The most frustrating part about the Three Mile Island accident is that the automatic systems would have prevented the meltdown, but the operators suppressed those actions due to their misinterpretation of the conflicting information.
Remember in "the simpsons" that homer's plan whenever there is a big security problem is to just throw water into the control panel so that there is a shortcircuit and the automatic emergency system takes the control of the nuclear plant😂😂😂. When i was a kid i didn't understand how he had so much luck. Now I realise it is thanks to the engineer who designed the safety system😂
To me, the most frustrating thing about the Three MIle Island incident is how it has created generations of "The sky is falling!" panic about nuclear power. There have been fewer deaths from nuclear power, worldwide, than in too many single dam failures, some chemical plant leaks, and many ferry sinkings. The deaths from nuclear power are not even a speck of dust on the graph of deaths from coal power generation.
If only the entire world focuses on how to mine deeper efficiently and faster to bolster the global production of the cleanest energy source possible which is geothermal
"One leading theory is that his stomach blocked the view of the control panel" I wonder if this is why the creators of the Simpsons decided Homer Simpson should be a safety inspector at a nuclear power plant.
Pretty much everyone who talks about Onkalo, the Finnish nuclear waste storage, misses one VERY crucial factor: It is built in a Craton. A craton is part of earths crust and is always going to be the oldest due to the way it is formed. Craton is twice as thick and has long tendrils that extend deep in the magma. They are not really like plates, but more like islands floating in a sea of rock.. They are lighter in density so they float on top of everything. What this means is that they are extremely stable formations, with no volcanic activity, no earthquakes. They are solid lumps of gneiss and granite, the bedrock is 4 billion years old and may even be here when the sun devours the Earth. If there is anything permanent in this ball of ours, it is the cratons. Other crust formations may push them around, for ex Baltic Shield was one located near where South Africa is now, just pushed up north but has remained intact. This is why parts of Finland and Sweden can build safe storages in the bedrock, they sit partially on top of the Baltic Shield. You drill a hole in it and it will be there, millions of years from now without any additional maintenance. Other cratons in the world are for ex north-east Canada and south-west Australia. Those locations are perfect for storing stuff for hundreds of thousands of years. They are also excellent for any kind of caves and storage space, Finland uses it for national defence, for ex there is a bomb proof second city under Helsinki that can withstand a nuclear blast that can house 600 000 people. Finland and Sweden dominate underground excavation equipment market, not really a surprise after knowing what the bedrock is like here.. We could build Moria here, several times over.
Molten salt has fundamental challenges that haven't been addressed and are generally glossed over in videos like this, and it goes far beyond "not ready for commercialization". With existing reactors, all of the nasty fission products are hermetically contained by the zircalloy cladding on the solid fuel rods. This lets us manage the waste safely and economically. We park it in a pool of water for a few months while the short-lived isotopes decay away, then the fuel rods get cool enough for dry cask storage, where they can sit for 100+ years without bothering anyone (you can walk next to a dry cask w/o any risk). Dry casks are big concrete things that don't need any electricity or maintenance other than basic monitoring and security (is it still there? Is it cracked? Is anyone actively drilling into it? OK, great, back to sleep), which is why many nuclear plants decide keep all of the waste they generate during their 60 year operational life, at ... an on-site parking lot inside their existing security perimeter (it's a tiny volume of material). People obsess about 30,000 year storage, but the reality is that the vast majority of the radioactivity is released within the first 100 years and the danger beyond that point is far less significant, and thus, easier to manage. Fuel reprocessing gets easier when all but two of the radioactive elements are gone (Sr and Cs). If global civilization is destroyed to the point where we can't monitor a handful of unpowered dry casks, then the hunter gatherers living in the detritus of civilization will have bigger problems to deal with than a few mildly radioactive fuel rods that didn't get their UN-sponsored pictograph explaining that radiation=bad. For example 9 degC of climate change is a far bigger burden to future hunter-gatherer tribes than anything we could do with our nuclear waste. Now imagine that the fuel is a molten salt. Fission products contain dozens of different radioactive elements. Some are solids that precipitate out of the salt. Others are solids that dissolve in the salt. Others are liquids. Others are gasses the bubble out of the salt and must be captured. In particular, Xenon-131 is a dangerous short-lived gaseous isotope that's tricky to capture. So we just "scrub the fission products from the fuel salt"... um, ok. That "scrubbing" is a chemical reprocessing plant, and the only examples we have of doing this are massive sprawling facilities that cost many billions of dollars and are THE source of the vast majority of the difficult to handle nuclear waste problems. Hanford. Chelyabinsk. It's an inherently difficult problem. Every chemical reagent becomes contaminated with radioactive isotopes, generating large volumes of low-level waste, much of it in liquid form. Every piece of equipment becomes low-level waste. Most of the processes have to be operated robotically. It's then difficult / expensive to maintain the now-radioactive machinery or to fix problems. Oh, and there's a near 100% overlap with the technology needed to extract weapons grade Plutonium for a bomb program, so there's inherent proliferation concerns with commercializing any form of "fuel scrubbing". It's also illegal in the US, so you have to get the law changed. None of this is easy, technically or politically, yet it gets hand-waived down to a single "scrub the fission products" sentence while the trivial challenges with solid fuel rods are portrayed some kind of disadvantage. Update: while my post addresses the molten fuel salt designs referenced in the video, several of the comments underneath have pointed out that there are interesting solid fuel designs that use molten salt as a coolant, such as Berkley's PB-FHR project (design studies; not hardware). I find these designs quite intriguing, especially their claims of fully passive decay heat management, which addresses what I view as the hard problem of nuclear safety. From digging through Berkeley's PDFs, one of their biggest remaining challenges seems to be that their coolant salt breeds Tritium when exposed to neutron radiation, which it absolutely will be inside a reactor core. I skimmed extensive discussions on methods to sequester the resulting tritium before it can work its way into structural metals and make them both embrittled and radioactive. That's not great, but it seems much closer to becoming a practical reality than molten fuel salt designs. And it attacks an important problem. There's a company named Kairos working on a commercial design, but they have almost no public info that I can find. Best of luck to them.
Salt has a higher temperature and it requires much better materials and steel, otherwise the reactor will quickly deteriorate. Well, imagine that the steel after hardening is kept at a temperature of about 300 degrees so that its internal stresses disappear and it becomes softer. And when using salt, the operating temperature can be above 300 degrees.
Great encapsulation of just one of the problems with nuclear energy! I see nuclear energy as a very poor expediency while we develop energy storage (batteries) that will make renewables the predominant energy source on the planet.
@@itsmatt2105 Except that batteries now are still decades or centuries away from being viable sources of energy through renewables, considering that they would have to replace coal/oil/nuclear as baseline energy production for the grid. That's not even taking into account the limited geographical applications of renewables, the environmental destruction from material sourcing, energy cost for cooling the batteries, and complications with recycling the batteries that make them extremely inefficient at scale. Nuclear is definitely the most efficient system in terms of energy density per cost and safety for baseline power grid loads when you consider the engineering designs of gen 3 and 4 reactors. SMR's and microreactors are going to be the standard by the end of the 21st century.
@@itsmatt2105 Until some mega genius invents a battery that can safely store a small nuclear bomb's worth of energy in a space no bigger than an energy drink can i'm afraid renewables will never be a replacement for the energy density of nuclear power.
Being in liquid form does make reprocessing a lot easier though. Because those solid fuel reactors only "burn" about 1% of the fuel: a molten salt reactor may be able to dramatically reduce the amount of material handling. My guess in on the order [of] 90% (since you are moving the same material more than once to some extent). I agree that the non-proliferation treaty is a significant barrier. With solid fuel it is a lot easier to audit the controlled substances by counting pellets. Liquid fuel is not really "countable".
The most frustrating part of the fukushima disaster isnt just that the four reactors were built on a fault line on the pacific side (most at risk of tsunami) of japan, its that the reactor was built from a design meamt for the midwest united states where tornados are common, and thus generators are safest underground beneath the building. Not safe for a place that is prone to earthquakes and at risk of flooding from anticipated tsunamis. Managerial and architectural neglegence is what ultimately caused the fukushima disaster, that's what made it so vulnerable. it was working class heroes that responded to it, and they will probably never be adequately recognized
It's not even just that the design was not suitable. It's that it was 100% known and they were told about it every step along the way, but they ignored it and actively covered up any mistakes and accidents.
“Boss the fastest way is pump sea water nearby to spray the reactor” "sea water corrodes the reactor! Our company can't afford that lost, think something else" "but Boss-" kaboom
This is the main reason we are opposed to nuclear in all forms. We don't trust any humans with it. The people who designed and built it don't live next to it when it fails.
@grahambennett8151Irresponsibility is our "original sin" as humans. What's scary, is we are already way past the point of no return in the "West" and there are no "good" outcomes for this situation. When guilty systematically are left unpunished, the entire system becomes guilty. The entire society is running out of time to right their wrongs, because the judgement day feels like it's happening, like yesterday.
yea one of the most heroic things of the disaster was the workers salvaging car batteries from the flooded out parking lot and hooking them up in series/parallel to actually get a cooling pump back online, sadly it was too late:(
Dry storage casks are not dangerous. One of the most famous examples of just how safe those things are had the testers ram it with an entire TRAIN, and it barely budged. They then proceeded to drop that same cask from several hundred feet, and set it so that it hit the ground with the corner(aka the point of most likely failure), and nothing happened to it(or it was drop test first followed by train ramming, not sure, but point still stands). Those things are literally the safest things humanity has ever designed.
