- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- climate@slrpnk.net
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- climate@slrpnk.net
First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled::NuScale and its primary partner give up on its first installation.
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Might save you a click:
Too many investors pulled out of the project, at least in part due to rapidly falling prices of renewables.
Interest rates too, I’d imagine. Investing in new nuclear and expecting a decent ROI would be a dumb move now.
I am surprised they got any investors. From what I see the only way to get investment money is to say you are making a new social media app or building a condo.
Hear me out … nuclear powered AI NFTs.
Does it support blockchain?
You know it does.
Oh man this is great. Hold on let me go get the sack of money labeled “pensions” and the other labeled “Covid relief funds”.
It is time
Yeah the same reason nuclear is being rejected everywhere, it’s economically unfeasible and a huge liability - no one wants to end up with a hugely expensive powerstation that no one wants to buy power from because it’s a thousand times more expensive per kWh than any other option.
Does solar power use some rare earth minerals and stuff like that? They own those, but you probably need them for nuclear and others
I can’t put a nuclear station on my roof or in my basement
Were you… Were you going to?
I mean, a teenage boy scout once built something like an amateur reactor in a shed in his parents backyard shed, so I see nothing wrong with a tractor on the roof or in a basement.
Yes and so do the batteries and all the controls.
There’s not necessarily a need for batteries. I’m generating energy and use it up directly, and inject the overage back into the grid against a compensation, and then at night or during times of heavy cloud coverage, I draw power from the grid pretty much on par with the money I received. So far it’s a zero sum game or slightly profitable.
Ok cool. So you outsourced the battery needs to someone else. Good job. Hey I figured out how to fix global warming, all we need to do is move all the stuff that causes it to different countries.
Didn’t address the controls I noticed.
Please read up on how power grids work, before returning to this conversation. Thanks.
Got a point go ahead and make it.
What he means is it’s not getting stored in a battery
Yeah go ahead and make a solar system with the dirt you have on your land. All you are doing is supporting one group of corporations over another. Worst argument I have ever seen for solar is what you have presented today.
Damn
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Nuclear power provides energy that is largely free of carbon emissions and can play a significant role in helping deal with climate change.
One hope for changing that has been the use of small, modular nuclear reactors, which can be built in a centralized production facility and then shipped to the site of their installation.
Their smaller size makes it easier for passive cooling systems to take over in the case of power losses (some designs simply keep their reactors in a pond).
The government’s Idaho National Lab was working to help construct the first NuScale installation, the Carbon Free Power Project.
Under the plan, the national lab would maintain a few of the first reactors at the site, and a number of nearby utilities would purchase power from the remaining ones.
NuScale CEO John Hopkins tried to put a positive spin on the event, saying, “Our work with Carbon Free Power Project over the past ten years has advanced NuScale technology to the stage of commercial deployment; reaching that milestone is a tremendous success which we will continue to build on with future customers.”
The original article contains 505 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 63%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Welp at least the Saudis will be happy.
True, it does prove their six billion investment in making the largest solar project in the world was a great idea.
Hopefully they’ll continue their plan to invest almost half a trillion dollars in renewables this decade.
I remember so many nuclear stans on lemmy a bit ago refusing to acknowledge that renewables are getting so good and cheap that they are more important to solving climate change than nuclear. I wonder how they feel seeing investors pull out in favor of renewables?
Like crap? Renewables are good in places where they work. Nuclear works everywhere and is more reliable.
Investors pulling out of a nuclear project like this just looks like a, really dumb kneejerk reaction. “Oh! New shiny thing!”
3 people got killed by one of these like 60 years ago due to blatant design flaws that could’ve been solved. This means they can never exist again.
Also remember that time that they wanted to test a safety system so they disabled the other safety systems and the protocols said they should have shut down the reactor instead of doing the test due to other factors but they did the test anyways and it exploded? Oh and their “emergency off” button was actually an “emergency increase power then off” button. Clearly there’s no way to do these things safely.
I was talking about the one that exploded in Idaho. It was a “small” reactor. The control rods had to be adjusted by hand. Clearly there was nothing they could have done instead to avoid human error /s
Lol I wasn’t familiar with that one.
But my point was that even the big ones that have had big failures were caused by dumb shit that was entirely avoidable. All three of the famous ones could be designed away in new reactors.
The problem I have is these problems are all caused by corner cutting and yes we could live in fantasy world where corporations don’t cut corners to save money and will just keep pouring money into a pit just to be safe even when they’re already losing money hand over fist due to not being able to compete with kWh pricing from renewables - but we don’t live in that world.
We’ll end up with minimum wage staff working without proper training, safety systems turned off because they’re too expensive to repair, and leaks not reported because company policy is broken. They’re going to be run by the same companies the are dumping oil into the Niger Delta for the last however many decades simply because it’s cheaper than fixing the issue - putting faith that ‘we’ll do it properly this time’ is incredibly dumb based on the near limitless examples of that never happening.
