Five Things the “Nuclear Bros” Don’t Want You to Know About Small Modular Reactors
Five Things the “Nuclear Bros” Don’t Want You to Know About Small Modular Reactors
A realistic understanding of their costs and risks is critical.
A realistic understanding of their costs and risks is critical.
What are SMRs?
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SMRs are not more economical than large reactors.
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SMRs are not generally safer or more secure than large light-water reactors.
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SMRs will not reduce the problem of what to do with radioactive waste.
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SMRs cannot be counted on to provide reliable and resilient off-the-grid power for facilities, such as data centers, bitcoin mining, hydrogen or petrochemical production.
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SMRs do not use fuel more efficiently than large reactors.
[Edit: If people have links that contradict any the above, could you please share in the comment section?]
While clearly biased and theres some wording and cherrypicking of studies (that isn't very egregious, to be clear!) that I'd take issue with in a more formal setting, the content of the article thru to point two are really quite an alright summary of the issues and raises some very valid questions the industry has yet to answer.
However it throws itself off the credibility cliff riiiiiight around this point:
In any event, regulators are loosening safety and security requirements for SMRs in ways which could cancel out any safety benefits from passive features. For example, the NRC has approved rules and procedures in recent years that provide regulatory pathways for exempting new reactors, including SMRs, from many of the protective measures that it requires for operating plants, such as a physical containment structure, an offsite emergency evacuation plan, and an exclusion zone that separates the plant from densely populated areas. It is also considering further changes that could allow SMRs to reduce the numbers of armed security personnel to protect them from terrorist attacks and highly trained operators to run them. Reducing security at SMRs is particularly worrisome, because even the safest reactors could effectively become dangerous radiological weapons if they are sabotaged by skilled attackers. Even passive safety mechanisms could be deliberately disabled.
What in the fearmongering fuck is this? "Oh no, terrorists!" And it's debunked on the first page of one of its own sources. Regulators have NOT put any pathways in place to "exempt SMRs from many of the protective measures." If you read the sources, what they have done is put in place guidelines for the evaluation of the current measures, to judge if those measures merit being re-evaluated. Its a path for a path to judge if maybe we should have a path.
And fucking hell, yes of course they would have smaller security contingents, the installations are physically smaller! There's less to guard! Thats in no small part the point!
Look there are a lot of problems with SMRs and even more questions we just don't have answers for yet. Those questions need answers before any progress can be made with SMRs. The benefits of lower transmission losses, dedicated power generation for industrial complexes being at all beneficial, or remotely finalized designs for the reactor technology needed here are all MASSIVE outstanding issues that have yet to be solved.
But this shit? "we cant have this source of green energy because terrorists!!!"
Fuck off with that.
There are more than enough issues with SMRs to justify extreme skepticism, hell microsoft wanting a bunch is probably reason enough to abandon the whole concept. We dont need to stoop to disinformation and blatant lies, what the fuck. This is why "nuclear bros" (Which great idea, lets "other" the critics, that's not a red flag at all...) get so much traction, because they dont stoop to conspiracy theory tropes to support their arguments.
There's so many people paranoid about the remote possibility of dirty bombs. Meanwhile, Norfolk Southern is actually spilling tankers full of toxic chemicals that get set on fire by being incredibly negligent.
If terrorists did want to poison an area, there's plenty of insanely toxic and commercially available compounds to choose from. The fixation on nuclear fuel is an indicator of someone who is just repeating a ghost story and doesn't actually know/care what the biggest sources of danger are.
Though to be fair, using dirty bombs or radioactive material has waaaaay larger "fear" factor than a random chemical that kills just as well.
There are plenty of good arguments against SMRs: none of them include terrorism.
The theory was always that you could get economies of scale if you were building the same reactor every time in a factory and transporting it to install somewhere else. In practice those economies never materialized (did they even exist?)
Meanwhile solar, wind, and batteries have plummeted in cost. There is no need for base load power generation if we have sufficient battery storage and an oversupply of generators - which is entirely feasible for wind and solar.
I'm sorry, I think you may not be using 'baseload' correctly. We will absolutely always have to meet the requirements for baseload power generation, otherwise we aren't making enough power and we will have brownouts.
