Since they shut down the plant in Zion, the Byron nuclear power plant is the only one that serves the Chicago region. With our ever increasing population and energy needs, it sure wouldn’t hurt to build another one.
In slightly different nuclear news:
This may fly as early as 2027.
NASA actually had a nuclear engine that worked - the NERVA engine dates all the way back to 1963. It was even test-fired on the ground, and ran for 12 minutes and generated 4,000 MW of power. Unfortunately, it was killed by the growing anti-nuclear sentiment in the US in the 1970’s plus waning interest in the space program.
This is a similar thing - a nuclear thermal rocket. Instead of using chemical reactions to heat the exhaust, it is run through a nuclear heat exchanger and heated to tremendous temperature, then exhausted out the back. This type of rocket is much, much more efficient than chemical rockets, and could open up the solar system to human exploration.
Research into these types of nuclear devices (including Kilpower - small nuclear reactors for the Moon and Mars), also helps us with SMR designs and technology.
@k9bfriender accurately described the issues of ramping, and NuScale describes their technology as providing baseload power.
In addition to thermal storage, there are other dispatchable technologies that can be coupled with either baseload or intermittent generation, but that’s probably it’s own topic.
Which tends to indicate that Nuclear Power plants have a place in our power grid and should not be run by civilians but as a part of the Navy or a new military branch using the Navy Nuke program model.
Maybe.
The last few years of buffoonery in USAF nuclear weapons stewardship shows the military is just as able to do a crappy job as anyone else once there’s not enough budget and not enough command / management attention placed on excellence regardless of cost.
The nuclear part of the Navy is their prestige division full of prestige jobs. Both back in Rickover’s day and now. USAF was also such in the heyday of SAC in the 1960s & 1970s. Not now.
Preventing a putative Federal Nuclear Power Service from turning into the proverbial Post Office or DMV is the challenge. Congress’ record of funding things well enough to achieve and maintain excellence is not good. And funding is merely one of many necessary conditions; it’s far from a sufficient one.
You could never use it as a launch platform, for both political and technical reasons.
The shielding required would be too much to give any sort of reasonable thrust to weight ratio, and I don’t think the public would go for a nuclear reactor taking off over their heads.
And as long as you are only using it in space, you may as well build it there as well. This allows you to take the reactor parts and fuel parts separately, and secure the fuel in such a way that there is no chance of it causing contamination issues if a rocket fails.
If you build it in space, you also get to save massively on shielding. If you put the reactor half a mile away on a truss, then you only have to shield a small fraction of it.
I do somewhat question the need for it at this time though. It’s too expensive to use for uncrewed missions, and there’s really nowhere to send a crewed mission to outside Earth’s orbit yet. It’s be great to get a probe to Jupiter in less than a year, but at what cost? And unless we are sending unisex crews or sterilized people on these multi-year missions, they are going to be making babies, and we really need more research (currently 0) on how that plays out in different environments before that’s ethical to allow.
One of the benefits of building a reactor on the moon is that you can probably get away with some more experimental designs. Even if on paper, you can show that certain designs are safer, the regulators still prefer something that they already know and understand. If they approve a new design, and something unforeseen does happen, then they will be held liable, politically even if not legally.
If we are no longer “risking” population centers, and instead just risking making a radioactive barren wasteland a bit more radioactive, it’s going to face less public backlash.
Getting reactors to work on the moon should be fairly straightforward. There are challenges, but they are known. One of the biggest is that traditional nuclear uses far too much water to be viable, so a higher temp reactor that uses the Brayton Cycle with turbines would probably be preferable to steam powered. This of course suggests molten salt reactors, whether based on straight Uranium or a Thorium cycle.
I do see a future where we develop the LIFTR model reactor on the moon before the Earth, and then import the technology back to be used on Earth to power all our needs.
Reactors in space, as in zero gravity, are going to be different enough that they are going to need to be reengineered almost from first principles, and most of that engineering would probably not translate to useful applications on Earth. Some stuff is the same, nuclear reactions don’t care about gravity, but anything to do with heat or fluid flow is going to be completely different.
Reactors in the US already have a good safety record. They are overseen by numerous regulator agencies, and the worker in their plants receive appropriate training. I don’t know exactly how it compares to Navy nuke training, but I doubt there is any substantial difference.
There are no Homer Simpsons in the control room.
The big 3, Chernobyl, TMI, and Fukushima, taught us a couple lessons.
The first is that corrupt authoritarian regimes with more corruption than oversite may build and operate reactors unsafely. That’s a lesson against being a corrupt authoritarian regime.
