the peaks, you'd still need to find ways to throttle it down or absorb the excess power when not in peak hours. Like you said, things need to be in balance. I saw a TH-cam documentary recently about how a hydro pumped storage facility is used in modern times to balance power output from nuclear. So nuclear alone (without energy storage) is not the answer.
yes, base load means continuous power delivery and people mistake stored power (eg gas) for this simply because it effectively acts as the same thing. We probably need different types of storage (more hydro if possible, flow batteries probably) and maybe hydrogen, but not likely as the low efficiency of making hydrogen outweighs the efficiency of building out batteries. But there again, if nuclear is "too cheap to meter" for the electricy production part, you can make more than needed and just throw the excess away and it might still be cheaper than trying to store it.
You seem to be forgetting about grid scale storage which is becoming widely installed. California has required it in all of their existing power plants. Hawaii is following suit. Having massive energy storage both means you can lean more on renewables and you can better optimize your plants which throttle slowly like nuclear.
Traditional base-load running 24x7 is indeed a terrible fit with a modern renewables-heavy grid. It's an economic problem, particularly for a nuclear plant which needs to be producing revenue with its (mostly) constant-power output 24x7. The problem is that it can't. The output is only useful to the grid after roughly 6pm and basically worthless (not able to produce significant revenue) for 12 hours out of the day. California, for example, actually has to curtail solar sometimes during the day just to let its one remaining nuclear plant continue to generate at a constant output. NG assets drop to nearly zero something like 8 hours and then cover a large chunk of the demand overnight.
Solving this problem for nuclear requires grid-scale storage and a lot of it. Only grid-scale storage soaking up excess renewables during the day and dumping that energy into the evening and overnight is able to smooth out daily cycle sufficiently to allow traditional base-load style generation (nuclear for example) to generate 24x7 and also stay solvent economically.
At the moment only California and Texas are really putting a lot of money into grid-scale storage. It is turning out to be incredibly beneficial to the grid. Not only is it soaking up excess power during the day, grid-scale storage is also able to be situated to remove grid congestion across the late afternoon and evening peak, economically revenue generating for its effort. That dynamic, in turn, reduces the need to expand transmission line infrastructure and defrays the cost of the batteries so much that it isn't even a question now whether to install battery storage or not any more. The economics are just too good.
-Matt
You could just synthesize hydrocarbons with surplus renewable energy too, solar thermal would be the optimal means as you can generate heat comperable to nuclear and heat reduces the electrical energy needed for water electrolsis. Their is no reason to utilize nuclear power for the hydrogen economy concepts, a concept which I should point out exists primarily to propup Natural gas industry.
MNR sounds interesting, but can the unit's be daisy chained on one site???
Hey, I think you didnt properly worded what or who, will benefit from the 3 tablespoons if HALEU at 2:54 , great video.
I would like to see SMRs or MNRs using fast neutrons so that they can utilize U238 and existing "nuclear waste".
Yes it can. Something very similar is being used under Denver International Airport.
How about using them to power ships?
Work on nuclear is important. Solar and battery tech are making much more serious and efficient and cheap inroads to energy needs meanwhile. Wind is not apt to get much cheaper except on volume but it is also an important buildout.
The main weakness of SMRs is competition. For their business model to work, they need economies of scale. One company needs to produce hundreds of copies of their SMR. If there are too many companies competing, each individual model can not be produced cheaply enough to be worth it.
solar prices is a sht market to compare it with since you can basically double the price without subsidies
and while its not on the bill, people still need to pay for those subsidies
I think we should just go ahead with these SMRs and nano reactors. The first ones may have a bit higher cost, but are necessary to build out economies of scale. The issue is that nuclear has stagnated for decades, so cost to start building them again is high. There is a lack of experience in the industry, so costs are higher. This combined with unnecessary regulation and irrational public fear keeps nuclear of life support, rather than commonplace.
isn't a micro reactor still preferable to solar due to the absurd amount of green minerals needed to produce them? i understand uranium mining happens in conflict areas but it seems like a more sustainable manufacturing resource then lithium. also just seems like overall less tonnage removed from the ground so arguably less environmentally destructive.
i know very little on the subject though so would love to hear what others think
Lithium can be mined sustainably, not saying this is true for all lithium mines though. If this not good enough for you sodium batteries are coming, you can get a near infinite amount of sodium his from sea water, and there are easier ways to sodium especially in usa
C0bolt is currently used in some batteries, but their are many other materials that can be used, LFP batteries are an example of this. Solid state batteries open up different material choices as well
I think that SMRs are a workaround for one of the two main issues holding nuclear power back: Ever stricter regulatory constraints. You can mass produce these and get _the design_ certified, instead of having to put each individual reactor through the gauntlet. The economies of scale come with, well... Scale! Just as with scores of other products, the cost will come down as more of the product is made.
I do object to the way you're handwaving the intermittency issue of wind and solar, by the way. Directly comparing wind or solar without the storage or gas power generation, to nuclear, isn't a fair comparison.
(IMO) Nano/Micro nuclear reactors are the future, for sustainable energy, if we can minuaturise reactors small enough to fit into a car sized vehicle, then we have portable energy on demand whereever we go, rather than being stuck to a centralised for profit grid. I think Batteries are a stop gap measure until we get micro/nano reactor technology, a cumbersome unreliable expensive technology that will give way to a hopefully lightweight portable, base load energy source that we take with us which means energy supply will increase in direct proportion to the demand for energy, no issues with brown outs etc.