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Bill Gates-backed nuclear contender Terra Power aims to build dozens of UK reactors
(www.cityam.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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No matter how you think about nuclear power in general, it will not be of any substantial help against climate change.
It's expensive and takes forever to build. Even the optimistic projections of the vendors are well above what wind and solar deliver right now.
Nuclear power is just a tech bro pipe dream. Nobody needs it. It's just prestige.
The goal of several of these new companies is to build small modular plants that are cookie cutter instead of individual boutique designs. That should bring cost down substantially.
It’s the opposite. Nuclear plants were built as large as possible because that was the only way that made any kind of financial sense. SMRs are a waste of money.
It might have been why in the past, but the issues right now with building new plants is getting a design through production that can survive the review process. Costs come down on the second plant because you have a design you can clone rather than developing it from scratch.
There are already several uses by several countries in using miniature nuclear power plants. This is just an attempt to make it more available to everyone.
Nuclear has never been competitive in terms of cost against the alternatives, first coal and gas, now renewables. In fact, nuclear is only getting more expensive. I really don't understand why you want to pay more for power than is necessary. I don't.
Well, the idea is to save the planet.
But it's a waste of resources, remember money is a token used to distribute production potential and reconsider it - all those people and resources could be allocated to other more efficient projects.
Nuclear in twenty years or solar, wind, trains, more efficiently insulated buildings, localized and ecologically sustainable infrastructure and industry before the end of the decade?
Get those tokens elsewhere IMO we should go for Both nuclear And renewables. We are not alone in the west.
We need to compare the cost of nuclear against firm renewables, including storage (developing technology) and long-distance transmission (location-dependent political/technical challenges).
Comparing against coal and gas is meaningless unless we include the atmospheric cleanup costs.
In places where this has been studied extensively renewables with storage are still the cheapest by a long way. Australia has the whole state of South Australia (plus Tasmania) as a test case. SA has transitioned to almost 100% renewable supply in under a decade.
We have a cost effective, distributed, redundant, easy to build solution. SMRs are not proven in cost or reliability. They should be studied and trialed, but not at the expense of acting responsibly today.
The Westinghouse AP1000 was a modular design approved in 2004. The US started building one in 2010 and just finished this year (well, it’s not actually finished yet, but the first reactor is now online).
I think China was the only country to build one in less than a decade - and it’s much easier to perform public works when you’re a authoritarian government who doesn’t have to deal with public or environmental concerns.
Well, then show me any viable concept. Just one. Not an "experimental protoype". An actual concept, that is even roughly comparable in cost to currently deployed systems.
Hi, I'm a physicist who believes that nuclear power is the most realistic option of moving ourselves off fossil fuels, without the astronomical cost and untested technology that would be required in order to create a majority intermittent grid.
I do also have strong feelings about crypto, mostly about how much of a incredible waste of resources it is and how disgusting it is that the obvious scam nature of most of it hasnt been clamped down on by governments
If you're a physicist why are you stating what you "believe"? I would've thought facts and evidence would be more appealing than feels. Of course facts and evidence point to nuclear being a massive waste of everyone's money when far cheaper alternatives are now available. Maybe that's why?
Facts and theory can only tell you so much, eventually things need tested and there are a lot of factors going into a potential move t nuclear power
bevaise human afairs cant be reduced down to a sime harmonic oscillator and solved. There is no equation to solve for "best societal outcome".
renewables are good to an extent but storage is an unsolved and difficult problem. Including enough storage to make them work as the majority source of power for a grid is vastly more expensive than nuclear power. Currently we are nowhere near that however, and given solar and wind deployment are bottlenecked in many places the obvious way forwards is to build as much renewables AND nuclear as possible.
Source on "storage is an unsolved and difficult problem" and "the majority source of power for a grid is vastly more expensive than nuclear power" because both of those appear to be false.
Storage at the scale needed to deal with intermittant generation is unsolved. You would be looking at trillions of dollars on top of the costs of actual generation for a large european country. Price per kWh of storage and usage of countries are easily searched figures, multiply them together for a few hundred hours and it is obvious.
That is what makes a majority renewable grid more expensive. Obviously fossil fuels are cheaper ignoring externalities, but assuming you want to get off those and dont have spare hydro capacity what otber choice is there?