The second is that, even in a nearly worst case scenario, modern reactors pose no threat to public safety, only to become expensive industrial accidents, where panic over irrational fears causes far more damage than the actual accident.
And finally, we have learned from these mistakes, and from both a design and operation standpoint, have learned to make them even safer.
I don’t have a good answer but I recall talking with my fission colleagues back when Oklo Power’s application was rejected about a year ago. They were really surprised and one told me he didn’t think it had ever happened before. In part because companies work with NRC to prep the application, and there’s some back and forth to fix deficits. But apparently they submitted 500 pages instead of the usual 10k.
Take all of this with a heap of salt.
Before the SMRs, a nuclear plant had to have regulatory approval of the design for every installation, regardless if it was an identical design to one already approved.
Once the design is approved, you had to get the site approved. And there were other approvals needed for construction itself. Also, anyone could file an injunction stopping construction even five or ten years into a project.
My understanding now is that the design is approved, and anyone who wants to use one only has to get approval for the site. Further, once approval is granted further injunctions and lawsuits are not allowed. This takes away the prime weapon of anti-nuke activists, which is to allow a site to begin construction, wait until all the capital is invested, then tie the project up with endless lawsuits, driving the cost of nuclear way up because of the time-value of the capital.
- Higher steel prices and interest rates are driving up the projected cost of energy from Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems’ planned 462 MW small modular reactor project, multiple municipal utilities have reported.
- Previous cost estimates were for the project to generate power at a price of $58/MWh, but at least one municipal power provider says project developers told it that prices could run $90/MWh to $100/MWh.
I expect the costs to continue to increase, perhaps reaching the $178/MWh of Vogtle
Let me preface this with my personal opinion about nuclear power: I 
nukes. I was raised about 10 miles from a huge plant with two reactors. In a 1980 referendum here in Sweden I voted Yes. I think we have wasted 35-45 years being scared of nukes, for very little reason, and because of this, most reactors in the world that are currently operating tend to be on the older end.
So, these past few years, with climate change looming and renewables not generating nearly enough electricity, nuclear has seen a renaissance. But - and here it comes - I think it’s totally misguided to place our hope in nuclear power to solve climate change, even though nuclear may very well, in one form or another be the best solution in the very long perspective, i.e. centuries and not decades.
So why do I think this? The TL;DR version is that the math doesn’t add up. It simply can’t be done.
• Uranium is not renewable. We use U235 of which there is a finite and not very big amount. Confirmed estimates say there are about 4.2M tons of U235 and we currently use about 60K tons. This means that we have fuel for 70 years at the current rate of use. Should the use ten-fold… Well, let’s not ten-fold the use. Cite.
Another problem with current technology is that it won’t mitigate CO2 emissions in a very meaningful way. By 2040 the estimate is reducing carbon in the range 2 - 5 percent. Cite
• What about U238? Well. If it could be done in a good way, this would mean that we don’t have to worry about running out of fuel, as U238 is more than 99 percent of our total uranium. However, the only way we currently know how to use it is with Fast Breeder Reactors. And it doesn’t seem that it’s a viable way forward, as we’ve been experimenting with FBRs since the 1950’s and still haven’t solved all problems. BTW, one of those problems is that a byproduct of using U238 in reactors is PU239. Cite.
There are currently three (3) breeder reactors operating in the world. Two in Russia and one in India. Cite.
• Another problem is that it’s expensive and price is rising. Since 2009 cost for running nuclear plants has gone up about 33 percent, while solar has gone down 90 percent.
Globally the cost of renewables is now significantly below that of either nuclear power or gas. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), wind and solar power are now the cheapest form of new electricity in most of the world. Furthermore, BNEF anticipates that it will be more expensive to operate existing coal or natural gas power plants in five years than to build new solar or wind farms.
Cite: PDF page 293
• Nuclear plants are expensive and take a lot of time to build. The poster child for modern nuclear power plants is Olkiluoto in Finland. Construction on its third reactor (a generation III reactor) started in 2005 and was projected to cost €3BN when it was completed in 2009. It became operational last year at a cost of close to €9BN, but was quickly shut down:
electricity production started on 12 March 2022. In May 2022, foreign material was found in the turbine steam reheater, and the plant was shut down for about three months of repair work. On 30 September 2022, the reactor reached its maximum output power for the first time.
I’ve been trying to find a good source that estimates if nuclear power is commercially viable without support/subsidies. There are a lot of sources out there that look into costs. Almost all of them agree that the upfront costs of construction, the security measures when running the plant, insurance fees and the disposal of waste are huge, whereas actually running the plant is cheap. Almost all ongoing projects do seem to have some kind of support from their respective countries and I can’t find a single project that is running without any kind of subsidies.
