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In Praise of Nuclear
A small reactor capable of powering 240,000 homes. Built on highly proven tech.
Anyone who says they care about emissions but does not enthusiastically endorse getting these in service without regulatory delay, is a liar.
Published in General
Or a watermelon.
Embrace the “and”.
Agreed. You´ve read Zubrin´s writing on nuclear power over at New Atlantis? If not, I would recommend it.
The US is still the world’s leader in nuke power plant design and development.
I’ll wish the Big W well on this, however, like their site notes, they don’t even expect design certification until 2027 with site specific licensing stuff coming after that. A 2027 design cert is probably a hopeful statement with so many other players in the small-modular game ahead of them right now. I expect we’ll have a NuScale SMR (called VOYGR) or GE’s BWRx-300 starting in construction phase before we get to 2027 and have them nearly complete by the time Westinghouse’s offering goes to first site construction activities.
Isn’t GE owned by China now, or is that only parts of what used to be the larger GE?
GE-Hitachi Nuclear Power is still headquartered on the coast of North Carolina where GE Nuclear has been historically, but now Hitachi Nuclear (Japan) is part of the broader company as it has been for more than a decade. Other aspects of GE (historical) likely have different ownership though.
So this is an entirely new system, right? The Westinghouse AP300 small modular reactor. Has even one ever been built or tested?
The linked marketing page doesn’t say so. The linked marketing page says that it is based on the larger, AP1000 design, and claims that there have been “18 reactor years of safe AP1000 operations.”
According to this story in World Nuclear News, there were 4 AP1000 reactors operational in China as of January 9, 2019. Wikipedia says that these are the only four operational AP1000 reactors in the world. Doing the math here, running 4 reactors in the 4 years, 4 months since January 2019 would be 17 1/3 reactor years, which is consistent with the 18 reactor years reported by Westinghouse itself.
So we have a brand new design, based on a prior design that has been operational in China in 4 reactors, for a bit over 4 years.
But everyone who doesn’t agree with you that this completely untested new system should be put in service “without regulatory delay” either doesn’t care about emissions, or is a “liar.”
What’s up with this sort of rhetoric, iWe? A bit extreme, don’t you think, particularly in an area in which I suspect you have just about no knowledge. (I have very little knowledge of nuclear plants, too, though I understand their basic operation in principle.)
Why not a story about a promising new technology?
While the AP1000 has only been in operation since about 2019, the broad design of the thing is an iteration of the Westinghouse AP600, which was licensed for use back in the early 90s from best recollection, which means it had significant testing and design verification before it even got there. AP600 used much of what was already known at the time from Westinghouse’ 40 years of design and operation experience and incorporated the learnings of the Combustion Engineering System 80 design that W bought. So, while an AP1000, as named, has only been in electrical power operation since 2019, it’s not all new technology at all. If it weren’t for the regulatory structure in the US and many other nations, which rely on the US’ NRC structure, Westinghouse likely already has enough information they could reasonably conclude the design and operate an AP300 in just a few years (assuming the components could be sourced along with the appropriate sourcing of craftsmen and operators).
I do recognize iWe’s comments were a bit rash though, but wanted readers to have some idea into what W already knows.
Yet those making energy policy act as if nothing has been learned in physics in the last 60 years.
I bought his books and he called me a Nazi for supporting Trump.
Looks good. The question is, “How much?”
SMRs have been the obvious path forward in nuclear technology for years. I’m glad to see Westinghouse scale down its AP1000 to offer (hopefully) a more affordable reactor. Actually, I’d like to see a range of sizes . . .
Might not be wise at least in the US system if each “model” has to undergo years/decades of testing etc.
There are a host of modular nuclear designs, based on extremely well known and established technology. Nuclear reactors in the West are the single safest technology we have for generating power – when measured against lives lost in construction, operation, and all the various kinds of fallout (e.g. pollution from coal emissions), safer than coal, wind, solar, oil, natural gas, and even hydro.
I have a pretty solid understanding of safety systems, and how challenging it is to go from 10^-6 to 10^-9, including the nature and operation of multiple failsafe systems. I even have some issued patents in the art.
It is regulations that killed nuclear – regulations of every kind. If we subjected nuclear to the same permitting as wind, electricity would cost consumers 5c or less per kWh.
I want to see how a single-loop PWR works.
Never rule out stupid.
The GE nuclear business is in a joint venture with Hitachi, with a 51/49 ownership split. (GE being the majority owner) GE is in the process of breaking itself into three parts: the Healthcare business had already been separated and is now trading as an entirely separate company. (GEHC)
The remaining two pieces are Aerospace (mainly jet engines) and the Power business, which includes gas generation and wind turbines and the GE stake in GE-Hitachi; it has been renamed as Vernova, for some reason.
