Westinghouse Unveils Small Modular Nuclear Reactor - Slashdot

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• Re:

  NRA will morph to NNA.

• Re:

  Economics of this in the short term might be expensive, however if we are genuinely thinking long term then this is really exciting https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com].

  • Re:

    Did you forget to switch accounts before replying to yourself?

    • Re:

      No, I forgot to post the link. Did you click on the link or just comment without thinking.

      • Re:

        I thought just fine before I posted thanks. What I thought was that it looked like someone replying to themselves as if they were someone else, but they forgot to switch accounts to make it look like someone else agreed with them. Typically, when replying to yourself to add something, you should add a note explaining why you're replying to yourself such as "I forgot to post the link" or sometimes "post too long, had to split it into two parts". Don't get annoyed at me for your mistake.

        • Re: So what's the ROI?

          Ah, I see the identical user names weren't enough of a give away that they were adding something to their previous post. Don't blame others for your own lack of awareness.

          • Re:

            ??? It's right there in my post. I was very clearly aware that they were posting in reply to themselves with the same username. I'm not sure what confusion of ideas or lack of reading comprehension or just basic logic failure could lead you to believe that I didn't notice that both posts had the same username, but felt compelled about the poster not switching usernames. It's just very odd to reply to yourself like that. I was just commenting on the oddness and also on the fact that we do seem to have more t

  • Re:

    Yeah, the video that fails econ 101.

    He fails to account for inflation. If you consider it, the numbers invert.

    • Re:

      Do you have suggestions on videos, papers, or whatever, that can demonstrate the economics of nuclear fission vs. other energy sources and take inflation into account?

      What you claim does seem plausible but I'd like to know just how much inflation impacts the numbers. If governments want to see that their citizens have ample supplies of energy, and inflation is somehow an obstacle to that, then perhaps there are some government policies that could be put in place to mitigate how inflation impacts energy sup

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  > If it's anything close to the current estimates of a nuclear reactor then it's already better than wind and solar.

  Ummm, what?

  The current estimated price of a nuclear reactor from Westinghouse is over $30 billion for 2x1117MW, or $13.25 per watt.

  Currently, utility-scale PV in the US is being installed for $0.95 per watt. I'll add 4 hours of battery and use the US-fleet average 25% CF.

  So now just type those values into the NREL LCOE calculator and we get 10.1 cents/kWh for nuclear and 4.6 cents/kWh for P

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  • • Re:

      To be fair, *estimated* at one billion with the as-yet-unbuilt design fresh from the drawing board. That's almost always the most favorable view of costs for an idea from that point onward.

      Safety isn't what's holding back the nuclear industry; it's economics. So a new reactor design that didn't look, on the drawing board, dramatically cheaper and faster to build would be pointless. If anything, it's not the dollar figure, but the lead time that's a the killer. A conventional light water reactor takes ove

      • Re:

        I think you're right that it's a matter of economics (assuming that this thing can be built and that it will work). First, there's economics for the buyers. 300MW for one year is 2.628 billion kWh, which at the $0.16/kWh average residential retail price comes out to $0.42 billion per year. There are obviously electrical loses and other derating factors, but those numbers suggest a break-even time of a few years, which is reasonable. Second, there's economics for Westinghouse. I don't know the engineeri

      • Re:

        >>Safety isn't what's holding back the nuclear industry; it's economics.

        To be honest it is fear that is having an economic impact, which is holding back the the industry

        This fear comes from propaganda foisted on the public by "environmental groups", that receive money from the fossil fuel industry to hamstring a competitor, nuclear power [environmen...ogress.org]

        It is hard to tell which anti-nuclear voices are shilling directly for fossil fuel industries, and which are just useful idiots repeating the lies while motivated by t

  • Re:

    The thing is that these are fantasy numbers. Nobody has 4 hours of storage, let alone days of storage that are actually necessary for a renewable grid. If you don't have days worth of storage, you still need fossil for firming, at which point you're not achieving net-zero emissions not to mention all the capex you have idling.

