Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
It's not even trying to solve the right problem. In the US, the NRC has given out licenses for new reactors. They're sitting there without the funding needed to go forward.
I have no doubt that licensing is a long process. It should be. That's how we keep fission power safe. But the more fundamental reason they're not getting built is because they reliably blow their budget and schedule.
Hell yeah.
Nuclear energy isnt a technical problem, it's a human problem. Specifically, the real expense in US nuclear construction is that there are only a handful of contractors who have the tribal knowledge to actually do nuclear construction e.g. pour concrete, install old-fashioned non-networked electrcal control systems, big switchgear, pipefitting, startup V&V, an so on.
They'll all gladly monkeywrench, slow walk, and re-work every step because they know there's no real competition for fleet-wide contracts, and no one from the CEOs to the craft on the ground want the job to end, so you get it decades late or not at all.
One more piece of evidence that prompt fondlers are not serious people.
Source: am person of nuclear
Yeah, even before the techbros showed up, there was this industry push to try to convince people that regulation was the problem. If we loosened the bolts just 10%, everything would work out, they think. Attacking the "linear no threshold model" seems to be the latest strategy.
It's almost like there's a reflexive need to blame government regulation on all the problems.
Linear no-threshold isn't under attack, but under review. The game-theoretic conclusions haven't changed: limit overall exposure, radiation is harmful, more radiation means more harm. The practical consequences of tweaking the model concern e.g. evacuation zones in case of emergency; excess deaths from radiation exposure are balanced against deaths caused by evacuation, so the choice of model determines the exact shape of evacuation zones. (I suspect that you know this but it's worth clarifying for folks who aren't doing literature reviews.)
Even ignoring AI datacenter builds, we still need clean energy. I would be all for nuclear fission if it were at all economically viable. It just isn't.
If we're talking about the general West, then there new nuclear is probably fucked. Rest of the world still builds for reasonable costs. Not nuclear bro amounts, but still.
I think we could see a future where nuclear makes 5-10% of the world's electricity, which would technically make it a niche source of power, but it would also be a massive increase from today.
Nuclear already makes 9% of world's electricity.
OK, my bad. I was thinking about scenario like this: https://eneroutlook.enerdata.net/total-electricity-generation-projections.html
If you assume doubling of electricity production by 2050 (development + electrification) then 10% of that would mean more than double nuclear production.
5% would not really be a massive increase, my mistake, but would still mean more builds than retirement.
China has built a couple of reactors recently. They also went overbudget and overschedule.
Could be, I don't follow that closely. I'm not aware of any that come close to the level of shitshow of say, Hinckley Point C. That matters.
yeah, even the green case for nuclear - which has been around for a long time - falters on wind and solar with battery just being hilariously cheaper. At this point the funding problem is interconnects.
@frezik there is an economic case for three nuclear reactor applications.
Medical isotopes need to come from somewhere, and so far as I'm aware, you can't do all of them with particle accelerators.
Marine power; your 250,000 DWT bulk transport or large container ship pollute significantly, can't go solar, and marine nuclear is not obviously a bad technical option. (They can maybe go with some sort of fuel cell, but that's not developed tech.)
High-latitude baseline power.
high latitude is sort of served by hydro because there's lot of river per person in some of areas that are in any significant way populated (norway, russian north)
medical isotopes are research reactor thing because of frequent loading/unloading - either that or some kind of channel reactors so either CANDU or RBMK. neither are exactly industry standard
marine power requires small reactors = way more enriched than usual sub 5% = expensive and a lot of diplomatic noise about proliferation
@fullsquare Sub reactors use enriched for service life (and some compactness); having to get things through the pressure hull is such a pain you will pay high upfront costs to not do it. A reactor designed to push a large cargo vessel around doesn't have those constraints and could be designed for easy refueling. (There are some marine thermal siphon designs with very few moving parts, come to that.)
