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.
Hey if you spiritual but not religious types could not fuck this up like the boomers did we would all appreciate it. I get it, you got pyramid power and The Secret. I don’t care. That is your concern. Once you start shilling for OPEC it becomes our concern.
SMRs are interesting.
Frankly i just think we need to take SMR tech and scale it up to stationary plant size. I realize thats a big ask, but it’s already a big enough ask to make SMRs a thing that exist and work. Plus a whole plant is more inline with existing regulations.
Also worst case scenario, it’s just normal nuclear plants. Instead of a bunch of small ones. We have a bunch of big ones, but with standardized designs.
Big Bespoke Reactors? Isn’t that what we do now?
I thought the entire advantage was to be small and use multiple.
- Construction is cheaper because you can gear up a factory to make many of the same thing
- Assembly is cheaper and more reliable because you have more complete modules shipped in for less site assembly
- Sizing is cheaper because instead of designing for the specific site and specific needs, design for how many standard modules you want
- Enhancing is cheaper because a smaller unit is easier to fit into whatever situation you have than to redesign the whole thing
- Maintenance is cheaper because taking one offline is less of a hit in total power generation
The Akademik Lomonosov was supposed to cost the equivalent of $232M, but ended up somewhere north of $700M all for a net electrical output of 64MWe. In that respect, it follows a familiar path for nuclear projects.
On a cost/kW basis, it’s about three times the cost of wind installations. ($3625/kW vs $1300/kW)
The last co-gen plant I worked on had an output of 353MWe and cost about $450M, which was about $50M under budget.
This misses one of the key points about smr’s. They’re supposed to be made in a factory. That ship is one unit and expensive as hell. If you make 100 or more of the same smr, you can amortize the tooling cost over many units. This also allows for configurable size stations. Right now, nuclear stations are one and done, custom jobs.
People keep saying this, but it’s not accurate.
An EPR is an EPR, the same with the AP1000. There are only very minor differences between installs, usually things that will help ease of construction or reliability on future builds. Both are GEN III+ designs, greatly simplified compared to previous generations, with fewer pump, valves and pipe-runs. They also shortened pipe runs where possible. They also have large, factory-built assemblies that are shipped to site, ready to “bolt” in, which should have reduced site construction time.
Where major changes do happen, it’s with the balance of plant infrastructure, which is site dependent. Location of access roads, where the switchyard is installed, where cooling water is accessed , etc will never be the same between sites. Nor will the geotech information. So a lot of mainly civil and structural design and fabrication will always be site specific.
The KLT-40S reactor is a variant of the KLT-40 reactors developed for and installed in the Taymyr icebreakers back in the late 1980s. It should have been cheap, as it’s a known quantity with a long track record.
the world’s first floating nuclear power plant
That’s a weird thing to say, considering we’ve had nuclear power plants inside submarines since 1958.
“SMRs — which are smaller and less costly to build than traditional, large-scale reactors”
They somehow forgot to mention a few key things:
They don’t actually exist yet.
They may be cheaper but they generate way less power. If you added up the cost of enough SMRs to equal one conventional nuclear plant they would be even more expensive than an already prohibitively expensive method of generating power.
What a dumb article.
They exist, what do you mean? We’ve been powering a fleet of submarines with them since the 1950s.
Yeah, it’s going to cost a lot upfront to get them commercially viable, but for the few places where renewables need assistance, I don’t see why this can’t make sense.
They exist, what do you mean? We’ve been powering a fleet of submarines with them since the 1950s.
I’m talking about methods of power generation that contribute to the grid. I thought that was obvious, my bad.
Yeah, it’s going to cost a lot upfront to get them commercially viable, but for the few places where renewables need assistance, I don’t see why this can’t make sense.
They will never be commercially viable. The reason we have always built the biggest nuclear plants feasible is because that was the only way that they made any financial sense.
One significant benefit of these would be the lack of transmission losses that plague massive plants which have to send electricity sometimes hundreds of miles. Having smaller units maintained by municipalities would be cheaper for cities far from major electrical plants.
I was curious, so I checked to see the current longest ultra-high voltage dc transmission line:
The Changji-Guquan ultra-high-voltage direct current (UHVDC) transmission line in China is the world’s first transmission line operating at 1,100kV voltage.
Owned and operated by state-owned State Grid Corporation of China, the 1,100kV DC transmission line also covers the world’s longest transmission distance and has the biggest transmission capacity globally.
The transmission line traverses for a total distance of 3,324km (2065 miles) and is capable of transmitting up to 12GW of electricity.
As a general rule of thumb, HVAC lines will be somewhere around 5-6% line loss per 1000kms, and HVDC somewhere around 3%/1000kms
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.
