[HN Gopher] Nuclear startup Oklo gets thumbs-down from regulators
___________________________________________________________________
Nuclear startup Oklo gets thumbs-down from regulators
Author : orangebanana1
Score : 177 points
Date : 2022-01-14 18:06 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.canarymedia.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.canarymedia.com)
| winphone1974 wrote:
| The article is certainly bias towards the move fast and break
| things mentality being applied to these nuclear startups. It
| basically calls the NRC a dinosaur that's blocking any future
| nuclear capacity, which in my mind IS a big party of its mandate.
| Is this canary media and industry outlet? This reads like an
| editorial
| microdrum wrote:
| Real science investors with access to high level nuclear talent
| never seemed to think much of this company.
|
| Its financing seems to be Koch Industries, through a strange sort
| of PR/VC arm they have.
|
| The denial is substantive. I am pro fission but, erm, would
| rather go with Westinghouse.
| philipkglass wrote:
| Here's the denial letter to Oklo directly from the Nuclear
| Regulatory Commission:
|
| https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2135/ML21357A034.pdf
|
| All Oklo application documents linked to from this top level
| page: https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/col/aurora-
| oklo.ht...
|
| While searching World Nuclear News for background about Oklo I
| ran into this story:
|
| "Oklo to power bitcoin mining machines"
|
| https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Oklo-to-power-Bi...
|
| This is dubious on a couple of levels. Micro-reactors like Oklo
| (1.5 megawatt electrical output per unit, compared to 1000+
| megawatts for Generation III reactors currently being built)
| would be hard pressed to produce electricity suitable for an
| industry that seeks globally-cheapest prices. Announcing a
| "20-year commercial partnership" to supply 100 units to a mining
| firm, before they've built a _single_ unit, is optimistic to the
| point of recklessness.
|
| The Oklo founders [1], Caroline Cochran and Jacob DeWitte, have
| no industrial experience, according to their LinkedIn profiles.
| They met at MIT while TA'ing and went straight from graduate
| school to founding Oklo.
|
| I just don't think that Oklo knows what they are doing.
|
| [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/28/oklo-planning-nuclear-
| micro-...
| gloriana wrote:
| Hand picked by Sam Altman. Lol
| PaulHoule wrote:
| They want to put this in the middle of nowhere in Idaho. It
| wouldn't be worth running transmission lines to connect a
| reactor this size to the grid.
|
| You could put the bitcoin mine right next to the facility and
| do something useful with the electricity. It really should be
| coupled to some real sink so they can see the dynamics of the
| reactor + powerset + consumer.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Before people jump down your throat with pseudo ethical pearl
| clutching, just replace "do something useful" with "generate
| income".
|
| You don't have to personally believe that bitcoin mining is
| "useful" to acknowledge that it certainly can generate real
| money to offset the cost of a remote experiment like this
| one.
| Tarrosion wrote:
| Ultimately I do not know whether Oklo and/or their founders
| know what they're doing, though I hope for the sake of the
| planet that they do and they succeed.
|
| But calling them out for having no nuclear industry experience
| seems somewhere between aggressive and wrong. Both founders
| have graduate degrees in nuclear science from MIT and have been
| in the nuclear industry _at Oklo_ for the better part of a
| decade. A quick LinkedIn search also shows that Oklo employs
| other people with nuclear industry experience, including at the
| NRC itself.
|
| If someone had a PhD from MIT in machine learning and then
| worked at Google doing machine learning for 8 years, would you
| say that person has no machine learning industry experience? At
| face value such a person would seem like a plausible expert!
| philipkglass wrote:
| I mean that they've never been at an organization that
| actually builds reactors or reactor components. Building
| working machines, at scale, at a price that customers can
| afford, is hard even if you're not in a heavily regulated
| industry. I'd also be skeptical of the chances for a pair of
| people to successfully move from graduate research in solar
| technology at MIT to commercializing a new solar cell design
| through their startup.
| readams wrote:
| There aren't any organizations that build reactors though.
| You'd have to go to France or China.
| bigthymer wrote:
| Doesn't Westinghouse build nuclear reactors?
|
| https://www.westinghousenuclear.com/new-
| plants/engineering-c...
| readams wrote:
| They're hoping to get to build some. Not in the US of
| course.
| philipkglass wrote:
| They're building reactors in the state of Georgia:
|
| https://info.westinghousenuclear.com/blog/shaping-the-
| future...
|
| Other companies that manufacture nuclear components in
| the US include Areva, General Electric, and Framatome.
| But Westinghouse is the only company that has a new
| reactor design currently under construction in the US.
| count wrote:
| The US is still fielding new nuclear submarines and
| aircraft carriers. So, they ARE building new power
| plants, just...not commercial ones.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Hah, it's the opposite of "you need 5 years of experience
| in a 3 year old technology": they need X years of
| experience in an industry that has been dead for the last
| 40.
| rfdave wrote:
| Looking at the number of failed kickstarters for physical
| objects that are multiple orders of magnitude less
| complicated than a nuclear power plant with new
| technology might be instructive.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| China's been building new reactors, poach some of those
| project managers.
| beders wrote:
| > I hope for the sake of the planet that they do and they
| succeed.
|
| The planet doesn't need nuclear. It just needs a concerted
| push to roll out renewables on a bigger scale and invest into
| promising long/medium term energy storage solutions (like
| various gravity storage solutions)
|
| The opportunity costs for nuclear are just way too high.
|
| https://www.oneearth.org/the-7-reasons-why-nuclear-energy-
| is...
| e_tm_ wrote:
| If they started an ML company that applied for grants and
| failed to supply the required information, it would be
| acceptable to inquire about their expertise.
|
| Academic experience does not equal Industry experience.
| notjustanymike wrote:
| Nuclear powered bitcoin mining. How is the human race so smart,
| yet simultaneously so so dumb?
| roughly wrote:
| We're more properly Homo callidus, not Homo sapiens.
| Antipode wrote:
| If it displaces fossil fuel based Bitcoin mining that's still
| a net gain in my book.
| arkitaip wrote:
| Our intelligence is dwarfed by our unlimited greed.
| echelon wrote:
| Sometimes you have to attach yourself to dumb ideas to sell
| the smart idea. There's a good chance these folks don't care
| about cypto at all and are just using this to obtain further
| investment and survive another day.
| blhack wrote:
| Can we please just take some remote area of Nevada, and let these
| people do whatever they want? We were literally blowing up
| nuclear weapons out there.
|
| If that doesn't work, howabout an oil platform (how symbolic!),
| or an old nuclear missile silo?
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > oil platform (how symbolic!)
|
| I can think of no better place for stray radioactive
| contamination to end up than in the ocean.
| worik wrote:
| > We were literally blowing up nuclear weapons out there.
|
| ...which resulted in some catastrophic health outcomes.
| Animats wrote:
| The classic Rickover quote, from the 1950s:
|
| _An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the
| following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is
| small. (3) It is cheap. (4) it is light. (5) It can be built very
| quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose. (7) Very little
| development will be required. It will use off-the-shelf
| components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not
| being built now._
|
| _On the other hand a practical reactor can be distinguished by
| the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It
| is behind schedule. (3) It requires an immense amount of
| development on apparently trivial items. (4) It is very
| expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of its
| engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is
| heavy. (8) It is complicated._
|
| _The tools of the academic designer are a piece of paper and a
| pencil with an eraser. If a mistake is made, it can always be
| erased and changed. If the practical-reactor designer errs, he
| wears the mistake around his neck; it cannot be erased. Everyone
| sees it. The academic-reactor designer is a dilettante._
|
| "Little that's happened in the 60 years since suggests Rickover
| was wrong." -- Kennedy Maize, 12/30/2014, Power Magazine
| contributing editor.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| My favorite pithy quote is "In theory, it works in practice; in
| practice, it works in theory."
| sklargh wrote:
| Go fast and break things is a suboptimal approach to nuclear
| fission related enterprises.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| > no nuclear plant that has submitted an application since the
| formation of the NRC in 1975 has yet commenced operation.
|
| Hasn't stopped the US Navy (including land-based ones), I wonder
| what their application\regulatory process is like...
|
| "All U.S. Navy submarines and supercarriers built since 1975 are
| nuclear-powered by such reactors."
|
| I think Oklo wanted to put their reactor at INL (Idaho National
| Laboratory), where the Navy has a land-based reactor.
| DennisP wrote:
| The NRC doesn't regulate the Navy's reactors. For a while,
| Flibe Energy planned to work directly with the military, to
| bypass the NRC. And the Navy's ship-based reactors at least are
| classified.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Naval reactors always run on highly enriched uranium, to make
| the core lighter and more compact. It's easy to make a gun-type
| nuclear weapon out of HEU. Not a big problem on a military
| ship, problematic in a civilian context.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| > no nuclear plant that has submitted an application since the
| formation of the NRC in 1975 has yet commenced operation.
|
| Wait, what? I knew that reactor construction stopped around then.
| I hear it alluded to often enough, e.g. "US grid could have been
| 100% low-CO2 power by now if we had just kept up the pace of
| deploying nuclear instead of stopping in the 80s." Still, I
| thought the story was a messy mix of regulations hitting at the
| same time as city growth was topping off and interest rates were
| skyrocketing.
|
| If the NRC just says "no" to everything, that's a big deal. Is
| there more to the story?
| kevinstubbs wrote:
| I was confused by the wording of that as well! I guess it would
| have helped if they put "yet" at the end of the sentence.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Below your quote, it says that NuScale has gotten approval.
| It's not that nobody has gotten approved, it's that nobody has
| commenced operation.
| petermcneeley wrote:
| Sophons at work.
| jessaustin wrote:
| Maybe the sophons should have paid more attention to Chinese
| literature?
| topspin wrote:
| > If the NRC just says "no" to everything, that's a big deal.
| Is there more to the story?
|
| The NRC doesn't say "no" to everything; AP-600/1000 designs
| were approved, an SMR design has been approved. The NRC is
| entirely willing to approve competent design efforts.
|
| The most candid explanation of the attitude of the NRC was
| offered by former chairman Dale Klien and his "no bozos"
| baloney test; there is no room in nuclear power for hucksters
| and the NRC won't indulge them. This rejection is evidence that
| this mentality still prevails; failure to respond to NRC
| questions about reactor design in a timely manner is bozoery
| and this is the correct outcome.
|
| The Oklo proposal isn't some generational variant on PWRs. They
| are proposing a fast breeder. You can't go to the NRC with a
| fast breeder application on anything less than a multi-billion
| dollar R&D operation designed to positively thrill the NRC with
| actually epic levels of competence and preparation and expect
| to be approved, and that is exactly how it should be.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Reminds me of that FDA reviewer who refused to approve any
| drugs on the grounds that risk couldn't be completely
| eliminated.
| WithinReason wrote:
| A common solution to the Trolley Problem.
| vpribish wrote:
| got a link?
| lvs wrote:
| You're misreading the claim. It's not that they have not given
| any approvals, it's that those reactors did not go on to reach
| operating status. That means these are more likely to be
| business problems, not regulator problems.
| richk449 wrote:
| I don't think it makes sense to talk about the business of
| building nuclear reactors as something separate from
| regulator problems. The two are very tightly intertwined.
|
| Four AP1000s are operating in China right now, demonstrating
| that under different regulatory regimes, the plants can be
| built.
| philipkglass wrote:
| The NRC said "yes" to 4 new AP1000 reactors in Georgia and
| South Carolina more than 10 years ago. They were all supposed
| to be completed years ago. The South Carolina project was
| abandoned after cost and schedule blowouts. The Georgia project
| continues to chug forward despite similar cost and schedule
| blowouts. Here's a brief synopsis of the Georgia project:
|
| _On August 26, 2009, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)
| issued an Early Site Permit and a Limited Work Authorization.
| Limited construction at the new reactor sites began, with Unit
| 3 then expected to be operational in 2016, followed by Unit 4
| in 2017, pending final issuance of the Combined Construction
| and Operating License by the NRC. These dates have since
| slipped to 2022 and 2023 for Units 3 and 4, respectively._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...
| ellyagg wrote:
| Right, but one interpreation of this fact is that they set
| the bar for compliance too high, so it's almost impossible to
| finish a reactor in a financially feasible way.
|
| Unfortunately, there seems to be no way for our society to
| overcome the apparent moral high ground that nuclear skpetics
| hold. Nuclear disastors are too good at capturing the
| imagination and all a skeptic has to say is "you can never be
| too safe."
|
| Meanwhile, we claim that our reliance on fossil fuels is a
| disastor, but if it's not enough of a disastor to compel us
| to make nuclear regulatorily viable, how much of a disaster
| can it really be?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The South Carolina reactors were abandoned. Vogtle looks on
| track to spin up this year. Vogtle was held up a long time
| because the index reactor of the type in China was held up
| while the factories were taking a while to figure out how to
| make the parts.
|
| In so far as a water reactor could be practical (awful
| economics of the steam turbine and steam generators) the
| AP1000 looks pretty good.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Thanks for the context!
|
| Yeah, that syncs up better with my intuition: disasters plus
| bad economic timing killed the industry in the 80s and it
| hasn't gotten back on its feet because big projects are hard
| enough _with_ momentum and the industry has to start over
| from zero.
|
| Here's hoping they can get back on their feet!
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Westinghouse Electric Company (the reactor manufacturer)
| took over construction management in 2015 after the first
| constructor botched schedules and costs. Westinghouse
| subcontracted to Fluor. In 2016, adding Bechtel.
|
| In 2017, Westinghouse declares Chapter 11 bankruptcy from
| construction losses, and the final owner Southern Company
| reselects Bechtel as the construction manager.
|
| Current operational date looks like 3Q 2022, and on track.
|
| tl;dr - Don't allow megaproject management experience to
| atrophy. The US military learned this (see: how the Navy
| builds carriers and nuclear subs). Have a prime and a
| secondary. Rotate. And, for god's sake _keep the pipeline
| full_. Skills atrophy and knowledge is forgotten.
| WithinReason wrote:
| See this chart:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...
|
| Edit:
|
| Apparently they approved NuScale's Small Modular Reactors:
|
| _NuScale spent over $500 million and more than 2 million labor
| hours to compile the information needed for its design
| certification application._
| renewiltord wrote:
| Each of the words there happens to be significant.
|
| - plant: plants that had reactors first approved earlier have
| since had reactors approved that will commence operation soon
| (Vogtle is the classic)
|
| - commenced operation: designs exist that have been approved
| but haven't commenced operation
|
| One could argue that the NRC only approves commercially
| unviable designs or something like that, I suppose. Or that we
| have just as many plants as we need and we just need more
| reactors. Or that the general stance of the public has shifted
| away from nuke.
| keewee7 wrote:
| Anti-nuclear lobbyists and demagogues have infiltrated the
| regulatory bodies in the US and Europe.
| cinntaile wrote:
| The NRC has approved several designs over the years. It's
| always a good idea to doublecheck what people say, even if it
| confirms your bias.
| barney54 wrote:
| No worries. That's only 47 years. Not too long in terms of new
| energy technologies.
| pfdietz wrote:
| What stopped the first nuclear buildout in the US was a
| combination of things. One is that the 7%/year growth in
| electricity demand suddenly moderated. This caught some
| utilities by surprise; if they had many NPPs in process they
| were in for pain (WPPSS went bankrupt). Another is the passage
| of PURPA in 1978, which started to open the grids to non-
| utility power. Cogeneration started to take off then. Any
| industrial activity that needed heat could now drive a
| combustion turbine and sell some power at low marginal cost,
| using the waste heat for their need. There were also so
| cogeneration-in-name-only non-utility plants that were mostly
| just to make power.
|
| All this made large, new, expensive nuclear plants difficult to
| justify. TMI was just the icing on the cake.
|
| The more recent "nuclear renaissance" died because natural gas
| become very cheap (and a combined cycle NG power plant costs
| $1/W to build; a factor of 10 cheaper than a nuclear plant) and
| because nuclear construction was more expensive than promised
| (bye, Westinghouse).
| slaw wrote:
| Why Oklo doesn't try to build reactor in a country with less
| regulation burden? Mexico?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I don't think it's a bad reactor but I looked at the application
| and it wasn't a good application. (The NRC says the same)
|
| There was a large amount of hand-wringing about the risk of
| avalanches and other natural disasters that were extremely low
| probability.
|
| They were skimpy on interesting details about the reactor such as
| "What do you do if the sodium coolant catches on fire?" (e.g.
| sodium burns in water, sodium burns in air, sodium burns in
| _carbon dioxide_ ) There are good answers to that in the U.S. and
| Russian experience. They don't draw on that experience to show
| they can solve it.
|
| If they fix the application and submit it again it could get
| approved.
| hangonhn wrote:
| Is there a reason why most molten salt reactors chose sodium?
| There's got to be a good reason to pick it given all its
| negatives (i.e. it burns in air, water, etc.).
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Sodium has great thermal conductivity and runs at high power
| density.
|
| Fast reactors need a large load of fuel (often high
| enrichment) to attain a critical mass. High power density
| helps pay for the fuel. It also means the reactor is smaller
| and the capital cost goes down compared to, say, a lead
| cooled reactor.
|
| If you get fuel damage the most biologically dangerous
| fission product is iodine. The iodine reacts with the coolant
| to form NI salt, that salt dissolves in the sodium. Dangerous
| iodine isotopes decay in a few weeks. An experimental reactor
| melted down in the suburbs of LA in the 1950s and they never
| saw the iodine because it stayed put and it decayed in place.
|
| Sodium reactors can run at high temperatures compared to
| water reactors. In the 1970s it was assumed that sodium
| reactors were attached to steam turbines and it was assumed
| fast reactors would cost more than thermal reactors, even
| though the performance of the steam turbine improves at high
| temperature.
|
| Modern thinking is that a closed-cycle gas turbine is 10% the
| size of a steam turbine and the same for the heat exchangers
| so a high temperature reactor could beat the LWR for capital
| cost and be competitive with other power sources. A sodium
| reactor is a good match for a CCGT.
| DennisP wrote:
| I can tell you know this but just to clarify, sodium and
| lead don't moderate the neutrons like water does (i.e. slow
| them down), so you can have a fast reactor, which means you
| can fission your U238 and transuranics instead of throwing
| them away as nuclear waste.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| You can run a water reactor with a much faster spectrum
| if you have more fuel and less water.
|
| Shippingport was able to breed on the Thorium-U233 cycle.
|
| Plutonium breeding could also be accomplished with a
| water reactor, possibly with two separate reactors in the
| fuel cycle to tune up the use of odd and even numbered
| isotopes. See
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_water_reactor
|
| The trouble with it is that water has limited ability to
| remove heat so you are going to have a large amount of
| fuel tied up creating a critical mass producing
| relatively little water. That makes it hard to build up
| the fuel inventory for a fleet of breeders and economics
| are even worse than today's water reactors.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Lead _does_ slow down sufficiently fast neutrons, by
| inelastic nuclear scattering. But this has a threshold
| (0.57 MeV); below that energy it hardly affects neutron
| energy at all.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The source term for cesium is more important than iodine
| over the long term, isn't it? What does cesium do in liquid
| sodium?
| DennisP wrote:
| Someone else replied with reasons for sodium, just want to
| mention that molten salt reactors are not sodium reactors.
| Sodium catches fire in water and air, salt is the stuff on
| your kitchen table. A molten salt reactor has nothing that
| could cause a chemical explosion.
| kingkawn wrote:
| Low-probability is not enough to wave away concerns when it
| comes to planning nuclear power
| csee wrote:
| What? Depends how low the probability is and the magnitude of
| the worst case we're talking about.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Yes, but focusing on the astronomically low probability
| scenarios while failing to discuss much higher probability
| scenarios is a bad look.
| tptacek wrote:
| Is it? Those astronomically low-probability scenarios have
| a track record of creating real-world catastrophes.
| amluto wrote:
| Fukushima was a power failure. Sure, am improbable
| disaster caused the power failure, but the issue was
| still a power failure. They should haven't been able to
| handle it and couldn't.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The power failure is not "low probability", it is the
| dominant failure mode that happens somewhere around 1 in
| 1000 to 1 in 10,000 reactor years.
|
| Reactors were licensed in the 1970s based on an entirely
| wrong model which saw the dominant failure mode being the
| pressure vessel bursting. Laymen have a totally wrong
| point of view about that, they think a pressure cooker
| really has the metal burst and go off like a bomb, really
| the seal breaks and you get sprayed with superheated
| steam which is dangerous enough. Pressure vessels burst
| because the chemicals eat them from the inside out but
| for every pressure vessel that bursts thousands of
| storage tanks get sucked in.
|
| After TMI the model was updated to recognize "station
| blackout" as the #1 risk.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| Fukushima currently has a body count of 1 and the city is
| perfectly habitable.
|
| It was also basically the worst case scenario that could
| happen to that reactor design.
|
| The tsunami and the earthquake killed 20000 for a scale.
| duped wrote:
| Only because the high probably scenarios are handled
| safely...
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| This is pretty straightforward survivorship bias, i.e.,
| you don't hear about the astronomically low-probability
| scenarios which don't result in real-world catastrophes
| (consider every building, bridge, etc which _hasn 't_
| collapsed).
|
| We have to balance that against the millions of annual
| fossil fuel deaths (tens of thousands die each year just
| in the US and just due to coal pollution
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-other-
| reason-...) and the cliff toward which climate science
| tells us we're careening.
| donio wrote:
| Natural disasters are not astronomically low probability
| scenarios, they happen all the time. Astronomically low
| probability would be something that is unlikely to happen
| during the entire lifetime of the planet.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| No, but an avalanche in a flat area is a lot less likely
| than, say, "what if the coolant runs out" and it seems
| they were missing some basic handling of these sorts of
| scenarios while still waxing poetic about things like
| avalanche contingency plans.
| idealmedtech wrote:
| This is a great assessment of the response by the NRC. The
| operating phrase to focus on is "without prejudice," which in
| this context means "just fix the problems and try again."
|
| We applied for a direct to phase 2 SBIR in 2020 and were
| thoroughly denied, mostly due to fixable errors in our
| application that we made because we put it together ourselves
| and had never applied for a grant before. After involving some
| consultants and the relevant institutions, we got a much lower
| impact score and are likely to receive the grant soon.
|
| Moral of the story: you can't fake regulatory experience, and
| regulatory applications require specialist knowledge to put
| together correctly.