Absolutely this, disappointed at Real Engineering for not considering the actual engineering reality here. Stored nuclear waste has never harmed anyone. Not only are the storage casks extremely safe as @maxwyght1840 describes, but also the material itself is not that dangerous. The radioactivity of nuclear waste decays exponentially: so within a thousand years it'd be safe enough to hold it in your hand (with gloves on, it's still chemically bad for you). By comparison fossil fuels kill millions every year due to air pollution. Every tonne of uranium produces 13Kg of high level waste which is safely contained and stored. The same amount of energy from coal releases 600Kg of mercury, which it throws into the air and leeches into water ways from ash piles. Radioactive waste will be largely safe in a few thousand years, mercury will be poisonous forever and it notoriously bioaccumulates up the food chain. People perceive that nuclear waste is very dangerous .. but the reality is that it's actually the safest form of energy waste we have. It doesn't matter that it's quite toxic, it's safely contained and it is containment that *actually* matters here.
And a big portion of those casks are filled with contaminated PPE and medial waste not spent fuel. We'll still need them even if we start recycling fuel.
Ocean dumping too is very safe. Divers have taken Geiger counters down there and didn't get any reading outside of waste barrels from the 1950s worse than an airplane, only on the soil directly below it (but only for a few inches out).
What hasn't been mentioned in this video is... One safety failure at 3 Mile Island was the control room lights were only connected to the switches and not the actual valves in the pipework. So when an Operator selected a switch to close a vent valve, the control panel showed it as "Closed" but the valve failed to move. Therefore the Operators had no way of knowing the real position of the vent valves. What should have been the design, was the control panel lights should be connected directly to the valves and machinery that its display represents
wait what... how... what retard thought that was a good idea? having direct connection is one of the most basic safety features you can have on any system.
RU-vid doesn't have appropriate reaction buttons for this so I'll verbalise it... WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK MAN!!! I work in rail safety and that sort of crap was designed out a century ago. Modern Computer Based Interlockings show 3 primary indications, effectively green or red, and white for when field objects are at variance with operator inputs with a few more to indicate specific failure modes.
@@coreyw427 But not a freaking nuclear reactor. The manual for it literally had a section on that issue, where they told the operators to use a thermometer and run up to the valve and check the temp before and after it, to determine if it was stuck.
4:50 I would like Real Engineering to do a video on these "dangerous interum storage facilities" like dry cask storage. You may find it to be more nuanced than simply calling them dangerous.
@@ddopson if i remember it correctly, kyle hill made a video about nuclear waste storage and how safe it actually is. Let me tell you I'd make an entire bunker out of these dry casks (with nuclear waste in it), that's how safe those things are.
They are not dangerous. Waste has not effected the environment in any measurable manner. Of course, the real issue is that we don't have a _long-term_ solution for nuclear waste. We don't know what will happen to it in the hundreds or thousands of years ahead when plates and continents are shifting. This is a problem that Finland(or another country around there, I forget) is working on.
The above ground containers that hold nuclear waste are extremely safe to the point where the people who designed it can be seen hugging the containers full of the stuff because they are so confidant in its design
Guy that invented adding lead to car fuel drunk lead to show it's not harmful (he knew that's a lie). He was very sick for few years, and never fully recover, but he "prooved" his point and whole world was severily poisoned for 100 years by leaded fuel. He earned a lot of money tho, and GM even more.
@@ynemey1243 there is literally a video of a train hitting one of these casks and the train lost. Also, we take countless radiation surveys around the casks and find they are no danger to anyone near them
Its a slight shame you didn't mention the UK's funding of Rolls Royce's SMR project , a government funded SMR project like you suggested. Rolls Royce also already have large factories and a huge employee base, plus they're a trusted name for customers.
Maybe they weren't included because of not keeping up in the race. Their website only shows rendered images and not much of how they will going to achieve technical challenges. There are many "partially" government funded SMR projects, not much of them will going to make it to the finish line without more stable investment.
My wife's grandfather was the vp of electrical generation at met ed when tmi happened. I inherited all of his engineering related items he saved throughout his career and by far the coolest thing is his documentation on the melt down. The transcripts from his debrief with the NRC are brutal. What has always confused me is the mystery aspect of the event. The maintenance supervisor knew exactly what happened and what had unfortunately already resulted from the loss of feed water.I can tell you this. He was literally the first point of contact and it took him roughly 40 minutes to arrive on site and the first note he took was the wind heading and mph....
The three mile island incident blows my mind. I spent a decade working at a tier 3 data center owned by a huge financial institution. The possibility of downtime was so terrifying to them due to the millions of dollars per minute they'd lose that our SOPs were basically idiot proof and it was the senior engineer's job to make sure every step was followed in the correct order. Whoever was in charge of the SOP during a given power transfer or maintenance operation would 100% lose their job if their was a fuckup. I can't understand how a nuclear power plant would be any less meticulous.
I get that, but I'm talking about the valve that should've been reopened after the maintenance. It never should have mattered that the operator couldn't see the warning lights.
From what I have learned from other sources I think it is a bit more complicated than that, the valve was ok, but when they find there was a problem, the man at the console activated the emergency valve, there is a problem troughs, the light is activated by the switch not by the actual movement of the valve, so they fought it was open when in reality was blocked, and they had no way of knowing that. To be fair in a modern nuclear reactor, no such thing could occur without having the engineers informed.
I am an engineer on a project called the Natrium Demo Plant. The design is not an SMR but we are using sodium in the core for heat transfer and a molten salt storage system to allow the power generation of the plant to match grid loads. I would recommend googling the name if you are interested in this technology.
How do you address the danger of air or water getting into the cooling loop (or sodium leaking out of the system) and leading to an explosion? Also, doesn´t sodium tend to form alloys that fall out of the liquid and block cooling passages? I guess my question is, do the benefits of switching to sodium outweigh the risks of introducing a new technology and the risks of using sodium itself?
Hey Cookie, RU-vid comments are the last place to network lol. I'm in the industry (actually on the fusion side right now). If anything for the improbability of it, can you and I connect? I've been following your company for quite some time.
Yeah using a sodium primary loop and nitrate secondary loop sounds like a great idea… Sodium fast reactors have been tried and they don’t work. Sodium has terrible volumetric heat capacity and a really high Prandtl number. Not an ideal coolant.
Fukushima also had a massive human element to it; greed. The company in charge of the plant was warned by multiple agencies, including their own engineers, that massive improvements to the plant were needed to make it safe in case it was hit by a tsunami of that level. All of those warnings were ignored. At other, more up to date plants in the disaster zone of the tsunami, there wasn't the devastation that you saw at Fukushima. In fact, some housed people left homeless from the tidal wave.
Yes, that points to an inherent problem with nuclear though, doesn't it? Because greed and human stupidity are very, very common everywhere. It is no good saying that a plant designed and run by thoughtful competent people is safe because if you go building thousands of them I can guarantee that some will not be designed and run by such people.
@@kenoliver8913 That's an issue that can be solved by NOT privatizing our power grid in an effort to line the pockets of the privileged few. Also, greed is NOT an inherent problem of nuclear power unless you consider human green an inherent problem for ALL power generation. The ultimate consequence of a meltdown is indeed the worst possible outcome, but if we are going by total numbers of people killed because of greed, coal leads the way, and it's not even close. Attacking nuclear power while we are still burning fossil fuels is like lecturing someone for eating processed foods.... while you shoot street heroin.
@@CanadaMMA Cost saving incentives come from reality though, not privatization. Chernobyl was a result of cost-saving driving really bad decisions even though it was in the furthest environment from privatization we've ever seen.
Correction: Liquid water is NOT a great conductor of heat. It is a good store of calorific enerygy with lesser change in temperature, hence can be used to move heat energy from one place to otehr safely
@@adfaklsdjf Well, why would you use fluids at all over solids? because you can use convection with a fluid. And once you have convection, conductivity plays a minor role. Keep the pumps running and than the most important thing is the specific heat capacity and there water is great.
@@ma_nu yeah I felt the reason to use fluid coolant was kind of obvious. it doesn't invalidate the original comment's point that water's conductivity isn't great.. but I felt another comment worded it a bit more charitably in a "I think you meant to say ___" framing
The CANDU reactors have had many of the mentioned features since the inception of the design. Fuel bundles can be replace without the need to shutdown the reactor, lack of a pressure vessel, the use of non-enriched uranium, shutoff rods that deploy under gravity if power should be interrupted, etc.
Also, there are plans developing to build several new CANDU reactors, as well the first SMR plant, in Ontario. All the old CANDU reactors are being refurbished with the goal of 100 year life times.
CANDU has great fuel flexibility, a U.S. based company called Clean Core Thorium Energy has developed a new thorium-HALEU fuel that reduces fueling cycles, improves safety and most importantly reduces waste by 87.5%. They are just starting pre-licensing and feel their product should be available this decade. An 87.5% reduction in waste would effectively make existing CANDU reactors 4th gen equivalent reactors.
