I always regret American conservatives missing the boat on this issue - if they'd admitted climate change was real but insisted that nuclear power was the only solution they'd annoy the libs just as much as they do now but the world would be a better place.
Solar seems like a more practical solution for Jamaica.
Yes, its small and somewhat crowded. But it's not *that* small- it's not the Kowloon Walled City. It's about 10^10 square meters. Cover just 1% of that with Solar panels, and you've got 100,000,000 square meters of panels.
Jamaica is blessed with a lot of sun- it's at low latitudes and it shines almost every day of the year when it's not a hurricane. It gets about 5 KwH/square meter of incident solar energy per day. At 20% efficiency, that would be 1KwH/sq meter: 100,000,000 KwH per day for the 1% of the country with solar panels, or 36,500 GwH per year. That dwarfs the roughly 4000 GWH that Jamaica currently produces in total electricity, as well as the 4600 that Iceland uses for its main aluminum smelter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rahnj%C3%BAkar_Hydropower_Plant).
OK, the sun doesn't shine at night, or 365 days a year. The standard story here is that you need to build battery storage systems to store the energy so you haven it constantly available. But I think Jamaica is a perfect case for the opposite- what renewable energy optimists call "superpower". Rather than adjust energy to meet your demands, you adjust your demands to meet the energy source. Make hay while the sun shines, as it were.
Specifically: you can plan to do aluminum smelting only while the solar panels are producing. You don't need to do at at night. And if they're not producing because of a hurricane or whatever, just take the day off. Jamaica is famous for having a relaxed, flexible culture, which fits this. Aluminum smelting doesn't need to be done continuously- it's not like a hospital or a heat source. The same applies to many of the other things they'd use energy for in the short term- water desalinization, liquor distilling, and yes, air conditioning. We just have to change the standard business/manufacturing culture to make this work. Flexibility is the key, rather than following a rigid schedule like a 19th century railroad timetable.
Ever been to Jamaica? Where exactly would you build these massed solar arrays? Deforest the place? Use the limited agricultural land? And why on earth would you use the least efficient method of energy storage, batteries, which have low energy density and require frequent recycling and replacement. Jamaica is mountainous. It would make much more sense to used pumped hydro storage for either wind or solar which, through the creation of the necessary reservoirs would also address their intermittent water problems.
One additional question, how well do you think either wind turbines or solar arrays would stand up to hurricanes. Seeing as these are frequent visitors to Jamaica?
You've been mind-killed by too much time arguing on the internet. That's why you saw someone mention "solar" and immediately thought "he wants to 100% clearcut the island and put in massive amounts of batteries" which is pretty much the opposite of what I wrote.
True, 1% is not a trivial amount of land. But it's not impossible. I don't know about Jamaica, but in the US we've covered about 40% of the land in farmland. So we'd only have to give up 2.5% of our farmland to get 1% total. Or any sort of abandoned mine, building, polluted land, whatever.
Is that because it's physically impossible, or is it just because the plants were designed that way assuming 24/7 power? I suspect it's the latter. We might have to redesign some things!
(and if I'm wrong about this, surely there's something else they could use electricity for besides metal processing)
Each step of the processing must happen at a specific (narrow) temperature range. It takes a long time to raise or lower the temperature of the machine and the material, given the huge scale, so not something you'd want to do on a 24h cycle. (Or so I would think. Again, no expert.)
I like this idea. It works especially well if you have an enormous consumer of electricity that you could budget for, say, 10% arbitrary downtime. Then you don't have to worry about overbuilding solar. Turn of the smelting plant and your solar panels can still meet the island's needs on a cloudy day, for instance.
An aluminum smelter is planning on scaling up/down electrolysis to match grid production. Now it sounds like they're using new technology here - so maybe the technology upgrade is also a requirement (some lines in the article imply that), but it does look like something that _can_ be done - especially if you're talking about a new plant.
I clicked on the link and either misunderstood the article or misunderstand your point. The article describes adding a battery to their process so they can "compensate for fluctuations in the power grid, making it easier to manage intermittent renewables."
This seems to be an attempt to reduce the cost of using renewables by adding a battery to their production process. If you went and offered them steadier energy production, pretty sure this plant would jump at it so they wouldn't have to spend the millions of dollars on this battery.
"The family-owned business is investing €36 million ($39 million) in a two-year industrial-scale pilot of systems that will allow power use across 120 electrolysis cells to be dialed up or down by 25 percent in either direction, for up to several hours."
That is, they can "add power to the grid" by scaling down their own usage (rapidly?). That won't power a grid that has no power on it, but does help (in the manner of a REAL battery) with demand/supply elements.
Addendum: I missed/overlooked this at the end, but suggests in general that this applies generally to smelters "“Large industrial and commercial dispatchable loads, like aluminum smelters, can be compensated through demand response programs for delaying being turned on during periods of peak demand, or encouraged to turn on during low periods of demand,” he said."
But in general this article would seem to support mpowell's suggetsion that they could scale up/down smelting based on whether the sun was shining.
"As a major industrial power user, Trimet already participates in German demand response programs, taking its aluminum smelters offline for short periods when required to stabilize the grid in the face of load surges."
My understanding is that they are already required to scale up or down based on grid needs. This was an attempt to address renewables increasing the grid variance.
More broadly, this seems like a hard ask to make of industrial producers. If its overcast for a week, do they just shut down because solar can't provide enough energy and the grid is strained? How do their employees feel about being sent home? Do they get paid even though they aren't working? If they don't get paid, pretty sure they are going to unhappy. If they do get paid, who is covering that cost? How about buyers from who expect deliveries? Do they just accept getting them late?
The best part of Nuclear for Jamaicia is that you can use the waste heat for desalination (multi-effect distillation) while still making electricity, and it gives a user that could be sized to let a reactor run near max power all the time by taking any extra capacity off peak.
A regionally related question - why isn't Biden doing more to normalize relations with Cuba, the largest and closest of the Caribbean Greater Antilles? If it's fear of Cuban voters in Florida I think that ship has sailed. One of the best things Biden has done was blow off the foreign policy establishment and just pull the plug in Afghanistan, and I would have hoped he'd show similar commonsense disregard for the groupthink that produced a decades long policy failure on Cuba.
My guess is it’s just too far down the list of things for his actual staff and is sitting in business as usual bureaucratic goo. The Afghanistan withdrawal alienated a lot of blobbers and some folks are hung up on the supposed ray gun attacks as well. He’s shown he can ignore them but in this case he probably needs some of ‘them’ to do the actual work.
I was strongly in the normalize relations with Cuba camp for a while. Reading recent articles about how Cuba essentially infiltrated Venezuela's government and kept Maduro in power, I'm less enthused. My previous theory had been that America would have a much larger impact on Cuba than the reverse - however, I now suspect that the America simply wouldn't give Cuba much thought either way while the Cuba would be much more focused on shaping the impact to the Cuban government's benefit.
It seems a little odd to describe ending a policy that has failed for 60 years to achieve its goal of dislodging the Cuban regime, and has in fact provided it with a reliable foreign foil, as tossing a lifeline. I'm pretty sure if the US had opened the floodgates of US investment and travel as soon as the Soviet Union fell, and dared Castro to explain to the Cuban people why they shouldn't partake, the Castro regime would long since be history by now.
Now, with Chinese backing and the Chinese blueprint, they're almost certain to use any opening to become a small, klepto-capitalist police state.
I'd rather see if the government doesn't disintegrate first.
And again, fundamentally, I don't care about Cuba or its well-being, I care about the well-being of the United States, and domestic political concerns trump any foreign policy ones in this instance.
"I'm pretty sure if the US had opened the floodgates of US investment and travel as soon as the Soviet Union fell, and dared Castro to explain to the Cuban people why they shouldn't partake, the Castro regime would long since be history by now."
I think that is wildly optimistic. If nothing else, Venezuela among other countries has demonstrated that governments can stay in power while refusing external investment. Valenzuela had companies begging to invest and their government literally caused the worst economic collapse in the modern history while staying in power.
At this point, I think it boils down to two things:
1. No domestic political benefit. Arguably no domestic benefit period, political or otherwise.
2. Who cares? Cuba's government is going to collapse eventually, it has too little legitimacy among the populace and it cannot seem to implement any sort of reforms that would help it gain more.
Easier to just sit around and change policy in response to events when the time comes.
This. The hypothesis that the Democrats could win Florida without the support of Miami's Cuban exile community was looking pretty good in 2008, a little shaky but still plausible in 2012, but dead in the water by 2016 and fully decomposed in 2020.
The new version of the claim is "well, we can win without Florida" and while 2020 demonstrated that it's _possible_ one could not in any real sense call it _easy_ and the conservative tilt of the USA's Latin-American population is getting larger not smaller so maybe let's not spot the opposition points without good reason.
