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Raenir Salazar posted:Just to be clear I'm not suggesting we copy and paste Navy reactors; but that the Navy is generally very successful at producing nukes that in the event that the government was to put in a trillion dollars into the mass production of nuclear power plants, that the problems of how to effectively administer such a program should heavily involve the Navy because they're good at their jobs; What specifically does the Navy know how to do that would apply to construction of civilian nuclear power plants?
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Jul 17, 2023 20:02
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We actually have counterexamples where naval reactor operation experience embedded priorities and procedures that do not translate safely to commercial plant operation. Phanatic is, imo, completely right to strongly hint that there's a world of difference between naval reactor design and operation and commercial reactor design and operation.
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Jul 17, 2023 20:05
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Potato Salad posted:We actually have counterexamples where naval reactor operation experience embedded priorities and procedures that do not translate safely to commercial plant operation. Phanatic posted:What specifically does the Navy know how to do that would apply to construction of civilian nuclear power plants? The historical example here is looking at the scale of the Manhatten Project handled by the Army. The point is administrative organization and trying a different set of incentive structures. We need a new pan national effort at solving climate change on the scale proportionally to the Manhatten Project and the military seems to me like ideal stewards of such a program to organize and tell subcontractors what to do. I think it's a bit silly of a question to ask what would apply to the construction of civilian plants because that's not really what I'm suggesting. It's about finding experienced and talented project managers, team leaders, logisticians, and so on who can get things done who don't have MBA brain.
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Jul 17, 2023 20:17
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Potato Salad posted:We actually have counterexamples where naval reactor operation experience embedded priorities and procedures that do not translate safely to commercial plant operation. It's not just design and operation. I work for a defense contractor. Let's say we have a part that we want to use for a test. We can't even just call up a supplier and say "Yeah, how much is this part?" and if we like the price say "We'll take a dozen." I'm not even allowed to order a $200 accelerometer for a multimillion-dollar test program from a random company before thousands of man-hours get spent on the big long process involved to even get a supplier on the approved list of suppliers we're allowed to purchase parts from. There are various laws that require US suppliers for certain things, which can supposedly be waived *by the President*. The Navy has suppliers to work with that have already passed the approval procedures they need to be a supplier to the Navy. Everybody knows everybody, everybody knows each others' procedures, it's an entirely different world of program management, planning, procurement, of QC and testing. The theory of nuclear power plant operation is about the only thing that would be similar between the two processes, and the Navy having become adept at one doesn't mean any of that will transfer over. Bettis can make naval reactors, they can't make civilian reactor vessels because those are much larger forgings, so if the Navy wants a reactor vessel of that size it's going to have to get in line just like everyone else. I am not sure where specifically just having the Navy involved is suddenly going to achieve so much cost/schedule savings. Raenir Salazar posted:It's about finding experienced and talented project managers, team leaders, logisticians, and so on who can get things done who don't have MBA brain. How does any of that fix, just as a single example, how ridiculously long and needlessly complex just getting a site license for a single reactor takes? Do you think that takes so long because private industry doesn't have talented project managers? And as for "different incentive structures," the contractors who actually built Oak Ridge and Hanford, which was what the overwhelming majority of Manhattan project money went towards, got paid a lot of money. What's the different incentive? Phanatic fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Jul 17, 2023 |
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Jul 17, 2023 20:18
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You know why you have never heard people complain that there could never be enough engineers to run a high renewable grid? Or complain that there could never be big enough curing facilities and trucks to build and install big wind turbines? Because those University courses got some funding to increase graduations, and the facilities were built. Mostly by state level funding. And nobody noticed because they were actually quite cheap when compared with other kinds of spending. Now I would agree that the currently existing nuclear industry is unable to do that, but that would not hold if there actually were people motivated to spend money on nuclear power without expecting massive returns this quarter.
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Jul 17, 2023 20:29
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Phanatic posted:How does any of that fix, just as a single example, how ridiculously long and needlessly complex just getting a site license for a single reactor takes? Do you think that takes so long because private industry doesn't have talented project managers? And as for "different incentive structures," the contractors who actually built Oak Ridge and Hanford, which was what the overwhelming majority of Manhattan project money went towards, got paid a lot of money. What's the different incentive? The private industry is a long ways different from the time where they literally paid the government back extra money they made and the systemic issues with the private sector are too endemic and anemic to be trusted with a mass rollout of new plants without a WW2-esque command of the effort. I feel like you're not interpreted my point as intended.
