> Samuel B. Morris, the general manager and chief engineer of Los Angeles’s Department of Water and Power, traveled all the way to Geneva in 1955 to attend the first International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. There, he made a case for small reactors, arguing that because the “number of small units…is many times the number of large units,” there could be “economy in development and repetitive manufacture” of the small units.
> But nothing in the history of small nuclear reactors suggests that they would be more economical than full-size ones. In fact, the record is pretty clear: Without exception, small reactors cost too much for the little electricity they produced, the result of both their low output and their poor performance.
For me, SMRs don't pass the smell test. Buying one big plot of land for a reactor, building one power interconnect, having a localized water impact is way easier and cheaper than many. Even if its cheaper to build small reactor vessels, MANY of the other costs become more expensive in larger numbers. Costs that you can ignore while you're just building a prototype.
> Even if its cheaper to build small reactor vessels, MANY of the other costs become more expensive in larger numbers.
There is no way SMR could beat solar+battery power cost even now. With sodium and other batteries projected to reduce storage cost, it is even more unlikely that SMR could be price competitive in future grids. SMR is the only way that dying western nuclear industry could attempt to deal with ballooning compliance and finance costs and hope for revival. China or India doesn't have this compliance cost and still build conventional nuclear.
Even for the SMR usecase that got funding recently, mega datacenter electricity, there is new geothermal power companies getting funding and are transitioning from pilot projects to production. Some are using tech that is already being used in oil fracking industry for decades, so new geothermal tech scaling up has far less roadblocks technology and compliance wise. So other than military and mobile civil applications like nuclear icebreaker, I don't see the chance of SMR succeeding anywhere else.
bryanlarsen
To a first approximation, China does not build nuclear power. Nuclear's share of power production in China is 4% and dropping. It seems to me that the main reason China keeps building a relatively tiny amount of nuclear is strategic. Reasons like ensuring they never forget how and ensuring they always have buildable designs so that if something changed they could ramp up the program. And probably even more likely: nuclear expertise is important to the country's military.
DennisP
But coal is still 49%. The whole point of nuclear in a carbon-free, mostly-renewable grid is to avoid needing enormous amounts of storage and overproduction. That's a need that doesn't come up when you're still half fossil.
If you want to decarbonize as fast as possible, it makes sense to focus on rolling out wind/solar/battery as fast as possible for now, but keep developing nuclear technology to cover the last bit where it starts getting especially expensive to replace fossil with renewables without losing reliable power. That's exactly what China appears to be doing. They're not just building a few reactors, they're also the world leaders in developing various GenIV designs, like molten salt reactors.
bryanlarsen
The most cost efficient new-build grid is 90-98% solar/wind/battery depending on your locales insolation & wind coverage. (Source Ember Energy) The remaining 2-10% is nat gas, if you have a piped source, or coal if you don't.
But 98% renewable doesn't mean you can hit 100% by adding 2% more of something else, it means your something else has to supply ~100% of the power 2% of the time.
If China is aiming for that cost-optimal 90-98% renewables, that means they need to build a lot of coal.
robocat
> supply ~100% of the power 2% of the time
Or you design the majority of loads so they can be turned off for 2% of the time.
Load shedding is a better solution than running peakers for [heated] towel rails.
bryanlarsen
If you do that, you'd then need to find a way to supply 98% of the power 2% of the time. It helps, but not much.
bethekidyouwant
It would also be better if you ate only vegetables and drove an ultralight (ebike) good luck. I personally like being able to turn on my lights 100% of the time
Earw0rm
The heck kind of lights are you running that won't go all night on a battery that fits in your palm?
joha4270
The one in my oven.
It's not about lights, it's about electricity always being available.
And well, always having power available (for domestic, but also for expensive production facilities that looses money while idle) using renewables is a lot more expensive than generating most of your power with renewables
fpoling
And they build a lot of modern coal power station with over 45% efficiency and flexibility in power output.
idiotsecant
Solar battery is not by any stretch of any possible definition the cheapest generation to deploy. Not even close. We do a disservice to the entire conversation saying easily falsifiable things like that. At 90% penetration solar + battery has a LFSCOE somewhere around $800/mwh depending on the study. Natural gas is something like 30-60. Solar panels are cheap. Building the required transmission and storage to service those panels is far more expensive than the panels themselves.
Increased renewable generation is an important goal, but we need to let the facts guide the path, not the other way around.
ViewTrick1002
Please, don’t cite the LFSCOE paper again. Citing it shows you have a beef against renewables.
That paper uses one renewable source, like only solar, and 2018-19 cost data for storage.
A real grid is made up of a mix of sources, which is why the research lately has focused on system costs.
All those analyses find that renewable grids are far cheaper than if involving new built nuclear power.
A) I am an electrical engineer who makes a living designing control systems for renewable generation. I know more about most of this than just about anyone in this conversation.
B) the post I am replying to is specifically calling for a 98% solar grid.
marshray
Enormous amounts of storage is awesome and overproduction is a good thing when its marginal cost is ~zero.
ViewTrick1002
The problem is that the economics of a ”firming”/”peaking” nuclear reactor is absolutely stupid due to essentially being only fixed costs.
It is already stupidly expensive when running at 100% 24/7. Now try running it only when renewables and storage doesn’t deliver.
Animats
That's a fundamental problem with nuclear plants. Their classic "baseload" niche is gone. Like the intermittent sources, wind and solar, they need storage to hold what they overproduce during peak periods.
This is also true of geothermal, which, like nuclear, is almost all fixed capital cost.
sfn42
It's only a problem because of capitalism. Every plant needs to independently make money, so nobody wants to be the ones spinning down because that's their profit margin dwindling.
But society would be better off with excess generation. So we either need a system where some are incentivized to spin down, perhaps by being paid a consistent amount regardless or something like that, or we need publicly owned power generation that doesn't care about profit.
ViewTrick1002
This argument assumes we must build nuclear power.
The problem is that electricity is fundamentally priced on the margin. Now that we are moving beyond a purely centralized design.
Think about a homeowner or factory with their own renewables and storage.
They fundamentally operate on marginal price by choosing when they use their own system and when they buy from the grid.
If you add state owned reliable power to this mix they will cherry-pick. Their own cheap electricity when it delivers and the states subsidized reliable electricity when it doesn’t.
We can try add all manner of markets, fixed connection costs and what not to this but all it does is introduce strange arbitrage possibilities in the market.
Which is why we have settled on net energy markets and then the lowest possible amount of ancillary markets to shore up any gaps which would cause problems for the larger society.
sfn42
We have needed to build nuclear power since the day it was invented. The amount of fossil fueled power generation is indisputable proof of that.
The only way we don't need nuclear power is if we have some other way of producing the energy we need without dooming the planet, and obviously we do not as we're still burning billions of tons of coal every year. Not to mention gas.
We could have made power generation fully fossil free many decades ago if we actually took climate change seriously. It would have been fine. Sure fossil fuels may have been cheaper, but if you include the damage they're already causing and will cause in the future you could multiply the cost of nuclear by orders of magnitude and it would still come out on top. Plus higher investment would lead to faster improvement in the technology, mass production of components and lower cost etc.
ViewTrick1002
Thats crying over spilled milk. We’ve spent the past 70 years trying to build out nuclear power. It didn’t deliver cheap energy.
Today, renewables and storage are the cheapest energy sources in human history. They are filling the gap nuclear power never managed to fill.
psd1
I agree that renewable with storage is cheaper of you price in destruction of habitable zones of the planet. Most people don't, and the dollar cost of the storage is a problem over fossil.
boplicity
The coal argument about China doesn't hold water when you look at what they're actually building. Around 80% of their new power sources are renewable, and 10 to 15% is coal. They're aggressively focusing primarily on building renewable -- so to say that their coal is 49% is either misleading or entirely missing the point.
p2detar
This assumes that the renewables built are actually contributing to the economy, which we don‘t actually know for sure. In fact there was an article stating that they discard a lot of the energy produced because the grid cannot deliver. [1]
> China, the world's top producer of solar power, rejected 360 terawatt-hours (TWh) of clean power from January to June, up 49% from the same period a year earlier, according to a report this month by Global Energy Monitor (GEM) and the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
That's why I said in my comment that China is "rolling out wind/solar/battery as fast as possible."
melling
China is building more new nuclear power than the rest of the world combined. They’ll soon produce as much renewable electricity as the United States produces electricity
testing22321
They have 36-38 reactors under construction today [1]. I think that’s a bit more than just keeping the wheels turning
which is great, but as i understand it will still lead to an overall decline in share of nuclear power. The scale of their power production is unfathomable
testing22321
Agree.
They’re building a massive amount of nuclear. They’re building a monumental amount of solar+wind.
bryanlarsen
Which works out to about 4 per year. And most of them are under 1GW.
SECProto
> And most of them are under 1GW
No, almost every one is above 1GW - divide the net capacity by the number under construction to see the power [1]. They appear to be almost all CAP1400 (1.4GW), Hualong One (1.0GW), or CAP1000 (1.0GW). I see a single Linglong 1 (100MW) under construction. Proposed are all above 1GW.
And almost exactly half of all reactors under construction in the entire world.
chickenbig
> There is no way SMR could beat solar+battery power cost even now.
Not a particular fan of this paper, but it does illustrate a point ... https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8867359 showed that for the UK to go 100% solar it would need an energy capacity of 1/3 of the total grid energy demand over the year. Figure 6 A shows the big trend of 6 1/2 months of discharge and 5 1/2 months of charge (i.e. cycle perhaps once a year). Seasonal variations do matter.
ViewTrick1002
Not sure what relevancy a 2019 paper has today?
It also seems like they are constraining the system to have no overproduction.
It’s like assuming that a fossil based system has all its producers generating the expected capacity factor and then smoothing out the season and daily demand changes with storage. Due to the difference between summer and winter demand such a fossil system would also need to have months of storage to compensate.
Which of course is absolute stupidity. When you can just overbuild production capacity and leave a far simpler problem to solve.
elcritch
If solar+battery were cheaper wouldn't the new AI data centers be opting to pay to build that rather than nuclear or LPG options?
mayama
To be specific, solar with 4hr storage is price competitive with grid right now. Storage becomes expensive after that at 8hrs even with projected sodium or lithium prices. For a datacenter usage they probably need couple of days storage at 50hrs like the planned google datacenter. Only alternate chemistry batteries that could be scaled up easily like flow, iron air, zinc etc. could be competitive for multi day storage, though most of these are still at experimental or pilot stages.
> Google’s new Minnesota data center comes with the world’s largest battery—and won’t raise electric bills
> The tech giant says it will fund enough new wind, solar, and long-duration storage to cover the project’s power demand and avoid shifting costs to ratepayers.
to11mtm
Nuclear, FBOW, has one big advantage.
Namely, It's very easy to 'design to load' where you don't need to worry about the next shipment of Coal, or an extended weather event causing excessive cloud cover and depleting your reserves.
Heck, even as far as compared to LPG, you don't have to worry as much about disruptions or possible cost shifts around LPG supply.
Yes, I'm possibly tongue-in-cheek handwaving specific types of 'weather events' here and potential impacts, i.e. Tsunamis... OTOH it's a lot easier in current gen designs to make something that would have minimal risk for something, say, in the middle of nowhere Texas.
Procrastes
Some of the data centers in Texas are at least partly being built to turn surplus natural gas into cash.[1][2]
It works better on a geographically spread-out grid, and the data centers are running into the same limit that renewable plants are, which is that the grid is struggling to keep up (in large part, in many places, due to a history of underinvestment).
teamonkey
They are cheaper, that’s why in most of the world, datacentres are being built where there’s copious solar or wind power.
The problem is that they need full power 24/365.
fpoling
Data centers with good load balancing between regions do not need exactly the same power 24/365 so the latest solar-wind-storage is already cheaper in theory. But it would take few years before production of sodium and other batteries will scale up and the mean time a turbine powered by natural gas wins.
stymaar
> there is new geothermal power companies getting funding and are transitioning from pilot projects to production.
If geothermal works economically (outside of volcanic zones where it already does) then it's game over for any other power source except existing dams though because it solves all problems at once.
