The case for nuclear power

In My Humble Opinion
21

That was probably me, since Imhave mentioned Small Modular Reactors (commonly known now as SMRs) several times on the board. Some are as described, others are more conventional in form factor. We are still a few years from commercial adoption, but they are coming and look promising. One potential advantage is that commonality of parts among many small reactors should allow some economies of scale and bring the per-MWh price down. More importantly, if a common certification of the design can speed up site selection and approval, we could move on nuclear pretty fast. But realistically, thi# is still a decades-long time frame.

There are plenty of other large advanced reactors that are much safer than old designs and can burn spent fuel from LWR reactors. We should be building some of those right now. We need some regulatory reform before anyone will invest, though.

22

Sovacool wrote that the mean value of lifecycle emissions from qualified studies is 66 g CO2e/kWh for nuclear and 443 for NGCC.

Although as others note, that’s mostly up front.

23

Yeah it seems there is already some traction on portables - still a ways off, but perhaps not decades away…

24

I believe that you are referring to traveling wave reactors and I want to scream that we have to build them. First off, they use only about 10% of the uranium, for a given amount of power generation. Second, the nuclear waste consists of elements with much shorter half-lives than current nuclear waste, typically measured in the tens of years. And finally, they can make use of old nuclear waste, not only generating power but also reducing them to waste with the short half-lives.

All three points are closely related. The point is that they “burn” the fuel much more completely. Yes, it would require new regulations to cover them, but the concept exists and is feasible. It beats waiting another 30 years for fusion.

25

The CANDU reactor does this, and has been in use in Canada for decades.

26

I agree with the OP in that we need to be throwing everything we have at nuclear power. I’ll go a step forward and post that we should build 10? 20? 50? 100? nuclear pants directly next door to water desalinization plants. We’ll use the power to desalinate the water and pump it from the ocean to wherever it needs to go; reservoirs, Lake Mead, etc.

27

30 years seems optimistic. I think we’re maybe 30 years away from the first fusion reactor that generates a useful amount of energy. Then, a few more decades to reduce the price to something reasonable, and a few more decades to actually build a significant number of reactors.

Except that in the meantime, solar will have come down another 10x in cost, as will storage, so fusion will have to be that much better in the first place. Which it won’t.

28

I was absolutely shocked when Kewaunee shut down…they had just had their license renewed for another 20 years. And of course it was kept sort of quiet; I didn’t know anything was going on until they started canceling high-dollar orders.

So much this!!! The company where I work supplies backup diesel-powered generators, parts, and service for nuclear plants. Even something as simple as a bolt can end up costing hundreds of dollars due to the amount of inspection and testing required for us to qualify it for safety-related service…and that’s just for a part that can be bought commercially. It gets even worse when you’re looking at custom parts, or trying to replace obsolete components from defunct companies.

At the height of nuclear plant construction, there were loads of companies that had “N-stamp” programs; they were authorized to produce components that had been built and tested in accordance with the appropriate ASME standards. Once construction dried up, many of these companies dropped their N-stamp programs; and, of course, companies merged or closed over the years. Finding or building suitable replacements takes a lot of time and resources. In cases where N-stamped items are no longer available – which is often – my company has to go through a process of proving that a replacement part is suitable. Sometimes this involves relatively simple testing; other times, complete environmental and seismic requalification is required. (Our customers almost never discuss requalification for radiation exposure; aside from the expense, we don’t sell many things that get installed in the containment area of the plant.)

29

I don’t think so. The Wiki article on the Candu reactor includes this sentence: “The basic operation of the CANDU design is similar to other nuclear reactors.” This would seem to preclude a radically new design, which a traveling wave reactor would be. Its main innovation seems to the use of heavy water as the coolant.

30

I was being sarcastic. Fusion reactors have always been 30 years away and always will be.

31

A bit less at present, because the heatwave and drought in Europe means they can’t run them at full capacity for lack of cooling. IOW they are going to be less useful and reliable power sources as climate change continues, not more.

32

I’m 61. When I was in college in the late 70s-early 80s, I took several Speech Comm classes and was in debate. Nuclear power was a very common topic back then and - IMO - the “pro” position was a no brainer. The objections were/are not science based.