@@nav27v I guess Canada won't have the climate change issues that takes down French nuclear reactors every summer now. Or at least, they are betting on nothing unforeseen to turn their reactors into massive paperweights.
Near my hometown in Ontario CA, a nuclear power station called Bruce Power recently announced that their third power station will be modular. They already operate 8 CANDU reactors undergoing life extension modifications. I think this site would be an interesting case study for you to check out.
I started working in an R&D department an year or so ago and I can tell you that developing something brand new without experience in a newly developing are is FUCKING EXPENSIVE! You pour money to learn by making mistakes, all the time at any step. You just can't imagine what challenges lie ahead of you and the costs just skyrocket.
NuScale has a lot of experience with this, they've been doing what you're talking about for decades. And they haven't built anything yet, they don't have any real experience🤣 Therefore, turn to a proven company that not only builds nuclear power plants, sells fuel to you, but is also ready to take spent fuel from you for processing under a contract.
I agree with this. I'm an applied mathematician, and I have worked in biomedical R&D, and even though my job involved building diff.eq models and simulating them, it still was a challenge, 'cause there's a whole lot of things not understood about human physiology.
Lots of anti-nuclear propaganda in this video. Every yellow barrel depicting nuclear waste in this video is propaganda, high-level nuclear waste is NEVER stored like that, NEVER. Nuclear waste is an asset, not a liability. At 16:35 he compares the cost of nuclear to wind and solar, they can not be compared one to one. Wind and solar need 100% backup from a reliable source and that is never included in their cost. When you do that nuclear is cheaper, more sustainable, and far less complicated. Wind and solar are a complete waste of time and money, they are slowing down the transition away from fossil fuels and this channel is helping with that.
The nuclear waste stored at nuclear power plants is not dangerous. There has been no injury or accidents involving nuclear waste. Like if the stuff is chopped up and spread about it could be dangerous but in the containers it is stored in it is not dangerous. The stuff simply needs to be used in reactors that could use the 95% of the energy that's still in it.
I work in the nuclear industry in Canada. I can tell you that money is the reason that many of these issues arise. The fight between production/supervision and quality control means that some things get rushed or blind-eyed to make "everybody happy". The client only pays X, and any hiccups in time or production schedule mean more cost to the customer. You need to make the customer happy because if they took their contracts to your competition after the current contract completes, a lot of people would be out of work. It's absolutely not how the nuclear industry should function.
Naw man we can totally trust capitalist cost cutting and profits for the already wealthy when it comes to properly handling one of the most dangerous systems humanity has ever developed
@@Praisethesunson I don't trust them, but i trust the communists even less to be safe with nuclear power so what can i do but pick the lesser of two evils.
10:53 technically the volume goes up and the density goes down. The decreased density is what reduces the reactivity as there is more distance between the fissile materials and neutron generators.
@@DemsW -- The arrow labeled "volume" points downward, and the exact wording of the narration is, "this expansion decreases the volume of fuel in the core of the reactors".
The density of the fuel decreases which means there’s less mass of the fuel in the reaction chamber where it can undergo fission is what he’s trying to say. He accidentally said these is less volume in the reactor which doesn’t make sense since volume of the reactor doesn’t change. He meant to say less mass is in the reactor. It is a weird way to say it but is correct. You’re also correct that density decreasing also means neutron absorption decreases as well.
Power grid should NOT BE treated like a business, but as a service. An ongoing expense that isn't supported to make money. Because it is supposed to provide electricity to people
dry cask storage is neither “dangerous” nor an “imminent ecological threat.” would really love if they could reprocess that fuel and use it but for right now it sits there, protected
@@trapjohnson Ah, no catastrophe YET, but it's serving as a pretty good hostage! After blowing up the dam, it's clear that Russia has no qualms about creating a massive ecological disaster. And they could do it at any time if they don't get their way. Even without any sort of radioactive release, giving a malicious actor that kind of leverage in a conflict already qualifies as "very dangerous." Obviously, Russia has nukes. But the same thing can and will repeat itself with non-nuclear powers in the future.
May I suggest that the human error at Fukishima was the placement of the backup generators for the cooling pumps in the basement, a design cchoice made by a human. In the basement, at the seaside in a typhoon and earthquake and tsunami prone area. As the reactor building survived the wave, having the backup power source on the roof may have been worth the extra cost.
There, the problem was not in the basement, it was that the doors were ordinary office doors, which did not even have tightness. And Fukushima continues to poison the ocean, water seeps from below because the reactor melted through the base.
Best way to avoid Fukishima-like incident is to shut down old generation reactor and not keep it running for the sake of producing materials for nuclear weapon.
All nuclear accidents have been the result of a long chain of human errors. The problem is the human mind seems not really suited for a low risk but high impact on failure technology.
@@henreator noone runs LWRs to make weapons. You have been lied. And for those concerned about backup generators: if you can fit primary system in 60m tall bunker - you can also put generators there. Two more pipes needed.
As a nuclear engineer currently in the nuclear waste management business, I have to respectfully but strongly disagree that interim storage is “dangerous”. There are issues with it, for sure, but the idea that it’s dangerous is plain wrong. Otherwise, well researched video
@@abc20914 I'm guessing he meant it is theoretically dangerous in the sense that the waste is still a physical, tangible object that can be accessed. Fossil fuel waste is discharged to atmosphere (though ironically it does more damage there than solid nuclear waste ever has) To answer your question: - the majority of "waste" is low level waste. By volume, most waste is material that had been near a reactor, and is minimally radioactive. This could be stuff like old pipe lagging or even nitrile gloves. All the waste has to be accounted for in the nuclear industry (though it if course depends on each countries regulations). - the intermediate and high level stuff contains spent fuel and is more dangerous in terms of radioactivity. It forms a very small proportion of overall waste (though not trivial) -stuff that is "really" radioactive decays quicker. So when you hear of things being "radioactive for thousands of years", this will be stuff that is quite weak and very slow decaying, often only alpha or beta emitters that can be blocked by paper or skin. -high level waste is often vitrified and encased in concrete, and left in containers that are quite literally bombproof, under armed guard, weighing many tons. So although the stuff inside IS intrinsically dangerous, is for all practical purposes stable, inaccessible and going nowhere. (This was a large generalisation and hopefully someone will correct me or provide more details)
@@ollietizzard5180 that’s a pretty good summary, and I think you’re probably right, the waste itself that’s being stored in the ILW containers is very dangerous, however those have very stringent regulations for how they’re stored. An incredible amount of analysis is done to ensure they’re safe, as a few examples there are seismic analyses to ensure no earthquake could cause the release of the material, and the same for various other scenarios like one of the more infamous, “survive a fully fueled 747 impact”
I understanding trying to simplify some of the concepts, but everytime light water reactors were referenced, the content that was shared was almost exclusively about pressurized light water reactors. Boiling water reactors are the other type of light water reactor, and while they are more complicated in engineering, they are more flexible designs with different constraints compared to those shared in the video. Also the fuel cycle discussion is more complex but in a good way. The US does use an open fuel cycle largely because of policymakers. Spent fuel reprocessing faces two challenges: fission gas release (ie xenon) and non proliferation concerns (presence of high quality plutonium in spent fuel). The first really isn't that bad, there is math that shows reprocessing all fuel used in the whole world for 100 years would still not bring background radiation effects high enough to be a measurable diifference, it's just a fear tactic. France is a mostly closed fuel cycle and it doesn't raise the cost nearly as high as the video may lead you to believe. And for plutonium, non-proliferation science has improved significantly over the last few decades and honestly is just more of a regulatory issue now more than a weapons issue. Refering to cask storage as "dangerous", as was said in the video, is not very informative or truthful. Cask storage has been used almost the entire time we've had commercial nuclear reactors. It is not dangerous in any measureable way, the video is very misleading there. Geological repositories will be the best long term solution, it's mostly been an issue of politics and not an issue of engineering or safety. Now for SMR talk "Thousands of reactors will need to be built before economies of scale kick in." Wrong, it'll take less then 10 of any one SMR type to see the effects of economy of scale. Research into these SMRs is the big cost driver but once they're being built they will be paid for quickly. I appreciate the acknowledgement that it's mostly just trying to get utilities on board. No one wants to be the first one to adopt new technology and that honestly is the biggest issue facing SMRs. There are a few SMR companies that are discussing funding their own construction without orders from utilities just so the early adopter issue isn't passed on to a utility. As for the NuScale project. It is happening. It's not necessarily the "most promising" but it is the first to go through the NRC approval process and is so important in setting the ground work for how regulators will evaluate SMRs. The NRC is one of the most inefficient and slow regulatory bodies in the world. They're kindof a necessary evil, but they're honestly the reason we don't have new technologies built and operating in the US. X-Energy has orders for the PNW. NuScale is building a demonstration project in the next couple of years. China is also building all types of reactors at a rate that makes the rest of the world look like it's at a standstill. Copenhagen atomics, Rolls Royce, and a handful of others are also making great progress in integrating SMR and other flexible nuclear projects. Government funding Saying that nuclear might not succeed without government funding and then comparing to wind and solar is honestly pretty funny. Wind and solar have succeeded because of government subsidy. If nuclear recieved the same amount of subsidy as wind and solar, we'd have more utilities adopting nuclear. Regardless, wind and solar are not nearly as environmentally friendly as they're made out to be and there will be a day when people begin to realize that and nuclear will again be brought in to solve those issues. Wind and solar are also not effective as baseload energy for a grid, there has to be other sources. Nuclear is the best fit, hyrdo is the next best fit for that role if we are to take out fossil fuel options. Wind and solar are also a huge pain to integrate into electrical grids. I'm not an electrical engineer, so I don't remember all the terms, but current and voltage regulation from wind and solar is a pain in the rear. They are also not effective for "islanding" which is necessary for critical infrastructure, putting the electrical grid at risk. Texas a couple of winters ago is an excellent example of what happens in first world countries when the power suddenly gets shut off and your grid isn't built in a safe way. People died, you need to the ability to have electrical islands and methods for restarting the grid. I think one of the best things that could get governments on board is the ability for nuclear to be a solution to space travel and space colonies. The US and others have expressed interest in setting up more permanant extraterrestrial stations, and they will likely look at using nuclear as their energy sources. Might be enough to get more funding towards those projects. Other notes Gen IV reactors are going to start going through approvals this decade and hopefully be commercially available next decade. There are so many improvements over the plant designs we've been using for 50+ years, they will change the game for nuclear in a good way and likely bring in private investment like we've never seen. Gen III+ will make a continued impact as well as we are adopting "old" technologies in ways that are more efficient and safer. SMRs also have huge potential for solving grid integration issues with things such as high-energy factories (like silicon fabs) and data centers (think Facebook, Amazon, etc). These types of facilities could potentially be serviced by their own SMRs and be independent of the commercial grid, alleviating huge concerns for grid operators and utilities. Nuclear is also important in things like medical isotopes and hydrogen production (alternative fuel source), so it's unlikely to just disappear. Fusion could be commercially available as early as 2035 the way they're moving right now. If that happens, humanities only option will be to adopt it, there is nothing better for clean energy. There are companies, like TerraPower, who are planning on repurposing old coal plant sites to benefit from grid infrastructure that's already set up. There are many people upset about taking away coal infrastructure, but if it's going away than nuclear presents the best option for repurposing those sites. I've already typed too much but I have two more things. Nuclear's biggest disadvantage is upfront capital investment. It takes a lot of money to start a nuclear plant but nuclear plants have excellent lifetimes and are very cost effective over time. The other thing is there are simply not enough minds in nuclear right now. There is a huge need for skilled and educated labor in nuclear. We need more nuclear welders, more engineers, more designers, more analysts, better regulators, and perhaps most importantly, we need lobbyists and advocates. Get educated, get involved, don't let someone else's fear run your life.