• Thorium. I’ve been hearing about Th for about 15 years. There are indeed a lot of advantages. It’s a lot more effective than uranium, it’s a lot more abundant. The reason for that may be that Th232, which is the isotope proposed for nuclear power has a half-life of 14 BN years.
But there is only one (1) reactor running right now. It’s in China and although the program launched in 2011, it’s not being scaled in any purposeful way.
Operated by the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics (SINAP), the Wuwei reactor is designed to produce just 2 megawatts of thermal energy, which is only enough to power up to 1,000 homes. But if the experiments are a success, China hopes to build a 373-megawatt reactor by 2030, which could power hundreds of thousands of homes.
Cite.
• SMR. We’re reaching the end of this very long post and I’ve saved the Small Modular Reactor to last. As evidenced in this thread, this is where our nuclear hopes and dreams are. In the U.S. the poster child is Nuscale. They started in 2007 and still hasn’t started its first prototype. In march 2020 things were delayed due to security risks. It now looks as if the $6.1BN SMR will be completed in 2030, producing 50 MW. Cite.
• Those 50 MW should raise questions. The International Energy Agency, IEA, estimates that that we need to increase nuclear with 10 GW to 2030. My handy calculator tells me that we need to build 200 of these SMRs from now to then. There are currently two (2) up and running with another four being constructed. Six more are being licensed. The rest (32 units) are at different stages of design. This is very far from 200 and we’d need to ramp up SMR deployment to a new SMR - up and producing power - around every two weeks starting now, if we’re to reach the estimate from IEA.
I am not saying that we should stop all plans. But I think we realistically have to face the fact that nuclear power is not the solution to climate change, and that it’s even hard to estimate to what extent it can actually help. Obviously some. We should’ve done what we’re doing now 40 years ago, but public sentiments back then made it politically impossible.
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Unless someone has magically discovered a way to deactivate the spent nuclear waste, then it is a dumb damn idea to have nuclear power plants operated by very fallible humans working in them. There is no good argument for having machines to do the job either because they will be made by fallible humans too. If something can go wrong, it will.
Wave generated electricity, hydroelectric, fuel cells, wind power, geothermal, biomass and solar are the future, along w/ high temperature energy storage sand batteries.
Yes, they can be operated safely.
How can we be assured that they will be?
Nuclear plants aren’t really suitable for on demand usage. Startups take days, changing power takes days, etc. They are designed to be on and stay at a stable 100%. Changing stuff is done VERY carefully, and deliberately.
Maybe we should have a regulatory government entity? Such as… a Nuclear Regulatory Commission?
It’s my understanding that the difficulty of solving the waste problem is political, not technological. Nuclear waste is also formed into concrete where it is relatively safe, but at a much smaller storage volume than coal waste. The problem is that even though it’s safe enough to bury under a golf course, ignorance and NIMBY sentiment cause us to consider only elaborate, unnecessary solutions like putting it into permanently stable geological formations (which is somehow never good enough for NIMBYs).
Here’s a video of a heavy diesel locomotive colliding with a reinforced nuclear waste flask at a speed that looks like ~60mph. The locomotive is destroyed, but the nuclear waste flask isn’t breached. I’d feel perfectly safe having one of these buried 10 feet under my basement.
If it can survive that, I’d categorize that as “pretty safe”. And when we’re talking about safety, we can’t ignore what coal is doing to the environment. It’s not “relatively safe” to run an uncontrolled experiment of running CO2 levels well past 400ppm. To avoid that, I would find it acceptable to render 0.01% of the earth’s surface (for example) to be rendered permanently uninhabitable. Not that nuclear power poses even a remote risk of doing that kind of damage, for reasons already described.
No realistic source of energy will be without its risks, but when we evaluate them, we have to be real about what those risks are, and we have to consider all of those risks.
I was looking for something a little more independent from the whims of politics and industry. From the Wiki on the NRC:
" The NRC is headed by five commissioners appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the United States Senate for five-year terms. One of them is designated by the President to be the chairman and official spokesperson of the commission."
" Numerous different observers have criticized the NRC as an example of regulatory capture. The NRC has been accused of having conflicting roles as regulator and “salesman” in a 2011 Reuters article, doing an inadequate job by the Union of Concerned Scientists and the agency approval process has been called a “rubber stamp”
Nuclear Regulatory Commission - Wikipedia
New National Academies of Sciences report out (you can download these for free):
Report at: