In costing out any form of electricity generation, there ought to be a calculation of the "social cost of blackouts" associated with the reliability of that supply. One sustained widespread blackout due to unreliable electricity generation (northern climes in January) will be enormously expensive and deadly. Nuclear reactors and coal, will have the lowest SCoB because these two forms of generation store their fuel on-site and do not depend on the weather, season, or day-night situation. Solar, wind, and inverters will have a high SCoB as their penetration into a grid advances.
Building a plant costs X. Operating it costs Y. I don't see consideration of operating costs for SMR nuclear plants in your assessment. NuScale was to build a dozen or so of their 70MW electric reactors in Idaho but the project collapsed because, as I understand it, NuScale could not produce electricity at a cost acceptable to the local utilities. Perhaps it was operating cost that did them in. One 1000MW electric plant needs ~4 operating crews, 3/day plus coverage for weekends, holidays and such. How many operating crews would a dozen 1/12 size reactors require or from a different direction, how many reactors can one crew safely operate, a figure the NRC will doubtlessly establish. Perhaps 2? If so, there are now 24 operating crews - $$$. Also, how many steam turbine plants is each reactor driving - one per reactor or one large steam turbine driven by as many reactors as are operating? I'm not a turbine guy but I suspect that the most efficient turbine is one matched to the steam supply and operating a turbine at part load is inefficient of energy. More $$$. And maintenance - with a bunch of SMRs you get a bunch of individual maintenance projects. Perhaps nuclear notes would like to lay out for us a thorough cost assessment of the SMR craze so we can better understand what it all will likely be.
Denis, the NuScale design has one crew operating a team of reactors. It's a heavily computerized control room. When I toured it, it reminded me of the cockpit of an advanced airliner; the information from the many different sensors is selectively displayed, and brought to the operator's attention when a reading differs from normal. It has major advantages over an analogue control room because the computer can spot trends early, and give prompts for corrective action.
SMRs have inherently worse neutron economy than reactors with bigger cores, but NuScale's essential problem was the jump in prices for steel and concrete.
FYI, each 77 MWe module has its own turbine.
Alas at the moment we don't have any operating experience for a NuScale plant, so it's hard to know exactly what its capacity factor would be and what it would cost to operate. This is also true of other designs that haven't been built yet.
Thanks for the info. Did NRC agree with one operating shift for all reactors? NRC has always been a very conservative organization and one shift monitoring a dozen or so reactors seems not very conservative to me. Another question you might be able to answer: has maintenance requirements for a dozen small reactors each with their own turbine compared to a single AP1000, for example, been studied? The idea seems akin to a city disposing of all their busses and replacing them with 20 or 30 times more self-driving Ford Fiestas. Cheaper to buy perhaps but maintenance?
In costing out any form of electricity generation, there ought to be a calculation of the "social cost of blackouts" associated with the reliability of that supply. One sustained widespread blackout due to unreliable electricity generation (northern climes in January) will be enormously expensive and deadly. Nuclear reactors and coal, will have the lowest SCoB because these two forms of generation store their fuel on-site and do not depend on the weather, season, or day-night situation. Solar, wind, and inverters will have a high SCoB as their penetration into a grid advances.
As the social cost of carbon is entirely made up, i agree we should make up our own factors.
And the SCC is likely -$1000, factoring in all the benefits
Building a plant costs X. Operating it costs Y. I don't see consideration of operating costs for SMR nuclear plants in your assessment. NuScale was to build a dozen or so of their 70MW electric reactors in Idaho but the project collapsed because, as I understand it, NuScale could not produce electricity at a cost acceptable to the local utilities. Perhaps it was operating cost that did them in. One 1000MW electric plant needs ~4 operating crews, 3/day plus coverage for weekends, holidays and such. How many operating crews would a dozen 1/12 size reactors require or from a different direction, how many reactors can one crew safely operate, a figure the NRC will doubtlessly establish. Perhaps 2? If so, there are now 24 operating crews - $$$. Also, how many steam turbine plants is each reactor driving - one per reactor or one large steam turbine driven by as many reactors as are operating? I'm not a turbine guy but I suspect that the most efficient turbine is one matched to the steam supply and operating a turbine at part load is inefficient of energy. More $$$. And maintenance - with a bunch of SMRs you get a bunch of individual maintenance projects. Perhaps nuclear notes would like to lay out for us a thorough cost assessment of the SMR craze so we can better understand what it all will likely be.
Denis, the NuScale design has one crew operating a team of reactors. It's a heavily computerized control room. When I toured it, it reminded me of the cockpit of an advanced airliner; the information from the many different sensors is selectively displayed, and brought to the operator's attention when a reading differs from normal. It has major advantages over an analogue control room because the computer can spot trends early, and give prompts for corrective action.
SMRs have inherently worse neutron economy than reactors with bigger cores, but NuScale's essential problem was the jump in prices for steel and concrete.
FYI, each 77 MWe module has its own turbine.
Alas at the moment we don't have any operating experience for a NuScale plant, so it's hard to know exactly what its capacity factor would be and what it would cost to operate. This is also true of other designs that haven't been built yet.
Thanks for the info. Did NRC agree with one operating shift for all reactors? NRC has always been a very conservative organization and one shift monitoring a dozen or so reactors seems not very conservative to me. Another question you might be able to answer: has maintenance requirements for a dozen small reactors each with their own turbine compared to a single AP1000, for example, been studied? The idea seems akin to a city disposing of all their busses and replacing them with 20 or 30 times more self-driving Ford Fiestas. Cheaper to buy perhaps but maintenance?