If what you meant was that a grid relying on solar and wind for primary generation and supplemented with battery facilities can make up the deficit at night/on calm days, then while that would be ideal it is extremely unlikely to happen in the next several decades. Battery technology is not anywhere near ready for this solution, and while ESS are making extremely impressive advances, they are such a new technology that it would be intellectually dishonest for me to list their shortcomings here. They are simply too new to know which problems are inherent to the concept, and which are due simply to flawed engineering of a new technology.
For matters of logistics, a few large generating sources linked together are much more desirable than a distributed network. In fact the issue with economies of scale in power generation is one of the arguments against SMRs made by the above linked article's author. One of the biggest concerns with truly distributed power generation is safety - namely, how can you safely work on a downed line when every single house has the independent capacity to energize the lines? But those large power generating stations run into the same issue that SMRs are in vogue to solve; what do we do about crypto miners
besides grinding them all up into dog food, which gets my vote.Their drain, and those of industry and data centers and so on, on local power infrastructure remains despite the source of the power in the system.
I know nothing on the topic, but the points you raise don't seem relevant to me?
SMRs are not more economical than large reactors.
Yeah, economies of scale mean small things are generally less efficient than big things. This is a criticism of local power generation that applies just as well to wind turbines for example. Nothing to do with this idea really.
SMRs are not generally safer or more secure than large light-water reactors.
Why would anyone expect large power plants to be less safe than this? I'd expect the technology in both to be safe. Tell me if this is safe or not, not if it's "safer" than large power plants on some ambiguous scale. Rooftop solar is also less safe than commercial solar power plants just due to being located near someone's living space, but it's a useless relative comparison.
SMRs will not reduce the problem of what to do with radioactive waste.
That one is the only valid point to me.
SMRs cannot be counted on to provide reliable and resilient off-the-grid power for facilities, such as data centers, bitcoin mining, hydrogen or petrochemical production.
Why not? Seems like they would.
SMRs do not use fuel more efficiently than large reactors.
This is just a repeat of the first point.
Again, I know nothing on this and don't have an opinion either way. I'm pointing out this seems to be a criticism but only one of the 5 points seems to actually criticize this.
These are not my points, they come from the article. So for example in relation to your question on the
SMRs cannot be counted on to provide reliable and resilient off-the-grid power...
they have a couple of paragraphs that give an explanation.
My first issue with this, is that he's still using his information from 2013. For instance, he claims that the spent fuel is just as dangerous. Yet we have proven time and time again, that the spent fuel rods can be used in other nuclear facilities to generate even more power off of them. We have the technology (theoretically of course, you need to actually build the facilities for this to work...) get even more energy off this "waste", in turn also making it far less dangerous!
Second issue being he says the reactors would need a secondary power source in case of emergency. Duh? Thats his reason, is that they would need a backup power source to keep the coolant system running... Duh.
I think the EU Commission has done a fairly good job of listing the pros and contras of small modular reactors:
They have some advantages over conventional (large) reactors in the following areas:
- if they are serially manufactured without design chances, manufacturing is more efficient than big unique projects
- you can choose a site with less cooling water
- you can choose a site where a fossil-burning plant used to be (grid elements for a power plant are present) but a renewable power plant may not be feasible
- some of them can be safer, due to a higher ratio of coolant per fuel, and a lower need for active cooling*
Explanation: even a shut down NPP needs cooling, but bigger ones need non-trivial amounts of energy, for example the 5700 MW plant in Zaporizhya in the middle of a war zone needs about 50 MW of power just to safely stay offline, which is why people have been fairly concerned about it. For comparison, a 300 MW micro-reactor brought to its lowest possible power level might be safe without external energy, or a minimal amount of external energy (which could be supplied by an off-the-shelf diesel generator available to every rescue department).
The overview of the Commission mentions:
SMRs have passive (inherent) safety systems, with a simpler design, a reactor core with lower core power and larger fractions of coolant. These altogether increase significantly the time allowed for operators to react in case of incidents or accidents.
