Off the Siberian coast, not far from Alaska, a Russian ship has been docked at port for four years. The Akademik Lomonosov, the world’s first floating nuclear power plant, sends energy to around 200,000 people on land using next-wave nuclear technology: small modular reactors.
This technology is also being used below sea level. Dozens of US submarines lurking in the depths of the world’s oceans are propelled by SMRs, as the compact reactors are known.
SMRs — which are smaller and less costly to build than traditional, large-scale reactors — are fast becoming the next great hope for a nuclear renaissance as the world scrambles to cut fossil fuels. And the US, Russia and China are battling for dominance to build and sell them.
You could make the same argument for renewables though, and they’re much, much more inexpensive.
Depends on many factors. Solar would be useful if the area had extensive terrain that could serve the city, however, in northern latitudes winter would be challenging with short days and low angle sunlight. If the situation allows, wind power could be useful, when the wind is blowing. The fantastic thing about these units is that they’ll crank out the KW day, night, no matter the season or location. They are not restricted to large generator farms with the scale of upkeep and maintenance they require. A city could be isolated in challenging remote areas and be self sustaining for their energy needs. These aren’t meant to be a “fix-all” solution for every situation, but they make tremendous sense in many applications where current methods are not ideal.
I get what you’re saying but we really should move away from needing power to be generated locally. High voltage DC can move power across huge distances with minimal loss - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
We don’t need new nuclear in the US, we need the government to get off its ass and mandate an upgraded national grid so we can send power to wherever it’s needed. We already have the perfect conditions in the south for solar and the midwest prairies for wind, as well as offshore. Couple those with storage and there really is no case for SMRs outside of them being a way for fossil fuel companies to justify continuing to kill the planet while we wait for “the next big thing in nuclear power”.
ok so, minor addition here.
Both ac and HVDC are relatively efficient forms of power transfer.
The problem with AC is the skin effect (tl;dr is that the current is carried around the edge of the conductor, not the center, though you can cheat this as well) And the fact that AC running in a submarine cable is going to essentially act as a capacitor, and cause problems. (large losses)
AC traveling through the air doesn’t have this problem. The skin effect is less pronounced than you think because you can just use a higher voltage since it requires less current (transformers also have really good efficiencies when not saturated or undergoing other shenanigans) Also you can design the cabling to abuse this, using outer strand conductors, and then an inner structural strand, to strengthen the line.
HVDC is particularly applicable in undersea cables, due to the capacitor thing just not existing. Making it actually viable. It’s applicable above ground, but the problem is transforming between AC to HVDC and then back to AC. There are reasons to do this, for instance you may be between two grids with two different frequencies, this is the only solution in that case. You may want the grids to be able to operate semi independently (again frequency related)
The big problem with HVDC is that it’s inevitably more complicated. Prior to micro electronics we would use vacuum tubes, or prior to that, two motors linked end to end, one run on AC the other generating DC, and then duplicate that in reverse on the other side (that was also how we used to do voltage conversion in DC systems IIRC)
These days we just use semiconductors, but carrying a lot of power is hard, and expensive. (and also not perfectly efficient) There’s a reason massive boxes of copper wire and mineral oil are the standard solution. Dead simple, easy to maintain, and they quite literally just work.
Except long distance power transmission losses are not minimal. Depending on many factors, losses can easily be in the 5% - 10% range. With the amount of energy going through those wires, that’s HUGE. The additional complexity and inefficienies of relay stations, all add up. Having worked in the power sector for nearly a decade, I knew engineers who were celebrated in being able to squeeze an improvement of tiny fractions of % efficiency, as that resulted in millions of dollars saved throughout the year.
