America’s Nuclear Future: Lessons from the Past.

[@LandYacht]

Great episode Chris. Thanks.

[@CoreyJones314]

So glad you're talking about the WHY behind the overruns so we can try to learn from them. Also really glad to see you point out the wins the industry has had regarding capacity factors (and operational excellence in general). You're finding some really great guests to have on the podcast! I'm excited to see who you find next :)

[@royalwins2030]

This guy was one of the best guests so far. Have him back

[@ryanrhodes3909]

I’m glad you brought up WPPSS. One of the big issues we have in WA state in regards to electricity is that the NW used to be the center of Aluminum production in the U.S. We haven’t really built any new power plants since the 80’s and have had huge growth since then but have become more efficient at using the electricity we currently have which is mostly hydro. They want to reopen the the smelter plants but BPA keeps telling the politicians and the company that they can’t supply the power they want at the price they want because honestly there is none to go around. If we would of stuck it out and built those plants I’m certain we could bring back industry in general because our electricity would have been as cheap as ever. Those plants would of been long payed off by now even with the cost overruns. Nobody cares how much big infrastructure cost 30 years after you build it because by then you take it for granted and can’t imagine how you would live without it. That was a rant!😅

[@waywardgeologist2520]

It was fun visiting the unfinished plant and standing in the cooling tower. Massive!

[@SootyMangabey.]

My late Grandfather worked for EBASCO Constructors building the Satsop Npp in Washington State which was never finished. He later went on to work on the South Texas project and Comanche Peak Nuclear power plants. He had passed away before my interest in Nuclear power grew, I Know he would have had some amazing stories to tell. He worked with my Father at Comanche peak and ended up firing Dad on that job. Dad later went on to work at Comanche Peak when It was put into service. In fact my Grandfather, Father and his Father all worked at the site as a Pipefitter, apprentice and Reactor engineer. RIP Eugene and John ..gone but not forgotten.

[@happyhome41]

EXTRAORDINARY episode and guest. THANK YOU !!! P.S., I'm a little surprised you didn't mention that Vogtle Unit 3 is DONE - declared commissioned and now in full commercial operation.

[@AngelicaAtomic]

Sometimes they record a little ahead of the release. But it was great timing for the episode to drop!

[@MiguelSanchez-bu7hd]

I would love to hear him address the question of if he had to pick just one large reactor design to build hundreds of in the U.S. going forward, is it the AP1000, ESBWR, or something else

[@AngelicaAtomic]

I think he did address it. Don’t be a perfectionist. Pick the one you have the most experience with. That’s definitely the AP1000

[@edsteadham4085]

Did you hear what he said? There is no obvious winner. Plant operations determine how well a system works and not design.

[@kennethkaminski3438]

Great interview, he was very knowledgeable about the US industry and the history of construction at all the different types of reactors. Thank you 👍

[@Scoots1994]

My father was a project manager for the decommissioning of Shippingport (at the end of his career ... before that he was a project manager at Hanford) and we got to go into the containment toward the end of the process. There was some incredible engineering in that thing and some beautiful machining. Last time I was there it looked like a nice park with walking paths but they had to put 16' fences around it.

[@EricMeyer9]

Another fascinating and entertaining discussion!

[@dankspain]

@29:30 Supply chain cannibalization is mentioned for nuclear which is sort of what is happening to offshore wind at the moment. So many projects being built at the same time and such pressure in the supply chain are making its cost rise until the supply chain is rebalanced (although not even close to where nuclear typically is).

[@smwk2017]

US nuclear power plants have been retiring early under deregulated energy market. It is hard to compete with gas-fired power plants.

[@gregorymalchuk272]

It was hard for nuclear energy to compete with natural gas in 2014 (and the 2010s generally) when natural gas bottomed out below $2.50 per MBTU. Fracking shale plays are flat or declining in many places and an irresponsible Europe is now (outrageously) bidding up North American Natural gas to $7 to $9 MBTU and rising, likely never to get that low again. Coal fired generating actually increased during 2021 for the first time since 2014. Coal is now competitive, and historically nuclear is slightly cheaper than coal.

[@kaya051285]

I think you are somewhat out of date. The price or Nat Gas in the US is currently $2.58/mmbtu so once more Nat gas fired power stations are dirt cheap to fuel Operating in baseload at 62% efficiency the marginal fuel cost of the electricity is just $14.20/MWh Nuclear can't come close to competing with that

[@miketheneanderthal9490]

I have been saying for a long time, wind and solar will not save us, and more recently I have added, and neither will SMRs. We need to make MORE electricity, A WHOLE LOT MORE, in order to tackle climate change, and there is only one way to do it, large-scale, replicable, nuclear power. It is the only thing that gets the terawatts up, and the costs down.

