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by AtlasBarfed
40 days ago
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You're talking to a molten salt reactor nut so I have some enthusiasm in the nuclear market. The problem with nuclear is that all the fancy designs aren't ready to go, all of them have 10 to 20 year permitting and construction cycles with the inevitable price overruns as well, there aren't enough nuclear industry people anymore... And really the biggest problem is that you can't Target an economic price 10 to 20 years out. Because wind and solar are dropping still on a constant improvement curve, as is grid storage. So already price non-competitive nuclear, and you fund a large-scale build out of nuclear reactors, and then in another 10 to 20 years have a bunch of reactors that are now three or four times. Less competitive than they were when you initially started construction. |
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1. Moving highly radioactive and quite corrosive liquid, without failure and leaks, around is a bit of a headache. Also maintenance of such machines is difficult. These are technical problems, which could be solved.
2. Because many molten salt reactor designs require online reprocessing, this could be a limiting factor in spread of this design. US strongly opposes spread of nuclear fuel manufacturing and nuclear reprocessing technology around the world. In case of Thorium fuel cycle, extraction of the protactinium-233 to make uranium-233 is a real proliferation possibility. These are geopolitical problems, I don't see a solution here.
Personally, I like to have the fission products contained in one small place, fuel rods.
Nuclear can compete with wind energy very well, the costs of wind will decrease only very slowly because the material and labor requirements are quite high for wind power.
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/material-intensity-electr...
For nuclear power to compete with solar, we have look what are the major costs of a nuclear power plants. It's cost of huge amount of high quality labor and quality assurance costs.
"Roughly 1/3rd of the costs are “indirect costs” - engineering services, construction management, administrative overhead"
"One thing that this makes clear is that nuclear plants are very labor intensive to build (with probably at least 50% of the cost from indirect costs and on-site labor)"
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...
For decrease of quality assurance costs we have to look at aircraft industry, where large airplanes with high quality can be build. So serial production of a standardized product, build not one, two, tens, but hundreds, thousands of identical products. This allows also to spread the high costs of the manufacturing facility to many products.
For decrease of labor costs we have to look at the solar industry. Automation allowed large decrease of labor costs in solar. Automation should be applied also to nuclear construction, especially automation of constructing the containment building.
Containment building should be generally made smaller, to decrease material costs of concrete and steel. To reach the same level of protection I would propose to move nuclear power reactors deep underground (200-300m), with application of automatic tunnel boring machines.
There have been low output nuclear power plants build underground (like the Ågesta Nuclear Plant in Sweden), but I would propose to move high output nuclear power plants build underground - not SMR. To make this realistic we have move to nuclear core design with high power density and dense working fluid capable of extracting large amount energy, in general small dimensions of the whole power plant. This is contrary to the passively safety of some Gen III+ designs which emphasize low power density that helps with passive cooling.
So the final proposal:
Pool type lead cooled reactor coupled to secondary loop working with supercritical CO2, deep underground with a thin containment, placed in cave drilled using automated tunnel boring machine. The components should be build in factory and designed to be train transportable. The secondary loop is pressurized to supercritical pressure, but the primary pool is at atmospheric pressure so a meltdown should result not in explosive release of fission products, only in an underground radioactive lava blob, a core catcher should be build under the reactor. Even in the worst case of supercritical core explosion, radioactive products should stay contained underground, we know this from underground nuclear weapon tests (so no Chernobyl scenario).
As the main opponent of nuclear power I don't see the wind and solar industry, because wind and solar can't on itself power an industrial country in an economic way (Yes, with no regards to costs you can power industrial country with wind and solar, the German Energiewende plan, the amount of renewable energy support paid by consumers through their power bills is currently around 25 billion euros per year). Battery improvements will help solar power to bridge the day/night cycle in coming decades, and increase solar penetration in places with high solar irradiance. The cost effective long term electricity storage is not solved problem, or to be more precise: the currently most cost effective solution for renewable variability is fossil fuels.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/how-much-does-ger...
As the main opponent of nuclear power I see nuclear proliferation. Lets not fool ourself, nuclear technology is a dual use civilian/military technology. The access to nuclear material, the experience with handling iradiated material can be used to make nuclear weapons. Each nuclear reactor produces materials or can be modified to produce materials for nuclear weapons. Each country capable of manufacturing nuclear fuel can produce materials for nuclear weapons. As much as nuclear power plants are now associated in the minds of general public with risks of radiation, the minds of politicians are focused on possibility of other countries acquiring nuclear weapons. I see many regulations in nuclear power industry that unreasonably increase costs of building nuclear power plants (LNT, ALARA) mainly not as means to save life (coal is much more dangerous), but as means to strengthen nuclear proliferation prevention by preventing more countries building nuclear power plants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons-grade#Weapons-grade_pl...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_Country_Experiment