Today, with 8 billion humans on this planet, only the few wealthy countries are extracting natural resources to bolster their economies and provide prosperous lives for their citizens.
Ronald Stein, P.E. is an engineer, columnist on energy literacy at America Out Loud NEWS, and advisor on energy literacy for the Heartland Institute and CFACT, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated book “Clean Energy Exploitations.”
Dr Robert Jeffrey is an economist, business manager and energy expert. He has a Master’s degree in economics from Cambridge, a Master’s degree in business management and holds a PhD in Engineering Management. He was on the economic round table advising the South African Reserve Bank
Olivia Vaughan is a business strategist. She has a Bachelor of Commerce in Law and an MBA and operates across key sectors in the circular economy, sustainable systems and the built environment. She is co-founder of a Nuclear innovation company in South Africa, Stratek Global.
Co-authored by Ronald Stein, Dr. Robert Jeffrey and Olivia Vaughan
Published March 3, 2025, at America Out Loud NEWS
Earth has existed for more than 4 billion years without present-day humans. In the past, dinosaurs and cavemen never used its plentiful natural resources.
The discrepancy in the allocation of earth’s natural resources between developed and developing economies, emphasizes a critical point affecting the future of the human species.
When we consider the needs of developing economies, we have no choice but to consider that access to electricity is a crucial cornerstone to alleviating poverty, promoting economic growth and improving living standards. It is an essential social and economic indicator. The link between electricity and GDP per capita is one of the strongest correlations in the social sciences. Why are we not utilizing a seemingly endless clean supply of electricity to shine some light on the hundreds of millions of people living in the dark?
Small Modular Reactors (SMR’s) hold the potential to revolutionize the clean electricity landscape by providing scalable and flexible solutions across both the developed and the developing world. Generation IV SMRs do not need to be near any large waterbody at all, a critical factor in many water scarce countries. They also incorporate a number of technological advances to meet the criteria of sustainability, nuclear safety, economic competitiveness and resistance to nuclear proliferation.
Small modular reactor development globally, is in part due to many South African engineers and scientists having been absorbed into private industry in South Africa and all over the world, including the USA. SMR’s have the potential to bring significant benefits to developing economies due to:
- Lower initial capital investment as SMRs require a lower upfront capital investment due to their compact size and modular design.
- Reduced construction time as SMRs can be deployed relatively quickly, with deployment timelines as short as three years.
- Siting flexibility as SMRs can be installed in a variety of locations, including remote areas with less developed infrastructure.
- Scalability as SMRs can be scaled up or down to meet energy demands. This flexibility allows developing economies to adjust their energy production as their needs change.
- Job creation and economic impact as the construction and operation of SMRs can create jobs and stimulate economic activity.
- Enhanced safety as SMRs have simpler designs and use passive cooling systems, making them inherently safer to operate than traditional reactors.
The generally accepted definition of access to electricity includes the provision of electricity, safe cooking facilities, and a minimum level of consumption. The International Energy Agency (IEA) takes a more holistic approach to its definition, requiring households to meet a minimum specified level of electricity, which gradually increases over time and is based on whether the household is in a rural or urban environment. The set minimum threshold is currently at 250 kWh per year for rural households and 500 kW per year for urban households according to the IEA.
According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), the average annual electricity used by a US residential customer in 2022, was 10,791 kWh. This equates to an average of roughly 900 kWh per month, 43 times the minimum rural threshold accepted by the IEA. We can thus understandably surmise that economic growth in developing economies inevitably requires growth in demand for electricity. Those economies that continue to grow, along with their long-term electricity sovereignty, must therefore develop their nuclear energy capability as a matter of fact rather than of opinion. Referring particularly to South Africa, which is an economy based on developing its mining, industrial and agricultural growth. It must focus its substantial base load electricity and energy growth on domestic nuclear power growth.
As a species, WE CANNOT accurately predict all future economic, technical and energy developments, which may radically change the upcoming economy and other progress of humans. However, we CAN focus on certain existing issues which need to be highlighted as the very reality that cannot be ignored. The proverbial elephant in the room is that there are consequences of those wealthier developed countries avoiding methods to deliver electricity to those in developing countries.