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Jul 17, 2023 22:49
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Kalman posted:Naval reactors run on HEU so using those designs commercially would present a serious proliferation risk. The united states already has nuclear weapons fyi
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Jul 17, 2023 23:41
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Raenir Salazar posted:The private industry is a long ways different from the time where they literally paid the government back extra money they made If you're talking about the Manhattan Project and the silver, that's not what went down. Private industry was not involved in the Manhattan Project, or any other military contracting, on a non-profit basis. QuarkJets posted:The united states already has nuclear weapons fyi The proliferation risk is in transporting HEU all willy-nilly. As I've mentioned before, the world has sat there and watched not only North Korea but Iran engage in proliferation without really giving a poo poo about it so I don't think "but my proliferation!" is a good reason to not do something. What is a good reason to not do something is that HEU is hugely expensive, and the cores that the Navy uses now have such an overabundance of reactivity (so that you don't have to refuel for the life of the reactor) that they're only safe by virtue of incorporating even more hugely-expensive burnable poisons life hafnium, and there is no reason whatsoever to base a civilian reactor on that fuel. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Jul 18, 2023 |
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Jul 18, 2023 00:51
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Phanatic posted:The proliferation risk is in transporting HEU all willy-nilly. And in putting it into private hands. And yeah, NK et al have proliferated, but failure to prevent that is not a good reason to make it even easier for the next state when there are cheaper, better, easier alternatives.
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Jul 18, 2023 01:05
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mobby_6kl posted:There seems to be some sort of unstated assumption that this can't possibly be improved. We've been able to turn around a plant in like 6 years without massive overruns with 70s technology, then haven't built any new ones in decades and let the industry atrophy, and now of course the first few plants are a bit of a clusterfuck. This is always the crux of the issue for me. We literally already know that it is possible to build nuclear reactors on time and in a reasonable budget, so it's not a question of if but how. It's crazy to say that nuclear is inherently expensive, which is the constant mantra not just outside of this thread but here too. In the 70s new reactors were getting built rapidly because it was actually cheaper per khw than coal! So the question is not, "Can we build reactors cheaply enough to complete," but "What went wrong that we no longer can build cheap reactors, and how do we fix it?" I suspect that most posters here who believe that there is outside political influence are correct because it seems the most likely assumption, but it's hard to prove.
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Jul 18, 2023 01:37
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aniviron posted:This is always the crux of the issue for me. We literally already know that it is possible to build nuclear reactors on time and in a reasonable budget, so it's not a question of if but how. It's crazy to say that nuclear is inherently expensive, which is the constant mantra not just outside of this thread but here too. In the 70s new reactors were getting built rapidly because it was actually cheaper per khw than coal! So the question is not, "Can we build reactors cheaply enough to complete," but "What went wrong that we no longer can build cheap reactors, and how do we fix it?" I suspect that most posters here who believe that there is outside political influence are correct because it seems the most likely assumption, but it's hard to prove. They were promised to be very cheap, but if you look at all those 70s reactor projects, many, many were cancelled due to massive cost and schedule overruns, and the track record on the ones that got built were not great. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_canceled_nuclear_reactors_in_the_United_States
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Jul 18, 2023 01:47
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aniviron posted:This is always the crux of the issue for me. We literally already know that it is possible to build nuclear reactors on time and in a reasonable budget, so it's not a question of if but how. It's crazy to say that nuclear is inherently expensive, which is the constant mantra not just outside of this thread but here too. In the 70s new reactors were getting built rapidly because it was actually cheaper per khw than coal! So the question is not, "Can we build reactors cheaply enough to complete," but "What went wrong that we no longer can build cheap reactors, and how do we fix it?" I suspect that most posters here who believe that there is outside political influence are correct because it seems the most likely assumption, but it's hard to prove. To solve it you'd need an entire sea change in procurement from top to bottom, no single point can fix the systemic gutting of the industry.
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Jul 18, 2023 01:55
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I’ve first hand seen billion+ dollar projects go T&M and they went exactly as expected. Yet if you don’t take the lowest bid the management gets replaced by another batch of dumb MBA.
