Why people want to put small nuclear reactors everywhere
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- čas přidán 1. 05. 2024
- The race to develop small modular reactors is on, with the promise to provide fossil-free energy everywhere. But only one has been built so far. What’s going wrong?
#nuclearenergy #smallmodularreactor #planeta
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Credits:
Reporter - Adam Baheej Adada
Supervising Editor - Kiyo Dörrer, Michael Trobridge
Fact Check - Jeannette Cwienk, Alexander Paquet
Read More:
Technical briefing on SMR technology
www.base.bund.de/SharedDocs/D...
A look at the current state of the SMR industry
thebreakthrough.org/blog/adva...
Analysis of public support for nuclear energy
www.radiantenergygroup.com/re...
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:06 The problem with big nuclear
02:25 How SMRs could work
04:36 Passive safety
06:41 The startup approach
09:04 SMRs as a strategic national investment
11:30 Are they viable?
12:36 Conclusion
What do you think of these small modular reactors?
cool if they will scale
The price of kilowatt per hour for them are too high, and it is rarely taken into account.
Don't work.
@@borystsolinthe hope is that being small, they can be made modular and thus reduce the cost significantly. Of course, if only one or two are built, then the price won't come down.
It's a bad idea. Better to develop solar, wind, and power storage - as well as energy efficiency standards.
Showing footage from a Boeing factory and emphasizing quality control is funny.
Really??? You don't think Boeing have good quality control?!!!
@@jamesgreig5168not anymore, they don’t. Unlike in the 1970s or ‘80s.
@@jamesgreig5168they killed a guy for speaking up about their quality
@@JohnGeorgeBauerBuis Maybe that was sarcasm. A plug door flying out due to someone forgetting to put some bolts in and inspection failing to catch missing bolts is quite the epic double-fail.
Pretty on brand for the nuclear industry actually. The nuclear industry has perhaps the most captured regulatory body of any energy technology on the planet. If regular people had any idea what actually goes on inside the worlds nuclear plants, they would demand that they all get shut down yesterday.
The comparison to airplane construction is unsettling with all the cost-cutting measures and skimping on safety that whistle-blowers are getting killed over...
Which whistle blowers have been killed? That sounds like another conspiracy theory sigh...
Airbus doing pretty good
@@kilo4911unlike Boeing.
airbus is a government company. a bit different than the other company
In as much as what you're saying is true you are just highlighting one particular manufacturer and trying to push the whole thing into some kind of conspiracy when in reality if you compare the amount of death from playing compare to the cars and other form order mobility airplane has achieved greater safety than most means of transportation the history of passenger airline proves it because any plane crash is a major headline and from search headline engineers learn and create safety and improved the reliability of air crafts.
What makes me crazy is that Three Mile Island was the nuclear disaster that could have been. But its always reported as a disaster that was. The incident caused a scare for sure with evacuations and concerns about released radiation but the containment building held and did its job of containing anything that escaped the reactor.
> But its always reported as a disaster that was.
That's because it is, for this type of reactor.
It was a nuclear incident, it most certainly wasn't a nuclear disaster.
You don't get to redefine words or domain terms, that is criminally stupid especially in a field that does some have inherent dangers to it and you should get no say on the topic if you cannot even agree to describe things as they are over what you fear or hope they ought to be
Then maybe look up the insane amount of negligence in both building and running it that resulted in the meltdown. We got lucky with 3 mile island. Safety rules were massively upgraded afterwards for a reason.
A meltdown is a complete loss of control and should never happen. If it happens there is no way of being certain if the structure will actually hold or just delay the inevitable.
My dear friend, you are talking logic to the ignorant, uneducated, and willfully illogical masses. We know nuclear is better and safer over the lifetime than fossil fuels - from extraction to consumption. Unfortunately the PR image that doomed it would require a strong leader to say to your average idiot voter, “We’re doing this whether you like it or not” and we don’t have any strong leaders like this anymore.
Yeaj, i watched the documentary series on netflix…mostly nothing, but a PR disaster. The china syndrome
Nuclear carrier reactors are comparable to SMRs. They have an outstanding safety record and probably billions of dollars have gone into studies and designs. Ford class output 700 megawatt but much of that energy is diverted to propulsion. But it seems a sound starting point instead of starting from scratch.
A previous potential safety feature of SMRs wasn't mentioned here. Yes, build them in factories, but install them in suitable holes. If one goes critical it's small effort to use remote control bulldozers to simply push dirt into the hole and seal off the radiation leakage.
Technically these are well within reach. The real problem is we can't get anything done anymore. It's all talk and arguments.
the real problem is money. nobody wants to loose money, and thats what happens if you invest in nuclear.
@@tjeulinknobody but the military. They would power their machines by literally burning money given an opportunity.
@@m1k3y_m1 i can get the military, they have different priorities than making money.
Problem with naval reactors is also that they usually use highly enriched Uranium, which is much more expensive and really not needed for a "simple" power plant. It's also weapons grade, so safety really is a concern there. I don't think these reactors by themselves would work in a stationary civilian setting, but they would probably be a good starting point if their design wasn't classified. That being said, the easiest and cheapest way of producing nuclear power is just like we are doing it now.
Nuclear reactors on ships are also manned by trained personnel just like in the big power plants. Having and managing the necessary personnel that would be scattered all over the place may be a big issue. Even if reactors can be mass produced, getting enough trained personnel is whole other issue.
'Civilisation ending disaster' is really exaggerated, a meltdown is practically impossible nowadays with all the safety precautions taken (which is partly why nuclear is so expensive), and even if it somehow did happen it's nowhere near 'civilisation ending'. I think you're confused with a nuclear explosion, which is an impossible feat for a nuclear power station.
That was just a stupid thing to say and is a good example of irrational nuclear hysteria.
Here in Florida, employees of a now defunct nuclear plant said the security issues did did employ a lot of armed guards. A good number of cancer deaths among employees also.
It doesn't end the world when it went into meltdown. It just ruined everyone life in that particular region. If you're lucky, it happens in remote areas with limited numbers of people.
@@Cerceifyhow on god’s green earth was there radiation in the parts employees went to
Chernobyl had the potential to be exactly that dangerous, which is part of why the USSR basically destroyed its own economy and citizens to try to contain it. I do agree though that something on that level NOW is almost impossible though.
There are almost 200 small modular reactors operating with a 100% safety record for 65 years, all over the world. Huh? Yes, on ships, almost all military. No one thinks twice about getting aboard a nuclear ship or having one in port.
But oh, the Chicken Littles!
Some are nuclear powered... And nuclear armed!
If you like some horror look into Abandoned Sovjet nuclear batteries (RTG's).
Except those are not designed to be cost effective. Which is why they are only used for submarines and the largest of aircraft carriers. There are hints that the newest A1B reactor might have potential for civilian power production, but good luck getting Bechtel and the USN to share.