The electricity from wind and solar renewables is weak, intermittent and unreliable. This makes them only suitable for certain situational applications, but the reality is that economic demand to achieve steady growth is for continuous, uninterruptable, dispatchable power. Delivery of electricity to humans makes them suitable to grow industries that provide products and services to the 8 billion on this planet.
Using current nuclear technology methods, the used energy rods are taken out and replaced after approximately five to ten years. However, only 3% of the energy available contained in nuclear fuel is used at this stage and 97% of the energy originally contained in this stored material is still available and can be used. In other words, there is still a further 10 times the energy used still available from the Slightly Used Nuclear Fuel (SUNF) with revised usage methods. It can then be extrapolated that nuclear power will be available to humans for a further 50,000 years or more from these SUNF sources. How are we not as a species, embracing this gift from galactic solar events the universe has bestowed upon us?
Next-generation reactor designs like Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and advanced fast reactors offer greater efficiency, improved safety features, and a notable reduction of spent fuel.
Two of the co-authors of this article are from South Africa, and they believe their country is well positioned to stand on its rich history of nuclear transparency and compliance as a gateway into Africa, as well as the Middle East and SE Asia. With increased safety, oversight and non-proliferation measures, isn’t it time that the developing world share in the power needed to build resilient economies of their own?
The costings from South African based nuclear companies developing SMR’s, are estimating ~$0.12/kWh by the third plant with no need for back up capacity, cost of capital and disposal costed in. It has an energy availability factor of 95%, all of the time. So, we can accurately predict production. As the modular production supply chain grows and incorporating recycled material, the cost is predicted to reduce to ~$0.01/kWh within the next generation.
Now is as good a time, as we are going to get to take the critical leap as a species to nuclear power. As a species, we can make use of the infinite power that we have access to because of collapsing stars, and hundreds of millions of nova and supernova galactic events across space and time. The infinite light in our universe has sent us the densest form of solar power it could ever muster when we use atoms for peace. Nuclear generated electricity and a rapid roll-out of Small Modular Reactors is the fastest way to cast a lasting beacon of light in forgotten developing worlds living in the dark.
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Since when was there an “infinite light in our universe” And how does it send anything anywhere? And on top of everything if this infinite light was a finite distance away we would be receiving an infinite amount of solar energy every second and we wouldn’t need any extra source of energy.
Of course there is infinite light in the universe. Photons are not subject to the exclusionary principle.
Can you demonstrate experimentally that an infinite number of photons cannot occupy a given volume – say 1 cm3?
So – infinite light, unless you can demonstrate otherwise. Any other questions?
Fortunately Michael, the expansion of the universe causes most of that light to be reduced in energy to the far, far infrared where it carries so little energy that our sky is black and extremely cold. Were it suddenly not to be so, our sky would be white, extremely hot and we would all be reduced instantly to potato chips
FYI you are quoting an old falsified theory
The idea that light loses energy over time is call tired light theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tired_light
It is completely inconsistent with observed facts
As far as anyone can tell a photon created billions of years ago still has the same energy today the red-shift is because of GR in an expanding universe
The “tired light” theory (of Zwickey I believe) tries to explain the observed redshift of universal light (redder as the source is further away) as if photons lose energy travelling long distances when they bounce against stuff on their way to your eye/instrument. As I noted in my comment, the redshift is due to the expansion of the universe with more distant light sources travelling faster away from us than nearer sources leading to reduction in the frequency of the light from these more distant sources towards the red. The phenomena is explained by one of the solutions to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.
Really? That statement elicits the age-old question: Why is the night sky mostly dark?
It’s hard to talk about “infinity”. Sure, there is the “universal” cosmic background radiation at an equivalent temperature of about 2.7 K, but that is certainly not “infinite” across the full range of EM frequencies (= range of photon energies . . . we’d be long dead if it were!). Also, as the universe continues expanding (currently predicted across infinite time going forward), that CBR is predicted to cool toward the definite temperature of 0 K.
If you want a serious answer it is one of the peculiarities of QM the photons don’t exist until they are observed. So actually there are infinite possible photons (called probability waves) but only a finite number of observers that can fit in a given space. You can argue about the theory but the experiments don’t lie.
If you want the background google “single photon with multiple detector experiments” which are lab experiments you can do with a single photon source. The technicality behind it is to observe/detect a photon you have to absorb it’s energy and once you do that the photon no longer exists.