    The Lazard's LCOE analysis that constantly got quoted has been updated with thees firming costs and it's much more competitive than it looks like if you just ignore the inconvenient pa

    • Re:

      If you can replace 10% of fossil fuel use then that's great! Why do you naysayers always like to imply that renewable is useless if it can't reach 100% availability immediately? Who cares if the sun doesn't shine at night when peak power usage is during the day when all the A/Cs are on. There are places where wind blow constantly.

      Maybe the mini nuke option will work out, but it's a long ways away. In the meantime renewable energy is already here. We have no need to ramp back up coal production just so t

      • Re:

        Who cares if the sun doesn't shine at night
        They've also apparently never heard of transformation of energy. No reason that the unused sunlight during the day cannot be:
        1. Used to pump water uphill, release it downhill to create power
        2. Store electrical power in batteries
        3. Store the thermal energy in a liquid
        4. Store the power in kinetic energy such as a flywheel

        Every time I head the phrase "You can't watch football because the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing!" I just thought how much of a fool

        • Re:

          No, everyone has heard of it. But this shit isn't free and always gets excluded from the conversation in order to make it convenient.

      • Re:

        No, it is great. But the lower costs that always gets cited for the great ROI and the reason to build PV/wind is highly misleading.

  • Re: So what's the ROI?

    1 solar/wind watt does not equal 1 nuclear/gas/coal watt.

    You have to normalize the numbers. For wind/solar that depends on location.

    Capacity factor is used. Nuclear averages about 93%, in the lower 48 USA average solar is 24.7%, Massachusetts is 15.6%, in Germany about 11.1%. Canada is even lower. America is also massively different, solar in the southwest is going be better than northeast.

    So for x watts of generation, nuclear needs 1.0753x watts, solar needs 4.04x watts solar in Germany needs 9.009x watts,

    • Re:

      Bravo! well put!

  • Re:

    Your numbers fail because you are equating one watt at a 25% capacity factor to one watt at 90% capacity factor. We'd have to build out 3x or 4x more solar in watts to get the same annual energy output per watt of nuclear fission.

    We'd likely use storage with nuclear fission to manage the peaks and valleys of demand, that means not needing to overbuild as much nuclear generating capacity. This is helpful if we assume energy storage is more costly than an overbuild of generating capacity, an assumption that

• Re:

  If you're spending $1B on something, I would hope that the labor building it wasn't cheap but rather well-skilled.

  • Re:

    If you're spending $1B on something, I would hope that the labor building it wasn't cheap but rather well-skilled.

    
    
    And then there's Microsoft Windows which has definitely cost $1 billion, but clearly the people behind it aren't well-skilled.

    • Re:

      The people who programmed Windows were/are well skilled. It's the management that's incompetent.

      • Re:

        The chief architects of NT in its early days were astonishingly competent people.

        I don't know whether the people in those chairs now are as competent, or not.

        I do know they're not as scrupulous as I want them to be.

• Re:

  Truly you have raised the discourse.

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  • Re:

    I have actually. That's higher than the normal level of discourse here especially about nukular!!!111 stuff.

• Re:

  Maybe instead of screeching you could address some of the issues.

  TFA has no detail, but the design seems to be similar to the NuScale one. "Passive" safety, in that you don't need a water pump in the event of an accident. However, you do need a pool of water, which has to be protected just as well as a traditional reactor. It can't leak in the event of an earthquake or accident, and it has to be monitored.

  They also don't mention the fuelling arrangement, but the NuScale design needs refuelling every 2 years

  • Re:

    Are you still bitching about used fuel(aka nuclear waste)? What the fuck is wrong with you? Used fuel has a total kill count of zero. It is a non-problem. Anything times 0 is 0. Meanwhile the waste from fossil fuels and biofuels kill 8.7 million people annually. Why is that preferable to zero deaths ever?

