Originally Posted by SeeGeeWhy
Hardly ideology to align oneself with the second and fourth laws. That tends to work out in the long run and even irrational human markets are starting to agree.
First off, she built precisely zero reactors in her illustrious two year stint at the NRC. Her expertise is limited to not building, so I suppose getting her to write this article was a good idea.
Her beef with Oklo is weird. The NRC is one of the worst offenders in terms of ensuring the “nuclear is expensive and dangerous” narrative remains true, and then pretends they have no part in that process.
Nuclear is expensive precisely because it has to pay off every Tom, Dick and Sherry that “has a concern”, valid or not. The process takes forever, and everyone gets a piece. The grift factor is huge, and yet, because it is so productive, it can pay the price.
Oklo made a choice to not pay the gate fee at that time. They couldn’t afford to! Deferring engagement with the regulator is not the same as being outright rejected or being unable to answer the questions. Now that they’re going public, they’ll be able to give the NRC enough lunch money to not get punched in the face for a while. Go look at what they made NuScale pay into the process, and their engineering still isn’t done. I am not convinced on NuScale, either to be totally friggen honest. So what’s the difference? Well, Oklo isn’t backed by a big EPC that gets to milk the project for billable hours, so they did what’s right for the project. WEIRD.
Second, the HALEU is messed up. She gets to claim that SOME of the reactors will make proliferation and waste issues worse, without pointing out that not all of the SMR variants or vendors require HALEU, or that some of the variants including Oklo will also consume SNF stockpiles which will have a net reduction of concern. Why is moving towards a closed cycle a bad thing?
It gets weirder here, given that Altman, Gates and Buffet are behind reactors that will require HALEU. Reactors sized quite nicely to run dedicated advanced data centres for purposes of let’s say… supporting OpenAI and MS Copilot efforts. Efforts that, without doubt, have proven they can effectively select who gets to win an election, or not. Do you think that Altman and Gates, with their open pandering to Congress regarding regulation of AI tools are not including access to HALEU in some kind of cross-agreement that will protect the interests of the bureaucratic class in exchange?
Third, and this is totally a dead horse, but I will repeat. Rebuildables are an inexpensive way to produce expensive electricity. Nuclear is an expensive way to build cheap electricity. Optimizing delivered cost and utility (exergetic potential, or, is it useful?) is the goal of the system, NOT maximizing the profit potential of those who invest in GENERATION.
That said, GW scale Gen III / III+ variants (VVER, Hualong One, EPR, AP) all have different performance metrics. First of a kind projects always do poorly, sorry to say. Megaprojects as a category also do poorly. GW scale projects are megaprojects by default and are thus subject to the pratfalls. Pointing to the worst of the worst, ignoring all other factors is deliberately misleading. Where is her example of Barakah, or OPG’s recent refurbishments? The markets that have GW scale plants have robust economies and outcompete their neighbours. The projects develop skills and establish supply chains that are broadly very useful, transferable and multi-generational. Very few “impartial analysts” discount these facts.
Four, we cannot eliminate spent fuel or weapons stockpiles without power reactors. Period. We can certainly develop more radioactive waste and weapons without power reactors. This equivalency is one of the most potent in the anti-toolkit and frankly we need to take that away from them. It’s a harmful narrative.
Five, Ray invested in TransAtomic and despite that shop predictably going bust, he made a return. It is true that raising capital for a new reactor design is a major challenge due to the risk bubbles and timelines involved, but many companies have done so. Very few of the start up vendors are chasing a BOO model where early investors will be asked to also invest in the construction of the projects themselves. Who invests in these are entities that have a timeline of concern greater than three months, and reap downstream benefits of having available, reliable, affordable, and useful energy provision. Exergic energy units are the base currency of every biophysical web, of every complex dissipative structure in the universe. Ignore that law at one’s own peril.
Six is one point where I partially agree. The phrase SMR is not helpful. All past reactors had elements of modularization. Modularization is not the panacea that folks on mega projects hope it will be. What is more useful is to think about the nature of the safety systems, and the market fit, not how it will come together between factory and site. Gains come from just straight up not needing to build massive containment structures out of tremendous amounts of specialized steel and concrete. Avoiding extended finance costs via reduced construction periods is also essential. Standardization and repeatability is a potential but distant and likely unnecessary benefit to make “SMRs” work.
As for market alignment, the BWRX-300 is not overly novel tech wise but has struck a major chord with the overall offering. Poland putting up for 90 units says a lot about the need for a non-emitting, dispatchable source in the neighbourhood of 300MWe. Oklo has an order book. Last Energy has an order book. Thorcon has an order book. This all says that GW scale nuclear is not the only nuclear with a willing market. Some places pay a huge amount TODAY for their power price sly becyaee they’re doing highly dischaotic work in remote places, and need a middle ground option that doesn’t involve coal, natty or diesel.
Then there are the high temp “primary” energy applications that “SMRs” (read Gen IV) designs serve in a way that the Gen II - III+ are just not designed to handle, and frankly nor are renewables. Copenhagen atomics and X-Energy both have order books right now for industrial applications that need high temp poly-gen plants co-located with their legacy assets to remain competitive and sustainable.
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