A realistic understanding of their costs and risks is critical.
What are SMRs?
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SMRs are not more economical than large reactors.
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SMRs are not generally safer or more secure than large light-water reactors.
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SMRs will not reduce the problem of what to do with radioactive waste.
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SMRs cannot be counted on to provide reliable and resilient off-the-grid power for facilities, such as data centers, bitcoin mining, hydrogen or petrochemical production.
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SMRs do not use fuel more efficiently than large reactors.
[Edit: If people have links that contradict any the above, could you please share in the comment section?]
Put as much money into the research of SMRs as you would like to waste. Meanwhile we just build a cheaper, better and more reliable system based on renewables.
This will happen with or without the nukebro hypetrain.
The economic advantage of SMRs is that when you make reactors in a location, the 1st is always more expensive than any following reactors. Just a reality of construction, permits, designs, etc. So if you have 4 reactors in one place, that’s pretty nice. They also have the advantage of being able to turn one off for maintenance and then having 2, 3, 4 other reactors in the same vicinity that can pick up the slack for the duration.
As for waste, yeah it’s the same problem. But it’s important to note that the volume of material is not that big. The entire volume produced by all us nuke energy ever takes up a football field stacked 10 ft high. All told, that’s a smaller problem than I ever thought.
I’m not a big nuclear advocate, I’m pretty mid on it. This is where I got all of the above information, an interview with the head of the US DOE loan program https://www.volts.wtf/p/nuclear-perhaps?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
The nice thing about nuclear waste is that it kind of just sorts itself out too. I half suspect not knowing what to do with it and kicking the can down the road is sort of the whole point. Nominally it’s pretty easy to deal with nuclear waste, you seal it up somewhere and leave it to not be radioactive any more. The problem is it takes a long time, and we don’t really know how to communicate to anyone 1000 years in the future “there’s nuclear waste here, stay the fuck away”. Making sure it’s an active topic for discussion kind of keeps it at the forefront and means it’s not forgotten about.
Except that is hardly unique to nuclear waste. A wide variety of industrial processes produce high grade chemical waste, especially electronics like computers, solar panels, and inverters. This is just as deadly as any nuclear waste, and if stumbled upon will kill just as quickly in a hundred years, a thousand years, million years, or a billion years.
There is however a well established solution to this problem, and that is making sure the government knows what and where it is as well as that someone it monitoring and securing the site. The actual chemical makeup of the stuff that kills you doesn’t actually matter all that much compared to makeing sure it stays where it’s supposed to be.
You uh… want to give a single example of solar panel manufacturing waste that is as deadly as nuclear waste in a thousand years?
Humanity has never built anything that has intentionally lasted 10,000 years, much less 250,000.
It’s the height of arrogance to think your society will last a thousand times longer than any in the history of the world.
Humanity has never built anything that has intentionally lasted 10,000 years
You don’t know what those cave people were thinking when they drew those pictures.
Arsenic, mercury, gallium, tellurium, and cadmium are all heavy metal waste products produced in quantity for semiconductor manufacturing, are commonly landfilled, pose extreme risk to human health if they ever managed to leach out of the landfill and into a aquifer, and being heavy metals have no non-nuclear method of decay. Given the primary risk of high grade nuclear is also that it is made up of toxic hevey metals that might be dangerous if lost to the local aquifer, it seems fair to compare the two.
Semiconductor manufacturing also makes heavy use of PFAS materials, which while less directly dangerous to human health still do end up measurably entering and contamating the environment through plant wastewater streams. Once in the environment, these also tend to last for between six hundred to a thousand years before being broken down or sequestered.
I don’t think my society will last a hundreds of thousands of years, but i’m pretty sure a society of people in the area will, and if not, then it isn’t a problem because evidently there is evidently no one around to harm. Structures like landfill barriers are not likely to last that long on their own, and as such it falls on people to renew and maintain them for as long as there are people around anyway. Hence why it is imperative that the local government knows about and monitors the site.
All of this is true regardless of which specific heavy metal or acid is stored at the site, though given the small quantity of nuclear waste makes up of similarly harmful industrial wastes it is going to be easier to manage on that face alone.
Obviously humanity hasn’t made anything that lasted tens of thousands of years, we weren’t building anything significant tens of thousands of years ago. We do however have plenty of local governments and buildings that have lasted thousands of years, and which are probably not going anywhere anytime soon.