    • Re:

      Nuclear fuel kills people. It's not zero carbon.

      Anyway, "just don't worry about it" isn't a very convincing argument for creating large amounts of dangerous waste with no plan for dealing with it long term. It's not me you have to convince though, it's investors and governments.

      • Re:

        Used fuel has never harmed a single person. Not one. As for carbon emissions nuclear power is 12 g CO2 per kWh which is the same as offshore wind and significantly better than solar (41). According to your dumbshit logic solar and wind would have to be banned too because they are not zero carbon.

        Anyways used fuel has caused zero deaths ever. And cask storage is more than adequate. Only antinuclear scumbags say otherwise.

        • Re:

          People have been hurt handling spent fuel, but I was referring to manufacturing the fuel. 12g CO2 is only possible if the fuel is available locally with a very clean mining operation.

          But again, you don't need to convince me. You need to convince the investors and governments. They have heard these arguments before, and particularly investors don't give a shit about emissions. It's the cost that is a problem for them.

          Look at the proposition here. Invest billions in R&D for something that may or may not w

          • Re:

            People have been hurt handling shower doors.

            I smashed the fuck out of my finger the other day in the shower door. I was lucky my finger didn't break but it hurt so bad I was getting dizzy and had to sit down for a few minutes. It's been about 2 weeks and it's still not fully healed.

            Let's ban shower doors!

            • Re:

              Okay, but, again... Nobody who matters actually cares. What's your plan to get them on board?

          • Re:

            France is actually at 6 g of CO2 per kWh because they used nuclear energy to enrich the fuel.

            Total systems cost for renewables + storage is greater than the cost for new nuclear.

      • Re:

        No, it doesn't. Yes, it is.

        There are plenty of safe and workable plans to recycle it and dispose of it safely and securely. Of course you know this but that doesn't make for good FUD does it?

    • Re:

      It's not exactly used fuel, but a control rod once literally impaled a guy and pinned him, through his groin and out his shoulder, to the ceiling. That's not an exact fit to what you were saying, but man does that one have repeat value!

      In any case, the fragments from the reactor core at Chornobyl, which killed plenty of people, qualify as containing used fuel as far as I'm concerned. As for specifically spent fuel rods carefully stored at nuclear facilities, that's because they're spent fuel rods carefully

      • Re:

        A meltdown caused by a stupid experiment does not count as used fuel.

        And RTG's don't count as used fuel either.

        • Re:

          The SL-1 accident was not a meltdown. It was a sudden criticality event that caused a steam explosion, but not a meltdown. It also was not caused by an experiment (not directly anyway, although the whole thing was an experiment). It was caused by the fact that the system required a manual control rod lift. Some suspect that it may have also been partly caused by a practical joke from one of the crew (the guy who ended up pinned to the ceiling) that startled the one doing the lifting (he had been known to in

          • Re:

            SL-1 was also not used fuel. So far you are 0 for 3 for the used fuel harming someone.

            • Re:

              For someone with "algebra" in your name, you're not very good at arithmetic. You kind of actually have to address points other than SL-1 before you can claim I'm "0 for 3". Your reading comprehension could use some work as well. I was pretty clear that I was not including the one about SL-1 because it was really a precise fit to what was being said. Seriously though it was a guy being pinned to the ceiling through the groin by a control rod! Worth mentioning just for the ouch factor. There's also the one ab

              • Re:

                LOL. You said Chernobyl was 1. You said Soviet RTG's are 2. And you said SL-1 was 3. You are 0 for 3. Not that any of those are valid excuses to oppose nuclear energy. And of course actual used fuel is not a valid excuse since it has never harmed a single person.

  • Re:

    2050, the target date for net zero, is 27 years away. That is lots of time no matter how hard you try and hold it up. Too slow was a lame excuse decades ago, and it still is.

  • Re:

    Maybe instead of speading FUD you could actually educate yourself. To much to ask? Thought so. Get out your hip boots, here comes AmiMoJo's brand of bullshit.

