[john_strinlai]

>SMR make as much sense as space datacenters.

you are in this thread a lot, so i am guessing you must be very familiar with the industry. maybe you can help me understand:

is the wikipedia on SMRs incorrect/lying when they say that there are commercially operating SMRs since 2020?

and how have so many smart people and companies been duped into seriously considering SMR technology if SMRs apparently break the laws of thermodynamics?

[Arodex]

>commercially operating

And struggling, propped up by taylor-made laws and public money.

>how have so many smart people and companies been duped into seriously considering SMR technology if SMRs apparently break the laws of thermodynamics?

Never said they break the laws of thermodynamics. They are just inefficient and will never be more efficient than alternatives such as... Bigger nuclear reactors.

Or solar.

And how long have you been out there? Have you never seen investors dumping and wasting billions in dead-ends? Never seen a mania before?

Nuclear attracts clever people, but it isn't smart nor wise.

[TheDudeMan]

Efficiency is not the problem. We have plenty of nuclear fuel.

[Arodex]

Money doesn't grow on trees.

[jkman]

>'taylor-made' Says it all, doesn't it

[john_strinlai]

>Never said they break the laws of thermodynamics.

true, you said "gaslight thermodynamics", which i have no idea what that means, so i took a guess at what you were implying.

>never be more efficient than alternatives such as... Bigger nuclear reactors.

is efficiency really the only metric to be considered? i feel like available space, availability of alternatives, time to complete construction, etc. are worthwhile to consider.

>And how long have you been out there? Have you never seen investors dumping and wasting billions in dead-ends? Never seen a mania before?

considering the length of time and sheer number of people, companies, and governments worldwide considering/investing in SMR tech it seems unlikely to be a mania. but i am not an expert. you are talking like you are one, which is why i am asking questions.

[Arodex]

>i feel like available space, time to complete construction

All of these favor again bigger reactors.

>considering the length of time and sheer number of people, companies, and governments considering/investing in SMR tech it seems unlikely to be a mania.

All of the Swiss energy companies are asking to be bailed out in advance of the investment in nuclear.

[Jolter]

Sweden recently did the same: in order for companies to agree to make new reactors, the government had to promise them a price floor for the electricity they produce. The price floor suggested is more than twice the current price on the spot market. That means that, for the lifetime of those reactors, Swedish taxpayers will be subsidizing production of nuclear power. I thought the idea was that they would be profitable? What happened to the political right’s love of the free market? When politicians go fixing prices with this kind of ”advance bailout”, it just makes it look like they are trying to get a nice retirement job in the nuclear power sector…

[mpweiher]

The biggest risk for nuclear is the government.

That's why the government has to indemnify the companies against those risks.

Spot market prices are not total system costs.

[Jolter]

You’re right, the total system costs include a lot of things, including disposal of spent fuel. Which is apparently so expensive, nuclear can’t compete with renewables fairly.

[Scroll_Swe]

Base load generation.

Yes, we have hydro.

Wind is way too unpredictable, solar is too.

So, we can only have 2 powers to provide base load in Sweden.

https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kontrollrummet/

[crote]

Nuclear base load is a lie.

The aforementioned subsidies aren't just for the electricity it produces, it is also for the electricity it could produce. The nuclear plant has a right to sell electricity to the grid at a certain price. Market price too low? The government pays the difference. No demand? The government buys the unused production capacity.

In practice this means that during periods of excess you are shutting down dirt-cheap solar and wind just so you can run a heavily-subsidized nuclear power plant. Nuclear doesn't pick up the gaps left by solar and wind, solar and wind pick up the gaps left by nuclear!

[john_strinlai]

>All of these favor again bigger reactors.

how does having less available space favor a bigger reactor?

and how is constructing a bigger reactor faster than constructing a smaller one?

[bryanlarsen]

There are two ways of achieving economies of scale: making things bigger or making more of them.

For small quantities, the former is usually more effective -- making things bigger lets you make fewer of them, reducing costs.

For large quantities, a factory can enable insane economies of scale.

SMR proponents are talking about building dozens of reactors. That fits very firmly in the "small quantity" column where economies of scale almost always favor building things bigger.

[Arodex]

If you need 500 MW, you build one 500 MW reactor, not five 100 MW reactors. They will take more space.

As for speed, a 100 MW reactor is not commissioned in 1/5 of the time a 500 MW reactor is.

[Jolter]

I think the promise of SMR is that the 1/5th reactor can be built in 1/2 the time. And you build five of them in parallell. And you have your power sources gradually online over about the same time as one ”big bang” build would take.

I don’t think it’s going to work out that way, but that’s how it’s being sold.

[cauch]

Just a guess (I'm not the previous user), but I guess you need to look at the space _per GWh_?

If a big nuclear reactor takes 10x more space but has 20x more capacity, then it means not having much space favors the big nuclear reactor rather than building 10 small ones that will take twice more space.

