A realistic understanding of their costs and risks is critical.
What are SMRs?
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SMRs are not more economical than large reactors.
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SMRs are not generally safer or more secure than large light-water reactors.
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SMRs will not reduce the problem of what to do with radioactive waste.
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SMRs cannot be counted on to provide reliable and resilient off-the-grid power for facilities, such as data centers, bitcoin mining, hydrogen or petrochemical production.
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SMRs do not use fuel more efficiently than large reactors.
[Edit: If people have links that contradict any the above, could you please share in the comment section?]
The economic advantage of SMRs is that when you make reactors in a location, the 1st is always more expensive than any following reactors. Just a reality of construction, permits, designs, etc. So if you have 4 reactors in one place, that’s pretty nice. They also have the advantage of being able to turn one off for maintenance and then having 2, 3, 4 other reactors in the same vicinity that can pick up the slack for the duration.
As for waste, yeah it’s the same problem. But it’s important to note that the volume of material is not that big. The entire volume produced by all us nuke energy ever takes up a football field stacked 10 yards high. All told, that’s a smaller problem than I ever thought.
I’m not a big nuclear advocate, I’m pretty mid on it. This is where I got all of the above information, an interview with the head of the US DOE loan program https://www.volts.wtf/p/nuclear-perhaps?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
The nice thing about nuclear waste is that it kind of just sorts itself out too. I half suspect not knowing what to do with it and kicking the can down the road is sort of the whole point. Nominally it’s pretty easy to deal with nuclear waste, you seal it up somewhere and leave it to not be radioactive any more. The problem is it takes a long time, and we don’t really know how to communicate to anyone 1000 years in the future “there’s nuclear waste here, stay the fuck away”. Making sure it’s an active topic for discussion kind of keeps it at the forefront and means it’s not forgotten about.
I also learned in that interview that after a relatively short period, the aggressive decay is over and you’re left with a barrel of waste that isn’t actually shooting off radiation very often.
Except that is hardly unique to nuclear waste. A wide variety of industrial processes produce high grade chemical waste, especially electronics like computers, solar panels, and inverters. This is just as deadly as any nuclear waste, and if stumbled upon will kill just as quickly in a hundred years, a thousand years, million years, or a billion years.
There is however a well established solution to this problem, and that is making sure the government knows what and where it is as well as that someone it monitoring and securing the site. The actual chemical makeup of the stuff that kills you doesn’t actually matter all that much compared to makeing sure it stays where it’s supposed to be.
You uh… want to give a single example of solar panel manufacturing waste that is as deadly as nuclear waste in a thousand years?
Humanity has never built anything that has intentionally lasted 10,000 years, much less 250,000.
It’s the height of arrogance to think your society will last a thousand times longer than any in the history of the world.
Arsenic, mercury, gallium, tellurium, and cadmium are all heavy metal waste products produced in quantity for semiconductor manufacturing, are commonly landfilled, pose extreme risk to human health if they ever managed to leach out of the landfill and into a aquifer, and being heavy metals have no non-nuclear method of decay. Given the primary risk of high grade nuclear is also that it is made up of toxic hevey metals that might be dangerous if lost to the local aquifer, it seems fair to compare the two.
Semiconductor manufacturing also makes heavy use of PFAS materials, which while less directly dangerous to human health still do end up measurably entering and contamating the environment through plant wastewater streams. Once in the environment, these also tend to last for between six hundred to a thousand years before being broken down or sequestered.
I don’t think my society will last a hundreds of thousands of years, but i’m pretty sure a society of people in the area will, and if not, then it isn’t a problem because evidently there is evidently no one around to harm. Structures like landfill barriers are not likely to last that long on their own, and as such it falls on people to renew and maintain them for as long as there are people around anyway. Hence why it is imperative that the local government knows about and monitors the site.
All of this is true regardless of which specific heavy metal or acid is stored at the site, though given the small quantity of nuclear waste makes up of similarly harmful industrial wastes it is going to be easier to manage on that face alone.
Obviously humanity hasn’t made anything that lasted tens of thousands of years, we weren’t building anything significant tens of thousands of years ago. We do however have plenty of local governments and buildings that have lasted thousands of years, and which are probably not going anywhere anytime soon.
I get your point, but Gobleki Tepe was built ~11,000 years ago, so we have built things meant to last tens of thousands of years.
Thank you for sharing this link. It was very interesting listening to someone from within the US that is head of an office now and started from Shell Solar.
There is a reasoning that I didn’t get. Maybe I misunderstood something or I lack some information/knowledge. Anyways, here it is:
At 1:02 they talks about nuclear waste saying that all the nuclear waste produced in the US by the nuclear power plants is like a football field that is 10 yards tall and then he talks about why this waste is not concerning.
Later at 1:07 He mentions that the US is not reprocesing the uranium fuel rods, in which 95% of the energy is still there, and that the US should do reprocessing like other countries do.
Doesn’t that mean that these unprocessed rods in the US that are in the “football field of nuclear waste” are therefore a concern?
So energy remaining and radioactivity are separate. The isotope that it becomes has a decently long half life, but it might only be a few protons or neutrons away from something really radioactive.
I do believe that the fuel rods count towards that pile of waste. I think the US has laws or rules that make it hard or impossible to recycle these back into the good stuff, but it’s very doable. France does it to a high degree.
