This is exactly what the industry needs. The technology already exists. The only challenge is to scale it to a degree where it makes economic sense, just like the semiconductor and automotive industry have done. More output also means more experienced engineers and better overall quality along the way.
No we need to stabilize the world so large nuclear reactors can be used. These SMRS all require enriched fuel and some even require isotopes that are bred in other types of reactors. The Americans and Western Europeans want smrs because they can put them below ground. By doing that they think they can continue going to war for resources and keep their grid protected. Smrs also use far too much uranium. We should use the candu reactor only and make peace with our neighbours.
BS in so many ways.... the technology does not exist yet and is not proven. There are massive doubts, that mass production will lead to relevant savings. And Fuel efficiency is about 30% lower, whereas the market for nuclear fuel is about 70 % dominated by Russian based or owned companies. And as you can think, wstern source are actually out of capacity.
@@geowar20 it is a bad idea. All of these reactors are fuel hogs. In weight they take the same amount of metal/fuel but once you enrich you are throwing material away. Americans only think of the next war they are going to fight and you can bet that if they get all civilian cars on electric and their power generators spread out and buried they will be ready for more war. We should only install CANDU reactors and Sade huge amounts of fissile material. Lots of diesel for the army and buried power for industry
Unfortunately, block units have been around for 60 years, but outside naval applications have never been used in scale. So I don't see any movement happening
It’s significant that he specifies the over budget and delay problems are unique to the west. Japan for example built over 60 reactors between 1974 and 2009 on budget and on time (typically in less that four years per reactor).
I've always wondered why there's so much talk about modular reactors being researched and developed. If they are powering ships and subs how can it be that much more difficult to do the same for grid power?
@@justinmyers6737 US NRC is the big enormous barrier for any commercial nuclear anything. Those Navy nukes are not licensed for commercial anything though they’re are perfectly safe designs. So from viewpoint of anti nuclear NRC, they don’t exist.
Ah as always, the unfought Nuclear-startup blabla. Half of the world forbids the entering of nuclear powered ships. Further those SMR use nuclear material only with 70% the efficiency of regular reactors,ö. Even worse: The market of Nuclear fuels is at around 70% in the hands of Russia. By going nuclear,you will support Russia!
*well,* to be *entirely* fair, the smaller a nuclear reactor is, the more dangerous it is, because it's controllable in less and less points, essentially. In a submarine reactor, one with 9 control rods (1 central and 8 arranged around it), the central rod has 80% of the reactor's power control authority. So I can see why they'd be more dangerous and less commercially licensed
@@matteodelgallo1983 “small … more dangerous” Cmon. More dangerous than a 3GW thermal reactor w 150 some fuel bundles, center core maybe 3M from ambient temp, spent fuel sitting in the pool, and w MWs of decay heat in a LOCA? Yes a small reactor might be harder to control at points. But it’s actual threat to the surrounding community from the amount of radioisotope it might dump, and the range it can throw them in some excursion is easily 3-4 orders magnitude lower for this dinky reactor vs large, and the threat for even the large is low. Then, they are going to bury this small plant, because they can when it’s small. More dangerous? The lack of perspective in the nuclear community baffles me sometimes. “Less commercially licensed” Not less, never. That’s because 1) the US NRC has never licensed anything new, start to finish until Vogtle. AEC started all the rest.2) the NRC cost structure for new designs is basically, 4 year, a $billion. large or small, more or less same price. Vendors go w large, unsurprisingly.
Using off the shelf technology is a huge plus! But 20MW is absolutely tiny, and there's several unexplained and concerning things about this idea like what is the fuel expense going to be and what's their energy efficiency.
Imagine putting these in substation plants, to stabilize grids, or in specific places like refineries or steel smelters. 20MW placed in the correct spots might be quite advantageous. Fuel expense is likely to be as low as regular reactors if they're using LEU fuel assemblies common to AP1000s or such. Energy efficiency will likely be slightly lower, because nuclear efficiency usually favours massive scale. If refueling becomes a matter of changing out entire cores, then delivery of new fueled cores and removal of old cores is weighed against the need for nuclear operators and those elaborate control rooms. So I'd refine your questions further, and ask one more; Is the same factory that builds these tiny cores also responsible for removal of the hazardous used cores, and disassembly for the removal of the used fuel rods?
@@acmefixer1 Probably not a thousand years. There are already nuclear plants in existence and many many more in development or being built that are just salivating at the "nuclear waste" because it's the perfect fuel for their reactor and rather than paying for it, people will pay you to take it. It's a win-win.
@grahambennett8151 Chernobyl tech isn't present here. The RBMK design was unique to the Soviet Union. They knew PWRs were safe and reliable, but they didn't want to use "American" tech. Also, Chernobyl didn't have a containment structure. These reactors will be buried underground. Fukushima only happened because of a massive earthquake and tsunami that can't happen in most places.
@@BallyBoy95 I wouldn’t… that’s where we are planning to store the nuclear waste 😀… …which has yet to kill a single person. Coal kills 10,000 a day. Nuclear is scary, but it’s safe.
The first reactors built were this small, we started to build bigger reactors for a very good reason - the bigger the plant, the better the efficiency.
If this idea works, we can dispense with massive hogging of space for solar farms or large, unsightly wind farms. The small, modular size means they could be placed next to a place that needs constant power like a web server facility.
Sounds good. I wish them luck. The other issue I'm wondering about is, what is the supply chain for getting 5% enriched uranium? Along with this, is the plan for waste storage.
Supply chain for "standard" 5% enriched uranium is pretty well established with several companies (Orano, Urenco, TVEL, etc.). Fabrication into final fuel assemblies also has several participants (Westinghouse, Framatome, KEPCO, etc.). Long term waste storage is usually the result the individual country's policies, which varies widely.
The Goddamn "supply chain" uranium corporations. And their political clout. Are why no new...and way better technologies...like thorium ...are being considered. That's not holding back the Indians and Chinese. The USA will be left in the "Uranium" dust to make money for established and way sh*ttier "legacy technologies". These reactors are NOT air cooled. They are still water cooled using electric fan driven evaporative coolers. Instead of the large towers that have nothing to do with Nuclear Power plants. But the, small hat "usual suspect" owned and controlled media have used those towers to "trigger" citizens into Nuclear Power freak outs and idiocy. The electrical evaporative coolers, help to inject water vapor into the atmosphere, at specific times and locations, for finer control of weather and precipitation. Come on. Think. Use your brain. Uranium is "so early 20th Century". The people of the Earth need to move on. Corporate powers are preventing that. And we all know who the usual suspects that stole the materials, plans and technology from the US are. The small hat "Usual Suspects".
@@phil20_20 I dated one of those back in college. Fun when operating on the edge at an equilibrium power level. Look out if the there is a runaway event or a power/cooling loss resulting in core exposure.. I learned to stay far away from Breeders in the late 1970s. Instant "Gamma Ray toxicity" is always just seconds away.
The big question is what is the cost per megawatt of generation of initial construction and operation compared to a larger standardized reactor? Each reactor is going to require at least two licensed operators per unit, so a large number would require a large # of operators for multiple units.
I think the idea is that after its approved, the initial cost of approval would be shared for the entire design which is the same, the number of operators don't really matter that much, its not salary that's expensive, I mean, not of the operators, but of the lawyers.
It will be interesting to see how that works out. One point about that though is since they are selling a PPA, the customer doesn't take on the risk of the operating costs.
The business plan seems like a great idea, so is not wasting time in the US. However, it's still a PWR which means it will be expensive by design. Copenhagen Atomics has the same business plan and also skipping the US who has no interest in energy leadership. However, they are going with a MSR which is inexpensive by design and as long as they separate the reactor vessel from the power conversion side, everything will also be off the shelf equipment. Output temperatures are much higher making industrial heat applications much greater.
Being a solid-fuelled reactor, it has similar inherent risks to existing ones. Even if they can achieve effective passive cooling, which is far from a certainty, any fault or damage in that system will ultimately lead to a meltdown. Those dots over Australia certainly won’t be realised without the adoption of the incomparably safer reactor configurations that incorporate liquid, or liquid-like, fissile fuel loads which can be dumped from the core into a reliably safe geometry (in terms of both fission and heat). It’s disappointing to discover that so much effort and cost is being wasted on reactor designs that don’t properly address the most significant safety concern with regard to nuclear energy. Absolute “walk away” safety is a prerequisite for many, and that can never be guaranteed with solid-fuelled reactors.
We’ve had the technology for clean power for the last 60 years but chose not to use it. We should have replaced all coal and gas plants by the 1980s or 1990s with nuclear. Hopefully something like this will help to replace fossil fuel plants
Damn. I was hoping to hear about the use of modular liquid fuel reactors. Using cheaper, more plentiful and safer liquid Thorium. Walk away safe. They do not need a large expansion volume, or atmospheric release, if cooling fails. In the the reactor. Or the low percentage, barely "used" fuel rod pools stop circulating. Uranium reactors boiling water were used because that was "proven technology" in submarines using highly enriched U235 as a fuel. Land reactors used low enrichment U235 and weren't under gigantic volumes of water. Where's the easy technology crossover there? And it generated lots of plutonium to build Boosted Fission and Thermonuckear weapons. Any solid fuel nuclear reactor that uses H2O(Water) as it's neutron moderator. And Water as it coolant is scientific idiocy. Adding more coolant, water, Increases the reaction in an accident situation. Even if you've got a lot of "20 Mule Team Borax" lying around. Stupid, Stupid, Stupid. We are beyond that need at this point. And have significantly more knowledge of materials reliability.