It doesn't seem like a question of right or left, so much as a question of whether to stick with a braindead policy that has failed to achieve its goal for literally decades (but appeals to a small, vindictive constituency personally affected by the Castro revolution), or do something else.
Yes, for being forced into exile and having their property confiscated. Understandable, but their personal emotional reaction shouldn't be allowed to drive policy for the US as a whole.
I love ideas like this but one missing element to this piece is that any serious consideration of nuclear in the Caribbean has to contend with the possibility of a Cat 5 hurricane. There is also tsunami risk as the area is highly geologically active.
Maybe this new generation of reactor can better contend with these threats. I'd like to know.
I believe the engineering is such that the joke is a worst case scenario could hit at 4:30pm of a Friday afternoon and the staff would say, “Well, I guess we’ll deal with it on Monday.” And walk away.
If wishes were horses. Nuclear energy's history is 50 years of grandiose promises ("too cheap to meter!") followed by significantly more expensive and problematic realities. I would very much _like_ for the mini-reactor designs to pan out, but I see no reason based on past history to assume that they will.
If it ever came within a billion miles of "cost parity", then sure, we'd have something to bitch about.
As it is... no.
Nuclear is expensive because:
1. Construction of complex, extremely heavily-reinforced, concrete-steel composite structures is ruinously expensive.
2. Fabrication of large pressure vessels out of specialty steels with very rigorous welding tolerances is ruinously expensive.
3. The entire industry's construction capacity might suffice to bring online 6 plants annually, and with no player having any degree of vertical integration it's impossible to control costs and learn to mitigate or avoid errors.
4th generation reactors might or might not get away from point 2 and mitigate the first half of point 3, but it's very hard to convince anyone that we can just leave them out without a reactor housing for any disgruntled idiot to set off a car bomb next to, which means points 1 and most of 3 are still in play.
The pop sci explanation for why France was so good at nuclear for a while was that they had just One Design for reactors and stamped them out en masse. I'm curious if you know how close to reality that was, and... would it be likely to help the current situation?
And the relative lack of seismic or serious wind design loads in France.
China's modern approach to bridges is somewhat similar; standard designs for highway and overpass bridges of X length, and form the land around to suit. I'm all in favor of stripping the US environmental review process down by three-quarters, but that's a bit extreme in terms of impact.
If France's heyday involved a similar theory for design and layout, I could see mass production working somewhat.
This is why I tend to discount the SMR theory of mass production; because absent a major shift in the threat environment we're not going to just be plunking a small reactor pressure vessel down on a mat foundation with a Quonset Hut around it for someone to run into with a freight truck after they go through a bad divorce. And as long as we're building structures, it's going to be an engineering project each and every time.
It would certainly reduce costs relative to 3rd generation nuclear, but I have serious doubts that it will reduce them *enough*, in the absence of a real carbon price, for it to compete with fossil fuels.
And all this assumes that we don't solve the intermittency problem through cheap storage and a mix of wind and solar to hedge output, which I think is just not a tenable bet.
My car can power my house for 3-4 days and its battery pack cost $6k for something overengineered for mobility, crash-survivability, and rapid-charging.
David, I have no expertise (or currently time to acquire it) in this but it would be really interesting if we could get Matt to engage with this details of the nuclear issue and knowledgeable critics like you more. He mentions it a fair amount and you've spent a LOT of time commenting with detailed criticisms. Do other readers agree?
Outside my area of expertise, and it would be hard to gauge as not all that many countries are building lots of new projects outside of China.
They're mostly gravity structures, so the finicky detailing (rebar, welding) that makes up the worst nuclear-specific problems (and also is a pain for things like tunnels) is not as much of an issue, but I don't know how staging and waterway diversion work beyond the most basic concepts, and I don't pretend to know how path-dependent everything is. I think most of the actual plant systems go in last, so in theory they they won't be as bad on that front either.
My guess is that they come in overbudget just like roads and bridges do, but not like nuclear or long tunnels.
Current nuclear doesn't seem like a good reference class for future predictions as many new designs share very little with old designs. And I don't just mean the physical design...it's different people, different organizations, different motivations.
Well keep in mind we went down a path dependent dead end because the priority was producing fissile material for nuclear weapons. There were much safer technologies we could have used if that need wasn't there.
Yeah, I'm a big believer in the argument that we should be investing tons of money to bring more nuclear power online and in the process figure out how to make it cheaper while finding a reasonable balance for safety. And I don't really care what generation technology you're talking about. But, practically speaking, experimenting with new nuclear designs on an island frequently exposed to hurricanes does not sound like the most promising situation. Maybe India is the right country to experiment with more nuclear power?
Why are hurricanes a risk? Any conceivable reactor building would be able to stand up to 200 mph winds with no problem. The issue with current reactors and hurricanes is that they require active cooling ,even when shut down.
You’ll recall that as soon as the earthquake hit Fukushima the reactors all SCRAMed and shut down. The problem was the lost their connection to grid power so they failed over to the diesel backup generators. When those failed they failed over to the emergency emergency battery backups. But those only lasted a few hours.
The new reactors don’t need active cooling. If you don’t keep them running they shut themselves down and slowly cool. Nothing a hurricane could do could cause a problem.
"Any conceivable reactor building would be able to stand up to 200 mph winds with no problem"
And would be very expensive, as all buildings able to stand up to earthquakes and hurricane force winds and remain fully functional are.
It's neither hard nor terribly expensive to design a building which will not *immediately collapse* due to a local magnitude 8 or even 9 earthquake, and which will provide for safe evacuation of its inhabitants to the outside before requiring demolition or complete retrofit.
It is markedly harder, and as such much more expensive, to design a building that continues functioning through the same event and suffers no structural damage that cannot be repaired in situ.
The latter is the standard to which nuclear power plants must be designed.
This blows the SMR promise of cheap mass-production mostly out of the water, and suddenly we're back within shouting distance of 3rd generation PWR economics!
No, they aren't. They're based on the reality that having to rebuild the structure every time there is a major seismic event or large hurricane is an even less economical approach than building it to a higher standard.
Even an SMR reactor complex is going to be a major work of engineering with a reactor housing consisting of a small steel pressure vessel, large steel containment vessel, and very, very heavily reinforced, difficult to construct, expensive to replace concrete shield structure.
That will be the case regardless of whether it's a small PWR, MSR, or gas-cooled reactor. All require fundamentally the same level of safety as concerns the actual rupture of the reactor vessel.
The interaction of the three has been the downfall of every single nuclear project in the last 3 decades and will not be ameliorated in the slightest by any of the proposed 4th generation reactor designs.
I'll make the point that, aside from nuclear reactors and hospitals, a great number of large commercial buildings voluntarily hold themselves to the same standard because of the great expense involved in rebuilding and because of the vast insurance benefits. Virtually every new mid- or high-rise building on the West Coast implements this standard.
It will make complete economic sense to build to that standard. If you don't, the LCOE will be *higher*, not *lower*.
I agree that it would be very nice if we had reactors that could be entirely passively cooled and still operated at even local utility scale, but I feel like it's worth pointing out that right now this is a sales brochure for, at best, a handful of engineering prototypes -- not something that you can buy now or will be able to buy any time in the next decade or more.
And even then, I think it's unrealistic to expect that "survive an Oklahoma City style truck bombing without poisoning every water source downstream for a generation" won't be a design requirement.
"I think it's unrealistic to expect that "survive an Oklahoma City style truck bombing without poisoning every water source downstream for a generation" won't be a design requirement."
Which is why the "promise" of SMR mass production is based on delusional thinking.
Whether this is *necessary* or not is debatable. I think it is, others can disagree.
But it is an absolute impossibility that it will not be *perceived as necessary*, so that debate is ultimately academic.
The more I look into this but but 10,000 years! Objection the more annoyed I get.
First, concrete won't last 10,000 years buried in the desert. Hum...do we have very old concrete buildings still standing? Sure, the Pantheon is 2000 years old, still standing and still in use. And it's been out in the weather!
Ok...hum do we have objects that have been buried in the dessert for thousands of years? Well....we have King Tut's tomb contents. They were buried 3,300 years ago. How did they hold up?
I somehow don't think waste mixed with glass, inside a muti foot thick 17,000 psi concrete sarcophagus that is welded inside a 2 foot thick stainless steel vessel that wrapped in f_cking kevlar, is going to have a problem lasting 10,000 years.
Also, who honestly cares about people 10000, or even 1000, years in the future? If they don't have better tech by then to address whatever problems may develop, that's on them, not us.
Exactly, and even if they find it what's the worst that could happen? They cut and burn and burrow and blast through the feet of cladding* and finally they are able to crack one open, what then? They get sick and die. And everyone says, we better fill that hole in again and be on our way. Vs. how many will die from global warming. It doesn't seem like an honest serious concern.