@@anticarrrot Jesus Krist. My point was that we already have hundreds of small reactors in long, successful service. Cost effectiveness is not in the conversation.
Military nuclear reactors as found on nuclear submarines are expensive given their output even when new nuclear submarines are being built every year, not to mention that they require several times higher purity of the fissile material. Thus, you can forget about powering your economy on competitive levels with these while civilian reactors aren't in any shape or form comparable just because they can be also made small, not like civilian SMRs are designed to be safe even when a whole submarine breaks and sink to the bottom where reactors being constantly exposed to excessive pressure. So no, SMRs aren't nor will be on levels with military reactors, nor do you want them to be if you don't want to go bankrupt...
Considering volume efficiency gains that come with larger reactors (do you want four half-liter engines instead of one two-liter?), one can wonder if SMRs can be even competitive on the cost of energy production once they are built because from what I see now is that main advantage of SMRs is in initial production cost due to modular pre-fab construction while there is a lot of silence about the cost efficiency over the whole service life of around 50 years.
SMRs may eventually reduce their costs to a point where they are practical, but it hasn't happened yet. You will know it when someone builds the first SMR factory, not when they build their first SMR.
you can't build the first SMR without the first SMR factory.
@@tjeulink Yes you can. Its called a prototype. Do you really think there are idle SMR factories sitting around waiting for orders?
@@SocialDownclimber i don't think they are viable so no.
Like any new technology that is expensive governments needs to be first movers to get the industry going and economy of scale then will start to take care of the cost after a while.
@@luffirton sounds like socialism man
The problem for Nuscale is its hideously expensive pool, not the reactors themselves. The reactors are modular ... but the pool is not.
Why is its pool so expensive?
@@theDaNi0 czcams.com/video/twMZJSMTqBo/video.html
@@theDaNi0 google "nuscale new problems, decouple media"
@@theDaNi0 sensors + earthquake measurements + overflow measurements + leakage protection + heat protection + protection from potential airstrike (yes all nuclear plants have this) and so on
"Rigorous quality control" when speaking of aircraft manufacturing. That quote didn't age very well :D
for airbus sure, not for boing lol
DW mentions civilication ending disaster as a possibilility. That is hyperbole in the extreme.
That's the typical confusion between nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
its fear mongering, as if building 400 acres of wind farms to power a city the size of new york isn't gonna fuck the ecosystem
@@falsemcnuggethopenuclear weapons is a nuclear reactor that goes to fast.. or just the waste of a reactor spread to the environment
@@SunShine-xc6dhThat's just so wrong. Nuclear fuel is just so far from refinement needed for nuclear bombs so it's impossible for actual nuclear explosion to happen.
@@SunShine-xc6dh a nuclear weapon is a bomb that will explode. A nuclear reactor won't do that, because it's not a bomb. Nuclear power is statistically one of the safest ways to generate power.
The reason SMRs are so expensive is that the development costs are being paid for by just a few units. If the designs work and are reliable, then many more SMRs can be built spreading the development costs over many more units. Government research grants to pay the development costs make sense.
that chart for land usage per mwh is pretty interesting
i would have assumed rooftop solar is 0 land usage, but it accounts for land used for mining the materials
which makes it even more surprising that nuclear is so low
I wonder if they considered the effects of mining nuclear...
@@gwynm8506well, they wouldnt need to mine alot, sinxe russian and the us already stole all the thorium from african and balkans
@@gwynm8506 presumably yeah, wouldnt make sense for only one of them to include mining
Look at at he recent story from India 3GW of solar CAPACITY (so about an average of 40% of that in generation) covering a vast area (5600 Hectares), the same in nuclear would be 2 reactors, with 97% uptime covering a couple of city blocks.
@@killcat1971 im pretty opimistic about nuclear, but even with optimistic expectations, that solar farm would still cost less than 1/3 of what that reactor did
nuclear isnt really competing with solar, it has a different job, and works in tandem with solar and other renewables
I'm no expert but here in the USA after Three Mile Island Congress enacted such difficult regulations to comply with that nobody could build a new power plant without violating the law somehow. I worked in the industry briefly in the 90s at a place that built power plants and it was if time had stopped after TMI. All the outstanding orders for new power plants were cancelled, most people quit or were laid off and a skeleton crew carried the load. The company eventually collapsed. I'd love to see new nuclear power plants in the USA but we need to change the laws so its possible and economical to build and operate them.
The fact that ensuring profit seems to be seen as more important than stopping global warming is quite sad.
That is true and continues to be true for fossil fuel industry. But there are much cheaper and safer alternatives than nuclear for the grid. Like the giant fusion reactor we get for free in the sky.
@@beyondfossil I too am a big fan of solar energy but as long as we are not able to store solar energy long term we are reliant on backup power plants and for places where hydro and geothermal aren't an option nuclear energy could come into play.
@@mrkokolore6187 Sure, and the grid scale problem is actively being worked on.
Furthermore, the more renewables production that comes online, then the more research & investments will be put into accelerating the growth of grid storage industry -- a positive feedback loop.
At 99.9% the mass of the solar system and 173,000 terawatts peak energy flux to the Earth, the sun daily provides several orders of magnitude we use every day. Less than 1% of the world's land surface covered in current generation solar panels could power all the grids. There is enough offshore wind to power the world several times over. There is always some combination of sun and wind in most places where most of world's populations tend to be located.
Keep nuclear for military and special scientific applications. Because the next 10 years will be pivotal to change course in our fossil fuel dependency. Whereas a single nuclear power plant can take 10+ years from inception to becoming online and operational. Pursuing nuclear at this critical juncture will have negative impacts on timeline.
@@mrkokolore6187 The grid storage problem is being actively worked on. Plenty of information on that online. The more renewables that come online, the more the grid storage industries grows.
(Looks like CZcams failed to post my other reply)
@@beyondfossil Yeah, I am aware of the continuous work on energy storage. For me pumped hydro and thermal energy storage(i.e., sand or molten salt) seem to be the most promising solutions. Perhaps also sodium-ion batteries. I also heard of a method where you convert iron oxide into iron metal with excess energy and burn it back to iron oxide when you need more power. All interesting and cool concepts. Don't know if they will be ready soon enough tho. Especially with fossil fuels still being dirt cheap. The problem is the focus on profit and fossil fuels sadly seem to still be very profitable.
As a Sputh African, this would be big for us.