@@chapter4travels It is not anti-nuclear, but the author is clearly afraid of going against the established narrative "windmills & photovoltaic vs. global warming".
There aren’t enough minds in nuclear because it’s a rabbit hole the world does not have time to go down right now no matter how much you idiots believe it can cure every one of our problems. You guys bend over backwards to ignore the fact that renewables are significantly cheaper, more versatile, and more abundant than nuclear while fulfilling the same goal. Stay mad at the world for not drinking your Kool-Aid.
Expanding on the issue of grid capacity. The capacity factor of wind and solar power plants is low, therefore the max power has to be high to produce enough during suboptimal weather conditions. It is possible to supplement Wind and solar with gas turbines nearby to always max out the grid connection rather than building a separate grid connection for gas and wind power plants. The issue of max power vs annualised power production means that cost will be higher and capacity factor has to be taken into consideration. In terms of the SMR hype, the new reactors might work well, but their cost of production and economies of scale are not yet realized. With large nuclear reactors the total number of reactors are reduced meaning, the cost might be lower if they are built cost effectively. Currently the capital costs of nuclear power plants are high given the low confidence of banks in these projects. Therefore an effect strategy for building and financing large reactor must be realised before their wide spread building. That said S. Korea has build several reactors cheaply. The S. Korean reactors are based on old Westinghouse designs and are proven also coming from a time when nuclear reactors were built cheaper than at the present moment. It will be interesting to see if SMRs succeed in attracting capital, finalizing designs and cheaply building reactors. I am however sceptical if small reactors are the best idea.
I think another challenging area relating to the topic is the lack of education initiatives, which in turn is influenced by politics and government policies, which further tends to shift depending on which political block is in power. To give an example: during my university studies for my bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering in 2019, we were told that there was no point studying nuclear energy as the only work opportunities in that field was basically deconstructing nuclear power plants. This was in Sweden (a big producer of nuclear energy!) while the center-left-wing political block was in power. Now, the right-wing block is in power and they are pumping money and praise into nuclear energy. This creates a situation where the economics and education becomes extremely volatile depending on which political block is in power since the topic has become political, and given the huge construction time and budget, volatility in workforce and LCoE is quite far from what you want.
This portrays nuclear waste very poorly. It is not just green goo that is haphazardly thrown into leaky barrels that pile up in warehouses and waste dumps, but is instead mixed in with ceramics and stored in over-engineered (the good kind) dry casks that can be hit by a train at full speed and handle it like a champ. The biggest reason people are so scared of nuclear energy is for an incorrect understanding of the kind of waste it produces.
I wouldn't say NuScaleare the best bet for the first commercially viable SMR by a long shot. At this point of everyone getting heavily delayed I'm actually starting to lean towards Copenhagen Atomics for our best shot. Their reactor is much more complicated which SHOULD normally mean it's further in the future than others but at this point the others should have already been running their experimental reactors and instead they're all waiting for licenses. All the while the engineering problems facing Copenhagen are slowly but surely being chipped away at. Also your MSR presentation is somewhat outdated. For instance the "freeze plug" technology is obsolete now. The widely adopted solution is a CONTINUOUS drain away from the reactor which is counteracted by actively pumping the fuel back into the reactor. Thus in case of a total failure you don't wait for the freeze plug to melt and fuel is already draining at a known rate using pipes which are known to work into an area where it can passively cool indefinitely.
It's a catch20 in the US, to build a demonstrator reactor in the US you need a licence, to get the licence you need to have built a demonstrator reactor
Really? Copenhagen atomic??? No disrespect to those guys but we understand LWRs so much better than molten salt and if you read back to the old experiments they’re always having problems with leakages and corrosion. And I see no reason why they would face any less licensing hurdle once they are even at that stage.
That is a lot of handwaving about technology that doesn't exist. Even existing nuclear technology always delivers over time and over budget. Some people seem to be extremely optimistic or even delusional about the lack of problems any new nuclear technology will face in development.... Even after they already get bogged down by those issues.
Another potential benefit of SMRs is that they can be used for industrial process heat. A chemical plat that needs a few MW of power to drive reactions could get that directly from an SMR (at near 100% efficiency) rather than running electric heaters or burning fuel.
@grahambennett8151 the kind of structure needed to stop a cruise missile is cheaper to build than a conventional containment vessel. A strong concrete box and a few thousand tons of rock piled on top should do the trick. If not, add more rock. Also, as long as there is no release, even having to scram the unit after a strike isn't any worse than a fossil fuel operation which is likely totally unprotected.
What is dangerous about the dry cask fuel storage systems? These dry fuel casks contain fuel that has sat in a spent fuel pool long enough to not have significant decay heat. They are cooled by ambient loses and stored in robust storage canisters.
BWRX-300 ... Ontario Power Generation (Canada), Tennessee Valley Authority (USA), Orlen-Synthos Green Energy (Poland), Fermi Energeia (Estonia) already signed on for significant deployments. All working together with GE Hitachi (the reactor and fuel vendor) and other partners to achieve a common design deployable in all 4 countries. Using a lot of off-the-shelf parts and a fully developed supply chain, including the nuclear fuel: a standard fuel design (GNF2) that has already seen significant use in the industry. Name another SMR with that level of experience, support, supply chain... you can't. NuScale doesn't even come close. Yet you didn't mention it.
Very interested to see how Poland's transition to nuclear goes. I think they are the test case for the modern nuclear powered economy. If it goes well, nuclear will see much greater use around the world. If it goes poorly, I think nuclear is largely dead.
@@SocialDownclimber For Poland and Estonia, it will still be expensive and inefficient energy. + even if they have resolved the issue of supplying fuel, which will not be the cheapest, how will they dispose of spent fuel? This will be an additional big expense.
@@VictorLarsen-fy9ls That's how I think it will go too, but I don't know for sure and a lot of people seem to think it will be cheap. Glad my own country seems to be going in a different direction but I'm happy to see what happens in the end.
The NuScale SMR project (the ONLY SMR project in the U.S.) was to come online starting in 2029 and was supposed to replace electricity from coal plants that are closing. Instead, NuScale and the Utah utilities announced Wednesday (11/ 8/23) they're terminating the project after a decade of working on it. The cancellation comes amid supply chain problems, high interest rates and a failure to obtain the desired tax credits.
@@Anthrofuturism Not one of the ones you mentioned is anywhere near as far along as NuScale and NONE of the ones you mention are receiving $2 billion in U.S. government support, like NuScale. Now that NuScale has failed and is being sued for FRAUD, look at the stock of those other projects
Open question: Has nuclear power and desalination technically been combined? One makes power, the other requires it, and both involve water. If you could use salt water as a coolent in a nuclear plant, the evaporated steam could be captured and used as drinking water. Designed in such a way where excess water could be simply used to dilute the waste water or that excess power processes more water, one should be able to develop a decent system. There's probably a stigma about drinking nuclear water, but it should be safe enough right?