This is just one of the huge societal issues on which little has been done over my lifetime. Very frustrating.

W/in the last year, I read that investors are intending to construct 2 new coal powered plants in Illinois, because it is profitable (not sure what the current state of those plans are). Meanwhile, our nukes are shutting down. Oughtta be criminal.

33

A couole of things: First, if we are willing to heavily subsidize or outright pay for renewable power, we could do the same with nuclear. Why not use carbon tax money to build nuclear power plants?

A big advantage of nuclear that makes it amenable to one-time subsidies or a crash government funded building program is that most of the cost is up-front, while operational and fueling costs are very low. So you aren’t tying a government to an ongoing subsidy. Help with capital costs, and you won’t need an ongoing subsidy as you would subsidizing something that has high operating costs but lower building costs.

Second, nuclear is a lot cheaper to add to the system, because it’s plug-and-play with current power sources like coal. Unlike renewables, which will require serious changes to the grid such as coming up with new ways to store power or adding HVDC grid coupling.

Third, nuclear is expensive mainly because the anti-nuclear movement made it expensive through endless regulations, appeals, and lawfare. There is no reason for nuclear to be that expensive or difficult. France went from 0% to 80% of their electricity from nuclear in less than 15 years, and had until recently the lowest power prices in Europe. Ontario built out a large percentage of their electricity production from nuclear, and kept power prices low. China builds a nuclear plant in 4-5 years, for something like $1 billion per gigawatt, compared to $5 billion in the U.S. It can be done, and can be done even cheaper and faster than that if we standardize some designs and bring in economies of scale.

What usable renewable energy sources are faster to build, comparing like to like? You would have to build out wind and/or solar including storage or I suppose a nationwide HVDC grid AND storage, just less of it. Anything else doesn’t really compare. And we’ve ben building out wind and solar for two decades now, and still don’t have a viable storage option and no one knows how to do it. All of the options at grid scale are enormous engineering projects that we don’t even know are feasible at this point. Building more wind and solar without storage will not solve a thing. Germany has more wind and solar than they know what to do with when the wind is blowing and the sun shining.

This is true, but every power source has environmental issues. Study after study shows that nuclear is at the bottom of the list for environmental externalities, and by a pretty large margin. When you throw in human deaths, it’s not even close.

34

You didn’t read far enough into the Wikipedia page, aparently:

The CANDU can be run on many fuel cycles:

  • Natural Uranium: No need to enrich.
  • Slightly Enriched Uranium: More efficient if you lightly enrich the uranium.
  • Fissile Material in waste: CANDU can burn waste from LWR reactors, burning unspent fissile material. It could also reduce actinides by 60%, making the waste from CANDI much safer than the LWR fuel it consumes.
  • Nuclear weapons warheads: When nuclear weapons are decommissioned, CANDU can directly burn the plutonium in the warheads, eliminating a current problem with nuclear warhead disposal.
  • Thorium: Existing CANDU designs can burn Thorium for fuel at about the same efficiency as natural uranium fuel cycles.

The NRC in Canada had a pilot study for using CANDU reactors to burn waste headed for Yucca mountain, providing energy and reducing the ‘deadly’ time of the waste from tens of thousands of years down to about 800, while also reducing the quantity substantially. A win for the environment, an enabling technology for LWR reactors (easing their waste concerns), etc. A $200 Billion investment here could reduce as much CO2 as electrifying the entire passenger car/light truck fleet.

CANDU reactors are not a future design. CANDU reactors have been around since 1962, and there are currently 34 of them in operation. Canada has been using them for decades (currently 18 are running in Canada), and there has never been a serious incident from any of them.

There is also a proposed SMR version of CANDU in the 300 MW range.

35

Wow! You are right; I didn’t read far enough into the article. Thanks for calling it to my intention. I am not sure whether this is actually a traveling wave reactor but since it can take nuclear waste as a charge, it would go a long way towards solving the nuclear waste problem which has always, IMHO, been the biggest drawback to nuclear power. So just tell me, why hasn’t the design been more widely adopted?