Nope, the writing was on the wall for almost a year on this one. The whole nuclear industry in general is a long history of cost and schedule overruns. This is more of the same. Investors are not dumb.
You can invest in a solar or wind deployment and have it running and producing revenue in six to twelve months. You can invest in nuclear with a stated schedule of five years, have it blow past that mark, needing more money to keep it going (or write the whole thing off), and then start actually getting revenue at the ten year mark. This isn’t mere speculation, it’s exactly what happens. Oh, and it’s producing at least half the MWh per invested dollar as that solar or wind farm.
It’s amazing anyone is putting any money into nuclear at this point. For the most part, they aren’t. The federal government has shown willingness to sign new licenses for plants. Nobody is buying.
SMRs do not appear to change any of this.
Now, something I think we should do is subsidize reactors that process old waste. Lots better than the current plan of letting it sit around, and probably better than storing it in a cave for millenia, too.
This. Green energy works best when complimented with nuclear energy. Then, we can ween away from big oil.
It’s the opposite. Nuclear outputs as close to 24/7 as possible, you can’t ramp it up and down to accommodate variable output from renewables for practical and economic reasons.
I mean you can vary it pretty significantly depending on the reactor type, but even if you couldn’t you can still put the energy to work in alternative ways, such as pumping water up into reservoirs/damns to generate energy at other points, or using the excess energy to split water. There are many ways to use excess energy.
So your solution to excess nuclear is to store it. The solution to shortfalls of renewables is also to store it.
Why do we need nuclear?
You can do the same with excess power from renewables though. My point was that you need something to fill in the gaps when renewable output is low, whether that be from batteries, pumped storage, peaker plants, etc.
Nuclear doesn’t fit in here, there are no nuclear peaker plants.
The problem with solar is that the sun doesn’t shine overnight. The good thing with that is that we use much less power overnight than we do during the day.
If you’re relying a lot on solar, you need to build a big-ass battery that you charge during the day and use at night.
Alternatively, you build a nuclear or gas plant sized to overnight usage and run them 24/7. Then, you build way smaller batteries to handle dispatchability and smoothing demand over the course of a day. Nuclear is good for baseline power, and doesn’t come with the environmental costs of a gas plant. It has a niche.
HOLY SHIT THE SUN DOESN’T SHINE AT NIGHT, WHY HAVEN’T WE THOUGHT OF THIS?
Peak load is during the day, so initially it’s not really a problem. Going from a grid that’s 0% solar to 10% solar is really easy. The solar is going to just displace peaker plants. You don’t really have to worry about night.
Going from a grid that’s 70% solar to 80% solar is way more expensive, because you’re probably using all that power at night.
You don’t go all in on solar, that’s dumb and unnecessary. The wind blows when the sun doesn’t shine. We have lots of historical data on how the two would perform and how long a lull would be when neither are performing. Pad that number, put in enough storage to cover that period, and there you go.
Getting to 95% solar/wind/storage is relatively easy. Nuclear does not help this mix. It just makes it more expensive.
The problem with solar is that the sun doesn’t shine overnight.
Big if true. Winds tend to be stronger at night though.
if you’re relying a lot on solar, you need to build a big-ass battery that you charge during the day and use at night.
Or pumped hydro, compressed gas, molten salt, green hydrogen, etc.
Nuclear is good for baseline power
Base load. See here: https://cleantechnica.com/2022/06/28/we-dont-need-base-load-power/
Eh, classic problem. By the time we all realize something was actually a good solution and should be used, it’s time to move on. And some people don’t get that memo as quickly.
Might be easier to get people’s opinions if you don’t insult them in the first sentence.
“stan” is a common word for excessive fanatic. It isn’t always purely an insult. I also was specifically referring to people that were pretty rude in their behavior before. Feel free to assume I’m not talking about you, I’m not saying there is anything wrong with people who like nuclear.
Think of me as a solar stan if it makes things simpler
Nuclear stans? Us vs them thinking here.
Yes my political opponents are the people I disagree with. I don’t see your point here.
Fixing our energy demands so they stop fucking the planet doesn’t require us to hold hands and sing together, we just have to invest in the proper energy infrastructure. Arguing about what energy infrastructure is proper is a good way to make sure we are looking at all sides of this.
I feel indifferent. Nuclear is good way to do shitload of energy. Not sure about the small reactors
Not only a lot but STABLE energy.
and one of the most clean to boot, all the residue is accounted for and stored solid in big concrete barrels to decay until harmlessness
It was such a unnecessary opinion that turned up so often on social media that I have to imagine it was seeded by mining companies.
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We’ve wasted so much money in r&d simply because it’s a tech that allows the rich to maintain their power monopoly, if we’d spent all that on more sensible options we’d be far closer to an ecologically sustainable future.