[@tomasfontes3616]

Well, with SMRs you can supply industries with power and heat without them needing to be connected to the grid (or at least significantly reducing their pressure on the grid). Also, you can choose more than one design as each model will be built in several places and thus allowing for economies of scale. For big power plants you get it with a much higher initial investment commitment, which means you are bond to just one or two designs. Don't get me wrong, this was good for spreading nuclear power, but at the same time it made the industry stagnant with just PWRs and BWRs (or say, AGRs in the UK). I like the combination of decentralization and high density, even though big power plants will continue to be demanded for large urban areas. I totally agree with you regarding wind and solar though, because of their very low density (although I'm for rooftop solar or agrivoltaics).

[@AngelicaAtomic]

@@tomasfontes3616 SMRs have their places and you point to some great applications. BUT. Economy of scale is a hell of a thing to go up against. We have HUNDREDS of giga watts of nuclear to build. You really want to do that 300MW at a time vs. 1,100MW?

[@tomasfontes3616]

@@AngelicaAtomic no, I want to build both micro, small and large reactors! What I'm implying is that SMRs can potentially speed up the learning curve, as they're really just smaller versions of the bigger ones and industries can directly contract with SMR suppliers instead of buying electricity from the grid (like the Dow-X energy agreement). In that way they can work like tests for different architectures which can then also be replicated on large scale (instead of the traditional standardization of just one type for an entire country). Intuitively redundancy is a good thing for me.

[@waywardgeologist2520]

This isn’t the video I watched, slightly off the topic but thank you for bringing clarity to SMR’s.

[@chapter4travels]

SMR is a marketing term/strategy. Reactors need to meet the demand and economy that customers need. In a coal or natural gas power plant, the power conversion equipment is 85% of the total cost of the plant. A high-temperature nuclear power plant like Terrestrial Energy or Natrium can and will use the exact same power conversion equipment, unlike all PWR?LWRs that require specialized nuclear-grade, low-temperature power conversion equipment. So the reactor vessel needs to cost the same as a coal or natural gas heat plant minus the fuel handling side. There is no reason that this can't be done, it should cost less. Terrestrial Energy is not far from commercialization and will test this theory. If (big if, really big if) Terrestrial Energy (or Natrium, Thorcon, Seaborg, Moltex, Copenhagen...) can get built for less than the cost of a coal plant, no one will ever build another AP1000 ever again. Low cost, industrial heat anywhere in the world. Did I mention industrial heat? Industrial heat has hundreds of direct applications of which electricity is only one.

[@CoreyJones314]

I'm super excited about Terrestrial Energy, and I hope their modular / factory-built approach avoids at least some of the issues they encountered at Vogtle 3 & 4.

[@chapter4travels]

@@CoreyJones314 It should. Just on the nuclear grade concrete cost line item, the amount needed for the Terrestrial Energy plant will be less than 1/10th the amount. Combining that with a minimal containment structure, no expensive pressure vessel, and power conversion equipment should ( big ? on the should) reduce the overall cost to equal to or less than a natural gas plant.

[@tomasfontes3616]

I'm moderately optimistic that SMRs will solve the marketing problem of nuclear power while also allowing for replication and thus standardization of not just one or two models like with big power plants, but of several designs. Heat and electricity-intensive industries would be obvious costumers, as well as remote regions which now use mostly diesel generators. Then, the knowledge obtained with these SMRs could be replicated for large power plants which of course will continue to be demanded for large urban areas.

[@chapter4travels]

@@tomasfontes3616 When did we standardize Google as our search engine? We didn't, they just came up with a superior product that everyone flocked to. The same should be the case for nuclear. Unfortunately, nuclear iteration is painfully slow.

[@tomasfontes3616]

@@chapter4travels ow by 'standardization' I didn't mean mandatory. Instead, I meant economies of scale, this time arising in a more competitive environment and thus allowing for more than just one or two designs. I agreed with you. PS: I use Brave now :P but yeah, it's a good thing that a choice exists

[@yooper8778]

I want Dr. Krellenstein, Dr. Touran, Rod Adams, and others to do a round table on Decouple Media about what the nuclear energy sector needs to focus on. James is right about narrowing down designs, sticking with modular construction, power companies avoiding individual deviations, taking advantage of economies of scale, and taking advantage of lessons learned. These lessons are universal for any industry, not just nuclear. James talks about energy companies wanting to deviate (not invented here) which negates some of the modularity advantages of production lines. But what I have noticed is that even the Subject Matter Experts in nuclear energy cannot agree on a single path forward, let along 10 paths. I believe a 50-year nuclear energy policy in the US and Canada would have a great deal more might if 20 or 30 PhDs sign off on it. But dealing with the NRC is probably easier. ☢☢☢

[@PaulHigginbothamSr]