*With Victorian era technology if they haven't rediscovered radiation!
Or the radioactive hole becomes the inspiration for a new world religion - such powerful spirits that react that way to being disturbed will need to be placated, no doubt.
Of all the places I have worked in the world in the course of an engineering career Jamaica was the most fascinating. It is the only place I have ever seen, for example, where electrical generation was accomplished by dragging the ass end of a large ship onto land. And hooking up its marine diesel to a generator. That was an impressive hack.
Jamaica being Jamaica it took weeks to get the permits and water supply to do the tests I was there to evaluate and demonstrate so I had a lot of time on my hands and a guide to show me around. And that was nine months after the equipment necessary had been shipped to Jamaica. I learned a lot. For example I learned that cultural status depends on the lightness of your skin. Hence dense crowds of all Jamaicans walk on the shaded side of a street be it never so crowded, while the sunny side is largely unoccupied. Even in the coolest times. I also learned that if you are ascending the heights surrounding Kingston and you have space in your pickup then you stop and let anybody climb on. Two classes of people live on those heights. The relatively rich who have cars and masses of poor people who daily trudge up and down. They line the roads. So if you don't want to be on the receiving end of a brick you give everybody you can a ride.
Also Red Stripe is a pretty good beer and makes an excellent bribe.
A quibble first with that line about coal fired generation being replaced with wind and solar generation and natural gas as an adjunct. I don't think you can can that when 90 percent of the coal replacement is being done with natural gas and the other 10 with alternative sources like wind and solar. You seem to have a very good grasp for a non-science guy of the nature of the problems associated with integrating large wind and solar generation but you did overlook one of the key problems. Yes you would have to massively overbuild wind and solar generation in order to have a hope of matching supply and demand. And yes this would also require a massive amount of energy storage in order for wind or solar to become primary energy sources. But it also, as you point out, would require that continent spanning grid in order to distribute such power from where it is generated to where it is needed. Batteries, btw, are the least efficient way of storing energy. The costs of creating such a grid as well as the energy storage problem make wind and solar very expensive indeed. And this is a fact that its advocates like to surround with a Somebody Else's Problem Field. But it will still show up on your electricity bill.
The question in my mind is could you even build that grid. There are numerous technical issues and frightening vulnerabilities inherent in putting all your eggs in one basket so to speak with that integrated grid. But I fear that the advocates for wind and solar are going to fight it tooth and nail. One need only look at what happened in Maine. Which voted down a transmission line that would wheel Quebec hydropower though Maine to Massachusetts where it is needed. Who fought against it hardest? The same people who tell you we need to rely on wind and solar. Even though the only way to scale up wind and solar is to build exactly such infrastructure.
Sometimes the stupidity of environmental activists makes me want to weep. After I am done laughing.
Another problem with only having 4 power plants is the lack of redundancy, leading to a fragile grid and widespread power outages during hurricanes. With a technology like SMRs, outages could be a lot more localized. Dr. Charlyne Smith touches on this in the INL profile Matt linked to.
Minor typo: NREL is the National Renewable *Energy* Laboratory.
I think stuff like SMRs and Thorium reactors and other advanced concepts are definitely important research that should be pursued further. But we should also be realistic about the timeline here. SMRs, for all the hype they're generating, are still a long way from being scalable and marketable. There's been a big OECD study recently where they concluded that SMRs won't entry the market until the mid-2030s at the earliest. And that's before those things get commissioned and actually built. Of course, you could always just build a standard run-of-the-mill nuclear power plant, but even those things take at least like a decade to construct (and are expensive as hell).
So while I agree that Jamaica seems to be one of the places where nuclear is actually a smart option because nuclear power plants take up so little space, it's not a solution it can depend on to combat the effects of climate change. The time we have to combat the worst effects of climate change is substantially shorter than 20 or 30 years. I feel like this is something that gets overlooked very often in the current energy debate. I'm also not sure if those aspiring Jamaican aluminium industrialists can wait two or three decades for their business to take off.
(Related question: Does Jamaica dabble in offshore wind energy at all? I mean, it's an island!)
The problem with offshore wind for Jamaica is the whole "ruins the view” thing. This is a minor issue in the US with its gigantic coastline and diversified economy, but for Jamaica—a *small* island heavily dependent on tourism—it’s harder to find a place the math works out economically.
I should think the Pedro Bank would be a good solution; entirely over the horizon from the coast, shallow enough for current technological approaches to work, and in a good location from a wind power perspective.
Well, I don't think Matt means Jamaica should combat climate change by reducing its emissions. I think he means more that it needs a lot of electricity to adapt to the effects of climate change, which will be very rough for island nations.
The term SMR seems to be being used for a pretty broad range of technologies.
The actual technology (planned to be) used can range from the highly conventional, like a PWR, to the more experimental designs.
And in size, the planned designs are ranging from really tiny ones that would be just shipped out and then plugged in basically, to things like Rolls Royce's planned "SMR" which will be 470MW (larger than many first generation conventional nuclear plants) and which, while it will contain many modular components, will still take years to build on site.
Cue an enormous meltdown (as it were) by the global environmental advocacy industry for “using the people of the global south to test dangerous and unproven nuclear technologies”.
And…they wouldn’t be entirely wrong? The optics of this really are kinda terrible: if these technologies are really so promising, why haven’t China or India made a serious play for them, and if they’ve demurred then why on earth would you make a tiny, densely settled country with endemic corruption and limited disaster response capacity the test bed?
If you want to do a simple thing to help Jamaica, let a lot more of them emigrate to the US. Speaking as a resident of a neighborhood that’s like 80% Dominican, it seems to work pretty well for the DR.
My only response to the DEI folks is “screw you, those people can make their own choices and didn’t ask you to speak on their behalf”. That is and always will be the only response a bunch of white trust fund babies deserve.
As for the rest, China IS avidly pursuing both 3+ and 4th generation nuclear technologies, the former at scale, the latter in laboratory settings. India is as well, albeit in more financially constrained manner.
The economics of China’s plants are every bit as bad as the recent American or British efforts, but as you note there are other motivations there; be seen doing something on the environment, develop prestige technologies and projects domestically, build up an ecosystem to plausibly support a much larger nuclear deterrent without all of it being solely military in nature.
That said, your impression of Chinese air quality is off in two ways; first, it’s gotten *considerably* better since a nadir in 2013-14, when “solid in winter” wasn’t too far off.
Second, the main issue involved was never coal-fired power plants, which are concentrated point sources and therefore relatively economical to scrub to first-world standards.
The biggest collective source of the particulate which made northern China miserable in winter was the subsidized winter heating programs north of the Yellow River. They consisted, almost everywhere, of hot water heat provided at the building or residential complex level by small coal-fired boilers.
No way in hell to scrub those, hence an ongoing campaign to move them all to natural gas. Hence huge contracts with Russia starting in 2015. Also hence several different meltdowns in the Northern Chinese energy grid and heating supply since, because there are teething problems.
>>why on earth would you make a tiny, densely settled country with endemic corruption and limited disaster response capacity the test bed?<<
I'm not sure who the "you" is but I think the idea is that the Jamaican government reads this post and says, "Great idea!" If it doesn't work (because of endemic corruption etc,) well, at least it was tried.
Gonna have to ask for a cite on that. To be clear I'm a duffer who's mostly working from the wikipedia "nuclear energy in china" page here so I have no particular expertise, but 150 is a number an order of magnitude higher than what's claimed there as being currently under construction.
So to be clear: if China _does_ manage to bring 200 gigawatts of nuclear online by 2035, that would be great and I would applaud. It would be a monumental accomplishment on multiple levels, not least because doing it means pretty implicitly that someone had finally bent or completely cracked the cost curve on reactor construction.
But you're stretching the definition of "in the pipeline" here well past the breaking point. This is a press release about what's going to be in the next Five Year Plan. Until personnel are allocated and shovels start going in the ground, this is a (laudable) goal and nothing more.
But you and others keep acting as if commentary to the effect of "I don't expect it to work for X, Y, and Z reasons" is somehow an impediment to trying, or constitutes "irrational opposition to nuclear" or whatever.
I find it amusing, because as late as 8 years ago, before my involvement with the China AP1000 projects, I was pretty bullish on nuclear. "We'll work out the kinks on these and then spam them out" type thinking.
I was completely and utterly wrong about both the possibility of unfucking nuclear construction and the incredible speed with which PV efficiency would rise and costs fall.
I was on the wrong side of the "hydrogen v. battery" debate at the time for the same reason. As it turns out, developing, engineering, and building new complex systems is hard and often impossible.
But spamming out easily manufactured individual products is not, especially when they require only incremental systemic change to accommodate them.
