TIL that Rolls Roys is doing SMR.
I am pretty curious on how this new trend of SMR will evolve in 20 years, I can see how it can be simpler and faster to build than full scale plant. However, I am not sure you’d save by multiplying the NIMBY to deal with and the whole support staff.
Historically, reactors were sized like modern SMR concepts once. The issue was that they were even harder to secure and ratio of effort/benefit was worse than with fewer, larger reactors. Just like all nuclear projects, SMR construction will run behind schedule and outside of cost estimates, we’ve already seen that with the cancelled NuScale reactors in the US.
Governments need to stop throwing money at this deadbirth of a technology.
They won’t evolve. Or at least not without massive subsidies.
Nuclear power is extremely expensive, even for SMRs, and most of the projections don’t even account for the waste management, which will cost money for at least several decades (assuming you just dump it somewhere “safe”).
There’s simply no economic incentive, unless you hope to be subsidized forever and leverage the nuclear bros.
Why build nuclear reactors when renewables are cheaper?
Article doesn’t really specify which Rolls Royce it’s referring to, and most people don’t know there’s two completely different companies called Rolls Royce, but im assuming this deal is being done with Rolls Royce Holdings; a major aeroplane engine /aerospace/defense company.
It has nothing to do with the car company; Rolls Royce Automoted Ltd.
The idea seems to be to have small modular units of which multiple can be installed in the needed capacity at sites of existing fossil fuel plants, not to have a lot of single units spread all over the place.
They’ve been doing it in the UL for some time. Note that their SMRs there are relatively-large, getting up towards conventional reactors in size – they’re putting more emphasis on the “modular” and less on the “small”.
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They will need like 25 years for construction while not building any wind or solar farms
Nuclear energy is not clean. Less CO2 intensive, maybe, but definitely not clean. It might be good in the short term but the long term looks grim regarding nuclear waste, among other issues.
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That is my point.
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Yes and you didn’t bring up that oil is not clean either?
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What? No. I was merely putting in perspective that nuclear energy is not a magic thing that will solve everything.
The US produces less than half the volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool of nuclear waste per year in total, so it’s not exactly hard to manage. Wind and even solar take up a lot more space than nuclear for the same energy, even if we were to consider decades worth of nuclear waste storage. Nuclear power production has about 130x higher density than wind, and needs 34x less space than solar PV.
And that’s considering that the US doesn’t even use their used nuclear fuel efficiently like, say, France. 96% of French nuclear fuel is recycled by them, while the US doesn’t really recycle their nuclear fuel. Thanks to free market capitalism fuel recycling never got commercialized in the US, so the over of century of usable fuel we have in recyclable nuclear fuel is just wasted. It’s cheaper to just buy new fuel rather than recycle, so of course companies don’t recycle. American problems I guess.
If space were a big issue than nuclear would still win by a long shot even over the long-term. There’s very little of it produced, it doesn’t take up much space to properly and safely store for tens to hundreds of thousands of years, and the power production is extremely reliable so you don’t need miles upon miles of giant batteries to store excess power just in case.
The US produces less than half the volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool of nuclear waste per year in total, so it’s not exactly hard to manage.
Storing and monitoring that waste for 100’000 years is too expensive, even if we manage to do it.
Nuclear power is simply not cost-effective.
I am very well aware of the state of nuclear waste in France, and it’s not 96% recycled. This is absolutely laughable.
I should say up to 90-96%. It depends on the methods and the type of fuel you use. Currently widely used nuclear technology is more like 30-50% recyclable. That number is able to be increased by using more recyclable fuel technology, which is available.
French nuclear waste in total is 0.0018 km³ (three olympic swimming pools) after 8 decades of using nuclear and primarily using nuclear for 4 decades, so I’m not so sure how you imply that the “state of nuclear waste” is bad. Even with the “inefficient” ways of using/recycling nuclear, there’s not a lot of waste produced in the first place.
Only ~10% of French waste is actually long-lived too, meaning after a few decades to 3 centuries, 90% of it will no longer have abnormal radioactivity. Meaning the radioactiveness of the waste just goes away on its own after a moderately short period of time and it basically just turns into a big rock.
I should say up to 90-96%.
Right, and I am up to 90% made of Mars dust.
0.0018 km3 is an enormous volume for something so dangerous. And that doesn’t taken into account the waste created during extraction and transformation of nuclear fuel. Map of nuclear waste storage here https://reporterre.net/CARTE-EXCLUSIVE-Les-dechets-radioactifs-s-entassent-partout-en-France
And recycling is an abusive terminology for nuclear waste, since reusing waste creates again nuclear waste, waiting for “valorisation ultérieure” i.e. stored.