You can use heated water for a heat exchanger which causes the salt water to boil. You collect the steam and that's your destination water. You definitely don't want to drink reactor water. Even the release of reactor water needs to be closely monitored.
I was disappointed that he didn't mention the GE-Hitachi bwrx300, it's entered pre-licensing in the USA and phase 2 testing in Canada. This isn't a design that needs to be developed, it's a fully functional platform that is going through approval steps leading up to deployment. GE estimates a cost of 2250$ per kw or 68 million per reactor.
As of July 7 2023 Ontario Power Generation has chosen to construct three additional BWRX-300 SMR reactors at the Darlington nuclear facility increasing the total being built in Canada to four.
@grahambennett8151 so what is the point of your comment exactly? I'd dig for meaning but it every answer I come up with seems so absurd I simply can't guess.
At 5:35, its name is “Forsmark” not “Frostmark”. “Frostmark” would translate to English as “ground frost”. On a fun note: I’ve visited one of the storage sites near Forsmark, it was really cool seeing what they would let you see.
would be interesting to know if the costs would go down if these small modular reactors were deployed on a larger scale. in my opinion these are more niche products for special circumstances like a research station on antarctica or a hidden underground facility
Of course it won't be cheaper. It's all hype and deceit. It's like making a car not with one engine, but with a large number of small engines and spare parts for them.
Some costs would go down with mass production, but in reality it's marginal and there's other aspects of reactor operation that make SMRs undesirable. MIT's studies found that with bigger reactors, a lot of cost overruns occurred because the reactors needed small redesigns to better fit their intended environment. Reactor redesigns require design reviews, re-licensing, and the added delays mean more interest builds up on loans taken out to fund the powerplant's construction. With smaller reactors, it's the local installation point in the powerplant that needs to be redesigned, not the reactor. The argument is that because the reactor and powerplant can be made in parallel and most redesigns will be civil engineering problems, it'll avoid those reactor redesign issues. The time to build is reduced, the risk of delays goes down, and so design review and loan interest costs should stay minimized. The other problem that comes up is the fuel. Small reactor cores need more concentrated fuel, this is due to "neutron economy". Fission depends on the probability of neutrons hitting and interacting with fuel atoms, so you either cast a wider net (larger core, less enrichment) or a finer net (smaller core, more enrichment). Most reactors have gotten bigger over the years because they get to maximize neutron economy. Raw natural Uranium is dirt cheap fuel, enriched Uranium isn't. SMRs need enriched fuel, so that bites into profits over time. SMRs and micro reactors are good choices for remote locations, and there are 5-10 MW reactors being designed for those applications. SMRs don't make as much sense for the power grid, they make more sense as testbeds, and that's really the key to Gen 4 SMRs. If Gen 4 reactors get commercial adoption, they'll get bigger over time to chase neutron economy and carry their unique benefits with them, but they need a buying customer first. Nobody wants a giant, multi-billion dollar unproven reactor.
A huge flaw we've learned from in the TMI incident isn't discussed enough, which is the use of zirconium as a cladding material for uranium fuel rods. Cladding prevents water (coolant) from coming into contact with the uranium fuel rods, which prevents radioactivity from leaking. A short note, uranium dioxide melts at ~2,880°C, which is usually difficult to reach inside the pessurized reactors of nuclear power plants. Unfortunately, zirconium alloys are easily oxidized at higher temperatures (~1,500 °C), which was reached when inadequate water was entering the reactor. Oxidation is generally exothermic, and for zirconium alloys, it is extremely so. When it happened, it released enough heat that caused the uranium fuel to partially melt in TMI and release radioactivity. On the other hand, when it oxidized, the substance it formed had melted over the uranium fuel rods and kept it from being further in contact with water.
Super video! But can we please change the color scheme for the graph at 16:20 in future videos? This was is not as bad as others I've seen, but why use 3 shades of yellow/orange and 3 shades of purple in a diagram that only has 8 colors? I understand it was probably a default color setting, but these similar colors cause the graph to be much harder than necessary to interpret.
2:06 "unknown reasons" Could it be the operator was sleeping off a box of donuts and a rocking toy bird was operating the control panel? I saw this scenario in a documentary on a nuclear power station.
The one thing id be worried about is security. The nuclear plants I know of are massive and have literal world-class SWAT-type teams with tanks and other intense weapons. I dunno about costs of security and all that, but I would imagine it makes alot more sense to heavily secure an extremely large region-power-providing reactor vs a smaller reactor. Not that they'd just be left in the open or anything, but the more common and easy to get something is, and the more places it can be, the less secure we are from single events.
@@gorb2518 They definitely do, or at least some. The one near me is separated from the main land with a large straight road in the open with multiple checkpoints and some kind of vehicle with a cannon on it.
I would recommend that the viewers of Johnny Harris' nuclear video rather watch the videos on this channel. this is real engineering and not journalism.
I think the most viable SMR is GEs BWRX-300. It’s big enough to scale, it uses half the materials per MWe as current reactors (which is a scaling advantage), it’s still modular and at 300MWe it’s about the same size as most existing Coal Fired reactors. As far as waste goes burn it up in next gen molten salt reactors when they become available.
The recycling of nuclear fuel has been promised for at least half a century, and never got anywhere. It's delusional to assume this is going to happen in time to store the enormous waste produced by bringing up SMRs to any scale that would matter.
It's a BWR, which is a form of PWR, which have only been able to be economical throughout history by going bigger, due to inherent drawbacks in the use of water as a primary coolant. Same argument against NuScale. PWR SMRs sound shiny and new and great but managing the high pressure, low operating temperature, potential for loss of coolant through a change of state and fast acting shutdown systems in a economical manner while meeting today's safety standards has always been an issue for PWRs and will continue to be - you'll see the same delays and ballooning costs with these reactors as we are currently seeing with full size PWRs, and it's going to be used as a example of why the nuclear industry as a whole isn't economically feasible, which just isn't true at all. It's a major separator between Gen III + systems (like those I just mentioned) and the Gen IV systems mentioned in the video, which don't rely on water as a primary coolant, and therefore can be economically made smaller. SMR shouldn't come first, it's a result of using a more suitable primary coolant, which neither NuScale nor GE Hitachi are doing. People like it in the industry cause it's closer to what they know, but that doesn't mean it's a better choice.
@@wmoysey BWR - Boiling Water Reactor and PWR - Pressurized Water Reactor. Some would call it a big difference. In a BWR, the reactor boils water to make steam. This wet steam flows though the turbine. In a PWR, hot high pressure water used to cool the reactor gives off it's heat in a heat exchanger (steam generator) to other water which boils to steam and turns a turbine. It is a bit like apples and oranges and maybe using the words, "form of PWR," should be editied. I see you've already edited your comment once.
@@wmoysey When the logistics and design is implemented correctly light water reactors have a decent cost record. US second gen water-cooled reactors at 600 MWe had an inflation-adjusted LOE of about $1,000 per megawatt vs about $2,500 for LNG. French light water reactors likewise have given France the lowest electricity cost in Europe. So there is plenty of evidence light water reactors can work if implemented right. The big advantage of light water reactors is they are available in the near future. Additionally over 20 BWRX-300 reactors are already on order. The nearest true 4th gen design is the X-energy gas-cooled pebble bed Xe-100. It should be available around the same time as the BWRX-300 and in a lot of ways is superior. Such as safety, a 4x reduction in high-level waste, 60 years of continuous operations, etc. But it’s not setting the nuclear world on fire, with two plants in the US and Canada on order. So for the 2027 to 2037 time frame, the GE design looks like the winner. And as pointed out scaling from 600 MWe to 1,000 MWe didn’t pay off so its historically accurate to say the industry believed scaling to 1,000 MWe reactors would be better in theory, but in reality, it wasn't Smaller US second gen plants were a lot more economical, so there really isn’t a historical precedent to believe going down to 300MWe should be worse if the plant is 90% smaller in space and materials than current boiling water designs. Also, the GE plant is the 10th iteration so it’s a well-known design and most coal plants are 250MWe to 600MWe. Using an existing brownfield coal site can reduce costs by 25-33% according to Department of Energy estimates so 300-600MWe for a reactor size might be the sweat spot as there are so many more siting opportunities for reactors of this size. I think in the long run more advanced molten salt reactors and possible high-temperature gas plants will be better, but for now, GE’s design is winning the order war, its scales a lot better than NuScale and other designs as well, while still retaining many of the benefits of being small and modular.
300 MWe on the BWRX-300? Okay, how quickly can they deliver 120 of these? I would like to fill in 20-30 GW base load with a bit extra for future growth and redundancy. At least much better than buying 400 NuScale.
Don't believe everything or in some case anything you see in a YT video. You do realize that anyone can make a YT video and even "experts" can make one without having any real first hand knowledge. Having a degree in something does not make you an expert in everything in that field
@@kennarajora6532 Every control room operator and supervisor at TMI that night was a highly experienced ex-navy nuclear plant operator. So your "Homer" is sailing around the world with a nuclear death ship.....how does that make you feel?
