Tag Archives: nuclear energy

Where are the Small Modular Reactors?

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Small modular nuclear reactors might be a key part of the solution to the climate crisis, or they might not. They seem to be near the end of the R&D stage (although doubtless they can and will continue to be improved) and at the very beginning of pilot testing/proof of concept. They are not yet economically competitive with other forms of power generation (including traditional large nuclear reactors), which you could say about pretty much any new technology. There is a chicken and egg problem where you have to implement it and scale it up for the unit price to come down, and it is hard to get the private sector (and public sector, if they are short-term financial return focused) to take the chance on implementation of something that might end up not working out. Of course, the idea is to invest in a portfolio of things that have some chance of working out, such that there is a high chance at least one of them will pay off. Anyway, some facts and figures in this Physicsworld article (isn’t that name slightly redundant?):

  • Nuclear power generated 17.5% of the world’s electricity in 1996, vs. only 9% today (2026 if you are a future historian reading this).
  • I somewhat naively thought US firms might be leaders in this technological knowledge (if not in implementation of anything at scale, where I would never be that naive). But it turns out that there are two of these reactors currently operating in the world, and they are in Russia. Two are being built in China.

Sure, there are mining, supply chain and waste problems, but in my view you have to balance them against the unfolding global ecological catastrophe caused by burning fossil fuels for two centuries and counting.

June 2024 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Some self-labeled “conservatives” in the United States want to do away with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Census Bureau, the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Education, and possibly even the Federal Reserve. All these are needed to have a competent, stable government and society and to be prepared to respond and recover from the shocks that are coming, so I would call this nihilist and not “conservative” at all. How is it conservative to want to destroy the institutions that have underpinned the success of our nation thus far? On the other hand, they also want to double down on the unimaginative pro-big-business, pro-war consensus of the two major parties over the last 50 years or so, which has also gotten us to where we are today. And it looks like the amateurs and psychopaths have the upper hand at the moment in terms of our November election. This is certainly not “morning in America”.

Most hopeful story: Computer-controlled cars are slowly but surely attaining widespread commercial rollout. I don’t care what the cynics say – this will save land, money and lives. And combined with renewable and/or nuclear energy, it could play a big role in turning the corner on the climate crisis.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I had a misconception that if the world reduces greenhouse gases today, the benefits will not kick in for decades. Happily, scientists’ understanding of this has been updated and I will update my own understanding along with that. The key is the ocean’s ability to absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere relatively quickly. (I am not sure this is good for the ocean itself, but it is somewhat hopeful for temperatures here on land.) And it is not all or nothing – any emissions reductions will help, so the failure to act in the past is not an excuse to continue to fail to act.

China 10-15 years head of U.S. in ability to deploy nuclear power, and gearing up for fusion

This article from “Information Technology and Innovation Foundation”, which I have never heard of but does not raise my government propaganda hackles, says China is “China likely stands 10 to 15 years ahead of the United States in its ability to deploy fourth-generation nuclear reactors at scale”. Also, “China’s innovation strengths in nuclear power pertain especially to organizational, systemic, and incremental innovation.” So, we can still invent technology here in the USA but we can’t follow through to execute and construct it at scale. Sounds about right. Plus, we have a strong headwind of fossil fuel company propaganda to overcome, which the nuclear and regulated electric utility industries do not seem able to match.

Nuclear power has to be a big part of the climate solution. It just has to, and we should have started the pipeline decades ago, but there is no time like the present and China has the right idea. There is no reason this should be threatening to the U.S. either, other than our companies’ inability to compete. We should partner with them and get this technology built for the good of the world, which is also our own good. Or if companies based in China are too much of a political hot potato, partner with Japanese and Korean companies that know how to get things built.

January 2024 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: 2023 was “a year of war“, and so far 2024 is not looking better. Those diplomatic grand bargains you always hear about seem to be getting less grand. And the drumbeat for a U.S. attack on Iran got louder.