That'd be a great thing for humanity but I don't think it's worth stopping pursuing alternatives already, because it's still a big "if".
will5421
Won’t geothermal cool the Earth’s core?
stymaar
Technically it would, but the same way an individual ant's breath contribute to global warming.
Note that the thermal energy contained in the inner earth isn't a fixed amount: the earth constantly generates new heat from friction and radioactivity, and that new heat is radiated away in space at night, alone the heat captured from the sun during the day. So technically geothermal will increase the efficiency of this heat transfer a tiny bit, but it's really a negligible amount. (In reality the ant's contribution to global warming is probably orders of magnitude than the phenomenon we're talking about here).
Procrastes
I'm not a geologist, but for comparison, the Siberian Traps[1] erupted for 2 million years, and there have been other large events on that scale. Any heat we release will be insignificant in comparison.
Not the core measurably, but my understanding is that it can very slowly cool the volume of earth immediately around the heat extraction site.
I have full faith in modern engineers' ability to account for these effects in the plant designs.
Ekaros
Nope. It is very far away from core. Core is very big. And energy is already flowing outwards. So just using it really have not any significant impact.
Real issue is that it is not actually usable everywhere. Again Earth is big and going deep in some places is very hard.
MachineMan
It could prevent volcanoes from erupting perhaps.
arpinum
SMR is driven by funding, insurance, and regulation. China doesn't have these issues and builds conventional at a great price. China is building 37 reactors, only 4-5 are SMR-type units, and are larger at 600MW. The rest are standard PWR, and the 40+ in planning are dominating by standard PWR.
Regulatory risk is too high, building too infrequent to understand costs, funding for first-of-its-kind is too hard for nuclear in most countries. SMR makes it fundable. New designs give the hope that regulatory burdens can be lowered.
bryanlarsen
China's nuclear production is only growing in an absolute sense. As a share of production, it's dropping, from a very low level of 4%. China is building other power types far faster than nuclear.
DanTheManPR
This is an important point: in a lot of ways, SMRs are a strictly worse than 1000MW plant. The potential financial benefits come from all the other factors you mentioned. I would rather have a "worse" nuclear power plant that actually gets built.
brennanpeterson
Why? It then proves nuclear is uneconomical?
Regulatory arbitration like this serves nothing?
Don't get me wrong, I would love to see more nuclear, but bad nuclear is not in fact better than none.
arpinum
It gives evidence the viability of nuclear is a political choice. China is using proven designs and delivering a good price for base load.
matthewdgreen
The hope of SMR is that it can be cost-effective at the same level that other factory-produced power sources are. If that's not on the table, then large-scale nuclear deployment mostly isn't going to happen.
briffle
> If it's so much cheaper to build multiple small reactors, just build one big plant with 24 small reactors.
That is literally the plan with several designs like NuScale (and I think TerraPower). The plan with NuScale is to ship the reactors on rail or barge, and then truck it in the last few miles. So they cost savings is in not having to custom desgin the actual components for each site, and build them on site. Standard reactor, standard monitoring systems, standard control room able to monitor multiple reactors, etc.
Plus, when you have 12 of them onsite in one large area, you can take one offline for refueling, and still produce power with the rest of them.
pfdietz
NuScale infamously failed to get their reactor funded in Utah (UAMPS and the CFPP), it was just too expensive. Costs kept rising, large utilities declined to sign up, and in the end those utilities remaining were going to hit the contractual off ramp so it was just cancelled. I have some links to minutes of municipal utility meetings in Idaho Falls that showed the wheels coming off (even though there was great local support for the effort.)
Their design requires considerably more steel and concrete per MW(e) than a large conventional PWR power plant. You don't do civil construction in a factory, and that's where much of the cost is. Their design appears to have it roots in the (false) idea that what was holding back nuclear was perception of safety, rather than cost.
agarwaen163
Your point is moot, it's the plan with almost all SMRs other than like the Deep Fission type of lazy ideas.
What about Valar Atomics?
agarwaen163
Your last point is entirely backwards and missed the scaling concept entirely. I suggest you watch a documentary on the Model T. The point being that these aren't civil projects once it's modular. The prices and material are what's being optimized. To compare to large RPVs and BWRs efficiency is idiotic as that's the only place they beat SMRs and the known downside to SMRs which is the point of scaling it.
It has always been a regulatoryu issue. As given by the fact Valar has a microreactor currently running just to disrpove your thesis.
bryan0
> Their design appears to have it roots in the (false) idea that what was holding back nuclear was perception of safety, rather than cost.
And why do you think they cost so much? Because people need to believe they are safe from catastrophic failure
derriz
Large scale civil engineering projects will always cost more than simply installing stuff that comes almost fully assembled from a factory (solar, wind, battery or small/medium gas turbines). Opex will always be much higher for a generation facility which requires 850 FTE specialist employees to operate (US average per plant) compared to the minimal requirements for on-site employees for utility scale solar or wind facilities. Generation tech which requires no fuel or hazardous waste handling and storage also has an obvious cost advantage. None of these factors have anything to do with “need to believe”.
bryan0
I don't think I get your point. A project will not be approved and funded if the local population does not believe it is safe, so safety must be demonstrated through a variety of means, including some you mentioned. This is directly tied to the high costs involved.
> To sum up, since the early 1970s, the cost of constructing nuclear power plants in the U.S. has been steadily rising. This can be traced to a constantly shifting regulatory environment, which has continuously changed plant design requirements, and added more and more safety features, which often were required to be implemented on plants under construction. The regulatory environment is partially a reflection of the fact that nuclear power and the risks of radiation had become increasingly controversial, and that early understanding of the likelihood of a nuclear plant accident was often inadequate.
derriz
Nuclear in this millennium is not competing with nuclear or other tech from the 1970s - it’s competing with newer technologies (solar, wind, batteries and gas turbines) which do not require 5 to 10 year huge civil engineering works. All these alternative technologies benefit from mass production in factories. While civil engineering does not get cheaper over time - not just for nuclear plant but all large infrastructure construction.
And that’s just capex - even if a nuclear plant could be built for free, the cost of operation (huge head count, fuel and waste handling), means it cannot compete with newer technologies. Indian Point shutdown years before end-of-life because it was too expensive to operate.
Nuclear plants are large and complex and expensive to build and run. I’m not sure why it should be surprising that electricity generation technology has advanced sine the development of the PWR - it’s been more than half a century. The world has moved on from electricity generation using a huge steam engine attached to an alternator with a fiddly and complex firebox.
It’s economics and newer technologies that have made nuclear power obsolete - not public opinion.
bryan0
Oh ok, yeah I think we agree. the original quote I was responding to was "the (false) idea that what was holding back nuclear was perception of safety, rather than cost." I was simply trying to say that safety and cost are not independent. Safety is a massive reason why nuclear costs so much.
mchusma
> If it's so much cheaper to build multiple small reactors, just build one big plant with 24 small reactors.
The biggest costs to nuclear are associated with each of them being unique snowflakes. They need to be standardized and mass produced to bring down costs.
So the dream is many big plants (eg starting 10+ per year), which is what France did and China does, but since we can’t seem to have that here, small reactors are an attempt to solve that.
marshray
Most of the reactors we have in the US today are the result of building many of a few models per year during the late 1960's - early 1970's.
In 1974, 12 reactors entered commercial operation and 13 more were begun.
The technology was given almost a century to prove itself cost-effective. It did not succeed in the market and only ever worked with truly massive amounts of government subsidies.
High fixed costs + more reactor sites -> more expensive, more nuclear waste sites for taxpayers to clean up
coryrc
Each of those existing plants were competitive against coal at the time without having the negative externalities of widespread radiation exposure (uranium in coal just released to the atmosphere); mercury contamination in all our freshwater lakes and the ocean, leading to strict limits on consuming fish for children and pregnant women; and a half-century of CO2 emissions.
Orders of magnitude more people are killed by rooftop solar, but we haven't raised safety standards on all other sources of electricity to be the same level we require for nuclear.
thinkcontext
NuScale is a terrible example. Their flagship project collapsed before it even started because of cost escalation and their other project was some sort of crypto scam.
throw0101d
> For me, SMRs don't pass the smell test. Buying one big plot of land for a reactor, building one power interconnect, having a localized water impact is way easier and cheaper than many.
Some things would depend on the specific location and the grid around it:
The Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station in New Brunswick may be 'overkill' because when it goes down every few years for inspections/retooling, there's little other redundancy available. SMRs would be useful for that regional grid: install 3-4 and one can go down with less fuss.
In (e.g.) Poland there were small/medium coal-fired generation stations near coal mines. If the mines are now empty (or retired for climate change), then the grid connections could be reused for SMRs on an existing generation site: less need to find a new site and build new power pylons, etc.
nradov
Security costs are also an obstacle. Any nuclear reactor requires 24×7 armed security and that's largely a fixed cost regardless of power output. You need almost as many guards for a small reactor as a large one.
gwbas1c
There's a political issue. Just look at how hard it's been to protest all the new gas plants that came up over the last ~20 years. The reason is that we built many small gas plants, instead of a handful of large ones. It divided up the protesters to the point where they couldn't work together.
When we built less, but larger, nuclear power plants, they're easier to protest. If we can make SMRs economical, it makes it significantly harder to protest.
hwillis
> Just look at how hard it's been to protest all the new gas plants that came up over the last ~20 years.
People have been talking about SMRs being the economic future for over 70 years. It has not happened because it not true.
agarwaen163
The people protesting nuclear honestly shouldn't be allowed to vote if they claim they're clean energy due to the apparent lack of critical thought. Seriously, if you're an actual engineer or scientist, this statement is self evident.
tastyfreeze
SMR proposals still use one plot of land. The plant is just built to house multiple reactors.
arjie
It's really a pity that we missed the boat on large nuclear reactors. So much more power would enable so many use-cases and cheap electricity would have enabled us to have much less gas heating. Massive damage to the climate caused by misguided regulation. I tried to write to deregulation.gov on reducing the fund allocation required for fission reactor cleanup but c'est la vie. Death by a thousand cuts and then a few big rocks, I suppose. We lost half a century, but so it goes. Now we should be able to do large-scale solar and wind, and if it weren't for the Burning Man people we could have geothermal too, but we'll get there.
unclad5968
What does burning man have to do with geothermal?
arjie
They blocked geothermal drilling in the desert. After multiple years of blocking it with use of environmental law they finally managed to preserve it as a conservation area for sustainable tourism:
> Organizers of the Burning Man festival in northwest Nevada have reached a settlement with a geothermal energy developer that cancels an exploratory drilling project that some feared would ruin the ambiance of the counter-culture event.
That's so weird. I have never seen more fossil fuels and wood burned just for art, than at burning man.
They should have had an artist work with them to make whatever the exploration gear was, look like a permanent installation. It might not have even required actual changes, just a label.
sojournerc
In addition to the sibling comment, I'll say that environmentalists have opposed nuclear energy for half a century, despite it being far better than coal or ng in terms of emissions. I'd say that the venn diagram intersection of burners and opposition to nuclear is significant.
api
Environmentalism comes in at least two forms. IMO they are entirely different things.
One form is science-based and concerned with finding out how to engineer our civilization to be more sustainable and compatible with the Earth's ecosystem. That faction has been mostly either pro-nuclear or at least open to it when renewables aren't enough or aren't ready.
The other form is a romantic back-to-the-land anti-industry or even anti-civilization movement. It's opposed to nuclear because it's a "techno-fix" when the real answer must be abandonment of high technology and advanced civilization and a return to pre-industrial (or even pre-civilization Paleolithic) ways of life. For this group that's the only acceptable answer. Finding a solution to climate change that didn't involve abandoning industry or growth would be bad, since it would allow "business as usual" to continue.
Returning to pre-industrial or pre-civ times would require the deaths of billions of people, since you can't support these populations without industry, but they don't mention that. That's the quiet part.
The second group is mostly the group that has opposed nuclear power. A few have even opposed wind and solar power, believe it or not. It sounds ridiculous but look it up. You can find cases, albeit more fringe than anti-nukes.
The second group also horseshoes around to the far right in some cases. Anti-vax and general anti-medicine ideology and the idea that we need to be "natural" in everything was originally something more associated with these types of greens, but today it's part of MAGA. There'a also an offshoot known as ecofascism. Look it up, it's also a thing. Also search up "Savitri Devi," a very odd crossover figure here.
sojournerc
Great reply!
