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Small modular nuclear reactors get a reality check in new report (newatlas.com)

submitted 6 months ago by machinin@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[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."

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[–] vzq@lemmy.world 33 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (55 children)

Nuclear technologies missed their window. The use cases where they are the best technical solution now are extremely limited, and that means you can get the investment going to improve them.

It’s a curiosity now.

There’s an alternative timeline where Chernobyl doesn’t happen and we decarbonize by leaning on nuclear in the nineties, then transition to renewables about now. But that’s not our timeline. And if it were, it would be in the past now.

[–] JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 52 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (25 children)

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:

Discover/build another form of consistent renewable energy (what's left? Dyson sphere?)
Up our storage game, big time (hydrostatic batteries, flywheel farms, lithium, hydrogen, whatever, just somewhere to put all this extra green energy)
Embrace nuclear
Clutch on to fossil fuels until we all boil/choke.

We can do all of them concurrently, provided there's money for it, but we only give money to the last one.

[–] intensely_human@lemm.ee 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] frezik@midwest.social 4 points 5 months ago

It's limited in the geography where it could be useful, such as near techtonic plate boundaries. Iceland gets about a quarter of its electricity that way. Some advancements in drilling techniques have made it more viable in more locations.

https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2023/05/is-geothermal-energy-making-a-comeback

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