36

Well, it has in lots of places. Argentina, China, India, Pakistan, Romania and South Korea.all have CANDU reactors. There are 42 of them around the world, making it a popular design. As the article noted, India is even burning thorium in a CANDU. India has 18 CANDU reactors currently running, and five more under construction.

The reason they aren’t being built in North America is because the anti-nuclear crowd has made it virtually impossible to build ANY nuclear reactors. They drove up prices and financial risks in the 80’s and 90’s, and scared the population into voting against nuclear proposals, then fracking drove down the price of gas and coal remained cheap, and no one wanted to invest in nuclear power. Too much up-front capital, and too much risk.

Only one nuclear reactor (not nuclear plant, just a new reactor at an existing plant) has started up in the U.S. since 1996.

The other problem getting CANDU reactors in the U.S. is the lobbying power of American nuclear companies like Westinghouse and GE. Americans aren’t going to put in a foreign-made reactor while shutting out American ones.

For nuclear to take off again, we need to treat it as ‘green’ and subsidize it the way we are subsidizing wind and solar. And we need regulatory reform.

The two biggest reforms needed:

  • The ability to prove out a design then have an expedited approval process for certified designs that only looks at site-specific issues, rather than forcing a complete bottom-up certification of the entire plant every time a new one is opened. This will be critically important for SMR adoption, but a proven design like CANDU should not have to go through full certification every time a copy is built somewhere. This would also drive standardization and economies of scale, instead of every reactor being a bespoke design.

  • A reform where a public comment and legal challenge is allowed up to the point where a full permit is issued, but which then restricts legal challenges thereafter. What happened to many nuclear plant projects is that they were fully approved, spent billions on construction, THEN got hit with regulatory and legal challenges that would delay the project for many years, driving capital costs through the roof. If there was a cutoff period after which planning could be done with proper timelines without fear of extensive delay, nuclear would be much more affordable and we could build it much quicker.

There are 161 nuclear reactors in the world that were built in less than 5 years. Eighteen of those were built in three years. The median build time for all nuclear reactors is 7.5 years. But this is mostly from reactors built before the ‘anti-nuclear’ movement got going.

Before 1970, the U.S. built reactors in less time than the world average. Then the anti-nuclear movement got underway in the U.S. after Three Mile Island, and a host of new regulations were put into place and government regulators got a lot more skittish with permits. After that, the situation just got worse and worse with regulations being added year after year. Some have called it a ‘regulatory ratchet’ that killed nuclear development.

Of the more modern reactors, China is still building them in 5-7 years, but other western countries are seeing build times between 10-30 years, almost all due to environmental and legal challenges, not because of anything intrinsic to the technology.

We are actually losing nuclear capacity every year as plants are being shut down without replacement. We will be replacing it with coal and gas if we don’t smarten up and start expanding nuclear power. Wind and solar can’t do it without enabling technologies that are still decades away and will increase costs of those sources dramatically.

I’m not trying to do a sales job for CANDU. There may be better choices out there now. My original point is simply that we don’t have to wait for some experimental reactor type to be proven out, or new designs like Molten Salt Reactors or traveling wave or pebble bed reactors. We have good, proven designs that have run safely now for 50 years and can burn thorium and waste from other reactors, as well as unenriched Uranium to alleviate the proliferation concerns. CANDU is one of them.

37

Nuclear has been massively subsidized, and continues to be. The government already acts as an insurer of last resort, since no one in the private sector is willing or able to insure against a significant disaster.

Renewables simply aren’t subject to this. Private insurance is more than sufficient.

Ok, but aside from insurance? How about $8.3B in loan guarantees from the US government?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-toshiba-accounting-board-idUSKBN17006K

Same for renewables, except even more so. They have long lifetimes and even lower operation costs than nuclear.

It’s over $10B/GW here. Vogtle-3 and 4 will have taken 10 years if they actually finish next year, and will cost >$25B for a pair of 1.1 GW reactors.

The US built out 23.6 GW of solar capacity in 2021. That’s nameplate, so obviously the nuclear-equivalent capacity is much less, but on the other hand solar corresponds very closely to peak demand. We’re having a heatwave in CA right now and extra solar would be perfect. Some minimal storage, say a couple of hours worth, could also be useful, but really it might make more sense to just overbuild the solar. For what we’re seeing now, those solar watts are very nearly as good as nuclear. Maybe better, if the nuclear plant has to reduce output due to the heat.

