I've seen quite a few SMR proposals over the last couple of years and not a single one that dared to address the whole cycle from deployment to eventual decommission as a function of the total revenues - costs to operate. Most of these projects seem to be made to bilk investors or governments rather than to actually produce power. The day Italy produces the first KWh that is net profitable to the operators without counting subsidies I will be highly amazed, and that's assuming they get to operational in the first place.
I agree, I tell everyone who will listen that no country, not Russia, China, Japan, France, USA etc has ever made nuclear power profitable. And you can't blame it on the environmentalists in China and Russia.
That being said, many countries consider it a national security issue not to be held hostage to foreign oil.
Is that because every country fails to adequately charge oil/coal/etc for its externalities? Are we essentially subsidizing oil, bringing the costs artificially low such that nuclear can't compete?
Nuclear has several major cost problems if it's own. Insuring against a major accident is prohibitively expensive, the kind of inspection+maintenance regime that's necessary for safety isn't amenable to cost reductions. The list goes on. Basically:
Nuclear isn't similar to the things that grow cheaper as the operators gain experience.
Much if fhe inspections and standards aren't "necessary for safety" but the direct product of paranoia and lobbying. Nuclear is brutally overregulated, far, far beyond what's necessary to ensure safety, and that's where most costs come from.
Fukushima happened in a highly regulated (and correspondingly expensive) environment. Improving the regulation doesn't necessarily just mean adding more of it.
The physics of nuclear reactors push you towards making them big, and that means that there are correspondingly few of them, and they are all big civil engineering projects that are a little bit different from each other. This is a recipe for expensive and slow construction. The whole reason people are trying to make SMRs a thing is to try and get around this but it's not obvious there's an intersection between what the physics is happy to make efficient enough and a scale where you can actually get some learning rates and economies of 'scale' (which is more economies of unit volume than just in total how big something is).
jacquesm · · focus · HN ↗
asmodeuslucifer · · focus · HN ↗
That being said, many countries consider it a national security issue not to be held hostage to foreign oil.
planckscnst · · focus · HN ↗
Arnt · · focus · HN ↗
Nuclear isn't similar to the things that grow cheaper as the operators gain experience.
Llamamoe · · focus · HN ↗
pvaldes · · focus · HN ↗
rcxdude · · focus · HN ↗
fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
What are they?
rcxdude · · focus · HN ↗