I also learned in that interview that after a relatively short period, the aggressive decay is over and you’re left with a barrel of waste that isn’t actually shooting off radiation very often.
Thank you for sharing this link. It was very interesting listening to someone from within the US that is head of an office now and started from Shell Solar.
There is a reasoning that I didn’t get. Maybe I misunderstood something or I lack some information/knowledge. Anyways, here it is:
At 1:02 they talks about nuclear waste saying that all the nuclear waste produced in the US by the nuclear power plants is like a football field that is 10 yards tall and then he talks about why this waste is not concerning.
Later at 1:07 He mentions that the US is not reprocesing the uranium fuel rods, in which 95% of the energy is still there, and that the US should do reprocessing like other countries do.
Doesn’t that mean that these unprocessed rods in the US that are in the “football field of nuclear waste” are therefore a concern?
So energy remaining and radioactivity are separate. The isotope that it becomes has a decently long half life, but it might only be a few protons or neutrons away from something really radioactive.
I do believe that the fuel rods count towards that pile of waste. I think the US has laws or rules that make it hard or impossible to recycle these back into the good stuff, but it’s very doable. France does it to a high degree.
Thank you for taking the time to reply. I think I kinda understand what you say but I have more reading to do. Currently I’m on some relevant wiki pages trying to get a better understanding [Spent nuclear fuel, Radioactive waste, Long-lived fission product].
In case you (or anyone) have any other links to suggest, please do not hesitate.
Damn this website is so much better than reddit
Nuclear power is simply a smokescreen. It’s proponents ultimately just want fossil fuel dependency to last as long as possible by promising silver bullet solutions that will never become reality, instead of focusing on solutions that exist and are effective today.
This is why it’s always the conservative parties advocating for it, as they are in bed with the fossil fuel industry.
If Bill Gates likes it, then im out.
Ill stick with renewables like a fine modern citizen.
Have you got anything to back that up with? Because the problems with nuclear power have been almost exclusively caused by conservative governments. The ludicrous licensure requirements are the largest factor in driving the cost of nuclear facilities so far out of the realm of feasibility, and those have been imposed almost exclusively by conservative governments (
with a special shoutout to Al GoreOkay that’s unfair, his legislation on nuclear power was largely based on anti-corruption ideals and not the ideals of the anti-nuclear movement)See the Australian conservative opposition (Liberal and National parties), for example. They are bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry, have no actual plan to roll out nuclear, but are using it as a delay tactic. See also how conservative parties are attacking renewables but not directly talking about coal (for the most part) because they know that the general public won’t accept it anymore. Conveniently, attacking renewables and talking up nuclear is an easy way to keep coal around for a little longer.
Your points are more historical, I’m talking more about the last few years or so, the period where most conservatives now won’t admit to being climate change deniers, but incidentally have positions that worsen climate change.
It’s more your characterization that only conservatives are advocating for nuclear (and by extension that nuclear advocacy is only to serve the interests of fossil fuel companies) that I’m taking issue with, since it’s overly reductive, regressive, an opinion which can be trivially shown to be incorrect and is a direct insult to me, personally. You’re coming across like an asshole that spouts blatant conspiracy theories when I seriously doubt you’d give that impression IRL.
Why not use one of the safest and cleanest ways of producing power?
The wind doesn’t blow all the time, neither does the sun shine all the time, and not everyone is around thermal or wave sources.
Battery tech is coming along, and we are building more gravity batteries, but nuclear can close right in and replace most fossil fuel plants.
I was very pro nuclear but in the past few years, solar+batteries have become cheaper than nuclear. We can go 100% solar + batteries for less than building nuclear and save the uranium for important things like spaceflight.
It’s not just the financial cost though. Going solar+batteries requires a significant increase in lithium production which has all kinds of environmental downsides. New battery tech is in the world to use just sodium and such but we’re nowhere near large scale for that yet. Nuclear (alongside other technology and reducing our power usage) could bridge the gap to the new tech.
Either way, good luck getting anyone in charge to agree on anything, let alone that hurts their coal and gas profits.
