This for me is the real crux. Safety, nuclear waste, land-use, etc, are all issues of relatively trivial concern. They're fixations on the wrong question. The dominant issue is delivering competitive unit economics.

For SMRs, all their work is still ahead of them. To get the learning rate going, you need to start mass production. Then you need to double that production again, and again, and again. Then, after 2-3 decades of doublings, you may be able to deliver $/Wh in the ballpark of where solar & storage is today.

Never mind that solar & storage will undergo multiple more doublings between now and then, and never mind that private industry will struggle to fund the required doublings for SMRs because it's not the maximally profitable choice on the margin.

It's just a very difficult pragmatic picture for nuclear.

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jacquesm 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Then, after 2-3 decades of doublings, you may be able to deliver $/Wh in the ballpark of where solar & storage is today.

I highly doubt that will be the case. Even if solar and wind do not get better costwise (which is likely not true) the cost of maintaining and decommissioning SMRs is likely only to go up. This based on every other nuclear power plant to date, I have seen zero good arguments on why SMRs would be an exception to that rule.

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energy123 3 days ago | parent [-]

It's worth noting that the nuclear power plants of the 1960s follow different scale economics to SMRs. Casey Handmer makes this point in his online interviews and debates. The 1960s plants get their scale benefits from their sheer size. Similar to building a few massive aircraft carriers or massive olympic stadiums, however inefficiently each one is built.

SMRs are more akin to mass manufactured widgets, where the scale benefits come solely from manufacturing efficiencies gained through volume. They'll have a learning rate that governs the price declines for each doubling in production volumes.

From a unit economics POV, it's probably more useful to think of SMRs as a solar/battery-like technology rather than a 1960s nuclear-like technology. The problem for SMR proponents is that solar/batteries have had 50 years of this feedback loop playing out, but SMRs are starting from no volume.

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jacquesm 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

All of the plans that I've seen for SMR 'farms' were hopelessly naive when it came to security, decommissioning and compliance costs. They were just a hair above that 'swimming turtle island' when it comes to design phase realism. I really see them more as a way to milk subsidies than something that will actually happen in the next 30 years or so, especially not given the rate at which we are putting up solar and stringing HVDC interconnects, which in my opinion are the answer to the storage problem.

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energy123 3 days ago | parent [-]

> stringing HVDC interconnects

Agree that this solves many of the same problems as storage (as does overbuilding).

The PR problem with renewables is that the solutions are invariably cognitively complicated and multifactorial. The solution is going to be some kind of optimized result that mixes various storage forms, HVDC interconnects, overbuilding, and diversifying with solar and wind, and the exact nature of the solution is going to vary by geography.

It's just a hopelessly difficult communication challenge. If so many HN people can't grasp these concepts and jump to provably incorrect catchphrases like "storage is too expensive", then what hope is there for the general public.

	▲	jacquesm 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		People on HN don't generally realize that energy has pretty much always been a mix and that adding new energy sources with different availability, slew rates (both up and down, and not necessarily symmetrical), cost, peak capability, base load capability and so on is a well understood problem that markets know perfectly well how to deal with. Then there is the 'cool' factor ascribed to some solutions, an element of hope that a favorite technology will one day power the planet and all kinds of unrealistic assumptions about what is and what isn't technically, socially and economically possible. You are right that this is a difficult communications challenge but the level at which the discourse takes place is well below the minimum standards for taking part in such a debate. We're talking about very simple basic and factual knowledge here we are still very far away from the complexity of say the 15 minute ahead market, balancing and long term cost projections of a particular technology, we are more in outright disinformation and denialism territory.

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_aavaa_ 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The analogy is incorrect though.

There is economies of scale for creating the thing, and then the economies of scale for the thing making electricity.

You can make nuclear reactors smaller under the assumption that you’ll be able to make them faster and cheaper over time. But the cost of the electricity they make goes up versus larger reactors because the costs for parts aren’t linear. An SMR is a basically a tiny plant for making electrify.

A solar panel doesn’t have this issue. Making the panel 2x, 5x, 10x bigger does not change the unit economics of the electricity it produces.

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bryanlarsen 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

SMR's have neither of those economics of scale. Ontario is building 4, and there's a couple others at similar scale. Nobody is contemplating the thousands you'd need for the scale necessary to make the switch from bespoke to assembly line worth it. So the worst of both worlds.

	▲	jacquesm 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		And the risk with bespoke but still much higher numbers than regular plants is that you will need all of the overhead for a much smaller amount of output and you'll definitely not have the same QA budget that you have for a much larger plant. Prediction: many small failures. Hopefully not a 'small Chernobyl'.

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panick21_ 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> They're fixations on the wrong question. The dominant issue is delivering competitive unit economics.

The problem is. The regulation around safety, waste and land-use is what make the economics the problem.

But you are right, it is difficult, or just straight up impossible with the current state or regulation and policy.

Just for reference, since NRC was establish, basically new nuclear has been approved. During the AEC, innovation was rapid. Basically, no longer a balance between concerns, but simply all out focus on safety for a specific set of reactors. That's not the only factor, but its a big one.

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ProjectArcturis 3 days ago | parent [-]

It's pretty clear that for-profit entities will optimize to maximize profit at the expense of all other variables, including safety and the environment. We certainly can't trust the CEO class to properly prioritize safety concerns. So we will always need government regulations to keep these tradeoffs balanced.

You seem to be calling for a magical new set of regulations that are just as effective but don't cost as much. That's not going to happen.

	▲	panick21_ 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Nuclear plants were already operated pretty safely and the saty was constantly improving as people were learning more and research was progressive. You do not achieve safety by hard-coding all regulation to a specific technology and make everything else practically impossible. It works like this: "Your computer needs a C compiler with good error messages otherwise you can't build this", "Ok but we are building a LISP machine, there literally is no C". "We hear you but your C compiler needs good error messages". "Ok, could you maybe tell us who you would accept from, we can show you our LISP compiler will have amazing error messages" "MMhh sure we can do that, give us a full specification, and then we get back to you, but its going to cost you for every 1h we invest in that. And at the end, will tell you what we will accept as an application" "Ok, how long will that take and how much will it cost" "We can not give you a time or a cost, you will just have to wait (implied it will take at least many years and at least 100s of millions of $ with no outcome certainty what so ever)" That's just the tip of the iceberg. And then each individual country has their own version of something like this. So we have a market that is ultra heavy capital that needs scale. But scale is basically impossible to achieve. Thankfully the US government has finally made some steps into relaxing some of these and adopting a smarter approach, but its like turning the titanic, see GAIN for example. I am not suggesting we hand out plutonium the everybody who asks for it. In fact what I dislike, is that anybody who even suggest that regulatory form is part of the solution people instantly bring out 'we need some regulation' or 'new regulation wont be magic'. Both are true, and both are irrelevant. The de/re-regulation of many other industries has had dramatic effects, think of airlines, trucking, software, the Bell System and so on and so on. The current regulatory regime was created at a high point in panic and anti-nuclear sentiment. What I would like to see is something like what NASA did, for commercial cargo and commercial crew. You start with something achievable (commercial cargo). Create programs where the government want's to achieve something, and has multiple companies bid in a technology independent way. Start with some smaller things, nuclear reactor for space, medical isotope reactors, off-grid nuclear and then do SMR.