@@kennarajora6532 My point was that the TMI operators were highly qualified and responded exactly as they had been trained. The idea that they were unqualified or a "homer" is trash spewed by no nothings that educate themselves vis YT videos
SMR is just hype and corruption. Read the history of the NuScale campaign, they do not have a single serious project, even paper projects have not been properly certified, they have no experience, they exist for decades only at the expense of investments without doing anything. NuScale collects promises and agreements in different countries like fleas in order to receive investments. And who will supply the fuel? Who will dispose of this fuel? This campaign does not provide such services.
Nuclear energy is MASSIVELY subsidized by the tax payers. Without the subsidies, nuclear energy would be well over $10 KWh instead of the $.08 to $.27 it is currently.
My main confusion about SMRs is the nuclear reactor may be smaller but the infrastructure to use it's power looks to me just as big as older style reactors.
I agree, and I think this will be one of the biggest stumbling blocks to it being economical. You'd have to make massive savings by being able to mass produce each SMR in factory to compensate for it
But the most essential parts are still self contained, so surely the rest of the plant can be less complex as a result? Instead of building a custom container and piping into the ground, you can make much simpler buildings and (in theory) mass produce the reactor housings in a factory. It's like building an IKEA bookshelf instead of carving one from a big block of wood. Or that's what it sounds like. Maybe the plants themselves need to be pretty complicated anyway 🙃
@@ollietizzard5180 What kind of mass production of SMR can we talk about if they have not even reached the level of production and utilization of fuel? This campaign is bottom.
I mean not really. Look at the plant footprint of BWRX-1000. It's 50% smaller per MW of electricity, and 90% smaller than it's larger cousins. These are already being built and will probably be the first SMR to come online. When you look at test reactors which are even smaller than SMRs they have small enough footprint to be used in existing institutions like research labs, training facilities, and even universities.
The whole point of transmission lines is that home made electricity was not available. The transmission grid is just off broke, it is so fragile and extremely expensive. Massive increase in grid capacity is economically stupid. Unloading the grid is critical for the economy.
Russians never stopped their nuclear energy like the west. Russia, Korea and China are way ahead just by keeping investing, their industry producing constantly. Even France has been 25 years off work in it.
9:50 "Salt reactors are not a risk of high temperature steam explosions." If the reactor leaks or is breached, wouldn't the molten salt explode on contact with water and catch fire on contact with air?
Nope. It can't catch fire it's already in a chemically stable state, it's sort of pre-burnt, and it could evaporate water into steam, but there shouldn't be any water near it, the only water is in the steam turbine loop, and that's assuming you use steam turbines.
@@killcat1971 I'm been told the reason the Navy doesn't really like molten salt reactors is it's explosive reaction to water, of which the reactor would perpetually be near on a ship.
@@Edax_Royeaux That may be part of the problem, but the designs often involve using convection currents which might be a problem in a vessel that's moving and altering angle.
@@Edax_Royeaux You may be confusing Sodium Cooled Reactors which the US Navy rejects for the reason you cited. Big problem on a naval vessel, not so much on land where it can be isolated from water/air. Another reason may be power density. Naval reactors are often enriched north of 90% to make them small and quiet.
Molten salt heaters are considered obsolete technology in hydrocarbon processing because of their high maintenance costs and low efficiency. We are pulling ours out and replacing them all with direct-fired heaters. It’s interesting to see them as cutting-edge tech in the nuclear industry.
Gotta love how stupid some people are. "No, do not store nuclear waste deep under ground in the middle of nowhere, store it next to my town above ground instead, much safer!". Bruh.
Why not just cut out government funding for solar subsidies and watch as nuclear takes off. The world must suffer the blackouts of solar covered California for people to demand reliable energy. People will only protest for climate related things if their lives are peaceful. The moment you make their lives inconvenient, they will buy as many fossil fuels needed to make them happy again.
I was about to say it when you said it at the end. The solutions to climate change aren’t really technology problems, we have the technology, or we have with the science and the breakthroughs. In order to proliferate the technology, we just have an economic incentive system That blocks change. As you said, the barrier to climate change is not technology, it’s not nuclear power, it’s capitalism and government that has been captured by a corporate sector.
Yet capitalism is the reason why technologies such as solar and wind power are deployable at scale. Look at the consumer adoption of home solar in Australia as to how rapidly consumer led deployment has outpaced solar power station builds. Like it or not capitalism is the democratisation of resources
If the state controlled the economy we'd still struggle to build these things economically, and we'd have _far_ fewer resources and capital available to build them with. This isn't an issue of state control, or any lack thereof, this is simply a technological and economic problem.
As you can sse there are technical limitations and there are capital limitations as well. Its more an issue of political will than the system of government. Even in state controlled economics, nuclear wont be done unless there is political will
@@ChucksSEADnDEAD People will never miss the slightest chance to blame capitalism. It's just something so poorly understood, so seemingly broad and all encompassing, it's easy to blame.
There are probably many people unhappy with either the overly positive or negative representation of this or that aspect of nuclear. While I also tend in one direction (overly optimistic towards Gen4 and SMRs) I, however, think it is important to acknowledge that this video is generally well-balanced in mentioning the advantages as well as the issues surrounding the topic. What I have a bigger issue with is the point of the overall video, or rather the lack thereof. There is a suggestion that we might need to globally nationalize energy production to solve this problem without explicitly saying so and I agree this is something we have to seriously consider as so far it seems that the free market simply might not be fit to solve the problem in time. But beyond that small point, what is the point? Every detail about nuclear reactors is extremely vague without actually going into any significant amount of depth on anything at all. While the premise is decent, this video feels like 95% hot air to me.
You are correct, this video is 95% anti-nuclear with a false facade of being fair. All the images of nuclear waste are fake propaganda topped off with anti-capitalist undertones.
SMR is just hype and corruption. Read the history of the NuScale campaign, they do not have a single serious project, even paper projects have not been properly certified, they have no experience, they exist for decades only at the expense of investments without doing anything. NuScale collects promises and agreements in different countries like fleas in order to receive investments. And this video does not say about the Russians that they have enrichment and fuel processing technologies 20-30 years ahead.
I feel like outside of professionals who work on it, nuclear energy has a very bifurcated level of understanding. One group thinks the Simpsons reflects reality. Another likes deep dives and has preference for which type of next generation reactors should be used. This video is aimed at the former but has a large group of the latter in the actual audience.
If you listen closely, there is extreme bias in favor of nuclear power and quite a bit of handwaving over the challenges to get SMRs working. There's no way this gets into widespread use in the next 10-20 years.
No mention of Thorium? And all its many advantages? Really. And wind and solar are NOT cheap, if you include the cost of the backup storage required. But all renewables are currently relying on gas as backup. The entire renewable system, including backup, with be 3x the present cost. R
Not to mention the lifespan of solar panels, batteries and wind turbines (and yes, believe it or not but these things need constant maintenance) and the amount of energy required to make them in the first place
One of the worrying things about nuclear for me is cost cutting power companies. When it eventually comes to large service intervals i can 100% see the opperatong companies cutting corners or extending the life by "just a little" to avoid spending money. And from that we get meltdows
That's why nuclear is and should be heavily state regulated and even state owned. All countries that do nuclear have strict independant nuclear safety regulators, that regularly audit them and allow them to run their plant only if they meet their regulations. Not as much can be said about the oil or chemical industry
Never forget that it's the French ecologists that, through the First Minister, closed down Phénix, Superphénix and most importantly Astrid which were the leading edge of fast neutron research. That was more than 20 years ago. We would probably be already building AND selling these reactors everywhere, providing for 100s of years of cheap, safe and clean energy, if it was not for the ecologists.
The Englishmen put pressure on Europe through the topics of ecology and CO2 in order to squeeze out industry and capital from Europe to their English countries, this is their capitalism. As a result, they have destroyed nuclear power and made other sources of energy very expensive and not profitable for industry, and the abandonment of cheaper Russian gas.
Fukushima had redundancies of 2 back up water pump systems. But the first system required electricity which had stopped across most of the country and the second were diesel generators with their own fuel tanks......stored in the basement of the plant. 🙄
So technological development has been artificially hampered since the 1970s, including through the creation by the Rothschilds of environmental organizations such as Greenpeace.
The problem is that nuclear and renewables don't complement each other well. You can scale a nuclear plant only down to 40%, but you can't turn it off and on easily to adjust to demand.
On the other hand it is on demand. Best thing you can do with not on-demand power sources is decoupled energy consumers such as carbon capture and synfuel production, where it doesn't really matter when exactly the work is being done.
Some newer designs currently under licensing use a molten salt heat storage similar to thermal solar to decouple the nuclear plant from the electricity generation which allows for load following while the reactor runs at 100% at all times (e.g. Natrium, SSRW). Essentially this turns the reactor into the equivalent of a gas peaker plant, which is exactly what is needed with renewables.
@@richardbaird1452 A PWR can already load follow just fine, including using around 5% of its capacity as peaker, but in general it's more expensive to do that than to just use a constant output. So places with lower % nuclear don't do it. France does and it works fine.
I love how every meltdown is just like 30 laughably lazy mistakes that wouldn't even be ok at a fast food place. Treating burgers with more reservation than nuclear power.
Which is factually wrong. The sun always shines somewhere and wind always blows somewhere. Distribution is key, which already works extremely well in Europe.