I don't think they will offer economical advantages over renewable power. Some amont of SMRs might however be called for to have a long-term steerable component in the power grid.
None of these points are relevant. Nobody is selling SMRs as better than large-scale plants (at least I hope they're not). The point of SMRs is that they are much easier to bring in and put down. A huge portion of the world still runs on fossil fuels, often with frequent brownouts or scheduled blackouts. Being able to bring in a RELIABLE non-fossil fuel power plant at a smaller scale would be huge. Distributed solar has some pretty awesome potential for individual households if you don't care about on- demand power, but you do eventually need something for your denser cities etc.
Put as much money into the research of SMRs as you would like to waste. Meanwhile we just build a cheaper, better and more reliable system based on renewables.
This will happen with or without the nukebro hypetrain.
I though the use case was that these reactors can be mass produced in a factory and not require large scale infrastructure projects?
I appreciate this hasn't been proven but comparing apples with oranges seems odd.
I though the use case was that these reactors can be mass produced in a factory and not require large scale infrastructure projects?
The mass production takes time to build up. It takes time to get experience. I've read various articles around SMRs. For at least the first 9 there will not be any mass production. It'll be very costly.
Usually production improves as more is produced. Possibly it improves by the experience gained, possibly by a new factory.
It'll not be immediately cheap and mass produced. While that is often claimed for SMRs.
As small ones aren't as efficient, it'll be more costly per kWh. That it'll be cheaper than regular nuclear power seems mostly wishful thinking.
My personal stance is that sustainability cannot be achieved within capitalism due to its model of eternal growth. We can have one or the other, but not both.
So creating more energy could not be the solution. Creating less demand would be, and the demand comes from industries.
More often than not, I it seems to me this discussion about clean energy is a deflection of the real problem which is industrialisation under capitalism. We don't question anymore what this energy is needed for.
All these are kinda no brainers, lol. I think we are still going to need nuclear as a baseload power supply where hydro doesn't work because it's too dry or flat. We gotta get off "clean coal" and "natural gas" as baseload power. I like sodium reactors and advanced, non-light water designs. Light water has become a political hot potato even though it is far safer than coal plants in terms of number of people hurt or killed by emissions.
As the coal and gas industry has done, advanced designs will need new names like "natural rock" to distance themselves from negative connotations.
Nuclear power is simply a smokescreen. It's proponents ultimately just want fossil fuel dependency to last as long as possible by promising silver bullet solutions that will never become reality, instead of focusing on solutions that exist and are effective today.
Why not use one of the safest and cleanest ways of producing power?
The wind doesn’t blow all the time, neither does the sun shine all the time, and not everyone is around thermal or wave sources.
Battery tech is coming along, and we are building more gravity batteries, but nuclear can close right in and replace most fossil fuel plants.
New reactors are expensive. New reactors are late. New reactors can basically only be built by nation states but not privately. Nuclear is not insurable. Nuclear produces waste with excessive half-life. Nuclear steals resources and mindshare from other options. Nuclear energy output can't be moderated well (basically for economic reasons, it runs full steam all the time and for safety reasons, you can only moderate output a little), so it does not effectively augment wind and solar, rather leading to wind/solar having to be turned off.
Wind and solar meanwhile can be built cheaply, quickly, privately, locally, site sizes easily scale between kW or GW of output and they only produce a little regular waste at the end of their life. (Okay, granted, Neodymium mining does produce some nuclear waste too — but definitely nowhere what uranium mining produces.)
Wind+solar+hydro+better national/continental grids+batteries+flexible demand is a much better combination.
This is why it's always the conservative parties advocating for it, as they are in bed with the fossil fuel industry.
If Bill Gates likes it, then im out.
Ill stick with renewables like a fine modern citizen.
Have you got anything to back that up with? Because the problems with nuclear power have been almost exclusively caused by conservative governments. The ludicrous licensure requirements are the largest factor in driving the cost of nuclear facilities so far out of the realm of feasibility, and those have been imposed almost exclusively by conservative governments (
with a special shoutout to Al GoreOkay that's unfair, his legislation on nuclear power was largely based on anti-corruption ideals and not the ideals of the anti-nuclear movement)