Maybe I'm missing something, but this part (~9:35) killed it for me: “..This does introduce some inefficiencies in that instead of only replacing the fuel the entire vessel has to be replaced.” A throw-away vessel each time the fuel needs replacing?
I don't see anything new here because if the goal is faster to deployment and production, it seems to have just as many impediments and hurdles to overcome as the many other nuclear start ups that have many beneficial advantages that using the old technology doesn't. Having said this, any effort to make genuine strides towards a carbon free that consumes less industrial resources (i.e. copper, lithium, rare earths) has to be encouraged and given a chance to prove itself.
No, listen again. It avoids all the usual things that slow down reactors, uses all the long used parts which are long certified, long understood to work. Then, it’s small size allows it to be built w cheap parts, no $150 million custom steel that only a few places can make and then can’t be shipped by truck.
Is it helpful to put a banner on your post that sounds like a military “take over”? No. Bad phrase if you support nuclear. It’s still a battle to win people over to this obvious energy source. Please keep that in mind. Thank you.
That's based on existing mines and the relative lack of reprocessing. There is way more Uranium just here in Australia that's not being explored due to lack of demand there is also likely large deposits in Canada and Russia that's not being dug up. We could also ramp up reprocessing and re-enrichment and develop and deploy more advanced breeder reactors so that we can replace U235 with plutonium or U233.
@@SpencerHHO You didn't watch Sabine's video then. There is just not that much uranium. I am all for the other types of reactors but the old style is not sustainable.
I don't know who sabine is but there certainly is enough uranium for 200 GW of new nuclear. If not, we could just recycle spent fuel and have enough uranium for hundreds of years.
As a Canadian, I look at the energy mix from Ontario for instance. For electricity generation 65% of Ontario's energy is nuclear from The Bruce (at 5.6gw the worlds largest nuclear plant) and Darlington and Pickering (they are working on building an SMR in one of those). Now the Bruce reactors were built over a number of years and there is a debate that the 10reactors at Darlington and Bruce will cost $12 and $13.8 billion to refurbish and that instead Ontario should focus on renewables. But in comparison some 2700 wind turbines have been built since 2010 in Ontario (assuming 3-4million a piece) at a cost of aprx $11billion. The total electricity generation by all of the wind turbines is at best 7% of the total generation, and is intermittent. Also renewables are not zero carbon, and would also require storage (which is also a cost and again not zero carbon). According to Engineering with Rosie on renewable if the world depends on renewables we will need 10,000 terrawatt hours of storage (or 10 petawatts) Sabine Hossenfelder in her videos estimates 1 petawatt hour. But essentially this is far more than what the world currently has in storage which is maybe 34gw in battery and 2.2 tw in pumped hydro. Storage needs to be increased 500fold. This is a long way to go.
Honestly, great points. The storage issue with renewables hasn't really been addressed in a large, scalable way yet. And like you said, the cost to scale it up to the capacity of the existing infrastructure isn't much better than keeping the current CANDUs running. If they proceed with their pressure tube replacements, there's no reason they can't continue.
BS. Why in the world would you need 10k TWh of storage? That's 40% of yearly global demand in 2022. Pumped hydro, HVDC, and EV vehicle to grid will easily cover the load shifting/storage needed, which is nowhere near 40% of yearly demand.
@@gerryburde5663 ev to grid? How many ev owners are willing to let the 'grid' use their expensive investment as storage (given that it will increase battery degradation) or get in to use their ev and find there is little juice. The issue of renewables is the intermittency - so storage is needed. And currently despite all the growth etc 80% of world energy use is fossil, with 8% nuclear 10% hydro and
@@gerryburde5663 In order to transition to renewables such as wind and solar (which are intermittent - sun doesnt shine at night or on cloudy days, the same thing with wind) Actual capacity is quite low. So storage is needed. ruclips.net/video/SuZ3nqzC6a0/видео.html So while 10petawatts may be on the high side, as likely we might use some heat energy storage, others say at least 1petawatt. Which is still 500x the total amount of existing storage. ruclips.net/video/Q8xsg9iK5yo/видео.html
@@gerryburde5663 I've stated before that all storage methods to cover a 90% loss of renewable output on windless/sunless periods lasting weeks at a time are much more expensive than nuclear power plants. Even at a ridiculously low cost of $100/kWh stored, a gigawatt-week of storage would cost $16.8 Billion - more than a gigawatt nuclear plant - for just a portion of the storage requirement of renewables able to sometimes produce a gigawatt of output.
I like the concept. The one part I would modify is the fuel source. Thorium cannot be used for bombs and spent Thorium requires much shorter storage times. Plus the refinement and availability are much easier and more available.
Changing the fuel source to Thorium means it is now a high tech project (breeder reactor), not a simple project to down scale and mass produce an ordinary reactor (burner reactor). Fortunately, other companies look at Thorium fuel. My favorite is Copenhagen Atomics.
Thorium reactors are actually uranium reactors, they breed the Th to fissionable U233. The Candu reactor design can already 'burn' Th as part of its fuel mix.
I like the modular approach, advocated by a few of the low pressure molten salt reactor startups. The Thorium cycle has a friendlier decay schedule, much better safety than water at 2250 psi, and much hotter output suitable for process heat or thermal storage for peaking loads. The fast spectrum chloride salt burning mildly reprocessed waste is another winner, needing no moderator. Nothing to explode is a clear bonus. MSRs seems to be mostly concerned about material research which should be accelerated as these high temp types show most promise. Putting potential nuclear spills in the groundwater is a problem .
@@Piccodon The Chinese already have at least two molten salt experimental reactors up and running. The US has recently approved similar experimental MSRs. The first of these at Abilene Christian University NEXT program is in an advanced state of construction. We should fairly soon have a handle on issues associated with this reactor type. If there are no show stoppers this should open the way for small modular units in the 50-500MW class within say, ten years.
Here is a possible use care. Take a MAJOR city like NYC. Get a full city block and rip everything down. Then build a police station, fire station and EMT station with EOC (Emergency Operstions Center) in the new building AND PUT A SINGLE SMR (Small Modular nuclear Reactor) in the basement. This will give you a full emergency response center with its own power supply that can ship its excess power the city grid.
The Arora case mentioned at 15:50 was a rejection by the US regulator, the corrupt NRC which has never approved any U.S. commercial reactor from start to finish. It doesn’t demonstrate how “difficult” it is in general to get regulatory approval.
Please explain how these power plants can operate without having a river or ocean nearby to cool the condenser? Is the plan to have an air cooled condenser? Is the plan to discard the low pressure steam, like they used to do with coal fired steam engines? Running fresh water through a nuclear boiler sounds like a plan for rapid corrosion. You should be aware that efficiency improves as condenser temperature is lowered, and river water or ocean water is usually cooler than surrounding air, which could be below freezing and that would be a disaster if condensate froze.
I thought they said air cooled reactor, again very, very bad idea if its the case. After the Windscale nuclear incident decission was made that air cooled reactors never to be build again. In those days reactors had graphite moderators, maybe good for neutron economy but very bad for safety if paired with air cooling.
@@goranz9446 the design is PWR which means it uses water for moderation, cooling and electricity generation. The difference is that the hot turbine exhaust is cooled by air, not river water. Btw, all modern has cooled reactor designs(which cool the core itself with gas) use a closed cycle, where the gas never leaves the reactor.
@@vaclavzajac214 Yes, but not with air that supports burning little less then oxygen but with noble gass like helium or carbone dioxide. The whole idea is very stupud, making 10 000 small PWR reactors Instead of making fast breeders convert/burn type using piles of spent fuel rods and piles of depleted uranium as fertile material. In that case we maybe wont have to mine uranium for hundreeds of years.
“Explain how these .. operate without .. river ..ocean” Plenty gas plants operate air cooled. And the biggest US nuclear plant is in the desert outside Phoenix. Looks they plan about 20 air coolers on the top of this 20 MW design. If they can build this thing fast and as cheap as they think, saving a massive cooling towers, then giving up a few percent efficiency is a no brainer.
@@goranz9446 What? No. It’s a standard PWR water loop, steam secondary, with a dozen or two fan air coolers instead of an expensive tower. Nothing “burns”
Nuclear projects especially ones that are government backed are allways treated as the goose that lays the golden egg. The goose will be captured and forced for decades to produce gold for as long as possible by industrial organisations and regulatory bodies. Very difficult to avoid capture unless you are agile.
@@atomicblender But still, one simple math was not done. I mean 10k means a lot. But is really a lot? I understood well 20 MW for this design? Then is 35 times smaller. 10k/35= 285. And now are 440 reactors, 500 with those already in construction. So 285 compared with 500 does not seem anymore so impressive. Just above 50 percent increase. This for the actual production. But increase in risk, is 20 times greater. Does it worth it?
@@vaclavzajac214 I assure you that the risk increases. It is not about the risk on design but in numbers. We may argue that actually the technology is pretty safe anyway. Just 2 accidents, plus the one at 3 miles Island that was not so bad. But those 2 .. damn we cannot afford too many of them. My surgeon is witness first hand. He told us about the days when he was an intern. When there was an cancer scheduled it was an actual event. Everybody gathered to watch. Now every single day there are at least three excisions in the same hospital. Sure, there are many other possible causes that are contributing to this dramatic increase. But global increase is 75 percent since 1990. So not even doubled. This is a lot less that the skyrocketing I mention. And we are few hundred km far from the site. Sure we was on the path downwind, so for sure, closer is much worse.