The second type is also inherently misanthropic. Their ideal is some Eden without humans at all. _Any_ human impact is morally wrong to this type of environmentalist.
Contrast that with the conservationist hunters, sportsman, fisherman, etc. who wish to conserve natural environments with a keen eye towards sustainability and ecosystem health. Human intervention in culling herds can actually be a kindness to animals whose predators have been eliminated, yet some will oppose it regardless of what the Department of Fish and Game and other scientists suggest simply because it involves hunting and eating meat.
Cutting off the nose to spite the face... which rhymes with the nuclear debate here.
sfn42
I'm pretty sure the actual second group is vanishingly small, it just seems larger because people in general don't know anything about anything so they will be vehemently against nuclear simply because they don't actually know that it's clean energy.
Similar to the "data centers use all the water" people. I saw a Facebook post with thousands of people raging against Nevada/Las Vegas data centers because they were being blamed for the region's dwindling water supplies - googled it and less than 1% of the water used in the area goes to the several dozen data centers. Seems to me like there's probably a lot of bigger fish to fry but I didn't look into it any further.
People are sheep. They jump on whatever bandwagon that happens to cross their path at the right moment. Almost everything people complain about they're just wrong about. It's actually insane scrolling on Facebook these days, it's just an endless stream of bullshit with hordes of NPCs raging about shit they know nothing about and every now and then there's a person with a functioning brain trying to spread some knowledge but it's obviously futile.
Most people can't tell you how taxes work even though they have been paying them their whole lives and complain about them constantly. They will happily tell you a bullshit story about "their friend" who passed on a pay bump because it would increase their taxes and reduce their after-tax income.
It's honestly so fucking frustrating. I mean nobody knows everything but as someone who has a decent overview of how the world works, who understands most important things at at least a basic level, it's just blisteringly obvious that the average person does not understand almost anything. They just got hooked into something at some point, somehow, and now that's their identity. Pretty much exactly like religion. Whatever cult they happened to be born into is obviously the only correct one, they'll ignore any and all evidence and arguments because it has nothing to do with reason. It's their identity and that's that.
asmodeuslucifer
Nuclear power has never been cheap and never will be. Every country that has tried has failed, and that included the Russians, the Chinese, South Koreans, French and the Japanese. And you can't blame it on the environmentalists in Russia and China.
sensanaty
How has France failed with their nuclear fleet, exactly? Considering they produce so much power they're selling it to their neighbours at a profit.
ZeroGravitas
All the cost were hidden off the balance sheet 40 years ago. They can't build them cost effectively (or on schedule) now that there's more scrutiny on where the money comes from.
sfn42
And the cost of fossil fuels is future (not to mention current and recent past, I believe Germany has had over 15k heatwave related deaths this summer) human lives, you wanna calculate those into your little napkin math there?
Timon3
Unfortunately they have to shut down their nuclear reactors when it gets too warm in the summer, which is only going to get worse. Since nuclear isn't capable of generating baseload, we should instead invest into solar & batteries.
asmodeuslucifer
They use it for national security, not price. They did not want to be held hostage to oil.
dopa42365
Except some of them are still building new plants today (large ones cause higher efficiency, unsurprisingly). For China and Russia those are entirely separate from the kind of reactors used for plutonium reprocessing or medical isotopes or whatever else, they only exist to boil water at the end of the day. The only incentive here is electricity, and both have plenty of other options available.
Bit of a paradox isn't it? They'd just burn coal or gas instead if that was much cheaper.
asmodeuslucifer
They just wish away the decommissioning costs by claiming they will last 60 years, 100 years, or forever.
samizdis
Hmmmnnnn. I remember getting excited reading a Wired article "Let a thousand reactors bloom" [0] - but that was back in 2004. I'm still waiting for a "pizza-safe" pebble-bed reactor.
This Nature article dubs TRISO fuel as "accident-tolerant", which is just as well given the lamentable history of it in actual use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor for instance, which suffered so many accidents that it was known as the "Shipwreck". It ended up with TRISO pebbles getting stuck in the reactor vessel, the primary circuit being hopelessly contaminated with fission products, and is now impossible to safely decommission using current technology.
It seems to me working SMRs really would be valuable, particularly for off-grid applications or where process heat is needed alongside electricity generation.
But as someone who was, like you, taken in by the pebble bed hype last time around, I've now learned to be much more sceptical about new nuclear technologies until they've actually been proven in practice.
pfdietz
TRISO is also more expensive, both in fabrication and disposal. It looks to me like another case of nuclear mis-optimizing for the wrong metric (safety vs. cost).
hvb2
> but SMRs should be cheaper and easier to construct.
The word should is doing some real heavy lifting there. Especially given the subject.
I guess we'll know in 2030 when one should come online.
HPsquared
We should know by then, at least.
ViewTrick1002
It just stupidly expensive if it is completed on time and budget.
To make the figure at least palatable for public funding the project assumes enormous learning effects for subsequent reactors.
agarwaen163
Except Valar already did it earlier this year.
DanTheManPR
A lot of people are betting serious money that they will cheaper, more flexible, faster to build, and safer. Including me - I'm working in the industry, and I think they might very well be future backbone of energy production.
But there's a real possibility when all this shakes out that SMR's only advantage will be their flexibility. And that might be enough. A major issue with gigawatt scale nuclear is that it's frankly too big for most markets. Only very large electric markets can can easily digest a new always-on 1000 megawatts of electricity, and you need to be building multiple plants at a time for this all to be economical. That's why the nuclear power rollout of the 60s through 80s worked, and why China and to a lesser extent India's nuclear industry is thriving presently.
With an SMRs smaller scale, there are just way more available projects where nuclear is feasible, and so a more consistent workload can keep everyone employed and subcontractor's backlogs filled. The flexibility in scaling lets you reclaim the benefits of having an experienced workforce and that knows how to build nuclear power plants, something we lost in the west when we stopped building them.
fulafel
What % of global electricity production is in too small markets? Seems to be working well in EU at least, markets and grids being multinational.
I'd guess many places in Africa could be potential markets that have underdeveloped grids but growing economies and populations. Hence the SMR industry in South Africa since the 90s I guess.
DanTheManPR
We're looking specifically at new power plant builds. The majority of that is in Asia, with China and India being the bulk of it. But there is a lot of Asia outside of those two, and in particular Southeast Asia has a lot of potential. There is a lot of long distance transmission line connectivity already, and more planned, but you still want to product power close to where it's used so as to avoid losses in transmission. And the finances for a smaller country are just more straightforward if you're not spending multiple billions of dollars on one giant plant.
The next big market is actually replacement plants in the USA and Europe. Electricity generation may have peaked there, but much of the generating capacity is decades old and needs replacement. There are a lot of smaller facilities that are not gigawatt-scale that need to shut down, and it's easier to plug that gap with SMRs.
South and Central America are small markets, but they won't be ignored. There is a lot of complexity here with the inter-national hydro projects and broken up grids, so I'm sure some countries will look into SMRs.
Africa unfortunately just doesn't factor in except as a long-term possibility for growth. It's only 3% of electricity generation now, and its share will probably fall as Asia electrifies.
This is all worst-case scenario where SMRs are less financially competitive than current gigawatt-scale designs. If SMRs do actually succeed in being cheap assembly-line reactors, then all bets are off and the industry will experience explosive growth.
hocuspocus
Even in Europe you can't necessarily bring online a 1200+ MW plant just anywhere, especially in the recent market where some PV production is curtailed in summer and brings the spot rates to zero.
In theory we should start investing in synthetic fuel production, but it's been mostly vaporware so far.
inglor_cz
Big reactors also need a lot of cooling, and we've just had a very dry summer in Europe which forced some nuclear power stations to dial down or shut down entirely.
ViewTrick1002
The problem is that you can’t assume ”always on” anymore.
Why should consumers choose expensive nuclear powered electricity when cheap renewables, or stored renewables are available?
They don’t and now capacity factors crater.
Leading to what was once seen as ”baseload” plants being forced to become peakers. And running a nuclear plant with those fixed costs as a peaker/firming becomes stupidly expensive per MWh produced.
See this Australian ”baseload” coal plant forced into a peaker role or be decommissioned.
Baseload is simply the lowest wattage your grid demands in a time period. Solar and wind have not made it irrelevant at all. All of the demand from data centers very much assumes constant reliable power which is in fact a perfect match for nuclear.
rcxdude
What solar and wind have made irrelevant is the assumption that constant supply of the baseload is an addressable market for a power plant. That only works if the supply is the cheapest on the market (something nuclear has even historically struggled to achieve without big subsidies), and solar and wind will supply the baseload much cheaper than any other source when they're running, causing a lot of problems for any plant on the grid that wants to run at a constant output.
UltraSane
There needs to be a market mechanism to ensure there is enough dispatchable spare capacity to meet demand when solar and wind can't supply it. More reliable sources of power are inherently more valuable.
ViewTrick1002
Yes. That’s called ancillary markets. One such are ”capacity markets”.
Nuclear power’s problem is that neither its spread between CAPEX and OPEX, nor its operational profile fits them.
We also have electricity futures. Again with the problem that their cost is far far below what new built nuclear power requires.
The flawed economics of nuclear are largely do the NRC basically making it as hard as possible to make a new reactor. China and Korea can build reactors for reasonable cost per watt.
marshray
Data centers are only 5-10% of all US electric power demand. A significant fraction of that load is responsive to spot market price. DCs incorporate their own battery storage infrastructure for backup purposes and some even sell stored energy back to the grid during times of high demand.
dalyons
it is not at all a perfect match for nuclear. Solar produces incredibly cheap power for the daytime hours, pushing the nuclear off the grid (why would a data center buy expensive nuke power in the hours when cheap renewables are available?). Nuclear needs to be running and selling power at its high price 24/7 for it to be even close to economically viable. Only supplying power that people want(due to its high price) during the night is fatal to nuclear.
Thats what OP means by baseload generation being irrelevant.
ViewTrick1002
Why should your data center buy multiples more expensive nuclear powered electricity when renewables or stored renewables are available? They won’t.
And even if they sign a PPA the renewable arbitrage they could do exerts large downward pressure on the price they are willing to pay.
Which is to say, they would want to sign a contract saying ”deliver cheap reliable electricity when renewables and storage doesn’t do it”.
And now you are trying to fit an extremely CAPEX heavy square into a round OPEX sized firming hole.
Mawr
> Why should consumers choose expensive nuclear powered electricity when cheap renewables, or stored renewables are available?
That's why truly free markets are a bad idea? We've been through this.
Repeat after me: the value of the electric grid is in its stability. It must not go down regardless of pesky events like the winter or cloud cover.
You don't get to sell below cost to push out your competitors, thanks to regulations.
But hell, whatever, I agree — let's only use solar & wind and see how it goes :)
Oh, now you want to burn coal/gas? Awww. Remind me, what was the cost of climate change again?
ViewTrick1002
Not sure why you are being condescending.
Perfect reliability is not worth the squeeze. In Sweden, which is a very electrified country with harsh winters, the figure is that it is acceptable to have 1.52 hours per year of not matching demand with production. Paying for more reliability is simply not worth it.
The research has lately focused on system costs. Finding renewable systems vastly cheaper than if involving new built nuclear power.
There are no working SMR's ready to be deployed in the West. The company (NuScale) that was furthest along had its flagship project die after cost estimates ballooned. Its other project was a crypto scam.
Whether any of these companies work out and make it to serial production is very speculative.
p2detar
The SMR in Darlington, Canada is already in construction.
Are you forgetting Valar Atomics exists buddy? Or Aalo, or Antares or Radiant?
thinkcontext
None of those are ready to deploy, they are in experimental testing. They have several phases of that still to go before they can get a license.
thelastgallon
Nuclear, while exorbitant, is necessary for security. See North Korea vs Iran/Venezuela. Nuclear scientists, supply chains, and a trained workforce takes decades to develop. Excess power production can be used to smelt aluminum. You can always have strategic excess supply of materials that can use flexible supply.
beardyw
"a supplement produced with financial support from Oklo Inc"
"Oklo Corp. Logo
Oklo is designing and deploying advanced fission power plants to provide clean, reliable, affordable energy"
hn_submit
Although generally safe these reactors aren't totally safe.