The universe really is that weird.
Yes, in QM this type of question will arise, but I would argue its purely philosphical. It falls in the same category as ‘does a tree that falls in a forest make a sound if nobody is there to listen?’ or ‘Is the moon there if nobody is looking?’. And from that point of view its not even particularly peculiar to QM, simply the observation that you can’t ‘know’ something exists unless you measure it (observe it).
I’ve never considered this perspective particularly enlightening or raise any enlightening questions.
Not trying to be critical to your comment, just observing that the concept of existence being tied to observation is true of everything, we just accept that we ‘observe’ a lot of things just by being alive (e.g. we ‘know’ that the sun is there by taking note of day light, that the moon remains in its orbit by observing tides, we don’t need to ‘look’ directly at them. Though to be 100% accurate in any statements that they exist you should look to see they are there).
In “normal life” you may argue it is philosophical but in a lab doing experiments it’s very real and an observed behaviour 🙂
I worked in labs, its no different in this case than ‘normal life’. Such experiments are simply confirming a tautology. The premise that something “doesn’t exist unless it is measured” is an unfalsifiable contention. You can’t prove something “does not exist”.
I appreciate the value that QM has provided humanity in better understand our universe. This is not a case where QM shed any light on reality, its delving in philosophy in these types of questions not science. So yes its no different than ‘normal life’.
The “peculiarities” of QM apply only at microscopic levels, NOT at the macroscopic size ranges of everyday objects up to cosmological scale. Photons will register on unmanned CCD detectors and unmanned photographic plates . . . and thus are positively shown to exist before they are “observed” by a human mind.
The “observer effect,” which is most closely associated with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, where the act of observing a quantum system collapses its wave function, essentially “forcing” it into a definite state rather than a superposition of possibilities, is cute, but again must be interpreted at the quantum level, not MACROSCOPIC ENSEMBLE level.
There is a large ongoing debate as to why, where and how “reality” bifurcates between macroscopic ensemble-level and microscopic quantum-level particle behaviors. I think it falls into the category of “grand unification theories”, or GUTs. Nice acronym!
The paradox of QM results because QM treats time as non local but SR showed time is local.
This leads to the QM paradox of Schrodingers cat where the cat is both alive and dead at the same time.
However the dead and alive cat do not exist at the same time. Each have their own local worldlines, only 1 of which will intersect with the observers “now” when the box is opened.
Thus superposition and wavefunction collapse are not an artiface of QM. They are an artifact of time.
So, do you believe incoming photons have not actually interacted with CCD electronic circuits or the chemical emulsions on film or astronomical photographic plates until a human “observer”—days, months, even years later—first “looks” at the electronic records or first visually examines the photos?
Ahhh, those poor photons . . . they don’t get any respect on their own!
And how about this: Can an AI bot collapse as wave function or must it be a human mind? Furthermore, after an AI “makes an observation”, is another AI bot or human mind required to “collapse” the wave function(s) associated with the preceding AI bot’s “observation”???
That QM claims that quantum objects don’t exist and quantum events don’t take place until they are observed by a conscious entity suggest to me that QM is an incomplete theory and our conception of the universe remains very anthropocentric. To me, the idea that the Universe is somehow dependent on a very clever chimpanzee on a rather insignificant planet making observations is beyond ludicrous.
Schrodinger never accepted the Copenhagen Interpretation and his famous cat thought experiment was actually to poke fun at that interpretation. However, Neils Bohr turned that around said that is exactly what he meant, at which point Schrodinger said you’re all nuts and left the field. Unfortunately, Bohr was able to bully the rest of his colleagues into adopting his views. Since then, the field has been dominated by mathematicians, not physicists, and this has resulted in a lot of beautiful mathematical theories bearing little or no relationship to the actual Universe.
Logic alert: “infinite” over infinite time does not imply “infinite every second”.
It could be argued that since infinity never equals zero, infinity over infinity equals any and all values except zero.
Calculus shows that infinity over infinity can approach zero, but even at the limit never equals zero.
Number theory argues that for the set of all fractions, only 0/n = 0 where n <> 0, and non zero everywhere else.