|
| I wish them all the best in their resubmission!
| dmoy wrote:
| Congratulations on (hopefully!) getting a phase 2 approved,
| that can be a breath of life for a lot of smaller companies.
| Animats wrote:
| Sodium-cooled reactors have a long and troubled history.
|
| * Sodium Reactor Experiment (Leak, minor sodium explosion,
| decommissioned)[1]
|
| * Monju Nuclear Power Plant (Sodium fire, never worked
| properly, decommissioned)[2]
|
| There's even been a sodium fire at a solar plant, one of those
| big focused mirror systems.
|
| Many of these new reactor designs are based on complex
| arguments that the worst-case accident doesn't require a huge,
| expensive secondary containment vessel capable of containing a
| major accident. That's a tough sell, since Chernobyl didn't
| have a containment vessel and Fukushima's reactors had ones
| that were too small. On the other hand, Three Mile Island had a
| big, strong containment vessel, and in that meltdown, it held,
| containing the problem. In all three accidents, the actual
| accident was worse than the design maximum credible accident.
|
| The NRC is right to be skeptical of weak containment designs.
|
| It's frustrating. The reactor designs that have worked reliably
| for long periods are very simple inside the radioactive portion
| of the system. Sodium reactors had leaks and fires. Pebble bed
| reactors had pebble jams. Helium gas-cooled reactors had leak
| problems. Molten salt reactors include a radioactive chemical
| plant. So nuclear power is stuck with water as a working fluid.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_Reactor_Experiment
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monju_Nuclear_Power_Plant
| speedgoose wrote:
| In France too they had a troubled history.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superphenix
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadarache
| pfdietz wrote:
| France has recently given up entirely of fast reactors,
| mothballing their proposed new program.
|
| https://www.powermag.com/france-scraps-fast-nuclear-
| reactor-...
|
| In addition to be bad news for fast reactors, this also
| means France does not see nuclear being a major factor in
| avoiding global warming (a nuclear powered world using
| burner reactors would run out of uranium very quickly, or
| would need to tap vast new sources at dubiously low cost.)
| DennisP wrote:
| Not all MSRs have the radioactive chemical plant, just the
| thorium-fueled ones. Several MSR companies are working on
| uranium-fueled versions; e.g. Terrestrial Energy, where the
| reactor core is a sealed can that gets swapped out every few
| years.
| trenchgun wrote:
| I am a fan of the can.
| hairytrog wrote:
| Here's some footage of Monju - pretty scary:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRJGHWbIxC0
| PaulHoule wrote:
| EBR-II and FFTF were 100% successful in the USA. Russia has
| also had very good experience with fast reactors. Sodium
| fires are a problem, but fires happen in industrial
| facilities all the time, you just detect them and then you
| put them out.
|
| Monju had many things wrong with the design, it was a loop-
| type reactor that nobody is talking about building anymore.
| Also it was nowhere near adequate from a seismic perspective
| it is kinda shocking they were allowed to build it at all.
|
| Water reactors have no future for the same reason nobody has
| built a coal plant since 1980. The steam turbine and
| associated heat exchangers are unacceptably large and capital
| intensive compared to modern fossil fuel power plants based
| on gas turbines. (Look at how huge the steam generators are
| for the PWR)
|
| Even if the construction problems were solved for the LWR,
| the economics will not work, you are better off capturing the
| carbon from a fossil fuel gas turbine plant and pumping it
| underground.
|
| For nuclear power to be competitive we have to develop closed
| cycle gas turbine powersets. The 1970s model was that a fast
| reactor would be more capital intensive than an LWR but with
| the CCGT advanced reactors could be possibly be competitive
| -- if we can develop the powerset and reactors that run at
| high enough temperatures (not water) to support the powerset.
| yourapostasy wrote:
| _> There are good answers to that in the U.S. and Russian
| experience._
|
| What are your personal favorites of what those good answers
| are? One write up I found [1] doesn't go into much engineering
| details, and I find similar high-level descriptions elsewhere.
|
| This reminds me of a documentary I once saw about what seemed
| to me a completely balls-to-the-wall experimental lab (the best
| kind) studying the earth's magnetic field by rotating a 12+ ton
| ball of molten sodium.
|
| The way they solved the fire question was by suspending dewars
| of liquid nitrogen above the ball of death metal. The only way
| I could think of to improve upon that is a passive trigger
| design, wrapping the ball with walls of dewars with spring-
| loaded lids that open up when pressure drops below the level
| that the liquid nitrogen is normally contained at. If one is
| breached, they all breach at the same time enveloping the
| entire sodium footprint.
|
| [1] http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2010/01/fire-in-sodium-
| cool...
| gloriana wrote:
| I think it is probably a bad reactor and a questionable
| company.
|
| 1. The company is totally opaque on even basic design details.
| This is not ghost mode. It's likely hiding incompetence and
| lack of design work / maturity.
|
| 2. It's a fast reactor so lots of high energy neutrons that
| will cause faster material degradation, higher maintenance
| cost, more downtime - the economics for fast reactors have
| never worked (not even in Russia or China), and this is
| probably why fusion reactors will never be economical (32x
| greater neutronicity).
|
| 3. It has terrible fuel utilization: 1% burn-up of fuel, with
| 100 metric tons uranium / GWe-year compared to 5-10% in other
| normal and advanced reactors.
|
| 4. The founders lie to congress claiming their reactor "can
| consume the used fuel from today's reactors" when each reactor
| is actually going to require 3 tons of pretty pristine HALEU...
|
| 5. The founders peddle some serious BS (bitcoin mining, TED
| talks ... etc) not unlike the other great MIT nuclear startup
| Transatomic.
