Comment by _trampeltier
Comment by _trampeltier 8 hours ago
This came up several times the last few weeks, but never stayed on the front for long. Also no comments.
I guess soon the west has to copy chinas tech.
Comment by _trampeltier 8 hours ago
This came up several times the last few weeks, but never stayed on the front for long. Also no comments.
I guess soon the west has to copy chinas tech.
This is US tech that China is copying. We could have done this at anytime in the last 60 years. The blocker isn't technology, its scientifically uninformed politics.
> soon the west has to copy chinas tech
Thorium MSRs don't make sense for the Americas, Europe or Australia. We have plenty of uranium.
Nuclear is receiving solid research backing in both America and China. (India is playing too. Austrlia is having an identity crisis.) Our different geologies mean there will probably be one solution for China, India and North Africa, on one hand, and the rest of the world, on the other hand.
I don't think Australia is having an identity crisis. There won't be research backing from Australia as the Nuclear agenda one party is pushing is essentially a cover story for replacing antique coal plants with gas plants. A genuine Nuclear plan for Australia would include realistic timelines and budgets, and use of other renewables to replace coal plants that are failing today while meeting climate targets. And meeting climate targets is important, because if we don't care about them then coal and gas will remain cheaper than Nuclear for Australia due to having large reserves.
> I don't think Australia is having an identity crisis
That was tongue in cheek. It's being indecisive. I guess that's conserved across the Anglosphere.
The cost of the fuel is less than 0.1% of the cost of running a NPP. The cost of the fuel has almost nothing to do with the economics of nuclear power. And considering a liquid fueled reactor makes heat in the 900C range and a AP1400 makes heat in the 300C range, they aren't really substitutes for each other. The amount of incorrect information in this thread is truly shocking. For example, you can make synthetic fuel from a LFTR, you can't from a BWR or a PWR. That might be a valuable feature, don't you think.
> cost of the fuel has almost nothing to do with the economics of nuclear power
Who said this?
> considering a liquid fueled reactor makes heat in the 900C range and a AP1400 makes heat in the 300C range, they aren't really substitutes for each other
Nobody said this either.
There are more reactor designs in the world than LFTR, PWR and BWR, particularly if we're talking at the demonstration scale like this reactor.
I don't know of a production NPP that isn't a PWR or BWR online today. One could exist but it would be very very old.
Breeding is a technology looking for a business case.
It's more expensive than just using fresh uranium in current market conditions. It's a way from keeping future uranium shortages from making nuclear power more expensive; it's not a way to make nuclear cheaper than it currently is.
It also apparently provides a way to make reactors that don’t depend as much on water so they don’t all have to be near the coast.
This would allow Western China to also develop reactors to help underpin their renewable and coal energy.
> The interest in MSR technology and Thorium breeding did not disappear however. China's nuclear power production relies heavily on imported uranium,[10] a strategic vulnerability in the event of i.e. economic sanctions. Additionally, the relative lack of water available for cooling PWRs west of the Hu line is a limiting factor for siting them there.
> also apparently provides a way to make reactors that don’t depend as much on water so they don’t all have to be near the coast
Non-water microreactors broadly fall into two categories: ones using a different moderator, most commonly sodium, a sodium salt or helium; and those using heat pipes. Most microreactor designs don’t use water.
Nuclear plants don't need more water than a coal plant of the same power, they both use the same steam turbine with water as cold source.
Emphasis on current market conditions. Relations with uranium mining countries and environmental opposition to uranium mining could shift conditions.
The truth is that nuclear power is not that financially attractive at the present and would the price of uranium rise enough that breeders would become economically viable most countries would just stop bothering with nuclear power altogether.
The cost of nuclear power is almost entirely capex and financing, not opex. Uranium input cost for nuclear power plants is 0.5c/kWh. With breeders you can divide that by about 100.
At least as of a couple years ago nuclear costs just a little more than solar plus storage and that’s not stopping anyone heh.
> The truth is that nuclear power is not that financially attractive
Let me fix that for you: "The truth is that nuclear power is not that financially attractive in the bureaucratic high cost litigious Anglo-sphere". And that's pretty much all infrastructure these days, unfortunately.
They highlight less the advantages from breeding, than other advantages of the molten salt design, like not needing a lot of cooling water, which allows this reactor to operate in the Gobi desert, the possibility of replacing the fuel without halting the reactor and various safety features.
> other advantages of the molten salt design, like not needing a lot of cooling water
This advantage is conserved by all non-water moderated reactor designs.
Nuclear reactors don't need a particularly big amount of cooling water.
The thermodynamic cycle needs a cold source though, and it's most commonly water. This doesn't depend on the reactor design and this is equally as true of coal plants.
As long as you are making electricity out of a thermodynamic cycle, you need a heat source (be it a flame or a nuclear reaction) and a cold source.
There is no business case for basic research, but if you stop basic research long enough you will have no business. The United States and its allies seem to have completely forgotten this.
Bell Labs also served to maintain positive perceptions of the monopoly. Unix was famously developed despite the knowledge that AT&T would not be able to offer it as an independent product.
The fuel cost of a NPP has almost no impact on the NPP's operational expenses and a LFTR (like all liquid fuel designs) is a far safer design. Nobody in the energy industry has talked about the fuel cost in nuclear in 50 years. It isn't even a consideration when comparing designs. Waste volume, safety, politics, and construction labor costs are the factors which are considered (also temp of the heat maybe).
> in current market conditions.
That is, as long as we don't build more nuclear power plants.
If you want to increase nuclear power adoption, then you're not going to stay in “current market conditions” for long.
Reducing the energy sector to pure business would probably work in the 1990s, but not now, when countries are afraid of strategic dependence on potentially hostile suppliers.
Uranium isn't as ubiquitous as, say, natural gas, and stockpiling it comes with a big heap of physical problems. I can definitely see countries spending on more expensive technology if it comes with more energy security.
I mean we're already doing that in many avenues. Solar being the most obvious. The only functioning solar manufacturing plants in the US are Chinese-owned and are only here to take advantage of subsidies.
Plenty has been learned by the US/West from copying their approach to agriculture, robotics in factories, mining, drones, etc. Have you seen their electromagnetic catapult technology?? That stuff seems like its from the space-age! There's even plenty of tech that we can't really explain like the all-moving wingtips on the new J-50s. (and yes, I'm avoiding talking about their supersonic cruise missiles)
Rickover was breeding with Thorium at Shippingport in the 1950’s. What China did is not new