This sounds like hyperbole. Nuclear has been powering the world for decades. It may not have enjoyed sexy headlines, but it's hard to believe billions of dollars has been invested in new plants without any research.

[–] bouh@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Recent research on nuclear has been litteraly sabotaged by ecologists and politics.

[–] spauldo@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

1960s nuclear has been powering the world for decades. Even most new plants are using reactor designs from over half a century ago.

New reactor designs exist and some have even been tested on the small scale, but nuclear power is an extremely conservative industry. That molten salt reactor built in China not that long ago that made all the news as a "new" reactor type? The US first tested that design in the 1960s, and the no further research was funded by anyone despite the fact that the prototype worked very well.

The current hope is that Small Modular Reactors catch on and drag the rest of the nuclear industry with them. They tend to use newer and potentially much safer designs.

[–] Sir_Osis_of_Liver@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's just not true. The Westinghouse AP1000 was given type approval in 2011. It's what is referred to as a GEN3+ reactor. A lot of R&D was put into simplifying the design, reducing the number of pipe runs, valves, pumps etc compared to GEN2 reactors. It also used large sub assemblies that were factory built off-site then moved for final assembly.

In theory they should have been cheaper to build, but they weren't. Large assemblies that don't fit together properly need a lot of very expensive site time for rework. There were other issues on top of that, which just compounded the assembly problems. It's how Vogtle ended up going from $12B to $30B+, and V.C Summer went from $9B to an estimated $23B when the project was cancelled while under construction.

The EPR units from Areva were similar GEN3+and received type approval in the early 2000s. They had similar cost overruns, for similar reasons.

I have strong reservations about SMRs. So far the cost/MW is about on par with traditional reactors while the amount of waste increases by 2 to 30x traditional reactors depending on technology used.

There are reasons why reactors moved from 300-600MW units to 1000MW+ in the first place. The increased output would cover what was thought to be marginal increase in costs. That turned out to be at least somewhat true.

[–] spauldo@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago

They can call it whatever they want but PWR is an old design. They polished the design a bit, so what? It's still an overblown pressure cooker.

Industrial scale reactor designs take a ton of time and money and experience to research. Research reactors are only a step in the middle of the process, and nobody's been willing to take any new designs past that.

SMEs have potential not because they're particularly efficient or cost effective, but because stand a chance of pushing the state of the art. They offer a way around the whole "I'm not paying $40bn for an unproven design" problem.

[–] IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Yep, it's more pro-nuclear bollocks.