Nuclear is never getting cheap [1]. Nuclear reactors need to be large to scale [2]. As for why SMR persists? Because someone makes money selling the idea. That's it.
And SMRs get sold is the very idea you state because it sounds compelling: the more you build, the cheaper it gets.
Nuclear seems like it should work. But there are massive unsolved problems like the waste from fuel processing, processing the spent fuel, who can be relied upon to run these things, who can be trusted to regulate them and the failure modes of accidents. Despite there being <700 nuclear reactors built we've had multiple catastrophic failures. Chernobyl still has a 1000 square mile absolute exclusion zone. Fukushima will likely take a century to clean up and cost upwards of $1 trillion if not more.
Yet this all gets hand-waved away. Renewable is the future.
[1]: https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/csiro-confirms-n...
[2]: https://spitfireresearch.com/scaling-example-1-small-modular...
> who can be relied upon to run these things, who can be trusted to regulate them and the failure modes of accidents.
I personally trust the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I also trust the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, and the regulatory bodies in the UK and the EU.
Why?
The failure modes are not binary. A reactor is not just operating fine or going boom. There are multiple small failures that can happen, and you can get an idea if a country's nuclear fleet is run with safety in mind or not.
Chernobyl happened during a safety exercise, an exercise that was attempted 3 times before and failed 3 times before. In principle the plant should not even have been allowed to operate until the exercise had been completed. The exercise was supposed to demonstrate if in case of reactor emergency shut-down the cooling water can be kept circulating in the core for one minute, the amount of time it took for the Diesel generators to ramp up power; it was an essential exercise to perform before starting full power operations. The fact that the plant was allowed to operate for 3 years without completing this exercise - no, actually, while failing this exercise multiple times, tells you a lot about the safety mentality of the nuclear industry in the Soviet Union.
In the US, the NRC performs a lot of monitoring, and the results are published. For example, here's [1] a dashboard of performance indicators. There are 17, such as: Unplanned Scrams per 7000 Critical Hours, Unplanned Power Changes, Residual Heat Removal System, Reactor Coolant System Leak, etc. Out of about 100 reactors, you can see only green, with the exception of one yellow; that yellow is for the Palisades plant that is not currently operating, it is in the process of restarting operations, and I am sure it will not be allowed to restart until all the performance indicators are green.
[1]https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/oversight/pi-summary
I more or less agree with your comment but feel it should be pointed out the CSIRO economic feasibility study is specific to Australia.
The arguments made there; why Australia is better to pursue renewables now rather than hope for nuclear eventually have no bearing on, say, China's use of nuclear for 20% of Chinese baseload.
A large part of the CSIRO argument is the greenfield standing start no prior expertise massive upfront costs and long lead time to any possible return.
China, by contrast, has an existing small army of nuclear technologists, multiple already running reactors, and many reactors of varying designs already in the design and construction pipeline.
Even China who committed to significant nuclear capacity and wanted to ramp up their nuclear percentage to 20% (IIRC) is slowly moving away. The percentage of nuclear has in fact reduced over the last 5 years and initial commitments/projections of nuclear capacity are likely not going to be med. The whole reason being that solar (and to a lesser degree wind) have become so cheap that nuclear just doesn't make economical sense even for China.
You say that and yet China is still building new reactors and have staged plans for more.
China is a special case. In fact, it's the one country on Earth I'd actually trust to build, maintain and regulate nuclear power.
I don't believe China is convinced (yet) of the long-term viability of nuclear power (fission or fusion) but, like with many things, they're hedging their bets. In the US? It's just another opportunity to transfer wealth from the government coffers to private hands through a series of cost overruns, massive delays and under-deliveries.
China's advantages here are extreme. They have the manufacturing base, would likely use the same plant designs in multiple places (rather than a separate procurement process in every city or province) and they have a bunch of existing infrastructure that gives them options, like they're pioneers in UHVDC transmission lines that might make it more viable to build a nuclear reactor away from populated centers. Even UHVDC development was to solve a largely China-only problem: the power generation is mostly in the west part of the country whereas the people are in the east.
And yes the CSIRO report is Australia-specific but the timeframes for building nuclear power in the US are similar: 10-15 years. Starting today it's unclear if such a plant would be online by 2040. Yet we can build solar in months.
That's the other part of this: if we're just looking at data centers, theyh can be placed anywhere. You can ignore where fiber runs. You just build more fiber if you have to. DCs need power and water, basically. The Southwest is very efficient for solar [1] but light on for water. There's the Colorado River but that's been tapped beyond its limits already.
