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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4067 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 29, 2023

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As someone with a persistent but highly amateur interest in energy, I’ve long been a fan of nuclear energy but dismayed at its cost overruns and slow build times. But over the last year or so I’ve heard more buzz about SMRs, eg here and here.

On the face of it, SMRs seem to offer (relatively) cheap and rapidly produced fission power that can be scaled up or down easily. And they could even be installed in old coal plants as discussed above.

I assume there’s a catch here. How far out is the technology? Are there major unsolved hurdles? Are there big downsides? I want to indulge my excitement but I’m prepared for disappointment! Any info appreciated.

SMRs are attempting to solve the catch with big nuclear projects, namely the need to build infrastructure to make the things that go into a reactor.

Reactor casings for example are generally larger than anything we can cast today, so you end up having to build up a steel mill to cast them with the risk that there is a regression to mean and you build a sprawling facility to make it only to scrap it after one.

Many such cases.

Seconding @Rex.

It's been a few years since I worked in power. We were running plants, not deploying new ones (much to the senior engineers' chagrin), but he's got the dynamics right. The closest thing we were doing to R&D was a somewhat unusual solar farm out in Colorado.

Keep in mind that the power industry isn't funded by futurists. It's owned in large part by investment banks, and given the high level of capital already built, that leads to a certain conservatism.

I would love to see SMR or nuclear in general take off. I just don't expect it to happen en masse without some sort of breakthrough to change that calculus.

I work in the energy industry, specifically around deploying new power plants. The latest round of nuclear renaissance talk has been quite annoying to read about. I can say with certainty that the utilities and power generation companies have zero interest in this stuff for a few reasons. One, its way more expensive than wind, solar, and gas. Like north of $5/watt. The other tech is about $1 to $2/watt. Conventional nuclear is also big, so your talking tens of billions of capital on a single project. Second, its incredibly risky. And not just risky for a nuclear disaster, I'm talking risk of failure to even build. Something like 2 of the 6(?) nuclear units the US has tried to build in the last 10 years have failed and left the owners with $30 billion in sunk costs. Noone wants to make that bet.

Maybe SMRs change the equation if the total cost to deploy a few is cheap enough that some companies give it a try, but im skeptical. The industry has zero appetite for this stuff. They've decided to invest their capital in wind and solar. All this nuclear talk is exclusively coming from the media and academia. SMR might work on paper, but noone has commercialized it yet. Plus the fact that 15 years ago we went through this same nuclear renaissance talk, the industry bought in and was subsequently burned badly.

I have a lot more to say but ill stop here. Things like how the U.S. has pretty much lost the industrial capacity to even build nuclear anymore. How wind and solar is actually the right choice for investment dollars rather than nuclear. Etc.

I'll leave you with one thing. On Friday i was watching Bill Maher (who i do actually like) and he had a bit on how the country hasn't really done shit to solve the climate crisis yet. He showed a stat that in 1979 we got around 40% of energy from coal and in 2019 we got around 39% of our energy from coal. Implying that we've made no progress. That seemed wrong to me, so i looked up the 2022 stats from DOE. Coal as a percentage of total generation is down to the low 20% range. A ridiculous number of coal plants have been turned off over the last 4 years. And almost every remaining plant is set to be retired in the next 5 years. I wouldn't be surprised if were well under 10% by 2030.

In fairness investors should recognize the importance of nominative determinism and avoid calling their mega project WPPSS (usually pronounced like 'whoops').

I'll note as someone working on the capital side of things, I've heard from the higher ups that the IAA included some nuclear stuff I haven't bothered to look into yet but that seemed interesting to them. A generous enough tax credit can paper over a lot of production cost problems. But do mostly agree that the vast majority of project are in wind and solar with a surprising amount actually in geothermal as well.

Do you have any concerns about the volatility of wind and solar, or the difficulty of storing energy?

Not really. It’s a known issue with some solutions that while not perfect, help quite a bit.

Offshore wind is much less volatile.

Distributed battery systems have started deploying over the last couple of years.

There’s some interesting applications of long duration storage tech. For example, I think there is a rust-iron battery that has very long and cheap storage where you rust and de rust iron.

Companies are actually deploying pilot storage tech right now.

We’re likely moving to a world where the sunny areas have solar plus storage. The east coast has offshore wind. And we have a large fleet of gas turbine plants that can be dispatched quickly when needed. Not exactly peakers, but flexible enough to support the intermittent resources.

SMR isn’t even on the map.

Distributed battery systems have started deploying over the last couple of years.

Do you know of anywhere public I can read about the deployment of grid-scale energy storage systems? I've been under the impression that this was mostly speculation and proposals from various academics and think-tanks, with little actual construction and deployment going on.

Many companies and developers are installing grid-tied battery storage systems at massive scale. Especially in California. The battery storage revolution is here.

Thanks for asking. I haven’t googled this in a while but it looks like the iron air battery projects are moving right along.

Here’s some detail that was just announced on Friday. It’s all moving very quickly.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/xcel-energy-form-energy-storage-coal-iron-battery/641386/

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