@@ehombane risk is a pretty loosely defined term. Risk might increase in numbers but less power and better safety features means less harm even in case of meltdown. Let me just point out that zero people died from Fukushima radiation and l about 4 000 people have died from Chernobylu. If chernobyl, powerplant with arguably the worst nuclear accident in history, was replaced with coal, it would've killed more people than the accident by air pollution from normal operation. New designs are are at least 3 orders of magnitude safer and risk of large radiation leak is practically zero which means about 1000 times less casualties per energy produced. Also, 75% increase in cancer rate is given by longer age-expectancy, better diagnostics, pesticides and other factors, certainly not from nuclear accidents.
Heres hoping Oklo can do what is necessary to satisfy the NRC and get approval to move forward. I have to wonder though, is the NRC doing their best to be ethical and are they being genuine in their choice to provide disapproval at this point in time, or are they in actuality biased or partial to the big boys already established in the industry, and simply trying to prevent entry to newcomers??? I don't know anyting about NRC- I don't know if they're genuinely ethical and professional or if they are biased and bought off. Would love to hear from an insider on this if one can be found.
“genuinely” While the NRC has licensed a weak designs (most never built) and approved many reactors to go critical, they had never approved a U.S. reactor from initial proposal to power, not one until Vogtle 3 flipped on a few months ago, at great cost.
While security around a nuclear power plant is mandatory, it's not because of terrorists that steal uranium to make bomb: those plant, and future ones, operates with a core composed mostly by the wrong isotope to make a bomb, and the part that is right is less than 5% at most, while bombs requires an enrichment of 95% or more. And if think "well they steal it to craft a dirty bomb" I'll answer that there's hospitals for that one, way more accessible and available than a nuclear power plant of any kind.
Makes no more sense than steam powered automobiles. At some point the DOE has to contribute constructively rather than being the biggest impediment to progress.
You are confusing DOE with the prior actions of NRC. DOE is supporting licensing activities of new designs in both Canada and the US; it also recently contributed $750 Million to Terra Power, as well as beefing up study of MSRs at the national labs. At least one NRC commissioner (Wright) sounds pro nuclear, recently quoted saying " We must recognize - and I believe this to be true - that successfully achieving these goals will not be possible w/o existing nuclear, new nuclear and advanced nuclear being a part of the generation mix today and going forward. "
pls, correct me if I'm wrong, but changing the whole vessel wouldn't allow the plant to receive state-of-the-art reactors that can wor with the rest of the plant?
It works with a small reactor vessel because it is light enough to be removed by crane, after disconnecting cooling loops and mechanical support and instrumentation. And it’s buried underground so roof off is straightforward .
The 4887.439 tons of spent fuel generated in one year by 10,000 20MW micro reactors can fuel 52 1GW Molten Salt Reactors for 100 years. 940 kg of natural thorium in a Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) can generate 1 gigawatt (GW) of electricity for one year. The 37,112 tons of unused depleted uranium processed to obtain the 4888 tons of enriched uranium can fuel 394 1GW Molten Salt Reactors for 100 years.
I doubt they'll get approval for long term storage of spent fuel in the original reactor vessel due to neutron embrittlement and boric acid corrosion issues.
Those issues arise from the vessel being carbon steel. If they change to stainless it should not be a long term problem, especially with the vessel neutron reflectors/shields seen on new PWR designs.
Technology for the sake of technology while making everything too complicated and failure prone is an American engineering fallacy. Technology exists to serve people in a reliable and cost efficient manner. Ask the Japanese.
@timothydevries383 except that, MSRs are simpler technology than nearly all competing technologies, while also being walkaway safe. It is Exponetionally cheaper per watt, safer, and there is no reliance on exotic materials and can even remediate the ones that already exist.
The other problem with small light water reactors is that their neutron economy is much worse then large ones. The fuel costs for light water reactors in the low 10s of MW range is over 10 times that of Gigawatt scale projects - source Decouple Episode "Will Nuclear Power AI"
While I'm all onboard with this approach, I know its less likely in the US than any other country on Earth. There is far far too much ignorance peddling going on in the states to see an advancement in US energy policy. One bit of criticism on this presentation was not providing a better explanation as to why putting the reactor underground was safer than on ground level. Common sense might lead us to the same conclusion but a better presentation would detail why that might be true. Now, why is that important? Because as first stated, ignorance peddling is at its height. Better education means more information, not less. We aren't trying to campaign for Congress.
The simple reason for underground placement is protection from aircraft impact, as required of all containment structures, as well as inexpensive shielding.
Well normal powerplant also have preproduced moduels that they put together, its just a higher number of those modules,... well and a lot of welding. Well and building a nuclear reactor really don´t take as long time as people tend to believe. A full size GW nuclear reactor can be built in 2-3 years . The issue is really not time, but will. Passive saftey is standard for all gen III reactors, that is pretty much all reactors that have been newbuild in the west the last 30 years or so. This is really not something new. Even in a gen II reactor, the operator need to do nothing to activate the active cooling system. Even some gen II reactors have semi passive cooling system. Perifalation is not really a thing with light water reactors. Specially so with sealed reactors. To use a light water reactor to make weapon grade plutonium you have to open it up every 3 weeks and swich out fuel. While that sounds like it would be possible in theory. In practical reality you really can´t do it while making fuel. Reactors like RBMK that was the type used in Chernobyl could extract fuel while operating, making this much simpler. The idea that you can just make a bomb out of used nuclear fuel is simply incorect. Its one of those, you could do it in theory, but its so horribly complicated, so its just easier to make it from scratch
i clicked on the video being skeptical like "oh, one of those fancy startup techs that overpromise and underdeliver?" but not using new tech and using components from a normal power plants make it actually sounds plausible
This takes up the same amount of space above ground as the GE-Hitachi SMR which will produce 15X the energy and at a cost 20% less, Last may want to work on that.
No chance. The pressure vessel for a 300MWe reactor is hopelessly custom, $150 million if it’s dime, made by only a few mills in the world. Can’t ship it by truck, can’t bury it underground. The 20MW Last Energy PV is right out of ASME tables w hundreds of mills that can make it in a few months, any semi can deliver, and it’s easy to install underground. Projects like the LE design are built in 18 months all the time. GE-H will be 7-10 years, and need a big water supply, above ground big containment. LE problem is the regulator. They have a shot in E Europe. A small cheap reactor built in two years will turn the world upside down, and many special interests don’t want that to happen, including GE Hitachi.
@16m: “it is unlikely any other regulator is going to be any more forgiving” That’s a broad sweeping statement in the extreme. Any evidence following? Why, no. The US NRC has well earned its No Reactors Commission nickname. The NRC had not issue initial proposal approval for any of the existing US reactors, until Vogtle 3 came online. Hundreds of reactor proposals have been cancelled over the decades under NRC. There was no ALARA requirement before NRC. The history suggests NRC is unusual throughout the world, not typical. And, Poland is very hungry for reliable clean power. Their populace will not tolerate intermittent RE games raising rates over 30cnt Euro per kWh as in Germany, becoming dependent on Russian gas or any other idiocy.
if there is an international organization regulating this, why isn’t there just one set standard, and manufacturers just have to surpass those standards. making the economy of scale that much easier to reach
There have are currently several ongoing attempts to do exactly this through WNA and IAEA and others. The problem is that every country has their own regulator and their own way of doing things. Would one country accept the rules of another being imposed on them? Who decides? Would the US NRC accept design decisions and requirements from Kazakstan or South Africa or any other country?
@@atomicblender It would be a shame if they all figured out about this special organizing body designed and funded to do exactly this sort of thing with their headquarters in New York. I believe Alger Hiss, that dead Commie bastard, called it the United Nations. Got himself hanged for his efforts.
@@vaclavzajac214 I am sure that it has far more to do with the unwillingness to reduce production capacity of weapons grade radioactive materials. Not that I can fault them for holding such a position considering the costs it took to simply build up the current capacity. Hopefully in the future the weapons grade will come exclusively from military operated reactors, and civilian reactors can be safer more cost effective Thorium reactors.
SMR's are a welcome addition, however, if done properly, this will put much more pressure upon our societies for dealing with the nuclear waste that is bound to be created.
When the first NPPs in were built in Germany teh dangers were discussed. We in Germany were told that there was no real danger because the NPPs were safe and a reall big accidents would only happen once in 20,000 years. Well, that was for one NPP. Now we have much more. My guess is about 1000 on the planets. So we all can count on a meltdown every 20 years give or take. With 10,000 NPPs more we can will have 11 times more NPPs and therefore we can count on a meltdown every 21 months ans about 24 days. That is really wonderful because it will accelerate evolution due to much more radioactivity. So, happy radiant future with all the mutants to come!
As a former quality control nuclear power plant inspector, This modular reactor STILL produces waste that has nowhere to go and lasts deadly for THOUSANDS of years.
Fluid dynamics, pipe size matters! Large reactors are efficient because they are large, using large pipes. Basic physics. Uranium at 5% that is mostly sourced from Russia and that is a supply issue. Large CANDU style reactors make more sense since they can run on low grade Uranium and can manage refuelling on the fly. SMRs are more for Silicon Valley glossy brochured investor schemes than a practical economic solution.
It’s funny how the original complaint about going green is it’s too expensive. Now 10,000 reactors - why not try “Liquid Air.” You get the same thing, except it’s cheaper - cleaner and less litigious. And the kicker no waste and once a plant gets old it can be recycled !!!
