And they're proposing to do what with the spent fuel rods?

Its because traditional nuclear plants are far too expensive and take far too long to build. By the time we were to finish building new ones renewables would have already been up and running for years at a far cheaper cost. The main issue is that battery and power storage technology isn't good enough to meet demand for nighttime hours when wind and solar outputs are at their lowest. This is where nuclear power would be useful. This modular reactors are much smaller meaning they are easier to spin up and cost far less than traditional reactor technology.

Wait...what qualifies this as uplifting? Or news?

You can transport those with electric vehicle in principal, burning fuel is not fundamentally required, which is the difference.

Plus, there are a lot of projects underway to recycle wind turbine blades, because as you pointed out that is a real long term concern. Not insurmountable, though.

https://cen.acs.org/environment/recycling/companies-recycle-wind-turbine-blades/100/i27

Also, Nuscale? We weren't comparing to Nuscale. We were comparing to current best nuclear technology. Not what someone can make in their garage with one of these little modular reactors.

And I used the wrong word. You said renewable. So I replied with the same word. I meant sustainable. And it is.

Sure if you want to say that nuclear was re sensible choice 10 or 20 years ago, I'm fine with that. Even as much as 8 year ago, I was lro nuclear.

But solar costs, wind costs, and storage options have decreased in price so much in the apsr two decades, with more decrease in the horizon (while nuclear hasn't), that it no longer makes sense.

Otherwise I'm not sure what that link is supposed to be contradicting in my post.

And it is cheap. Cheaper than putting up a hundred thousand windmills to produce the same amount of power as one plant. Some plants are already there, could just be field and powered back up to save even more money (than constructing a new one).

But the cost to transport the blades and other pieces in a wind turbine kit (flat-bed truck fueled by Diesel). And I doubt very much you can recycle them also. If they break. They go in the landfill and stay there for a hundred years or so.

We actually did have all those concerns in the navy, just different ways of handling them. Navy nukes were subject to the heavy hand of Naval Reactors, who are way bigger cocksuckers than the NRC or INPO or those other ABC organizations.

Naval nuclear power and its development the reason civilian nuclear power is as safe as it is.

Or at the very least. I WAS right. But then technology improved and costs decreased. If that was the case, you could have saved a lot of time and just said that.

And then someone with even less time can come back in and show you that you're wrong. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy

And I was a nuclear reactor safety analyst for commercial pwrs. So what. I worked with many ex Navy people. I think they would all agree there's a big difference in operating requirements and environments that make their safety strategies quite different. Are navy nukes subject to NRC regulations? Is a nuclear sub required to have an exclusion zone, or any of the other site conditions that a commercial plant does? A ship or sub doesn't have to worry about loss of offsite power, staging FLEX equipment, store spent fuel. So you could argue that naval reactors are more safe, but they don't have the safety requirements to protect a nearby civilian population.

And I’m saying you’re wrong. I’ve served on a nuclear powered naval vessel and worked ops at a commercial nuclear plant.

So on those notes I'd say:

1. The cost of SMRs isn't one being presented by critics here, it's directly the cost the NuScale company is stating the project will have. They should be the ones giving the MOST optimistic.picture, not the least.

2. The NuScale costs are are still (without subsidy) worse than the "solar/wind plus imposed costs" number in that article.

3. Arguing against regulations on the nuclear industry, while at the same time arguing that nuclear is a great safe energy source, when the safety is largely produced by those same regulations, always feels problematic to me. I'm sure there are some regulations that can be changed, but in general... Issue.

4. If we want to bring up the Japan issue, then it seems completely fair to tally in the independently estimated $800 billion total cleanup cost of Fukushima. Split across the approximately 10,000 TWh of electricity Japan has produced with nuclear plants since the first one came online in the 60s, that's an added $80/MWh of cost produced by using nuclear power, which is roundabout the entire "solar/wind plus imposed costs" number on its own. Even if you use lower estimates of $400 billion. It's still a huge cost added.

5. That article somewhat disingenuously claims that wind would "use up" 17,800 acres for a plant that produces a TWh /year of electricity. That number is actually the land area that wind turbines would be spaced out across; wind installed capacity is around 5 MW/km^2 (20 kW/acre). So at 35% capacity factor, 16,000 acres of spacing needed to install the 320 MW of wind that would produce 1 TWh of electricity a year (Their numbers assume a slightly lower capacity factor which isn't a big deal). However, the direct land footprint of wind power (land actually taken up and unavailable for other use) is more like 0.75 acre / MW. So that 320 MW wind farm only "uses up" 240 acres of space, or about 2.5x what nuclear needs. Not 178x as the article tries to claim.

Solar definitely uses significant land, and their number is near enough correct there.

