The article mentions Kairos Power but doesn’t mention that their reactors in development are molten-salt cooled. While they’ll still use Uranium, its a great step in the right direction for safer nuclear power.
If development continues on this path with thorium molten-salt fueled and cooled reactors, we could see safe and commercially viable nuclear (thorium) energy within our lifetimes.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-06/china-building-thorium-nuclear-power-station-gobi/104304468
To my layman’s knowledge, using thorium molten-salt instead of uranium means the reactor can be designed in a way where it can’t melt down like Chernobyl or Fukushima.
Edit: The other implication of not using uranium is that the leftover material is harder to make in to bombs, so the technology around molten-salt thorium reactors could be spread to current non-nuclear states to meet their energy needs and reduce reliance on coal plants around the planet.
If development continues on this path
If we continue down the path of wasting energy and polluting to produce useless shit humanity is screwed.
We fixed the glitch.
Crazy how quickly we’ve gone from “Nuclear is a dead technology, it can’t work and its simply too expensive to build more of. Y’all have to use fossil fuels instead” to “We’re building nuclear plants as quickly as our contractors can draft them, but only for doing experiments in high end algorithmic brute-forcing”.
Would be nice if some of that dirt-cheap, low-emission, industrial capacity electricity was available for the rest of us.
Fun Times! Because everyone pays for the waste and when something goes wrong. Privatizing Profits while Socializing Losses. The core motor of capitalism.
The cleanup for fossil fuels is an order of magnitude more expensive, and an order of magnitude more difficult. It also impacts so many things that its true cost is impossible to calculate.
I’m aware of the issues with nuclear, but for a lot of places it’s the only low/zero emission tech we can do until we have a serious improvement in batteries.
Very few countries can have a large stable base load of renewable energy. Not every country has the geography for dams (which have their own massive ecological and environmental impacts) or geothermal energy.
Seriously, we need to cut emissions now. So what’s the option that anti-nuclear people want? Continue to use fossil fuels and hope battery tech gets good enough, then expand renewables? That will take decades. Probably 30+ years at the minimum.
We’re talking 11 years for 7 “small” reactors. The first decade just to establish a business, but no real difference in the overall picture. How many years, decades after that to make a noticeable difference?
Meanwhile we’re building out more power generation in renewables every year. Renewables are already well developed, can be deployed quickly, and are already scaling up, renewables make a difference NOW.
You are totally ignoring their arguments. Not every place can do wind or solar or hydro. Like it’s simply not an option.
Time doesn’t care. Neither does the rate of climate change.
Renewables cannot provide a reliable base load. Not unless you can have your solar panels in space where the sun always shines, we figure out tidal power, or you’re lucky in terms of geography and either hydroelectric or geothermal work for you.
Solar power doesn’t produce energy at night, wind doesn’t always blow. You know the drill.
You completely sidestepped the entire crux of my comment.
We need a base load of energy to fill that gap, because batteries currently can’t, and likely won’t be for decades. Here are the options we have available:
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nuclear power, which produces a waste that while trivial to store far away from people, will be radioactive for hundreds of years.
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fossil fuels, which cause massive damage not only to the local environment, but to the planet, and cleanup is effectively impossible.
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we put society on unpredictable energy curfews. At night the population can’t use much energy. When there’s a drop in wind or solar production, we cut people’s energy off. Both political parties must commit wholeheartedly to this in order to make it viable. Our lives would become worse, but we’d not have either of the above problems.
Of those 3 options, I’d rather go with nuclear. What’s your choice?
More renewables.
We’re at the beginnings of having useful levels of storage and can keep building out renewables while we develop storage. At the current rates of adoption, we’ll need true grid storage in about ten years.
However, note that one option for “grid” storage is a battery in every home. Another is a battery in every vehicle. Neither is the best option but those are options we already know and just need to scale up
Ok, you’ve added more solar panels and wind turbines.
It’s nighttime. There isn’t much wind. An extremely common thing to happen I’m sure you’ll agree.
There now isn’t enough power, places have constant blackouts, electricity prices skyrocket because demand far outstrips supply.
Grid storage large enough to replace fossil fuels + nuclear is far, far, far, far further than 10 years off.
I’ll ask again:
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Nuclear base load that assists renewables
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Continued fossil fuels for multiple decades that assists renewables, and hope that we can reverse some of the damage done in the meantime through some kind of carbon capture tech (unfortunately we can’t fix respiratory issues, strokes, and dead/extinct animals and plants after the fact).
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Regular blackouts, energy rationing, but 100% renewable
What do you choose? Saying that you’ll magic up some batteries in a capacity that currently isn’t possible isn’t an answer.
I want 100% renewables too. Anybody with any sanity would. But it’s currently not feasible. Our choice is between having a fossil fuel base load or a nuclear base load. Other options aren’t available yet.
And here’s the magic choice …… “time of use metering”. As we electrify everything and add “smart” controls, we can be much more dynamic with time of use metering to adjust the load.
When the sun doesn’t shine at night, already has much lower electrical load than daytime. Early analog efforts at time of use metering tried to shift more load to the night so “base load” wouldn’t have to adjust, and max load wouldn’t be as high
Now we can develop smart time of use metering to shift more load to “when the sun shines”. I’m not aware of anything to quantify this so let me just make shit up: if the load “when the sun doesn’t shine” is half what it is when solar is producing, that’s a crap load of grid storage or base load that magically never has to exist
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Boy are they gonna look stupid when they realize that no one outside their little bubble has a use for AI.
It’s not even close to ready for launch and why are we wasting energy on it?
because idiots like me who have no marketable skills can use it to fool ourselves into thinking we can do code/art/literature/etc.
actually this (yes, I’m replying to myself). I’m an idiot with no marketable skills. I put boxes on shelves for a living. I want to be an artist, a musician, a programmer, an author. I am so bad at all of these, and between having a full time job, a significant other, and several neglected hobbies, I don’t have time to learn to get better at something I suck at. So I cheat. If I want art done, I could commission a real artist, or for the cost of one image I could pay for dalle and have as many images as I want (sure, none of them will be quite what I want but they’ll all be at least good). I could hire a programmer, or I could have chatgpt whip up a script for me since I’m already paying for it anyway since I want access to dalle for my art stuff. Since I have chatgpt anyway, I might as well use it to help flesh out my lore for the book I’ll never write. I haven’t found a good solution for music.
I have in my brain a vision for a thing that is so fucking cool (to me), and nobody else can see it. I need to get it out of my brain, and the only way to do that is to actualize it into reality. I don’t have the skills necessary to do it myself, and I don’t have the money to convince anyone else to help me do it. generative AI is the only way I’m going to be able to make this work. Sure, I wish that the creators of the content that were stolen from to train the ai’s were fairly compensated. I’d be ok with my chatgpt subscription cost going up a few dollars if that meant real living artists got paid, I’m poor but I’m not broke.
These are the opinions of an idiot with no marketable skills.
These are the opinions of an idiot with no marketable skills.
Certainly doesn’t sound like an idiot with no marketable skills to me. You’re coming up with creative ideas and finding ways to try to prove them out in disciplines that you aren’t terribly familiar with. You’re really selling yourself way too short here and should be A LOT more compassionate towards you.
Really, it sounds like you are in a similar place to Product Management.
The way that you are approaching things is about diametrically opposite to the sort of problematic behavior that the corpos using LLMs to bludgeon labor are participating in.
After they decide to abandon their AI project can we use them for something meaningful?
Probably not… It’s a pretty outdated energy source already.
Not at all! Nuclear is an excellent compliment to renewables and as a companion source to support the grid they are actually really effective. They’re also really useful in situations where renewables just aren’t an option such as large scale shipping. Obviously we haven’t seen any nuclear container ships yet but that’s mostly around startup and infrastructure costs as well as outdated regulations.
With small nuclear reactors becoming commonplace I wouldn’t be supprised if we start to see nuclear shipping becoming a thing in industry in the next 20-50 years.
Its already been proven as a reliable, safe, and effective power source in a naval context. The main hangup people seem to have is with accidents at sea, however again, the militaries of the world have already proven nuclear reactors safe in a number of accidents where a nuclear vessel has been lost and the reactors shut down safely and did not cause release of nuclear material.
Nuclear is an excellent compliment to renewables and as a companion source to support the grid they are actually really effective.
No, it isn’t. The nuclear industry wants this to be true, but an overview of the benefits and problems with wind, solar, and nuclear put it to rest.
What nuclear is really good at is providing baseload power; it runs for 30+ years at the same output with relatively little maintenance and fuel costs. Wind is good at being cheap when the wind is blowing. Solar is good at being cheap when the sun is shining.
The problem with nuclear is it has incredibly high up front costs, which need to be amortized over its lifetime; you can ramp it down, but you’re cutting into your profits by doing so. The problem with wind is that the wind doesn’t always blow, and the problem with solar is that the sun doesn’t always shine.
Solar and wind are both incredibly cheap when they work. So cheap that we wouldn’t want to use anything else if we can avoid it. Meaning we’d need to ramp down what nuclear and anything else is doing. Except now we’re just making nuclear’s up front cost issue worse; we can’t amortize the cost as well when it’s ramped down. You could try adding storage capacity so you can run all three at once and use it later, but then we could just use that storage for wind and solar on their own.
What you can do is take historical data on wind and sun patterns for a given region. The wind is often blowing when the sun isn’t shining, and vice versa. We have lots of data on that, and we can calculate the maximum length of lull when neither will provide enough. So what you can do is put in enough storage capacity to handle that lull, and double it as a safety factor.
This ends up being a lot less storage than you might think. Getting to 95% renewables would be relatively cheap; Australia almost has enough storage capacity under construction right now to pull that off. That last 5% is harder, but even getting to 95% in industrialized nation states would be a big fucking deal.
Add in HVDC lines to this, and you’ve really got something. The longest one right now is in Brazil, and is 1300 miles long. That kind of distance in the US would mean solar panels in Arizona could power Chicago, and wind in Nebraska could power New York. At that point, the wind is always blowing somewhere, and sun is always shining somewhere else. You can also take advantage of existing hydro pumped storage anywhere you like–there may be enough of it right now that we wouldn’t need to build any other storage.
Your opinion is not really appreciated here with the nuclear industry trying to capitalise on the renaissance that seems to be fashionable these days. But I fully agree with your assessment, China is of course building nuclear plants, but have also seen the light in the sense that they are building more renewable generation capacity than all other generation sources combined.
Nuclear will not make a full ‘come back’, literally no one in their right mind is going to invest in 15 year projects when grid connected battery capacity is tripling every 6 months.
While! I love nuclear’s possibilities. I’ve seen commercial, shippings safety and maintenance records. I don’t think that would be a good idea
Eh, it’s honestly safer than you’d think. The size of the reactor plays a huge role in safety.
A reactor sized for a container ship would be literally incapable of melting down, because there just isn’t enough fuel to get to those temperatures. You could then limit the ship’s speed, and over build the reactor a bit, so that the reactor is never truly stressed during normal operation.
Then for refueling, you just remove the entire reactor and replace it with a new, fully fueled one every 10 years or so.
That’s where you want your controls.
Other than that, yeah it would be safer than oil. A crash just means your reactor casing gets wet.
The main worry is someone cutting into the reactor to take out the spicy rocks… and there are easier ways to get spicy rocks.
I’ll be amazed if this ever comes to fruition.
Generally speaking renewables + storage are the cheapest way of generating non-polluting power. After that there’s nuclear power and it’s much, much more expensive:
After that, and even more expensive are SMRs. Also, they don’t actually exist yet as a means of generating power.
From the article, “For example, it has already received the green light from the U.S. Nuclear Registry Commission (the first one to do so) to build its Hermes non-powered demonstrator reactor in Tennessee. Although it still doesn’t have nuclear fuel on-site, this is a major step in its design process, allowing the company to see its system in real life and learn more about its deployment and operation.”
Generally speaking renewables + storage are the cheapest way of generating non-polluting power.
At variable scale, based on time of year and weather. Nuclear is much better for base-load, particularly at the scale of GWs. You know exactly how much electricity you’re going to get 24/7, and the fuel costs aren’t exposed to a market that can vary by 150-300% annually.
See my comment here:
The high price of nuclear power comes from it being a stagnant and obsolete technology for 30 years.
As well as being choked to death in red tape.
As well as being choked to death in red tape.
I hear this a lot. Can you give an example of a regulation that could safely be removed that would lead to a significant reduction on the cost of new nuclear?
Well one easy one, in my country it is that nuclear plants need to emit zero radiation from their core, like nothing. This is incredibly expensive to achieve, a more sensible value would have been similar or less than normal background radiation.
Nuclear has a lot of advantages that are really low hanging fruit of producing safe clean energy that is perfect for a grids baseload.
Interesting, can you provide more info? Which country? Link?
Wouldn’t emitting radiation, even at background levels, lead to an increase in radiation as it’s in addition to background stuff?
Also, there are strong arguments that we no longer need baseload generation and in fact it’s detrimental:
"No new nuclear or coal plants may ever be needed in the United States….
Wellinghoff said renewables like wind, solar and biomass will provide enough energy to meet baseload capacity and future energy demands. Nuclear and coal plants are too expensive, he added.
“I think baseload capacity is going to become an anachronism,” he said. “Baseload capacity really used to only mean in an economic dispatch, which you dispatch first, what would be the cheapest thing to do. Well, ultimately wind’s going to be the cheapest thing to do, so you’ll dispatch that first.”…
“What you have to do, is you have to be able to shape it,” he added. “And if you can shape wind and you can effectively get capacity available for you for all your loads.
“So if you can shape your renewables, you don’t need fossil fuel or nuclear plants to run all the time. And, in fact, most plants running all the time in your system are an impediment because they’re very inflexible. You can’t ramp up and ramp down a nuclear plant. And if you have instead the ability to ramp up and ramp down loads in ways that can shape the entire system, then the old concept of baseload becomes an anachronism.”"
https://energycentral.com/c/ec/there-really-any-need-baseload-power
South Africa, you can read up on us if you want to learn about a country that really fucked up its energy supply, but that is a different story.
You do need a baseload, this is not something an argument of saying we do not really need a baseload can wish away, industries that run 24/7 like a smelting operation where if you cannot shutdown, or hospitals or traffic lights, there is a certain percentage of baseload that has to be generated.
Solar and wind are amazing and I really wish to see these systems play a major role in power generation, but you say the nuclear and coal plants are very inflexible. I do not know who this guy is but Nuclear and coal can very easily ramp up their power generation, both these are basically steam engines, both nuclear and coal can very quickly heat up and generate a lot more steam that powers generators, like an car engine but more accurately a steam train that you give more power to go faster. Solar and wind cannot ramp up on their own, cannot ask the wind to blow harder or the sun to shine brighter suddenly when the system requires it, they need costly backup systems like methane peaker plants or energy storage, be it batteries, pumped hydro, hydrogen electrolysis the list goes on. These things added to solar and wind plants are usually not allocated to the cost of generation, a total cost of generation including these additional backup systems are a better indicator of solar and wind systems cost.
Now what about waste. I agree coal is messy and is causing global warming and needs to be phased out. But nuclear waste is a solved problem, it has been for decades, the spent fuel is usually stored deep underground where it will never interact with the world again. Solar on the other hand, if it costs about $20-$30 to recycle a panel but like $1-$3 to send it to a waste dumps, what do you think will happen to the solar panels. https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-dark-side-of-solar-power Harvard business did an article about how solar recycling has really been a point of weakness, where nuclear we have set guidelines on how to environmentally and safely dispose of nuclear waste currently. I am willing to bet you the environmental impact from pollution from nuclear, including all the disasters will be negligible compared to the waste impact from solar panels and batteries currently.
So my point is not to dismiss solar or wind, really where wind and sunshine are naturally plentiful it will be a waste not to harvest these resources, just like where geothermal resources are available it will be wasteful not to utilise it.
But nuclear, even with its high initial capital cost and long build time, still does provide energy cheaply and will last for a lot longer than solar panels and wind turbines, nuclear can be easily and quickly ramped up or down depending on the load required.
You do need a baseload,
Did you read the link in my post that you’re replying to? It’s from a former Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner.
Here’s another article on the subject:
“The old myth was based on the incorrect assumption that base-load demand can only be supplied by base-load power stations; for example, coal in Australia and nuclear in France. However, the mix of renewable energy technologies in our computer model, which has no base-load power stations, easily supplies base-load demand. Our optimal mix comprises wind 50-60%; solar PV 15-20%; concentrated solar thermal with 15 hours of thermal storage 15-20%; and the small remainder supplied by existing hydro and gas turbines burning renewable gases or liquids.”
https://theconversation.com/baseload-power-is-a-myth-even-intermittent-renewables-will-work-13210
I’ll skip over the rest of your comment as it’s not really relevant.
But nuclear, even with its high initial capital cost and long build time, still does provide energy cheaply
It literally doesn’t. See the graph I posted.
and will last for a lot longer than solar panels and wind turbines,
Nobody is arguing that. We’re talking about cost and base load.
nuclear can be easily and quickly ramped up or down depending on the load required.
This is absolutely not true. It’s also worth noting that nuclear needs to operate as close to 24/7/365 to be economically viable. It’s a source of base load power, it’s not dispatchable and can’t be used as a peaker plant.
Wouldn’t emitting radiation, even at background levels, lead to an increase in radiation as it’s in addition to background stuff?
Yes. But a single flight across the US exposes people around 4 times ground level background radiation.
Sure, it’s a negligible amount but OP was saying that nuclear would be competitive on cost if only red tape wouldn’t keep pushing the price up. Their contention was that less shielding would substantially lower the price of new nuclear but so far I’ve not seen anything to support this argument.