I'm concerned lax physical security will allow miscreants to blow them up and spread nuclear materials over a wide area. The ensuing panic would totally destroy any goodwill nuclear power has gained over the last 20 years or so.
I'm also concerned these things will mostly be used by Big Tech for their A.I. data-centers playing the Good Samaritan with their claims of "Carbon Neutral Environmentally Friendly A.I."
unglaublich
Well, gas and oil plants are actively emitting pollutants that kill thousands. And nuclear still is the safest energy sort available.
boplicity
People are far more terrified of flying, in general, than they are of driving. However, driving is far, far more dangerous -- with flying commercial being one of the safest modes of travel.
testing22321
> And nuclear still is the safest energy sort available.
Depending on what kind of solar, it can have quite a high death/TWh ratio because people fall off roofs while installing them. As a ratio is far better now that so much new solar is ground level solar farms and not installed by amateurs or professionals who have a van, a ladder and watched a YouTube video that one time. Some older estimates based, I think, on generic roofing accident rates, were up to 0.44 deaths/TWh.
Wind is more dangerous than nuclear (0.04), I guess also from falls and accidents during construction and maintenance.
Edit: All are incredibly safe compared to the next worst, hydro (1.3, or 30 times worse than wind).
pfdietz
The differences in deaths from (non-accident) nuclear and wind/solar are very small compared to the amount of energy produced. The effect of the statistical value of lives lost is tiny compared to direct differences in energy cost, and so shouldn't have any effect on which is chosen.
This is not the case for coal, where the cost of lives can be substantial.
georgefrowny
Yes, indeed all are far below the next one (hydro, 1.3, dam failures, I imagine).
And brown coal is sitting pretty at 36+, i.e. ONE THOUSAND times worse than nuclear.
pfdietz
The cost for coal depends a lot on how the emissions are treated, and how deaths from CO2 are calculated. A general problem with the latter is these are global deaths, and foreign lives are valued far below domestic lives. Kind of horrible, but choices on spending illustrate this.
marshray
The scam here is presenting average occupational accident rates as a measure of "safety" when the obvious risk of nuclear power is the rare large-scale events which render large areas of land uninhabitable for generations while producing few directly-attributable deaths.
Mawr
Are those large-scale events in the room with us? Or are you saying over the last, however many decades of all sorts of countries running nuclear plants, we've just been oh so lucky to have a negligible number of serious accidents? Luck is an interesting argument.
Also, you may want to fact-check your "large areas of land" because you're just making that up, if talking about accidents that have already happened, or going of by feels I guess if talking about hypothetical accidents that have by luck not happened all this time?
The real scam is bikeshedding about the safety of nuclear vs solar while happily burning coal. Take a deep breath, let your lungs taste the byproducts of burning coal. And now, I dare you, say something about the nuclear waste "problem". barf
tcfhgj
what about other risks such as the risk of large scale contamination of habitable areas?
ted_dunning
Coal is particularly bad about large scale contamination. Nuclear has historically involved substantial contamination in processing plants (Hanford, Paducah, Oak Ridge, Rocky Flats and so on).
Solar, wind, and battery do not have comparable large scale contamination risks.
bb88
The potential for widespread radiation leakage from nuclear doesn't exist with wind or solar. I would think a terrorist would hit a nuclear power plant over any wind or solar farms.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone will remain uninhabitable for the next 20,000 years.
If refugees were allowed to live there, I wonder how many people would choose radiation over their current worse situations?
The article mentions people moving from Donbas (perhaps less inhabitable): "Following the outbreak of the war in Donbas in 2014, refugees from that conflict settled in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone or nearby".
Mawr
Now calculate what % of habitable land on Earth that exclusion zone takes up.
Yeah, that's a lot of zeroes.
PowerElectronix
Only if you remember to reapply sunscreen every few hours.
bb88
Terrorists are only one piece of the issue. Corporations and "Responsible Adults" have done more to harm nuclear power in this country than any terrorist act has.
ConEd and Three Mile Island meltdown brought out a mass of normal people to chant "Hell No! We won't Glow!"
Hanford in Washington State.
San Onofre in So Cal.
Santa Susana Meltdown.
The reality is that everyone wants nuclear, but no one wants to live near a nuclear power plant.
coryrc
Hanford was nuclear weapons, not nuclear power.
bogzz
"Miscreants" conjures in my mind an image of little British boys with dirty feet in Industrial Revolution era attire.
simonh
Those cheeky chappies from Vodkaland with their Polonium water and Novichok perfume don't half get up to some jolly old japes!
dathinab
> A.I. data-centers
I wouldn't be so sure about that (in the US).
Like usage in A.I. data-centers assumes
that they get price competitive with low quality gas turbines run by state subventioniere natural gas...
or the government actual enforces proper environmental protections so that they can't continue running gas turbines without proper filters (and this isn't even (mostly) about climate change, but air pollution harming people)
and from how it currently looks both things seem unlikely :/
naasking
> I'm also concerned these things will mostly be used by Big Tech for their A.I. data-centers
Why is that a concern?
xfil
I'm also a bit confused by that criticism. If Big Tech wants to use a portion of their ginormous profits to create a much larger market for the commercialization of small reactors, it sounds like a net positive to me. The data center construction spree is basically, in part, a giant private stimulus program for our energy supply. Yeah it's messy in the short run, but considering how much of Big Tech's profits are arguably undeserved, I'll take it over other options if regulatory & legislative actions lack feasibility.
Mawr
> Although generally safe these reactors aren't totally safe.
I have some seriously bad news about the safety of your totally-safe house against meteorites. Or for that matter, thermonuclear explosives detonated directly above its roof.
As a bonus, here's a channel with hundreds of commercial aircraft accidents in which thousands of people have died: https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot. Now enjoy traveling using the objectively safest mode of transport — commercial aviation.
fakedang
Regardless, better that they're the ones who spend the money for these reactors, and better that they use nuclear instead of coal or gas plants.
One option is to also mandatorily lock the powerplants to the municipal grid, and provide rebates to data center operators via net metering instead of simply giving them cash back.
But yes, the lax security and the laissez-faire don't give a shit attitude of the current admin far outweighs any of these benefits
marcosdumay
Just worth remembering that the cost/W of steam generators decrease quickly (almost linearly) with size up to ~1GW. What in reverse also means it increases quickly with reduced size, down to the point you can order them 3D printed on the internet (what is around a couple of kW).
And also that steam generators alone have a really hard time competing with solar nowadays.
You could probably just sink it all in the ocean near a subduction zone.
pfdietz
I wish this subduction zone idea would just die. It's dumb. Things move so slowly it wouldn't help, and subduction zones have large amounts of volatiles coming back up via mud volcanoes and, later, actual molten rock volcanoes.
If you want to dispose of waste deep in the sea floor do it far away from subduction zones. Or just store it cheaply in dry casks and minimize the net present value of the cost of dealing with the waste.
bell-cot
Short-term, subduction zones are deep, maximizing the difficulty for malicious actors trying to get their hands on the waste. The subduction itself is more a marketing feature, for folks who oppose putting the waste anywhere on the surface of the Earth.
Longer-term - it's mid-ocean ridges, not subduction zones, where you find all the volatiles and volcanoes. Yes, millions of years in the future, some micro-percentage of the subducted material will re-emerge, hundreds of miles away, via volcanoes. So will vastly more natural radioactivity, whether or not we dispose of nuclear waste in the subduction zone.
pfdietz
> Longer-term - it's mid-ocean ridges, not subduction zones, where you find all the volatiles and volcanoes.
That's simply not true. Yes, there are volcanoes at mid-ocean ridges, but subduction zones also have plenty of activity.
"There are 10 active mud volcanoes in the Izu–Bonin–Mariana Arc which can be found along a north to south trend, parallel to the Mariana trench.[43] The material erupted at these mud volcanoes consists primarily of blue and green serpentinite mud which contains fresh and serpentinized peridotite material from the subduction channel. Fluid from the descending Pacific Plate is released by dehydration and alteration of rocks and sediment."
(for description of how subduction zones create magmatic volcanoes)
Subducted material is very wet, and as it descends the volatiles ascend to melt the rock above, creating magma (water reduces the melting point of rocks just like it reduces the melting point of sugar.)
odyssey7
> Hermes 1, by contrast, is fuelled by tristructural isotopic (TRISO) pebbles — poppy-seed-sized particles of uranium, encased in a carbon-ceramic shell.
What writing
testing22321
I wish the article had more details on the cost to build these reactors, the cost to operate, refuel, dispose of fuel and then decommission. Details about how long they’re expected to operate, and how much power they will generate in their lifetime. Then we could get a projected cost per kWh for the power they will generate.
I ask because the last reactors the US brought online took so long to build and cost so much they caused the cost of power to go up.
This seems unworkable when solar is already causing power to be free (Australia), and gets cheaper by the day.
zdragnar
There's two reasons they take so long: large plants need to be redesigned as conditions on the site develop (soil type unexpectedly changes as excavation occurs) or regulations change during the process, and the second reason is that there's basically no nuclear construction industry.
The benefit of an SMR is that it can theoretically be built largely off-site without the same risk that larger plants have wrt needing to customize everything. That allows construction companies to centralize and reuse talent and suppliers rather than needing to drag them all over the country or subcontracting to people more accustomed to building offices.
In areas like where I live, there's weeks or more of time in winter where every day is overcast, short, and has little wind. To go completely renewable, we would need to pay southern regions to overproduce by triple digit percentages of their needs and then send the energy to us by HVDC that don't exist yet either.
A bad ice storm or tornado could leave millions without any power at all at the most dangerous time of the year to not have electricity.
It's doable, but we are a long way off and if SMR miraculously hits the right numbers, it'd be a better fit for us. Until then, we'll keep burning gas supplemented with solar.
Animats
How are the fusion startups coming along? There are at least 21 of them.[1]
The top 3, by funding. These all have more than a billion dollars.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems. The MIT people. This is a tokamak with better magnets. The magnet insight is that if you put a superconductor and a regular conductor in parallel, all the current flows through the superconductor. So you can plate a superconducting material on stainless steel tape, using stainless steel as an insulator. Winding a magnet out of stainless steel tape works fine. They demoed that back in 2021. But no fusion yet. Well funded, big operation, around 1000 people.
Helion Energy. This is a strange magneto-inertial fusion system. It's vaguely like a free-piston internal combustion engine generator, except that the piston is a plasma. After seven rounds of increasingly large prototypes, they can get D-T fusion, but it's not self-sustaining, nor do they get power out. Prototypes have thus far underperformed claims.
Around 500 people.
TAE. Recently merged with Trump Media. Really.
There are quite a few others. Many are working on some kind of pulsed fusion, like the Livermore National Ignition Facility. This is known to create fusion, but is hard to turn into a useful power source. They can get to a non-useful fusion demo by pumping a lot of energy into a small space, so it looks like progress.
On the continuous fusion front, several startups are trying to revive 1950s Stellarator technology.
For a few years back then, fusion energy looked close.
Anyone have expertise in this area? Are any of these going to work? Or is the product the stock?
Helion most likely would not work. Even their own optimistic modeling gives very thin margins and even they completely ignore radiation damage to equipment.
Commonwealth and other tokamak designs are too optimistic as well. We do not know how instability in plasma will behave in production volumes.
Stellarator-based designs at least do not have big ifs, but they are way further and even they assume that radiation damage from neutrons will be manageable.
And all of this is ignoring costs. Outside of niche applications it is very hard to sea how fusion even if it works can compete with solar plus storage.
soco
With solar and batteries getting cheaper and cheaper, is this still a topic? Or at least for the time being until that "cheaper" gets cheaper enough?
fasterik
The problem with 100% solar+batteries is that you need to massively overbuild for the system to meet demand. It's far more cost-effective to have some portion of generation come from a firm, weather-independent source. The main options are fossil fuels, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear. Since fossil fuels emit carbon and hydro and geothermal are geographically limited, nuclear is the best option in a lot of places.
bryanlarsen
> firm
That's the opposite of what you want. You want something that is cost-effective to operate at a 10%, 1% or 0.1% duty cycle. Like nat gas or hydro. Not nuclear.