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Jul 18, 2023 02:35
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in a well actually posted:They were promised to be very cheap, but if you look at all those 70s reactor projects, many, many were cancelled due to massive cost and schedule overruns, and the track record on the ones that got built were not great. Potato Salad posted:Nothing baseload remains. Round the decay
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Jul 18, 2023 03:34
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in a well actually posted:They were promised to be very cheap, but if you look at all those 70s reactor projects, many, many were cancelled due to massive cost and schedule overruns, and the track record on the ones that got built were not great. Almost all of the cancellations prior to 1980 were cancelled plans, not cancelled construction. It's only in the 80s that we really start seeing plants under construction terminated. Planning isn't subject to the same kinds of catastrophic cost & schedule overruns as a reactor that is actually being realized. It also makes sense that we see a lot of cancelled plans in the 70s, because there were a lot of new plants being built in the 70s and it was seen as a successful technology; so it's natural for people to consider expansion in many locations but ultimately decide that some aren't worthwhile before ever breaking ground. You don't see many cancelled plans now because nobody is interested in building reactors in the first place now.
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Jul 18, 2023 06:08
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Phanatic posted:that they're only safe by virtue of incorporating even more hugely-expensive burnable poisons life hafnium, So couple incorrect bits here. Hafnium is considered nonburnable and is primarily used in control rods. Boron is mainly what people refer to for burnable. Those in no way make the reactors unsafe or unsuitable. Part of the reason the Naval Reactors program is so successful is that they have funding and facilities and training pipeline that covers the full 50 year core life. They disassemble and examine that poison burnup, and xenon fractures, and H2 embrittlement. And those results get fed into the validation of the next generation designs which won't see that same validation themselves for another 50 years. That's the kind of thing people should be pointing too about nafal reactors in the civilian space. They've got stable funding to do long lifetime tasks like that. They've got stable funding for training. They've got stable funding to develop a new design every decade. M_Gargantua fucked around with this message at 08:17 on Jul 18, 2023 |
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Jul 18, 2023 08:14
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Naval reactors generally use hella enriched fuels right? To avoid having to ever refuel?
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Jul 18, 2023 14:29
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:Naval reactors generally use hella enriched fuels right? To avoid having to ever refuel? That's part of the story. HEU (highly enriched uranium) is used for compactness more than anything else; you can get away with a smaller mass of fuel and play games with reactivity and the nuclear chemistry more easily if the fuel is richer. Endurance is part of the reason to use HEU (and running a reactor straight for a third of a century brings its own extra considerations for evolution of the chemistry and reactivity of the fuel) but we were using HEU for compactness first, even back when we had to service fuel much more frequently.
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Jul 18, 2023 14:59
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M_Gargantua posted:So couple incorrect bits here. Hafnium is considered nonburnable and is primarily used in control rods. Boron is mainly what people refer to for burnable. Those in no way make the reactors unsafe or unsuitable. Hafnium is used in naval reactor control rods specifically because of the large excess reactivity those cores are designed with. Shippingport also used it, but Shippingport was a naval core adapted into a civilian PWR. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4240391 Hafnium isn't typically used in civilian reactors because of the cost, but if you have a small dense core that needs to go 30-50 years without refueling it's a good choice. I mean nonburnable, not burnable; Hf176 can absorb 5 neutrons before it stops being hafnium. My point isn't that it makes reactors unsafe or unsuitable, my point is that a reactor that uses 90%+ enriched HEU and has such an excess of reactivity that you need to incorporate hafnium in your control rods to make it safe (and boron would not make it safe, because the boron would burn too fast leaving you with a huge excess of reactivity) is completely unsuited to civilian power applications.
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Jul 18, 2023 16:35
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Also, it’s not like naval reactors are designed by people who have nothing to do with civilian ones - Westinghouse, Bechtel, GE do naval reactors. If there were major benefits they’d have adopted that approach for civilian reactors so they could sell more of them.
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Jul 18, 2023 18:36
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I was more thinking there is evidence that it's possible to push out several smaller reactors per year. Probably not a lot of capacity to expand without investment.
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Jul 18, 2023 20:36
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Force the Navy to go through the civilian permitting and licensing scheme and then see how many reactors they can turn out a year.
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Jul 18, 2023 21:02
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Phanatic posted:Force the Navy to go through the civilian permitting and licensing scheme and then see how many reactors they can turn out a year. Isn't this the crux of the issue that we're arguing for? Relaxing and streamlining this process, investing in safer more modular reactors where this permitting is less required and can be put "anywhere" safely, and so on? And also: M_Gargantua posted:Part of the reason the Naval Reactors program is so successful is that they have funding and facilities and training pipeline that covers the full 50 year core life. They disassemble and examine that poison burnup, and xenon fractures, and H2 embrittlement. And those results get fed into the validation of the next generation designs which won't see that same validation themselves for another 50 years.
