Technology

59608 readers

3621 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

394

Small modular nuclear reactors get a reality check in new report (newatlas.com)

submitted 5 months ago by machinin@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

154 comments fedilink hide all child comments

[T]he report's executive summary certainly gets to the heart of their findings.

"The rhetoric from small modular reactor (SMR) advocates is loud and persistent: This time will be different because the cost overruns and schedule delays that have plagued large reactor construction projects will not be repeated with the new designs," says the report. "But the few SMRs that have been built (or have been started) paint a different picture – one that looks startlingly similar to the past. Significant construction delays are still the norm and costs have continued to climb."

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

all large projects have this level of corruption and grift

Skill issue. I can't even blame capitalism, since the french manage to get almost 90% of their power from nuclear.

China has 53 GW installed, 25 GW under construction, and another 47 GW planned. Generally they're pretty clear-eyed when it comes to major projects like this, so I think we can infer the availability of cheap hydro and solar doesn't favor doing more than ~15% nuclear since they're only planning to increase it by 150% over the next couple decades.

Maybe that will change when they set up long term storage/reprocessing.

[–] Devorlon@lemmy.zip 12 points 5 months ago

IIRC the French reactors are all nearing their end of service life and'll be decommissioned soon.

[–] vzq@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Surely you made a typo? 50 MW is a tenth of the electrical yield of the smallest PWR you can profitably operate.

[–] alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Off by a factor of 1000. That's why I'm not a nuclear engineer.

[–] flambonkscious@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 months ago

So, there's this thing called Java...