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by meisanother
1390 days ago
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>>>
As with everything nuclear, the real problem is that we stopped progressing in the
early 1970s and are still using blown up submarine reactors. The real problem is not nuclear, but technology stagnation because of societal issues. <<< About this, I wonder if the number of new works mean that we are getting over the bump of stagnation. Do you think enough is getting done on that end?
Also, I wonder what type of work can have the most impact on this side. My Government (Quebec, Canada) closed our last nuclear reactor years ago, but there's still some knowledge base around smaller reactors in Universities. There's also plan to expand investment into private-held reactor development (https://www.cnl.ca/clean-energy/canadian-nuclear-research-in...).
Is this an avenue, considering the legislative/regulation overhead, that will ever be sustainable or it should be spearheaded by governments like it was in the 50s? |
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The CNSC is at the very lead in terms of GenIV (hate that term) reactor designs. They created an innovate new way of going threw licensing. See:
https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-li...
Canada is also finally investing some amount of money into next generation fuel reprocessing. Canada might actually be the first country to really solve fuel reprocessing. Together with Moltex Energy they have a real plan of turning their CANDU fuel waste in fuel for next generation reactors. This kind of reprocessing is much better then the process used in France for example. It could be a model for the world.
All that said, Canada is simple not the market that is big enough. Its not the US, India or China. So for real impact this technology has to move from Canada to the US.
The US really did a horrible thing regulation, NRC is a terrible agency in a number of ways, specially when it comes to next generation reactors. The AEC had been far more active, since the NRC took over, almost nothing has been done.
Thankfully the US DoE finally started to realize how bad they were doing in some aspects. They made some fantastic changes like the GAIN program.
https://gain.inl.gov/SitePages/Home.aspx
However turning the DoE is like turning a ship 100x the size of the titanic.
So the real hope is that the DoE will look into the process of the CNSC and do a co-licensing. Meaning that if a plant gets a license in Canada. It will be very easy to do the same in the US. That would be the best outcome. Nuclear safety should have one globally process, at least for the west.
There are also some interesting things happening in the US. NuScale is a interesting company and their efforts while still being focused on PWRs does actually have number of things in its license that other companies will be able to use and build on.
In addition to that, Kairos Power is doing some pretty interesting things trying to 'hack' the traditional licensing process. They are trying to do fast iteration with nuclear the same way SpaceX does in space. And have the regulator follow along so when they are ready to build a full plant, the regulator already knows a huge amount about the design.
There is also some hope that some countries in Eastern Europe (Poland, Estonia ...) might start buying advanced nuclear plants, giving these plants more of a market. Since these countries don't have the very high level regulators, they might just mostly reuse the Canadian process. So a single GenIV plant built in Canada could be globally transformative.
So yeah good things are finally happening again. A lot of credit goes to ground up nuclear movements kicked of partly by Kirk Soronson. He rediscovered a lot of the molten salt work and published. And many of the nuclear companies, like Terrestrial Power, actually met at these early events about molten salt and thorium. He himself has Flibe Energy, their vision is somewhat more complex and longer term but very interesting and fundamental.
Its hard to see what happening in China. India has every intensive to do nuclear and they have some of the right ideas, but India is pretty slow moving.
Europe is just highly divided and every country is cooking its own soup. So its hard for Europe to serve as market. That is why the US is so fundamental. Its the only market driven state where you don't necessarily need focused central government driven push for next generation nuclear.
You will never have some Canadian startup building plants in France. So France did great with nuclear but also their technology stagnated and they are somewhat of an island. They threw away promising reactors like Superphonex, a GenIV reactor that was 3GW thermal and actually connected to the grid. But of course it was killed by left/green alliance and never revived.
So lots of stuff happening, finally also some actual button up support that politicians can point to.
I still believe in 2100 people will use mostly nuclear power and will look back on these times thinking we were idiots. "They discovered all the technology in the 60s, why are they not using it".