And overbuilding isn't the only lever you have to ensure coverage meets your target 99.99% level -- geographic diversity works really well (the wind is always blowing somewhere), and wind power production is usually negatively correlated with solar power production.
fasterik
Natural gas and hydro are firm power. You're correct that nuclear is not a good backup power source, but that's not the suggestion. The question is whether adding high-capacity-factor firm generation reduces total system cost. In regions where hydro and geothermal are unavailable, nuclear is the next best low-carbon option. I think you're underestimating the costs and difficulties associated with 100% renewables, especially transmission capacity between regions.
bryanlarsen
I think you're underestimating the costs and difficulties associated with 99.99% renewables and/or using it as a straw man against the highly inexpensive and achievable 95% renewables.
You're also underestimating the costs of using nuclear to achieve 99.99% reliability on top of a grid with 95% renewables: in that scenario you need nuclear capable of supplying ~100% of your power. In which case you might as well ditch the renewables. But the world does not have the quadrillions needed to go 100% nuclear. The world does have the 10s of trillions needed to go 95-99% renewable.
fasterik
>in that scenario you need nuclear capable of supplying ~100% of your power.
Where are you getting that from? Again, nuclear doesn't need to be a full backup, and nobody is suggesting we ditch renewables for nuclear. A perfectly viable solution would be a grid with a majority of power coming from renewables and storage, with enough nuclear generation to reduce the amount of overbuild necessary and to stop burning natural gas.
>Individually, each firm technology delivers substantial cost reductions relative to portfolios restricted to wind, solar, and energy storage alone. Additionally, because each technology occupies a distinctive functional niche in the electricity system, having all of these technologies available optimizes the utilization rate of each resource and reduces system costs by up to 10% relative to cases with just one class of firm resource.
bryanlarsen
If you're using nuclear as a backstop in that way, you're using the same statistical techniques that let you use cheaper, less reliable sources of power for backstop.
UltraSane
You are very wrong. US base load demand is around 400GW that must be provided 24/7
bryanlarsen
Baseload is a cost optimization strategy only relevant if your non-dispatchable power generation is cheaper than your dispatchable power generation.
You need to have dispatchable capacity equal to or greater than your base load in order be able to guarantee you will be able to deliver it with 100% reliability year round.
I am very dubious of any energy policy coming form Germany because they have managed to make their electricity among the most expensive in the world while STILL being high carbon.
bryanlarsen
> You need to have dispatchable capacity equal to or greater than your base load in order be able to guarantee you will be able to deliver it with 100% reliability year round.
Just one word change needed:
You need to have dispatchable capacity equal or greater than your peak load in order be able to guarantee you will be able to deliver it with 100% reliability year round.
dalyons
Solar produces incredibly cheap power for the daytime hours, pushing any nuclear off the grid (why would a data center buy expensive nuke power in the hours when cheap renewables are available?). Nuclear needs to be running and selling power at its high price 24/7 for it to be even close to economically viable. Only supplying power that people want(due to its high price) during the night is fatal to nuclear.
base load demand does not mean it has to be met with a constant matched source, and in fact that no longer works economically.
Natrium has an interesting design for a 345MW reactor that has thermal storage that can boost output to 500MW for 5.5 hours. This lets it increase output during peak prices.
dalyons
I mean, sounds kinda cool. But that 2023 idea is very clearly not going to happen in the current US political environment.
We’re in an era of brutal capitalism, and nothing else matters but price. Not even emissions sadly. Green compacts like this have no chance, and neither do nukes. Unless they pay the right bribes for some subsidies.
UltraSane
The Trump admin is actually very pro-nuclear power. They are ending the "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" (ALARA) standard in favor of fixed limits which is actually a good idea, possibly the only one the Trump admin has ever had.
dalyons
i know they are (or claim to be). Im extremely unconvinced that meaningfully changes the flawed economics of nuclear power. I would love to be proven wrong and a wave of innovative economically competitive nuclear technology emerges... possible, but seems vanishingly unlikely.
I think we'll see a few companies and projects connected to the administration get grants and tax breaks and favors, pull a few headlines, seem like there's movement. Maybe even build something! but ultimately be a meaningless footnote in the energy transition. Just another grift for the most corrupt admin in US history.
UltraSane
The flawed economics of nuclear are largely due to the NRC basically making it as hard as possible to make a new reactor. China and Korea can build reactors for reasonable cost per watt.
dalyons
thats, not true at all. Safety costs a little, but they are fundamentally massively complicated, huge, specialized, EXPENSIVE things to build. They require 100s of staff to run at all times. The insurance is so expensive only nation states can back them. The economics are flawed because on modern grids with cheap renewables, they will never pay back the ridiculous up front capex. Relaxing regulations changes very little about this situation.
China and Koreas are massively state subsidized (koreas 51%, chinas 100%). Which obscures the real cost, and these state enterprises dont have to pay insurance or decommissioning. Which is the only way you can make them work today - massive state subsidies.
if your argument is "well without regulations someone could build a reactor that somehow avoids all these economic constraints" . Maybe, but today thats a fantasy.
Mawr
> Like nat gas or hydro
Since hydro is impossible to "just" build, that's gas only. No, there's no "nat" gas.
> geographic diversity works really well
"Give up your energy independence :)" I'm sure world leaders are eager to jump on that great idea.
"and wind power production is usually negatively correlated with solar power production"
Well, that should be fine, I only usually need electricity.
bryanlarsen
You don't need to cross oceans to get good geographic diversity.
fpoling
If solar becomes 2 times cheaper, it will be economical to capture nitrogen from atmosphere and produce ammonia and use that for long-term energy storage and fuel. And with that one does not need massive solar overbuild.
This does not require any magic technology, just scaling up what is available today is enough and will definitely happen within the next 20 years, before small nuclear will have any effect.
istjohn
If I recall correctly solar panels are already so cheap that to halve the installed cost again will require most of the efficiencies to be found in other costs like manufacture of associated hardware and equipment and installation. I don't know if those costs will be so easy to reduce.
chickenbig
> If solar becomes 2 times cheaper
It would be good to see a techno-economic analysis of this. For instance, taken to the limit, if solar were free what would be the CAPEX and OPEX to produce the ammonia? In addition, the plant to consume the ammonia to produce electricity would not be free.
fpoling
Ammonia does not require a plant to generate electricity. While fuel cells running on it require temperatures over 600 Celsius to get to 70% percent of efficiency and not exactly small, with cheap way to produce ammonia they would provide energy dense batteries that could run for months if necessary.
RivieraKid
Solar + battery is very land inefficient, that's basically the main argument.
Edit: Per ChatGPT's calculation, nuclear is significantly cheaper than solar + battery in my country (Czech Republic) if we're talking about adding new reactors to existing power plants.
pfdietz
Land is cheap. Even in Europe, the cost of land onto which renewables are put is small compared to the cost of the renewable energy equipment itself. Here in the US, it's common for the land to be just a few percent of the project cost.
actionfromafar
But batteries can be very distributed and stabilize and prop up the grid in ways a huge plant can't without building out distribution. (Situation dependent of course.)
petcat
> In March 2025, the US Department of Energy (DoE) announced US $900 million in grants to support the deployment of SMRs. One year later, the European Commission said it would invest up to €200 million (US $228 million) in the construction of SMRs.
If this is the goal, they're failing spectacularly.
istjohn
It is if the nuclear industry pays for it to be. See the disclaimer at the bottom of the article.
inglor_cz
Scaling is a problem.
How many batteries do you need to power, say, entire Scandinavia during winter? That would be a lot of lithium, btw.
"Dunkelflaute" periods when it is dark and no wind to run the wind turbines are common in northern winters, IIRC the longest one a few years ago was 12 days long.
Which means that in order to have a reasonable buffer against it, you would need enough batteries to supply the entire region for three weeks. Not going to happen, unless we discover some much more efficient class of batteries.
fpoling
Sodium batteries are cheaper for storage and does not require any rate/expensive minerals, just scaling up production. Then in Scandinavia the main problem in winter is heating and using heated water as a battery is already a thing. Then producing amonia or even carbon fuel from atmosphere for energy-dense storage will be viable option in 10-20 years. And of cause Norway and Sweden can have massive hydro for energy storage.
bryanlarsen
That 12 day event was a regional event in Germany, there was still lots of wind in the North Sea. And sun & wind didn't drop to 0, it dropped below 10%.
Dunkelflaute's are a German phenomenon: the standard pattern in most of the world is that the high pressure systems that suppress winds are generally sunny. And the high elevation areas in Germany are sunny during a dunkelflaute.
IOW, batteries aren't the only answer required to cover a dunkelflaute.
pfdietz
Hydrogen is one possibility for a 100% grid to cover Dunkelflauten and seasonal leveling (the former for wind, the latter for solar). To see the effects on overall cost per MWh, explore at https://model.energy/
dalyons
boy am i tired of hearing that Dunkelflaute word as if its some kind of gotcha. Even ignoring the fact that you can continue to source power from other geographies during a localized phenomenon..... Just burn gas in peaker plants for the few days a year that this happens. That small amount of emissions wont matter for the next 50 years of decarbonization, after which we'll likely have plenty of other options.
The absolutism in all these arguments is so tiring, as if its not 100% perfect solution for 100% of every imaginable scenario than its no good. 95% reduction over a year would be astounding, we would have won the climate battle.
coryrc
That's fine, but you need to include the cost of having barely-used gas peaker plants when calculating the cost of "renewables+storage". Laymen keep using arbitrary "marginal cost of solar with sun shining" to say "solar is cheaper than everything!". If it's true that capex of 80% gas peaker (and LNG storage and employees on standby and so on) + solar + wind + batteries is cheaper, then people should make that argument and provide the data.
dalyons
The latest figures from ember etc are not only “sun shining”, they’re talking about 24hr firmed solar-storage costs, and they’re still mostly cheaper than fossil in most geos. It is true that we will have to pay for having gas fill the gaps - how much exactly is a very complicated function of market economics and real time power auctions. Depends on so many variables, how big is the shortfall, how long, what competition does the gas have locally and extra-geographically, many other things. For connected countries in Europe you are never going to get to a situation where you need an 80% sized backup to your production, there will always be varied other sources. And perhaps you just choose to load shed in truly black swan scenarios, rather than paying for enough backup for every possible rare scenario. Life does go on.
Though I confess predicting it is beyond me and I’m not sure how you would model it to achieve conclusions generally applicable to every country / market .
moogly
Fission reactors in multiple European countries had to shut down due to heatwaves. And in Scandinavia (Sweden), they are "routinely" stopped for scheduled and most importantly unscheduled maintenance.
But those don't have scary sounding German names, I guess.
inglor_cz
I don't find the word Dunkelflaute any more scary than the word Kindergarten, but I am used to speaking and reading German...
And you might have noticed me commenting on the need to shut down some reactors due to lack of water elsewhere.
CrzyLngPwd
Literaly, designed for datacenters
emsign
The future will be solar. Especially in underdeveloped regions without a centralized power grid, solar makes the most sense. And even in developed countries having solar panels on your roof and a battery in your cellar is the most cost effective way of getting all your electricity needs.
danra
I've always advocated for smaller atomic refactors.
...oh. Never mind.
bell-cot
Nuclear power's biggest problem is that it attracted, even back in the 1940's, a figurative army of techno-utopians - whose pie-in-the-sky promises of electric power too cheap meter, flying cars, and better-than-Santa's-sleigh safety were not quickly and loudly contradicted by people who knew better.
Probably didn't help that many of those keeping quiet had obvious short-term interests in promoting "nuclear everything". Even as various accidents, leaking waste dumps, and regular warnings of deadly communist mushroom clouds made it damned obvious to the general public that they were being systematically lied to.
Sadly, the pro-nuclear camp is still far too influenced by utopian and partisan considerations.
Yes, it'd be nice to see competently-done SMR's in regular use, for the use cases where they make sense. But if I was a policy maker with finite political capital and resources, I'd probably be winding down nuclear power - both to show the public that I wasn't too gullible to trust, and to show advocates for other technologies that lies and delusions would be carry harsh penalties.
