Re: power shortages

Imagine all electric cars all electric house and hot water heating no nukes no coal no ng destroy hydro dams

Imagine lots of darkness.

Would mean that the US would need 30% more generating capacity than it has now.

Sounds sensible.

Very sensible - they take ages to build and produce very expensive electricity.

Equally sensible. Wind and solar both produce electricity at a lower price per kilowatt hour.

Less sensible. Burning natural gas doesn't produce cheap electricity either, but you can turn on a natural gas fired turbine generator in a few minutes, on those rare occasions when you need it. Grid scale storage is a better solution, but it may take a while to install enough of it. Even longer if the fossil carbon extraction industry can slow it down.

Why would you do that?

The fossil carbon extraction industry does a lot of that. They imagine a smaller market for their product, and smaller cash flows, and lie like fury to delay the inevitable.

These are planned to be the --now old-fashioned-- Westinghouse design? Big installations that need ten years to build?

I wonder if it wouldn't be better to start an industry of small modular reactors. Tens of megawatts rather than hundreds, Something that could fit on a barge, or a train, transported where it's needed, and up and running in months rather than years.

Jeroen Belleman

Except that they don't exist yet. The technology that could create small modular reactors does exist. The production lines that could churn them out in months doesn't and would have to be built, and only after the modular reactors themselves had been designed.

The small reactors that go into nuclear submarines and nuclear powered aircraft carriers were designed a long time ago under very different constraints.

If they really were going to produce cheaper electric power than wind turbines and solar cells, somebody probably would have designed them by now. In fact a few people have, but the designs haven't been attractive enough get the kind of start-up capital required, and probably never will be.

Already in development!

"By design, our SMR is focused on attracting all forms of private capital to support the build out of global SMR demand. With a proven factory built commoditised approach, our SMR will offer investors and lenders a degree of confidence that will enable future customers to access a range of capital options to finance their SMR purchase."

They've got as far as having a proposition that they hope will attract private capital. There's no suggestion that they have attracted any yet, let along enough to cover the cost of building a whole production line.

It's a pipe-dream.

Hmm, This comes across as an attempt to seduce investors and greenies. Not much substance there.

Jeroen Belleman

Can they find enough high ground to keep them clear of flooding if things go badly wrong?

There's plenty of the Netherlands that is actually above sea level.

Where I used to live in Nijmegen was 30 metres above the sea level at Amsterdam. Admittedly, when I lived there, the Rhine did flood, and some of my colleagues were thinking about moving stuff into my basement, but you wouldn't put a nuclear reactor on a site that was susceptible to flooding, and the Dutch do know which sites are susceptible to flooding.

Their current minister for science

has a surname which means that one of his ancestors was responsible for making sure that the dikes in his area were up to snuff. The title "graaf" is roughly equivalent to "count" or "earl", but a dijkgraaf was more a functional title than an aristocratic rank.

The man himself is something of an intellectual aristocrat, but didn't act like one when I met him. Perfectly agreeable.

Unfortunately the possibility of some malevolent power flooding the country (or at least using the threat of that as a way of holding Europe to ransom) is no longer the negligible risk we once thought it was.

That might appease the Greenies, but the Watermellons would still try to sabotage them. In the UK at least, nuclear power plants are guarded by armed police. They're keen to ensure no fuel is stolen and subsequently enriched. The same would have to be done for small reactors anyway, so that should give the 'mellons something to think about.

It would be nice if we could make nuclear energy on the scale required for a single household economically viable. Everyone has his own little self-contained nuclear device in a hole in the cellar, producing heat and electricity enough to provide for the needs of the home and the means of transport over 30 years or so, each unit providing something like 10 to 50 kilowatts, heat and electricity combined. When it's worn, it gets replaced by a new one. I'm just dreaming. It's not likely to ever happen. Even if it'd be technically possible, the economy wouldn't work.

Jeroen Belleman

All?

Not so, many were funded by governments one way or another.

Gosh, it is a very rational fear.

Governments usually waste public money, and pour more in when things go wrong.

Funding research is good. Funding industries is usually boondoogles; let the market invest and pick the winners.

The best thing government can do for industry is to do less. Less regulation, less taxation, less support for unions. Business is mobile via various mechanisms, easy to chase away.

Stay away from mountains and airplanes and your own cellar. Don't ever eat bananas or potatoes.

I don't. I love flying and mountains. Not a problem. I also eat potatoes frequently.

The number of cancers caused by non-Russian reactors is about zero.

Coal power plants emit maybe 10x the radiation per KWH compared to nukes. Plus a lot of other nasty stuff.

What's shocking is that cigarettes are legal. They kill about half a million peope in the US every year. A deal was cut to keep them legal, with the states and feds getting a lot of tax revenue to kill people.

Like the scouts say, be prepared. For me that means a wood stove for heating, a generator, a LiFePO4 battery, a solar panel for that, and a swamp cooler that runs on very little power. Plus lots of rechargeable lights with exchangeable 19650 cells.

Oh, and ham radio. When the power goes the cell service usually knocks off 15-200mins later. Landlines drop immediately due to that wonderful VoIP stuff. That's when I hope neighbors will remember the house with the strange antennas in case someone has a heart attack, a stroke, a fire or something else that requires help.