Along the Mississippi is another option. Not as efficient as the Southwest for solar but water is plentiful. Inclement weather is an issue though, both tornadoes and the winters.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/7fk7eu/solar_power...
> And yes the CSIRO report is Australia-specific but the timeframes for building nuclear power in the US are similar
* The US has existing commercial scale nuclear power stations. Australia does not.
* The US has an existing nuclear weapons industry. Australia does not.
* The US has existing advanced courses on nuclear technology for workforce scale populations. Australia has extremely limited coursework.
* The US actively builds and maintains SMRs for submarine use. Australia does not.
These are fairly critical differences in terms of additional costs to Australia above and beyond build times.
They should focus research on thorium reactors as they are supposedly cleaner than what we have today, and afaik you can actually use the fuel waste again and again, so it drastically reduces the problem of nuclear waste and what to do with it.
The promise of thorium is that it requires external energy to be added to maintain the reaction. The theory is that it is safer because of this as it's far less likely that you get a runaway or out-of-control reaction.
The reality is more complex [1].
Molten salt reactors are another active area of research but they have been for decades as well.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IqcRl849R0&t=1652s
- Spent fuel is a solved problem, we just store it securely
- Who can be relied upon: who do you rely upon to run your drinking water?
- Failure modes of accidents: have been extensively studied and essentially designed out
- Multiple catastrophic failures: sounds bad until you realize that you can name only two:
1. Chernobyl: old flawed reactor design, basically impossible today, a few unfortunate deaths among first responders in the cleanup, that's it
2. Fukushima: no radiation deaths. You would get a higher dose of radiation flying to Japan to visit Fukushima than from drinking the irradiated leaked water there.
> upwards of $1 trillion if not more.
Where are you getting this number? According to https://cnic.jp/english/?p=6193 it was estimated at JPY 21.5 trillion (roughly USD 150 to 190 billion).
> Spent fuel is a solved problem, we just store it securely
This is simply untrue. Depending on the type and enrichment of the fuel it will need to be actively cooled for some period, possibly decades. After that you can bury it. You need facilities for all of this. You need personnel (done by the NRC currently) to transport and install new fuel, remove old fuel and transport it to suitable sites as well as manage those sites. Before they even make it to storage sites they'll typically be stored onsite or in the reactor for years.
> Who can be relied upon: who do you rely upon to run your drinking water?
Given the current administration, almost nobody. The state of drinking water in places like Flint, MI is a national disagrace. The continued existence of lead pipes that leech lead into drinking water in many places is a national disgrace. The current administration gutting the EPA and engineering the Supreme Court to overturn things like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act are just the cherry on top.
A significant ramp up of nuclear power would necessitate a commensurate ramp up of the NRC in all these capacities.
> Failure modes of accidents: have been extensively studied and essentially designed out
Like I said, hand waved away.
> Where are you getting this number?
Multiple sources [1][2]. Fukushima requires constantly pumping water to cool the core. That water needs to be stored (in thousands of tanks onsite) then processed and ultimately released back into the ocean, which itself is controversial. Removing the core requires inventing a bunch of technologies that don't exist yet. The decomissioning process itself is something most of us won't live to see the end of [3].
The $1 trillion and a century for 1 nuclear plant. Pro-nuclear people will point to the death figure because it suits their argument. It's economically devastated that region however.
And as for Chernobyl, billions of euros was spent building a sarcophagus for the plant, only to have the integrity of that shield destroyed by a Russian drone.
[1]: https://archive.ph/EBhF7
[2]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...
[3]: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/fukushima
The issue with spent fuel has to do with the long term (essentially permanent) storage part and is purely political. It's a solved problem except for getting approval for the solution.
The other fuel issues you mention are already dealt with today as a matter of course. It's just the final part that remains up in the air.
You are the one hand waving about failure modes. As with aircraft, as failures have happened we've learned from them. New designs aren't vulnerable to the same things old ones were. All the mishaps have happened with old designs.
Personally I think the anti-nuclear FUD that the climate activists push is unfortunate. We would likely have been close to carbon neutral by now if we'd started building it out in the late 90s.
That said, I'm inclined to agree that solar might be a better option at this point in environments that are suited to it. The batteries still aren't entirely solved but seem to be getting close. In particular, the research into seasonal storage using iron ore looks quite promising to me.