By mathematical definition, infinity never equals any value, real or imaginary (as in complex number theory).
Are SMR ready to go today? I’m all for SMRs but if we can’t start building them tomorrow let’s build nuclear we can start building tomorrow.
China started a 200MWe unit in Dec 23. As far as I know it is still in commercial operation. No reports of big bangs but apparently capacity factor has not been encouraging.
Yes, it is a pebble bed design, has undergone safety auto-shutdown test etc..
.. It has been in commercial operation since last October.
It is modular in design, and they are now building a larger version.
<p>China’s demonstration HTR-PM enters commercial operation</p> – World Nuclear News
There is something odd about the need to make bigger Small Nuclear Reactors (SMRs)?
That defies the very merit of the concept and needs to be reconsidered.
Now if they were engaged in reducing the size and simplifying the modular design still further that would make sense.
The prize has to be who can put the whole power plant on a truck in a container.
The added plus being the ability of modern design to consume legacy stored radioactive waste from traditional nuclear plants.
The future for nuclear is very exciting, if I were at the youth stage of life, looking at engineering options, it is where I would want to focus my career.
I knew a person who followed that career advice in 1995ish.
Is “commercial operation” the right term for something operating in China?
Copilot/Bing/Microsoft 1.17 25
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NuScale Power is collaborating with Doosan Heavy Industries and Construction Co. (DHIC) in South Korea to manufacture components for their Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). The reactor housing is being cast at Doosan’s facility in Changwon, South Korea2. According to the information available, the project is on track, and the reactor is expected to be ready and begin commercial operation in the United States by 2029.
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The NuScale Small Modular Reactor (SMR) project in Romania is progressing well! The project, a collaboration between NuScale Power, Nuclearelectrica, and RoPower Nuclear, aims to replace a former coal plant in Doicești with a six-module NuScale SMR plant. The project has received substantial funding and support from international partners, including the USA, Japan, South Korea, and the UAE2. Currently, the project is in the Front-End Engineering and Design (FEED) Phase 2 stage, with Fluor Corporation providing design and engineering services. The goal is to have the SMR plant operational by 2029.
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NuScale Power’s Standard Design Approval (SDA) application for their small modular reactor (SMR) design, known as the US460, is currently under review by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The review process is expected to be completed by July 2025. NuScale has made significant progress, including receiving design approval and certification from the NRC, and starting production of long lead-time components2
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NuScale’s SMR technology has also been selected by Standard Power for two facilities in Ohio and Pennsylvania, aiming to produce nearly 2 GW of clean energy..
Thank you that is good information. Do you think SMRs are the future or would it be best to have them in combination with traditional generation three (or what ever generation we are in now) reactors. It would seem to me that large population centers and industrial areas would be better served with traditional reactors given a reliable cooling source.
Got to think U.S Navy has been doing something like this for a long time.
Tried and true.
EXACTLY. We’ve been putting Nucs in submarines, aircraft carriers etc for decades. I don’t see how what is called an “SMR” here is particularly earth shattering. If they are cost effective and safe you’d think they’d have commercial viability.
Perhaps the regulatory framework is still heavily stacked against Nucs, in my observation/opinion its the primary issue with getting any nuc plant built these days.
U.S. Navy reactors are not designed for steady power levels, although they can do that very well. Very different designs. Navy has a lot of human oversight and constant maintenance. The new Gen IV SMRs are far less expensive to build and operate. I was a USN nuclear electrician’s mate, 1979-1983.
Sub or Surface?
JamesB_684 is spot on. Admiral Zumwalt made sure that Navy nuke designs required highly trained, skilled personnel for safe operation, which is the opposite of affordable. There are some other features of Navy nukes that take them out of the commercial realm, most notably their use of highly enriched uranium (93 to 95% U-235 – fine for 25 years unrefueled operation, but also fine for making very simple atomic bombs). None of that is necessary, and in fact, the trade space for nuclear power technology is vast. Oak Ridge looked at thousands of different implementations before homing in on low-enriched uranium pressurized light water reactors as the main technology for U.S. nuclear electric utilities. There are scads of alternatives, many safer and arguably cheaper. Everyone has been afraid to get near anything called “nuclear” because of decades of anti-nuke propaganda. That’s going to change, however.