Most hopeful story: According to Bill Gates, some bright spots in the world today include gains in administering vaccines to children around the world, a shift toward greater public acceptance of nuclear power, and maybe getting a bit closer to the dream of fusion power. He pontificates about AI, and my personal sense is it is still too soon, but AI does hold some promise for speeding up scientific progress.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: The return of super-sonic commercial flight is inching closer.

air pollution kills

U.S. coal power plants have killed (i.e. caused premature deaths of) 460,000 people over 20 years, according to the Guardian. That is not going to include future premature deaths due to climate damage. Sure, even switching to natural gas is much better than this, but I can’t help comparing it to nuclear power. Deaths and risks due to nuclear power have been much exaggerated, in my view. I can imagine a world where nuclear power was implemented on a much larger scale, along with electric vehicles and electric HVAC in buildings, decades ago. It could have been the bridge fuel that got us to a more renewable future. Or maybe we would have even learned enough by doing to decide it was a good choice for the long haul. So the question now is whether to double down on nuclear research and implementation, or just throw all our eggs in other renewable baskets.

And as for air pollution, there are just so many reasons to make it a central issue, from the obvious health impacts of breathing particulate matter to the multiple benefits of spending more time outdoors getting around under our own muscle power in clean air. It could be a virtuous loop if we really made it a priority.

what’s new with small modular nuclear reactors

Nuclear energy just has to be part of a climate smart future. It has to be. It also maybe, can be, should be part of a peaceful future free of nuclear weapons. Anyway, what’s new and exciting is that a small modular nuclear reactor was permitted for the first time in the United States. What’s not exciting is the company decided the project was…

https://medium.com/afro-cinemaphile/not-economically-viable-man-beb060247fce

Still, if it can and has been permitted, hopefully somebody will find a business model that works, and/or governments will subsidize it to get it off the ground. In the cancelled or on-hold negotiations between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia recently, we hear that the U.S. was willing to consider “giving” Saudi Arabia civilian nuclear technology. This seems problematic, when we know countries (Iran and Israel just to name a couple) have managed to develop dual-use uranium enrichment technology under the appearance of a peaceful civilian energy program. So the technology shouldn’t be “given” unilaterally by nuclear powers (the geopolitical kind of power here) to governments they like. This needs to be done under the IAEA under a strict inspection regime, and there has to be a commitment to enforce it. It seems somewhat unlikely the dysfunctional UN Security Council is set up to do this in the near future.

August 2023 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Immigration pressure and anti-immigration politics are already a problem in the U.S. and Europe, and climate change is going to make it worse. The 2023 WEF Global Risks Report agrees that “large scale involuntary migration” is going to be up there as an issue. We should not be angry at immigrants, we should be angry at Exxon and the rest of the energy industry, which made an intentional choice not only to directly cause all this but to prevent governments from even understanding the problem let alone doing anything to solve it. We should be very, very angry! Are there any talented politicians out there who know how to stoke anger and channel it for positive change, or is it just the evil genocidal impulses you know how to stoke?

Most hopeful story: Peak natural gas demand could happen by 2030, with the shift being to nuclear and renewables.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: There are a number of theories on why “western elites” have not been (perceived to be) effective in responding to crises in recent years and decades. Many have to do with institutional power dynamics, where the incentives of the individual to gain power within the institution do not align with the stated goals of the institution. Like for example, not killing everyone. The possible silver lining would be that better institutions could be designed where incentives aligned. I have an alternate, or possibly complementary, theory that there has been a decline in system thinking and moral thinking. Our leaders aren’t educated to see the systems and or think enough about whether their decisions are on the side of right or wrong.

retrofitting retiring coal plants with advanced nuclear reactors

I find this idea of retrofitting old coal plants with nuclear reactors appealing. We are told the new generation of nuclear reactors is safe, and that our fears of nuclear accidents are based on half-century-old obsolete designs. These fears have held back the entire industry for decades, and you can imagine an alternate world where intensive use of nuclear power for all those decades has staved off the climate crisis the world now finds itself in.