|
| 6. NRC really went out of their way to publicly reject this
| with press release and all. This was not done lightly to a
| company often featured in the WSJ and Popular Mechanics.
|
| 7. I'm disturbed by the way they talk about their reactor as a
| "community meeting place" with their modern glass A-frame
| without any power generating equipment. Is there going to be a
| daycare center or country club in there? Where the hell are the
| cooling towers? I'm all for nuclear power, but we shouldn't be
| down playing the seriousness of nuclear power systems.
| roenxi wrote:
| Well we're all creatures of opinion; but there is a lot here
| without much real backing. We have a similar post on tech
| forums for almost every company from Apple to ... I can't
| think of a company name starting with Z, Volkswagen will have
| to do. And pretty much every startup if someone cares to look
| in to them.
|
| Cynicism is extremely easy. Every company looks dodgy from
| the outside and most of them are dodgy. Many such posts turn
| out to be correct. But that is because cynicism is misplaced
| - the point of these startups is that some of them will,
| despite looking dodgy, turn out to be keystones for trillions
| of dollars of industrial success.
|
| The upside of a serious energy revolution completely
| outweighs any of these points raised. There needs to be a way
| for dodgy-looking startups to experiment without just getting
| a "nah, this year's work is a write off. Oh well lol" from
| regulators.
| [deleted]
| hairytrog wrote:
| Seems like you have an ax to grind. But will agree the
| opaqueness is disturbing and unnecessary. just compare to
| https://usnc.com/mmr/ or https://www.nuscalepower.com
| gloriana wrote:
| I mean, I am just criticizing the founders and company
| based on the information available - which isn't much, but
| it's their fault. They seem to have a lot of press coverage
| for an empty landing page, and a lot of it is unreasonably
| glowing.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Also, it's _far_ from unusual for someone to find a given
| company suspicious and go digging to find out more and
| produce public reports or comments questioning their
| validity. That's not "axe to grind" and more "amateur
| investigative journalism".
| [deleted]
| spiderice wrote:
| > Seems like you have an ax to grind
|
| I don't feel like this is at all a fair or appropriate
| response to GP. They all seemed like very valid points.
| Which points fall under the "grinding an axe" category, as
| opposed to "valid criticism" category?
| hairytrog wrote:
| Point 2 is highly debatable. DOE is funding TerraPower's
| Natrium (Bill Gates company) which is a fast reactor, to
| the tune of 2.5B as part of the Advanced Reactor Demo
| Program. So a lot of people in the industry believe fast
| reactors can be commercially viable.
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| People being _wrong_ about things is not a reason to
| accuse them of acting in bad faith.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Look to FFTF for a completely successful fast reactor run in
| the U.S. that was unfortunately shut down for political
| reasons that, retrospectively, look like a terrible mistake.
|
| One of the most interesting features of the FFTF was a
| sodium-to-air heat exchanger which is a key to fast reactors
| having superior economics.
|
| That is, no nuclear reactor which uses a steam turbine is
| going to be economically competitive with fossil fuel fired
| gas turbine generators. Between the absolutely huge and
| massive steam turbine and absolutely huge and massive heat
| exchangers (look at how big the steam generators are in the
| PWR or the huge tube-in-shell heat exchanger used at
| Dounreay)
|
| A closed cycle gas turbine will fit in the employee break
| room of the turbine house of a conventional LWR. It requires
| some kind of reactor that runs at a higher temperature than
| the LWR. I like fast reactors and molten salts but have a
| hard time being enthusiastic about HTGR and friends.
|
| So much of the literature still looks like a stopped clock.
| People still compare nuclear to coal although coal has been
| economic for a long time for the same reason as the LWR...
| The cost of that huge steam turbine.
|
| Problems with fast reactors I worry about are the fear of
| proliferation (not proliferation) constricting what you can
| use for fuel and (more so) the plutonium nanoparticle problem
| w/ MOX fabrication. Of course you don't need to use MOX or
| you'd think in 2022 you could use 100% remote handling and
| not have the problems that Karen Silkwood was worried about
| at the place where she worked.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| I went looking for operating closed cycle gas turbine power
| plants- this seems like a research topic all on its own, no
| matter the heat source.
|
| It's definitely true that simple cycle gas turbine plants
| are much cheaper than equivalent size steam plants. This
| right here sets the bar for any kind of thermal power
| plant.
|
| See table ES3 for cost comparisons..
|
| https://esmap.org/sites/default/files/esmap-
| files/TR122-09_G...
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > One of the most interesting features of the FFTF was a
| sodium-to-air heat exchanger which is a key to fast
| reactors having superior economics. > That is, no nuclear
| reactor which uses a steam turbine is going to be
| economically competitive with fossil fuel fired gas turbine
| generators.
|
| OK, but FFTF reactor has not generated electricity at all.
| How is "sodium to air heat exchanger" supposed to generate
| electricity, to make it more economical than steam
| turbines?
|
| > That is, no nuclear reactor which uses a steam turbine is
| going to be economically competitive with fossil fuel fired
| gas turbine generators.
|
| That's highly likely to be true (at least until cheap gas
| runs out, which will happen at some point, though it will
| take many decades/centuries until then), but I thought we
| are aiming to get off fossil fuels, no? We should be
| willing to pay some premium for nuclear, because it does
| not emit GHG.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| A next generation nuclear reactor is not going to couple
| to air but probably to carbon dioxide and then to a
| powerset like
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S173857
| 331...
|
| Nuclear also competes with fossil fuel powerplants that
| capture carbon. There are many options such as: (1) turn
| the fuel to hydrogen and burn the hydrogen, (2) run the
| exhaust gas through an amine stripper, (3) burn the fuel
| in pure oxygen so the amine stripper has less work to do
| (recycle the combustion products so the turbine doesn't
| burn up), (4) chemical looping combustion that uses a
| metal like iron as an oxygen carrier, etc.