I am strongly against not pursuing nuclear out of fear. That is just nuts. There is zero chance we reach climate goals without the consistent energy from nuclear
I broadly agree, but when I start hearing folks in the nuclear industry talk about "unesscessary regulatory burdens" it's difficult to trust. People forget that nuclear power workers aren't just neutral experts here to provide the best opinions, they are financially invested in the success of nuclear power even if it means making something that isn't safe. The problem is the margin of error is such that, if those cost inflating regulations aren't followed, even small disasters can leave radioactive products that are really expensive to clean up. Honestly, I think people forget that other industries with similar environmental impacts like chemical processing plants or former mining operations really ought to have had these kinds of regulations too, but we see what happens when companies can just pull out and leave their trash behind, and the results are horrifying even when it's not radioactive byproducts causing the environmental impact. The sad part here is that these non nuclear impacts often go ignored. We're not doing ourselves any favors if we replace one shitty polluting system of energy and industry with another that just pollutes differently. Honestly, this is why I think that any kind of green energy initiative that fails to also address the problems of late stage capitalism (i.e. needing to run a profit on carbon neutral energy) isn't going to work out. That's the piece that I think some nuclear power advocates miss out on. It becomes a sort of tunnel vision that is honestly just as driven by the fear of climate change, which is a valid fear to be sure, but which ignores the possibility of substituting one shitty future for another. Let's just not pick shitty futures? Socialize energy production.
Fourth generation Nuclear power plants, small, reliable. No meltdowns, re-usage of nuclear waste from the past, small and modular. These are the goals for a return of nuclear as power source. You are right, the public may reject the technology out of fear, from past disasters. But they don’t think that the Superphenix has been working for 30/40 years now, and there are 54 active Nuclear power plants in the US
@@saturationstation1446 Mind you, from the known nuclear disasters, there were zero (0) casualties in Fukushima. The other tragedies happened due to human error or cost saving measures. On average, water dams do more harm than nuclear, and people don't seem to fear them?
@@cavemann_ I fear water dams. I definitely wouldn't want to live downstream from one.
ITs fine .I have one across the road about a mile away-- Darlington - 3 reactors and a SMR under construction, 35 years and no problems.@@saturationstation1446
thanks for your report, I find it balanced for the short timeframe. I believe that bigger nuclear power plants are the way to make an impact (both in terms of energy baseline and low CO2 emissions), while, as you pointed out, SMRs can have a niche application to energy-intensive industries that need additional energy capabilities (e.g. for steel production). All in all, the implicit good news is that investment is rising after decades of negligence - and with high investments comes high innovation, just as it was for solar and wind. Perhaps in the next video you can highlight the investments in EU and the Countries that plan to start or expand their civilian nuclear fleet. Thanks!
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Imagine if energy was free or at least extremely extremely cheap. Life would be so less stressful
Too bad we have to pay for the sun. The plants and trees must be rich to pay that bill.
SMRs are most practical in space (moon and mars), and in desolate environments. Unlike their bigger counterpart, they can more easily be 'automated'. With SMRs you can quite easily build a reliable power source in desolate environments like the moon and Mars, etc (Titan - Saturn's moon).
"the quality control are the same as airliners".
well at least in this case doors won't fall from the sky.
Airbus has a high quality control standard compared to the airplanes of the US ;)
In case of nuclear power economy of scale means lots of output power. SMRs need everything a large reactor has, so the savings are not there. Same counts for wind energy as well, so we see wind turbines get bigger and bigger.
The reason wind turbines get bigger and bigger is the higher and more stable wind speed at greater height.
Here is one issue I have with these SMR related videos. Virtually none of them, including this one, had pointed out that SMRs absolutely work and we have decades of experience. Just look at all the nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers. Since the 50's there have been over 160 nuclear naval vessels built, and every single one of them is powered by a SMR.
@@astebbin I shall argue the 2 points you made are perhaps erroneous.
1. Enrichment Levels:
Naval nuclear reactors runs on military grade enriched fuels of over 93% enrichment. The proposed SMRs run on HALEU grade of no more than 20% enrichment. It is simply far too low to be weapons grade. The much lowered enrichment level also serves as an extra level of safeguard to the already stellar safety records of naval SMRs.
2. Proliferation:
This seems to be the go-to argument for much of the anti-nuclear energy crowd, but it is simply incorrect. As a matter of fact, commercial nuclear energy generation is the best proven way to denuclearize one's military arsenal. To prevent Soviet nukes falling into the wrong hands after the collapse of the USSR, the Megatons to Megawatts Program was put in place from 1993 till the Russian invasion of Crimea. The program decommissioned an equivalent of 20,008 or 45% of total stockpiled nuclear warheads by the USSR. The decommissioned warheads were then downblended into commercial reactor fuel. During those 20 years, 10% of total US electricity generation came from those "recycled" Soviet warheads. If anything, it should be argued that commercial nuclear energy generation has greatly served the propose of anti-proliferation.
@@astebbinthat isn’t a requirement, though, and that fuel is currently used for supply-chain reasons.
And at least hundreds of navy soldiers lose their hairs
They should look into reactors that use thorium instead of uranium. Thorium cannot be used for bombs.
Also, the SNR concept includes burying the reactor to begin with. A thief trying to steal the nuclear material could be stopped long before the reactor has been unearthed.
@@astebbin 57% of global carbon emissions come from countries that already have nuclear weapons and aren't a proliferation concern.
This is a great solution for grid balancing and remote locations, hopefully we will see it more and more 😊❤❤
3:48 Oh yes, building SMRs like modern airliners is a very convincing argument. Boeing is the perfect example.
Nuclear Waste can be recycled! SMR's can produce power, heat, and hydrogen. The technology for decarbonization exist, you just have implement it.
You have to think about the money. Imagine holding a billion dollars... and betting that "solar/wind + storage" is going to be more expensive in 10-15 years than your nuclear technology (an industry know for massive time and cost over-runs). You honestly wouldn't do it.
The waste has to be modified to work. It's not like a trash bin lorry where you can put everything in and you are good to go.
yes and plastic can be recycled too, yet we have the great ocean garbage patch. that somthing is theoretically possible has nothing to do with it being practically possible.
All 4 generation reactors can use or recycle more than 50% of nuclear waste to the nuclear fuel.
All of them can use at least twice recycled nuclear fuel.
All fast reactors can produce more nuclear fuel than got
It's basics.
@@1968ChristiaanFrance decarbonized electricity in 15 years with 1970s reactor technology and has the cheapest electricity in Europe. You're nuts.
SMRs are everywhere as we speak, how many ships and subs are nuclear powered ?
Not to mention how many are planned or under construction? Dozens...
Military reactors have a very different set of design principles to civilian SMRs.
Many ports and countries ban nuclear vessels from docking, or only docking at designated areas.
@@adamdavies6248True. But I think this is misguided considering the excellent safety record of nuclear powered ships. What really should be banned is filthy oil-burning ships - especially cruise ships - that produce a huge amount of local pollution.
So, how much do they cost per megawatt?
I'm still banking on Last Energy being the ones to break the SMR barrier first. Using mostly off-the-shelf parts from mature oil/gas industry supply chains is brilliant, and should finally allow for true enough standardization to actually get the cost per reactor way down.
SMRs that consume waste, such as molten salt reactors designed by Copenhagen Atomics. might be a good solution for dealing with waste. Excellent video, but let's keep thinking positively.
"You Must Construct Additional Pylons!"
"Not enough minerals."
"Nuclear launch detected"
I honestly find it hard to understand how subhumanly evil people have to be to think it's only worth protecting the planet and humanity if it makes a profit.
They are world class grifters so they know a grift when they see one..
So why haven't you done anything for society?
@@edenassosbecause they're not a billionaire
@@kaden-sd6vbthat would require making profits, which aren't important apparently
“In any system of energy, Control is what consumes energy the most.
No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores.
No system of energy can deliver sum useful energy in excess of the total energy put into constructing it.
This universal truth applies to all systems.
Energy, like time, flows from past to future” (2017).
Congratulations! You just discovered the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
I don't see what the big deal is. We manufacture small reactors for years that are put in our submarine and ships. Reinventing the whole thing commercially vs government continuing with what they have been using safely for years is questionable. Allowing many to use the technology is an issue that I believe should be kept , at this point, under direct government control. Having power for the country is a matter of national security and should be controlled by the military [even if it's just the security of the plant]. Use an existing micropowerplant design and have the government install and operate. Keep our need to be dependent on outside countries fuel to power the country. When the units age we control scraping them vs private companies going bankrupt and leaving us to flip the bill anyway.
The problem with SRMs is that they don't have the economics of scale of traditional larger nuclear plants. So the energy production from them needs to be subsidized
energy production from nuclear already has to be subsidized, for SMR its just even more. wind and solar are economically viable on their own.
Thsts why we need large modular reactors and loans guaranteed at the government bond rate.
@@gregorymalchuk272 sounds a lot like socialism
@@tjeulink It sounds like vertically integrated public utilities.
That's not true, there is no need for subsidies you are clearly a European though lol. SMR's (Not SRMs) are still cheaper then fossil fuel and provide reliable backbone power, you can over build it and dump the waste energy into CO2 collectors to recapture the CO2 we've released. The thing keeping their costs up is the fact nuclear power especially SMR's aren't the mainstream thus they don't have the economics of scale. All we gotta do is build SMR factories and get the fuel cheap. Thorium SMR's are my favorite as they're physically resistant to meltdowns without needing active cooling.
Couldnt we just convert coal plants that are planned to be shut down into nuclear energy plants to recoup costs
Hey there! This is possible and currently studied/considered in some places. It can obviously save costs by using existing infrastructure. Not all coal plants are suitable but according to a study by the Department of Energy it would be about 300 existing and retired coal power plant sites in the US that could be converted.
SMRs can also easily be integrated with technologies that are energy consuming, e.g. SMR powered nuclear submarine. The SMR component can easily be automated (alone with the droned, nuclear powered submarine).
We could straight up solve our energy problems if we built more nuclear power plants. It’s 100% green energy.
As much as I support nuclear energy SMRs never seemed a too bright idea. You have great economy of scale with the normal size, the site has to be specially monitored and defended wheter it produce 300MW or 3-4GW. Same with the infrastructure. Also they use more material, the same capacity may requires more personnel. As long as they plan to install many of them at the same site it isn'treally worth it, and if they don't then there is the problem of botth the nuclear waste, and vulnerable infrastructure being too disperesed.
I think the best advantage is the modularity.
Who's going to put down billions in investment and wait at least 5 years to see an NPP running.
MSRs allow piecemeal expansion. Oh, your energy needs expanded by a few hundred MW? Just add one more reactor to the plant.
As opposed to adding gigawatts and spending billions for every reactor.
@@anxiousearth680 Only in theory. In practice, you end up needing a bigger turbine, possibly more power line, and other equipments. You also shut down the facility cause you "install an upgrade", regulators has to check the new parts, you need instrumentation, controlls and ppl for the new reactor. You have to prove with tests that the new one did not change the current characteristics of your installation significantly, and now you have to run all of them on a capacity that justifies the new one, with its added costs, manifacture, maintenence extra staff and permitting. The problem is, you end up redoing everything for addign like 50-100MW which in many case can be done as a major upgrade on an existing higher capacity plant. And while at it, you better just build another big one, jump through the hoops once and add another 1000-1200 MW.
Everything is built from scratch doesn't matter if it's big or small it's built from something - that does not determine its danger
I think the first discussed option is better from a long term perspective. Having an entity on which the whole of production is dependent is exactly what the two example countries are - soft authoritarian regimes
One of the reasons France's nuclear energy program has been so successful is that France developed a good design and then refined and improved the design over may units. The majority of France's nuclear power plants are the same basic design. Moderate in size and reliable.
On the other hand the US industry had a race to build bigger and bigger reactors. The industry would make a few of a design and then jump to a new larger design. No feedback for the old design to improve. Just a race to the next bigger design.
What are the cause and effect if something goes wrong?
What do you mean in specific thats a vague question. Im going to assume you mean what are the cause and effects interms of negative consequences in the event of a critical emergency or other hazardous incident causing a nuclear radiation leak. The most obvious solution is that because the smr radioactive components are inside the smr then it would be super easy to just take it offline and then take it to a nuclear disposal site (which is safe since we have solved alot of the issues around when the famous disasters happened and when nuclear energy was being debated to replace fossil fuels)
Besides progress in nuclear powers safety which make anything like like the famous incidents like chernobyl & fukishima. Now we have systems that have many failsafes and such.
But in specific to smrs their design is so that the risk is minimized in the first place but if and when something goes wrong they are both not big enough sources of radiation to be more than a local incident, as well as many of them being underground and shielded by concrete. If that fails its very very easy to shut the smr off and then move the entire thing to a nuclear waste disposal site. If youarent aware already we have actually solved the issue of nuclear waste watch kyle hill's video titled "weve already solved nuclear waste" since they can explain it much better than i could. But the smr is designed so that the whole unit can be easily moved so that means if it becomes problematic it can be moved to a safe disposal site where it wont pose any dangers to humanity or even that local area wher it went wrong or even the workers at the disposal site. In fact, in the video I recommended kyle hill literally kisses nuclear waste containers and stands rigjt by them because he knows its safe. No protective equiptment either just plain clothes.
I can try and specifically answer any questions you might have if you specify what you mean but i hope this eas enough of an answer for you. Also i hopeyou check out the video so you arent just relying on my word and you can see for yourself.
@@anarcho.femboyism wow. This is what I wanted to know 👍😀. Thanks for this long wonderful explanation. I have seen the video from kyle after you asked me to and yes. I will complete the video. No me it is bit worrying when everytime governments are involved and funding projects. Most of the time they see their own interest and make compromises. This is usually a red flag in such projects. I think this to me is like a rocket science, where we theoretically apply things but when it come to real life anything can go wrong. Sometime we oversee something minor in nature. That is what I meant by my comment above.
11:30 Absolutely nightmare scenario...
Do you know how crazy effective this would be for farmers? I live in Canada. It’s cold. Can’t grow anything 1/4 of the year even tho I’m in one of the warmest zones.
With those reactors as a power supply, you can run massive greenhouses. Large enough to grow things like bananas, citrus, custard apples, tropical plants that normally can’t be grown anywhere near Canada. All at a large scale. Large enough to make the food cheaper, with the benefit of being fresh.
The comparison to airliners hasn’t aged well
In Australia SMRs are already widely employed specifically to extend the life of coal and gas generation - miners, media & right wing politicians tell the punters that SMRs are almost available and will deliver cheap, hassle free electricity and so renewable projects should be handbraked to leave the market open until such time as we can build them all.
We use small nuclear reactors in naval vessels. I can imagine converting or replacing the merchant fleet of giant cargo and cruise ships to nuclear. At least they should connect to the local grid when at port so their existing fossil fuel reactors don't pollute the city.
Miniaturized Nuclear Reactor Exists:
Gundam Fans: hey siri cancel my flight to Australia…
Very cool! :)
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Stop being scared of nuclear energy!
I think we (society) learned the wrong lesson from those famous Reactor Meltdowns.
The lesson we learned was:
Not to trust nuclear energy.
When the lesson we should have learned was:
Don’t cut corners, especially with things that potentially have big consequences.
Similar with the Challenger Space Shuttle.
That crippled public interest in space. My mom talks about it and its impact, as she was a child watching it live with her classmates in school.
When the engineers say that you really need something, then you Really Need That “Something”
Like that you Need to call off the launch.
Or you Need the proper safety measures in your Nuclear Power Plant.
And that you Need to Not cut corners.
So a good video again, informative as usual.
My issue with nuclear in my country, Australia, is one of our major political parties that often deride renewables are putting up nuclear as an alternative.
So if it was nuclear in addition to renewables, fine. But if it's instead, we'll be waiting years to decarbonise - no Australia won't rely on a Chinese company as the same political side is also wary of China.
So I would rather loads of renewables & storage plus gas for when needed. And if the green hydrogen dream ever works out, then we can get to 100%.
Hydrogen will never be a economical source of energy. Even the IEA doesn't even list hydrogen in its annual study of green power implementation.
of course it should be renewable and nuclear against fossil
The biggest mistake in the Fukushima accident was that the emergency battery was installed underground, and seawater got into it.
So I don't think all nuclear power generation is dangerous.
I understand that Germany, which is close to Russia, has abolished nuclear power plants, but it is also true that CO2 is a stable gas, so it is very troublesome.
Until a small nuclear reactor that can ensure safety is completed, we need to reduce electricity consumption at night when solar power is not generated.
Nuclear power IS dangerous. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima and lots and lots of smaller "accidents" demonstrated that.
Building more reactors just means that more reactors can have a meltdown. You can't make reactors bullet proof. There's always a residual risk and that risk will eventually result in another accident.
Btw, Germany isn't close to Russia. If you ignore Kaliningrad they are 1000 km apart. Berlin and Moscow are 1600 km apart. That's a huge distance.
We also don't need to reduce electricity consumption at night. That's already the time where most of the country is shutdown and asleep.
We need feasible electricity storage solutions that can work with the peculiarities of solar and wind power.
We must raise up energy consumption at night to reduce energy losses in generation and transmission.
Because of that at least 30% of cars will be electric or plugin electric after 2050
@@MihailG5541 30%? In Europe it will be 90%. They banned producing gasoline & diesel car engines by ~2035 (depends on country). By 2050 most cars with combustion engines will be gone.
@@doesnotcompute6078 you are taking about NEW cars, not ALL cars.
It's impossible to exchange half billion old cars to new cars so fast.
At least half of new cars will be hybrid
@@MihailG5541The average life time of a car in Europe is 12 years. So yes, 15 years after banning the sale of cars with combustion engines there won't be much of them left.
With less and less combustion engine cars the number of gas stations that sell gasoline and diesel will become fewer making these cars even more unattractive.
I'm sure by 2070 or so the only cars that need gas or diesel will be vintage cars that will be driven once a year.
Why not build 10 of these SMRs on the same land? You make profits and probably reduce risks🤷🏾♂️
That is a suggestion in the marketing material of many SMR companies.
Having multiple plants always means having multiple points of failure. The risk actually increases with the amount.
because it isn't profitable.
Because cost per MW is 120$ and higher.
It's good for Alaska or Island but not for other world
I get it though. I believe the more SMRs built, the cheaper their components are gonna cost. And in the long run become profitable.
8:40 The caption is wrong, she correctly says "per kilowatt-hour", but it's incorrectly captioned as "per kilowatt/hour". We typically measure energy in kWh, 1 kWh = 3600000 J.
Good eye! Thanks for the correction! 😊
As far ipas my raearch noted that compact nuclear safer and mid enegy input and mean ti lead to nuckas fusion also solar and wind included to boost results
One key advantage that wasn't mention in the video is their relation with the grid. A typical nuclear plant will need high voltage cables to serve a huge area while snr could work on lower voltage, smaller grids with no problem. great for small islands or energy intensive companies that don't want to rely on the grid like data enters
How to spot a scam/money grab 101:
"it promises to fix all the problems with..."
I don’t understand the lady in the video, she says SMR doesn’t have the economy of scale of energy production but could you not combine SMRs to get huge outputs like big power plants do now, with much lower cost, to both the size of land needed and the cost and time of the initial construction
There has never been economies of Small scale on power generation. Your comment makes no sense. EXAMPLE: If auto manufacturers wanted more power in vehicles, why do you think they put in larger more efficient engines instead of putting in multiple smaller engines in one vehicle? If you can answer that, you have the answer to your comment
We can put them inside cities and use the exhaust steam for heating, process heat, and refrigeration.
Japanese people don't want new one anymore. Where will it be going to build?
There is a lot pressure from big oil against clean energy such as this.
As is this whole video and channel it seems. Everything is BS designed not to inform but to introduce dour FUD aka Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt... It's the only thing DW traffics in these days...
@@timwoodruff5728 you know what. You are probably right :-) ... but, small self contained low bureaucracy nuclear reactors have the potential to disrupt petrol industry, but you are right they are probably not lobbying against it at this point.
Fossil fuel companies like SMRs right now because right wing governments and politicians are using the prospect of them coming “soon” to hold off on other renewable energy projects. The politicians say that solar or wind farms may wait or don’t have to happen because SMRs will be a silver bullet to solve the climate change problem and let us live our extravagant lifestyles.
Considering what's happening in Ukraine these small modular reactors makes a country less vulnerable to attacks.
Also nuclear energy is way better for our health. Fossil power plants cause way more deaths every year.
SMRs is the future, you could combine multiple of them to create a big power plant, much faster to build with GW of power as you need without the extreme high cost and extreme long build times.
The local news article below was written 1 year before NuScale (U.S. company) canceled their SMR project. NuScale received $2.4 BILLION in taxpayer money along with free government land on which to build. Their investors are now suing for FRAUD.
In 2013, the Wall Street firm Lazard estimated that the cost of generating electricity at a new nuclear plant in the United States will be between $86 and $122 per megawatt-hour. Last November, Lazard estimated that the corresponding cost will be between $131 and $204 per megawatt-hour based upon the 4 recent new nuclear projects in the U.S. . During the same eight years, renewables have plummeted in cost, and the 2021 estimates of electricity from newly constructed utility-scale solar and wind plants range between $26 and $50 per megawatt-hour. Nuclear power is simply not economically competitive.
SMRs will be even less competitive. Building and operating SMRs will cost more than large reactors for each unit (megawatt) of generation capacity. A reactor that generates five times as much power will not require five times as much concrete or five times as many workers. This makes electricity from small reactors more expensive; many of the original small reactors built in the United States were financially uncompetitive and shut down early.
The estimated cost of constructing a plant with 600 megawatts of electricity from NuScale SMRs, arguably the design closest to deployment in the United States, was originally advertised as costing $1 billion but upon requesting actual bids from engineering firms, increased to $6.1 billion in 2020. Given inflation and other cost constraints that cost today can only be expected to be significantly higher.
The cost was so high that ten members of Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems canceled their contracts. NuScale then changed its proposed plant configuration to 6 fewer reactors but increased each reactor output from 50 Mw to 77 Mw costing at total of $5.3 billion. The NRC just last week approved the construction of the 50 Mw design but now will have to start the review process all over given the switch to a 77 Mw design. For each kilowatt of electrical generation capacity, that estimate is around 80% more than the per-kilowatt cost of the Vogtle project in Georgia - before its cost exploded from $14 billion to over $30 billion. Based on the historical experience with nuclear reactor construction, SMRs are very likely to cost much more than initially expected. And they now have delayed the project start until 2025 in an attempt to find more backers. All this before the inevitable setbacks that will occur once construction starts.
The salient point here is no-one has managed to build one economically yet.
Fusion Power has been only a decade away since 1950, and despite billions in investment, we haven't made that either.
Glad this video explained the cost side heavily. The promise of SMRs has essentially already failed--they've shown that they're no better cost-wise than our old nuclear plants which was always the problem. The simple fact of the matter is that wind/solar + batteries is already a cost-effective solution that's proven and available today, albeit in need of ramping capacity. SMRs likely still have a niche long term (e.g. commercial shipping, remote outposts), but it really doesn't make sense for the grid when wind/solar + batteries are already cheaper than fossil fuels, let alone nuclear.
what are you talking about, batteries are insanely expensive, to power a city when there is not sun/wind is either nuclear or fossil fuels
@@mggaming4624 thats what grid interconnects are for. it barely happens that there is no sun or wind.
All wind and solar energy have only 3% of accumulators power per MW of "green" power.
That's change all.
13-15% is the transmission to another time zones.
20% is hydro energy balancing.
50% is fuel (gas, oil or coal) balancing.
Only french nuclear reactors can change their power from 50% to 100% up to 200 times per year, but cost of that is 1.5x times more uranium for that.
@@astebbinCivilian reactors can't produce weapons grade plutonium. They produce contaminated reactor grade plutonium.
Dynamic electricity pricing combined with point of use energy storage will have a huge influence on the global energy calculation
"Just make electricity more expensive and difficult to use, that's the solution for energy."
Soviet union did something like this to power lighthouses and radio towers in isolated areas collapsed and now every few years somone gets a darwin award trying to scrap them.
The reason this isn't happening is US petrodollar hegemony.
Imagine if humanity eventually don't exist anymore, and what outcome/s may occur when all the backups fails to keep the reactors nice and cool?......🤔
SMRs are safer than you think. The mistakes you point out are learning curves. This one is smaller safer and better.
@@fayebird1808 And how many have to fail before you learned how not to make mistakes? There are thousands of recorded nuclear accidents. Luckily not all of them released radiation into the environment.
100 "old" nuclear power plants are 100 plants that can have accidents. 1000 SMRs are 1000 plants that can have accidents. Also each of the 1000 SMRs needs as much special protection and safeguarding as the "old" plants. You can't skimp on that.
Canada knows how to keep the fuel cool. We have decommissioned several reactors due to age. And replaced them,. Yes, there have been incidents but spilling heavy water certainly cant be compared to a meltdown .CANDU reactors are very safe in the business of heavy power generation. We have about 3 Stations on the Great Lakes --Bruce 6.61 MW on Lake Huron, Pickering 3.1 MW ,Darlington 3.1MW on Lake Ontario.@@doesnotcompute6078
not much honestly
My honest question: Do we have enough raw materials (also including recycling) to make the energy transition ?
I am on with renewable, Nuclear and EV, but it's my biggest concern :/
We REALLY need these to power the worlds data centers.
SMR’s are inevitable, in small quantities, but they need to figure out how to bring the costs down as they’re far too expensive, especially compared to solar and wind + battery storage, to realize any mass scale. Solar + battery storage is so crazy inexpensive and reliable, nothing else can compete.
if we could trust humanity then atomic energy would be a solution. but with all those strange egos who like to wage war, the risk becomes too great. Using less energy is the only solution
Civil nuclear technology cannot serve military purposes. The production of large amounts of electricity from nuclear simply doesn't provide the conditions for atomic weapons to be built.
Secondly, we can't "consume less": sure we can -as individuals and western societies- reduce our energy inefficiencies, but if we want to grow and develop as humanity we'll inevitably consume more energy.
And anyway, even if we managed to significantly reduce our energy consumption, if we want to phase out fossils we need to electrify our systems. And for that we need a lot of electricity.
Nuclear power can provide that electricity in a way that is clean, safe and cheap for consumers
k, you tell to the to the Afrikans...
@@bose9618 it is not using atomic energy for war, the problem is bombarding atoic energy plants that create the ris
Legend has it that in the year 1848, one in four inhabitants of Riga, Latvia were named "David Fishman". o/
I will bet that the engineer who compared SMR fabrication with the fabrication of airliners was not thinking about Boeing airliner construction practices.
I'm putting an SMR in my bathroom 😂
The energy produced from SMR literally available all year round. SMR + Molten salt battery is the best way forward for this time. Lithium battery and solar is the legacy systems of renewables. These are the future.
The waste and risk will not just be "available all year round", but for many generations to come.
@@mavigogunwrong
Show me someone who has built an SMR on their roof for under $10,000 and I'll believe you.
@@SocialDownclimber it’s not for personal use. A small reactor can still power hundreds or more homes. Your roof solar panel won’t do that.
@@uhohhotdog I don't need to power my whole neighbourhood with solar panels though. I only need power for myself. I can't buy a nuclear reactor, but I can buy solar panels. It turns out that that model of personal power generation is very very popular, more so than getting all your power through the grid.
In today's world, I'd be worried about risks in trying to keep many small nuclear reactors, scattered around the countryside, out of the hands of extremists. How do you protect all of these nuclear plants from a nutter with a bomb? The costs of securing numerous small plants are much higher than securing a large plant.
Listening to this very interesting and informative video and then hear the narrater mention "net zero" yet again is like reading a really smart CZcams comment and the commenter adding "LOL" in the end. It really detracts from the value of the message. I mean, does DW planet get paid to drop climate words to make their bingo cards completed?
If anyone but China can deliver a Nuclear Power plant in time and budget even remotely close to the lifecycle kw cost of solar I might consider Nuclear Power to be viable, but even SMRs are way to expensive to be a good investment compared to solar + energy storage.
Solar energy and storage are more expensive than the most expensive nuclear electricity ever.
It's never going to have the energy to cause an accident and can be used in remote locations to generate a lot of power efficiently, while being very easy to quarantine in case of an accident.
Seems perfect to me, outside of maybe economics of scale.
We’re really trying to live in the fallout universe for tech smh
Didn't TOSHIBA have multiple approaches in the small reactor space?The 4S, the MoveluX, Micro - none of them made it to the market?
Finally someone says what is really causing the decline of nuclear power: It's economically not worthwhile. We are wasting a lot of money and brain power researching a type of power that again isn't sustainable, needs heavy subsidies to work out economically and is not even close to working out technically.
Imagine if we put all that into researching more and better renewables, large area energy networks and energy storage, which we have to do anyway at some point. For example, wind power plants deployed into the atmosphere with baloons or kites could easily cover *all* of the power needs of the forseeable future. Instead, we are having strawmen discussions (even here in the comments) about how irrational it is to be scared of nuclear, while the very same people bring insane arguments like "what if the wind doesn't blow?", all just because some gullible people are falling for the marketing of the nuclear industry.
Renewables are definitely cheaper no question about that, but I do still think that nuclear power should play a role in future power generation. The argument "what if the wind doesn't blow?" may be a bit simplified, but is essentially a valid and inherent drawback of wind and solar. Wind is usually somewhat stable and reliable, but solar power generation goes from 100 to 0 in a few hours daily. To make up for those gaps and use the surplus that's generated during the day you need massive amounts of power storage which only pumped hydro can get close to providing. Problem is that these can only be efficiently built in specific geographic locations, which leads to the most viable sites already being used and other areas being too remote or distant from any consumer. In the end many regions still need a way to produce a varying but large amount of electricity over the day. In my opinion nuclear power is a solution for this problem that needs relatively little space and (not monetary) resources, while also not producing large carbon emissions.
Its very economically viable. Strange how barely developed countries in the 80s were able to build up nuclear to a point where it provided 50% of the country energy need, yet 45 years later we still cry about it how its too expensive lol. Those countries still to this day usually have the cheapest and cleanest energy, coming from those old reactors. Just start building it and stop with the FUD.
@@magyararon6918 What you nuclear lobbyists always forget to mention is that your patrons completely "forgot" to plan for disposal of a reactor at end of life, burdening society with the effort to dismantle and dispose of giant industrial ruins that are also partially poisonous and irradiated. Then you keep on telling everybody how much safer reactors have become but also "forget" to mention that all the measures that your patrons were forced to take to get there have massively increased both the setup and operational costs. And then you also forget to mention that it is getting more expensive every year to mine uranium and produce fuel rods.
And all that so you can con the public about nuclear being the "cheapest and cleanest" source of energy, so that you can keep building reactors although you know that with the increased setup costs, operating costs, fuel costs, the dismantling cost and the competition from actual green energy it is not economical to use nuclear reactors. You try to safe your profits today fully aware of the fact that 20, 30 years down the line when you run out of money you can extort governments to pick up your debt because they are dependent on the energy your reactors provide.
@@trnogger Here the government literally runs the power plants. The disposal is a miniscule issue compared to global warming. We cant rely on renewables in most countries.
South Africa has a very advanced nuclear capability having tested and produced 6 atomic bombs which were declared and dismantled at the end of apartheid. In addition South Africa was the first country in the world to start research on SMR s about 30 years ago and is the worlds leading expert in this field. This research was done by the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation at Pelindaba Pretoria a government owned and one of the oldest nuclear research organisations in the world.
Stratek Global has followed up on this research and has just signed up with an investor to manufacture a number of small privately owned nuclear reactors in SA the first probably at Pelindaba.
In addition therr is a facility at Pelindaba that manufactures and supplies nuclear fuel that has already produced and will be supplying the nuclear fuel it would require to operate.
According to the announcement two days ago construction is said to be going to start shortly.
I am surprised that this was not mentioned in this report.
Great we'll see how it works out!
South Africa?
That country that can't generate enough electricity for its population since 20 years ago?
That country that uses the words "load shedding" because it is too embarrassing to call it by the right words: rolling blackout?
That country that has a rolling blackout for more than 3 years now?
That country where power plants shut down because the fuel was stolen by the workers?
That country where corruption is so high that they shot the guy that wanted to stabilize the energy generation and combat the corruption?
That South Africa? Dream on!
It looks like it won't be commercially ready for another 10 years, but I can see the practical uses by that time.
Designing a reactor with a negative thermal coefficient would make it shut down as it gets hotter.
1:36 "Civilization ending disasters"? Sounds a little dramatic when you see Chernobyl already being a tourist hotspot and Fukushima having people living near the power plant.
Chernobyl is a hotspot alright.
Fool.
@@saturationstation1446 Are you ok?
Hyperbole is the only thing DW excels at these days...
@@saturationstation1446 1 place? What about the exclusion zone around Fukushima?
How close can you get to Three Mile Island? Btw they estimate it'll take them till 2078 to remove all contaminated materials. The melt down occurred in 1979 so 99 years to clean up. Hmmm nice.
It's another in the power industry's arsenal of evasive tools to avoid what should be their rapid and mandatory conversion to proven and available green technologies.
Thanks for this informative video! 😊
If economics are the issue, why not use them for heat generation too? A lot of industrial processes need insanely high temperatures as part of the manufacturing process. It's a very good way of decarbonising industry while providing a revenue stream for the company researching and constructing them.
Exaclty. Sell the exhaust steam for space heating, process heat, and absorption refrigeration.
Using the gamma rays to bake bread or what?
@@JeermynRex No? How is that the first thing that comes to your mind when there is the obvious application of using the heat from nuclear fission to process metals, synthetic fuels and desalination, and the generated neutrons to dope semiconductors?
Nuclear plants are too expensive, take too long, are too fraught with uncertainty. Uncertainties as; cost overruns, delays, cancellations, accidents, natural disasters, war & terrorism. While solar, wind are cheap & growing very fast. Worldwide solar grew equal to 53 nuke plants in 2023. Even SMRs are 4 times more than the cost of energy now. Legacy nuclear is about 10 times more than solar and wind right now. Tax dollars should not be used to build SMRs. Private equity doesn't want to invest it because of all the uncertainty. The idea that reduced regulatory control is a way to make SMRs cheaper is just playing with fire.