Lithium production has dramatically less environmental impact than coal mining.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster
Sodium just went large scale grid installed:
https://cnevpost.com/2024/05/13/china-1st-large-sodium-battery-energy-storage-station-operation/
But for grid, even ancient nickel iron batteries are fine. Lithium is only needed for mobile device (car/bike/laptop/phone).
New reactors are expensive. New reactors are late. New reactors can basically only be built by nation states but not privately. Nuclear is not insurable. Nuclear produces waste with excessive half-life. Nuclear steals resources and mindshare from other options. Nuclear energy output can’t be moderated well (basically for economic reasons, it runs full steam all the time and for safety reasons, you can only moderate output a little), so it does not effectively augment wind and solar, rather leading to wind/solar having to be turned off.
Wind and solar meanwhile can be built cheaply, quickly, privately, locally, site sizes easily scale between kW or GW of output and they only produce a little regular waste at the end of their life. (Okay, granted, Neodymium mining does produce some nuclear waste too — but definitely nowhere what uranium mining produces.)
Wind+solar+hydro+better national/continental grids+batteries+flexible demand is a much better combination.
You’re right that is a great end game
We sure can’t slip anything by you, can we? Curses…
deleted by creator
Basically, Warl0k3 thinks Diplomjodler’s argumentation is a conspiracy theory. In his comment, he ironically takes the position of a nuclear bro who finds out that his devious plan was discovered.
This exactly!
(But jeeze, way to concisely summarize my point without a three-paragraph-long comment. Showoff.)
Well, thanks.
Otoh, I withheld judgement on your opinion for a reason: I can think of at least one example of a German pro-nuclear pro-coal anti-renewables shill who has rather recently turned into a pro-nuclear anti-climate-change shill.
[Addendum: In fact, in Germany, associations like Nuclearia (pro-nuclear), Eike (anti-renewables), Vernunftkraft (anti-wind power) are all linked, including in their financing through the Heartland Institute.]
I understand that the situation might be a little different in other countries, but the whole worldwide civil nuclear field was born out of the military-industrial complex and is still very connected in governments, much more so than solar/wind energy companies are.
I’m of the opinion that a technology should be evaluated on it’s own merits, otherwise people start to point out that the field of modern engineering as a whole is the product of the military industrial complex and it gets all reddit-comment-thread-y. I’m not about to argue that there’s no astroturfing or outright propaganda in the energy industry (because I don’t like looking like a fool or losing arguments because I’m clearly wrong…) though. I wholly agree that it’s a hugely manipulated issue, and the mountains of evidence supporting that idea are so large that they threaten to bury you and I and the rest of this comment thread in an avalanche of carefully documented conspiracy and related rat bastardry.
However, I do take issue with painting all proponents of a particular thing as being some kind of fake ‘smoke screen’. While I’m sure some percentage of commenters are serving any number of nefarious agendas, they can take their attempt to de-legitimize an entire opposing perspective by painting them all as “shills” and kindly fuck right off. That’s trump-supporter shit, and furthers absolutely nothing except to divide voters on an incredibly important topic. That style of wedge-driving is the kind of thing you find in The Foundations of Geopolitics and is what the ‘smokescreen’ people actually do use to drive potential allies to infighting instead of coordinating an effective campaign for energy reform.
(Not that I think the above poster actually is some nefarious shill, but it’s a somewhat amusing juxtaposition)
It’s a satirical comment made to highlight using mild terms that the comment in question is highly suspect. The implication is that I myself am a member of the ‘smokescreen’, which is an implied but nonspecific organized group of people engaging with this topic in bad faith so as to shift the narrative in some unfair way, and that I am confessing that the above poster has figured out our secret motivations and because of that, foiled our evil scheme.
This is, of course, an absurd assertion on my part. I’m not a member of the shadow government. There is no shadow government. The regular government is plenty evil enough as-is. Trust me on that, I’m a member of it.
To dismiss an extremely effective and proven technology like that is fine, if you provide any evidence to support your position. But that comment is, to put it politely, “horseshit”. To call out just one aspect that irked me, it embodies the extremely tired trope of making a claim while not demonstrating any evidence that said claim is true, then asserting their claim as an obvious and correct conclusion. The issue in specific is that they failed in any way to establish how advocating for an alternative source of power would somehow empower the petrochemical lobby.
