[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.”
All good points, and I’m all for pretty much any technological research, but
Thorium is another form of fission generation that has not been commercialized yet. In the real world, maybe it will be better, or maybe it won’t. But fission generation already takes too long to build out, so why switch lanes to a different form of fission generation that also needs more time and money to be commercialized? Nuclear uranium fission generation had its growing pains over the years, as the technology found challenges to address and areas to improve, but thorium has not yet gotten far enough to run into those so there will be additional challenges requiring time, money, further development
If those were decades ago when the future was bright for fission technology, I’d be all over this. However the future is dark and cloudy for fission generation, nightfall may be approaching. The advantages of thorium are not enough to shine a new light, there’s not enough room for improvement to save fission generation, this is just an expensive detour.
This is nonsense. Like someone else said we will need some kind of nuclear power for future space exploration. There are parts of the world that are dark for six months of the year, and plenty of places that don’t get enough light for solar to be practical.
Most renewable sources are not consistent enough to be used by themselves, and battery storage isn’t practical with current technology. Then there are the concerns with hydro power and biomass and how that affects the environment. I have even been told by leftists that biomass shouldn’t be installed as it destroys too many native forests.
Of course the actual best solution is one we don’t have the technology for yet: things like nuclear fusion or neutrino capture.
For the record, I disagree with you both and this narrative is also part of the problem in my book. Screw the futurism and longermism of “we need nuclear power for space exploration”. We’re not talking about that. We’re talking about mitigating runaway climate effects and filling the blanks of an alternate energy mix by using complementary tech.
Absolutely let’s keep working on nuclear power. Absolutely let’s keep working on battery storage, and potential energy storage and thermal storage and wind and geothermal and whatever else we can come up with. And absolutely let’s abandon whatever doesn’t work or is made obsolete, starting with no longer burning hydrocarbons as soon as we can stop.
There’s this air of erudite dilettantism about this chatter that just pisses me off. People sitting by and idly projecting their sci-fi fantasies about colonizing planets or about a fully solar powered planet and feeling smart about it. Given the short-term, impending human cost of this issue, both for climate reasons and for energy scarcity reasons, that just feels gross at this point.
What do you disagree with me? I was trying to back you up up here saying that yes we need nuclear in addition to all the other technologies. I am not saying that you shouldn’t use solar, just that it isn’t applicable everywhere on earth.
You should be talking about that. After all climate change is also a future problem. Staying on a single planet isn’t safe even if you eradicate climate change, war, disease, and just about everything else. There is pretty much nothing stopping a gamma ray burst or stray blackhole, or any number of other things from killing everyone on this planet. Like yeah climate change is a high priority, but it doesn’t make all other issues go away.
Look, I’m just trying to impress something very specific here and I can tell I’m not getting through.
I’m not here to call out people arguing for or against one or another type of energy generation. I’m complaining about the discourse about this being about long term hypotheticals and optimal solutions when we should be in emergency mode.
It’s like we’re in a burning building and people are having arguments about the cost per year of different types of fire extinguishers. But if I make this point about someone criticising nuclear power it comes across as me “siding” or “shilling” for nuclear power, same if I do it when someone argues against solar power.
But I’m neither. I’m arguing for practicality and immediate action. Because we need it now, not because I just finished reading the Dune books and have some really neat ideas about generation ships.
Remind me what type of thinking leads to climate change, and pretty much every pollution issue we have now? Short term thinking that didn’t take into account long term consequences. If we aren’t careful we could actually make things worse by chasing things like lithium battery technology.
Trying to come up with short term solutions to climate changes is fine, but you have to thinking about the long term as well.
I also don’t think you give enough credit to the people who are criticising nuclear, they are talking about the short term. “Renewables” are cheaper in the short term. The thing is solar panels, wind turbines, and so on is that they don’t last forever, recycling the equipment is problematic, and manufacturing them is an environmental crisis in its own right.
Nuclear in its current form is a medium term solution with its own shortcomings around waste storage, and the materials needed to construct and fuel a reactor.
This is all still probably better than fossil fuels but we are talking about the difference between getting shot (fossil fuels) or getting stabbed (nuclear/“renewables”).
Immediate action? We needed yesterday’s action, but rushing things today isn’t going to make up for it. In fact probably the best thing you can do right now is stop having kids. Bring the population down. Ideally this needed doing decades ago too. If we don’t do it then nature will do it for us, which is probably inevitable at this point anyway.
And I was one of those someone else’s, but in the context of calling out that there’s likely little in common.
That’s a choice: too many less developed countries still clear native forest for agriculture, so expanding agriculture has a downside . ITs something those countries need to take care of regardless, just to feed their people.
This is a failure of policy and governance, not technology
I have as much of a handle on the challenges of small thorium generators as I do on the costs and challenges of generation and containment of green hydrogen or the solutions for storage of solar power. That is to say, I know there are challenges, I roughly understand what they are and I know we don’t know how to fix them yet. At least not beyond a number of companies that have invested a lot on doing that saying they’re on track to do that and a bunch of people saying that no they aren’t.
I don’t know why I need to be “all over” any of this in any way. I know that we need to solve the challenges on multiple of those technologies, and we need it for ten years ago. The reasonable approach seems to use all of these as they become available based on their total emissions and cost. Anything else seems like either irresponsible idle tribalism or disinformation. Hell, in any case where the least amount of emissions is fossil fuels… well, you do fossil fuels. This is not about ideology at this point.
You are still doing the thing, just like the other guys. I keep wishing people would stop doing the thing.