@@davidleadford6511 And thats's why you distribute and cooperate. Investing in a proper power grid is the best thing for energy safety that any country can do.
The question arises as to how much process heat a wind turbine or a solar plant generates for industry. Industry, for example the chemical industry, needs huge amounts of process heat to be able to manufacture products that are demanded by the markets. Wind turbines and solar plants do not produce heat, neither process heat nor heat for heating homes. The new generation of nuclear reactors operates at a much higher temperature than the 300°C of light water reactors. This means that this new generation of nuclear reactors can not only produce large amounts of electrical energy, but also large amounts of process heat. Unfortunately, this fact is always swept under the carpet and forgotten! The Dual Fluid Reactor, for example, operates at about 1000° C. This also means that at these very high temperatures, thermochemical splitting of water into hydrogen and oxygen is possible. A dual fluid reactor not only generates large amounts of electrical energy, but also thermal energy for the required process heat and for the splitting of water into hydrogen and oxygen. In addition, a Dual Fluid Reactor can also convert salt water into drinking water with its residual heat. The fact that a Dual Fluid Reactor can even use the previously accumulated nuclear waste as fuel makes this patented reactor concept the most promising, since the production costs for electrical energy, i.e. electricity, and thermal energy, i.e. heat, as well as for the production of hydrogen and fresh water are significantly reduced. It is not surprising that the Dual Fluid Reactor is referred to as a 5th generation reactor type, as it combines the advantages of a molten salt reactor with those of a lead-cooled reactor design. As the name Dual Fluid Reactor suggests, the fuel and the liquid lead flow in two separate circuits. Since lead is an excellent heat conductor and a very good radiation absorber, the efficiency of the reactor is increased. Safety is also increased, as lead has a melting point as low as about 328° C and a boiling point of about 1748° C. The advantage of the separate circuits, fuel circuit and cooling circuit with liquid lead, further increases efficiency and safety. High-purity and very valuable rhodium, ruthenium and molybdenum-99, which is used in nuclear medicine, are also produced as fission products.
"neither process heat nor heat for heating homes" Converting electrical energy to heat has an efficiency of worst case nearly 100% and best case 300% - 500% when using a heat pump. For process heat this might not be applicable to get to high temperatures but for heating homes i see absolutely no reason why we would need heat production and cant fare with electric heating.
The meta is that subsidies are required for power systems to change. Politicians and their ability to even get elected is also determined by the money from industry. We have to remove corporations from politics and influence.
"We have to remove corporations from politics and influence." Ahhh yes, I'm sure those subsidies are totally free from politics and influence. Like here in Canada where the government gave billions to large automotive companies to build battery facilities, at almost 1 million dollars per job in corporate subsidies.
In the US, it’s not just safety concerns that limit nuclear power. Significant cost and lack of experience in nuclear reactor construction and installation are the primary reasons no governments want to invest in new reactors. The only nuclear plants in construction are in Georgia and have taken twice as long and twice as much as originally budgeted. It also bankrupted Westinghouse. The experience in Georgia is why no other states will consider planning for new reactor installs. The United States just doesn’t have the resources required to effectively and affordably implement nuclear power. It’s extremely disappointing.
SMR sounds small scale, but it requires a much larger scale than conventional nuclear power in actual practice. To make any difference, especially in terms of carbon emissions, you'd need a humongous investment in creating the infrastructure necessary to build and run these systems. There is a lot of handwaving in nuclear lobbyism. Who is going to run the plants? You'd need a massive highly specialized workforce that doesn't exist right now and even France has a huge problem with its existing infrastructure. Making these SMRs automated enough that you need far less people (while the population in the neighborhood still trusts you, which they really don't, in most countries) will take further decades. BEFORE building any of them, and nuclear projects always come in over budget and over time, even starting with years or a decade of build time. Saying SMRs will change this is just more of the same handwaving. And worse, distributing smaller scale reactors to more facilities would greatly increase the security problems. Putting them all in the same locations would not achieve economy of scale and just perpetuate the other issues. And then we'd have to ask and trust those scientists and engineers, who said chernobyl and Fukushima can't happen, if it will be harder to secure cooling systems for many small locations or fewer big locations.
S. M. R. Can never be equal to a full scale Reaction... Difference is the supply... National or Multiple City's vs City's and Village's S. M. R. Should be projected to be profitable after at least 10-15 years... So not attractive to individuals for investments and governments largely deal in patch works and rarely commit to holistic solutions. P.S. didn't bother to read the second half of your comment
@@bk_1627 wow you can't actually read properly, right? I compared SMRs to conventional "existing" nuclear power, not to anything else, and I'm saying it is delusional to think of this technology as "small scale". And no, nobody would have built the plants in Chernobyl or Fukushima if they had known this was a considerable possibility. They didn't talk about acceptable risk, they said it wouldn't happen. And got surprised by reality, like you are saying it would never happen with those SMRs. Yeah, the concept of "meltdown" was known, but they always said it wouldn't happen. And yes, you can skimp on regulation and popular participation when you run an authoritarian government (South Korea isn't that much better than China, in some respects). And we can only hope that China is orders of magnitude better at regulating the nuclear industry than any other industry. Hint: They suck at regulatory oversight, even while making a big show of it. We can only hope they are somehow magically better at regulating this particular industry. I don't even debate that nuclear power sounds awesome in theory. But in practice the risks have proven to be impossible to calculate (that means we don't even know if they are acceptable or not, they may actually be), from simple Human error to natural catastrophes, even adversarial intention.
@@marlmyster Yeah, it would be inconvenient to actually read the comment you are replying to, right? And no, most SMRs would need to be built at larger sites, with multiple SMRs per location. Smaller sites would increase the cost of waste storage and overall security, because a large plant needs the same security than a smaller plant. You can't risk anyone breaking in and taking out the nuclear fuel, and you'd spend a lot of money doing that at every village those things are deployed at...
Brian, Please. I love Real Engineering and the work that you do, but this is a topic that NEEDS more research and/or consulting of nuclear engineers before publishing.
4:41 To be fair it's should be said that temporary storage are worst compared to a definitinive storage but aren't inherintly dangerous and also are troughfully tested to be missile proof, also already at this point we have acces to techonolgies to reuse radioactive waste, you can either reprocess it to do MOX like in france (as said in the video) or use a 4th gen design that uses fast neutrons to "burn" attinids (long lasting chemical compunds) and produce energy (tranforming a waste in a resource). Also nuclear generation are rather strange (IAEA also advise against it) that is due to most people thinking a 4th gen is inherintly better than a 3rd or 3rd+ when in reality is like comparing a fighter jet with an airliner they are designed in a completely differnt way to achive the same basic function (fly). Another thing regarding price, it's true that latest project especially in EU have surpassed allocated budget and time by a lot, but this is also due to the extremely strictly regulation, every single bolts in a nuclear reactor must be certified from extraction to final manifactury (they must pass a total of 7 test) the only other field with this maniacal level of control is manned space operation. Also it has happen that regulation have changed while construction was still underway, so they had to recertify all components to start to finish again! (and this happened multiple time). Also another thing regarding renew and price per MW, it does not take into consideration interconnesion (cable needed for a more diffused production which is inevitable with renew and storage, it's true that it is cheap, but it not avaible 24/7 and the price for consumer is still set to that of gas due to coupling with the other energy source that can do baseload. Another problem of different metric such as LCOE is that it does not take into account diminishing return of continuing installing renew. There is no system who can ride 100% intermitent renew, so the best solution is a mix of both techologies nuclear for baseload, renew for peak load.
👍👍 Yes, you have excellent points! As do many other commenters. I always really liked Real Engineerings Videos, but this one really has an awful aftertaste of propaganda
The problem with nuclear has always been the same, despite the fuel being dirt cheap, using it isnt. And time to implement is so long its not a short, let alone long term solution. In the UK one plant has been knocked back time and again, with EDF (in the typical energy monopoly), playing victim if the state doesent pay for it. The irony being it got every plant in the UK it owns for pennies to what it cost to build, and ran them into the ground without replacing them. So yeah, nuclear isnt an option unless we invest in smarter, efficient technology on the long term plan, and capitalism has a lot to answer for in terms of lack of planning, or infrastrucure replacement and upgrading to begin with. I can give another example of how bad EDF is, cracks in the basin of a Scottish reactor, that they had already run a decade beyond its intended lifespan, without any effort to replace it. Repeated reports condemning it, the closure was forced for safety of the local population. And the result was another baseline of power was lost, but thankfully replaced with windfarms being rolled out at scale.
Nuclear power is only as safe as the people we put in place to be in charge of those programs. If the industry is full of corruption and laziness we really only have ourselves to blame for voting in the corrupt and lazy people that let it get to such a state. If people want nuclear power to be safe maybe they should use their brains more the next time they go to the voting booth.
Nuclear power stations can be made very safe (helped by the fact that it takes far more radiation to hurt you than you'd think) but they are built and run by humans so if you go building thousands of them around the world inevitably there will be some that are not safe. But the big problem is not that, but that it has turned out to be one of the more expensive ways to boil water. Wind+solar+storage (hydro and battery) is now cheaper than new coal in most of the world and getting steadily cheaper. As nuclear has never been able to beat coal for price new nuclear makes no economic sense. That said it was daft of Germany to shut its existing nuclear, with the result they had to depend on Polish coal and Russian gas.
