Off the Siberian coast, not far from Alaska, a Russian ship has been docked at port for four years. The Akademik Lomonosov, the world’s first floating nuclear power plant, sends energy to around 200,000 people on land using next-wave nuclear technology: small modular reactors.
This technology is also being used below sea level. Dozens of US submarines lurking in the depths of the world’s oceans are propelled by SMRs, as the compact reactors are known.
SMRs — which are smaller and less costly to build than traditional, large-scale reactors — are fast becoming the next great hope for a nuclear renaissance as the world scrambles to cut fossil fuels. And the US, Russia and China are battling for dominance to build and sell them.
One of the less widely discussed issues with nuclear is that the bigger plants are all somewhat unique in their engineering particulars, which makes it more costly to maintain them. SMRs can be more readily standardised, which is expected to improve their economics as well as their cost to maintain.
If I’m not mistaken SMRs also handle power demand shifts better and don’t have to just do a base load. Something very useful with the growth of renewables and how they are not always supplying power.
That is a particular type of reactor that is in testing.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottcarpenter/2020/08/31/bill-gates-nuclear-firm-says-new-reactor-can-backstop-grid-with-molten-salt-storage/?sh=d81c7c55e65c
Renewables being unable to do base load is just a myth that has been debunked countless times.
I’ve love for just one of the people anonymously downvoting to chime in. What you wrote is completely accurate but every nuclear-themed post here and on Reddit is downvoted without anyone putting forward a counter-argument.
here https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1610381114 we can talk about this, feel free to put forward counter arguments, the gist of the cited paper is that previous studies claiming 100% renewable baseload is possible requires sketchy manipulation of the expected demand as well as currently unavailable storage technology on an almost impossible scale. We’re working on all kinds of storage solutions but the reality is we’re not there yet. I’m rooting for molten salt storage or compressed gas storage rather than ramping up more lithium battery storage. Flow batteries are promising as well, but in any case we won’t have enough storage or transmission capability to have a 100% renewable baseload in the next couple of decades.
Looks like someone beat me to it :)
“In sum, Clack et al.’s analysis is riddled with errors and has no impact on Jacobson et al.’s conclusions.”
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1708069114
Surely there wouldn’t any astroturfing be going on here, would there?
I don’t think it’s astroturfing, it’s just cognitive dissonance. Lots of people were raised thinking that nuclear power was the future and they can’t let go of that. That’s why they downvote without commenting - there’s no factual case for new nuclear and that goes double for SMRs.
No, it’s because it’s an off topic tangent. We’re talking about SMRs doing not-baseline. Not renewables doing baseline. The very fact they brought it up is indication of binary thought patterns like team sports thinking. “They are for this one thing I don’t like, therefore they must be against the thing I do like!” kind of thing. False dichotomy.
Apparently it’s also false on top of that. Go figure.
This is only partially true, France for example has standardized its reactors in the past, with a lot of success, and is planning to do it again for the new projects which are planned in the 2030s. Now it was done in the past with little care for local populations and so on, so we’ll see how it goes. What is true though is that standardization also makes sense when there is a repetitive market foreseen. New nuclear project tend to be announced in small numbers, due to the difficulty of investing so much capital at a time, which makes standardization difficult. Smaller reactors may help, but I remain sceptical with the tech.
Can we not standardize the big ones? Their only dependent factor is a big enough water source for cooling, right? Everything else is just land space and supplies.
I think the scale of the projects and the amount of time it takes to build gives people time to work things in to the plans. I also imagine it’s affected by the local supply chain.
That being said I’m more on the fence about them after reading about some of the challenges involved in making them economical. Can you imagine a factory recall on a reactor part? And that’s not even talking about nuclear waste disposal which we still haven’t figured out reliably beyond “stick it over there and hopefully it won’t be a problem for a few hundred years.”
The construction projects themselves also typically require upgrades to local infrastructure. I live near the failed nuclear project in SC and they had to upgrade rail infrastructure near my town, they had to build multiple new bridges over the railroad because the clearance wasn’t high enough for some of the prefabricated components that had to be transported to the site by rail, etc.
They also depend on a final nuclear disposal site.
Yes and no. Currently the rules around nuclear plants are so strict that each installation becomes bespoke, because small changes that are the reality of construction need to get reapproved.
If regulatory bodies were more open to approving acceptable ranges, or being proactive in the design process we could have more standardized designs.
I think one of the differences is where the construction happens. SMR should be able to come from the factory in more complete modules, vs assembling everything in the field. While it could never do the volume to make it mass production, in theory you could get similar benefits from automation, repetition, controlled environment, etc. Meanwhile site assembly should be corresponding simpler
They have only one small drawback, which is that they’re nothing but vapourware.
Sadly! I’m not in this field but I had a professor at uni who was involved in these. I wish they were more prevalent
And why do you think they’re not?
What I’m trying to say is that I’m a fan of the concept despite not being an expert.