The marine vessels of the US Navy that employ nuclear fission reactors to provide electrical and propulsive power have essentially unlimited water cooling capability right at hand. That is not the case for SMR’s that are planned for land use, although they may have of comparable nameplate energy rating.
Haven’t we had them since the 50s… on naval vessels.
SMR = subsidy harvesters.
The best bet for SMR development is cookie cutter identical modular with assembly line factory manufactured reactors delivered to the jobsite on semi-trailers and up and running in two years.
NuScale Power Module (NPM), has a cylindrical containment vessel with dimensions of approximately 76 feet (23 meters) in height and 15 feet (4.5 meters) in diameter and rated 77 MWe.
The maximum length for a semi-trailer operating on the Interstate Highway System is generally 48 feet. However, there are exceptions for certain types of trailers and combinations, such as double trailers, which can be longer.
Thankfully, history has shown us what starts up as big can be reduced is size quite considerably (stop laughing at the back!). The first computers in commercial use took up whole buildings. Now some seventy years on we have more commuting power in our pockets than those original state of the art installations.
Engineering is a wonderful discipline and provides civilisation with endless options when it is allowed to.
But computers are not energy generating devices, they are energy consuming devices. What has advanced to our benefit in their development is the invention of ever less-energy-consuming ways to do their work and their ability to do much more. The same principles apply to ever better cars, aircraft, home heating systems and such. In energy producing devices like furnaces or nuclear reactors, the laws of thermodynamics apply – if you need more energy, more machines or larger machines are required. The NUSCALE machines, for example, are very small, about 77 megawatts of electricity production. To get the 1200 megawatts of energy production from them that modern full scale reactor can produce, one would need 16 of them. Whether 16 is cheaper than building, operating and ultimately disposing of one large machine remains to be seen. Much of the cost question has to do with the NRC rules for SMRs. For example does each reactor need a separate operating team or can several be operated by one team – one control room for 2, or 4 or 8 or for all 16? Does each need its own containment should it or its operators act to Chernobylize it (Chernobyl itself had no containment at all) or can all be contained in one structure? I am not convinced that a group of SMRs will prove to be cheaper than big machines but with so many trying to do just that, we shall soon see.
I believe that part of the attractiveness of SMR is the ability to distribute them.
The ability to locate the power source close to the place where power is in demand, should be able to reduce the cost of the distribution system.
Another issue is reliability. If you have one unit, and it goes down unexpectedly, you have lost a lot of power generations.
If you have 20 units, and one goes down unexpectedly, you have lost a lot less. On the flip side how much does having 20 units increase the likelihood of one going down unexpectedly? Do you make your long term plans assuming 95% availability and just be happy when you get more?
What you have in your pocket relies on huge buildings filled with computers that draw massive amounts of power.
Not to be rude but this fallacy is what keeps the climate cult continuing to promise ‘better, cheaper, smaller batteries’. Computer chips are significantly different, in fact they seem unique in the way they’ve scaled power vs size where by ‘power’ I mean ‘capability’.
Sure a lot of things can be scaled down in size now but they aren’t going to provide greater capability than their larger versions, at least not at the scale computer chips have accomplished. There’s a whole host of physical limitations in many things that don’t allow them to scale down while at the same time providing greater capability.
Making smaller versions of a motor may be a good thing & have a market but its unlikely you’ll find a 400HP motor the size of a thimble any time soon.
A Fiat 500 is a lot smaller than Cadillac Escalade. Does that mean the Fiat 500 is more advanced?
I’m not sure what the point of your question is given I’m explicitly saying that unlike the advancement in computing, making something smaller doesn’t necessarily make it better and even if it does its not by a significant amount.
Moore’s Law with respect to computing was real, it doesn’t apply to pretty much anything else.
So I have no clue if the Fiat 500 is ‘better’ than the Escalade as that’s a market question for buyers, but I’m betting it doesn’t have nearly the same horsepower.
There’s a world of difference between shrinking the size of a transistor and shrinking the size of a generator.
Theoretically, transistors need only a few atoms in order to controllably switch states.
Nuclear power needs a fixed number of atoms in order to generate a fixed amount of power.
You can enrich your fuel so that your fixed number of atoms fits into a smaller space, however enrichment leads to it’s own set of problems so there is a limit to how far you can go.
