[T]he report’s executive summary certainly gets to the heart of their findings.
“The rhetoric from small modular reactor (SMR) advocates is loud and persistent: This time will be different because the cost overruns and schedule delays that have plagued large reactor construction projects will not be repeated with the new designs,” says the report. “But the few SMRs that have been built (or have been started) paint a different picture – one that looks startlingly similar to the past. Significant construction delays are still the norm and costs have continued to climb.”
I hate that the conversation is happening on these terms. I hate that we have a bunch of opinionated online “teams” on this issue.
Hey, you know what we need? All of it. Any sort of energy generation that lowers atmospheric emissions in any way we do need. The concept of “nuclear shills” shouldn’t exist, the concept of “solar shills” or “hydrogen shills” or “fossil fuel shills” shouldn’t exist. The entire conversation is a PR battle by energy corps to get people to buy into marketing so they can get governments to back popular choices so they can get expensive contracts for large infrastructure work.
I hate that we have online keyboard warriors overrepresenting the challenges of one of the contributors to lowering emissions while underrepresenting the challenges of others. Hey, do you think nighttime generation and storage is an issue? Maybe installation costs for domestic solar generation, the state of the grid or the uneven distribution of solar power yields on different territories? Because I do.
And I do think cost and build times for nuclear generators are a problem (which makes it confusing that some countries are dismantling plants that seem to be working safely and are within their expected lifespan, but I digress).
And I do think the impact of hydroelectric power in nearby areas is a problem.
And I do think the open questions for geothermal are a problem.
And I do think the issues with cost, storage and dirty generation of hydrogen are a problem.
And I do think we should be working on all of that. At once. This isn’t kids arguing about which game console is better on the backyard, this is a massive existential issue, and would be even if we weren’t dealing with a climate change ticking bomb. This report? It’s bad news. Any report that tells us any of the ideas we have for weaning off fossil fuels is not working as well as we expected is bad news. Can we all get with that program?
The problem is that “both” isn’t a valid option unless a country has unlimited finances.
Otherwise you have to decide on what’s the most feasible option and then renewables win big time
I sometimes feel as if the current push for atomic is from the fossil-lobby as they are aware that it either works and they get 10-20 more years to sell oil until the reactors are built - and even if it doesn’t work out it still will slow down rollout of renewables
If you have 100 billion to spend on energy producing you have to choose if you want to go all-in with one source or split it up which would move the end of fossil fuels Back further
Not to mention having to buy the radioactive materials from dictatorships and having problems to cool down the reactors with rising temperatures and rivers running dry
I just don’t see how atomic isn’t a huge gamble that can backfire hard (and I’m not even talking about catastrophic events like Fukushima)
You keep doing the thing. The thing sucks. Please stop.
For one, no, that’s not how that works. Money is already being spent in energy generation, mostly towards oil and gas. This isn’t your weekly takeout budget.
It’s also not a race towards infinite energy where you dump money to make the infinite energy bar go up. Energy generation will continue to be costly and have problems, regardless of the mix of options chosen. There is simply no single silver bullet. Which is, presumably why we already don’t go “all-in” on one energy source, which is just about the dumbest possible plan. Energy diversification is absolutely part of this, regardless of where the majority of the output is coming from.
So please stop it. Genuinely stop it. This isn’t a zero sum game, it’s about finding the mix of energy sources that gets you less killed in the next century or so. Not finding a single source, not backing a single winning horse, not having your stupid team you support for either dumb Internet reasons or disingenuous trolling reasons win.
having to buy the radioactive materials from dictatorships
Not really, but also kinda. The biggest exporters of ore are Kazakhstan, Namibia, Canada, and Australia.
The only major producers that aren’t American puppets stripping themselves of resources to maintain western hegemony are Russia, Niger, China, and India, who total less than 15%.
I wouldn’t call Russia or India not-dictatorships, but I don’t see them using US weapons and training to put down a restive population and keep the resources and money flowing out like Kazakstan.
Most countries have unlimited finances. They only have limited real resources like labor, concrete, copper, glass, etc. The fact that we still don’t understand this and behave as if the metadata of the economy accurately describes reality puts artificial brakes on the solutions of many problems, climate being one of them.