High latitude hydro has "and it froze" issues, same after anything else outside up there.
either sub or aircraft carrier reactors might be somewhere around 50 to 220MWe, panamax might need 60MWe tops, regular land based PWRs are more like 300MWe and up. the smaller you go, the higher enrichment you need, but also military propulsion has different priorities, they use 90%+ enrichment in part because they can, and in part because this gives them massive excess reactivity, which means power level can change ridiculously fast. tradeoff is that spent fuel has much more useful uranium, and it's overall expensive, but you also don't skimp on your doomsday ride so it's all fine. commercial powerplants are physically capable of doing slower load following, but it's more economical most of the time to just use full power in order to best utilize fissile material. what you're proposing would have all disadvantages of both, because no way in hell this thing will run on standard, low enriched fuel for PWRs, it might need something maybe more than 5%, maybe closer to 10%, perhaps more, which means problems, because it means worse proliferation risks than with normal fuel and it's already fuel that goes around, and can be taken over in some unfriendly waters; higher enrichment also means it'll be much more expensive, both because of more SWU needed, but also because it's a specialty product that requires extra licensing; and it also won't be as compact and responsive as military reactor, because civilians don't get to play with HEU like that; and also it will require refueling after some time, maybe longer than regular-sized PWR (refueling every year to three) that probably will require visit to manufacturer to do refueling there, which would be, everything else equal, a bit harder than in regular powerplant because it needs to be done in a drydock
it has all disadvantages of SMRs but also you can steal them on high seas and it's probably great for diplomacy if some random ass pirate get hands on that
but also military propulsion has different priorities
And you never know when a couple weirdos are going to break in and steal your gamma-ray photons so they can recrystallize their dilithium.
Medical isotopes don't necessarily need to be created in power reactors.
High-latitudes is a very limited application. Very few people live in areas where solar isn't viable. They also tend to have a lot of space for wind power and some potential geothermal. Long distance HVDC lines shouldn't be discounted, either.
Marine power is where I hope SMRs actually work out.
helps to be the US Navy and not be worried about costs
ship-sized SMR power is quite expensive!
iirc us navy loads their reactors with 93% enriched uranium, the same grade that is used in (american) nukes (and also in couple of very special use cases like oak ridge high flux reactor fuel). can't hand this out just like that. one fuel load is expected to last entire ship lifetime. the less enriched grade you use, the bigger reactor becomes and refueling has to be more frequent
Trump was ready to give some Sam Altman project highly enriched uranium, though I'm not clear on whether that was 20% (already considered a serious proliferation risk) or full bomb-grade 95%.
uranium or plutonium, because i've heard of some plutonium that was slated to be disposed of this way 20 years ago and just sat there unused (not that saltman has facilities or people to do anything with it)
plutonium, looks like:
US offers nuclear energy companies access to weapons-grade plutonium - Oct 21st https://www.ft.com/content/2fbbc621-405e-4a29-850c-f0079b116216 https://archive.is/Pc949
The Department of Energy on Tuesday published an application that nuclear energy groups can use to seek up to 19 metric tonnes of the government’s weapons-grade plutonium from cold war-era warheads.
...
At least two companies, Oklo, which is backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and France’s Newcleo, are expected to apply to access the government’s plutonium stockpile.
may I just say:
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST
However, experts have raised concerns about the commercial use of plutonium and the risk of the material falling into the wrong hands.
NO SHIT
no you can't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium_Management_and_Disposition_Agreement
russians did their part, they basically gave that plutonium to their nuclear engineers for new things development to fuck around with and got a couple of working fast reactors out of that. americans did something that is very mckinsey coded and debated whether to burn it in pwr as mox like the french do or mix it with some magic powder and hide it in mountain which would be basically the same, right, and russians didn't like it because you can reverse that, and it ended up with americans doing nothing, then russians withdrew (and they were right in doing this)
tldr diplomacy by committee
weird that EDF didn't want to buy it, maybe they also have surplus plutonium (reactor grade, so of worse quality)
The conclusion of the NS Savannah was that it would have been economical after the oil crisis of the 1970s caused a price spike in fuel costs. Ports also need facilities and training to handle nuclear fuel. Once you have that, it's perfectly viable.
Unlike energy generation on land, there isn't a lot of alternatives for decarbonizing marine transport.
I'm sure there will be no issues setting up nuclear fuel handling at ports worldwide. Well, maybe one or two.
If the AI bros get these things built before the bubble pops, we should expect bad designs, not allowing for local conditions, setting up the reactor operators for ridiculous errors, and lots of nuclear accidents. Hopefully not very big ones. Cross fingers!
If and when those accidents start happening, its going to set back adoption of nuclear power by years, if not decades - especially if there's an incompetent response to those accidents (which, considering Starmer and Trump are in charge, is worryingly likely)
One of the other important things about the nuclear regulation process is that it makes sure the local people are involved. You can’t skip that step either. If you just run roughshod over the locals for the sake of AI, you’ve already got people in the streets protesting AI.
The government will almost certainly try to just bypass the activists. But remember: anti-nuclear activists have decades of experience at this. So I’m sure it’ll go great all round.