DennisP
Sure, and none of solar's advocates are utopian at all.
wing-_-nuts
I don't think solar even needs advocates at this point. Battery backed solar should win on pure economics.
bell-cot
The general public doesn't care about utopian-measuring contests between different groups of zealots. They want cheap electricity on demand, safety, and a sense of control. Solar does a pretty good job of offering that. Nuclear? Nope.
DennisP
I agree that the utopian tendencies of various groups are irrelevant. So I'm not sure why you brought it up.
agarwaen163
Sounds like you're the one who's been lied to if you still believe the anti nuclear rhetoric. Study it more, it behooves you.
jauntywundrkind
They're all ridiculously fuel inefficient and we're going to have to figure out how to dispose of thousands or tens of thousands of these reactors. Aside from that one that starts pre buried, where the plan is to just leave a spent nuclear reactor buried in a hole. A cost that will almost certainly be externalized to the taxpayers.
The promise here is the rich fleecing the average citizen.
Getting downvoted wicked hard super fast. But how else are we supposed to see this? How else do we citizens of the world interpret this? The fuel efficiency is a fact. The nuclear clean up has been a problem every single time.
wing-_-nuts
'Fuel efficiency' is not the bottle neck to getting more clean energy on the grid, scale is. Waste? grind it up, vitrify it, bury it in an abandoned coal mine or something. People get more radioactivity from a coal power plant than they will ever get from properly handled nuclear waste.
pfdietz
It sure is. If the world were nuclear powered (all energy, not just grid) with burner reactors, estimates of uranium resources (not reserves) at up to 3x the current price would last about five years.
A fully nuclear world needs to use nuclear fuel efficiently, which means breeder reactors.
tstrimple
It's easy when you just ignore all the externalities! I'll be paying for the decommissioned nuclear plant near us for the next 20+ years through my electric rates. The plant is closed and no longer operational but still has to be staffed and guarded for decades during the decommission process. Imagine this issue scaled up across thousands of SMRs.
ck2
there is just one problem
like everything else with the current US administration
Nuclear regulation could genuinely do with a lot of reforms that would streamline the process without appreciably impacting safety. Everyone would benefit. And that's the huge problem with the administration's breaking of trust and naked corruption: we as a lay people, what should we think if they come out with a bunch of proposals eliminate a bunch of commercial licensing requirement and lowering radiation safety standards? Is that because the old rules are genuinely archaic and not serving their purpose... or because Trump's family and donors are personally financially invested in the very companies mentioned in this article.
neuroelectron
This is a great temporary solution to continue developing AI up to a reliable state, then the ownership can be transferred to a particular state that is major global presence in cybersecurity, semiconductor design, and tech innovation, who is already well positioned with key stakeholders in most if not all American tech companies with strong grantees in government support.
Major technology companies have signed strategic agreements for SMR development, but regulatory approvals and supply-chain scaling place widespread commercial deployment in the late 2020s through the 2030s. Now that we are in astronomical debt, it's our responsibility to turn our nation into a wasteland in order to provide this particular nation a scalable, full spectrum and robust AI defense solution that will allow them to achieve their geopolitical goals safely without fear of reprisal while they continue to expand their influence in tech and the global economy, hopefully culminating in extracting taxes on ships going through key trade canals near their borders and beyond.
ZeroGravitas
Donald Trump does a lot of stupid evil stuff to further fossil fuels but getting all the tech nerds excited about even more expensive nuclear power is actually evil genius.
actionfromafar
Yes. They are apparently scrubbing the truth but archive.org still has it.
> Samuel B. Morris, the general manager and chief engineer of Los Angeles’s Department of Water and Power, traveled all the way to Geneva in 1955 to attend the first International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. There, he made a case for small reactors, arguing that because the “number of small units…is many times the number of large units,” there could be “economy in development and repetitive manufacture” of the small units.
> But nothing in the history of small nuclear reactors suggests that they would be more economical than full-size ones. In fact, the record is pretty clear: Without exception, small reactors cost too much for the little electricity they produced, the result of both their low output and their poor performance.
For me, SMRs don't pass the smell test. Buying one big plot of land for a reactor, building one power interconnect, having a localized water impact is way easier and cheaper than many. Even if its cheaper to build small reactor vessels, MANY of the other costs become more expensive in larger numbers. Costs that you can ignore while you're just building a prototype.
If it's so much cheaper to build multiple small reactors, just build one big plant with 24 small reactors. Thing is the nuclear reactor part is only 10-15% of the plants full cost: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...
There is no way SMR could beat solar+battery power cost even now. With sodium and other batteries projected to reduce storage cost, it is even more unlikely that SMR could be price competitive in future grids. SMR is the only way that dying western nuclear industry could attempt to deal with ballooning compliance and finance costs and hope for revival. China or India doesn't have this compliance cost and still build conventional nuclear.
Even for the SMR usecase that got funding recently, mega datacenter electricity, there is new geothermal power companies getting funding and are transitioning from pilot projects to production. Some are using tech that is already being used in oil fracking industry for decades, so new geothermal tech scaling up has far less roadblocks technology and compliance wise. So other than military and mobile civil applications like nuclear icebreaker, I don't see the chance of SMR succeeding anywhere else.
If you want to decarbonize as fast as possible, it makes sense to focus on rolling out wind/solar/battery as fast as possible for now, but keep developing nuclear technology to cover the last bit where it starts getting especially expensive to replace fossil with renewables without losing reliable power. That's exactly what China appears to be doing. They're not just building a few reactors, they're also the world leaders in developing various GenIV designs, like molten salt reactors.
But 98% renewable doesn't mean you can hit 100% by adding 2% more of something else, it means your something else has to supply ~100% of the power 2% of the time.
If China is aiming for that cost-optimal 90-98% renewables, that means they need to build a lot of coal.
Or you design the majority of loads so they can be turned off for 2% of the time.
Load shedding is a better solution than running peakers for [heated] towel rails.
It's not about lights, it's about electricity always being available. And well, always having power available (for domestic, but also for expensive production facilities that looses money while idle) using renewables is a lot more expensive than generating most of your power with renewables
Increased renewable generation is an important goal, but we need to let the facts guide the path, not the other way around.
That paper uses one renewable source, like only solar, and 2018-19 cost data for storage.
A real grid is made up of a mix of sources, which is why the research lately has focused on system costs.
All those analyses find that renewable grids are far cheaper than if involving new built nuclear power.
Here are two modern papers on the subject:
https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost-2025-26-Final/Ge...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
B) the post I am replying to is specifically calling for a 98% solar grid.
It is already stupidly expensive when running at 100% 24/7. Now try running it only when renewables and storage doesn’t deliver.
This is also true of geothermal, which, like nuclear, is almost all fixed capital cost.
But society would be better off with excess generation. So we either need a system where some are incentivized to spin down, perhaps by being paid a consistent amount regardless or something like that, or we need publicly owned power generation that doesn't care about profit.
The problem is that electricity is fundamentally priced on the margin. Now that we are moving beyond a purely centralized design.
Think about a homeowner or factory with their own renewables and storage.
They fundamentally operate on marginal price by choosing when they use their own system and when they buy from the grid.
If you add state owned reliable power to this mix they will cherry-pick. Their own cheap electricity when it delivers and the states subsidized reliable electricity when it doesn’t.
We can try add all manner of markets, fixed connection costs and what not to this but all it does is introduce strange arbitrage possibilities in the market.
Which is why we have settled on net energy markets and then the lowest possible amount of ancillary markets to shore up any gaps which would cause problems for the larger society.
The only way we don't need nuclear power is if we have some other way of producing the energy we need without dooming the planet, and obviously we do not as we're still burning billions of tons of coal every year. Not to mention gas.
We could have made power generation fully fossil free many decades ago if we actually took climate change seriously. It would have been fine. Sure fossil fuels may have been cheaper, but if you include the damage they're already causing and will cause in the future you could multiply the cost of nuclear by orders of magnitude and it would still come out on top. Plus higher investment would lead to faster improvement in the technology, mass production of components and lower cost etc.
Today, renewables and storage are the cheapest energy sources in human history. They are filling the gap nuclear power never managed to fill.
> China, the world's top producer of solar power, rejected 360 terawatt-hours (TWh) of clean power from January to June, up 49% from the same period a year earlier, according to a report this month by Global Energy Monitor (GEM) and the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
1 - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-leads-wave-cle...
[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67746
They’re building a massive amount of nuclear. They’re building a monumental amount of solar+wind.
No, almost every one is above 1GW - divide the net capacity by the number under construction to see the power [1]. They appear to be almost all CAP1400 (1.4GW), Hualong One (1.0GW), or CAP1000 (1.0GW). I see a single Linglong 1 (100MW) under construction. Proposed are all above 1GW.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China#Future_...
Not a particular fan of this paper, but it does illustrate a point ... https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8867359 showed that for the UK to go 100% solar it would need an energy capacity of 1/3 of the total grid energy demand over the year. Figure 6 A shows the big trend of 6 1/2 months of discharge and 5 1/2 months of charge (i.e. cycle perhaps once a year). Seasonal variations do matter.
It also seems like they are constraining the system to have no overproduction.
It’s like assuming that a fossil based system has all its producers generating the expected capacity factor and then smoothing out the season and daily demand changes with storage. Due to the difference between summer and winter demand such a fossil system would also need to have months of storage to compensate.
Which of course is absolute stupidity. When you can just overbuild production capacity and leave a far simpler problem to solve.
> Google’s new Minnesota data center comes with the world’s largest battery—and won’t raise electric bills
> The tech giant says it will fund enough new wind, solar, and long-duration storage to cover the project’s power demand and avoid shifting costs to ratepayers.
Namely, It's very easy to 'design to load' where you don't need to worry about the next shipment of Coal, or an extended weather event causing excessive cloud cover and depleting your reserves.
Heck, even as far as compared to LPG, you don't have to worry as much about disruptions or possible cost shifts around LPG supply.
Yes, I'm possibly tongue-in-cheek handwaving specific types of 'weather events' here and potential impacts, i.e. Tsunamis... OTOH it's a lot easier in current gen designs to make something that would have minimal risk for something, say, in the middle of nowhere Texas.
1. https://energynow.com/2026/03/us-natgas-prices-at-waha-hub-i...
2. https://www.rbccm.com/en/insights/2026/05/natural-gas-powers...
The problem is that they need full power 24/365.
If geothermal works economically (outside of volcanic zones where it already does) then it's game over for any other power source except existing dams though because it solves all problems at once.
That'd be a great thing for humanity but I don't think it's worth stopping pursuing alternatives already, because it's still a big "if".
Note that the thermal energy contained in the inner earth isn't a fixed amount: the earth constantly generates new heat from friction and radioactivity, and that new heat is radiated away in space at night, alone the heat captured from the sun during the day. So technically geothermal will increase the efficiency of this heat transfer a tiny bit, but it's really a negligible amount. (In reality the ant's contribution to global warming is probably orders of magnitude than the phenomenon we're talking about here).
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_Traps
I have full faith in modern engineers' ability to account for these effects in the plant designs.
Real issue is that it is not actually usable everywhere. Again Earth is big and going deep in some places is very hard.
Regulatory risk is too high, building too infrequent to understand costs, funding for first-of-its-kind is too hard for nuclear in most countries. SMR makes it fundable. New designs give the hope that regulatory burdens can be lowered.
Regulatory arbitration like this serves nothing?
Don't get me wrong, I would love to see more nuclear, but bad nuclear is not in fact better than none.
That is literally the plan with several designs like NuScale (and I think TerraPower). The plan with NuScale is to ship the reactors on rail or barge, and then truck it in the last few miles. So they cost savings is in not having to custom desgin the actual components for each site, and build them on site. Standard reactor, standard monitoring systems, standard control room able to monitor multiple reactors, etc.
Plus, when you have 12 of them onsite in one large area, you can take one offline for refueling, and still produce power with the rest of them.
Their design requires considerably more steel and concrete per MW(e) than a large conventional PWR power plant. You don't do civil construction in a factory, and that's where much of the cost is. Their design appears to have it roots in the (false) idea that what was holding back nuclear was perception of safety, rather than cost.
