| ▲ | Norway eyes 200-250 MW floating nuclear reactors to power industry(interestingengineering.com) |
| 11 points by PaulHoule 19 hours ago | 13 comments |
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| ▲ | magicalhippo 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Norway has had two small experimental nuclear reactors since the 50s or so, and they're getting decommissioned. Turns out that's expensive. Very expensive. Current estimates have ballooned to 56 billion NOK ($5.6b). So what does SMR decommissioning look like? At least this project has skipped the huge NIMBY issue by putting them on ships. And if anything goes wrong I'm sure nobody would mind glow-in-the-dark sushi... |
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| ▲ | PaulHoule 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Decommissioning isn’t usually as bad as building reactors — it’s not unusual for decommissioning projects to come in under budget and early. | |
| ▲ | FridayoLeary 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What makes is it so expensive? | | |
| ▲ | _aavaa_ 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Small reactors miss out economies of scale that large reactors get access to. Halving the size of a pipe doesn’t halve the cost. | |
| ▲ | magicalhippo 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | In the case of our experimental reactors, a large part as I understand it is that they were fooling around in the 60s. Thus a lot of "meh just put it over there" scenarios and such, without much consideration of the consequences. Another point is that Norway has no way to process the leftover materials, and currently nowhere to store the processed materials. So we need to ship the highly radioactive stuff abroad, and build a storage facility for when it's processed. |
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| ▲ | EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| How safe are these reactors in the war that is coming? |
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| ▲ | SilverElfin 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Russia built a floating reactor recently too. I wonder if it is too much of a risk though. Polluting fishing waters doesn’t sound good. |
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| ▲ | phillipseamore 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There are hundreds of nuclear reactors sailing around our oceans in ships and submarines and have been doing so for more than 70 years. Most estimates are above 400 total reactors though the actual count isn't really known since nearly all of these are military vessels. | |
| ▲ | inejge 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Operating since 2019/2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov It's in the far north, I'm not sure how much fishing is going on around there, or how a potential radiological leak would spread around. | | |
| ▲ | whaleofatw2022 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | It looks like each of its two reactors are a good bit more powerful than what is in an Ohio Class Submarine, but far less than what's in a Gerald R Ford class Aircraft carrier. For whatever thats worth |
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| ▲ | rasz 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| North of Norway has ~5 euro/MWh power most of the year https://euenergy.live/country.php?a2=NO3 , nuclear cant beat that. |
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| ▲ | lysace 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > The floating plants are expected to supply electricity to nearby offshore platforms and feed power into the onshore grid. Norwegian offshore platforms means it's related to fossil oil/gas extraction. |
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| ▲ | magicalhippo 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Indeed. There was a big push towards electrifying the offshore platforms and refineries using green hydro power. This was so our carbon budget didn't look so bad, as the actual end products are not counted. However in recent years there's been strong pushback as people realized just how much power these platforms and refineries take, and what plugging them into our grid would do to electricity prices. So this seems to be aimed at having your cake and eating it. We get "green" oil and gas, and no astronomical electricity prices. |
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