Small Nuclear Reactors: Always on the horizon

There are many tech ideas that are always on the horizon, never actually here. Personal air travel (formerly known as "flying cars"), quantum computing, fusion energy, the commercial use of superconductivity.

Another item for this list is surely "small nuclear reactors". Even in the heyday of the nuke/anti-nuke debates, after Three Mile Island, there was a theory on the pro-nuke side that the real problem was the endless delay that comes with bigness. Smaller ("modular") reactors could mean less expensive projects, a quicker licensing cycle, more expeditious actual building, and the gradual popular acceptance that would come with familiarity.

"Okay, in my back yard, because it seems to be in just about everybody's back yard." That's the idea.

More recently, the growing concern over climate change as THE great environmental issue, and on the burning of hydrocarbons as the great controllable cause there of, the politics of nuclear power has changed. It is no longer a left/right thing. Climate change deniers shout "drill baby drill" and may be averse to nuclear power as an alternative to all of their beloved drilling. Climate change activists, whose heroes amongst the old folks may have been anti-nuke protesters back in the day, may see nuclear power as part of the way forward, or at least part of a transition to a no-carbon system.

This political shift has brought renewed attention to the technological shift toward smaller scale reactors. But ... why aren't they on the scene already?

The IAEA says that work is underway, or investment is on the table, in at least twenty-five countries toward the end of modular nuclear energy. In some energy-intensive industries, such as steel production, it seems to make sense to bring the nuke "in house," under the corporate roof of the steel company, rather than dealing with the broader utility/grid.

But the modular nukes do not yet exist. NuScale Power, an Oregon based company founded in 2000, seemed to have the inside track. For a time, it was using the year 2024 as the date on which it would actually start making deliveries of the devices, which were to be capable of generating 460 MW of electrical power per hour. They would have made this first delivery to the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems. It didn't and won't happen. The estimated costs kept going up, and UAMPS tolerance for the increases reached a ceiling. The project was cancelled last year.

That sequence of events has happened a lot -- early on the numbers are low, the turn-around time is said to be quick. The former increase quickly and the latter gets stretched out. Of course, over-promising is not unique to the nuclear industry. But in this case the over-promising may seem reasonable because there is so little industry experience to go on. If I'm going to give you a fair guess as to how soon I can get the widget to your door and what I'll have to charge you for it, I will presumably look at comparable widget projects so I canmake defensible guesstimates.

In this case, though, there is virtually no comparable widget history.

The problem is a frustratingly circular one, true. There can't be a history for comparisons until deliveries get made. Deliveries are getting made because the customers can't count on the guesstimates. Which is true because there is no history for comparisons. Usually high-risk early adopters help a new development blow through such a circle. This time? Well ... the UAMPS' of the world aren't feeling that frisky.

So ... don't hold your breath on this one.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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