Grumble wrote: ↑Wed Jan 24, 2024 9:18 am
The need for nuclear in a world of renewables is less than clear. Cases like massive ships are interesting though.
They are certainly very useful in a world of renewables, where those renewables have very variable supply. If you have a low-carbon baseload supply, that greatly reduces the amount of energy storage you need to carry out to get you over the peaks and troughs of supply of the renewables.
I saw an analysis which contrasts the history of rapid roll-out of nuclear stations in the 70s-90s with the large increase in construction costs that has occurred more recently, at least in western markets. As the analyst said, if we decide we are going to build a large run of nuclear stations, and do it at sensible cost, then we can, in principle, put in place the conditions to achieve that. But in practice, it is very hard to step back from decisions made in the interim, that present that problem.
The obstacle to that is social-institutional, just the same problem that occurred in the railway industry, which had a large increase in construction costs over the same time-scale, without anything quite as awful as Fukushima to motivate it. The EC identified that the underlying obstacle to a unified railway construction market, which might therefore reduce costs through greater scale and standardisation, was the widely differing approach to safety assessment and safety acceptability from country to country. So it tried to start a process of creating a common understanding of that. But it failed, because it couldn't get anyone to step back from its established approach. So the only approach it could apply was one that achieved what every individual nation already tried to achieve in its approach. And even when it devised a standard, because in practice those did not visibly include everyone's existing standards, countries refused to step back from the standards they already had. So new implementations had to follow both the new EU standard and the existing national standards.
Because ultimately, if you step back from anything, you have to prove that you aren't importing safety risk, even when the safety risk that is currently protected against is a belt and braces approach to a very small risk. And people whose job it is to analyse safety risks will always focus on any safety risk they can easily see and devise a mitigation for, even when it is ridiculously over-specification to do so. When they should have been focusing on the bigger risks instead.
The Chinese are much more immune to this problem, because they hate transparency, there's high enforcement of keep-your-mouth-shut to the whole population about potentially national embarrassments, and the individual welfare of the population is a relatively minor concern. When eventually their cheap high speed trains started to exhibit an undeniable trend of a high accident rate, they did go back and fix a bit of stuff, and started to build them a bit more carefully going forward. So they are not totally immune to safety considerations and public opinion - it doesn't seem to be RMBK bad, where the known operating issues were concealed even from the people in charge of operating the Chernobyl plant - but it's a lesser concern to them.
So maybe the Chinese will develop MSRs and soon have a batch of them operating, to more, er, flexible safety standards than would apply in the west. And if they achieve that, and they are a step forward from PWRs in the local context, then since they are something like a third of the world's carbon emissions, that can be pretty good for the planet.
Whether the rest of the world will look at them only with a sharp intake of breath, for their failure to meet our standards, or will become keen to see how that can be implemented elsewhere, we wait to see. I'm reminded of the mixed oxide fuel plant in France and the attempt to replicate it in the USA. Mixed oxide plant, it's only a bit of chemical processing, it's not even a reactor, how hard can that be? Well, when the plant that cost less than €1bn to build in France met US administration and bureaucracy, it took a very long time and over $7bn to complete - (working from memory, figures maybe rather approximate.)