The size of a generator needed to produce a set amount of power, is pretty well fixed. (At least until room temperature supper conductors become available.)
The amount of force needed to turn that generator is fixed.
The amount of steam pressure needed to generate that much force is pretty close to being fixed.
The amount of steel needed to contain that steam pressure is pretty close to being fixed.
The size of the radiator needed to dump the excess heat so that your steam returns to water, is also pretty much fixed.
The reality is, that while the power system does have the ability to shrink as technology improves. The amount by which it can shrink, is small.
To compare that to computers going from vacuum tubes to micro-electronics with millions of transistors on a single chip, is just plain silly.
“As a species, WE CANNOT accurately predict all future economic, technical and energy developments…”
One thing we can easily predict; the Marxists, Maoists, and other assorted Malthusians that infest GangGreen, like Alaskan summer mosquitos on caribou, will continue to suck dry and craze the body politic until obvious cooling occurs, or a functional spigot it placed on their money stream!
The Trump Admin 2.0 is like old Red Adair; but instead of trying to stop the waste of precious FFs in an oil well fire, they are trying to stop the waste of taxpayer dollars on destructive climate fantasies!
Sadly, I fear that after the events of the last few days, we will be seeing small nuclear weapons long before we see an operational small nuclear reactor.
Your fears have long been realized. Small nuclear weapons, they are called tactical weapons because they can supposedly be used on a battle field, have existed for many decades. Some are small enough to be fired from a common cannon. They have been tested but never used in battle.
Never used so far.
My bet is when Putin decides to take Poland for national security. The Northern European Plain is, to Russian minds, an open door. To get round the Pripet Marshes you use that route or south through Ukraine.
That’s not going to happen, at least not with Trump or Vance as President. Putin is a tyrant, but not stupid.
Yes, Putin does have a sense of self-preservation. This is a good thing. It keeps him from going off the cliff.
It looks like Trump’s peace initiative is still alive. Zelenskyy says he is ready to make a deal as soon as possible, according to Trump, in his speech last night.
Careful . . . Co-President Elon Musk may decide that tactical nukes are way more efficient than RDX or TNT for battlefield use.
/sarc
But no one seems able to bring one to market.
Indeed! NUSCALE was to have built a bunch in Idaho but the project failed when no utility could be found to buy the electricity because of its high cost.
I believe that the power was offered at a price well below the latest offshore wind prices, but it was competing against fracked gas.
If only the UK were a developing country. It’s deindustrialising fast.
The upper class of the UK longs for the good old days of an agrarian economy, when their huge estates brought them massive amounts of wealth and power, and the peasants never went anywhere and were proud if offered the chance to serve them.
Generation IV SMRs don’t need to be near a body of water? Are they not thermal machines? If so how do they function without a condenser? If not how do they make electricity? The diagram in this article is not that of a functional machine.
Some SMR designs will use closed-cycle cooling, so won’t need to be near a water source. The Chinese SMR mentioned by RickWill is a pebble bed reactor, so doesn’t need to be located near water.
It uses helium as coolant and graphite as the moderator.
<p>China’s demonstration HTR-PM enters commercial operation</p> – World Nuclear News
The Chinese pebble bed high temperature gas cooled reactor is a steam generating machine, like all power reactors designed or built so far. It probably uses cooling water for the steam cycle. It may be feasible to cool the steam cycle with a really big radiator but that would be expensive and probably thermodynamically inefficient. The Brits have lots of experience with gas cooled power reactors and we have a little. Ours was Fort St. Vrain in Colorado. It didn’t work well because of design errors that led to water getting into the gas cycle causing all kinds of mayhem. It was shutdown after ~10 years and converted to a conventional natural gas plant.
Thermodynamics, Greame…First Law…Carnot principle and such…The turbine that runs the generator still has to reject the reactor heat to a low temperature heat sink, which needs to be cold as possible and in close proximity to the reactor for cost reasons.
The heat is rejected to the coolest surroundings possible. For example, Nuclear subs leave a heat trail in their wake, one of the methods used to determine what their recent course was by methods similar to Schlieren photography except using sound waves. Hard on whales’ hearing though.