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Jul 19, 2023 11:44
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:https://twitter.com/FT/status/1676089998569873410?s=20 Toyota has made this announcement on an annual basis for about 5 years.
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Jul 19, 2023 18:01
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Phanatic posted:Why? How? Specifically. Well for one, unlike Utilities they don’t have incentives NOT to finish projects. The issue with utilities is that their economic model doesn’t motivate them to do anything on time.
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Jul 19, 2023 18:04
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Potato Salad posted:bolded the part I think you need to have a good https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/ “But many of the US' nuclear plants were in fact built around the same design, with obvious site-specific aspects like different foundation needs. The researchers track each of the designs used separately, and they calculate a "learning rate"—the drop in cost that's associated with each successful completion of a plant based on that design. If things went as expected, the learning rate should be positive, with each sequential plant costing less. Instead, it's -115 percent. ... But those were far from the only costs. They cite a worker survey that indicated that about a quarter of the unproductive labor time came because the workers were waiting for either tools or materials to become available. In a lot of other cases, construction procedures were changed in the middle of the build, leading to confusion and delays. Finally, there was the general decrease in performance noted above. All told, problems that reduced the construction efficiency contributed nearly 70 percent to the increased costs.”
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Jul 19, 2023 18:05
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about and also research what exactly those fuckups were
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VideoGameVet posted:Well for one, unlike Utilities they don’t have incentives NOT to finish projects. Do you really need a list of government- and military- managed programs that have gone completely off the rails?
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Jul 19, 2023 18:09
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Mid-Life Crisis posted:I’ve first hand seen billion+ dollar projects go T&M and they went exactly as expected. Yet if you don’t take the lowest bid the management gets replaced by another batch of dumb MBA. I lost a potential job at a game studio in 2007 (multiple interviews and finally flew me up to Seattle with future wife to find a place to live) because I mentioned to the CFO that using T&M based funding of contractors was a bad idea and they needed to pay on a milestone basis. The guy who ran the show was the one who did that and my offer was rescinded on Monday.
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Jul 19, 2023 18:12
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There's some news about a "breakthrough" geothermal by basically using fracking technique to create the necessary permeability quote:Fervo Energy says it has achieved a breakthrough in geothermal technology. It carried out a 30-day well test at its site in northern Nevada and says it was able to achieve a "flowrate of 63 liters per second at high temperature that enables 3.5 megawatts of electric production." The company says the test resulted in flow and power output records for an enhanced geothermal system (EGS) and that it was completed without incident. This definitely sounds promising but I've no idea how much this would actually expand the possible generation capacity.
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Jul 20, 2023 12:04
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Phanatic posted:Do you really need a list of government- and military- managed programs that have gone completely off the rails? Nothing ever being perfect is not the same as perverse incentives.
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Jul 20, 2023 13:28
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Harold Fjord posted:Nothing ever being perfect is not the same as perverse incentives. If you're claiming the military doesn't have perverse incentives I don't know what to tell you.
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Jul 20, 2023 14:32
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Phanatic posted:If you're claiming the military doesn't have perverse incentives I don't know what to tell you. Disaster YouTube (True Disaster? Reality Disaster?) sems to be slowly going through maritime disasters now, and it was pretty shocking to learn just how hard the Navy's leadership tried to blame the Iowa gun explosion on a malicious improvised explosive with zero evidence, and with the FBI even concluding that there was no explosive device. All because some careerist rear admiral wanted to be paid a few thousand dollars more per year, and this would have jeopardized that promotion. People itt talk about the Navy abusing its sailors right now, but Jesus that's a bad history too Potato Salad fucked around with this message at 14:44 on Jul 20, 2023 |
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Jul 20, 2023 14:42
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Well you are right that bad things exist in the world. But what's your alternative? (There is no alternative we are super doomed)
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Jul 20, 2023 15:11
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Harold Fjord posted:Well you are right that bad things exist in the world. But what's your alternative? There are things that will help and things that are just changes that don't address the underlying problems. "Have the Navy do program management for reactors that are almost entirely unlike the reactors it is familiar with and which will operate in an entirely different regulatory environment with entirely different requirements and processes" is not something that is likely to help. The things the government should be doing include: Ending what are effectively enormous subsidies for fossil fuels. CO2 emissions have an external cost that plant operators get to completely ignore because we allow them to dump their waste into the commons. Make a proper accounting of that cost, and price that in to the cost of fossil fuel consumption. Streamlining the gently caress out of the regulatory approval process for a nuclear plant. This time and legal complexity is absurdly long, which in turn enormously increases capital expense. Preapproving site locations. Big map of the US, start going around and doing surveys and painting the map colors and saying "Yeah, you can put this design of nuclear plant in anywhere colored green, this design of plant in anywhere colored orange, etc." This idea where a plant design first has to be certified and then a specific site needs to be licensed and these two things are independent of each other is ridiculous. Countering the first-mover effect. Nobody wants to be the first to do something new because they bear the risk of learning how to do it, and then the second mover has the advantage of being able to learn from their mistakes. Production tax credits amounting to some percent of the historical construction cost, government-funded R&D for fuel cycle research and new reactor technologies (like, the IFR was loving *brilliant*, but we killed it because we are *dumb*).
