Microsoft doubles down on small modular reactors and fusion energy

We're not seeing a lot of realistic numbers published for the cost of a 100% renewables + storage grid because there is the X factor of "How many outages can you tolerate?"

Storage over a 24 hour period is one thing, the economics don't look difficult at all. In places like Upstate NY, however, usable insolation can vary by a factor of 3x between summer and winter. You can overbuild solar panels by 3x or you can add a few months of storage which costs a lot more than a few hours or days worth of storage. There is also the issue of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute

It would be great to have a backup energy source which is fully and economically dispatchable and environmentally benign but it's not there. I suspect there is some point of required reliability where adding nuclear baseload makes the grid more reliable economically compared to building months worth of storage. See

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212...

also nuclear power plants are capable of load-following

https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-news-29-2-lo...

it's just not an optimal use of the capital. The Gates foundation has been researching LMFBRs that use thermal batteries to improve load following abilities.

You might think dispatchable natural gas fired plants with some kind of carbon capture would help but with amine-based carbon capture the capital cost is high, just like with nuclear, so you are looking at a high multiple of what it would cost to add carbon capture to a coal plant that runs continuously. Calcium-based chemical cycling, metal-organic-frameworks and such offer some hope for lowering costs but probably not enough for those scenarios.

The real criticism of nuclear at this point in time is that any new plants are a decade out. It's a reason to start early, but no matter how you slice when the next NPP goes online in the US the amount of solar and wind added to the grid between here and now will dwarf it.

It's easy to be "unconditionally cheapest" when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. "Simple, cheap" power plants that burn a lot of expensive natural gas (or even worse, coal) are the current approach to that problem, which is not working very well. The point is to do better, and nuclear may be a very sensible choice since a single nuclear plant can replace a whole lot of natural gas peakers.

> But how often is it cloudy and windless for weeks at a time?

'“Energy Droughts” in Wind and Solar Can Last Nearly a Week, Research Shows':

* https://www.pnnl.gov/news-media/energy-droughts-wind-and-sol...

See also:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute

I think it would be location-dependent (low risk that (e.g.) the UK would be windless for long stretches of time, especially off the coast).

If it was only a matter of 'once-every-few-years' then current emergency capacity will suffice. The problem is that:

A) It happens often enough to be a problem emergency capacity can't handle.

B) Natural gas is not always an option (especially when Russia is the only readily available seller in the area and you DON'T want to be dependent on a potentially hostile neighbor).

C) Existing storage solutions require a massive investment in local solutions, or in the national grid if storage is centralized.

We need to re-think the entire idea about energy always being cheap and available, while somehow preventing those with more money from simply monopolizing supply by outbidding everyone else. You won't solve that with batteries. Many therefore try to maintain the current situation by doing this the old way.

I agree generally, but is carbon-captured natural gas generation actually a thing? The only carbon capture I've heard of is at the gas production site removing CO2 from the reservoir gas and pumping it back underground - that's not after combustion. (And the pumping it back underground hasn't been particularly successful, eg https://www.boilingcold.com.au/regulator-limits-chevrons-tro... )

Isn't that to store energy as heat so you don't produce it by other means during winter? Seems to address a specific class of storage needs

For district heating, sure. For electricity? Yes, in theory, but not at efficiencies that would make financial sense.

> It is currently not feasible to use batteries for base load needs, it would be insanely expensive.

The CSIRO report says that nuclear is almost 2x more expensive than renewables even after factoring in all costs of storage and interconnects.

> Solar is much better than wind btw, wind is simply a costly mistake as it is a lot more intermittent than solar.

That depends on the location. Insolation and seasonality vary depending on distance from the equator, among other factors. Also, solar and wind are negatively correlated on both seasonal scales and intraday scales, so it often makes sense to mix the two if you're in Europe, rather than pick a simple winner.

"Disastrous" by what metric? What are you even talking about? Germany went from >50% fossil fuel (mostly coal, not even gas!) to >60% renewables for electricity within the last two decades.

This is a huge success already.

Ahem

https://colliebattery.com.au/

It's worth noting that the nuclear power plants of the 1960s follow different scale economics to SMRs. Casey Handmer makes this point in his online interviews and debates. The 1960s plants get their scale benefits from their sheer size. Similar to building a few massive aircraft carriers or massive olympic stadiums, however inefficiently each one is built.