The risk of nuclear accidents is objectively much lower than the risk of climate disaster we face. And yet…I have to ask myself if I would want a nuclear reactor a few blocks from my house. There is in fact a very old fossil fuel (oil and gas in this case) power plant a few blocks from my house. There have been accidents both at that plant, at the very old (and now closed) oil refinery nearby, and with the trains that carry oil past our neighborhood. Then there is whatever the air pollution from the plant is doing to my family’s lungs and cancer risk. All these things tell me that rationally I should welcome a nuclear reactor a few blocks from my house. And yet…it is so hard to separate emotions and be purely rational. And I tend to think I am more coldly rational than most people in the neighborhood would likely be if this were proposed. So this would be a tough road. But our power plant is also in a very densely populated urban area, and there would probably be much more out-of-the-way places where it could be tried (and hopefully the handful of people who lived there would be treated fairly).

China and thorium reactors

China is moving ahead with thorium-based nuclear reactors, at least at the pilot scale. It is based on a design that the U.S. pioneered and then abandoned.

When China switches on its experimental reactor, it will be the first molten-salt reactor operating since 1969, when US researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee shut theirs down. And it will be the first molten-salt reactor to be fuelled by thorium. Researchers who have collaborated with SINAP say the Chinese design copies that of Oak Ridge, but improves on it by calling on decades of innovation in manufacturing, materials and instrumentation…

Molten-salt reactors are just one of many advanced nuclear technologies China is investing in. In 2002, an intergovernmental forum identified six promising reactor technologies to fast-track by 2030, including reactors cooled by lead or sodium liquids. China has programmes for all of them.

Some of these reactor types could replace coal-fuelled power plants, says David Fishman, a project manager at the Lantau Group energy consultancy in Hong Kong. “As China cruises towards carbon neutrality, it could pull out [power plant] boilers and retrofit them with nuclear reactors.”

Nature

I’ve come around to the idea that it was misguided for environmental activists in many countries to essentially shut down a shift toward nuclear power over the past 50 years or so. Whatever the short-term risks, they would have been smaller than the long-term risks of fossil fuels, many of which are now locked in. Maybe thorium and molten salt are technologies we should be making available to developing countries to ease nuclear weapons proliferation pressure. We still need to double down on progress toward true renewables at the same time.

checking in on the “nuclear rennaissance”

This article focuses on one particular failed nuclear power project in the U.S. but it checks in on the idea of a stalled “nuclear rennaissance” overall.

The South Carolina legislature conducted hearings about the project’s collapse. But it has fallen to the United States Attorney for South Carolina to outline internal decisions that led to project abandonment—via court filings, plea agreements, and indictments. These filings are proving to be the best documentation so far of criminal behavior related to projects that were part of a much-hyped “nuclear renaissance” that began in the early-2000s but has since petered out in the United States…

The fault for the shocking AP1000 misadventure falls squarely on the shoulders of Westinghouse and the involved utilities. They all fell victim to their own reactor-promotion propaganda but lacked the technical and management competence to pull off the projects as envisaged. With pursuit of large light-water reactors in the United States all but dead, the nuclear industry is now endlessly touting an array of “small modular reactors” and a dizzying menu of so-called “advanced reactors,” all of which exist only on paper. It’s unclear if there’s a path forward for this nuclear renaissance redux, and if there is, whether taxpayers will be put on the hook for financing some of it.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

I can imagine an alternate history without Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and where climate change was understood and taken seriously by the public and governments much earlier. Nuclear energy was embraced on a vast scale, homes, buildings, and transportation were mostly electrified, and the world economy grew for 50 years without the devastating carbon emissions that are now starting to wreck our planet’s ecology and threaten our food supply. No doubt, there are some accidents and waste storage/disposal problems in this world, but with an honest accounting of the cost of carbon pollution would this world be worse off? Maybe nuclear weapons proliferation would be worse in this world, but then again, maybe a world where civilian nuclear technology was more shared but controlled by international safeguards would feel less pressure for proliferation.

The other issue with nuclear power plants is they have incredibly high up front costs and are incredibly long-lived. As technology progresses, a nuclear power plant is going to be obsolete (i.e., not based on the latest technology) by the time you design it and get it in the ground, and then you are stuck operating it for the next 50 years. So you have to take a really long range view, governments have to shoulder a good portion of the risk, and you have to keep the R&D going in parallel even though you know it takes decades to pay off. All this is doable, it just takes leadership and discipline, which our species and civilization mostly lacks.