I don't intend to continue being mistaken about these things for the same reasons, that's very close to the commonly cited lay definition of insanity.
I won’t claim any knowledge at all of what the lobbying landscape is for coal vs nuclear in China, but they currently have 50 nuclear plants in operation and another 15 under construction, so I think I can claim with a straight face that coal doesn’t have a total stranglehold on development plans there. Coal is _cheap_ but its downsides for China are really obvious right now and are not hidden away in the periphery either: the air in Beijing is a semisolid in winter. I don’t think that the PRC is likely to turn up their noses at any plausible energy technology that would help keep them on their growth path?
(I am of course not Chinese nor do I live there — if anyone here has deeper insights than the Wikipedia page I’d be grateful to hear them! Ditto India.)
China is actually plowing lots of money and expertise into 4th generation reactors.
Just because they dont release figures for costs for Sanmen and other projects doesn’t mean they don’t know within the Party that they’re ruinously expensive.
Most of my attitude towards nuclear stems from my peripheral involvement in projects there. If the Chinese regulatory environment cannot make them safe, cheap, and fast to build, it’s *not possible at all*.
I would not be too happy if China proves that 4th generation reactors are perfectly safe and then starts selling them around the world, including places like Jamaica. I don't want to see the US become irrelevant, so we should be trying everything reasonable.
You can't throw R&D money at everything, but helping US firms partner with Jamaica to test out ideas? Sounds good to me.
I mean... I could just as easily have said "The US is actually plowing lots of money and expertise into 4th generation reactors." We are. And the companies commercializing it are looking into building testbeds abroad. It hasn't happened not for lack of willing candidates but because no one is ready to build any of their PowerPoint presentations.
I'm not worried about the amount of attention this receives, I simply do not expect it to pan out well in a timely fashion.
Yeah, this is my worry: if the only thing that's standing in between us and abundant nuclear-sourced energy were euroamerican regulatory squeamishness, I would predict that China would have already built several hundred of whatever plant type was most efficient and would have located most of them in Xinjiang and Tibet along the Indian border to "deal" with any safety concerns. That they haven't suggests strongly to me that the limiting factors lie elsewhere and if you've got the time or inclination I'd be fascinated to hear more about your direct observations.
Well, you already liked the other comment. Here's a bit more detail.
For 3rd and 3rd+ generation technology, it boils down to this:
No matter *what* safety regime I am operating under, I'm building a reactor housing that eliminates any likely cause of the reactor pressure vessel rupturing, because that's a goddamned doomsday event for the local area and ultimately for groundwater supplies in a several-thousand square mile area.
So I am fabricating, on-site, a large reactor shielding vessel out of high-grade (stainless, I believe) steel, basically by welding big hoop segments together. (*Large*; their size is limited by crane lift capacity and nothing else, so we're often talking about 3-4,000 metric tons per segment.
At the same time, I am building a small plant within it; the reactor and pressure vessel, support infrastructure, and the hookups that have to be staged through the shielding vessel and structure
And at the same time, I am staging a huge construction operation around it, to simultaneously build the actual plant infrastructure and connect it to the reactor pressure vessel, *AND* erect a very, very oversized concrete-steel composite reactor shield around the whole set of works.
Typical designs for modern reactor housings are feet of extremely-heavily reinforced concrete. Sometimes overtop more plate steel for a composite structure. In any case, the concrete is reinforced to the point where 15-20% of its internal volume is replaced by steel, rather than the 1-3% which is typical in a building.
This entire process is path dependent. I cannot complete work on a given stage of the shield vessel until certain internal assemblies are complete, I cannot complete work on stages of the concrete shield structure until the corresponding stages of the steel shield vessel are complete, and I cannot close the whole thing up in anything less than the precise order dictated by what fits or needs to pass through where. So a delay in, say, getting a reactor vessel and pile in place cascades down the whole project. The chances that A goes awry are very high because of the complexity involved, and I cannot make up ground by doing B first, which is much less frequently the case in other projects. Which adds up to financing costs. Lots of them.
Even the China projects, which were backstopped by the government and therefore had extremely low financing costs, still came in vastly over time and budget from what I know of them.
The American projects routinely had to rip out already-completed work as they backtracked and discovered they'd have to do something that happened before it over again, principally due to massive issues with welding quality control. I suspect China had the same issues on Sanmen as it had most of the same delays, just covered up in part by throwing labor at the problem on the concrete side to make up time.
The officially admitted figures for Sanmen put the two reactors 80% overbudget. I would be unsurprised to find they actually came in at more like 2.5X projected cost, with the savings relative to Vogtle mostly down to financing costs.
I agree with Charlie P. Nuclear always runs over time and budget, has had tons of government funding and little to show for it. Even the well run French scheme is not cheap enough to make bauxite refining work. Just coating the existing Jamaican building stock with solar panels should be be able to give you close to 10 GW, plus you must be able to find some unproductive land to build another 10GW at say 2-3c/kWh. There’s a lot of ruin in a nation. And wind can coexist with animal grazing and other forms of agriculture. Unlike nuclear which requires lots of water and will most likely have to be built on the coast, killing tourism.
I think we can give up on anything resembling productive engagement with the nuke bros.
I've seen the same playbook out of all of them; nitpick the one incorrect word choice you make and act as if that invalidates an argument for which they have no meaningful counter.
In the meantime, since you have no information I didn't already know and no arguments actually worth listening to, I'm going to add you to the list of people whose posts I chuckle at and scroll away from.
Damn... late to the comment party as always. Random thoughts.
None of the gas turbines are Siemens Energy models. I only bring this up because it would be awesome to work there. Damn it. Actually the only Caribbean Island we work on is Trinidad and Tobago, and... it's not so nice. Actually one of the shittier places we work at.
Also... go Idaho National Laboratory! Not only is Idaho top of the charts on renewable energy... we have all dem smarty pants Nuke dudes.
One of the biggest resources needed for a Nuclear Plant is cooling water, and Jamaica's island status makes it ideal. So I fully support this idea. Hell, I would even slum it and work the Nuke / Steam side of the house to get a job there.
On the footnote. On population density.... it's the West that really changes things, above and beyond Alaska.
The site is on or in the non-tourist part of the island. And the people aren’t friendly. It was also a little dangerous. So when I say dangerous, that means something since I routinely work in Latin America. Also, hot as fuck to work
Possibly. But Rich doesn’t mean pleasant. The United States is the richest country in the world, and there’s still places here that I don’t like to work at. On the other hand, Colombia is fucking awesome.
I assume the future of this technology lies with France and / or China - developed countries that really have the political will to get behind next-gen nuclear and to make a national export industry out of it.
I always regret American conservatives missing the boat on this issue - if they'd admitted climate change was real but insisted that nuclear power was the only solution they'd annoy the libs just as much as they do now but the world would be a better place.
Macron is basically building reactors to own the greener-than-thou Germans and it is hilarious, the libs are being well and truly owned.
“water scarcity issues evaporating” made me chuckle.
Solar seems like a more practical solution for Jamaica.
Yes, its small and somewhat crowded. But it's not *that* small- it's not the Kowloon Walled City. It's about 10^10 square meters. Cover just 1% of that with Solar panels, and you've got 100,000,000 square meters of panels.
Jamaica is blessed with a lot of sun- it's at low latitudes and it shines almost every day of the year when it's not a hurricane. It gets about 5 KwH/square meter of incident solar energy per day. At 20% efficiency, that would be 1KwH/sq meter: 100,000,000 KwH per day for the 1% of the country with solar panels, or 36,500 GwH per year. That dwarfs the roughly 4000 GWH that Jamaica currently produces in total electricity, as well as the 4600 that Iceland uses for its main aluminum smelter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rahnj%C3%BAkar_Hydropower_Plant).
OK, the sun doesn't shine at night, or 365 days a year. The standard story here is that you need to build battery storage systems to store the energy so you haven it constantly available. But I think Jamaica is a perfect case for the opposite- what renewable energy optimists call "superpower". Rather than adjust energy to meet your demands, you adjust your demands to meet the energy source. Make hay while the sun shines, as it were.
Specifically: you can plan to do aluminum smelting only while the solar panels are producing. You don't need to do at at night. And if they're not producing because of a hurricane or whatever, just take the day off. Jamaica is famous for having a relaxed, flexible culture, which fits this. Aluminum smelting doesn't need to be done continuously- it's not like a hospital or a heat source. The same applies to many of the other things they'd use energy for in the short term- water desalinization, liquor distilling, and yes, air conditioning. We just have to change the standard business/manufacturing culture to make this work. Flexibility is the key, rather than following a rigid schedule like a 19th century railroad timetable.