What about Valar Atomics?
It has always been a regulatoryu issue. As given by the fact Valar has a microreactor currently running just to disrpove your thesis.
And why do you think they cost so much? Because people need to believe they are safe from catastrophic failure
https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs:
> To sum up, since the early 1970s, the cost of constructing nuclear power plants in the U.S. has been steadily rising. This can be traced to a constantly shifting regulatory environment, which has continuously changed plant design requirements, and added more and more safety features, which often were required to be implemented on plants under construction. The regulatory environment is partially a reflection of the fact that nuclear power and the risks of radiation had become increasingly controversial, and that early understanding of the likelihood of a nuclear plant accident was often inadequate.
And that’s just capex - even if a nuclear plant could be built for free, the cost of operation (huge head count, fuel and waste handling), means it cannot compete with newer technologies. Indian Point shutdown years before end-of-life because it was too expensive to operate.
Nuclear plants are large and complex and expensive to build and run. I’m not sure why it should be surprising that electricity generation technology has advanced sine the development of the PWR - it’s been more than half a century. The world has moved on from electricity generation using a huge steam engine attached to an alternator with a fiddly and complex firebox.
It’s economics and newer technologies that have made nuclear power obsolete - not public opinion.
The biggest costs to nuclear are associated with each of them being unique snowflakes. They need to be standardized and mass produced to bring down costs.
So the dream is many big plants (eg starting 10+ per year), which is what France did and China does, but since we can’t seem to have that here, small reactors are an attempt to solve that.
In 1974, 12 reactors entered commercial operation and 13 more were begun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
The technology was given almost a century to prove itself cost-effective. It did not succeed in the market and only ever worked with truly massive amounts of government subsidies.
High fixed costs + more reactor sites -> more expensive, more nuclear waste sites for taxpayers to clean up
Orders of magnitude more people are killed by rooftop solar, but we haven't raised safety standards on all other sources of electricity to be the same level we require for nuclear.
Some things would depend on the specific location and the grid around it:
The Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station in New Brunswick may be 'overkill' because when it goes down every few years for inspections/retooling, there's little other redundancy available. SMRs would be useful for that regional grid: install 3-4 and one can go down with less fuss.
In (e.g.) Poland there were small/medium coal-fired generation stations near coal mines. If the mines are now empty (or retired for climate change), then the grid connections could be reused for SMRs on an existing generation site: less need to find a new site and build new power pylons, etc.
When we built less, but larger, nuclear power plants, they're easier to protest. If we can make SMRs economical, it makes it significantly harder to protest.
People have been talking about SMRs being the economic future for over 70 years. It has not happened because it not true.
> Organizers of the Burning Man festival in northwest Nevada have reached a settlement with a geothermal energy developer that cancels an exploratory drilling project that some feared would ruin the ambiance of the counter-culture event.
https://www.eenews.net/articles/burning-man-to-buy-back-geot...
They should have had an artist work with them to make whatever the exploration gear was, look like a permanent installation. It might not have even required actual changes, just a label.
One form is science-based and concerned with finding out how to engineer our civilization to be more sustainable and compatible with the Earth's ecosystem. That faction has been mostly either pro-nuclear or at least open to it when renewables aren't enough or aren't ready.
The other form is a romantic back-to-the-land anti-industry or even anti-civilization movement. It's opposed to nuclear because it's a "techno-fix" when the real answer must be abandonment of high technology and advanced civilization and a return to pre-industrial (or even pre-civilization Paleolithic) ways of life. For this group that's the only acceptable answer. Finding a solution to climate change that didn't involve abandoning industry or growth would be bad, since it would allow "business as usual" to continue.
Returning to pre-industrial or pre-civ times would require the deaths of billions of people, since you can't support these populations without industry, but they don't mention that. That's the quiet part.
The second group is mostly the group that has opposed nuclear power. A few have even opposed wind and solar power, believe it or not. It sounds ridiculous but look it up. You can find cases, albeit more fringe than anti-nukes.
The second group also horseshoes around to the far right in some cases. Anti-vax and general anti-medicine ideology and the idea that we need to be "natural" in everything was originally something more associated with these types of greens, but today it's part of MAGA. There'a also an offshoot known as ecofascism. Look it up, it's also a thing. Also search up "Savitri Devi," a very odd crossover figure here.
The second type is also inherently misanthropic. Their ideal is some Eden without humans at all. _Any_ human impact is morally wrong to this type of environmentalist.
Contrast that with the conservationist hunters, sportsman, fisherman, etc. who wish to conserve natural environments with a keen eye towards sustainability and ecosystem health. Human intervention in culling herds can actually be a kindness to animals whose predators have been eliminated, yet some will oppose it regardless of what the Department of Fish and Game and other scientists suggest simply because it involves hunting and eating meat.
Cutting off the nose to spite the face... which rhymes with the nuclear debate here.
Similar to the "data centers use all the water" people. I saw a Facebook post with thousands of people raging against Nevada/Las Vegas data centers because they were being blamed for the region's dwindling water supplies - googled it and less than 1% of the water used in the area goes to the several dozen data centers. Seems to me like there's probably a lot of bigger fish to fry but I didn't look into it any further.
People are sheep. They jump on whatever bandwagon that happens to cross their path at the right moment. Almost everything people complain about they're just wrong about. It's actually insane scrolling on Facebook these days, it's just an endless stream of bullshit with hordes of NPCs raging about shit they know nothing about and every now and then there's a person with a functioning brain trying to spread some knowledge but it's obviously futile.
Most people can't tell you how taxes work even though they have been paying them their whole lives and complain about them constantly. They will happily tell you a bullshit story about "their friend" who passed on a pay bump because it would increase their taxes and reduce their after-tax income.
It's honestly so fucking frustrating. I mean nobody knows everything but as someone who has a decent overview of how the world works, who understands most important things at at least a basic level, it's just blisteringly obvious that the average person does not understand almost anything. They just got hooked into something at some point, somehow, and now that's their identity. Pretty much exactly like religion. Whatever cult they happened to be born into is obviously the only correct one, they'll ignore any and all evidence and arguments because it has nothing to do with reason. It's their identity and that's that.
Bit of a paradox isn't it? They'd just burn coal or gas instead if that was much cheaper.
[0] https://www.wired.com/2004/09/china-5/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor for instance, which suffered so many accidents that it was known as the "Shipwreck". It ended up with TRISO pebbles getting stuck in the reactor vessel, the primary circuit being hopelessly contaminated with fission products, and is now impossible to safely decommission using current technology.
It seems to me working SMRs really would be valuable, particularly for off-grid applications or where process heat is needed alongside electricity generation.
But as someone who was, like you, taken in by the pebble bed hype last time around, I've now learned to be much more sceptical about new nuclear technologies until they've actually been proven in practice.
The word should is doing some real heavy lifting there. Especially given the subject.
I guess we'll know in 2030 when one should come online.
To make the figure at least palatable for public funding the project assumes enormous learning effects for subsequent reactors.
But there's a real possibility when all this shakes out that SMR's only advantage will be their flexibility. And that might be enough. A major issue with gigawatt scale nuclear is that it's frankly too big for most markets. Only very large electric markets can can easily digest a new always-on 1000 megawatts of electricity, and you need to be building multiple plants at a time for this all to be economical. That's why the nuclear power rollout of the 60s through 80s worked, and why China and to a lesser extent India's nuclear industry is thriving presently.
With an SMRs smaller scale, there are just way more available projects where nuclear is feasible, and so a more consistent workload can keep everyone employed and subcontractor's backlogs filled. The flexibility in scaling lets you reclaim the benefits of having an experienced workforce and that knows how to build nuclear power plants, something we lost in the west when we stopped building them.
I'd guess many places in Africa could be potential markets that have underdeveloped grids but growing economies and populations. Hence the SMR industry in South Africa since the 90s I guess.
The next big market is actually replacement plants in the USA and Europe. Electricity generation may have peaked there, but much of the generating capacity is decades old and needs replacement. There are a lot of smaller facilities that are not gigawatt-scale that need to shut down, and it's easier to plug that gap with SMRs.
South and Central America are small markets, but they won't be ignored. There is a lot of complexity here with the inter-national hydro projects and broken up grids, so I'm sure some countries will look into SMRs.
Africa unfortunately just doesn't factor in except as a long-term possibility for growth. It's only 3% of electricity generation now, and its share will probably fall as Asia electrifies.
This is all worst-case scenario where SMRs are less financially competitive than current gigawatt-scale designs. If SMRs do actually succeed in being cheap assembly-line reactors, then all bets are off and the industry will experience explosive growth.
In theory we should start investing in synthetic fuel production, but it's been mostly vaporware so far.
Why should consumers choose expensive nuclear powered electricity when cheap renewables, or stored renewables are available?
They don’t and now capacity factors crater.
Leading to what was once seen as ”baseload” plants being forced to become peakers. And running a nuclear plant with those fixed costs as a peaker/firming becomes stupidly expensive per MWh produced.
See this Australian ”baseload” coal plant forced into a peaker role or be decommissioned.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...
Nuclear power’s problem is that neither its spread between CAPEX and OPEX, nor its operational profile fits them.
We also have electricity futures. Again with the problem that their cost is far far below what new built nuclear power requires.
Here’s some reading on electricity futures:
https://www.next-kraftwerke.com/knowledge/futures-market
Thats what OP means by baseload generation being irrelevant.
And even if they sign a PPA the renewable arbitrage they could do exerts large downward pressure on the price they are willing to pay.
Which is to say, they would want to sign a contract saying ”deliver cheap reliable electricity when renewables and storage doesn’t do it”.
And now you are trying to fit an extremely CAPEX heavy square into a round OPEX sized firming hole.
That's why truly free markets are a bad idea? We've been through this.
Repeat after me: the value of the electric grid is in its stability. It must not go down regardless of pesky events like the winter or cloud cover.
You don't get to sell below cost to push out your competitors, thanks to regulations.
But hell, whatever, I agree — let's only use solar & wind and see how it goes :)
Oh, now you want to burn coal/gas? Awww. Remind me, what was the cost of climate change again?
Perfect reliability is not worth the squeeze. In Sweden, which is a very electrified country with harsh winters, the figure is that it is acceptable to have 1.52 hours per year of not matching demand with production. Paying for more reliability is simply not worth it.
The research has lately focused on system costs. Finding renewable systems vastly cheaper than if involving new built nuclear power.
Here are two modern papers on the subject:
https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost-2025-26-Final/Ge...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
Whether any of these companies work out and make it to serial production is very speculative.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/darlington-smr-n...
"Oklo Corp. Logo Oklo is designing and deploying advanced fission power plants to provide clean, reliable, affordable energy"
I'm concerned lax physical security will allow miscreants to blow them up and spread nuclear materials over a wide area. The ensuing panic would totally destroy any goodwill nuclear power has gained over the last 20 years or so.
I'm also concerned these things will mostly be used by Big Tech for their A.I. data-centers playing the Good Samaritan with their claims of "Carbon Neutral Environmentally Friendly A.I."
Surely solar is orders of magnitude safer.
Depending on what kind of solar, it can have quite a high death/TWh ratio because people fall off roofs while installing them. As a ratio is far better now that so much new solar is ground level solar farms and not installed by amateurs or professionals who have a van, a ladder and watched a YouTube video that one time. Some older estimates based, I think, on generic roofing accident rates, were up to 0.44 deaths/TWh.
Wind is more dangerous than nuclear (0.04), I guess also from falls and accidents during construction and maintenance.
Edit: All are incredibly safe compared to the next worst, hydro (1.3, or 30 times worse than wind).
This is not the case for coal, where the cost of lives can be substantial.
And brown coal is sitting pretty at 36+, i.e. ONE THOUSAND times worse than nuclear.
Also, you may want to fact-check your "large areas of land" because you're just making that up, if talking about accidents that have already happened, or going of by feels I guess if talking about hypothetical accidents that have by luck not happened all this time?
The real scam is bikeshedding about the safety of nuclear vs solar while happily burning coal. Take a deep breath, let your lungs taste the byproducts of burning coal. And now, I dare you, say something about the nuclear waste "problem". barf
Solar, wind, and battery do not have comparable large scale contamination risks.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone will remain uninhabitable for the next 20,000 years.