Great dream but a dream nonetheless! The concept is great but there is a long road from concept to reality and I could already see many things that needs to be improved or modify the get there. One of the most obvious is to reduce the size of actual reactors to fit the model. Not only it needs to be smaller but it also needs to be economical to build and operate and this is not a small task. Another problem I see is to build it in the US and install it in Europe. Two points: First it will be expensive to build in US and it will be hard to find the necessary personnel to do the job. Second, if you think this is the hardest problem, wait till you try to get the necessary permits in Europe. It would be hard today to get them but it will be even harder to complete that task in the future with the geopolitical changes that we are facing at the moment.
What a brilliant concept. Instead of using a single six cell 66 amp car battery to start a car, we going to use thousands button wrist watch batteries for the same purpose. Not to mention the existing piles of spent nuclear fuel, now adding more to it, instead of breeding new from it. Everything went wrong in nuclear industry.
@@volta2aire the reactors can run for longer than 6 year, they just need a new RPV (stupid idea imo) and 1 trillion dolars is a small price to pay considering how much electricity they can produce.
So the nastiest and most popular nuclear reactors are LWR, which says these guys are ruling out LFTR and CANDO both of which have considerable advantages.
Don't you dare say anything bad about PWRs. LFTRs are still experimental and won't be available before first fusion tokamaks(at least 50 years) with too many disadvantages for too little advantages. CANDUs are nice but their overnight cost is too high and it looks like no new CANDUs are going to be built.
“nastiest” Commercial LWR never killed public anywhere ever. Has a vast record now. You want to chuck it aside to run something never proved commercially anywhere, never proved any advantages commercially.
@@Nill757 There have apparently been some 100 nuclear accidents since Chernobyl, all in LWR reactors. Check this snippet before I offer additional comment: The worst nuclear accident to date is the Chernobyl disaster which occurred in 1986 in Ukraine. The accident killed approximately 30 people directly[22] and damaged approximately $7 billion of property.[citation needed] A study published in 2005 by the World Health Organization estimates that there may eventually be up to 4,000 additional cancer deaths related to the accident among those exposed to significant radiation levels.[23] Radioactive fallout from the accident was concentrated in areas of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. Other studies have estimated as many as over a million eventual cancer deaths from Chernobyl. Now these numbers differ dramatically from your ill informed tripe. LWR are and accident waiting to happen and they produce more long lived waste than other types. Learn something before you shoot your mouth off, or at the very least check the facts you want to present. Because you type words, they do not become fact.
“Tackling the main issue that has plagued the nuclear industry for decades, hugh upfront costs…” No. If one listens to the CEO, the main issue is drastic over regulation in the US, led by the industry, which switched years ago to a “safety” business instead of a power business. So, a constant cost of a $billion to certify any design, drove the industry into building huge reactors, which naturally has all kinds of supply chain problems. The NRC for instance demanded changes to the new Vogtle design, *after* the reactor was approved. Also, the NRC regularly ships staff abroad, so there is nowhere in Europe where the hand of the NRC won’t be felt. Last Energy has a wonderfully sound and inexpensive reactor design which would revolutionize the energy industry. Seems unlikely they can get past the main gate, the regulator.
You mentioned in a different thread that there arent any Chernobyl reactors. There are. 8 are still in operation but are being shut down between 2024 and 2034. 8 others including 3 at Chernobyl were still in operation until 2021.
@@namename9998 “there are” There were several Soviet built reactors using the so called RBMK design from the 1970s. The Chernobyl reactor accident 1986 was one of those. The gross flaw in the RBMK design was its inherent “positive feedback”, where in dome situations, increasing the reactor power intentionally cause it to be naturally more reactive, and it runs away. All other commercial reactors have negative feedback. After the accident, all the remaining RBMKs were heavily modified to eliminate the condition, as documented by the IAEA. There are 8 RBMKs left, all in Russia, which are modified.
Submarines have been using them for decades. Compact and powerful. I do prefer low-pressure ones. Let's hope molten salt and thorium come to the party soon. Production line and modular parts would make sense. Sadly, less than 10% of current fuel rod fuels are converted into energy, with the other 90% wasted. Mass storage of wind and solar, as proposed by AMBRI, may be the answer. Molten Salt as electrolyte, Calcium as anode, and Antimony as cathode. A big insulated box with hot elements that cannot mix.
Part of me loves the use of proven existing technology.... but part of me wants us to move away from old technologies and develop something better.... "Philosophical conflict spiral".
This is stupid. At 20 MW per unit this does not have the economies of scale to pay for all the personnel and maintenance required. All NPP require operations, security, radiation protection, and maintenance. These all have a relatively high cost. This is not such a burden on a dual 1000MW unit plant with a 40-200k hourly revenue. This does not pencil out on a 5 x 20 MW plant.
Watch the actual video @7min. Small can do away with some risks, thus less expense to protect the reactor. Also, the interest payments on long to build large reactors have zero payback with scale. Last Energy claims it can build 2 years. Examples: o No 25 mi evac plan necessary for a 20MW reactor, as one might need w a great 1300 MW reactor. US NRC already approved no large scale Evac for Nuscale reactors o East to bury a small reactor, w a small hole in the ground, which adds cheap safety and security. Large holes get expensive exponentially. o Small reactors much easier to disperse shutdown decay heat than big, as the heat path to the outside from the center core is short. A small reactor 20MW is just about passively safe against a melt down without doing extra cooling. It can’t get hot enough in shutdown to make hydrogen which caused the Fukushima accident. Regulators know that too. o Netherlands for instance think the US small army security force on reactors is stupid. It’s especially stupid for a small reactor which really can’t hurt anybody outside the plant. Likely other eastern countries like Poland think the same.
They will naturally produce plutonium as a byproduct mixed into the waste like most other reactors. Turning it into a weapon would require the same level of difficulty as most existing plants -- special chemical separation facilities. In short, these reactors not a good way for plutonium production. There are much more efficient and cheaper ways if that's the goal.
Chemical separation will not yield weapons grade Pu from this reactor, which is why spend fuel from a commercial light water reactor reactor has never been a path to bomb. One would have to do isotope separation as well, in which case it’s easier to dig up uranium from the side of the road.
It's more awesome to use fast reactor technology in nuclear like lead cooled fast reactor because the reprocessing gives you unlimited amount of fuel. The use of same old PWR technology doesn't make sense I think.
@@atomicblender yes that’s key. There’s a great deal of hype around nuclear power new companies, about cost, efficiency, etc, and the only thing matters at all is certification from a regulator. Components already in use for years seems like a smart play, maybe the only play.
![BLACK BAG - Official Trailer [HD] - Only in Theaters March 14](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Du0Xp8WX_7I/mqdefault.jpg)
This is exactly what the industry needs. The technology already exists. The only challenge is to scale it to a degree where it makes economic sense, just like the semiconductor and automotive industry have done. More output also means more experienced engineers and better overall quality along the way.
No we need to stabilize the world so large nuclear reactors can be used. These SMRS all require enriched fuel and some even require isotopes that are bred in other types of reactors. The Americans and Western Europeans want smrs because they can put them below ground. By doing that they think they can continue going to war for resources and keep their grid protected. Smrs also use far too much uranium. We should use the candu reactor only and make peace with our neighbours.
BS in so many ways.... the technology does not exist yet and is not proven. There are massive doubts, that mass production will lead to relevant savings. And Fuel efficiency is about 30% lower, whereas the market for nuclear fuel is about 70 % dominated by Russian based or owned companies. And as you can think, wstern source are actually out of capacity.
It would also be less expensive to mass produce them in a factory instead of doing one-off construction like they do now.
@@geowar20 it is a bad idea. All of these reactors are fuel hogs. In weight they take the same amount of metal/fuel but once you enrich you are throwing material away. Americans only think of the next war they are going to fight and you can bet that if they get all civilian cars on electric and their power generators spread out and buried they will be ready for more war. We should only install CANDU reactors and Sade huge amounts of fissile material.
Lots of diesel for the army and buried power for industry
Unfortunately, block units have been around for 60 years, but outside naval applications have never been used in scale. So I don't see any movement happening
It’s significant that he specifies the over budget and delay problems are unique to the west. Japan for example built over 60 reactors between 1974 and 2009 on budget and on time (typically in less that four years per reactor).
As a marine engineer, this is the way to go. Big container vessels have 80 MW propulsion units. A nice fit for the supplier/user
I've always wondered why there's so much talk about modular reactors being researched and developed. If they are powering ships and subs how can it be that much more difficult to do the same for grid power?
@@justinmyers6737 US NRC is the big enormous barrier for any commercial nuclear anything. Those Navy nukes are not licensed for commercial anything though they’re are perfectly safe designs. So from viewpoint of anti nuclear NRC, they don’t exist.
Ah as always, the unfought Nuclear-startup blabla.
Half of the world forbids the entering of nuclear powered ships. Further those SMR use nuclear material only with 70% the efficiency of regular reactors,ö. Even worse: The market of Nuclear fuels is at around 70% in the hands of Russia. By going nuclear,you will support Russia!
*well,* to be *entirely* fair, the smaller a nuclear reactor is, the more dangerous it is, because it's controllable in less and less points, essentially. In a submarine reactor, one with 9 control rods (1 central and 8 arranged around it), the central rod has 80% of the reactor's power control authority. So I can see why they'd be more dangerous and less commercially licensed
@@matteodelgallo1983 “small … more dangerous”
Cmon. More dangerous than a 3GW thermal reactor w 150 some fuel bundles, center core maybe 3M from ambient temp, spent fuel sitting in the pool, and w MWs of decay heat in a LOCA?
Yes a small reactor might be harder to control at points. But it’s actual threat to the surrounding community from the amount of radioisotope it might dump, and the range it can throw them in some excursion is easily 3-4 orders magnitude lower for this dinky reactor vs large, and the threat for even the large is low. Then, they are going to bury this small plant, because they can when it’s small. More dangerous? The lack of perspective in the nuclear community baffles me sometimes.