Thank you for taking the time to reply. I think I kinda understand what you say but I have more reading to do. Currently I’m on some relevant wiki pages trying to get a better understanding [Spent nuclear fuel, Radioactive waste, Long-lived fission product].
In case you (or anyone) have any other links to suggest, please do not hesitate.
Damn this website is so much better than reddit
I know nothing on the topic, but the points you raise don’t seem relevant to me?
SMRs are not more economical than large reactors.
Yeah, economies of scale mean small things are generally less efficient than big things. This is a criticism of local power generation that applies just as well to wind turbines for example. Nothing to do with this idea really.
SMRs are not generally safer or more secure than large light-water reactors.
Why would anyone expect large power plants to be less safe than this? I’d expect the technology in both to be safe. Tell me if this is safe or not, not if it’s “safer” than large power plants on some ambiguous scale. Rooftop solar is also less safe than commercial solar power plants just due to being located near someone’s living space, but it’s a useless relative comparison.
SMRs will not reduce the problem of what to do with radioactive waste.
That one is the only valid point to me.
SMRs cannot be counted on to provide reliable and resilient off-the-grid power for facilities, such as data centers, bitcoin mining, hydrogen or petrochemical production.
Why not? Seems like they would.
SMRs do not use fuel more efficiently than large reactors.
This is just a repeat of the first point.
Again, I know nothing on this and don’t have an opinion either way. I’m pointing out this seems to be a criticism but only one of the 5 points seems to actually criticize this.
These are not my points, they come from the article. So for example in relation to your question on the
SMRs cannot be counted on to provide reliable and resilient off-the-grid power…
they have a couple of paragraphs that give an explanation.
My first issue with this, is that he’s still using his information from 2013. For instance, he claims that the spent fuel is just as dangerous. Yet we have proven time and time again, that the spent fuel rods can be used in other nuclear facilities to generate even more power off of them. We have the technology (theoretically of course, you need to actually build the facilities for this to work…) get even more energy off this “waste”, in turn also making it far less dangerous!
Second issue being he says the reactors would need a secondary power source in case of emergency. Duh? Thats his reason, is that they would need a backup power source to keep the coolant system running… Duh.
All these are kinda no brainers, lol. I think we are still going to need nuclear as a baseload power supply where hydro doesn’t work because it’s too dry or flat. We gotta get off “clean coal” and “natural gas” as baseload power. I like sodium reactors and advanced, non-light water designs. Light water has become a political hot potato even though it is far safer than coal plants in terms of number of people hurt or killed by emissions.
As the coal and gas industry has done, advanced designs will need new names like “natural rock” to distance themselves from negative connotations.
My personal stance is that sustainability cannot be achieved within capitalism due to its model of eternal growth. We can have one or the other, but not both.
So creating more energy could not be the solution. Creating less demand would be, and the demand comes from industries.
More often than not, I it seems to me this discussion about clean energy is a deflection of the real problem which is industrialisation under capitalism. We don’t question anymore what this energy is needed for.
Good news then, Microsoft is building a new multibillion dollar AI facility which will ratchet up power demands alongside the increase in power demands for crypto. Oh wait, I said good news. Uhh…
We have excellent incentive to start a Dyson sphere?
No sun to warm us, No global warming.
But in all seriousness some of the breakthroughs in fusion reactors have me excited long term. It’s nowhere near ready yet, but we’ve hit net energy gain, just can’t sustain it well.
I think the EU Commission has done a fairly good job of listing the pros and contras of small modular reactors:
They have some advantages over conventional (large) reactors in the following areas:
- if they are serially manufactured without design chances, manufacturing is more efficient than big unique projects
- you can choose a site with less cooling water
- you can choose a site where a fossil-burning plant used to be (grid elements for a power plant are present) but a renewable power plant may not be feasible
- some of them can be safer, due to a higher ratio of coolant per fuel, and a lower need for active cooling*
Explanation: even a shut down NPP needs cooling, but bigger ones need non-trivial amounts of energy, for example the 5700 MW plant in Zaporizhya in the middle of a war zone needs about 50 MW of power just to safely stay offline, which is why people have been fairly concerned about it. For comparison, a 300 MW micro-reactor brought to its lowest possible power level might be safe without external energy, or a minimal amount of external energy (which could be supplied by an off-the-shelf diesel generator available to every rescue department).
The overview of the Commission mentions:
SMRs have passive (inherent) safety systems, with a simpler design, a reactor core with lower core power and larger fractions of coolant. These altogether increase significantly the time allowed for operators to react in case of incidents or accidents.
I don’t think they will offer economical advantages over renewable power. Some amont of SMRs might however be called for to have a long-term steerable component in the power grid.
Put as much money into the research of SMRs as you would like to waste. Meanwhile we just build a cheaper, better and more reliable system based on renewables.
This will happen with or without the nukebro hypetrain.
None of these points are relevant. Nobody is selling SMRs as better than large-scale plants (at least I hope they’re not). The point of SMRs is that they are much easier to bring in and put down. A huge portion of the world still runs on fossil fuels, often with frequent brownouts or scheduled blackouts. Being able to bring in a RELIABLE non-fossil fuel power plant at a smaller scale would be huge. Distributed solar has some pretty awesome potential for individual households if you don’t care about on- demand power, but you do eventually need something for your denser cities etc.