    You know, if we could harness the methane off the three main Trolls, we wouldn't need wind, solar, or nuclear. A endless supply of renewable, green power.

• Agreed

  I'd like to stop paying executives at this point. If we're going to build nuclear I want it 100% built, owned and operated by the government. Just like with the moon landing it's too much for private businesses. They can't make enough money doing it.
  
  Let private business build wind and solar farms. They're cheap, easy to build and don't have the disaster and property risks (and yeah SMRs can still melt down if left unattended, they just take a few days to a week to do it).

  • Re:

    Government-owned nukes won't be subject to the same safety regulations as private ones. They'll just cover up mishaps and move right along, nothing to see here! See Hanford etc.

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    • • Re:

        For Ameria, unsafe, unreliable, and... expensive!

    • Honestly if gov't can't run a plant safely

      without a profit motive, nobody can. But gov't *can* run safe nuclear power. They do it all day long in the military. The problem is always the same: budget cuts.
      
      But again, if gov't can't run a safe nuclear power plant, nobody can. So then nuclear is not a viable option.
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      • • Solar & wind are fine for our needs

          We just need a huge, moonshot level program to build it out.
          
          But I like how you put that in a list of things I said to make it sound like I said it. Nice Rhetorical trick. Are you a professional troll or do you just do it so much that you've learned these tricks on your own?

    • Re:

      It's fundamantally dishonest to drag Hanford into the discussion on nuclear power. It was a first gen weapons manufacturing plant.

    • Re:

      Yeah... You might want to read a few books about one Admiral Hyman G Rickover and the operational records of his reactors; and then reconsider the BS you just wrote.

• Re:

  I fully support free enterprise.

  I do to, especially when free enterprise results in global contamination dangers, like arsenic leaking from the abandoned gold mines in Canada. Bonus if taxpayers then have to spend a billion dollars to prevent the whole earth from becoming wrecked by toxic pollution.

• There are massive subsidies for fossil fuels as well as renewables. Let's do nuclear too.

  • Re:

    Subsides are not welfare. Texas produces twice as much power from wind and solar as from nuclear, produces a quarter of the wind energy in the nation, so any funding means power for the people. Nuclear welfare means we might get power in a decade. If the welfare queens donâ(TM)t just keep pushing the ball down the road.

• Economics are the key.

  On the other side small reactors are easier to site, they need less cooling water for one example. They are easier to control, the negative temperature coefficient is larger because the surface area to volume ration is larger, and emergency cooling is easier, less total heat to dump.

  The Navy ran S5W reactor plants for decades, then moved to the twice as big S6G for more decades. The S5G and S8G reactors can run at low power on natural circulation, so a whole group of problems from loss of flow don't happen as long as gravity still works. Small reactors do have a long history.

  Not everything follows the usual scaling rules used in chemical engineering that dictates that one big one is cheaper than two little ones.

  • Re:

    SMRs only need less cooling water because they produce less power. While it's true that they require a cooling pool rather than a constant supply of water from a river or the sea, if you want to match the output of traditional reactors you need a lot of pools.

    They aren't just random swimming pools either, they have to be extremely resilient and constantly monitored. If they leak the reactor can melt down. Not ideal in parts of the world that experience earthquakes, for example.

    I'm sceptical that in the end

  • Re:

    Except big ones are cheaper than two little ones. Best estimates so far for SMRs have put them at a cost that is anywhere from 5x to 20x that of a large scale nuclear facility in per MWh generated terms.

    Even here you're talking about reactors significantly larger in terms of thermal output than the ones you're comparing them to.

    Westinghouse is quoting a mythical $1bn for an as yet to be optimised / economies of scaled production run of these 300W reactors.
    This is the same Westinghouse that quoted $6bn for 2

    • Re:

      Well, theoretically. As we've seen, big projects (not just nukes) tend to run over budget and time. Smaller projects are easier to manage and account for contingencies. When building many identical reactors you can also learn from the process and improve it, vs making one huge one per decade.