“Less commercially licensed”
Not less, never. That’s because 1) the US NRC has never licensed anything new, start to finish until Vogtle. AEC started all the rest.2) the NRC cost structure for new designs is basically, 4 year, a $billion. large or small, more or less same price. Vendors go w large, unsurprisingly.
Using off the shelf technology is a huge plus!
But 20MW is absolutely tiny, and there's several unexplained and concerning things about this idea like what is the fuel expense going to be and what's their energy efficiency.
The SMRs require much higher enriched uranium, and they don't burn the fuel as efficiently. Just more nuclear waste to store for thousands of years.
Imagine putting these in substation plants, to stabilize grids, or in specific places like refineries or steel smelters. 20MW placed in the correct spots might be quite advantageous.
Fuel expense is likely to be as low as regular reactors if they're using LEU fuel assemblies common to AP1000s or such. Energy efficiency will likely be slightly lower, because nuclear efficiency usually favours massive scale. If refueling becomes a matter of changing out entire cores, then delivery of new fueled cores and removal of old cores is weighed against the need for nuclear operators and those elaborate control rooms.
So I'd refine your questions further, and ask one more; Is the same factory that builds these tiny cores also responsible for removal of the hazardous used cores, and disassembly for the removal of the used fuel rods?
@@acmefixer1 The fuel will be too expensive and too many safety issues then. Another startup grifter.
@@acmefixer1 Probably not a thousand years. There are already nuclear plants in existence and many many more in development or being built that are just salivating at the "nuclear waste" because it's the perfect fuel for their reactor and rather than paying for it, people will pay you to take it. It's a win-win.
@grahambennett8151 Chernobyl tech isn't present here. The RBMK design was unique to the Soviet Union. They knew PWRs were safe and reliable, but they didn't want to use "American" tech. Also, Chernobyl didn't have a containment structure. These reactors will be buried underground. Fukushima only happened because of a massive earthquake and tsunami that can't happen in most places.
I'd rather live next to 10,000 nuclear reactors than 1 coal plant
I'd rather live next to 10 million wind turbines, than 10,000 nuclear reactors.
@@BallyBoy95 Would there be any land or steel left to build your house?
@@jewymchoser good point. I'll have to live in a burrow like a hobbit.
@@BallyBoy95 I wouldn’t… that’s where we are planning to store the nuclear waste 😀…
…which has yet to kill a single person. Coal kills 10,000 a day.
Nuclear is scary, but it’s safe.
@@jewymchoser how many people do win turbines kill?
The first reactors built were this small, we started to build bigger reactors for a very good reason - the bigger the plant, the better the efficiency.
If this idea works, we can dispense with massive hogging of space for solar farms or large, unsightly wind farms. The small, modular size means they could be placed next to a place that needs constant power like a web server facility.
Sounds good. I wish them luck. The other issue I'm wondering about is, what is the supply chain for getting 5% enriched uranium? Along with this, is the plan for waste storage.
Supply chain for "standard" 5% enriched uranium is pretty well established with several companies (Orano, Urenco, TVEL, etc.). Fabrication into final fuel assemblies also has several participants (Westinghouse, Framatome, KEPCO, etc.). Long term waste storage is usually the result the individual country's policies, which varies widely.
The Goddamn "supply chain" uranium corporations. And their political clout.
Are why no new...and way better technologies...like thorium ...are being considered.
That's not holding back the Indians and Chinese. The USA will be left in the "Uranium" dust to make money for established and way sh*ttier "legacy technologies".
These reactors are NOT air cooled. They are still water cooled using electric fan driven evaporative coolers.
Instead of the large towers that have nothing to do with Nuclear Power plants. But the, small hat "usual suspect" owned and controlled media have used those towers to "trigger" citizens into Nuclear Power freak outs and idiocy.
The electrical evaporative coolers, help to inject water vapor into the atmosphere, at specific times and locations, for finer control of weather and precipitation.
Come on. Think. Use your brain.
Uranium is "so early 20th Century". The people of the Earth need to move on.
Corporate powers are preventing that. And we all know who the usual suspects that stole the materials, plans and technology from the US are. The small hat "Usual Suspects".
@@atomicblender thats not an answer on the waste...
Breeder Reactors. 😉
@@phil20_20 I dated one of those back in college. Fun when operating on the edge at an equilibrium power level.
Look out if the there is a runaway event or a power/cooling loss resulting in core exposure.. I learned to stay far away from Breeders in the late 1970s. Instant "Gamma Ray toxicity" is always just seconds away.
The big question is what is the cost per megawatt of generation of initial construction and operation compared to a larger standardized reactor? Each reactor is going to require at least two licensed operators per unit, so a large number would require a large # of operators for multiple units.
I think the idea is that after its approved, the initial cost of approval would be shared for the entire design which is the same, the number of operators don't really matter that much, its not salary that's expensive, I mean, not of the operators, but of the lawyers.
It will be interesting to see how that works out. One point about that though is since they are selling a PPA, the customer doesn't take on the risk of the operating costs.
10:54 that's Budapest Hungary, not Romania
It all comes down to economies of scale if new nuclear can get that right it will take off.
The business plan seems like a great idea, so is not wasting time in the US. However, it's still a PWR which means it will be expensive by design. Copenhagen Atomics has the same business plan and also skipping the US who has no interest in energy leadership. However, they are going with a MSR which is inexpensive by design and as long as they separate the reactor vessel from the power conversion side, everything will also be off the shelf equipment. Output temperatures are much higher making industrial heat applications much greater.
Check out Nano Nuclear. Their plan is to deliver nuclear energy
Being a solid-fuelled reactor, it has similar inherent risks to existing ones. Even if they can achieve effective passive cooling, which is far from a certainty, any fault or damage in that system will ultimately lead to a meltdown. Those dots over Australia certainly won’t be realised without the adoption of the incomparably safer reactor configurations that incorporate liquid, or liquid-like, fissile fuel loads which can be dumped from the core into a reliably safe geometry (in terms of both fission and heat).
It’s disappointing to discover that so much effort and cost is being wasted on reactor designs that don’t properly address the most significant safety concern with regard to nuclear energy. Absolute “walk away” safety is a prerequisite for many, and that can never be guaranteed with solid-fuelled reactors.
We’ve had the technology for clean power for the last 60 years but chose not to use it. We should have replaced all coal and gas plants by the 1980s or 1990s with nuclear. Hopefully something like this will help to replace fossil fuel plants
Damn. I was hoping to hear about the use of modular liquid fuel reactors.
Using cheaper, more plentiful and safer liquid Thorium.
Walk away safe. They do not need a large expansion volume, or atmospheric release, if cooling fails. In the the reactor. Or the low percentage, barely "used" fuel rod pools stop circulating.
Uranium reactors boiling water were used because that was "proven technology" in submarines using highly enriched U235 as a fuel. Land reactors used low enrichment U235 and weren't under gigantic volumes of water. Where's the easy technology crossover there?
And it generated lots of plutonium to build Boosted Fission and Thermonuckear weapons.
Any solid fuel nuclear reactor that uses H2O(Water) as it's neutron moderator.
And Water as it coolant is scientific idiocy. Adding more coolant, water, Increases the reaction in an accident situation. Even if you've got a lot of "20 Mule Team Borax" lying around.
Stupid, Stupid, Stupid.
We are beyond that need at this point. And have significantly more knowledge of materials reliability.
Is it active air cooled or passive air cooled ???
5:52; Does it have a turban or a turbine? Really wish they would sort this out....
NRC to Oklo: "An A-frame cabin a containment building does not make; much to learn you still have".
Greezy to internet: “I have no idea what Oklo submitted in their design, but I’ll belief what ever the bureaucrats say and pretend I know what’s up”
Maybe I'm missing something, but this part (~9:35) killed it for me: “..This does introduce some inefficiencies in that instead of only replacing the fuel the entire vessel has to be replaced.” A throw-away vessel each time the fuel needs replacing?
I think the US should have built over 250 reactors like was originally planned
I don't see anything new here because if the goal is faster to deployment and production, it seems to have just as many impediments and hurdles to overcome as the many other nuclear start ups that have many beneficial advantages that using the old technology doesn't. Having said this, any effort to make genuine strides towards a carbon free that consumes less industrial resources (i.e. copper, lithium, rare earths) has to be encouraged and given a chance to prove itself.
No, listen again. It avoids all the usual things that slow down reactors, uses all the long used parts which are long certified, long understood to work. Then, it’s small size allows it to be built w cheap parts, no $150 million custom steel that only a few places can make and then can’t be shipped by truck.
Is it helpful to put a banner on your post that sounds like a military “take over”? No. Bad phrase if you support nuclear. It’s still a battle to win people over to this obvious energy source. Please keep that in mind. Thank you.
There is not enough uranium for conventional reactors at this scale (see Sabine's video). We need to be use more advanced reactors.
That's based on existing mines and the relative lack of reprocessing. There is way more Uranium just here in Australia that's not being explored due to lack of demand there is also likely large deposits in Canada and Russia that's not being dug up. We could also ramp up reprocessing and re-enrichment and develop and deploy more advanced breeder reactors so that we can replace U235 with plutonium or U233.
@@SpencerHHO You didn't watch Sabine's video then. There is just not that much uranium. I am all for the other types of reactors but the old style is not sustainable.
I don't know who sabine is but there certainly is enough uranium for 200 GW of new nuclear. If not, we could just recycle spent fuel and have enough uranium for hundreds of years.