I'd note however than land constraints aren't actually particularly significant right now (particularly in the US context with millions of acres devoted to wasteful corn-ethanol-fuel production), so these larger land footprints should not be a primary concern at this time. If they DO become a concern, note that a significant portion of solar can be installed on rooftops or parking lots with zero new land use (possibly 1/2 the current electricity demand of the US can be covered in this way), and the land use of field-solar can be mitigated using agrivoltaics. Where mixed agriculture and solar land use ends up being more efficient than just having two different fields dedicated to each one.

TBH I share your skepticism on Sizewell but it would be a major controversy if it didn't, especially now China has been paid off

EPRs at either Wylfa/Oldbury (April 2022 announcement) plus some as yet unrealised plans from 2021 to build a hybrid wind farm / Nuscale SMRs that is meant to be for generating hydrogen.

Not to say you're wrong, but, https://www.mackinac.org/blog/2022/nuclear-wasted-why-the-cost-of-nuclear-energy-is-misunderstood

I'm not saying they're less safe. I'm saying they would not have the type of safety requirements that a stationary civilian power plant must have.

What's the third EPR? I'm only aware of Hinkley and Sizewell.

And for sizewell. While I knownits been approved, I'm still maintaining some skepticism on it actually being built, until construction is significantly underway.

SMRs will be useful for net zero if they come in as economically viable. But right now, that prospect does not seem likely.

Govt policy here is aiming at around 20-25% nuclear by around the mid 2030s. Three off 3.2GW EPR sites (one under construction, one agreed, one contended) plus one existing AGR.

They are supporting a Rolls Royce version of the SMR in this article but there isn't a policy that includes their use in generation yet given they aren't being built and aren't approved. But I can't see a scenario where SMRs won't come in useful for net zero if we can crack it.

Nuclear isn't an answer for long term outages of renewables, though, unless you are proposing we just build a 100% pure nuclear grid, overbuilt by a factor of 60% or something to be able to ramp up and down to load follow.

Because in any normal model of nuclear buildout you don't have significant "spare capacity" to bring online to backstop renewable shortages; the plants are designed to run at 90-95% capacity factor. Minimal room to ramp up further.

All the happens if you have a 50% renewable 50% nuclear grid is that if half the renewable generation drops out, you drop to 75% output and the grid collapses into rolling (or long term) blackouts anyways.

We're building more solar & gas at pace here - a good thing but over here it'll barely keep up with the ageing out nuclear stations & the woodchip burners going offline by 2028. All those storage things are nearly as far out in adoption as SMRs and we're really going to need them as well as the planned 10GW nuclear.

Mostly, the storage will be able to last hours, maybe days, the HVDC between nations smooths things out. But when that Black Swan weather event happens & blankets most of Europe in a high pressure bubble that kills off the wind for 2 weeks... Not many answers with what we'll have around 2030.

E.g. Lithium batteries are great as instantaneous peakers & grid frequency stability for a few hours - but lower tech solutions like flow batteries are more suited to stationary applications, especially as lithium production hits a pinch point where it's really wanted for Gigafactories for electric vehicles above all else - and transport will pay more.

Nuclear doesn't mesh well with intermittent sources at all, though.

The only thing it does is provide a base level below which generation will not drop, which is not actually that useful for the way grids operate. What you need for intermittent renewbales is backup sources that can be easily, economically, and quickly ramped up and down to balance demand and supply.

Currently that does mean gas generators, unfortunately. Medium to long term, various storage plants such as pumped hydro, batteries, maybe gravity storage, compressed air storage, maybe hydrogen, etc.

UK has 3.2 GW of nuclear that will be finished (Hinkley C). And 3.2 GW that might be built (Sizewell).

Alongside something like 90 GW of wind power in the pipeline that will produce 6-7x as much annual electricity as those two nuclear projects.

🇬🇧 last 12 months. We certainly have more wind & solar to harness. A record 21GW just last month followed by a period where it wasn't windy & we only got 0.7GW out of it.

41% gas underpins this. And we've all (Europe) been walloped by the price fluctuations caused by the geopolitical antics of producers of said gas jacking up the price this side of the pond. Gas is not an energy security friendly fuel. And it still heats a large percentage of homes here.

We're building HVDC interconnects for all we're worth. Hydro & geothermal isn't really a thing here and hydro is mostly built out. Our wood pellet burners (6.5% total 12mths) are disallowed past 2028 so we don't chip up North American virgin forests to supply them.

Nuclear plants provided >16% electricity but each year fewer plants will be around so that has dropped from 9GW to 5GW in a few short years. It ain't cheap but it is secure so policy is aiming at around 10GW by 2035 to assist net zero. SMRs might help buy us 50 years or so while we work out the harder problems intermittent sources bring

Simple. Uranium is fundamentally consumed (changed into another isotope) when you use it in a nuclear power plant. Aluminum / lithium / silicon is not fundamentally consumed in a solar/wind/battery plant. You absolutely can recycle the materials and reuse them. Losses in this process are an engineeriing issue; losses in the nuclear process are physics and fundamental.