Sounds to me like a sure path to a meltdown! That is, unless you consider Earth’s environment as part of the “cycle”.
ROTFL.
X-Energy uses a high temperature gas cooling & energy transport. Their web site has pretty good explanation
How much cooling is required depends on the size of the reactor, how efficient the turbines are in turning hot steam into energetic electrons and how efficient the radiator attached to the unit is.
You can make your system more efficient if you increase the temperature it runs at.
Of course, if the temperature gets so high that the metals being used start to soften, that can be problematic. You can increase the operating temperature by using exotic alloys, however that runs counter to the goal of making these things cheaper.
So many tradeoffs.
Out for a drive yesterday in Oak Ridge.
X-Energy is doing site work for its TRISO fuel plant. This looks to be massive, far larger than anything I would have imagined.
Kairos Power is pouring concrete for its demonstration reactor. What they are doing is constructing support pillars six feet in diameter and ten feet down to bedrock. They’re doing it in an extremely disciplined way even doing a test to work out how to do this part of the construction.
The gate was open at TVA’s Clinch River Site but I didn’t go in. Couldn’t see anything from there. Must be some activity.
Orano is also doing site prep but couldn’t see much. They are building a new gas centrifuge plant.
On a side note a company also located on the site of the old ORGDP steam plant, Carbon Rivers, has a massive pile of wind turbine blades. They are developing ways to extract the glass and petrochemicals from these used blades and other fiber glass products. I have fond memories of the old steam plant having spent a little time there awaiting my clearance back in 1974. All gone now as is most of ORGDP.
Small Modular Reactors will benefit developing economies.
That’s why, post Net Zero, the UK will need them.
From Cap Allon: GO NUCLEAR OR SHUT-UPIf climate alarmists were actually serious about reducing carbon emissions while maintaining reliable energy, nuclear power would be the answer. As per the data, it’s the safest, cleanest, most efficient, and least land-intensive energy source going.
THE CASE FOR NUCLEAR1) Nuclear energy has the lowest death rate per terawatt-hour (TWh) of electricity produced—lower than coal, oil, biomass, natural gas, and even wind and solar.
2) Nuclear emits just 6 tons of CO2 per gigawatt-hour (GWh), compared to coal (970 tons), oil (720 tons), and natural gas (440 tons). Even solar and wind have higher emissions over their lifecycle than nuclear.
3) A single 10-gram uranium fuel pellet produces as much energy as 1 ton of coal, 120 gallons of oil, or 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas.
4) Nuclear plants operate at full power 93% of the time, outperforming solar (23%) and wind (33%).
5) A 1,000 MW nuclear plant occupies just over 1 square mile and can power 775,000 homes. To match that output a solar farm would require 6,000 acres but only power 193,000 homes; a wind farm 32,000 acres to power 277,000 homes. Wind and solar not only take up vastly more space but also require battery storage due to their intermittency, further increasing land and resource demands.
Nuclear energy offers the ONLY reliable, scalable, and ‘environmentally responsible’ path to clean energy, if that’s your goal. Wind and solar, while good for small, off-grid solutions, cannot match nuclear’s efficiency, reliability, and land conservation benefits.
Does point 5 take into account the relative availability of the power being generated by the various sources?
hmmm! steam generator but nothing to cool the steam. This would make the turbine incredibly inefficient – it needs a large pressure differential to operate. Who drew your graphic!
Pulling energy out of the steam to spin the turbine cools it quite a bit. But you are correct that there is a lot of detail being left out.
Ontario is going with a boiling water reactor BWR that drives the turbine directly with reactor coolant. The reactor shown in this article is a PWR which isolates the reactor coolant from the turbines.
And even Boiling Water Reactors are steam machines. The exhaust from the turbine(s) must be condensed back to water before it can be resupplied to the BWR. That requires a condenser and cooling water.
Trump heard about that and is going to charge 35% tariffs on those electricity imports, paid by US consumers of course, but won’t show up on the distributor’s bill cuz it was an input cost to them. Been there done that with carbon taxes and electric bills in Canada. 35% is a lot more than Ontario Hydro makes in profit. Smart guy that Trump…using the tariff money to protect jobs and all (he says)…making more off a whole industry than the industry does without the industry even being in the US. Worse for the consumer will be when the Canadian government decides they can make money off the consumers too, and put an export tax or counter tariff on it. But Trump says he will match that with a tariff increase…oh my…what’s a poor consumer to do ?