SMRs are more akin to mass manufactured widgets, where the scale benefits come solely from manufacturing efficiencies gained through volume. They'll have a learning rate that governs the price declines for each doubling in production volumes.

From a unit economics POV, it's probably more useful to think of SMRs as a solar/battery-like technology rather than a 1960s nuclear-like technology. The problem for SMR proponents is that solar/batteries have had 50 years of this feedback loop playing out, but SMRs are starting from no volume.

> And baseload is hardly ever qualified with even a ballpark estimate in GW or GWH of capacity needed.

If we close all the steel mills and ship off manufacturing to China, then yes, we won't have baseload, and we can be happy that we saved the planet using solar!

> Renewables can't meet the base energy needs. That assertion is not something everyone agrees with. And baseload is hardly ever qualified with even a ballpark estimate in GW or GWH of capacity needed. So, it's a fairly hollow and meaningless term.

> And the reality is that for every 100GW added to grids world wide, about 80% or more is renewable.

Do you have solar at home? Because I do, I have 10kW of panels on my roof. I just checked my stats and in December I approximately made about 15% o peak capacity. And even that isn't the whole picture, as there were chunks days where I basically made nothing and even the batteries couldn't pull me through it. And I have no idea how you're calculating this 100GW. If you count adding 2000 500W panels as adding 1MW, then even on the Caribbean your calculation is going to be incredibly generous.

> Nuclear is only small portion of the remaining capacity

As for nuclear, it was made way too expensive because the economy and money became fake, divorced from real value, and pearl-clutchers and concern trolls made it too expensive. But even in the 70s-80s when things were actually built in Europe, it was clear that Gen IV (of which SMRs are an example) was the future of nuclear, its just nobody bothered to build it because it was easier to ship off manufacturing into the 3rd world.

>Besides, data centers are a great example of something that can easily scale up and down its energy consumption.

Yeah when you buy millions of dollars of HW, the 'we'll need to run it at 15% capacity in December and during night, not at all' sounds like a sound return on investment. Way to cheerlead to get another industry shipped off from the continent.

> SMRs won't have fixed anything until there are lots of them.

SMRs are not small, they are scalable, and can be made in similar capacity to existing coal and gas plants. Once they reach EOL, they'd be a perfect slot-in zero emissions replacement. But since nuclear is the devil's work, I guess we'll get to keep burning gas for another half a century.

The wear and tear and fuel costs are non-zero.

Which is why old paid off nuclear reactors are today are being forced off the grids when renewables bring sustained low prices.

K://nuclear_power_run_book FOR NEW JOINERS (v2 copy).docx (3) (SHARED)

I’m sure it’s printed out and put in a 3-ring binder, but why wouldn’t the instructions for “what to do when the primary coolant loop pressure drops” be in a Word document somewhere?

In all seriousness, it’s only a matter of time before an LLM makes a critical error in language-translating (or even being used to write) a reference manual for an industrial process, and escapes the attention of regulators. One can only hope that that process is not nuclear…

File corrupted, bad sector

I want to see a real explanation of the bungling that makes projects go 3x late and over budget and it is not "environmentalists" who might make it go 20% late.

I've looked long and hard and not found an explanation of the bungling fitting the facts better than that it's like a poker game: the vendor never believed in the sticker price, but the vendors figured that once there were chips in the pot the sunk cost fallacy would mean the buyers would never fold.

Thing is, they do, at least in the U.S.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal

I think NuScale was trying to be honest about costs but the buyer in Utah built a process in which they could control costs by folding early and they did. Europe, China, and other places have more engineering thinking and less financialization and they're more likely to "stay the course" but as an engineer I'm not sure this is right -- it might work for China but not for Europe.

On one hand I'm glad to see GE get the BWR, especially the work done on ESBWR, back into the game with the BWRX300, but the costs they are quoting are too freaky low and their talk about "design to cost" makes it seem like they just quote the cost number that they need to be competitive with the solar sticker price without storage which will lure in the public as opposed to being competitive to whatever the (unknown) solar + storage sticker price will turn out to be. (e.g. highly variable because it depends by "how frequent blackouts will your accept?")