Ever been to Jamaica? Where exactly would you build these massed solar arrays? Deforest the place? Use the limited agricultural land? And why on earth would you use the least efficient method of energy storage, batteries, which have low energy density and require frequent recycling and replacement. Jamaica is mountainous. It would make much more sense to used pumped hydro storage for either wind or solar which, through the creation of the necessary reservoirs would also address their intermittent water problems.
One additional question, how well do you think either wind turbines or solar arrays would stand up to hurricanes. Seeing as these are frequent visitors to Jamaica?
You've been mind-killed by too much time arguing on the internet. That's why you saw someone mention "solar" and immediately thought "he wants to 100% clearcut the island and put in massive amounts of batteries" which is pretty much the opposite of what I wrote.
I suggest a nice relaxing trip to Jamaica.
I read it more as, "Even 'only' 1% of the land in Jamaica is a lot of clearcutting / replacing agriculture".
True, 1% is not a trivial amount of land. But it's not impossible. I don't know about Jamaica, but in the US we've covered about 40% of the land in farmland. So we'd only have to give up 2.5% of our farmland to get 1% total. Or any sort of abandoned mine, building, polluted land, whatever.
I am no expert, but I would be very surprised if you could cycle power up and down in a massive metal processing plant.
Is that because it's physically impossible, or is it just because the plants were designed that way assuming 24/7 power? I suspect it's the latter. We might have to redesign some things!
(and if I'm wrong about this, surely there's something else they could use electricity for besides metal processing)
Each step of the processing must happen at a specific (narrow) temperature range. It takes a long time to raise or lower the temperature of the machine and the material, given the huge scale, so not something you'd want to do on a 24h cycle. (Or so I would think. Again, no expert.)
I like this idea. It works especially well if you have an enormous consumer of electricity that you could budget for, say, 10% arbitrary downtime. Then you don't have to worry about overbuilding solar. Turn of the smelting plant and your solar panels can still meet the island's needs on a cloudy day, for instance.
Except you can't. Review the chemistry of Aluminum production.
If you're going to say something like that, please provide a link making your point.
I started googling to find one and the first thing I found either way was this:
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/german-firm-turns-aluminum-smelter-into-huge-battery
An aluminum smelter is planning on scaling up/down electrolysis to match grid production. Now it sounds like they're using new technology here - so maybe the technology upgrade is also a requirement (some lines in the article imply that), but it does look like something that _can_ be done - especially if you're talking about a new plant.
Desalination might also work the same way.
I clicked on the link and either misunderstood the article or misunderstand your point. The article describes adding a battery to their process so they can "compensate for fluctuations in the power grid, making it easier to manage intermittent renewables."
This seems to be an attempt to reduce the cost of using renewables by adding a battery to their production process. If you went and offered them steadier energy production, pretty sure this plant would jump at it so they wouldn't have to spend the millions of dollars on this battery.
It's a "virtual" battery:
"The family-owned business is investing €36 million ($39 million) in a two-year industrial-scale pilot of systems that will allow power use across 120 electrolysis cells to be dialed up or down by 25 percent in either direction, for up to several hours."
That is, they can "add power to the grid" by scaling down their own usage (rapidly?). That won't power a grid that has no power on it, but does help (in the manner of a REAL battery) with demand/supply elements.
Addendum: I missed/overlooked this at the end, but suggests in general that this applies generally to smelters "“Large industrial and commercial dispatchable loads, like aluminum smelters, can be compensated through demand response programs for delaying being turned on during periods of peak demand, or encouraged to turn on during low periods of demand,” he said."
But in general this article would seem to support mpowell's suggetsion that they could scale up/down smelting based on whether the sun was shining.
"As a major industrial power user, Trimet already participates in German demand response programs, taking its aluminum smelters offline for short periods when required to stabilize the grid in the face of load surges."
My understanding is that they are already required to scale up or down based on grid needs. This was an attempt to address renewables increasing the grid variance.
More broadly, this seems like a hard ask to make of industrial producers. If its overcast for a week, do they just shut down because solar can't provide enough energy and the grid is strained? How do their employees feel about being sent home? Do they get paid even though they aren't working? If they don't get paid, pretty sure they are going to unhappy. If they do get paid, who is covering that cost? How about buyers from who expect deliveries? Do they just accept getting them late?
The best part of Nuclear for Jamaicia is that you can use the waste heat for desalination (multi-effect distillation) while still making electricity, and it gives a user that could be sized to let a reactor run near max power all the time by taking any extra capacity off peak.
A regionally related question - why isn't Biden doing more to normalize relations with Cuba, the largest and closest of the Caribbean Greater Antilles? If it's fear of Cuban voters in Florida I think that ship has sailed. One of the best things Biden has done was blow off the foreign policy establishment and just pull the plug in Afghanistan, and I would have hoped he'd show similar commonsense disregard for the groupthink that produced a decades long policy failure on Cuba.
My guess is it’s just too far down the list of things for his actual staff and is sitting in business as usual bureaucratic goo. The Afghanistan withdrawal alienated a lot of blobbers and some folks are hung up on the supposed ray gun attacks as well. He’s shown he can ignore them but in this case he probably needs some of ‘them’ to do the actual work.
I was strongly in the normalize relations with Cuba camp for a while. Reading recent articles about how Cuba essentially infiltrated Venezuela's government and kept Maduro in power, I'm less enthused. My previous theory had been that America would have a much larger impact on Cuba than the reverse - however, I now suspect that the America simply wouldn't give Cuba much thought either way while the Cuba would be much more focused on shaping the impact to the Cuban government's benefit.
Yea, I'm disinclined to decide *now* of all times to toss the Cuban government a lifeline.
It seems a little odd to describe ending a policy that has failed for 60 years to achieve its goal of dislodging the Cuban regime, and has in fact provided it with a reliable foreign foil, as tossing a lifeline. I'm pretty sure if the US had opened the floodgates of US investment and travel as soon as the Soviet Union fell, and dared Castro to explain to the Cuban people why they shouldn't partake, the Castro regime would long since be history by now.
Probably, but that's a sunken cost.
Now, with Chinese backing and the Chinese blueprint, they're almost certain to use any opening to become a small, klepto-capitalist police state.
I'd rather see if the government doesn't disintegrate first.
And again, fundamentally, I don't care about Cuba or its well-being, I care about the well-being of the United States, and domestic political concerns trump any foreign policy ones in this instance.
"I'm pretty sure if the US had opened the floodgates of US investment and travel as soon as the Soviet Union fell, and dared Castro to explain to the Cuban people why they shouldn't partake, the Castro regime would long since be history by now."
I think that is wildly optimistic. If nothing else, Venezuela among other countries has demonstrated that governments can stay in power while refusing external investment. Valenzuela had companies begging to invest and their government literally caused the worst economic collapse in the modern history while staying in power.
At this point, I think it boils down to two things:
1. No domestic political benefit. Arguably no domestic benefit period, political or otherwise.
2. Who cares? Cuba's government is going to collapse eventually, it has too little legitimacy among the populace and it cannot seem to implement any sort of reforms that would help it gain more.
Easier to just sit around and change policy in response to events when the time comes.
Nice try at reverse psychology. Biden’s trying to win elections, not get crushed.
This. The hypothesis that the Democrats could win Florida without the support of Miami's Cuban exile community was looking pretty good in 2008, a little shaky but still plausible in 2012, but dead in the water by 2016 and fully decomposed in 2020.
The new version of the claim is "well, we can win without Florida" and while 2020 demonstrated that it's _possible_ one could not in any real sense call it _easy_ and the conservative tilt of the USA's Latin-American population is getting larger not smaller so maybe let's not spot the opposition points without good reason.
It doesn't seem like a question of right or left, so much as a question of whether to stick with a braindead policy that has failed to achieve its goal for literally decades (but appeals to a small, vindictive constituency personally affected by the Castro revolution), or do something else.
Vindictive?
Yes, for being forced into exile and having their property confiscated. Understandable, but their personal emotional reaction shouldn't be allowed to drive policy for the US as a whole.
That could be said of any issue where a small minority has impassioned beliefs. Climate policy, say.
America's Judeo-Christian Tradition, for instance?
I love ideas like this but one missing element to this piece is that any serious consideration of nuclear in the Caribbean has to contend with the possibility of a Cat 5 hurricane. There is also tsunami risk as the area is highly geologically active.
Maybe this new generation of reactor can better contend with these threats. I'd like to know.
I believe the engineering is such that the joke is a worst case scenario could hit at 4:30pm of a Friday afternoon and the staff would say, “Well, I guess we’ll deal with it on Monday.” And walk away.
If wishes were horses. Nuclear energy's history is 50 years of grandiose promises ("too cheap to meter!") followed by significantly more expensive and problematic realities. I would very much _like_ for the mini-reactor designs to pan out, but I see no reason based on past history to assume that they will.