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Jul 20, 2023 15:32
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mobby_6kl posted:There's some news about a "breakthrough" geothermal by basically using fracking technique to create the necessary permeability Was listening to a VOLTS podcast about this subject the other day, it was extremely interesting. Most people (me included) when we are hearing geothermal we actually think about hydrothermal exclusively. There is so, so much more, and the potential is really incredible. Dante80 fucked around with this message at 15:42 on Jul 20, 2023 |
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Jul 20, 2023 15:39
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In general the perverse incentives within the Military are more aligned with our goals of bootstrapping massive adoption of nuclear power; i.e officers put in charge of administering the "surge" want to be promoted and advance their careers, corporations want profits; you can get corporations and contractors to improve things but insofar as we really want to revitalize the nuclear industry by any means necessary the incentives of "I want to be promoted"/"advance my KPIs" means the incentive lies in getting the job done.
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Jul 20, 2023 18:18
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mobby_6kl posted:There's some news about a "breakthrough" geothermal by basically using fracking technique to create the necessary permeability It’s a good read but I was kinda shocked that it never mentioned this microwave drilling tech that, if it works, would be faster and less disruptive (no induced quakes). https://news.mit.edu/2022/quaise-energy-geothermal-0628 “Quaise’s drilling systems center around a microwave-emitting device called a gyrotron that has been used in research and manufacturing for decades.” I’m not claiming that Quaise Energy is going to win this battle, but not mentioning them seems like sloppy journalism, Actually I confused the Engadget article with this Wired piece (alas both skip mentioning Quaise). https://www.wired.com/story/a-vast-untapped-green-energy-source-is-hiding-beneath-your-feet/
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Jul 20, 2023 23:24
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Phanatic posted:There are things that will help and things that are just changes that don't address the underlying problems. "Have the Navy do program management for reactors that are almost entirely unlike the reactors it is familiar with and which will operate in an entirely different regulatory environment with entirely different requirements and processes" is not something that is likely to help. The regulatory process isn’t the issue. See my earlier post on what caused the delays and price overruns.
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Jul 20, 2023 23:26
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VideoGameVet posted:The regulatory process isn’t the issue. See my earlier post on what caused the delays and price overruns. Which elements of what you cited--which is indeed accurate--would you contest do not get addressed by what Phanatic mentions that are also specifically germane to nuclear industry? Phrased another way: you cite Dumb Cost Cutting And Bad Management In Construction, which is wreaking havoc across the board right now, especially with projects executed slavishly by disinterested stakeholders (see my comments about Southern Do you argue that any of these problems are unsolvable, either right now or under management lacking deep and structural fossil conflict of interest? Potato Salad fucked around with this message at 03:46 on Jul 21, 2023 |
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Jul 21, 2023 03:38
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I also want to ask if the final cost of and timeline of Votgle 3 is ultimately unacceptable in however you interpret that the great game of bitching and moaning capitalistically about balance sheets ought to be played as we face climate Armageddon. That is, was it too expensive for your tastes? Should we spare more of a thought for the Free Hand of the Market, which is totally fine and doing a great job of solving the baseload and peaking fossil dependence right now? I can't wait to see someone explain how the falling price of renewables is going to magic a national smartgrid out of invisible market forces, or how we're going to totally pay for more than a couple battery arbitrage projects when things get REALLY genuinely prohibitively expensive in the last teens of % of baseload that needs to be decarbonized (per the Stanford study on California energy blend pathways discussed extensively earlier this year). Potato Salad fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Jul 21, 2023 |
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Jul 21, 2023 03:50
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