While clearly biased and theres some wording and cherrypicking of studies (that isn’t very egregious, to be clear!) that I’d take issue with in a more formal setting, the content of the article thru to point two are really quite an alright summary of the issues and raises some very valid questions the industry has yet to answer.
However it throws itself off the credibility cliff riiiiiight around this point:
In any event, regulators are loosening safety and security requirements for SMRs in ways which could cancel out any safety benefits from passive features. For example, the NRC has approved rules and procedures in recent years that provide regulatory pathways for exempting new reactors, including SMRs, from many of the protective measures that it requires for operating plants, such as a physical containment structure, an offsite emergency evacuation plan, and an exclusion zone that separates the plant from densely populated areas. It is also considering further changes that could allow SMRs to reduce the numbers of armed security personnel to protect them from terrorist attacks and highly trained operators to run them. Reducing security at SMRs is particularly worrisome, because even the safest reactors could effectively become dangerous radiological weapons if they are sabotaged by skilled attackers. Even passive safety mechanisms could be deliberately disabled.
What in the fearmongering fuck is this? "Oh no, terrorists!" And it’s debunked on the first page of one of its own sources. Regulators have NOT put any pathways in place to “exempt SMRs from many of the protective measures.” If you read the sources, what they have done is put in place guidelines for the evaluation of the current measures, to judge if those measures merit being re-evaluated. Its a path for a path to judge if maybe we should have a path.
And fucking hell, yes of course they would have smaller security contingents, the installations are physically smaller! There’s less to guard! Thats in no small part the point!
Look there are a lot of problems with SMRs and even more questions we just don’t have answers for yet. Those questions need answers before any progress can be made with SMRs. The benefits of lower transmission losses, dedicated power generation for industrial complexes being at all beneficial, or remotely finalized designs for the reactor technology needed here are all MASSIVE outstanding issues that have yet to be solved.
But this shit? "we cant have this source of green energy because terrorists!!!"
Fuck off with that.
There are more than enough issues with SMRs to justify extreme skepticism, hell microsoft wanting a bunch is probably reason enough to abandon the whole concept. We dont need to stoop to disinformation and blatant lies, what the fuck. This is why “nuclear bros” (Which great idea, lets “other” the critics, that’s not a red flag at all…) get so much traction, because they dont stoop to conspiracy theory tropes to support their arguments.
There’s so many people paranoid about the remote possibility of dirty bombs. Meanwhile, Norfolk Southern is actually spilling tankers full of toxic chemicals that get set on fire by being incredibly negligent.
If terrorists did want to poison an area, there’s plenty of insanely toxic and commercially available compounds to choose from. The fixation on nuclear fuel is an indicator of someone who is just repeating a ghost story and doesn’t actually know/care what the biggest sources of danger are.
Though to be fair, using dirty bombs or radioactive material has waaaaay larger “fear” factor than a random chemical that kills just as well.
There are plenty of good arguments against SMRs: none of them include terrorism.
The theory was always that you could get economies of scale if you were building the same reactor every time in a factory and transporting it to install somewhere else. In practice those economies never materialized (did they even exist?)
Meanwhile solar, wind, and batteries have plummeted in cost. There is no need for base load power generation if we have sufficient battery storage and an oversupply of generators - which is entirely feasible for wind and solar.
I’m sorry, I think you may not be using ‘baseload’ correctly. We will absolutely always have to meet the requirements for baseload power generation, otherwise we aren’t making enough power and we will have brownouts.
If what you meant was that a grid relying on solar and wind for primary generation and supplemented with battery facilities can make up the deficit at night/on calm days, then while that would be ideal it is extremely unlikely to happen in the next several decades. Battery technology is not anywhere near ready for this solution, and while ESS are making extremely impressive advances, they are such a new technology that it would be intellectually dishonest for me to list their shortcomings here. They are simply too new to know which problems are inherent to the concept, and which are due simply to flawed engineering of a new technology.
For matters of logistics, a few large generating sources linked together are much more desirable than a distributed network. In fact the issue with economies of scale in power generation is one of the arguments against SMRs made by the above linked article’s author. One of the biggest concerns with truly distributed power generation is safety - namely, how can you safely work on a downed line when every single house has the independent capacity to energize the lines? But those large power generating stations run into the same issue that SMRs are in vogue to solve; what do we do about crypto miners
besides grinding them all up into dog food, which gets my vote.Their drain, and those of industry and data centers and so on, on local power infrastructure remains despite the source of the power in the system.At temperate latitudes, you can actually get something like 95% of the way there using wind, solar, and reasonable amounts of storage in addition to existing hydropower.
