[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 disagree, a bit.
Base load is still hard to get with renewables, unless you can get a somewhat consistent level of power from them. That’s basically just hydro/tidal and geothermal at this point, and all of those have very limited areas where they can be used.
Nuclear, on the other hand, can be built anywhere except my backyard.
We have four choices:
We can do all of them concurrently, provided there’s money for it, but we only give money to the last one.
Exactly. I live in Utah, which is perfect for nuclear:
So why don’t we do it? FUD. We should have a nuclear base with solar and wind helping out, but instead we have a coal base and are transitioning to natural gas. That’s dumb. And it’s hilarious because we sell electricity to California when their backbone isn’t sufficient.
It’s probably not the best option everywhere, but it’s a really good option in many areas.
A consortium of Utah’s utilities (UAMPS) literally just pulled out of its commitment to backing NuScale’s modular reactor in November 2023. It was a problem of cost, when the construction looked like it was going to become too expensive, at a time when new wind construction is dropping the price of wind power. It basically just couldn’t compete on cost, in the specific environment of servicing Utah.
I wouldn’t sleep on geothermal as a future broad scale solution for dispatchable (that is, generation that can be dialed up and down on demand) electrical power. The oil and gas fracking industry has greatly improved their technology at imaging geological formations and finding places where water can flow and be pumped, in just the past decade. I expect to see over the next decade geothermal reach viability beyond just the places where geothermal heat is close to the surface.
Yeah, I just saw that news, which apparently happened end of last year. The public wants nuclear (or at least a non-coal base power), but projects keep getting delayed or scrapped due to local lawsuits or local governments pulling financial support.
Geothermal is cool, and apparently there’s an active project. It should produce 400MW, which is pretty significant, but still a pretty small fraction of total capacity (~9.5GW).
If the Blue Castle project ever finishes, it’ll supply ~1.5GW power. That, with geothermal, could take up ~1/4 of the total energy generation, which would be a really good start. I’d also like to see hydrogen production as a “battery” source (produce from solar, burn at night). Looks like that’s under development as well.
Lots of interesting things are happening now, I just wish they started 10+ years ago…
Who’s working to change the perception there?
Perception seems fine, every poll I’ve seen going back 10 years has been positive for nuclear power. Everyone seems to want it, they just don’t want it in their backyard.
The Blue Castle project was (is?) a proposal for a nuclear plant in eastern central Utah, which is pretty far from any urban center and buffered by a mountain range. They won a lawsuit regarding water rights more than 5 years ago, but there have been no updates on it for 5-ish years.
There’s a SMR project in S. Idaho that was active recently, Unfortunately, it seems to have missed subscription targets, so it’s unlikely to move forward. I don’t know where those subscriptions are supposed to come from (I’m interested), but I’m guessing it’s cities buying in and many dropped out due to financing not being certain.
A lot of the pushback is from politicians, not residents. The popular support is there, but our legislatures and local governments are pretty conservative and unwilling to take risks.
I think this can be expanded out a bit, to the more generalizable case of matching generation to demand. Yes, storage can be a big part of that.
But another solution along the same lines may be demand shifting, which in many ways, relies on storage (charging car batteries, reheating water tanks or even molten salt only when supply is plentiful. And some of that might not be storage, per se, but creating the useful output of something that actually requires a lot of power: timing out industrial processes or data center computational tasks based on the availability of excess electrical power.
Similarly, improvements in transmission across wide geographical areas can better match supply to demand. The energy can still be used in real time, but a robust enough transmission network can get the power from the place that happens to have good generation conditions at that time to the place that actually wants to use that power.
There’s a lot of improvement to be made in simply better matching supply and demand. And improvements there might justify intentional overbuilding, where generators know that they’ll need to curtail generation during periods where there’s more supply than demand.
And with better transmission, then existing nuclear plants might be able to act as dispatchable backup power rather than the primary, and therefore serve a larger market.
The timing of all those things has been carefully selected by billions of people. Timing is already super important to humanity for other reasons.
There is value in the schedule arrangement we have, which is why there is already sufficient demand to have different electric prices at different times and people still pay it.
The schedule we have arranged contains value. Demand shifting means getting people to do things at times other than they naturally would choose to.
We can’t talk about things like this like they’re free. There’s a big, real, not easily measurable cost to changing the times of day we use energy.
Our solution is to serve us, not the other way around.
Some shifts genuinely are free, though. Wholesale prices for electricity follow a pronounced “duck curve,” and drop to near zero (or even negative) in areas where there’s a substantial solar base, during the day at certain parts of the year. People will shift their demand for non-time-sensitive consumption (heating, cooling, charging of devices/EVs, batched/scheduled jobs) in response to basic price signals. If a substantial amount of future demand is going to be from data centers performing batched/scheduled jobs, like training AI models or encoding video files, a lot of that demand can be algorithmically shifted.
There are already companies out there intentionally arbitraging the price differences by time of day to invest in large scale storage. That’s an expensive activity, that they’ve determined is worth doing because there’s profit to be made at scale.
At household scale, individuals can do that too.
Put another way, we shouldn’t talk about current pricing models where every kilowatt hour costs the same as if that arrangement is free.
Plus, the timing of consumption already does naturally tend to follow the timing of solar generation. Most people are more active during the day than at night, and work hours reflect that distribution. Overcapacity in solar can go a long way towards meeting demand when it naturally happens.
There are ways to get demand shift working with residential, but I doubt enough residences would participate.
A lot comes down to smart grid, and integrating high draw appliances that don’t always need electricity right now. Like fridges and water heaters. Some may come down to residential storage systems charging during off-peak and being used during peak. And using EVs as an extension of residential storage.
We could also get not so used to expecting a specific level of comfort. Honestly how uncomfortable will we be if the AC or heater doesn’t kick in for 10 extra minutes or so, when the clouds part over the huge solar array 500 miles away and there’s going to be excess.
So how much would it cost to do geothermal to power a city? It must be wildly infeasible if I’ve never even heard it mentioned. Can significant electric generation be had from that?