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First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled::NuScale and its primary partner give up on its first installation.
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Might save you a click:
Too many investors pulled out of the project, at least in part due to rapidly falling prices of renewables.
Interest rates too, I’d imagine. Investing in new nuclear and expecting a decent ROI would be a dumb move now.
I am surprised they got any investors. From what I see the only way to get investment money is to say you are making a new social media app or building a condo.
Hear me out … nuclear powered AI NFTs.
Does it support blockchain?
You know it does.
Oh man this is great. Hold on let me go get the sack of money labeled “pensions” and the other labeled “Covid relief funds”.
Yeah the same reason nuclear is being rejected everywhere, it’s economically unfeasible and a huge liability - no one wants to end up with a hugely expensive powerstation that no one wants to buy power from because it’s a thousand times more expensive per kWh than any other option.
It is time
Solar power was actually pushed by big oil in the 70s, 80s and 90s because they were afraid of nuclear.
Solar was not viewed as a viable energy system by big oil back then.
Does solar power use some rare earth minerals and stuff like that? They own those, but you probably need them for nuclear and others
I can’t put a nuclear station on my roof or in my basement
Were you… Were you going to?
I mean, a teenage boy scout once built something like an amateur reactor in a shed in his parents backyard shed, so I see nothing wrong with a tractor on the roof or in a basement.
Watch me.
Currently, no. With enough investments in nuclear and less fear mongering, it’s possible that’s be an option. Small scale nuclear reactors can exist and can be safe, and the amount of nuclear material they’d need is fairly small.
Yeah every power source needs some materials.
Silicon, iirc
Made from sand. A very rareaterial.
Yes and so do the batteries and all the controls.
There’s not necessarily a need for batteries. I’m generating energy and use it up directly, and inject the overage back into the grid against a compensation, and then at night or during times of heavy cloud coverage, I draw power from the grid pretty much on par with the money I received. So far it’s a zero sum game or slightly profitable.
Ok cool. So you outsourced the battery needs to someone else. Good job. Hey I figured out how to fix global warming, all we need to do is move all the stuff that causes it to different countries.
Didn’t address the controls I noticed.
Please read up on how power grids work, before returning to this conversation. Thanks.
Got a point go ahead and make it.
What he means is it’s not getting stored in a battery
Yeah go ahead and make a solar system with the dirt you have on your land. All you are doing is supporting one group of corporations over another. Worst argument I have ever seen for solar is what you have presented today.
Hey everyone, this comment doesn’t say that solar is bad. It says this isn’t the argument for solar the OP thinks it is. Solar requires a whole lot of mining and refining. Nuclear actually requires less. Using the same argument, nuclear is the better option. It’s just a stupid argument.
Welp at least the Saudis will be happy.
True, it does prove their six billion investment in making the largest solar project in the world was a great idea.
Hopefully they’ll continue their plan to invest almost half a trillion dollars in renewables this decade.
You taking financial advice from the Saudis? Ok then.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Nuclear power provides energy that is largely free of carbon emissions and can play a significant role in helping deal with climate change.
One hope for changing that has been the use of small, modular nuclear reactors, which can be built in a centralized production facility and then shipped to the site of their installation.
Their smaller size makes it easier for passive cooling systems to take over in the case of power losses (some designs simply keep their reactors in a pond).
The government’s Idaho National Lab was working to help construct the first NuScale installation, the Carbon Free Power Project.
Under the plan, the national lab would maintain a few of the first reactors at the site, and a number of nearby utilities would purchase power from the remaining ones.
NuScale CEO John Hopkins tried to put a positive spin on the event, saying, “Our work with Carbon Free Power Project over the past ten years has advanced NuScale technology to the stage of commercial deployment; reaching that milestone is a tremendous success which we will continue to build on with future customers.”
The original article contains 505 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 63%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Damn
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I remember so many nuclear stans on lemmy a bit ago refusing to acknowledge that renewables are getting so good and cheap that they are more important to solving climate change than nuclear. I wonder how they feel seeing investors pull out in favor of renewables?
Like crap? Renewables are good in places where they work. Nuclear works everywhere and is more reliable.
Investors pulling out of a nuclear project like this just looks like a, really dumb kneejerk reaction. “Oh! New shiny thing!”
This. Green energy works best when complimented with nuclear energy. Then, we can ween away from big oil.
It’s the opposite. Nuclear outputs as close to 24/7 as possible, you can’t ramp it up and down to accommodate variable output from renewables for practical and economic reasons.
The problem with solar is that the sun doesn’t shine overnight. The good thing with that is that we use much less power overnight than we do during the day.
If you’re relying a lot on solar, you need to build a big-ass battery that you charge during the day and use at night.
Alternatively, you build a nuclear or gas plant sized to overnight usage and run them 24/7. Then, you build way smaller batteries to handle dispatchability and smoothing demand over the course of a day. Nuclear is good for baseline power, and doesn’t come with the environmental costs of a gas plant. It has a niche.
The problem with solar is that the sun doesn’t shine overnight.
Big if true. Winds tend to be stronger at night though.
if you’re relying a lot on solar, you need to build a big-ass battery that you charge during the day and use at night.
Or pumped hydro, compressed gas, molten salt, green hydrogen, etc.
Nuclear is good for baseline power
Base load. See here: https://cleantechnica.com/2022/06/28/we-dont-need-base-load-power/
I mean you can vary it pretty significantly depending on the reactor type, but even if you couldn’t you can still put the energy to work in alternative ways, such as pumping water up into reservoirs/damns to generate energy at other points, or using the excess energy to split water. There are many ways to use excess energy.
You can do the same with excess power from renewables though. My point was that you need something to fill in the gaps when renewable output is low, whether that be from batteries, pumped storage, peaker plants, etc.
Nuclear doesn’t fit in here, there are no nuclear peaker plants.
We’ve wasted so much money in r&d simply because it’s a tech that allows the rich to maintain their power monopoly, if we’d spent all that on more sensible options we’d be far closer to an ecologically sustainable future.
What’s not sensible about nuclear power?