One radical answer that question which is often neglected for the facile "regulations" explanation is that we quit building coal burning power plants at the same time we quit building nuclear plants because the steam turbine and heat exchanger cost too much compared to natural gas plants.

If that's really the case then a Gen 4 reactor that runs at higher temperature, uses printed circuit or other advanced heat exchangers and a Brayton cycle gas turbine could win on the capital cost but it's easier said than done. There's not a lot of hope I think the LWR but the BWRX300 is at least trying to do it by deleting the heat exchanger and the only way you're going to get costs down radically will be by deleting things. Commercial Gen 4 reactors are at least 20 years out and we should have gotten started 20 years ago.

The point of the baseload argument isn’t the “desirability” of power sources that can provide baseload, it’s the necessity. Renewables that can be scaled up (i.e. not niche cases like geothermal) are all too inconsistent to replace the entirety of generation without storage. Other tactics like long range transmission can reduce the amount of storage needed but not eliminate it. Fully replacing generation with renewables isn’t just unprofitable without storage, it’s impossible.

Storage is making great strides but for it to get good enough to fully convert the grid we need qualitative advances in the underlying technology, not just manufacturing scale driving down prices.

The point of separating electricity artificially into "baseload" and "peaking" was the quirk of engineering that made coal and nuclear cheaper if you ran them flat out.

In a world where both solar and wind are massively cheaper, that entire paradigm collapsed. Even more so when you can reuse the same hydro and gas that was working as peaking as "firming" to complement the new model.

Why would the risk be small? I've seen pretty expensive machinery been left behind. I destroyed such machinery to take out the copper wires from its transformars to make a net.

What makes you think that this can't happen? It can happen in so many ways, i.e. the owner is criminal and runs away or fucks up and loses everything and the court takes years to decide who gets what from the factories, the new owners put it on sale it takes another 10 years to sell because the repair costs incurred are massive and equipment is getting obsolete therefore you can't find a buyer. People get old, move on and all that decays for 50 years until the land becomes valuable enough for someone to buy it with all that obsolete garbage.

It happens all the time.

I think you underestimate the amount of mismanagement and human error that happens every day. May I remind you of the Goiânia accident? Additionally, Wikipedia has a seriously long list of “orphan source incidents”.

You are not going to load a reactor at the end of its lifetime on a truck to ship it back to the factory.

I know how deadly it can be. The thing about the chemical stuff is that it smells bad, it look dirty etc. Once we wandered in an old building that had a huge pool like thing filled with something that smells like freshly roasted nuts. A pleasant smell but its out of place, therefore run away.

Playing with lead, you notice that it lives traces on your hands, it looks wrong so you try not to play with the lead anymore.

A lightbulb with a shiny liquid in it? Don't break it or break it in open air at safe distance. Even if you touch the liquid make sure you wipe it out clean as it looks unnatural.

You easily develop instincts to detect what's dangerous with machines and chemicals, with nuclear you can't do that.

Ans as for the active ones, I hope they are taking good care of them. Bhophal 2.0 is indeed possible.

Take a look at the open compute project for example. Instead of having power supplies in each server, they have a lesser amount of large ones for example.

Economies of scale wins in big compute projects too

Which is why comparing mainframes and nuclear reactors is a bad analogy. A better one would be datacenters vs individual PCs. If the goal is efficiency, datacenters win everytime.

I'm still half cheering it because at the very least it's still nuclear progress, and will help ensure we still have nuclear energy workers for another generation here. I worry a lot about what's been done to the Atomic Energy Workers in terms of whittling away at our capability to produce good energy workers with tribal wisdom and the Canadian nuclear culture of safety.

But solar isn't built like nuclear. Solar involves parallel exploration of device designs at very small scale, installed with massive redundancy and resilience. Many billions of PV cells have been manufactured. The real cost decline driver is manufacturing automation. Nuclear, even SMRs, have orders of magnitude coarser granularity.

If you want "hot rocks", it's probably much cheaper to just resistively heat them with cheap solar (you don't even need inverters). This could store energy over many months and, pushed to its cost reduction limits this promises to be the final nail in the coffin for any dreams of a nuclear revival.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45012942