"Nuclear waste is being stored in dangerous interim storage facilities across the countries." This is just wrong. There is nothing dangerous about the concrete casks we use to store the waste. They are all but impervious and impossible to steal. They are kept at the power plants they're created at so there is 24/7 security. There is so little of it thanks to the insane energy density of nuclear fuel. This is a non issue. Yucca mountain was a terrible idea from the start because of its crappy geology. We already have a working repository in the US. It's called WIPP and it is only used for military nuclear waste. We could start using it for civilian waste with the stroke of a pen.
I remember reading ages ago (probably from someone in the industry twittersphere) that SMRs produce more waste compared to a bigger plant of the same total power output. Presumably this would lead to more opposition from the general public, and if they're less efficient then more fuel would need to be purchased in total - but is that even a problem?
Which is why we need a few fast breeder reactors (small modular if possible). France has one such reactor amongst the dozens of reactors they have in service and it alone eats up most of the waste the other reactors produce.
@@jeffbenton6183 you can't take France as a good example of the nuclear industry any more. They had to close off so many power plants due to serious faults last year, that the burdened the whole european energy market. They also do not have a final storage solution. Germany exported the most power in 2022 -despite problems caused by the war in Ukraine.
@@1968Christiaan I wasn't using "France" (i.e., the entire French nuclear industry) as an example. I was only using one, specific component: their one and only one breeder reactor which can use nuclear waste as fuel. In a way, they *do* have a final storage solution, they're just not using it. Their one breeder reactor takes care of *most* of their waste. They should build another one (or two, or three). I do agree that Germany gets too much hate from the pro-nuclear community on the internet. The best model would be a composite of the German model *and* the French model: go ham on renewables (as Germany is doing) while also going ham on nuclear (as France did when their reactors were new). While I'm at it, I should add that one of the key decisions that Germany made to compensate for the Russo-Ukrainian war was to build floating LNG terminals in their harbors so they could receive natural gas from the US. I think they should've done that back in 2015 (I guess that's neither praise nor criticism for Germany, just stating a fact - maybe a "back-handed compliment of sorts)
That is true, you can reach higher burnup in conventional reactor. 60GWd/tU is current standard, while up to 90GWd/tU is expected with more resilient fuels. NuScale says their maximal burnup could reach 62GWd/tU, but they also state, that average burnup would not exceed 45GWd/tU - so it is "back to Gen II" idea, just in integrated power module.
Imo for now nothing really points to SMR's reducing the cost of nuclear in the future other than promises or too general and optimistic assumptions of advantages, while potentially ignoring the disadvantages too much. It seems the closer they get to production phase, the more it becomes clear they might not even be able to compete with regular reactors or at best equal those. And quite some cost and difficulties not yet factored in might also come up during operation and end of life too. This doesn't mean that SMR's can't play a role anywhere, there are plenty of potential situations where SMR's might be really usefull. Like remote communities, industrial sites that need 24/7 guaranteed power, things like space travel in the future, ... If SMR's do become less costly per kW than the regular large reactors, great. Maybe they will once they get past the R&D and protoype phase. I just don't see it happening for anytime soon, definitely not before the new fleet of reactors will/should get rolled out to combat climate change in time. The project at 15:40 is essentially already quite a bit more expensive than the generation of new large scale reactors that France is ment to start building in the next 10-15 years. These plants are expected to be around 8-9B per 1600MW reactor (or at least it was before recent inflation spikes, but this article is also from 3 years ago), while this project according to this would be around 13,5B. This is similar to Flamanville 3, the first modern new modern reactor in France, essentially a kind of prototype/1st of what will be used to replace the older close to retiring old French reactors. Having learned from this "prototype" they'll be able to reduce cost and time for the future reactors in the fleet (normally) to the expected 8-9B cost. Anyway, I guess we'll see what the future brings regarding nuclear use and what SMR's will amount to.
SMR is just hype and corruption. Read the history of the NuScale campaign, they do not have a single serious project, even paper projects have not been properly certified, they have no experience, they exist for decades only at the expense of investments without doing anything. NuScale collects promises and agreements in different countries like fleas in order to receive investments. And who will supply the fuel? Who will dispose of this fuel? This campaign does not provide such services.
Nuclear got expensive when construction in the western world got slow. At 8% interest (normal for nuclear now) a 12 year build costs 60% in rent payments and 40% in literally everything else. A 5 year build as done during the heyday at 4% interest would cost 16% in rent payments and 83 in literally everything else. Rent has gone from costing 20% ontop of building the powerplant to 150% ontop of the powerplant. MSRs can make nuclear a lot cheaper by passive safety features making construction faster, Easier modularization, making construction faster, higher temperatures allowing use of modern coal plant engineering in the steam/CO2 part of the power plants allowing engineers form those sectors to work here, the fuel salt being only slightly above atmospheric pressure for pumping it around not requiring as heavy a bunker light water reactor require and the reactor vessel being made out of specialty stainless steel that is much less thick allows it to actually be manufactured by more than 4 factories in the world. Light water might be cheaper in a pure engineering world but we have to deal with financing and logistics in our real world that make nuclear cost 3 times more than it would actually need to cost.
@@pokekick4185 *MSRs can make nuclear a lot cheaper by passive safety features making construction faster, Easier modularization, making construction faster* A big reason "construction" is so slow is due to regulation, bureaucracy, ... though. This is unlikely to change with SMR's. Passive safety systems can also be build into bigger reactors, so that isn't a good reason for why SMR's would change things. The same with higher temperatures. Like the only thing you've said that SMR's has that big reactors can't have is modularity. And that has its own downsides too.
@@MDP1702 I agree that most of the reasons cited are not SMR specific, however the financing piece could be a game changer if the smaller plants can be built faster. Long build times can double or triple the cost of building the plant as noted, which is the biggest part of the nuclear cost. It may not matter if the sticker price/MW is a bit higher or the efficiency is a bit lower if that financing cost multiplier hurdle can be overcome.
@@richardbaird1452 That is the thing, can they be build faster? A lot of the time problems are bureaucratic and financial in nature (which is why it generally goes faster in countries like the middle east and even south korea) and ofcourse you'll need a lot of SMR's to get the same amount of power output. For example you'd need 27 reactors of NuScale to have the same power output as most modern big nuclear reactors. I want to first see them building the equivalent of a large reactor before making any conclusions. I also wonder if it might not be more expensive to refuel those 27 reactors vs a big one.
I think it's _really_ important to note that in three mile island, even though there was the combination of both mechanical error _and_ human error at the same time, _literally zero people were killed in the immediate aftermath or in future years from released radiation_. Yes, we shouldn't ignore it, and lessons can be learned, but it is very possible to _learn too much_.
I wish you hadn't glossed over the fact, that Three Mile Island didn't actually have any casualties in that accident. So much went wrong, yet nobody was harmed. Not by luck, but by design.
just a multi billion dollar 3 month old plant completely trashed. $1 billion to just clean up the melted fuel and a containment so contaminated that it is not even scheduled to be cleaned until 2040, 60 years after the accident. Nothing to see there
Not continuing to pour good money into a industry that becomes less and less efficient would be learning, but this video advocates just the opposite aka continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result.
@@kennethferland5579 SMR is just hype and corruption. Read the history of the NuScale campaign, they do not have a single serious project, even paper projects have not been properly certified, they have no experience, they exist for decades only at the expense of investments without doing anything.
@@SoloRenegade And at the same time, Russia is the only one in the world that has a fast neutron reactor with a closed fuel cycle, which already provides energy for use. Also, Russia is the only one in the world that has the most modern technologies for uranium enrichment, and the United States enriches about 30% of its fuel there.😆
i’m so happy Canada isn’t scared of nuclear cause honestly the only other solution that we would’ve gone for was coal or using the tar sands and i’m sure everyone knows how bad those are
Our grid needs aren't big enough for a large reactor, even the 700 MW CANDUs I believe, so the development of the 300 MW SMRs we're looking into is very nice, and Ontario's now building four so we'll have at least one built elsewhere before deciding to start one of those
Hey Real Engineering, I hope this comment finds you well! Your channel is amazing, and I'm a huge fan of your content. I wanted to suggest a topic that I think is gonna be good its about the Avro Vulcan. It's a masterpiece of engineering and design, and I'm sure you could create an incredible video about it!
All of this could be easily avoided with a CANDU reactor, that Canada has been operating safely for many many years. And no mention that Canada is already building SMR's? partnered with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, SNC-Lavalin, and Aecon to construct North America's first Small Modular Reactor (SMR) GE Hitachi’s BWRX-300 SMR
It could be, which is the strongest evidence that he is talking out his arse here. It pisses me off when people go on about waste as this unsurmountable problem, when the simple reality is that it is such a minor concern that the reactor designs that mitigate it are simply not worth it.
@@agsystems8220 You are right about some of his discussion on waste. I have no fear about the casks outside nuke plants. A little Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) liven up the video.
CANDUs have really good passive safety characteristics with the small fuel channels capable of natural circulation. Not as bulletproof as Nuscale or other new options but with a proven track record of building at a good cost. I think they combine safety with economy of scale like no other option. The ones with a shared vacuum building and rooftop reservoir have 10-12 days of passive cooling and can continue to cool without power with water being pumped into the boilers even then
