[T]he report’s executive summary certainly gets to the heart of their findings.
“The rhetoric from small modular reactor (SMR) advocates is loud and persistent: This time will be different because the cost overruns and schedule delays that have plagued large reactor construction projects will not be repeated with the new designs,” says the report. “But the few SMRs that have been built (or have been started) paint a different picture – one that looks startlingly similar to the past. Significant construction delays are still the norm and costs have continued to climb.”
I disagree, a bit.
Base load is still hard to get with renewables, unless you can get a somewhat consistent level of power from them. That’s basically just hydro/tidal and geothermal at this point, and all of those have very limited areas where they can be used.
Nuclear, on the other hand, can be built anywhere except my backyard.
We have four choices:
We can do all of them concurrently, provided there’s money for it, but we only give money to the last one.
Exactly. I live in Utah, which is perfect for nuclear:
So why don’t we do it? FUD. We should have a nuclear base with solar and wind helping out, but instead we have a coal base and are transitioning to natural gas. That’s dumb. And it’s hilarious because we sell electricity to California when their backbone isn’t sufficient.
It’s probably not the best option everywhere, but it’s a really good option in many areas.
A consortium of Utah’s utilities (UAMPS) literally just pulled out of its commitment to backing NuScale’s modular reactor in November 2023. It was a problem of cost, when the construction looked like it was going to become too expensive, at a time when new wind construction is dropping the price of wind power. It basically just couldn’t compete on cost, in the specific environment of servicing Utah.
I wouldn’t sleep on geothermal as a future broad scale solution for dispatchable (that is, generation that can be dialed up and down on demand) electrical power. The oil and gas fracking industry has greatly improved their technology at imaging geological formations and finding places where water can flow and be pumped, in just the past decade. I expect to see over the next decade geothermal reach viability beyond just the places where geothermal heat is close to the surface.
Yeah, I just saw that news, which apparently happened end of last year. The public wants nuclear (or at least a non-coal base power), but projects keep getting delayed or scrapped due to local lawsuits or local governments pulling financial support.
Geothermal is cool, and apparently there’s an active project. It should produce 400MW, which is pretty significant, but still a pretty small fraction of total capacity (~9.5GW).
If the Blue Castle project ever finishes, it’ll supply ~1.5GW power. That, with geothermal, could take up ~1/4 of the total energy generation, which would be a really good start. I’d also like to see hydrogen production as a “battery” source (produce from solar, burn at night). Looks like that’s under development as well.
Lots of interesting things are happening now, I just wish they started 10+ years ago…
Scrapping the NuScale project had nothing to do with lawsuits. Governments pulled their financial support because projected costs were exceeding what was contractually promised, mostly due to pandemic-related supply chain and inflation issues.
This is typical of nuclear. The industry wants to believe its problem is regulation. It’s not, at least not if you want to have better safety guarantees than the Soviet Union did. Its problem is that to be safe, nuclear is expensive, and there doesn’t appear to be a way out of that.
deleted by creator
Yes, NuScale wasn’t scrapped due to lawsuits, I was more referring to the delays to Blue Castle, which was delayed for 3-ish years due to lawsuits.
NuScale is a pretty small operation promising something like 300-400MW. Blue Castle is a lot larger promising ~1500MW.
Initially, yes, but amortized over the life of the plant, it’s pretty cheap. It has a high upfront cost and relatively low operating costs. And one of the big operating costs (waste disposal) won’t be an issue here, the larger issue is water access for cooling, and that’s political (farmers don’t want to give up water rights).
My main concern is seismic activity, since if we get an earthquake, it’ll likely be very violent. That increases initial costs, but doesn’t really impact ongoing costs. Utah just doesn’t like throwing large sums of money around, hence the political pushback.
We’re still >50% fossil fuels, so I’ll support anything that replaces that. I like hydrogen (in development), geothermal (in development), solar (expanding), and wind (seems to be slowing), but that’s not going to be enough. Even if all of those were operating today, we’d still be using significant amounts of fossil fuels. I think we will still need nuclear, we have the space and demand for it.
Base load is not necessary. It was made because you could build certain types of plants really cheap if they’re run all the time at the same level. They aren’t a requirement, but rather an economic convenience in an old way of doing things.
Renewables with storage are able to match demand more closely than traditional plants ever could. This results in less wasted power. That means we don’t have to replace every GWh of traditional generation with a GWh of renewable.
Hydro and geothermal have both had some interesting breakthroughs the last few years. Small scale hydro can get useful amounts of power from smaller rivers than was feasible in the past. There are places to put them we didn’t have before.
There’s also high voltage DC lines. The longest deployed one is currently in Brazil, and is about 1500 miles. An equivalent run in the US would mean wind farms in Kansas could power New York, or solar in Arizona could power Chicago. When you can transmit that far, then the wind is always blowing somewhere, and it’s sunny somewhere for the entire day, as well.
Nuclear lost its window of opportunity. It may already be cost competitive with putting solar panels in space.
Edit: fixing autocorrect’s bad corrections
I agree with all of this as an electrical engineer in the field. Base load is only base load because of the load profile of devices connected to the grid having either an on or off switch. Most of the time this means motors/HVACs, but the world of electronics is coming to that equipment just like how inverters have changed how we export solar PV and wind to the grid. VFDs, soft starters, and the like will make our industrial processes that much more efficient. We just need to spread awareness and ramp up implementation, just as much as for renewables themselves.
I think this can be expanded out a bit, to the more generalizable case of matching generation to demand. Yes, storage can be a big part of that.
But another solution along the same lines may be demand shifting, which in many ways, relies on storage (charging car batteries, reheating water tanks or even molten salt only when supply is plentiful. And some of that might not be storage, per se, but creating the useful output of something that actually requires a lot of power: timing out industrial processes or data center computational tasks based on the availability of excess electrical power.
Similarly, improvements in transmission across wide geographical areas can better match supply to demand. The energy can still be used in real time, but a robust enough transmission network can get the power from the place that happens to have good generation conditions at that time to the place that actually wants to use that power.
There’s a lot of improvement to be made in simply better matching supply and demand. And improvements there might justify intentional overbuilding, where generators know that they’ll need to curtail generation during periods where there’s more supply than demand.
And with better transmission, then existing nuclear plants might be able to act as dispatchable backup power rather than the primary, and therefore serve a larger market.
It’s interesting watching how the 30minute electricy price has shifted patterns in the UK. 3-4 years ago there was no doubt that the cheapest time was 1am - 4am. These days the overnight dip isn’t anywhere near as significant as it was, and it’s now equally likely for 1pm-4pm to be the cheapest time of day.
All I can assume is that so many have moved usage to overnight due to “time of use” tariffs that now the demand curve has evened out a bit, and now the extra supply from solar during the day pushes the afternoon price down.