To harvest energy you need a hot and cold source, similar to a head of water. No practical machines operate on heat alone. They require a gradient.
South African academics. Experts again. Academics don’t seem to ever do anthing. I have been reading about these forever it seems. Will we ever see them in use in numbers?
“I have been reading about these forever it seems.”
My guess is “about 15 years”. About 10 years ago I posted a 10, 100, 1,000 rule.
That is, get 10 up and running thereby demonstrating the viability, have another 100 under construction, and an additional 1,000 planned, permitted, and financed.
These are not relevant to the “net zero” arguments nor to “the climate” but folks still around in 2050 should be appreciative.
There are no natural resources. The presence of a material does not make it a resource. Resources don’t exist until Mankind invents them by finding a beneficial use for things that occur naturally.
And note. Farmers’ fields with oil just under the surface were a disaster as the land could not be used to grow crops or graze animals. Now it makes them millionaires.
Were coal, oil, gas, resources in the Stone Age or Iron Age? No, but they were there. We don’t know what resources there may be in the future until they are invested.
Developing Countries don’t need high tech which they cannot properly operate or maintain independently, they need simple, proven low tech like coal-fired power stations – and for meddling fools from developed Countries to mind their own business.
Developing Countries don’t need high tech which they cannot properly operate or
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We lived in Tonga for a year. The tales I could tell. Filling lead acid batteries by pissing into them. Fixing a low oil pressure alarm by disconnecting the alarm.
Send the SMR to Tonga and glow in the dark will follow.
Civilization needs 10,000 LARGE thermal co-production reactors at the correct places.
Small, by the way, does not mean safer.
Can the South African government seize SMRs from white people without compensation?
What SMR’s . . . oh, you mean the imaginary ones? Sure, why not?
From the above article:
“Small Modular Reactors (SMR’s) hold the potential to . . .”
Hmmm . . . I think the exact same thing was said about cold fusion in 1989, more than 35 year ago.
From the above article:
“Generation IV SMRs do not need to be near any large waterbody at all, a critical factor in many water scarce countries.”
Well, that totally depends on the rated output power level of the SMR. The best large-scale fission nuclear power power plants today achieve a “thermal efficiency” of about 33%, meaning for every 1 kWh of electrical power sent out to the grid, 2 kWh of thermal power must be dissipated into the local environment as “waste heat”. Due to volume-to-surface area scaling laws, it is very likely that SMRs will do well to achieve 25% overall thermal efficiency (i.e., 1 kWh useful electricity, 3 kWh of waste heat).
Up to a certain rated nameplate capacity, probably around 50 MW or less, air-cooled dissipation of waste heat becomes totally impractical from an engineering perspective. Compare that to a typical, currently-existing water-cooled nuclear power plant at 1000 MW nameplate capacity.
Otherwise, the above article is a good advertising recap of one potential future.
The best fuel for power plants in most of the world is coal.
Any power plant that has fuel that kills even in small amounts is eventually going to bite you.
Coal mining to fuel power plants has a long history of killing people.
Burning coal with insufficient air, resulting in carbon monoxide production, has a long history of killing people.
Sealed/Coded Time Capsule – to be opened at future some point in time when appropriate:
zqzco mznsa msrkr jzgkm wdyha wjrix jmgex pkezt mnips qqkvi isvtg wsgtp efzwg cdubv tnlox gmqga kmciz mpnxj ohtyk ofmvz wdhna thstr pvdxm fjwfy ijuxy bmauf frqka wqodo tlggu mxfch qjlim ytaau ywzvm ussjp hmlxy xfkzq hwydv qahab dtwxu bqkeh vywot swhjc pngpl fivbe rkndt chywm owobj fdluq ddcuv gufno ronlv bzdqk khtcw dtkcv wughv voyxb xgwso wyxtw goawa hxyzf vuauf ldlpi
Enigma M3, UKW-B reflector, Rotors(1-3):[secret], Ring:AAA, Plugboard:None
Test case: “ABCDE” encodes “BJELR” with Rotors:”AAA”
https://cryptii.com/pipes/enigma-machine