|
| The cost of something like that doesn't look crazy,
| optimizing it is a job for the systems engineering
| department, you can compress the CO2 to 1500 psi and
| inject it into saline aquifers which exist in most
| places. (Drives me nuts that carbfix gets so much press
| for a process which only works in a few places and
| consumes much more water than the carbon it captures)
|
| It is not happening because regulators aren't forcing it,
| there is no carbon tax or carbon credit for it.
|
| You could save the world with a nuclear option that is
| truly cheaper than the alternatives without subsidy.
| Anything that involves subsidy is going to give somebody
| an opportunity to get rich by siphoning off 5% of the
| credits and keep the gravy train running by paying 1% of
| that to politicians. Anything like that will run into
| intense opposition, look like a scam to people, probably
| be a scam in many cases (extortion like "we'll cut down
| this forest if you don't pay us" and then the forest gets
| cut down or burned anyway, unverifiable schemes like
| grinding up rocks and leaving them at the beach, ...)
| damage the legitimacy of the government and delay real
| solutions.
| [deleted]
| morning_gelato wrote:
| > the economics for fast reactors have never worked (not even
| in Russia or China)
|
| Russia currently has two sodium-cooled fast reactors that are
| producing power, the BN-600 and BN-800. They also have
| another sodium reactor under development, the BN-1200. BREST-
| OD-300, a lead-cooled fast reactor, is under construction as
| well.
| mlindner wrote:
| In Fusion reactors the neutrons are used to breed Tritium
| from the Lithium so they're not hitting the structure and
| degrading it.
| hairytrog wrote:
| Not quite. 80% of the energy in D-T fusion reactions are
| released as neutron energy. I sure hope most of that will
| be used for generating electrical power rather than
| breeding tritium... :) The dpa rates and helium
| embrittlement are way higher for fusion and fast fission
| reactors than for thermal fission reactors. See Figure 3
| and 5 of
| https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-
| matsci...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You have to absorb the neutrons to capture that energy,
| so you will always have to deal with transmutation. You
| can't choose one or the other.
|
| On this case, the lithium absorbs the neutrons and
| convert most of the energy into heat, while it becomes
| tritium.
| pfdietz wrote:
| So, we have half a meter of lithium just sitting there, not
| contained in any structure?
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| > 2. It's a fast reactor so lots of high energy neutrons that
| will cause faster material degradation, higher maintenance
| cost, more downtime - the economics for fast reactors have
| never worked (not even in Russia or China), and this is
| probably why fusion reactors will never be economical (32x
| greater neutronicity).
|
| Commonwealth Fusion Systems's ARC has an interesting approach
| to handling this -- using a liquid blanket which can be
| circulated. Of course, ARC isn't built yet! But if that
| approach is workable, perhaps it can be applied more
| generally?
| gloriana wrote:
| I believe it has to be replaced every 4 years of operation
| as intermediate level radioactive waste.
| belorn wrote:
| The question that should be asked is if the faults of the
| application is severe enough that its worth continuing burning
| fossil fuels until/if there is a new and better source of
| energy. That is the counter part when determining a balance
| between the need for strict regulation and risk assessments.
| The damage we know we are causing with known technology, or the
| damage we might cause with new technology.
|
| We have this kind of cost-benefit assessment in other
| regulations. It is always a trade off between the benefit of
| having them vs the cost of not allowing it, be it a new food
| safety restrictions or building codes. A replacement for diesel
| generators might be worth a slightly higher risk given how much
| damage those fossil fuel generators do to the environment, and
| the global commitment to prevent climate change.
| colechristensen wrote:
| That question does not need to be asked. Nuclear power is
| dangerous and needs to be done with extreme care and
| extensive regulation. A worst case nuclear disaster can have
| local and not so local effects which are worse, sooner, and
| longer lasting than any global warming threat. If you are
| careful those things don't happen.
| roughly wrote:
| Alternatively, "we asked that question and the answer is
| 'yes'."
| nradov wrote:
| If you're competent and do your job correctly then it's
| possible to get NRC approval on the first try. Doing it right
| doesn't have to be slower or more expensive.
| tptacek wrote:
| Can you say more about this? I'm glad the top comment here is
| actually about the application itself and would love to read
| more about this.
| [deleted]
| bpodgursky wrote:
| The NRC has never approved a new nuclear reactor (which ended
| up in production). The NRC says the same about _every_
| application.
|
| It also took two years for the NRC to provide this rejection.
|
| Please don't excuse incompetence on an issue this important to
| the future.
| anonporridge wrote:
| So why is anyone wasting money trying to innovate on this
| technology in the US?
|
| Surely there is some other nation state that is less risk
| averse and open to nurturing innovation.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Applicants and the NRC have to figure out what the
| expectations are for a new reactor application to be
| considered a good application. Oklo is leading the way in
| that process, I hope they make it through.
| epistasis wrote:
| It sounds like Oklo didn't bother to try to figure out what
| the regulators wanted, since they didn't bother to answer
| the questions of regulators.
|
| I've done some first mover approval work in biology, and
| yes it's more work, but all first movement is more work in
| every way because you're pioneering something new. The FDA,
| at least, is not unreasonable and is usually very open
| about the bar they think they need to set. You just need to
| talk to them, request a meeting, and show up. And also
| realize that it's going to be an iterative process, as any
| new product design process is also iterative.
| hangonhn wrote:
| I remember someone lecturing about the nuclear industry
| mentioned that there is an inherent second mover advantage
| in the industry because the first mover has to figure out
| all the new stuff and get it approved by regulators. The
| second mover just follows the template and has a much
| easier time. If this is truly the case, then it seems like
| it would be hard to innovate in this space. If so, how can
| we remedy that?