This leaves a fairly small chunk which needs either long-duration storage or firm generation. Nuclear might be able to fill part of that, but only if it comes in at a lower price than currently seems likely. Other technologies, such as induced geothermal and sodium-ion flow batteries are a lot more likely-looking right now.
Yes, exactly! Err, but I’m not sure where the ‘actually’ comes in. It looks like we’re agreeing. Am I misunderstanding? I can try to be a little bit more belligerent if that would help! This is internet commenting, we’re supposed to be at each other’s throats by this point in the comment chain…
While battery technology is making grand strides, it’s my understanding that we’re not to a point where we can even speculate on how to renovate our entire grid with them for a vast host of reasons. Using them to cover while switching to other higher-capacity ESSs seems to be the role they are best suited for, and outside of a few experimental exceptions that looks like the role they’re stepping into in the current industry. I have high hopes for the future, but we still have a long way to go, especially in longevity. I’m not advocating for SMRs nor expansion of nuclear, solar or wind, just that we should not limit ourselves to considering a subset of our options because of ideological beliefs.
(And I’m sorry, but I have no idea what induced geothermal is. Sounds potentially volcano-y though, so that’s always a plus in my book.)
(I don’t really see any possible downsides to giving IBM a small nuclear reactor, though. They seem so nice.)
No need for power generation dedicated to the base load.
Nuclear power generation is base load only: it does not full the role of a peaker.
Battery + renewable technology is already the primary source of power on many tries and the trend continues accelerating in that direction.
I’m really sorry to do this again, but did you mean tribes?
Grids*
Ducking autocorrect
I though the use case was that these reactors can be mass produced in a factory and not require large scale infrastructure projects?
I appreciate this hasn’t been proven but comparing apples with oranges seems odd.
I though the use case was that these reactors can be mass produced in a factory and not require large scale infrastructure projects?
The mass production takes time to build up. It takes time to get experience. I’ve read various articles around SMRs. For at least the first 9 there will not be any mass production. It’ll be very costly.
Usually production improves as more is produced. Possibly it improves by the experience gained, possibly by a new factory.
It’ll not be immediately cheap and mass produced. While that is often claimed for SMRs.
As small ones aren’t as efficient, it’ll be more costly per kWh. That it’ll be cheaper than regular nuclear power seems mostly wishful thinking.
My personal stance is that sustainability cannot be achieved within capitalism due to its model of eternal growth. We can have one or the other, but not both.
So creating more energy could not be the solution. Creating less demand would be, and the demand comes from industries.
More often than not, I it seems to me this discussion about clean energy is a deflection of the real problem which is industrialisation under capitalism. We don’t question anymore what this energy is needed for.
Good news then, Microsoft is building a new multibillion dollar AI facility which will ratchet up power demands alongside the increase in power demands for crypto. Oh wait, I said good news. Uhh…
We have excellent incentive to start a Dyson sphere?
No sun to warm us, No global warming.
But in all seriousness some of the breakthroughs in fusion reactors have me excited long term. It’s nowhere near ready yet, but we’ve hit net energy gain, just can’t sustain it well.
All these are kinda no brainers, lol. I think we are still going to need nuclear as a baseload power supply where hydro doesn’t work because it’s too dry or flat. We gotta get off “clean coal” and “natural gas” as baseload power. I like sodium reactors and advanced, non-light water designs. Light water has become a political hot potato even though it is far safer than coal plants in terms of number of people hurt or killed by emissions.
None of these points are relevant. Nobody is selling SMRs as better than large-scale plants (at least I hope they’re not). The point of SMRs is that they are much easier to bring in and put down. A huge portion of the world still runs on fossil fuels, often with frequent brownouts or scheduled blackouts. Being able to bring in a RELIABLE non-fossil fuel power plant at a smaller scale would be huge. Distributed solar has some pretty awesome potential for individual households if you don’t care about on- demand power, but you do eventually need something for your denser cities etc.
[Edit: If people have links that contradict any the above, could you please share in the comment section?]
What kind of a moron are you? When you make claims you bring the proof.