The problem is that if a country treats money as unlimited and without a cost then inflation will mirror that and people in that country will lose their savings, their job will not pay for their bills anymore and so on
It’s not as simple as “just spend more”…
All good points, and I’m all for pretty much any technological research, but
And I do think cost and build times for nuclear generators are a problem
Thorium is another form of fission generation that has not been commercialized yet. In the real world, maybe it will be better, or maybe it won’t. But fission generation already takes too long to build out, so why switch lanes to a different form of fission generation that also needs more time and money to be commercialized? Nuclear uranium fission generation had its growing pains over the years, as the technology found challenges to address and areas to improve, but thorium has not yet gotten far enough to run into those so there will be additional challenges requiring time, money, further development
If those were decades ago when the future was bright for fission technology, I’d be all over this. However the future is dark and cloudy for fission generation, nightfall may be approaching. The advantages of thorium are not enough to shine a new light, there’s not enough room for improvement to save fission generation, this is just an expensive detour.
This is nonsense. Like someone else said we will need some kind of nuclear power for future space exploration. There are parts of the world that are dark for six months of the year, and plenty of places that don’t get enough light for solar to be practical.
Most renewable sources are not consistent enough to be used by themselves, and battery storage isn’t practical with current technology. Then there are the concerns with hydro power and biomass and how that affects the environment. I have even been told by leftists that biomass shouldn’t be installed as it destroys too many native forests.
Of course the actual best solution is one we don’t have the technology for yet: things like nuclear fusion or neutrino capture.
For the record, I disagree with you both and this narrative is also part of the problem in my book. Screw the futurism and longermism of “we need nuclear power for space exploration”. We’re not talking about that. We’re talking about mitigating runaway climate effects and filling the blanks of an alternate energy mix by using complementary tech.
Absolutely let’s keep working on nuclear power. Absolutely let’s keep working on battery storage, and potential energy storage and thermal storage and wind and geothermal and whatever else we can come up with. And absolutely let’s abandon whatever doesn’t work or is made obsolete, starting with no longer burning hydrocarbons as soon as we can stop.
There’s this air of erudite dilettantism about this chatter that just pisses me off. People sitting by and idly projecting their sci-fi fantasies about colonizing planets or about a fully solar powered planet and feeling smart about it. Given the short-term, impending human cost of this issue, both for climate reasons and for energy scarcity reasons, that just feels gross at this point.
someone else said we will need some kind of nuclear power for future space exploration
And I was one of those someone else’s, but in the context of calling out that there’s likely little in common.
- a power plant on earth needs to be scaled up, assembled on site to meet the needs, can depend on gravity and open air. It needs repair ability and refuel ability, and can’t pollute ground water. It is well staffed and call in more as needed
- a power plant off planet is likely much smaller, it has t be completely assembled ahead of time to fit on a rocket, and can not count on gravity, water, air, or even air pressure. It’s critical that it move mostly hands off: there’s no staff, no repairs, no spare parts.
biomass shouldn’t be installed as it destroys too many native forests.
That’s a choice: too many less developed countries still clear native forest for agriculture, so expanding agriculture has a downside . ITs something those countries need to take care of regardless, just to feed their people.
This is a failure of policy and governance, not technology
I have as much of a handle on the challenges of small thorium generators as I do on the costs and challenges of generation and containment of green hydrogen or the solutions for storage of solar power. That is to say, I know there are challenges, I roughly understand what they are and I know we don’t know how to fix them yet. At least not beyond a number of companies that have invested a lot on doing that saying they’re on track to do that and a bunch of people saying that no they aren’t.
I don’t know why I need to be “all over” any of this in any way. I know that we need to solve the challenges on multiple of those technologies, and we need it for ten years ago. The reasonable approach seems to use all of these as they become available based on their total emissions and cost. Anything else seems like either irresponsible idle tribalism or disinformation. Hell, in any case where the least amount of emissions is fossil fuels… well, you do fossil fuels. This is not about ideology at this point.
You are still doing the thing, just like the other guys. I keep wishing people would stop doing the thing.