Part of the failure of nuclear to achieve that low-cost profile is due to regulatory constraints.
Nuclear is expensive by design - as soon as it achieves anything approaching cost parity the safety requirements rachet up increasing cost.
If it ever came within a billion miles of "cost parity", then sure, we'd have something to bitch about.
As it is... no.
Nuclear is expensive because:
1. Construction of complex, extremely heavily-reinforced, concrete-steel composite structures is ruinously expensive.
2. Fabrication of large pressure vessels out of specialty steels with very rigorous welding tolerances is ruinously expensive.
3. The entire industry's construction capacity might suffice to bring online 6 plants annually, and with no player having any degree of vertical integration it's impossible to control costs and learn to mitigate or avoid errors.
4th generation reactors might or might not get away from point 2 and mitigate the first half of point 3, but it's very hard to convince anyone that we can just leave them out without a reactor housing for any disgruntled idiot to set off a car bomb next to, which means points 1 and most of 3 are still in play.
Mega-projects suck and we suck at them.
The pop sci explanation for why France was so good at nuclear for a while was that they had just One Design for reactors and stamped them out en masse. I'm curious if you know how close to reality that was, and... would it be likely to help the current situation?
I'm sure it helps.
So did much cheaper labor costs.
And the relative lack of seismic or serious wind design loads in France.
China's modern approach to bridges is somewhat similar; standard designs for highway and overpass bridges of X length, and form the land around to suit. I'm all in favor of stripping the US environmental review process down by three-quarters, but that's a bit extreme in terms of impact.
If France's heyday involved a similar theory for design and layout, I could see mass production working somewhat.
This is why I tend to discount the SMR theory of mass production; because absent a major shift in the threat environment we're not going to just be plunking a small reactor pressure vessel down on a mat foundation with a Quonset Hut around it for someone to run into with a freight truck after they go through a bad divorce. And as long as we're building structures, it's going to be an engineering project each and every time.
It would certainly reduce costs relative to 3rd generation nuclear, but I have serious doubts that it will reduce them *enough*, in the absence of a real carbon price, for it to compete with fossil fuels.
And all this assumes that we don't solve the intermittency problem through cheap storage and a mix of wind and solar to hedge output, which I think is just not a tenable bet.
My car can power my house for 3-4 days and its battery pack cost $6k for something overengineered for mobility, crash-survivability, and rapid-charging.
David, I have no expertise (or currently time to acquire it) in this but it would be really interesting if we could get Matt to engage with this details of the nuclear issue and knowledgeable critics like you more. He mentions it a fair amount and you've spent a LOT of time commenting with detailed criticisms. Do other readers agree?
I think we've come to agreement that "mega projects suck and we suck at them" is the root of the problem for nuclear (and other things).
Curious if you know if the same holds for hydro electric dams and such. Have their construction costs gone up similarly?
Outside my area of expertise, and it would be hard to gauge as not all that many countries are building lots of new projects outside of China.
They're mostly gravity structures, so the finicky detailing (rebar, welding) that makes up the worst nuclear-specific problems (and also is a pain for things like tunnels) is not as much of an issue, but I don't know how staging and waterway diversion work beyond the most basic concepts, and I don't pretend to know how path-dependent everything is. I think most of the actual plant systems go in last, so in theory they they won't be as bad on that front either.
My guess is that they come in overbudget just like roads and bridges do, but not like nuclear or long tunnels.
All the things you've mentioned are mainly due to the need for active cooling.
That's... I don't even know what possible logic could lead you there.
Care to explain?
Current nuclear doesn't seem like a good reference class for future predictions as many new designs share very little with old designs. And I don't just mean the physical design...it's different people, different organizations, different motivations.
Well keep in mind we went down a path dependent dead end because the priority was producing fissile material for nuclear weapons. There were much safer technologies we could have used if that need wasn't there.
My reaction is almost identical to Doctor Memory's, just less eloquent:
"Pshhhh. More hogwash."
Yeah, I'm a big believer in the argument that we should be investing tons of money to bring more nuclear power online and in the process figure out how to make it cheaper while finding a reasonable balance for safety. And I don't really care what generation technology you're talking about. But, practically speaking, experimenting with new nuclear designs on an island frequently exposed to hurricanes does not sound like the most promising situation. Maybe India is the right country to experiment with more nuclear power?
Why are hurricanes a risk? Any conceivable reactor building would be able to stand up to 200 mph winds with no problem. The issue with current reactors and hurricanes is that they require active cooling ,even when shut down.
You’ll recall that as soon as the earthquake hit Fukushima the reactors all SCRAMed and shut down. The problem was the lost their connection to grid power so they failed over to the diesel backup generators. When those failed they failed over to the emergency emergency battery backups. But those only lasted a few hours.
The new reactors don’t need active cooling. If you don’t keep them running they shut themselves down and slowly cool. Nothing a hurricane could do could cause a problem.
"Any conceivable reactor building would be able to stand up to 200 mph winds with no problem"
And would be very expensive, as all buildings able to stand up to earthquakes and hurricane force winds and remain fully functional are.
It's neither hard nor terribly expensive to design a building which will not *immediately collapse* due to a local magnitude 8 or even 9 earthquake, and which will provide for safe evacuation of its inhabitants to the outside before requiring demolition or complete retrofit.
It is markedly harder, and as such much more expensive, to design a building that continues functioning through the same event and suffers no structural damage that cannot be repaired in situ.
The latter is the standard to which nuclear power plants must be designed.
This blows the SMR promise of cheap mass-production mostly out of the water, and suddenly we're back within shouting distance of 3rd generation PWR economics!
Yay!
Your numbers are based on the need for active cooling.
If we went full Chernobyl and built our reactor in a shed ,when the hurricane blew the building away the reactor would stop and begin to slowly cool.
Also do you think natural gas power plants in Jamaica or Florida or California aren’t designed for worst case weather and seismic events?
No, they aren't. They're based on the reality that having to rebuild the structure every time there is a major seismic event or large hurricane is an even less economical approach than building it to a higher standard.
Even an SMR reactor complex is going to be a major work of engineering with a reactor housing consisting of a small steel pressure vessel, large steel containment vessel, and very, very heavily reinforced, difficult to construct, expensive to replace concrete shield structure.
That will be the case regardless of whether it's a small PWR, MSR, or gas-cooled reactor. All require fundamentally the same level of safety as concerns the actual rupture of the reactor vessel.
The interaction of the three has been the downfall of every single nuclear project in the last 3 decades and will not be ameliorated in the slightest by any of the proposed 4th generation reactor designs.
I'll make the point that, aside from nuclear reactors and hospitals, a great number of large commercial buildings voluntarily hold themselves to the same standard because of the great expense involved in rebuilding and because of the vast insurance benefits. Virtually every new mid- or high-rise building on the West Coast implements this standard.
It will make complete economic sense to build to that standard. If you don't, the LCOE will be *higher*, not *lower*.
"No, they aren't. "
Cite.
Post Andrew residential buildings in Miami-Dade county need to withstand 185 mph winds. You really think power plants are held to a lesser standard?
I agree that it would be very nice if we had reactors that could be entirely passively cooled and still operated at even local utility scale, but I feel like it's worth pointing out that right now this is a sales brochure for, at best, a handful of engineering prototypes -- not something that you can buy now or will be able to buy any time in the next decade or more.
And even then, I think it's unrealistic to expect that "survive an Oklahoma City style truck bombing without poisoning every water source downstream for a generation" won't be a design requirement.
"I think it's unrealistic to expect that "survive an Oklahoma City style truck bombing without poisoning every water source downstream for a generation" won't be a design requirement."
Which is why the "promise" of SMR mass production is based on delusional thinking.
Whether this is *necessary* or not is debatable. I think it is, others can disagree.
But it is an absolute impossibility that it will not be *perceived as necessary*, so that debate is ultimately academic.
The more I look into this but but 10,000 years! Objection the more annoyed I get.
First, concrete won't last 10,000 years buried in the desert. Hum...do we have very old concrete buildings still standing? Sure, the Pantheon is 2000 years old, still standing and still in use. And it's been out in the weather!
Ok...hum do we have objects that have been buried in the dessert for thousands of years? Well....we have King Tut's tomb contents. They were buried 3,300 years ago. How did they hold up?
https://www.arabnews.com/sites/default/files/styles/n_670_395/public/main-image/2018/05/05/1178196-1318541902.jpg
It's made of f_king wood! A skinny guy might still be able to ride it.
And
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c4/Tutankhamun_tomb_photographs_2_057.jpg
Reeds! It's a basket made of reeds!
I somehow don't think waste mixed with glass, inside a muti foot thick 17,000 psi concrete sarcophagus that is welded inside a 2 foot thick stainless steel vessel that wrapped in f_cking kevlar, is going to have a problem lasting 10,000 years.