Or you know, I could assert that you’re, say, a donkey-fucker. If you got proof to the contrary, please provide it.
What kind of a moron are you? When you make claims you bring the proof.
Or you know, I could assert that you’re, say, a donkey-fucker. If you got proof to the contrary, please provide it.
I am not making claims. I shared an article on a matter that bugs me. I wanted to see what people think and potentially inform myself further.
And your input was definitely invaluable!
that donkey just didn’t know how dangerous the bears really were.
I know nothing on the topic, but the points you raise don’t seem relevant to me?
SMRs are not more economical than large reactors.
Yeah, economies of scale mean small things are generally less efficient than big things. This is a criticism of local power generation that applies just as well to wind turbines for example. Nothing to do with this idea really.
SMRs are not generally safer or more secure than large light-water reactors.
Why would anyone expect large power plants to be less safe than this? I’d expect the technology in both to be safe. Tell me if this is safe or not, not if it’s “safer” than large power plants on some ambiguous scale. Rooftop solar is also less safe than commercial solar power plants just due to being located near someone’s living space, but it’s a useless relative comparison.
SMRs will not reduce the problem of what to do with radioactive waste.
That one is the only valid point to me.
SMRs cannot be counted on to provide reliable and resilient off-the-grid power for facilities, such as data centers, bitcoin mining, hydrogen or petrochemical production.
Why not? Seems like they would.
SMRs do not use fuel more efficiently than large reactors.
This is just a repeat of the first point.
Again, I know nothing on this and don’t have an opinion either way. I’m pointing out this seems to be a criticism but only one of the 5 points seems to actually criticize this.
These are not my points, they come from the article. So for example in relation to your question on the
SMRs cannot be counted on to provide reliable and resilient off-the-grid power…
they have a couple of paragraphs that give an explanation.
My first issue with this, is that he’s still using his information from 2013. For instance, he claims that the spent fuel is just as dangerous. Yet we have proven time and time again, that the spent fuel rods can be used in other nuclear facilities to generate even more power off of them. We have the technology (theoretically of course, you need to actually build the facilities for this to work…) get even more energy off this “waste”, in turn also making it far less dangerous!
Second issue being he says the reactors would need a secondary power source in case of emergency. Duh? Thats his reason, is that they would need a backup power source to keep the coolant system running… Duh.
My first issue with this, is that he’s still using his information from 2013.
That’s actually a thing against nuclear power. For decades it’s the best thing. But often drawbacks are only solved in a new design that isn’t in a lot of nuclear power stations. And if they’re actually build then the cost overrun by a factor of 2 and more.
It’s always the next iteration that’ll solve things. It seems to be like a costly way to produce power if it’ll be built. Existing ones can be cheap, but then there are often several technical versions out of date.
Not to mention that nuclear waste is a ridiculously small problem.
France has mainly worked off of nuclear for 40+ years now, and the entirety of our nuclear waste takes about a swimming pool worth of volume… I think we should be able to handle that kind of output for a while.
I think the EU Commission has done a fairly good job of listing the pros and contras of small modular reactors:
They have some advantages over conventional (large) reactors in the following areas:
- if they are serially manufactured without design chances, manufacturing is more efficient than big unique projects
- you can choose a site with less cooling water
- you can choose a site where a fossil-burning plant used to be (grid elements for a power plant are present) but a renewable power plant may not be feasible
- some of them can be safer, due to a higher ratio of coolant per fuel, and a lower need for active cooling*
Explanation: even a shut down NPP needs cooling, but bigger ones need non-trivial amounts of energy, for example the 5700 MW plant in Zaporizhya in the middle of a war zone needs about 50 MW of power just to safely stay offline, which is why people have been fairly concerned about it. For comparison, a 300 MW micro-reactor brought to its lowest possible power level might be safe without external energy, or a minimal amount of external energy (which could be supplied by an off-the-shelf diesel generator available to every rescue department).
The overview of the Commission mentions:
SMRs have passive (inherent) safety systems, with a simpler design, a reactor core with lower core power and larger fractions of coolant. These altogether increase significantly the time allowed for operators to react in case of incidents or accidents.
I don’t think they will offer economical advantages over renewable power. Some amont of SMRs might however be called for to have a long-term steerable component in the power grid.