Around 8 or 9 I visited one of our radar installations of the air force. All this top secret stuff. I hope they knew how much information I retained after this visit. Of course I never told anyone what I had seen. I separated from the "and this is what this does group" and the service men were only happy to tell me everything and what it did. They had tape over the ranges at the bottom of the scopes but easy to figure out after reflection. Then in a room by two 16" 16 cylinder gensets, as that was how much energy the friend or foe computer needed to run. These were about 2.5ft high and ran about 30ft long and were tube type. Two aircraft took off from Portland about 80 miles away and they told us to run out to see them fly over. In my minds eye they seemed to be f105s but not sure now. One jet flew with it's cockpit glass inches away from the tailpipe of the other. 1950s. The radar vacuum tubes to power these were sitting after use in a display that the men told me were 30,000 dollars each tube.

[@darrellpowell4331]

What about the 10, 20, and 30 MW units with small grids across the country?

[@esioanniannaho5939]

Any chance of doing a video on the players of Torium nuclear reactors. Both mining and production especially the micro container sized reactor kits ? I gather that a German Dutch consortium as well as China are leading the field with prototypes at an advanced stage !

[@anotherperspective6247]

My current client is a utility who recently split off from their generation business. The reason utilities want nothing to do with nuclear is the liability. TEPCO in Japan was bankrupted by their disaster. Investors owning investor owned utility shares are even more risk averse than your average investor and want nothing to do with nuclear and its associated risks whether real or perceived. I think more an more utilities are going to split between their generation and delivery sides just due to the risks on the generation side not just nuclear but also fossil fuels as they get further demonized and regulated out of existence.

[@davidwilkie9551]

One supposes that the defence strategies are in keeping with military practice to protect national interests, so a through analysis of humanity's civil societies in the global ecosystem, is over due for inclusion.

[@kaya051285]

Nuclear fuel might be cheap But American nuclear engineers aren't A gas fired power station is operated by 40 people A nuclear plant will be closer to 600 people Juat the wage differential alone. 560 people x $120k salary = $67.2 million is enough to buy you a VAST quantity of Nat Gas which costs less than 1 cent per KWh in the USA

[@waywardgeologist2520]

Great point which seems is a design aspect that needs to be addressed at the very beginning.

[@kaya051285]

@waywardgeologist2520 It's not so much that nuclear is bad. More that a CCGTs are just so dam efficient far more man power and capital efficient than a coal plant The staffing is one example just 40 men That's not 40 on site at any one time. That's 40 total. At any one time is only about 9 men for a 1GW power station which itself is probably 3 x 350MW units so each unit has 3 men at it. Probably one man to push a lever. A second man to make sure the first man can take a shit break 💩 and a third man to make sure there is a ref if man #1 & #2 get into a fight 😄 its as close to zero staffing as you can get Either you build nukes where the staff are far cheaper eg china you can pay 1/5th as much for a worker so having 600 staff isn't as costly as Amercians Or you site them where gas isn't so cheap eg Japan pays like 4x as much for Nat Gas vs Texas Or you just accept that nuclear isn't going to be cheap if you pay your nuclear engineers six figure incomes

[@aliendroneservices6621]

@@kaya051285 Cite your source claiming every person employed at every uranium-fired power plant is a nuclear-engineer.

[@kaya051285]

@@aliendroneservices6621 are they slaves working for free?

[@aliendroneservices6621]

@@kaya051285 Cite your source claiming every employee has a degree in nuclear-engineering.

[@FernandoWINSANTO]

Future depends on how you deal with waste.

[@Nill757]

Krellenstein and Kiefer tell an interesting history but it’s all so much off point theater. There are 60 reactors under construction globally now, only one of them in the US, no more approved, zero in Canada. The big elephant in the room is the NRC. Industry knows this. So one can sit down and talk about finance and supply chain and lack of std design all you want, throw in all the tax credits you like. Doesn’t matter, when a malevolent NRC director can show up and demand changes to any already approved and underway design as with Vogtle. Notice who never appears on any of these nuclear podcasts. The NRC. Get serious.

[@waywardgeologist2520]

It was talked about in another video in this series. Yes, it’s time for a major overhaul of the agency.

[@Nill757]

@@waywardgeologist2520 Seems to me the model for change already there. The AEC was destroyed by Congress, and replaced w a new regulator, 1970s. NRC needs the same treatment.

[@kaya051285]

Nuclear wont happen in the USA in the near term as natural gas is cheap and CCGTs are very efficient $2.58 for natural gas today. Run it through a 62% efficient CCGT = $14.20 per MWh for the fuel cost You are looking at $87 million of NatGas to power a 1GW CCGT operating 70% of the year As a nuke of similar size has 500 more workers x $120k salary = $60 million So yeah Nuclear fuel might be cheap But nuclear engineers aren't

[@lamontmariam2923]

😭 Promo sm