Also, who honestly cares about people 10000, or even 1000, years in the future? If they don't have better tech by then to address whatever problems may develop, that's on them, not us.
Exactly, and even if they find it what's the worst that could happen? They cut and burn and burrow and blast through the feet of cladding* and finally they are able to crack one open, what then? They get sick and die. And everyone says, we better fill that hole in again and be on our way. Vs. how many will die from global warming. It doesn't seem like an honest serious concern.
*With Victorian era technology if they haven't rediscovered radiation!
Or the radioactive hole becomes the inspiration for a new world religion - such powerful spirits that react that way to being disturbed will need to be placated, no doubt.
Of all the places I have worked in the world in the course of an engineering career Jamaica was the most fascinating. It is the only place I have ever seen, for example, where electrical generation was accomplished by dragging the ass end of a large ship onto land. And hooking up its marine diesel to a generator. That was an impressive hack.
Jamaica being Jamaica it took weeks to get the permits and water supply to do the tests I was there to evaluate and demonstrate so I had a lot of time on my hands and a guide to show me around. And that was nine months after the equipment necessary had been shipped to Jamaica. I learned a lot. For example I learned that cultural status depends on the lightness of your skin. Hence dense crowds of all Jamaicans walk on the shaded side of a street be it never so crowded, while the sunny side is largely unoccupied. Even in the coolest times. I also learned that if you are ascending the heights surrounding Kingston and you have space in your pickup then you stop and let anybody climb on. Two classes of people live on those heights. The relatively rich who have cars and masses of poor people who daily trudge up and down. They line the roads. So if you don't want to be on the receiving end of a brick you give everybody you can a ride.
Also Red Stripe is a pretty good beer and makes an excellent bribe.
A quibble first with that line about coal fired generation being replaced with wind and solar generation and natural gas as an adjunct. I don't think you can can that when 90 percent of the coal replacement is being done with natural gas and the other 10 with alternative sources like wind and solar. You seem to have a very good grasp for a non-science guy of the nature of the problems associated with integrating large wind and solar generation but you did overlook one of the key problems. Yes you would have to massively overbuild wind and solar generation in order to have a hope of matching supply and demand. And yes this would also require a massive amount of energy storage in order for wind or solar to become primary energy sources. But it also, as you point out, would require that continent spanning grid in order to distribute such power from where it is generated to where it is needed. Batteries, btw, are the least efficient way of storing energy. The costs of creating such a grid as well as the energy storage problem make wind and solar very expensive indeed. And this is a fact that its advocates like to surround with a Somebody Else's Problem Field. But it will still show up on your electricity bill.
The question in my mind is could you even build that grid. There are numerous technical issues and frightening vulnerabilities inherent in putting all your eggs in one basket so to speak with that integrated grid. But I fear that the advocates for wind and solar are going to fight it tooth and nail. One need only look at what happened in Maine. Which voted down a transmission line that would wheel Quebec hydropower though Maine to Massachusetts where it is needed. Who fought against it hardest? The same people who tell you we need to rely on wind and solar. Even though the only way to scale up wind and solar is to build exactly such infrastructure.
Sometimes the stupidity of environmental activists makes me want to weep. After I am done laughing.
Another problem with only having 4 power plants is the lack of redundancy, leading to a fragile grid and widespread power outages during hurricanes. With a technology like SMRs, outages could be a lot more localized. Dr. Charlyne Smith touches on this in the INL profile Matt linked to.
Minor typo: NREL is the National Renewable *Energy* Laboratory.
I think stuff like SMRs and Thorium reactors and other advanced concepts are definitely important research that should be pursued further. But we should also be realistic about the timeline here. SMRs, for all the hype they're generating, are still a long way from being scalable and marketable. There's been a big OECD study recently where they concluded that SMRs won't entry the market until the mid-2030s at the earliest. And that's before those things get commissioned and actually built. Of course, you could always just build a standard run-of-the-mill nuclear power plant, but even those things take at least like a decade to construct (and are expensive as hell).
So while I agree that Jamaica seems to be one of the places where nuclear is actually a smart option because nuclear power plants take up so little space, it's not a solution it can depend on to combat the effects of climate change. The time we have to combat the worst effects of climate change is substantially shorter than 20 or 30 years. I feel like this is something that gets overlooked very often in the current energy debate. I'm also not sure if those aspiring Jamaican aluminium industrialists can wait two or three decades for their business to take off.
(Related question: Does Jamaica dabble in offshore wind energy at all? I mean, it's an island!)
The problem with offshore wind for Jamaica is the whole "ruins the view” thing. This is a minor issue in the US with its gigantic coastline and diversified economy, but for Jamaica—a *small* island heavily dependent on tourism—it’s harder to find a place the math works out economically.
(Am I the only person who thinks that the big windmills are really pretty?)
No, but enough people think they're ugly to put a dent in tourism revenues.
Fair enough. More people should like windmills though! :)
They're *mesmerizing*, but I'm not sure I want them *everywhere*.
I should think the Pedro Bank would be a good solution; entirely over the horizon from the coast, shallow enough for current technological approaches to work, and in a good location from a wind power perspective.
Well, I don't think Matt means Jamaica should combat climate change by reducing its emissions. I think he means more that it needs a lot of electricity to adapt to the effects of climate change, which will be very rough for island nations.
The term SMR seems to be being used for a pretty broad range of technologies.
The actual technology (planned to be) used can range from the highly conventional, like a PWR, to the more experimental designs.
And in size, the planned designs are ranging from really tiny ones that would be just shipped out and then plugged in basically, to things like Rolls Royce's planned "SMR" which will be 470MW (larger than many first generation conventional nuclear plants) and which, while it will contain many modular components, will still take years to build on site.
Cue an enormous meltdown (as it were) by the global environmental advocacy industry for “using the people of the global south to test dangerous and unproven nuclear technologies”.
And…they wouldn’t be entirely wrong? The optics of this really are kinda terrible: if these technologies are really so promising, why haven’t China or India made a serious play for them, and if they’ve demurred then why on earth would you make a tiny, densely settled country with endemic corruption and limited disaster response capacity the test bed?
If you want to do a simple thing to help Jamaica, let a lot more of them emigrate to the US. Speaking as a resident of a neighborhood that’s like 80% Dominican, it seems to work pretty well for the DR.
My only response to the DEI folks is “screw you, those people can make their own choices and didn’t ask you to speak on their behalf”. That is and always will be the only response a bunch of white trust fund babies deserve.
As for the rest, China IS avidly pursuing both 3+ and 4th generation nuclear technologies, the former at scale, the latter in laboratory settings. India is as well, albeit in more financially constrained manner.
The economics of China’s plants are every bit as bad as the recent American or British efforts, but as you note there are other motivations there; be seen doing something on the environment, develop prestige technologies and projects domestically, build up an ecosystem to plausibly support a much larger nuclear deterrent without all of it being solely military in nature.
That said, your impression of Chinese air quality is off in two ways; first, it’s gotten *considerably* better since a nadir in 2013-14, when “solid in winter” wasn’t too far off.
Second, the main issue involved was never coal-fired power plants, which are concentrated point sources and therefore relatively economical to scrub to first-world standards.
The biggest collective source of the particulate which made northern China miserable in winter was the subsidized winter heating programs north of the Yellow River. They consisted, almost everywhere, of hot water heat provided at the building or residential complex level by small coal-fired boilers.
No way in hell to scrub those, hence an ongoing campaign to move them all to natural gas. Hence huge contracts with Russia starting in 2015. Also hence several different meltdowns in the Northern Chinese energy grid and heating supply since, because there are teething problems.
Thank you, that's a useful and interesting point about residential boilers being a larger part of China's pollution problem than I realized!
>>why on earth would you make a tiny, densely settled country with endemic corruption and limited disaster response capacity the test bed?<<
I'm not sure who the "you" is but I think the idea is that the Jamaican government reads this post and says, "Great idea!" If it doesn't work (because of endemic corruption etc,) well, at least it was tried.
China has ~150 next-gen reactors in the pipeline.
Lolz. It also has a TSMC-beating chip fab company "in the pipeline", but I don't see SMIC getting there anytime soon.
Gonna have to ask for a cite on that. To be clear I'm a duffer who's mostly working from the wikipedia "nuclear energy in china" page here so I have no particular expertise, but 150 is a number an order of magnitude higher than what's claimed there as being currently under construction.
150 includes all plans, not just in active construction.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-climate-goals-hinge-on-440-billion-nuclear-power-plan-to-rival-u-s
So to be clear: if China _does_ manage to bring 200 gigawatts of nuclear online by 2035, that would be great and I would applaud. It would be a monumental accomplishment on multiple levels, not least because doing it means pretty implicitly that someone had finally bent or completely cracked the cost curve on reactor construction.
