Technology

60073 readers

3459 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

394

Small modular nuclear reactors get a reality check in new report (newatlas.com)

submitted 6 months ago by machinin to c/technology

152 comments fedilink hide all child comments

[T]he report's executive summary certainly gets to the heart of their findings.

"The rhetoric from small modular reactor (SMR) advocates is loud and persistent: This time will be different because the cost overruns and schedule delays that have plagued large reactor construction projects will not be repeated with the new designs," says the report. "But the few SMRs that have been built (or have been started) paint a different picture – one that looks startlingly similar to the past. Significant construction delays are still the norm and costs have continued to climb."

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] MrEff 23 points 6 months ago

You are on a nuke loving platform and people are going to downvote anything that isn't hard pro nuke. But you are correct. I have had this exact same discussion before. The numbers you are looking for are called the LCOE, or the 'levelized cost of electricity' where the lifetime of the technology cost if factored in. Offshore wind is currently the lowest followed by solar. Nuke is clost to 10x the cost. There is even an international nuke consortium that has several reports agreeing with exactly what you are saying and basically sum it up as: if you invested in nuke early, then it is cost efficient to just keep upgrading. If you didn't invest in it early, then the cost to implement it so high that you are better off going wind/solar. Even if you add in the cost of battery systems, it is still cheaper than building a new nuke plant. And more than that, with these new nuke plants you have to upgrade all your infrastructure because your old wires can't handle the output loads. If you look at the 30+ billion Georgia spent on this plant, they could have simply given out a micro generation grant to everyone to add solar to their roofs, not needed to upgrade the lines, and been far better off. But hey, just like reddit, if you are commenting on lemmy you better be pro nuke only and ignore the other numbers.