Comment on First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled

• Reptorian@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This. Green energy works best when complimented with nuclear energy. Then, we can ween away from big oil.

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  • IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It’s the opposite. Nuclear outputs as close to 24/7 as possible, you can’t ramp it up and down to accommodate variable output from renewables for practical and economic reasons.

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    • Uranium_Green@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I mean you can vary it pretty significantly depending on the reactor type, but even if you couldn’t you can still put the energy to work in alternative ways, such as pumping water up into reservoirs/damns to generate energy at other points, or using the excess energy to split water. There are many ways to use excess energy.

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      • frezik@midwest.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        So your solution to excess nuclear is to store it. The solution to shortfalls of renewables is also to store it.

        Why do we need nuclear?

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      • IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        You can do the same with excess power from renewables though. My point was that you need something to fill in the gaps when renewable output is low, whether that be from batteries, pumped storage, peaker plants, etc.

        Nuclear doesn’t fit in here, there are no nuclear peaker plants.

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    • Pipoca@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      The problem with solar is that the sun doesn’t shine overnight. The good thing with that is that we use much less power overnight than we do during the day.

      If you’re relying a lot on solar, you need to build a big-ass battery that you charge during the day and use at night.

      Alternatively, you build a nuclear or gas plant sized to overnight usage and run them 24/7. Then, you build way smaller batteries to handle dispatchability and smoothing demand over the course of a day.

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      • frezik@midwest.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        HOLY SHIT THE SUN DOESN’T SHINE AT NIGHT, WHY HAVEN’T WE THOUGHT OF THIS?

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      • IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        The problem with solar is that the sun doesn’t shine overnight.

        Big if true. Winds tend to be stronger at night though.

        if you’re relying a lot on solar, you need to build a big-ass battery that you charge during the day and use at night.

        Or pumped hydro, compressed gas, molten salt, green hydrogen, etc.

        Nuclear is good for baseline power

        Base load. See here: cleantechnica.com/…/we-dont-need-base-load-power/

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• frezik@midwest.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Nope, the writing was on the wall for almost a year on this one. The whole nuclear industry in general is a long history of cost and schedule overruns. This is more of the same. Investors are not dumb.

  You can invest in a solar or wind deployment and have it running and producing revenue in six to twelve months. You can invest in nuclear with a stated schedule of five years, have it blow past that mark, needing more money to keep it going (or write the whole thing off), and then start actually getting revenue at the ten year mark. This isn’t mere speculation, it’s exactly what happens. Oh, and it’s producing at least half the MWh per invested dollar as that solar or wind farm.

  It’s amazing anyone is putting any money into nuclear at this point. For the most part, they aren’t. The federal government has shown willingness to sign new licenses for plants. Nobody is buying.

  SMRs do not appear to change any of this.

  Now, something I think we should do is subsidize reactors that process old waste. Lots better than the current plan of letting it sit around, and probably better than storing it in a cave for millenia, too.

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  • joel_feila@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Well the costs and schedule is a regulatory thing.

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    • frezik@midwest.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Even if that’s true, what are you going to do about it?

      Say you do a whole lot of research, and conclude that loosening regulations x, y, and z will not impact safety in any measurable way, and will substantially reduce costs. Even detractors with scientific credentials agree this research is solid. Best case scenario, here.

      NIMBYs will still kill it. What you just did is hand them a way to say “they are cutting corners using unproven methods to let their investors line their pockets at the expense of the lives of their workers and everyone who lives around it”.

      They may be wrong, but their arguments in front of a government body can still be persuasive. They don’t have to be right, just vaguely plausible to people who aren’t experts. That will be enough to kill it.

      You can’t beat NIMBYs by having the best argument. You need to plan around them. Don’t hand them a weapon before the fight begins.

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      • joel_feila@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        So nimby will appose everything. Want to build a solar farm nimby, what to make a wind farm, nimby. I have people turn against a wind farm once they learned it would make electricity for their city but for the whole power grid. Simple because they learned other people would be able to use that electricity. How dare something they can see help the other. Making the build time and cost better helps build around them.

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• PeterPoopshit@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  3 people got killed by one of these like 60 years ago due to blatant design flaws that could’ve been solve. This means they can never exist again.

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  • rambaroo@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That is massively understating the damage Chernobyl did as well as the number of people who died from cancer and radiation poisoning, to the point of sheer dishonesty.

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  • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Also remember that time that they wanted to test a safety system so they disabled the other safety systems and the protocols said they should have shut down the reactor instead of doing the test due to other factors but they did the test anyways and it exploded? Oh and their “emergency off” button was actually an “emergency increase power then off” button. Clearly there’s no way to do these things safely.

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    • PeterPoopshit@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I was talking about the one that exploded in Idaho. It was a “small” reactor. Thr control rods were moved by hand.

      Clearly there was nothing they could have done to avoid human error /s

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      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Lol I wasn’t familiar with that one.

        But my point was that even the big ones that have had big failures were caused by dumb shit that was entirely avoidable. All three of the famous ones could be designed away in new reactors.

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