Wow.
Absolutely terrific research on this 40 minute video pointing to some of the glaring issues with the rollout of Small Modular Nuclear reactors. (SMRs)
I’ve read, and heard, a lot from engineering experts about some of the manufacturing bottlenecks and economic challenges for SMRs, but this piece does a deep dive into the fuel cycle, which will be unique, and, it turns out, potentially very, very expensive.
When he gets his enrichment facility centrifuge manufacturing line up 44 months from now, how much solar and wind with battery backup/FCAS distributed to grid transmission substations will have been installed? How much will the rate at which they can be installed have grown? Once you start manufacturing centrifuges, will the rate of growth of HALEU measured in GWhours per month keep up with the Green Energy Rate of Growth in Supply (GERGS)? Will the cost of production Of HALEU be falling at or faster than the cost of installed solar wind battery? How much as a venture capitalist are you willing to bet in HALEU Manufacturing?
Probably not enough.
This was great – I’m unfamiliar with AtomicBlender, but have seen some very good dives into fuel cycles and shielding and other issues when Nick Touran goes onto Chris Keefer’s Decouple channel for their discussions.
The conclusion mentioning Russia, China and South Korea understand the sense in going with the big water reactors left out the US since (I think still) we produce more electricity from nuclear than any other nation. My fears about nuclear are not about big, well-designed and well-operated power plants in (hopefully) stable nations.
My concerns about the new wave is they want to lower safety regulations, they’re all going to be running into hairy engineering issues that afflict the first ‘n’ of any complex machine – especially one that’s dealing with high temperatures and radiation. And the other concern is also about tracking and managing every bit of fuel and fuel wastes. Along with a general breakdown of what had been decades of a fairly stable world order, we’re hearing more and more nations beginning to ask why they haven’t got their own nuclear weapons – heck, Shellenberger (formerly at Breakthrough) went right out and wrote about what an injustice it is for nations to deny other nations the “right” to own nuclear bombs for self defense.
I’m thinking that high-temperature process heat is going to become available through some combination of improving heat pumps, improving thermal storage and smart use of generated and stored electricity – so the need for nuclear for that is probably not a justification for small nukes either.
So build some big, make them efficient and rock solid, site them properly and put the required amount of guards around them to manage the operation safely and keep fuels and fuel reprocessing equally low-number, high-protection sites. Save us from tech investors looking to cash in on just the attempt to make the next great SMR.
Yes, how many things are more justifiably terrifying than a government that is both rabidly pro-nuclear and fanatically anti-regulation?
“…but this piece does a deep dive into the fuel cycle, which will be unique, and, it turns out, potentially very, very expensive.”
The cost of fuel processing was always an unknown important variable for me.
What I hadn’t considered before was (1) the regulatory cost difference when crossing a certain assay line (10%, I believe), and (2) the waste management cost associated with fragmentation into numerous small, isolated sites (and the HALEU waste, of course, being inherently more dangerous).
Spent TRISO fuel shouldn’t be any more dangerous than uranium oxide – there’ll be less of it per megawatt-hour generated, for one thing, and it’s almost indestructible. The problem is its cost – reactors used to be expensive to build, but very cheap to run – and the fact that its very toughness makes it difficult to recycle and re-use. I don’t think uranium supply will be a problem except in the short term, though. Australia has the world’s largest reserves, but only three mines – and one of those, even though it’s second largest producer in the world, is primarily a copper and gold mine, with uranium a byproduct. If uranium prices track high enough, there’ll be more incentive to use Canadian-style heavy water reactors, which not only dispense with enrichment, and get 30% more power per mined kilo of yellowcake than US-designed pressurised water reactors – they can also run happily on the waste from PWRs, which has about 50% more fissile content than the natural uranium Candus were designed for.
If someone wants to build a CANDU reactor in the US, fine, do it. But we’re still at square one in that would be a 10-15 year project, a first of a kind for American operators, and does not help us in the near term with burgeoning demand.
I think the NRC would be slow to licence Candus in the US – even though, unlike American-designed PWRs and BWRs, they’ve never had a meltdown. That said, the last two of four built in South Korea took 3 years 11 months, and 4 years 9 months, first construction to criticality. The Chinese then used fast techniques the Koreans had pioneered, and built two, from 1998 to 2003, in 4 years, 3 months, and 4 years, 4 months. The initial deal to buy Candus was signed in late 1994. China had planned to build more Candus, and fuel them on light-water reactor spent fuel, but Sino-Canadian relations turned septic after Canada arrested the daughter of Huawei’s CEO.
The US grid and power plant planning is an unholy mess. Investors want guarantees of coverage for cost and schedule overruns from ratepayers and taxpayers because they won’t fulfill the requirements that commercial insurance companies would need to analyze the cost and schedule risks.
Alternatively, using nuclear reactors to provide industrial process heat would keep it in the private sector to provide the capital if it considers it a cost-effective investment.