Anti-nuclear activists are going to have a field day with this, aren't they?
have you seen how much time it takes to built single NPP? openai will be a smoking crater well before site for the first plant will get selected. then you have a backlog for turbines and reactors
That's a great question! If it's for an AI power station, it turns out that 3.6 roentgen is a nutritional requirement.
Is there anything else I can help you with?
Given the state of renewables and energy storage, this feels a lot like the final opportunity for nuclear power in its current state to actually do anything at all, and the “move fast and break things” crowd have no idea about building physical things more complex than a datacentre which honestly, isn’t that challenging in comparison.
openai will be a smoking crater well before site for the first plant will get selected
Other things that might not last that long include the government of the country in which you’re trying to build massive piece of infrastructure that represents a significant ongoing maintenance burden and risk.
renewable generation, i'm with you, but i'm not sold on storage. i'm not even sure if there's enough lithium for grid batteries to seriously matter, so it might need to use something else. the boring, working option (geographically limited) is of course pumped storage hydro, but other than that, i think that the right way to do things is to use energy when it's made, not when it's needed. in particular, water heaters have tiny duty cycle and hot water just sits there, which means you could, in principle, make it so that water heaters soak up all, or at least as much as practical, of excess power, wherever it is available
some countries do fund nuclear power as a kind of strategic energy independence hedge* no matter costs, most prominently france and russia, and to some degree india and a couple of others
*also for military use
i hear sodium batteries are emerging as an alternative to lithium, but note that I also don’t know shit about this domain
sounds good, no obvious critical materials but also first facilities are just in single MW range and came online like two months ago. needs like four orders of magnitude more. already matches lead acid on durability, still less than li-ion. maybe it's solvable, but in case it's not you can just burn it down because there's nothing worthwhile to recycle and it's nontoxic
this happens a lot. lithium anything has this problem obviously, but so do flow batteries (vanadium or zinc bromide - bromine is commercially sourced just from either dead sea or some american underground brines). some lithium batteries also use cobalt. hydrogen generation or fuel cells use a lot of platinum, (some of) new power electronics are made from GaN. etc etc
We should transition to NIMH technology. As in, let’s experiment on some rats to make them superintelligent and get them to solve all our problems.
nahh first they'll gonna try to build machine god and then any announcement will be in form of 30000 word long notices wait nvm
I assume the problems in question are billionaires, and superintelligent rats could probably do a good job of Brown Jenkins-ing them.
Of all the things that will never happen, this will never happen the most.
I think it's not very difficult to construct a really shitty small reactor that is horrendously expensive per watt. Can probably be built in a year if you get rid of NRC and just half ass it completely.
I mean, Demon Core was a small reactor. You pretty much have to do a lot of work to ensure you won't create a small reactor when a truckload of fresh fuel falls into a river.
What's difficult is making a safe reactor that is actually making electricity at somewhat reasonable price per watt.
"You pretty much have to do a lot of work to avoid creating a small reactor, if a truckload of fresh fuel falls into a river."
Don't give them any ideas.
Yeah. Currently the center-right government here in Sweden are pushing nuclear, because the one thing they hate more than brown people is green people. But the industry actually tasked with building and running the plants have extracted both credit guarantees (== taxpayer money) and a legally mandated minimum price on electricity - remember, the entire populist narrative of nuclear is that it will bring cheap power! Plus they're unlikely to start building unless there's a stable parliamentary majority to cement the deal.
OK, so far, so good (nuclear policy in Sweden is colored by the fractious debate on ending nuclear power in the late 70s, but the principals of that debate (boomers) are finally dying off). But when the shovel hits the ground, you need a site to build it on. And the neighbors of said site are generally of the opinion that a fucking power pylon is an infringement on their god-given right to property resale price increase. Imagine a concrete box of eldrich power blocking the skyline, and imagine a population of people who know how to pull the levers of obstruction and have had decades of practice doing it. Fun times ahead.
Our previous gov in .nl also tried to push nuclear, but first they had to do a location study (which have already been done in the past, and for some added hilarity, our incompetent farmers party didn't know you needed rivers near those plants), but even if those were really redone and not just a stalling tactic, they already couldn't find a company willing to build one.
And after our gov fell we are all back to square one now. Esp as I think forming a new gov will take forever again. Esp with the rightward shift of so many parties. (Our labour green party and our center right (but people think they are center left) party are now considered far left)
hmm, would sea water be too corrosive for cooling?
No idea, prob doesnt flow properly and has too much variation compared to a river. Also risk of jellyfish.