Inhabitable: there are people living there off their own gardens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samosely
However Undesirable to you or I.
If refugees were allowed to live there, I wonder how many people would choose radiation over their current worse situations?
The article mentions people moving from Donbas (perhaps less inhabitable): "Following the outbreak of the war in Donbas in 2014, refugees from that conflict settled in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone or nearby".
Yeah, that's a lot of zeroes.
ConEd and Three Mile Island meltdown brought out a mass of normal people to chant "Hell No! We won't Glow!"
Hanford in Washington State.
San Onofre in So Cal.
Santa Susana Meltdown.
The reality is that everyone wants nuclear, but no one wants to live near a nuclear power plant.
I wouldn't be so sure about that (in the US).
Like usage in A.I. data-centers assumes
that they get price competitive with low quality gas turbines run by state subventioniere natural gas...
or the government actual enforces proper environmental protections so that they can't continue running gas turbines without proper filters (and this isn't even (mostly) about climate change, but air pollution harming people)
and from how it currently looks both things seem unlikely :/
Why is that a concern?
I have some seriously bad news about the safety of your totally-safe house against meteorites. Or for that matter, thermonuclear explosives detonated directly above its roof.
Now tell me: Is Your Car Safe From Supermaneuverable Air-Defense Fighter Aircraft? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7YVxLLIuGM
As a bonus, here's a channel with hundreds of commercial aircraft accidents in which thousands of people have died: https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot. Now enjoy traveling using the objectively safest mode of transport — commercial aviation.
One option is to also mandatorily lock the powerplants to the municipal grid, and provide rebates to data center operators via net metering instead of simply giving them cash back.
But yes, the lax security and the laissez-faire don't give a shit attitude of the current admin far outweighs any of these benefits
And also that steam generators alone have a really hard time competing with solar nowadays.
You could probably just sink it all in the ocean near a subduction zone.
If you want to dispose of waste deep in the sea floor do it far away from subduction zones. Or just store it cheaply in dry casks and minimize the net present value of the cost of dealing with the waste.
Longer-term - it's mid-ocean ridges, not subduction zones, where you find all the volatiles and volcanoes. Yes, millions of years in the future, some micro-percentage of the subducted material will re-emerge, hundreds of miles away, via volcanoes. So will vastly more natural radioactivity, whether or not we dispose of nuclear waste in the subduction zone.
That's simply not true. Yes, there are volcanoes at mid-ocean ridges, but subduction zones also have plenty of activity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mud_volcano
"There are 10 active mud volcanoes in the Izu–Bonin–Mariana Arc which can be found along a north to south trend, parallel to the Mariana trench.[43] The material erupted at these mud volcanoes consists primarily of blue and green serpentinite mud which contains fresh and serpentinized peridotite material from the subduction channel. Fluid from the descending Pacific Plate is released by dehydration and alteration of rocks and sediment."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_arc
(for description of how subduction zones create magmatic volcanoes)
Subducted material is very wet, and as it descends the volatiles ascend to melt the rock above, creating magma (water reduces the melting point of rocks just like it reduces the melting point of sugar.)
What writing
I ask because the last reactors the US brought online took so long to build and cost so much they caused the cost of power to go up.
This seems unworkable when solar is already causing power to be free (Australia), and gets cheaper by the day.
The benefit of an SMR is that it can theoretically be built largely off-site without the same risk that larger plants have wrt needing to customize everything. That allows construction companies to centralize and reuse talent and suppliers rather than needing to drag them all over the country or subcontracting to people more accustomed to building offices.
In areas like where I live, there's weeks or more of time in winter where every day is overcast, short, and has little wind. To go completely renewable, we would need to pay southern regions to overproduce by triple digit percentages of their needs and then send the energy to us by HVDC that don't exist yet either.
A bad ice storm or tornado could leave millions without any power at all at the most dangerous time of the year to not have electricity.
It's doable, but we are a long way off and if SMR miraculously hits the right numbers, it'd be a better fit for us. Until then, we'll keep burning gas supplemented with solar.
The top 3, by funding. These all have more than a billion dollars.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems. The MIT people. This is a tokamak with better magnets. The magnet insight is that if you put a superconductor and a regular conductor in parallel, all the current flows through the superconductor. So you can plate a superconducting material on stainless steel tape, using stainless steel as an insulator. Winding a magnet out of stainless steel tape works fine. They demoed that back in 2021. But no fusion yet. Well funded, big operation, around 1000 people.
Helion Energy. This is a strange magneto-inertial fusion system. It's vaguely like a free-piston internal combustion engine generator, except that the piston is a plasma. After seven rounds of increasingly large prototypes, they can get D-T fusion, but it's not self-sustaining, nor do they get power out. Prototypes have thus far underperformed claims. Around 500 people.
TAE. Recently merged with Trump Media. Really.
There are quite a few others. Many are working on some kind of pulsed fusion, like the Livermore National Ignition Facility. This is known to create fusion, but is hard to turn into a useful power source. They can get to a non-useful fusion demo by pumping a lot of energy into a small space, so it looks like progress.
On the continuous fusion front, several startups are trying to revive 1950s Stellarator technology. For a few years back then, fusion energy looked close.
Anyone have expertise in this area? Are any of these going to work? Or is the product the stock?
[1] https://www.energystartups.org/top/fusion-energy/USA/
Commonwealth and other tokamak designs are too optimistic as well. We do not know how instability in plasma will behave in production volumes.
Stellarator-based designs at least do not have big ifs, but they are way further and even they assume that radiation damage from neutrons will be manageable.
And all of this is ignoring costs. Outside of niche applications it is very hard to sea how fusion even if it works can compete with solar plus storage.
That's the opposite of what you want. You want something that is cost-effective to operate at a 10%, 1% or 0.1% duty cycle. Like nat gas or hydro. Not nuclear.
And overbuilding isn't the only lever you have to ensure coverage meets your target 99.99% level -- geographic diversity works really well (the wind is always blowing somewhere), and wind power production is usually negatively correlated with solar power production.
You're also underestimating the costs of using nuclear to achieve 99.99% reliability on top of a grid with 95% renewables: in that scenario you need nuclear capable of supplying ~100% of your power. In which case you might as well ditch the renewables. But the world does not have the quadrillions needed to go 100% nuclear. The world does have the 10s of trillions needed to go 95-99% renewable.
Where are you getting that from? Again, nuclear doesn't need to be a full backup, and nobody is suggesting we ditch renewables for nuclear. A perfectly viable solution would be a grid with a majority of power coming from renewables and storage, with enough nuclear generation to reduce the amount of overbuild necessary and to stop burning natural gas.
From this article:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266627872...
>Individually, each firm technology delivers substantial cost reductions relative to portfolios restricted to wind, solar, and energy storage alone. Additionally, because each technology occupies a distinctive functional niche in the electricity system, having all of these technologies available optimizes the utilization rate of each resource and reduces system costs by up to 10% relative to cases with just one class of firm resource.
https://en.acatech.de/publication/baseload-power-plants/
I am very dubious of any energy policy coming form Germany because they have managed to make their electricity among the most expensive in the world while STILL being high carbon.
Just one word change needed:
You need to have dispatchable capacity equal or greater than your peak load in order be able to guarantee you will be able to deliver it with 100% reliability year round.
base load demand does not mean it has to be met with a constant matched source, and in fact that no longer works economically.
Natrium has an interesting design for a 345MW reactor that has thermal storage that can boost output to 500MW for 5.5 hours. This lets it increase output during peak prices.
We’re in an era of brutal capitalism, and nothing else matters but price. Not even emissions sadly. Green compacts like this have no chance, and neither do nukes. Unless they pay the right bribes for some subsidies.
I think we'll see a few companies and projects connected to the administration get grants and tax breaks and favors, pull a few headlines, seem like there's movement. Maybe even build something! but ultimately be a meaningless footnote in the energy transition. Just another grift for the most corrupt admin in US history.
China and Koreas are massively state subsidized (koreas 51%, chinas 100%). Which obscures the real cost, and these state enterprises dont have to pay insurance or decommissioning. Which is the only way you can make them work today - massive state subsidies.
if your argument is "well without regulations someone could build a reactor that somehow avoids all these economic constraints" . Maybe, but today thats a fantasy.
Since hydro is impossible to "just" build, that's gas only. No, there's no "nat" gas.
> geographic diversity works really well
"Give up your energy independence :)" I'm sure world leaders are eager to jump on that great idea.
"and wind power production is usually negatively correlated with solar power production"
Well, that should be fine, I only usually need electricity.
This does not require any magic technology, just scaling up what is available today is enough and will definitely happen within the next 20 years, before small nuclear will have any effect.
It would be good to see a techno-economic analysis of this. For instance, taken to the limit, if solar were free what would be the CAPEX and OPEX to produce the ammonia? In addition, the plant to consume the ammonia to produce electricity would not be free.
Edit: Per ChatGPT's calculation, nuclear is significantly cheaper than solar + battery in my country (Czech Republic) if we're talking about adding new reactors to existing power plants.
Yes, it does seem to still be a topic.
If this is the goal, they're failing spectacularly.
How many batteries do you need to power, say, entire Scandinavia during winter? That would be a lot of lithium, btw.
"Dunkelflaute" periods when it is dark and no wind to run the wind turbines are common in northern winters, IIRC the longest one a few years ago was 12 days long.
Which means that in order to have a reasonable buffer against it, you would need enough batteries to supply the entire region for three weeks. Not going to happen, unless we discover some much more efficient class of batteries.
Dunkelflaute's are a German phenomenon: the standard pattern in most of the world is that the high pressure systems that suppress winds are generally sunny. And the high elevation areas in Germany are sunny during a dunkelflaute.
IOW, batteries aren't the only answer required to cover a dunkelflaute.
The absolutism in all these arguments is so tiring, as if its not 100% perfect solution for 100% of every imaginable scenario than its no good. 95% reduction over a year would be astounding, we would have won the climate battle.
Though I confess predicting it is beyond me and I’m not sure how you would model it to achieve conclusions generally applicable to every country / market .
But those don't have scary sounding German names, I guess.
And you might have noticed me commenting on the need to shut down some reactors due to lack of water elsewhere.
...oh. Never mind.
Probably didn't help that many of those keeping quiet had obvious short-term interests in promoting "nuclear everything". Even as various accidents, leaking waste dumps, and regular warnings of deadly communist mushroom clouds made it damned obvious to the general public that they were being systematically lied to.
Sadly, the pro-nuclear camp is still far too influenced by utopian and partisan considerations.
Yes, it'd be nice to see competently-done SMR's in regular use, for the use cases where they make sense. But if I was a policy maker with finite political capital and resources, I'd probably be winding down nuclear power - both to show the public that I wasn't too gullible to trust, and to show advocates for other technologies that lies and delusions would be carry harsh penalties.
The promise here is the rich fleecing the average citizen.
Getting downvoted wicked hard super fast. But how else are we supposed to see this? How else do we citizens of the world interpret this? The fuel efficiency is a fact. The nuclear clean up has been a problem every single time.
A fully nuclear world needs to use nuclear fuel efficiently, which means breeder reactors.
like everything else with the current US administration
they deregulated nuclear safety
* https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5677187/nuclear-safety-...
* https://www.npr.org/2026/08/27/nx-s1-5920368/nrc-nuclear-rad...
any other administration even Republican I'd be willing to listen to why
this administration will happily kill thousands or give them cancer if it means another million dollars in their pockets
there is only one kind of nuclear reactor that should be built anymore
and that is Thorium reactors, they "fail safe" (or at least safer)
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElulEJruhRQ
Major technology companies have signed strategic agreements for SMR development, but regulatory approvals and supply-chain scaling place widespread commercial deployment in the late 2020s through the 2030s. Now that we are in astronomical debt, it's our responsibility to turn our nation into a wasteland in order to provide this particular nation a scalable, full spectrum and robust AI defense solution that will allow them to achieve their geopolitical goals safely without fear of reprisal while they continue to expand their influence in tech and the global economy, hopefully culminating in extracting taxes on ships going through key trade canals near their borders and beyond.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250507123042/https://docs.nrel...