That’s not a problem in and of itself. Hell, use it for bitcoin mining for all I care. Run the windmills as fans to keep the turtles cool.

Solar and wind are so cheap that it may make sense to simply overbuild instead of bothering with lots of storage. That $10B/GW for nuclear converts nicely to $10/W. Solar farms cost more like $1/W today, unsubsidized. You can overbuild or add storage or a lot of other things for that difference in price.

38

You can NOT get rid of shortages through overbuilding. I pointed out that last January wind and solar together, while being 20% of our capacity only provided about 2% of our power, for the entire month. The wind was calm, it was -30 and we had a lot of snow. Other jurisdictions on the western grid had similar results. There is no reasonable amount of wind and solar capacity that would have saved us if we didn’t retain the ability to run 96% fossil fuels. And you really don’t want a blackout in Northern Canada in winter during a deep freeze. Even a two day outage would be catastrophic. If the grid went down for a week it would be a mass casualty event.

California and other southern states are much better suited for solar. You get more insolation, the gap between winter and summer is smaller, and your power demands match solar better because of air conditioning.

In the north, all that goes upside down. Solar insolation in California runs between 1700 and 2100 kWh/m^2 depending on latitude. In Canada, depending where you are it’s about 1100-1300. So we are already starting at a big disadvantage. And it’s hugely mismatched between summer and winter. We get about 75% of our annual solar insolation in summer, and 25% in winter. We also get deep freezes and snow, which won’t melt off a solar panel when it’s -30. The importance of tracking and setting incidence correctly goes up in the north as well, making rooftop solar less efficient.

Finally, we don’t have nearly the power demand for air conditioning, but if we have to go to electric heat our peak demand will be much higher in winter when solar is nearly useless. Last year our peak energy demand months were November through February, when solar production is very low, and that with primarily natural gas and gas cars. Electric cars lose about 30%-40% of their efficiency in winter here, so charging demand will go up in winter as well if we transition to electric vehicles.

This is the case for the northern states in the U.S. and northern Europe, including Germany. I’m not anti-solar: There’s a place for it in the energy mix, and for some places, maybe like California, it can be a big part of the mix. But without storage it isn’t going to provide more than 20-30% of our power needs in the northern populous countries in Europe and North America. Australia and equatorial countries can use quite a lot of it.

For us here, a good mix would be something like 50% baseload (hydro, nuclear preferably, but coal or natural gas can do it as well), 30% renewables, of which 30% is solar and 70% wind, and a capacity of 40% natural gas for load and supply following, with the hopes that when wind and solar produce well, natural gas need only provide 10-20% of our power or so, with all the rest being zero carbon. Then we can work on adding storage over time, with storage being a replacement for natural gas load following.

But even without storage, that’s a reasonable, feasible path to a grid that runs on maybe 10% of the CO2 emissions we currently have, without risk of grid failure if renewables aren’t delivering. Construction could start today - No waiting for magic technology to show up.

39

For reference, here is a world solar insolation map:

Notice that most of Europe is pretty bad, with insolation levels about half of southern California. Even Italy only reaches aboutbthe level of southern Canada. Northern Europe has the same winter/summer problem we have in Canada.

40

Well, we just aren’t going to come to a lot of agreement as long as we’re talking about totally different environments.

Massively more solar is exactly what CA needs this week. It’s been a huge heatwave, with high A/C demands. As you may know, there’s what’s called the “duck curve”, where demand lags peak solar production by a bit, but there are several ways around that: overbuilding, orienting the panels to better take advantage of late-day sun, battery storage, smart grids, and a few other things. All well within the realm of possibility, and essentially what we’re already doing. We just need to do more of it, and faster.

Europe should be building more north-south grid ties. So should Canada and the US. It makes way more sense than a stupid oil pipeline, and lots of people thought that was a good idea. Imagine we’d invested in that instead of wasting so much money on the Keystone XL.

Of no shock to anyone, there’s also been a huge propaganda push lately, with headlines like “California bans gas cars but tells EV owners not to charge”. Idiots lap that stuff up. It does real damage, though.