(and same for the time)

[john_strinlai]

its probably my fault for not making myself clear. i mean when the available space is constrained to a specific amount of space that cannot be exceeded.

just picking random numbers:

i have 1 square mile available. a big reactor takes 4 square miles. i cannot fit a big reactor, despite the bigger reactor being more efficient.

[vablings]

I think you have a misunderstanding of what a SMR is supposed to be.

Nuclear power plants are eye watering levels of expensive. The require massive scale and cost with lengthy approvals and requirements, the fundamental idea of SMRs is to move that cost and approvals into a smaller scale so that multiple standard units can be produced and deployed in a turnkey situation, they still will be expensive but the time to deploy and cost will be significantly reduced.

We also know SMRs work very well, considering the majority of the US Navy is powered entirely with SMRs and have been for a very long time. Off the top of my head ship power has been exported to local areas for disaster relief

Solar is absolutely fantastic and your average person should not be hawking at solar for your home to offset your power bill. The problem with solar is that you need power 24/7 and solar will not make power in the night.

I don't think the likes of Westinghouse, Siemens, Rolls Royce and GE are duped. They are trying to solve a very hard problem!

[Arodex]

>The problem with solar is that you need power 24/7 and solar will not make power in the night.

Ok, question: for the cost of one nuclear power plant, how many batteries can you have?

For the cost of the R&D of one next generation nuclear reactor design, how many next generation battery and solar panels technologies can you develop?

[vablings]

> Ok, question: for the cost of one nuclear power plant, how many batteries can you have?

Not that many. Sizewell C the latest nuclear project in the UK is projected to cost around 50 billion and expected to last for 60 years. We can cut that estimate short to say oh well, About a billion a year for the next 50 years.

Assuming that you can purchase storage at $70/kwh with 50 billion you could purchase around 715GWh of battery storage, at the same output of Sizewell C that means you could output 3.2GW for 200+ hours! wow.

One problem. The batteries will realistically only last somewhere between 10-20 years. A moderate 15-year estimate would be more realistic. Now obviously it's very hard to calculate and account for a reduction in pricing increase in capacity etc... But with today's technology you would have to buy the pack 3.33 times over

So now you go into 0.300 * 715GWh gives you 214.5 GWh and now with that 3.2GWh load it could run for just shy of 3 days. This is like the entire capacity storage of China right now.

So yeah, to answer your question 214.5 GWh of storage

[slibhb]

This is such a silly argument. Battery and solar technologies are progressing regardless of people building nuclear. It's simply not the case that we can stop investing in nuclear and use that money to accelerate battery/solar.

The best energy strategies are all-of-the-above.

[Arodex]

This isn't a silly argument, this is a problem of allocation of resources.

We could have had mass solar deployment since the 70s. We chose not to, and allocate the money elsewhere. Nuclear will take away billions in public money, put it into the hands of nuclear industries, to get electricity at twice the going rate, maybe, in twenty years. A white elephant and a waste of effort.

[vablings]

That's exactly the point of SMRs. Do away with the huge capital allocation of public funds to overspend and overrun on infrastructure projects.

[hollerith]

Can you explain how that would have worked with the much less efficient and much more expensive solar panels available in the 70s?

[p2detar]

> For the cost of the R&D of one next generation nuclear reactor design, how many next generation battery and solar panels technologies can you develop

This is a horrible argument. Yeah, let’s not spend money improving technology. We wouldn’t have increased Solar panel efficiency if we followed such ill advice.

[Arodex]

>We wouldn’t have increased Solar panel efficiency if we followed such ill advice.

We didn't for decades. The photoelectric effect is known since the XIXth century. Solar panel research could have had far more money behind it since the 70s and the first oil crisis. It was a choice not to. And the current US and Swiss governments are choosing to prop up some industries -coal, nuclear- at the expense of others, with public money that don't grow on trees.

[bryanlarsen]

I think you have a misunderstanding of economies of scale.

There are two ways of achieving economies of scale:

1. make things bigger

2. make more of them

Making things bigger generally is more effective when n is small. You need fewer sites, fewer approvals, each of the steps in the process is done fewer times.

When n is large, you can build and optimize a factory for them and achieve economies of scale that way.

Nuclear plants got large to take advantage of economies of scale because n is small. Nobody's building millions or even thousands of SMR's.

[crote]

> We also know SMRs work very well, considering the majority of the US Navy is powered entirely with SMRs

And what's their cost per MWh?

Considering they are fueled by highly-enriched uranium: are you okay with most of the world being handed the capability to build nukes?

[vablings]

> And what's their cost per MWh? We do not know but its likely expensive

>Considering they are fueled by highly-enriched uranium: are you okay with most of the world being handed the capability to build nukes?

There are SMR designs that do not use highly-enriched uranium.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69b2f41497f6f...

" The RR SMR uses PWR technology and industry standard LEU fuel and builds on operational experience from existing PWR reactors."

I cite this as RR is the most advanced out of all the other companies working on this afaik