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Five Things the “Nuclear Bros” Don’t Want You to Know About Small Modular Reactors
(blog.ucsusa.org)
this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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There are plenty of good arguments against SMRs: none of them include terrorism.
The theory was always that you could get economies of scale if you were building the same reactor every time in a factory and transporting it to install somewhere else. In practice those economies never materialized (did they even exist?)
Meanwhile solar, wind, and batteries have plummeted in cost. There is no need for base load power generation if we have sufficient battery storage and an oversupply of generators - which is entirely feasible for wind and solar.
I'm sorry, I think you may not be using 'baseload' correctly. We will absolutely always have to meet the requirements for baseload power generation, otherwise we aren't making enough power and we will have brownouts.
If what you meant was that a grid relying on solar and wind for primary generation and supplemented with battery facilities can make up the deficit at night/on calm days, then while that would be ideal it is extremely unlikely to happen in the next several decades. Battery technology is not anywhere near ready for this solution, and while ESS are making extremely impressive advances, they are such a new technology that it would be intellectually dishonest for me to list their shortcomings here. They are simply too new to know which problems are inherent to the concept, and which are due simply to flawed engineering of a new technology.
For matters of logistics, a few large generating sources linked together are much more desirable than a distributed network. In fact the issue with economies of scale in power generation is one of the arguments against SMRs made by the above linked article's author. One of the biggest concerns with truly distributed power generation is safety - namely, how can you safely work on a downed line when every single house has the independent capacity to energize the lines? But those large power generating stations run into the same issue that SMRs are in vogue to solve; what do we do about crypto miners ~~besides grinding them all up into dog food, which gets my vote.~~ Their drain, and those of industry and data centers and so on, on local power infrastructure remains despite the source of the power in the system.
At temperate latitudes, you can actually get something like 95% of the way there using wind, solar, and reasonable amounts of storage in addition to existing hydropower.
This leaves a fairly small chunk which needs either long-duration storage or firm generation. Nuclear might be able to fill part of that, but only if it comes in at a lower price than currently seems likely. Other technologies, such as induced geothermal and sodium-ion flow batteries are a lot more likely-looking right now.
Yes, exactly! Err, but I'm not sure where the 'actually' comes in. It looks like we're agreeing. Am I misunderstanding? I can try to be a little bit more belligerent if that would help! This is internet commenting, we're supposed to be at each other's throats by this point in the comment chain....
While battery technology is making grand strides, it's my understanding that we're not to a point where we can even speculate on how to renovate our entire grid with them for a vast host of reasons. Using them to cover while switching to other higher-capacity ESSs seems to be the role they are best suited for, and outside of a few experimental exceptions that looks like the role they're stepping into in the current industry. I have high hopes for the future, but we still have a long way to go, especially in longevity. I'm not advocating for SMRs nor expansion of nuclear, solar or wind, just that we should not limit ourselves to considering a subset of our options because of ideological beliefs.
(And I'm sorry, but I have no idea what induced geothermal is. Sounds potentially volcano-y though, so that's always a plus in my book.)
(I don't really see any possible downsides to giving IBM a small nuclear reactor. They seem so nice.)
No need for power generation dedicated to the base load.
Nuclear power generation is base load only: it does not full the role of a peaker.
Battery + renewable technology is already the primary source of power on many grids and the trend continues accelerating in that direction.
I'm really sorry to do this again, but did you mean tribes?
Grids*
Ducking autocorrect