andrewducker | Interesting Links for 05-08-2017

Along with safety considerations which add to the cost I think there are also three other things going on. One is the size of the power stations mean they are built in small numbers. They are usually the result of a national nuclear programme and even in large developed nations there is usually only room for a handful of new nuclear plants in each generation. You therefore struggle to gain much in the way of scale economies.

Secondly, there seems to be a lot of tweaking of designs within programmes so that often it appears that your nuclear fleet is actually a series of proto-types with the associated costs of doing things for the first time.

The third factor is that with large, long term projects with huge capital requirements comes a long-term financial risk which makes funding difficult or requires long-dated (and politically difficult) guaranteed off-take arrangements.

Smaller modular designs which you can make in a factory like Liberty Ships would seem to offer a way forward. As would buying double-digit numbers of the same design from the Russians or the Chinese. The former seems more politically acceptable in the West.

That said, I'm still of the opinion that renewables plus storage prove cheaper than nuclear plus storage and on a timescale so quick that the nuclear industry struggle to react.

My understanding of the economics of nuclear is that because of the associated infrastructure, you have to make them enormous to recoup the investment in an acceptable timeframe, and nobody needs that many enormous power plants, so it's hard to get to economy-of-scale levels. (Especially when there are a half zillion designs out there.) I was kinda hoping tiny installations like the Toshiba 4S were going to be the way of the future, but it doesn't seem like that's going to happen.

I think it depends what infrastructure you are thinking off.

The Chinese are looking at a pebble bed modular reactor based on a German design of about 250 MW. One of the applications for it is to replace the power train in coal power plants by running them in parallel.

Lots of people appear to be looking at modular designs but it's difficult attracting financing in a world where gas and solar PV cheap.

The Indian government has recently approved a fleet of 900MW nuclear plants. Which is something you can do if, like India, you have a population of more than billion and a goodly fraction of them without any electricity at all.

Specifically, on-site wet and dry storage for used rods, security, and crashing-aircraft-proof containment, was the infrastructure I was thinking about. Gas, coal, wind, and solar really shine on those fronts, and hydro does pretty well.

I keep reading about the Indian thorium reactors. I lived near a reactor capable of using thorium (and actually did so) and have always thought it would be a good idea to pursue that. (Particularly for India.)

Interesting Links for 05-08-2017

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