      China is building SMRs now. Let's build a few dozen and see how that goes.

  • Re:

    Nuclear reactors absolutely do, and it has nothing to do with chemical engineering. It has to do with inspection costs, site design costs, per-unit fueling costs, site security costs, and per-unit decommissioning costs (if you don't plan and account for the full cradle to grave lifespan, you are doing it wrong.) It doesn't cost only 1/3 as much to weld and inspect a pipe that carries only 1/3 as much coolant. It probably costs 2/3 as much. By making the same shitty design smaller, they're going to have all

• Re:

  The real problem is they don't include waste disposal and decommissioning in the costs. Of course, neither did the coal plants (or the gas plants), and solar and wind haven't really faced it yet, but they've ALL got this problem. It's just that nuclear has it really bad.

  IIUC, the small nuclear plants have a much worse spent fuel problem than the larger plants.

  N.B.: In principle the nuclear waste problem is easy. Pile it all up in one place with a waterproof underpinning, and just wait for it to stop be

  • 2 hidden comments

• Re:

  It is a Western problem. China is building lots of nuclear.

• Re:

  It will die by autoerotic asphyxiation, choking on its own red tape and process.

  Is that better or worse than asphyxiation from huffing your own fossil fuel fired farts?

• Re:

  No inertia is going to make for sketchy grids.

• Re:

  If we could build these at the same *cost* that wind and solar plantations get built we wouldn't have the problem. The problem with pace is largely related to the desire of the product. The reason the nuclear industry is in the state that it is is because they largely didn't have customers who instead opted for cheaper solutions which left the industry in tatters.

• Re:

  We need different kinds of reactors for nuclear to be even a medium-term solution to our hunger for more electricity.

  Global readily available uranium sources will be tapped out by the end of the century at current consumption rates and their typical use scenarios.

  We're still using gasoline at scale after a century, and we're looking to replace it with something that we currently expect will run out in less than a human lifetime. That seems pretty short sighted.

  We shouldn't build any more traditional nuclea

  • Re:

    This sort of problem almost never turns out to actually be a problem. As readily-available sources decline, the price rises and other sources are identified and techniques for exploiting them invented. Very often, this results in greater supply and lower price than before we approached depletion. In this case, for example, we could ultimately fall back on extracting uranium from seawater. Right now, our methods for doing cost orders of magnitude more than mining it... but the cost of fuel is negligible for

  • Re:

    50 year ago we had 50 years of available oil reserves. Today, we still have 50 years of available oil reserves. 50 years from now, we will still have 50 years of available oil reserves. That is how far ahead it is practical to look, not how much is actually left.

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• Re:

  Doc Brown's Mr. Fusion is just around the corner. Actually, he didn't claim to invent it; probably got it from WalmartGPT in 2030.

• Re:

  Your foil hat is radioactive

• Re:

  That is the nuclear industry for you: Lying when they open their mouths.

• Modular

  Modular means the main reactor components can be mass-produced and shipped to the site, unlike current, meaning 1970's produced, reactors that are all assembled on-site.

  You are probably thinking of micro-reactors, which are self-contained and roughly the size of a small passenger bus. There are a few of those designs getting ready for deployment.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

• Re:

  You are so depressing. Not a single fact based on science, you just complain and complain and complain. And complain a bit more.

  You should really refrain from talking on topics you obviously have no knowledge about, because, as your sig says: The internet does not make people stupid. It just makes the stupid ones more obvious.

  You really don't have to prove this sentence right every time you post, you know. We got it the first time we read one of your comment.

  • Re:

    Well, if you lie and lie and then lie some more, you will never say anything true. I get it, being delusional is far more comfortable.

  • Re:

    He has been whining about scary atoms since the 60s. Probably still wearing his tie-dye and flared jeans.