See source in Frenc https://inventaire.andra.fr/sites/default/files/documents/pdf/fr/andra_essentiels_2021_in_web.pdf
Yah but we can manage Nuclear waste. We can’t manage runaway climate change. CO2 is the enemy.
Yah but we can manage Nuclear waste.
Really? How?
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Unless it’s a reprocessing plant, the waste is not managed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository
But the important part is that we can not manage CO2, the existential threat.
Still mad that the visitor centre was closed when I stayed basically nextdoor to it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository
Will the Polish waste be stored there? If not, it’s not managed.
But the important part is that we can not manage CO2, the existential threat.
Yes, we can. It called renaturalization. Has countless other benefits.
That’s the model. Poland and other countries can build similar projects. Are you being intentionally obtuse?
Poland and other countries can build similar projects.
They don’t. Therefore it’s not managed.
Are you being intentionally obtuse?
Your need to lash out with personal attacks shows that you know that your argument holds no water.
CO2 is not an existential threat, corporations and financial entities are because what we call polution, they call it life.
Yes CO2 is the existential threat. Even in socialist countries CO2 is produced.
Economic systems and forms of production do not make energy sources clean. Socialist and capitalist countries both ought to and must fight against CO2 production.
Socialist countries? Of course definitions vary, so which ones are you referring to?
Also neo-libs don’t want any state interference on business, unless it involves bailing them out with tones of money. So which capitalist country will do otherwise with so much lobbying going on?
We hide it under the carpet and future generations will deal with it. This strategy has worked superbly for climate change.
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There is this conversation about nuclear power that bugs me. The downvoting part in this section motivated me enough to talk about the following.
The way I see things humanity does not have an energy issue, industries do. We don’t need more energy to heat our homes, for example. More energy is needed for the industries to be able to expand. So I don’t understand why this SMR “adventure” is so well perceived by the public or even environmentalists.
We know that businesses, corporations etc care only about their monetary profit, and not about the environment or humans. Governments take tones of money to enforce these kind of policies worldwide. Some bribes have even evolved to taxable salaries.
Why are people so eager to defend SMR like it’s a solution? It’s like pretending that the problem is not related to the eternal growth model of capitalism. No?
As you can tell, I cannot see an ecological solutions withing capitalism. Is there anyone who can? If yes, how would those solutions bypass or change the eternal growth model, to a sustainable one?
I might need to change my point of view, this is why I shared this rant.
A huge part of global CO2 emissions come from various industries, so they certainly have a lot to improve. We should definitely start with that instead of blaming regular consumers of everything.
Switching to completely renewable energy sources requires grid energy storage, which we don’t really have at the moment. While we’re building renewable energy plants and the facilities to balance out the mismatching nature of energy production and demand, we’re still going to need some sort of energy during the transition period, and that’s when nuclear energy comes in handy. The way I see it, it’s not a long term solution for everything, but a temporary tool for managing the transition period, which is apparently going to take decades.
The private sector does what’s economically attractive and viable, but policies dictate what makes economic sense and what doesn’t. Therefore, I think we should all vote for the local politicians who support renewable energy and grid energy storage.
Building large reactors isn’t economically attractive, so maybe SMRs could help with that. Time will tell. Or maybe we need to make it more expensive to build and run fossil fuel plants, and politics would be the right tool for that.
Building large reactors isn’t economically attractive, so maybe SMRs could help with that.
It looks like this is not the case, at least by reading the following:
Some advocates misleadingly claim that SMRs are more efficient than large ones because they use less fuel. In terms of the amount of heat generated, the amount of uranium fuel that must undergo nuclear fission is the same whether a reactor is large or small. And although reactors that use coolants other than water typically operate at higher temperatures, which can increase the efficiency of conversion of heat to electricity, this is not a big enough effect to outweigh other factors that decrease efficiency of fuel use.
From Five Things the “Nuclear Bros” Don’t Want You to Know About Small Modular Reactors
If you have a source that claims otherwise, please share.
Yepo, guess it’s about using oil & coal is just worse.
Maybe soon we in the west will have “enough” of “stuff” (you can only eat that much every day right) and would transit to another less degrading system.
Or so I hope.
Environment Minister, Paulina Hennig-Kloska, said the investment would be in the public interest and align with Poland’s energy and climate policies.
Some more greenwashing then, in the name of _ public interest._