@@vaclavzajac214 ruclips.net/video/0kahih8RT1k/видео.html
@frank13 no, you breed Pu-239 from U-238 which is quite easy.
Don't like the Pressurized in PWR.
“Nuclear” doesn’t explode. Pressure explodes.
Agreed, PWR means it's expensive and has low output temperatures.
As a Canadian, I look at the energy mix from Ontario for instance. For electricity generation 65% of Ontario's energy is nuclear from The Bruce (at 5.6gw the worlds largest nuclear plant) and Darlington and Pickering (they are working on building an SMR in one of those). Now the Bruce reactors were built over a number of years and there is a debate that the 10reactors at Darlington and Bruce will cost $12 and $13.8 billion to refurbish and that instead Ontario should focus on renewables. But in comparison some 2700 wind turbines have been built since 2010 in Ontario (assuming 3-4million a piece) at a cost of aprx $11billion. The total electricity generation by all of the wind turbines is at best 7% of the total generation, and is intermittent.
Also renewables are not zero carbon, and would also require storage (which is also a cost and again not zero carbon). According to Engineering with Rosie on renewable if the world depends on renewables we will need 10,000 terrawatt hours of storage (or 10 petawatts) Sabine Hossenfelder in her videos estimates 1 petawatt hour. But essentially this is far more than what the world currently has in storage which is maybe 34gw in battery and 2.2 tw in pumped hydro. Storage needs to be increased 500fold. This is a long way to go.
Honestly, great points. The storage issue with renewables hasn't really been addressed in a large, scalable way yet. And like you said, the cost to scale it up to the capacity of the existing infrastructure isn't much better than keeping the current CANDUs running. If they proceed with their pressure tube replacements, there's no reason they can't continue.
BS. Why in the world would you need 10k TWh of storage? That's 40% of yearly global demand in 2022.
Pumped hydro, HVDC, and EV vehicle to grid will easily cover the load shifting/storage needed, which is nowhere near 40% of yearly demand.
@@gerryburde5663 ev to grid? How many ev owners are willing to let the 'grid' use their expensive investment as storage (given that it will increase battery degradation) or get in to use their ev and find there is little juice.
The issue of renewables is the intermittency - so storage is needed.
And currently despite all the growth etc 80% of world energy use is fossil, with 8% nuclear 10% hydro and
@@gerryburde5663 In order to transition to renewables such as wind and solar (which are intermittent - sun doesnt shine at night or on cloudy days, the same thing with wind) Actual capacity is quite low. So storage is needed. ruclips.net/video/SuZ3nqzC6a0/видео.html
So while 10petawatts may be on the high side, as likely we might use some heat energy storage, others say at least 1petawatt. Which is still 500x the total amount of existing storage. ruclips.net/video/Q8xsg9iK5yo/видео.html
@@gerryburde5663 I've stated before that all storage methods to cover a 90% loss of renewable output on windless/sunless periods lasting weeks at a time are much more expensive than nuclear power plants. Even at a ridiculously low cost of $100/kWh stored, a gigawatt-week of storage would cost $16.8 Billion - more than a gigawatt nuclear plant - for just a portion of the storage requirement of renewables able to sometimes produce a gigawatt of output.
Copenhagen Atomics have a similar system, using molten Thorium salt, their prototype is slated for 2025 as well.
The modular nature of this idea is a no-brainer. More companies are beginning to move to modular frameworks for obvious reasons.
I like the concept. The one part I would modify is the fuel source. Thorium cannot be used for bombs and spent Thorium requires much shorter storage times. Plus the refinement and availability are much easier and more available.
Changing the fuel source to Thorium means it is now a high tech project (breeder reactor), not a simple project to down scale and mass produce an ordinary reactor (burner reactor).
Fortunately, other companies look at Thorium fuel. My favorite is Copenhagen Atomics.
Thorium reactors are actually uranium reactors, they breed the Th to fissionable U233.
The Candu reactor design can already 'burn' Th as part of its fuel mix.
Thorium along cannot run a reactor. You need enriched uranium mixed in. But using thorium in a molten salt reactor is a great goal.
I like the modular approach, advocated by a few of the low pressure molten salt reactor startups.
The Thorium cycle has a friendlier decay schedule, much better safety than water at 2250 psi, and much hotter output suitable for process heat or thermal storage for peaking loads.
The fast spectrum chloride salt burning mildly reprocessed waste is another winner, needing no moderator.
Nothing to explode is a clear bonus.
MSRs seems to be mostly concerned about material research which should be accelerated as these high temp types show most promise.
Putting potential nuclear spills in the groundwater is a problem .
@@Piccodon The Chinese already have at least two molten salt experimental reactors up and running.
The US has recently approved similar experimental MSRs. The first of these at Abilene Christian University NEXT program is in an advanced state of construction.
We should fairly soon have a handle on issues associated with this reactor type. If there are no show stoppers this should open the way for small modular units in the 50-500MW class within say, ten years.
@3:25 “same type … used in some 300 plants around the world…”
Yes, and same as another 300 naval vessels the last 60 years, mostly PWR.
no new technology is what has plagued the business of nuclear electrical generation. We need reactors that are passively stable.
I agree.
Here is a possible use care.
Take a MAJOR city like NYC. Get a full city block and rip everything down. Then build a police station, fire station and EMT station with EOC (Emergency Operstions Center) in the new building AND PUT A SINGLE SMR (Small Modular nuclear Reactor) in the basement.
This will give you a full emergency response center with its own power supply that can ship its excess power the city grid.
screw that - a filthy nuclear reactor with all the significant risks for only 20 MW. What a joke.
The Arora case mentioned at 15:50 was a rejection by the US regulator, the corrupt NRC which has never approved any U.S. commercial reactor from start to finish. It doesn’t demonstrate how “difficult” it is in general to get regulatory approval.
Please explain how these power plants can operate without having a river or ocean nearby to cool the condenser? Is the plan to have an air cooled condenser? Is the plan to discard the low pressure steam, like they used to do with coal fired steam engines? Running fresh water through a nuclear boiler sounds like a plan for rapid corrosion. You should be aware that efficiency improves as condenser temperature is lowered, and river water or ocean water is usually cooler than surrounding air, which could be below freezing and that would be a disaster if condensate froze.
I thought they said air cooled reactor, again very, very bad idea if its the case. After the Windscale nuclear incident decission was made that air cooled reactors never to be build again. In those days reactors had graphite moderators, maybe good for neutron economy but very bad for safety if paired with air cooling.
@@goranz9446 the design is PWR which means it uses water for moderation, cooling and electricity generation. The difference is that the hot turbine exhaust is cooled by air, not river water. Btw, all modern has cooled reactor designs(which cool the core itself with gas) use a closed cycle, where the gas never leaves the reactor.
@@vaclavzajac214 Yes, but not with air that supports burning little less then oxygen but with noble gass like helium or carbone dioxide. The whole idea is very stupud, making 10 000 small PWR reactors Instead of making fast breeders convert/burn type using piles of spent fuel rods and piles of depleted uranium as fertile material. In that case we maybe wont have to mine uranium for hundreeds of years.
“Explain how these .. operate without .. river ..ocean”
Plenty gas plants operate air cooled. And the biggest US nuclear plant is in the desert outside Phoenix. Looks they plan about 20 air coolers on the top of this 20 MW design.
If they can build this thing fast and as cheap as they think, saving a massive cooling towers, then giving up a few percent efficiency is a no brainer.
@@goranz9446 What? No. It’s a standard PWR water loop, steam secondary, with a dozen or two fan air coolers instead of an expensive tower. Nothing “burns”
Nuclear projects especially ones that are government backed are allways treated as the goose that lays the golden egg. The goose will be captured and forced for decades to produce gold for as long as possible by industrial organisations and regulatory bodies. Very difficult to avoid capture unless you are agile.
The 3 month refueling may be a sticking point as most existing reactors can refuel in 30 days or less.
It is longer than most large reactors, but it is doing it 3-6x less often since it's every 6 years.
@@atomicblender But still, one simple math was not done.
I mean 10k means a lot. But is really a lot?
I understood well 20 MW for this design?
Then is 35 times smaller. 10k/35= 285. And now are 440 reactors, 500 with those already in construction.
So 285 compared with 500 does not seem anymore so impressive. Just above 50 percent increase.
This for the actual production.
But increase in risk, is 20 times greater.
Does it worth it?
@@ehombane the risk doesn't increase 20 times since the design is supposed to be safer than the previous designs but yeah, 20 MW is too small.
@@vaclavzajac214 I assure you that the risk increases.
It is not about the risk on design but in numbers.
We may argue that actually the technology is pretty safe anyway. Just 2 accidents, plus the one at 3 miles Island that was not so bad. But those 2 .. damn we cannot afford too many of them.
My surgeon is witness first hand. He told us about the days when he was an intern. When there was an cancer scheduled it was an actual event. Everybody gathered to watch. Now every single day there are at least three excisions in the same hospital. Sure, there are many other possible causes that are contributing to this dramatic increase. But global increase is 75 percent since 1990. So not even doubled. This is a lot less that the skyrocketing I mention. And we are few hundred km far from the site. Sure we was on the path downwind, so for sure, closer is much worse.
@@ehombane risk is a pretty loosely defined term. Risk might increase in numbers but less power and better safety features means less harm even in case of meltdown. Let me just point out that zero people died from Fukushima radiation and l about 4 000 people have died from Chernobylu. If chernobyl, powerplant with arguably the worst nuclear accident in history, was replaced with coal, it would've killed more people than the accident by air pollution from normal operation. New designs are are at least 3 orders of magnitude safer and risk of large radiation leak is practically zero which means about 1000 times less casualties per energy produced. Also, 75% increase in cancer rate is given by longer age-expectancy, better diagnostics, pesticides and other factors, certainly not from nuclear accidents.
