You are so wrong on this, again. But I've noticed you double down if anyone challenges what you think it true, rather than listening to anything that contradicts your opinions.
And gee, wonder why there are attempts at fusion plants, if its 'too expensive'.
Of course we are not on the same page: your main argument and Cindy' as well is "oh, there are all these new shiny toys being available soon, so cool, hooray!" You are just believing the pro nuclear power propaganda which has been circulating around a lot since climate change has become a more pressing topic, without asking questions or looking back at the origins of these designs and experiences with former research reactors done in the past, if there are such things.
I on the other hand am arguing with an array of various facts:
1. nuclear energy todays is much more expensive than renewables, meaning it makes economically not much sense without tons of subsidies received by the state during its lifetime and afterwards.
2. construction time of nuclear reactors is 8 years mean time, even in countries like China.
3. All type of the new reactors, your little shiny new toys, either don't have even a working prototype yet or alternatively the research prototypes of the past have a troubled history, or if already available and under construction like the EPR IV, are building time and cost wise an utter catastrophe.
I could also continue with mentioning that Uranium is quite the limited ressource, which means if nuclear power gets scaled at large price might skyrocket.
Peak Uranium is indeed a thing, which though is not so pressuring right now due to some technical advances. But it could become if more power plants at large are being constructed. If it becomes pressuring enough it either means that you have to recycle worn out nuclear fuel rods a lot, which is really expensive and a desaster for the environment, or use other elements as nuclear fuel like Thorium. This is the reason why the nuclear strategy of many countries originally contained as important pillar one nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, but not every country build one like La Hague in France or Sellafield in the UK. Which is why so many people are now pushing Thorium based reactor designs a lot, this does not come out of the blue, no, these are aware about Peak Uranium. Thorium is a much less rare element than Uranium, I guess it's around 3 times more on Earth than Uranium, so this makes absolutely sense.
Fusion power is a nice idea and it's good that this is being researched. This is what scientific research is here for. The question though is nobody knows at the moment if it ever will work the way we'd like to be, because there are still many problems which need to be resolved first. I do support this research, but do not expect to witness a working commercial power plant during my lifetime.
To cover this MIT article:
Nuscale wants to build small designs, similar to
Akademik Lomonossow, which is a Russian build SMR on a ship. It took the Russians a decade to build that thing. Nuscale seems to be less complicated, we've got to see though when they start constructing stuff how long it will take.
Sodium-cooled reactors? Who cares, really not a new technology at all. France has build such a thing with 1.2 GW electrical power called
Superphenix, this is so far the biggest sodium cooled reactor ever build. It was operational for around 11 years. Reliability was around 7%. Russia has two still operational. It's really a hard to handle technology, and there's a reason why only so few of the list of such reactors ever made it into criticality and were operated for more than a few months. Just because China builds it now will not make the fundamental problems change or magically go away.
Bill Gates traveling wave reactor, ah yes. Sounds good on paper and is another old concept from 1958, like so many of these "new designs". Problem is again sodium cooled and too pricy. Aside that according to Gates the wave would take around 60 years or so. Really something complicated again with doubtful outcome that this theoretical concept will ever work in reality.
And of course the poster boy of new nuclear reactor designs, the molten salt fluid reactor, which was a design originally conceived to safely power airplanes. The US airforce wanted to have big bombers which could travel the world for weeks, this was scrapped when ICBMs became a thing.
It sounds promising on paper, also quite safe as well. Have a leakage somewhere? Look, no problem, as soon as the molten salt reacts with fresh air it becomes solid, problem solved. And if the nuclear fuel gets too hot in the reactor we'll use gravity as fail safe device; there's a metal plomb at the bottom of the reactor which then will just melt, and big nice tanks below the reactor which are wide enough that criticality is destroyed. Problem solved.
This design was conceived at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratories by Alvin Weinberg, the same guy who also designed the reactor type still being used in submarines and supercarriers. This design was Weinberg's favorite by a long shot. They had a prototype running at the JPL for over 6000+ hours. What the fanboys of this reactor design are not telling you is that the nuclear fuel of the decommissioned reactor was not safe in the tanks, but migrated through the system. The salt in the prototype was heated once a year. Also given the fact that it uses a molten salt for cooling instead of water this means that the wear and tear on the pipes is much bigger than with conventional reactor types, because salt is corrosive. In 1994 they discovered that the concentration of uranium created the potential for a spontaneous nuclear criticality accident - which contradicted the main promise of this design that it is fool proof designed to prevent this from ever happening - which means uncontrolled nuclear fission chain reaction, as well much fluorine. Getting the uranium out of the salt took six years. Just look at decomissioning in the Wikipedia article:
Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment - Wikipedia
Moving on with pebble bed reactors. We've got one such thing in Germany, which worked also for quite some time. It turned out that the pebbles were not so safe as originally thought, and damaged, contaminating the whole building. The whole building is still contaminated, deconstruction will start around 2045 due to that. There's been also a company in South Africa, which really tried to renew research on that stuff after the 2000s. For some time it was considered as the new hot stuff. It never materialized.
So excuse me, but I've got more than good enough reason to believe that nuclear power is not our saviour as some conceive it to be. It's not even an important stepping stone into a better future, because we do need clean energy at massive scale right now and the enormous construction times of available nuclear reactor designs makes this impossible for nuclear power.
www.theguardian.com