A lot is going on with nuclear, around the world, these days. See my Nuclear News Update from last month. In addition to the Westinghouse announcement, the other major news since that post is from Italy, where Giorgia Meloni and the Italian parliament are supporting nuclear.
When did the appliance and locomotive parts separate?
Transportation (locomotives) was sold to Wabtec in 2019. Appliance, must earlier, some of the purchasing companies got the right to use the GE name for a long time, maybe forever. Bad idea.
I believe it’s because they don’t really want “clean” power. The want “no” power. No where. No how. None. Otherwise there would be the desalination plants that Israelites have been using for decades up and down the CA coast – especially near the desert. But – no new power.
I did a lot of work with GE (before it imploded). It was an interesting and capable company, but the CEO who led the breakup was not competent. A lot of value destruction occurred.
I’m sorry but nuclear power has numerous problems and use of wide spread nuclear power is likely a fantasy pipe dream. Nuclear power plant design improvements is just a small piece of the puzzle.
First of all, great plant designs have been around for decades, but there is always one big problem- what do you do with the nuclear waste? That problem has never ever been addressed. It is not just a scientific problem but an enormous logistical one and an enormous political one. One that is fraught with huge political risks so it has always been avoided for decades.
Second, the credibility of the scientific community is utter crap at the moment. Why would anyone believe one of your experts these days, when all sorts of experts on the key issues of the day like COVID, the VAX, the Lockdowns, many of our medical procedures and proper care, the state of the economy and the proper approach to it, government statistics, gender norms, the War in Ukraine, etc are all lying through their teeth?
As a risk manager, on must assess the risk of any solution and one must ask ‘what is the worst thing that could happen” . Well, in this case several million people could die if one of your designs goes wrong. Therefore, reasonably, all facets of this operation need to be addressed with solutions that address all those facets with great certainty, which in the this political and scientific environment won’t happen in a truly unbiased way for a very long time.
But, but, but the designs are so great you say. Take seismic design. Very little is still understood about earthquakes. Well we have now much better research you say. Ya but, predictions of what the impact an earthquake will do to a structure is still educated guesswork, and the codes for earthquake design are incredibly faulty. Take the issue fo the Cascadia Subduction Zone, which was only discovered in the 90’s and has a possibility of generating a ground acceleration of over a hundred times that of a earthquake in Southern California. Do the codes reflect that? Hell no.
Take the issue of the New Madrid quake of 1817 which was felt in New York City over a thousand miles away, which raises a whole series of questions we can’t answer. Take the issue of the Northridge quake of 94, the last large urban quake in the continental United States, which destroyed a number of then prevailing theories on earthquake design. I should know for I inspected over thirty structures in that quake as part of an engineering inspection team. Also, we are likely entering a “Grand Solar Minium” which historically has generated unforeseen hellacious earthquake activity.
Then one needs to approach how are these nuclear plants going to get approved. As one who has endured dozens of public planning approval processes, those approvals are very difficult even when there are no questions, but these plants have tremendous unsolved questions.
At least with regard to earthquakes, unlike the current huge power plants, smaller modular units could be built on independent “plates” not anchored to the ground.
@Unsk, have you looked at LFTR? I keep looking for the “yeah, but…”, and I don’t see it.
It has, but the solutions take away the anti-nukes’ most powerful arguement aginst nuclear power. Waste minimization would drastically reduce the amount of waste and recover unused fuel for recycling. In addition, the arguments against recycling are based on nuclear nonproliferation, as if recovering spent fuel and concentrating for reuse wouldn’t be closely monitored by the government.
Even without waste minimization, the volume of waste generated is significantly less than the left would have us know. Humans probably have more impact on the environment via household garbage than nuclear waste . . .
You feed the waste to another reactor that accepts lower quality stuff. We currently don’t have enough waste to make this viable. More nuclear waste, please!
There has not been a single nuclear reactor in the United States under the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that went from concept through to production. That is 49 years.
Cut the red tape! More nuclear waste gives us more opportunities for more power, and the regulatory approval problems are nuclear energy’s biggest problem.
I inherited a Roth IRA when my dad passed. The special rules are that I have 8 years to leave it alone and then whatever value it has is tax free. I figured I might as well swing for a home run even if I risked a strikeout. When I met with the advisor and told him to put it in a nuclear fund, he looked at me like I was crazy. We’ll see.
It might take a good deal longer, but hopefully not.
What is in the fund?….hard to find a pure play in Nuclear, other than Cameco and NuScale.