Heres hoping Oklo can do what is necessary to satisfy the NRC and get approval to move forward.
I have to wonder though, is the NRC doing their best to be ethical and are they being genuine in their choice to provide disapproval at this point in time, or are they in actuality biased or partial to the big boys already established in the industry, and simply trying to prevent entry to newcomers???
I don't know anyting about NRC- I don't know if they're genuinely ethical and professional or if they are biased and bought off. Would love to hear from an insider on this if one can be found.
“genuinely”
While the NRC has licensed a weak designs (most never built) and approved many reactors to go critical, they had never approved a U.S. reactor from initial proposal to power, not one until Vogtle 3 flipped on a few months ago, at great cost.
the biggest obstacle is the permitting process.
Will you be doing a video on the BWRX-300 at some point?
GE-Hitachi has gotten several wins lately for the BWRX-300, I'd like to do one soon. Good idea.
While security around a nuclear power plant is mandatory, it's not because of terrorists that steal uranium to make bomb: those plant, and future ones, operates with a core composed mostly by the wrong isotope to make a bomb, and the part that is right is less than 5% at most, while bombs requires an enrichment of 95% or more.
And if think "well they steal it to craft a dirty bomb" I'll answer that there's hospitals for that one, way more accessible and available than a nuclear power plant of any kind.
You're selling this very well I kinda also want my own now! 😂
If you have a few million laying around, you can build one yourself!
Makes no more sense than steam powered automobiles.
At some point the DOE has to contribute constructively rather than being the biggest impediment to progress.
You are confusing DOE with the prior actions of NRC. DOE is supporting licensing activities of new designs in both Canada and the US; it also recently contributed $750 Million to Terra Power, as well as beefing up study of MSRs at the national labs. At least one NRC commissioner (Wright) sounds pro nuclear, recently quoted saying " We must recognize - and I believe this to be true - that successfully achieving these goals will not be possible w/o existing nuclear, new nuclear and advanced nuclear being a part of the generation mix today and going forward. "
This is a better chance for a better future for the world
They can't do that! What will happen to my oil stocks! - Just build them backwards, like Diablo Canyon. 😂
pls, correct me if I'm wrong, but changing the whole vessel wouldn't allow the plant to receive state-of-the-art reactors that can wor with the rest of the plant?
It works with a small reactor vessel because it is light enough to be removed by crane, after disconnecting cooling loops and mechanical support and instrumentation. And it’s buried underground so roof off is straightforward .
Sounds ok but what about all the waste?
Mentioned in the video. Solved every six years. Sheet that, not mentioned at all. Yet. Perhaps later this can be solved?
That decorative light…how much was that?
The 4887.439 tons of spent fuel generated in one year by 10,000 20MW micro reactors can fuel 52 1GW Molten Salt Reactors for 100 years. 940 kg of natural thorium in a Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) can generate 1 gigawatt (GW) of electricity for one year. The 37,112 tons of unused depleted uranium processed to obtain the 4888 tons of enriched uranium can fuel 394 1GW Molten Salt Reactors for 100 years.
I doubt they'll get approval for long term storage of spent fuel in the original reactor vessel due to neutron embrittlement and boric acid corrosion issues.
Those issues arise from the vessel being carbon steel. If they change to stainless it should not be a long term problem, especially with the vessel neutron reflectors/shields seen on new PWR designs.
Europe is currently looking at fast spectrum MSRs....
This is a step backwards.
True. But I think it's more of a "keep what's working" until more advanced designs can be done commercially.
Technology for the sake of technology while making everything too complicated and failure prone is an American engineering fallacy. Technology exists to serve people in a reliable and cost efficient manner. Ask the Japanese.
@timothydevries383 except that, MSRs are simpler technology than nearly all competing technologies, while also being walkaway safe. It is Exponetionally cheaper per watt, safer, and there is no reliance on exotic materials and can even remediate the ones that already exist.
Amazing idea of using existing supply chain componentry.
The other problem with small light water reactors is that their neutron economy is much worse then large ones. The fuel costs for light water reactors in the low 10s of MW range is over 10 times that of Gigawatt scale projects - source Decouple Episode "Will Nuclear Power AI"
While I'm all onboard with this approach, I know its less likely in the US than any other country on Earth. There is far far too much ignorance peddling going on in the states to see an advancement in US energy policy.
One bit of criticism on this presentation was not providing a better explanation as to why putting the reactor underground was safer than on ground level. Common sense might lead us to the same conclusion but a better presentation would detail why that might be true. Now, why is that important? Because as first stated, ignorance peddling is at its height. Better education means more information, not less. We aren't trying to campaign for Congress.
The simple reason for underground placement is protection from aircraft impact, as required of all containment structures, as well as inexpensive shielding.
Yeah, I can see Germany grabbing onto mass-produced SMR's like a drowning man thrown a life preserver.
I think they will prefer to drown assuming they can take all of the EU down with them.
that’s similar to what we were looking to do with Thorium MSR
this is not an msr using thorium, it is a pressurized containment vessel like traditional nuclear plants with meltdown dangers.
@@kirtg1 What's wrong with PWRs?
No, MSR is a completely different concept, kinda the opposite of what they are doing.
Well normal powerplant also have preproduced moduels that they put together, its just a higher number of those modules,... well and a lot of welding.
Well and building a nuclear reactor really don´t take as long time as people tend to believe. A full size GW nuclear reactor can be built in 2-3 years . The issue is really not time, but will.
Passive saftey is standard for all gen III reactors, that is pretty much all reactors that have been newbuild in the west the last 30 years or so. This is really not something new.
Even in a gen II reactor, the operator need to do nothing to activate the active cooling system. Even some gen II reactors have semi passive cooling system.
Perifalation is not really a thing with light water reactors. Specially so with sealed reactors.
To use a light water reactor to make weapon grade plutonium you have to open it up every 3 weeks and swich out fuel. While that sounds like it would be possible in theory. In practical reality you really can´t do it while making fuel.
Reactors like RBMK that was the type used in Chernobyl could extract fuel while operating, making this much simpler.
The idea that you can just make a bomb out of used nuclear fuel is simply incorect. Its one of those, you could do it in theory, but its so horribly complicated, so its just easier to make it from scratch
i clicked on the video being skeptical like "oh, one of those fancy startup techs that overpromise and underdeliver?" but not using new tech and using components from a normal power plants make it actually sounds plausible
This takes up the same amount of space above ground as the GE-Hitachi SMR which will produce 15X the energy and at a cost 20% less, Last may want to work on that.
No chance. The pressure vessel for a 300MWe reactor is hopelessly custom, $150 million if it’s dime, made by only a few mills in the world. Can’t ship it by truck, can’t bury it underground. The 20MW Last Energy PV is right out of ASME tables w hundreds of mills that can make it in a few months, any semi can deliver, and it’s easy to install underground. Projects like the LE design are built in 18 months all the time. GE-H will be 7-10 years, and need a big water supply, above ground big containment.
LE problem is the regulator. They have a shot in E Europe. A small cheap reactor built in two years will turn the world upside down, and many special interests don’t want that to happen, including GE Hitachi.
@16m: “it is unlikely any other regulator is going to be any more forgiving”
That’s a broad sweeping statement in the extreme. Any evidence following? Why, no. The US NRC has well earned its No Reactors Commission nickname. The NRC had not issue initial proposal approval for any of the existing US reactors, until Vogtle 3 came online. Hundreds of reactor proposals have been cancelled over the decades under NRC. There was no ALARA requirement before NRC. The history suggests NRC is unusual throughout the world, not typical. And, Poland is very hungry for reliable clean power. Their populace will not tolerate intermittent RE games raising rates over 30cnt Euro per kWh as in Germany, becoming dependent on Russian gas or any other idiocy.
I think the background music is gonna kill the project
My initial thought with a reactor the small is what is the labor efficiency
if there is an international organization regulating this, why isn’t there just one set standard, and manufacturers just have to surpass those standards.
making the economy of scale that much easier to reach
There have are currently several ongoing attempts to do exactly this through WNA and IAEA and others. The problem is that every country has their own regulator and their own way of doing things. Would one country accept the rules of another being imposed on them? Who decides? Would the US NRC accept design decisions and requirements from Kazakstan or South Africa or any other country?
@@atomicblender It would be a shame if they all figured out about this special organizing body designed and funded to do exactly this sort of thing with their headquarters in New York.
I believe Alger Hiss, that dead Commie bastard, called it the United Nations. Got himself hanged for his efforts.
This kind of mindset is exactly why NRC can't approve new reactor designs
@@vaclavzajac214 I am sure that it has far more to do with the unwillingness to reduce production capacity of weapons grade radioactive materials.
Not that I can fault them for holding such a position considering the costs it took to simply build up the current capacity. Hopefully in the future the weapons grade will come exclusively from military operated reactors, and civilian reactors can be safer more cost effective Thorium reactors.
Great info! Sounds about like size of a Nuclear Power plant on a modern nuclear submarine. Hope the succeed.
this is among the least desirable outcomes for me but you did a good job laying it out
SMR's are a welcome addition, however, if done properly, this will put much more pressure upon our societies for dealing with the nuclear waste that is bound to be created.
There are hundreds, thousands of hazards to human health. Nuclear spent fuel is not one of them.
"Will be built underground" then shows footage of SMR getting built from outside in....
