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+--- Thread: Small nuclear reactors -not doing well? (/thread-16846.html)
Small nuclear reactors -not doing well? - confused2 - Nov 17, 2024
Nuclear power looks like being the only way to get anywhere near 'net zero' but it has to be cheap enough that folks don't just vote for "Drill, Baby, Drill" and to hell with the consequences.
Partial transcript:-
If you look at what has been done so far, that isn’t promising at all.
The first US plan for a small modular reactor was the mPower project. It was launched in 2009
and should have become operational in 2018. Instead it was cancelled in 2017 after the
costs almost doubled to half a billion and the Department of Energy refused to eat up the bill.
Then there’s the American company NuScale. In 2016, NuScale’s CEO, John Hopkins said that
they expect “to deliver its first project of twelve power modules… for an overnight price
of approximately 3 billion dollars, with commercial operation commencing in 2024.”
But NuScale gradually shifted the starting date to 2030,
and the estimate cost more than tripled, eventually exceeding 9 billion dollars. Then,
in November last year, they terminated the project entirely.
You might hope that these are isolated cases, or specific to the US, but unfortunately,
they’re not. The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis in the
United States has collected the numbers in a recent report and they’re really depressing.
There are currently only three small modular reactors in operation. Two in Russia and one
in China. They each cost more than 3 times as much as originally estimated.
One that’s under construction in Argentine has now exceeded 7 times the planned cost.
It’s the same thing with small modular reactor projects that are still underway,
such as the one from Hitachi or X-Energy, that’s one of the companies that Amazon
just invested into. The costs are doubling, tripling, quadrupling and more.
Why is that happening? Partly I think it’s because companies have an incentive to
underestimate costs if looking for investors, but it’s also because they have a hard time
coming by with reliable data to make good estimates.
RE: Small nuclear reactors -not doing well? - C C - Nov 20, 2024
For one reason or another, the hope of safe or convenient nuclear fission and sci-fi fusion energy production seems to endlessly recede like Escher's Circle Limit prints.