But you're stretching the definition of "in the pipeline" here well past the breaking point. This is a press release about what's going to be in the next Five Year Plan. Until personnel are allocated and shovels start going in the ground, this is a (laudable) goal and nothing more.
"if these technologies are really so promising, why haven’t China or India made a serious play for them"
they are making a play for them - China is spending billions on it. Is the technology proven yet? No, but the only way to get there is to try it.
Of course.
But you and others keep acting as if commentary to the effect of "I don't expect it to work for X, Y, and Z reasons" is somehow an impediment to trying, or constitutes "irrational opposition to nuclear" or whatever.
I find it amusing, because as late as 8 years ago, before my involvement with the China AP1000 projects, I was pretty bullish on nuclear. "We'll work out the kinks on these and then spam them out" type thinking.
I was completely and utterly wrong about both the possibility of unfucking nuclear construction and the incredible speed with which PV efficiency would rise and costs fall.
I was on the wrong side of the "hydrogen v. battery" debate at the time for the same reason. As it turns out, developing, engineering, and building new complex systems is hard and often impossible.
But spamming out easily manufactured individual products is not, especially when they require only incremental systemic change to accommodate them.
I don't intend to continue being mistaken about these things for the same reasons, that's very close to the commonly cited lay definition of insanity.
I won’t claim any knowledge at all of what the lobbying landscape is for coal vs nuclear in China, but they currently have 50 nuclear plants in operation and another 15 under construction, so I think I can claim with a straight face that coal doesn’t have a total stranglehold on development plans there. Coal is _cheap_ but its downsides for China are really obvious right now and are not hidden away in the periphery either: the air in Beijing is a semisolid in winter. I don’t think that the PRC is likely to turn up their noses at any plausible energy technology that would help keep them on their growth path?
(I am of course not Chinese nor do I live there — if anyone here has deeper insights than the Wikipedia page I’d be grateful to hear them! Ditto India.)
China is actually plowing lots of money and expertise into 4th generation reactors.
Just because they dont release figures for costs for Sanmen and other projects doesn’t mean they don’t know within the Party that they’re ruinously expensive.
Most of my attitude towards nuclear stems from my peripheral involvement in projects there. If the Chinese regulatory environment cannot make them safe, cheap, and fast to build, it’s *not possible at all*.
I would not be too happy if China proves that 4th generation reactors are perfectly safe and then starts selling them around the world, including places like Jamaica. I don't want to see the US become irrelevant, so we should be trying everything reasonable.
You can't throw R&D money at everything, but helping US firms partner with Jamaica to test out ideas? Sounds good to me.
I mean... I could just as easily have said "The US is actually plowing lots of money and expertise into 4th generation reactors." We are. And the companies commercializing it are looking into building testbeds abroad. It hasn't happened not for lack of willing candidates but because no one is ready to build any of their PowerPoint presentations.
I'm not worried about the amount of attention this receives, I simply do not expect it to pan out well in a timely fashion.
Yeah, this is my worry: if the only thing that's standing in between us and abundant nuclear-sourced energy were euroamerican regulatory squeamishness, I would predict that China would have already built several hundred of whatever plant type was most efficient and would have located most of them in Xinjiang and Tibet along the Indian border to "deal" with any safety concerns. That they haven't suggests strongly to me that the limiting factors lie elsewhere and if you've got the time or inclination I'd be fascinated to hear more about your direct observations.
Well, you already liked the other comment. Here's a bit more detail.
For 3rd and 3rd+ generation technology, it boils down to this:
No matter *what* safety regime I am operating under, I'm building a reactor housing that eliminates any likely cause of the reactor pressure vessel rupturing, because that's a goddamned doomsday event for the local area and ultimately for groundwater supplies in a several-thousand square mile area.
So I am fabricating, on-site, a large reactor shielding vessel out of high-grade (stainless, I believe) steel, basically by welding big hoop segments together. (*Large*; their size is limited by crane lift capacity and nothing else, so we're often talking about 3-4,000 metric tons per segment.
At the same time, I am building a small plant within it; the reactor and pressure vessel, support infrastructure, and the hookups that have to be staged through the shielding vessel and structure
And at the same time, I am staging a huge construction operation around it, to simultaneously build the actual plant infrastructure and connect it to the reactor pressure vessel, *AND* erect a very, very oversized concrete-steel composite reactor shield around the whole set of works.
Typical designs for modern reactor housings are feet of extremely-heavily reinforced concrete. Sometimes overtop more plate steel for a composite structure. In any case, the concrete is reinforced to the point where 15-20% of its internal volume is replaced by steel, rather than the 1-3% which is typical in a building.
This entire process is path dependent. I cannot complete work on a given stage of the shield vessel until certain internal assemblies are complete, I cannot complete work on stages of the concrete shield structure until the corresponding stages of the steel shield vessel are complete, and I cannot close the whole thing up in anything less than the precise order dictated by what fits or needs to pass through where. So a delay in, say, getting a reactor vessel and pile in place cascades down the whole project. The chances that A goes awry are very high because of the complexity involved, and I cannot make up ground by doing B first, which is much less frequently the case in other projects. Which adds up to financing costs. Lots of them.
Even the China projects, which were backstopped by the government and therefore had extremely low financing costs, still came in vastly over time and budget from what I know of them.
The American projects routinely had to rip out already-completed work as they backtracked and discovered they'd have to do something that happened before it over again, principally due to massive issues with welding quality control. I suspect China had the same issues on Sanmen as it had most of the same delays, just covered up in part by throwing labor at the problem on the concrete side to make up time.
The officially admitted figures for Sanmen put the two reactors 80% overbudget. I would be unsurprised to find they actually came in at more like 2.5X projected cost, with the savings relative to Vogtle mostly down to financing costs.
I agree with Charlie P. Nuclear always runs over time and budget, has had tons of government funding and little to show for it. Even the well run French scheme is not cheap enough to make bauxite refining work. Just coating the existing Jamaican building stock with solar panels should be be able to give you close to 10 GW, plus you must be able to find some unproductive land to build another 10GW at say 2-3c/kWh. There’s a lot of ruin in a nation. And wind can coexist with animal grazing and other forms of agriculture. Unlike nuclear which requires lots of water and will most likely have to be built on the coast, killing tourism.
Yes - its all gotten much more expensive. Due to over-regulation and too many veto points. That's why other countries can do it cheaper than we can.
But they still can't do it for less than coal or gas and they still can't do coal or gas for less than solar or wind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:20201019_Levelized_Cost_of_Energy_(LCOE,_Lazard)_-_renewable_energy.svg
That chart says nothing of the kind.
Nope, solar and wind currently being half the lowest price that Nuclear has ever been doesn't say that at all.... \s
I don't see any country comparisons on that chart - do you?
I think we can give up on anything resembling productive engagement with the nuke bros.
I've seen the same playbook out of all of them; nitpick the one incorrect word choice you make and act as if that invalidates an argument for which they have no meaningful counter.
LOL
Time will prove which of us is right.
In the meantime, since you have no information I didn't already know and no arguments actually worth listening to, I'm going to add you to the list of people whose posts I chuckle at and scroll away from.
Damn... late to the comment party as always. Random thoughts.
None of the gas turbines are Siemens Energy models. I only bring this up because it would be awesome to work there. Damn it. Actually the only Caribbean Island we work on is Trinidad and Tobago, and... it's not so nice. Actually one of the shittier places we work at.
Also... go Idaho National Laboratory! Not only is Idaho top of the charts on renewable energy... we have all dem smarty pants Nuke dudes.
One of the biggest resources needed for a Nuclear Plant is cooling water, and Jamaica's island status makes it ideal. So I fully support this idea. Hell, I would even slum it and work the Nuke / Steam side of the house to get a job there.
On the footnote. On population density.... it's the West that really changes things, above and beyond Alaska.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapping-population-density-dot-town/
On a completely semi-not related subject. Wow Yellowstone was a great show. Explains why Montana's murder rate is higher than Idaho.
If you'd be willing to elaborate on Trinidad and Tobago, I'd be curious to learn more.
The site is on or in the non-tourist part of the island. And the people aren’t friendly. It was also a little dangerous. So when I say dangerous, that means something since I routinely work in Latin America. Also, hot as fuck to work
Isn't Trinidad the single richest country in the Caribbean? Barring PR, of course...
Possibly. But Rich doesn’t mean pleasant. The United States is the richest country in the world, and there’s still places here that I don’t like to work at. On the other hand, Colombia is fucking awesome.
Bahamas are the richest, but Trinidad is up there.
I assume the future of this technology lies with France and / or China - developed countries that really have the political will to get behind next-gen nuclear and to make a national export industry out of it.