20 MWe or 20 MWt? (20 MW Electrical output or thermal output)?
Looked up on Wikipedia, it mentions a lot of detail on the company, it is 20 MWe, which is quite impressive for the size.
@@LFTRnow most impressive is 6 year non stop run time, 2 yr build and 4 mo install.
This is cool. How do I get involved in promoting renewable energy?
This clip was about possibly low cost nuclear energy.
Huh ?
When the first NPPs in were built in Germany teh dangers were discussed. We in Germany were told that there was no real danger because the NPPs were safe and a reall big accidents would only happen once in 20,000 years. Well, that was for one NPP. Now we have much more. My guess is about 1000 on the planets. So we all can count on a meltdown every 20 years give or take. With 10,000 NPPs more we can will have 11 times more NPPs and therefore we can count on a meltdown every 21 months ans about 24 days.
That is really wonderful because it will accelerate evolution due to much more radioactivity. So, happy radiant future with all the mutants to come!
The world needs 10,000 big reactors
As a former quality control nuclear power plant inspector, This modular reactor STILL produces waste that has nowhere to go and lasts deadly for THOUSANDS of years.
Fluid dynamics, pipe size matters! Large reactors are efficient because they are large, using large pipes. Basic physics. Uranium at 5% that is mostly sourced from Russia and that is a supply issue. Large CANDU style reactors make more sense since they can run on low grade Uranium and can manage refuelling on the fly. SMRs are more for Silicon Valley glossy brochured investor schemes than a practical economic solution.
It’s funny how the original complaint about going green is it’s too expensive. Now 10,000 reactors - why not try “Liquid Air.” You get the same thing, except it’s cheaper - cleaner and less litigious. And the kicker no waste and once a plant gets old it can be recycled !!!
So no thorium or molten salt? 🧐
Imagine that simply for building cars Elon say production is hard. Now multiply the complexity times nuclear. 😳
Great dream but a dream nonetheless!
The concept is great but there is a long road from concept to reality and I could already see many things that needs to be improved or modify the get there. One of the most obvious is to reduce the size of actual reactors to fit the model. Not only it needs to be smaller but it also needs to be economical to build and operate and this is not a small task.
Another problem I see is to build it in the US and install it in Europe. Two points: First it will be expensive to build in US and it will be hard to find the necessary personnel to do the job. Second, if you think this is the hardest problem, wait till you try to get the necessary permits in Europe. It would be hard today to get them but it will be even harder to complete that task in the future with the geopolitical changes that we are facing at the moment.
What a brilliant concept. Instead of using a single six cell 66 amp car battery to start a car, we going to use thousands button wrist watch batteries for the same purpose. Not to mention the existing piles of spent nuclear fuel, now adding more to it, instead of breeding new from it. Everything went wrong in nuclear industry.
What about wind and Solar?
The navy has done this for years
Not that cheap and fast as planned here by Last Energy but yes navy has built hundreds of small reactors.
Isn't U 235 limited supply?
Not for hundreds of years
That's like 100x 2GW-plants that start making power after one year each. Each reactor can run for 6 years.
10000 reactors x100 million dollars each = 1000 billion = one trillion dollars at 11:44
@@volta2aire the reactors can run for longer than 6 year, they just need a new RPV (stupid idea imo) and 1 trillion dolars is a small price to pay considering how much electricity they can produce.
So the nastiest and most popular nuclear reactors are LWR, which says these guys are ruling out LFTR and CANDO both of which have considerable advantages.
Don't you dare say anything bad about PWRs. LFTRs are still experimental and won't be available before first fusion tokamaks(at least 50 years) with too many disadvantages for too little advantages. CANDUs are nice but their overnight cost is too high and it looks like no new CANDUs are going to be built.
“nastiest”
Commercial LWR never killed public anywhere ever. Has a vast record now. You want to chuck it aside to run something never proved commercially anywhere, never proved any advantages commercially.
@@Nill757 There have apparently been some 100 nuclear accidents since Chernobyl, all in LWR reactors. Check this snippet before I offer additional comment: The worst nuclear accident to date is the Chernobyl disaster which occurred in 1986 in Ukraine. The accident killed approximately 30 people directly[22] and damaged approximately $7 billion of property.[citation needed] A study published in 2005 by the World Health Organization estimates that there may eventually be up to 4,000 additional cancer deaths related to the accident among those exposed to significant radiation levels.[23] Radioactive fallout from the accident was concentrated in areas of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. Other studies have estimated as many as over a million eventual cancer deaths from Chernobyl.
Now these numbers differ dramatically from your ill informed tripe. LWR are and accident waiting to happen and they produce more long lived waste than other types. Learn something before you shoot your mouth off, or at the very least check the facts you want to present. Because you type words, they do not become fact.
“Tackling the main issue that has plagued the nuclear industry for decades, hugh upfront costs…”
No. If one listens to the CEO, the main issue is drastic over regulation in the US, led by the industry, which switched years ago to a “safety” business instead of a power business. So, a constant cost of a $billion to certify any design, drove the industry into building huge reactors, which naturally has all kinds of supply chain problems.
The NRC for instance demanded changes to the new Vogtle design, *after* the reactor was approved. Also, the NRC regularly ships staff abroad, so there is nowhere in Europe where the hand of the NRC won’t be felt.
Last Energy has a wonderfully sound and inexpensive reactor design which would revolutionize the energy industry. Seems unlikely they can get past the main gate, the regulator.
You mentioned in a different thread that there arent any Chernobyl reactors. There are. 8 are still in operation but are being shut down between 2024 and 2034. 8 others including 3 at Chernobyl were still in operation until 2021.
@@namename9998 “there are”
There were several Soviet built reactors using the so called RBMK design from the 1970s. The Chernobyl reactor accident 1986 was one of those.
The gross flaw in the RBMK design was its inherent “positive feedback”, where in dome situations, increasing the reactor power intentionally cause it to be naturally more reactive, and it runs away. All other commercial reactors have negative feedback. After the accident, all the remaining RBMKs were heavily modified to eliminate the condition, as documented by the IAEA. There are 8 RBMKs left, all in Russia, which are modified.
I voted by relocating(retired) within 5 miles of a nuclear power plant that will make the remainder of my life comfortable and affordable.
Chernobyl has great affordable lots available!
Can it melt down ???
Once again, giving nukes a glowing recommendation.
Submarines have been using them for decades. Compact and powerful. I do prefer low-pressure ones. Let's hope molten salt and thorium come to the party soon. Production line and modular parts would make sense. Sadly, less than 10% of current fuel rod fuels are converted into energy, with the other 90% wasted. Mass storage of wind and solar, as proposed by AMBRI, may be the answer. Molten Salt as electrolyte, Calcium as anode, and Antimony as cathode. A big insulated box with hot elements that cannot mix.
Make it 20,000 and electric vehicles will have a chance...
Not a single one in Venezuela, expected
They have been shooting at transformer stations, what will happen if they do the same to these, is it really ultra safe?
Ink jet cartridge of the nuclear industry.
Why are small reactors not automatic?
Sounds like the Chernobyl Design: no containment building.
Part of me loves the use of proven existing technology.... but part of me wants us to move away from old technologies and develop something better.... "Philosophical conflict spiral".
Great, another plan. I was just thinking we don't have enough plans.
Uranium or Thorium?
This is stupid. At 20 MW per unit this does not have the economies of scale to pay for all the personnel and maintenance required. All NPP require operations, security, radiation protection, and maintenance. These all have a relatively high cost. This is not such a burden on a dual 1000MW unit plant with a 40-200k hourly revenue. This does not pencil out on a 5 x 20 MW plant.
Watch the actual video @7min. Small can do away with some risks, thus less expense to protect the reactor. Also, the interest payments on long to build large reactors have zero payback with scale. Last Energy claims it can build 2 years.
Examples:
o No 25 mi evac plan necessary for a 20MW reactor, as one might need w a great 1300 MW reactor. US NRC already approved no large scale Evac for Nuscale reactors
o East to bury a small reactor, w a small hole in the ground, which adds cheap safety and security. Large holes get expensive exponentially.
o Small reactors much easier to disperse shutdown decay heat than big, as the heat path to the outside from the center core is short. A small reactor 20MW is just about passively safe against a melt down without doing extra cooling. It can’t get hot enough in shutdown to make hydrogen which caused the Fukushima accident. Regulators know that too.
o Netherlands for instance think the US small army security force on reactors is stupid. It’s especially stupid for a small reactor which really can’t hurt anybody outside the plant. Likely other eastern countries like Poland think the same.
And just where do you think you will find the fuel .
Will these produce the plutonium for nuclear weapons?
They will naturally produce plutonium as a byproduct mixed into the waste like most other reactors. Turning it into a weapon would require the same level of difficulty as most existing plants -- special chemical separation facilities. In short, these reactors not a good way for plutonium production. There are much more efficient and cheaper ways if that's the goal.
Chemical separation will not yield weapons grade Pu from this reactor, which is why spend fuel from a commercial light water reactor reactor has never been a path to bomb. One would have to do isotope separation as well, in which case it’s easier to dig up uranium from the side of the road.
It's more awesome to use fast reactor technology in nuclear like lead cooled fast reactor because the reprocessing gives you unlimited amount of fuel. The use of same old PWR technology doesn't make sense I think.
“New novel design”
No, Last Energy has a radically traditional light water PWR design, with no new tech and no new parts.
New approach to a traditional design?
@@atomicblender yes that’s key. There’s a great deal of hype around nuclear power new companies, about cost, efficiency, etc, and the only thing matters at all is certification from a regulator. Components already in use for years seems like a smart play, maybe the only play.