I'm not a nuclear engineer but an electrical engineer but I can do math and I can look at the economics. I just don't see much hope for small module reactors. Any of them that use a fabrication of fuel that is not commercially available right now to me is going to be very expensive UP the front. The only real hope nuclear is to make it less expensive than or equivalent inexpense Coal. Factoring in 100 year life plus a high capacity factor of 90% plus might make nuclear cheap enough versus the front costs to regular commercial reactors of a large size of about gigawatt. Westinghouse AP1000 megawatt reactor seems too expensive. https://jackdevanney.substack.com/ == If you want the public to support nuclear, make it cheap
Thanks for the comment, Brian. You're right - SMRs are currently too expensive to be commercially viable unless cost is not the most important thing - like in nuclear submarines or remote locations. They hope to lower the cost by ramping up volume, but which comes first - the chicken or the egg? The cost has to be reasonable before they'll get enough orders to get any volume.
On full scale nuclear, like the AP1000, a large amount of the cost has been because of the bureaucratic red tape - that is changing, and I'm hopeful. Jack Devaney is a bit of a pessimist, IMO.
Al Christie presents good facts about nuclear power. That is different from writers who have little or no experience in nuclear power. They describe a future that is far from what experience has shown to be practical and safe, like the whole world on nuclear power in 50 or 100 years, and nuclear power saving the world from the supposed pollutant, man-made carbon dioxide. I worked in commercial nuclear power in the USA and Switzerland (where I learned a lot). Also learned a lot from the French nuclear power program. Later, I had the privilege to get to know the hands-on pioneering experts in fast breeder reactors. Bill Gates and others didn't listen to them about the incompetence and the anti-advanced-nuclear-power bias embedded in the DOE by Obama's Science Advisor, John Holdren, an acquaintance of mine since 1970.
I'm not a nuclear engineer but an electrical engineer but I can do math and I can look at the economics. I just don't see much hope for small module reactors. Any of them that use a fabrication of fuel that is not commercially available right now to me is going to be very expensive UP the front. The only real hope nuclear is to make it less expensive than or equivalent inexpense Coal. Factoring in 100 year life plus a high capacity factor of 90% plus might make nuclear cheap enough versus the front costs to regular commercial reactors of a large size of about gigawatt. Westinghouse AP1000 megawatt reactor seems too expensive. https://jackdevanney.substack.com/ == If you want the public to support nuclear, make it cheap
Thanks for the comment, Brian. You're right - SMRs are currently too expensive to be commercially viable unless cost is not the most important thing - like in nuclear submarines or remote locations. They hope to lower the cost by ramping up volume, but which comes first - the chicken or the egg? The cost has to be reasonable before they'll get enough orders to get any volume.
On full scale nuclear, like the AP1000, a large amount of the cost has been because of the bureaucratic red tape - that is changing, and I'm hopeful. Jack Devaney is a bit of a pessimist, IMO.
Al Christie presents good facts about nuclear power. That is different from writers who have little or no experience in nuclear power. They describe a future that is far from what experience has shown to be practical and safe, like the whole world on nuclear power in 50 or 100 years, and nuclear power saving the world from the supposed pollutant, man-made carbon dioxide. I worked in commercial nuclear power in the USA and Switzerland (where I learned a lot). Also learned a lot from the French nuclear power program. Later, I had the privilege to get to know the hands-on pioneering experts in fast breeder reactors. Bill Gates and others didn't listen to them about the incompetence and the anti-advanced-nuclear-power bias embedded in the DOE by Obama's Science Advisor, John Holdren, an acquaintance of mine since 1970.