Go with solar and wind. It is what the market is doing. This year the US is not building any new coal plants, one nuclear plant and only a small amount of natural gas is being added. The rest, that is 96.5% of additions to electric generation, is wind and solar renewables, or renewable related, namely batteries. Putting 66.7 GW of wind, solar and batteries capacity online in one year is going to retire a lot of fossil fuel plants, as well as negate the need for nuclear. Nuclear at this junction is simply too slow, too expensive and too fraught with uncertainty to implement.
You can't fully substitute fossils with renewables, since they're not stable sources. When you have too much renewable power it doesn't actually provide any benefit, since its going to add even more energy during peak moments of the day but still be useless at night, for instance.
You need some backup source that can cover the base load. And you can do that either with fossils or nuclear. Since we want to abandon fossils, the solution needed is pretty clear
@timwoodruff5728 yes of course, I wasn't saying renewable don't have any place in the energy sources cake graph. We need them, and we still have a pretty wide margin of deployment, but we can't hope to phase out fossils going 100% renewable. That base load must be covered by a stable and reliable source
Batteries are filling the gap that used to be occupied by base load power stations. There has always been a mismatch between demand cycles and generation. The graph that plotted demand was called the duck because of the way it looked. It showed low demand at night and the early morning rising up when people woke up, it dropped a little when people were at work and then would rise up again when people got home and turned on TVs, air conditioners, ovens etc. Most electricity used peaked in the evenings after work and then would go down again as people slept. This represents intermittency of demand. Power plants were built to meet peak demand with the rest of the time the plants were being underutilized. Utilities don't want demand to go beyond peak because that would mean they would have to build a new plant to meet demand that wouldn't be its most profitable until demand reached near peak again. Utilities would employ fast turn on peaker gas powered power plants to cover when demand would pass peak periodically. This was always very expensive. Peaker plants would just be standing by until needed and then they would charge the utilities lots of money so they could stay in business when they weren't needed. This was the old model. Base load barely existed since it was only viable for the amount of demand that electricity would drop to at night.
Wind and solar plus batteries has created a new paradigm. With batteries power can produced at anytime as long as it is enough to cover all the demand for a few days. Demand can be anytime since matching that demand with batteries can be almost instant, unlike gas peaker plants that need time to start up. Right now places like California and Texas are producing more wind and solar than can be used during the day. Ever see wind turbines not turning? That is the utility curtailing wind turbine generation because there is too much electricity on the grid. The same happens with solar. With batteries all this curtailment can be stopped and the energy can be stored in batteries to be used when it is needed. It also can grow incrementally as demand grows without needing to spend the time and billions to build a whole new power plant.
So, to answer your comment. Wind and solar can and does substitute for fossil fuels right now. New generation of wind and solar with batteries is set to be some 50 plus gigawatts in the US this year. Batteries matches both demand intermittency as well as generation intermittency. Wind and solar with batteries are winning the day.
We need to focus on renewable instead of technologys that does not even exist nowadays
Nuclear does not compete with renewable. They simply have different purposes.
Our electric base load can't be covered by renewables, since they're not stable and reliable. The choice then is between fossils or nuclear. Since we want to abandon fossils, the solution looks pretty evident.
@@bose9618 false. Fossile Fuels are not for baseload but for peak times. So dont write before knowing anything about the topic
@@bose9618 inaccurate. Renewables and nuclear do compete. Cheap RE reduces profitability of nuclear when nuclear’s marginal price is above RE and is curtailed by grid operators. This is a problem in Europe currently. Please Google to find relevant news.
@@bose9618 *sigh* nuclear and renewables do compete. All tech in a grid competes because they bid in at their cost of operation plus a marginal profit which is regulated in each grid operators territory. In the EU, renewables bid in at $0 because they have zero cost of operation, and this causes nuclear curtailment. Google it. Nuclear had higher marginal cost. Renewables compete with everything higher than 0 marginal cost because they compress the dispatch stack’s value and depress marginal prices causing curtailment of higher cost sources.
@@timwoodruff5728 that doesnt change the fact that fossile fuels are flexible and nuclear is just baseload even if there is enough renewable capacity there
The first smr has to get built, to show its viable. Then a factory for smr needs to built. Then it needs to export those smrs. Somewhere along the way, a better waste solution needs to be found. I'm thinking collecting all the waste to heat large amounts of water, then run heat pumps off the heated water. Or we ship it to a multinational funded storage site in Antarctica.
There is a pike of dirt across the road from us at Darlington Nuclear with a SMR sign on it under construction.
Theres also the part where nuclear is not clean energy.
Want a nuclear plant in your backyard? Store waste for thousands of years after 30 years of energy? Insulation doesn’t melt down-neither does solar or wind or pumped hydro or…
If the proposed SMR is of 2nd generation, I agree with you. But technology has advanced and 4th generation nuclear power plants are using nuclear waste from the past as fuel, producing only a fraction as waste, and don’t need “fresh” uranium to work. In addition, by not using fresh water to cool but molten salt, as in example, there is no more possibility for meltdowns.
That's the description of 70s technology (the world moved on since then btw) and even by that standard during those years, nuclear triumph all tech solar, wind, geothemal, etc.
Nuclear waste is not that big of a deal: we produce it in very small quantities and we know how to safely and effectively deal with it. Plus, it won't be dangerous forever, unlike other toxic waste from several industries that we just "throw away" without even treating.
And btw, nuclear power plants usually operate for more than 60 years. In many cases their licenses get extended to 80 or even more.
80 years of abundant, safe and clean energy.
What if a team of security will be needed 24×7×52, for 30 years. to hinder green terrorist, from attacking the plant, eg tesla plant in Germany
SMRs suck. Dirtier, more dangerous, more expensive and more nuclear targets everywhere. Renewables and efficiency for the win.
Smaller footprint than renewables, reliable, no CO2, helps with diversity of energy sources... You can add it to renewables, efficiency for the win as well
You have a lot to say about something you clearly know nothing about
The energy produced from SMR literally available all year round. SMR + Molten salt battery is the best way forward for this time. Lithium battery and solar is the legacy systems of renewables. These are the future.
@@multienergico9299 Oh, ya, sure- great if you just ignore all the liabilities that have gone unconfronted for almost every nuclear power plant, ever. Nuclear power has a fatal flaw- people.
You need some statistics to prove your point .Nuclear is safer than you say. nobody has died from a properly built nuclear reactor. Chernobyl was built by the Russians from stolen plans for the CANDU reactor that were rejected because it was flawed and dangerous.. The Russians didn't care about quality and built it anyway.
Just make a 50% larger model, smaller than full scale reactor bigger than these SMR, should be more cost efficient while being small and easy to work on than large reactors
So too large for serial production, but too small to make a profit when built one by one. Bright idea!
"With a Geiger Counter in my hand, I'm going out to stake me some government land.
Uuuuran-ium feeever has done and got me down"