| ryanSrich wrote:
| Limit the regulations. That's the only way.
| winphone1974 wrote:
| For nuclear power. Right.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > For nuclear power. Right.
|
| This right here is the problem.
|
| It is actually possible to over-regulate something, no
| matter what it is. The more people believe something
| needs to be regulated, the more likely it is to be
| regulated disproportionate to the need. Consider the
| safety record of commercial nuclear power in the US.
|
| So some coal company gets a regulation inserted that says
| that in order to open a new nuclear reactor, you must
| first push a boulder up a hill for a thousand years.
|
| Later someone does a cost benefit analysis on that
| regulation, it turns out to be costing a lot while
| actually making safety worse, so they propose to repeal
| it.
|
| Headline: Get your Pitchforks, People, They Want To
| Deregulate Nuclear Power
| ryanSrich wrote:
| I was answering the question. What other ways can you
| achieve innovation without limiting regulation? If the
| NRC is unwilling to budge, and they hold the keys to the
| castle, there's no solution.
| _dain_ wrote:
| Yes:
|
| https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
|
| >Excessive concern about low levels of radiation led to a
| regulatory standard known as ALARA: As Low As Reasonably
| Achievable. What defines "reasonable"? It is an ever-
| tightening standard. As long as the costs of nuclear
| plant construction and operation are in the ballpark of
| other modes of power, then they are reasonable.
|
| >This might seem like a sensible approach, until you
| realize that it eliminates, by definition, any chance for
| nuclear power to be cheaper than its competition. Nuclear
| can't even innovate its way out of this predicament:
| under ALARA, any technology, any operational improvement,
| anything that reduces costs, simply gives the regulator
| more room and more excuse to push for more stringent
| safety requirements, until the cost once again rises to
| make nuclear just a bit more expensive than everything
| else. Actually, it's worse than that: it essentially says
| that if nuclear becomes cheap, then the regulators have
| not done their job.
| Zak wrote:
| I'm often at least sympathetic to anti-regulatory
| sentiment whether or not I'm fully onboard with it, but
| not here. The risk to others in operating a nuclear
| reactor is considerable, and anyone wishing to do so
| should be required to prove they understand the risks and
| have mitigated them to a degree acceptable to the public.
|
| Instead, regulators may have opportunities to improve the
| process to make it easier for applicants to understand
| what they must do to receive approval. In this case, I
| have the impression the NRC _did_ adequately explain what
| Oklo needs to improve in its application.
| pkaye wrote:
| Slow down the approval of the second mover to match the
| pace of the first approval.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Two years actually sounds incredibly reasonable for a new
| nuclear reactor design.
| [deleted]
| api wrote:
| Every time I hear "liquid sodium" I think "run away!" How in
| the world would you make that safe even without the nuclear
| stuff?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| (1) Argon cover gas
|
| (2) Fires happen all the time in industrial facilities. You
| detect them and put them out. US and Russian literature tells
| you how it is done. EBR-II, FFTF and BN-800 point the way.
| Japan shows you how not to do it. (Not detect the fire for a
| long time, lie to the media about how bad the damage was)
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > You detect them and put them out.
|
| Well, not molten sodium. You don't put it out. You isolate
| the fire and let it run.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| See https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6669413-xoXD4J/
| HPsquared wrote:
| Keep it inside the box I suppose, same principle as keeping
| the nuclear stuff safe.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Sometimes you open the box. There could be 'cartridge
| reactors' that live in a stylish hutch and only get opened
| at the factory, but if this is the first one they will
| probably need to open it and poke around inside for some
| reason.
|
| Even if it only gets opened at the factory then you have to
| worry about the factory.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That one is reasonably easy. You make sure that you only
| open the box when it's not molten. It's much easier than
| the nuclear part.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| If the sodium is cold you will have the hardest time
| getting the fuel rods in and out to refuel.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Oklo's response...
|
| https://okloinc.medium.com/whats-next-566bb49b74dc
|
| >We woke up a few days ago to incredibly surprising decisions by
| the NRC. Although Oklo responded to every request for
| information, and the last thing we heard from the NRC was that
| the information we submitted was helpful, the NRC has denied our
| first application on the basis of not having submitted
| information. The NRC has now gone from having one combined
| license under review to none.
| foofoo55 wrote:
| I find their public response unprofessional and immature. The
| Nuclear regulatory process is similar to other federal and
| international public-safety regulatory processes such as
| aviation, medical, and wireless: companies soon learn that it
| is best to work with the regulations and regulators and not
| fight them.
| lvs wrote:
| In reading over this, I honestly became more worried about the
| prospect of this company building nuclear reactors than before
| I read it. This is not a professional response that breeds
| confidence. It is... petulant.
| barney54 wrote:
| This is a huge issue for nuclear power generally. It is
| incredibly expensive to navigate the regulations. Oklo thought
| they were good and now they need to spend millions and millions
| more to apply again. (I'm assuming good faith on Oklo's part). I
| really think there needs to be serious reform at the NRC.
| halpert wrote:
| The article is really sparse on what information was missing.
| Neither the NRC or Oklo specified what else is needed. It's
| probably wise to give both sides the benefit of the doubt.
| bgentry wrote:
| While the article doesn't reference all these details, the
| NRC's denial letter to Oklo covers more of them:
| https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2200/ML22006A267.pdf
|
| The claim from the NRC in that letter is:
|
| _"Oklo's application continues to contain significant
| information gaps in its description of Aurora's potential
| accidents as well as its classification of safety systems and
| components," Veil said. "These gaps prevent further review
| activities. We are prepared to re-engage with Oklo if they
| submit a revised application that provides the information we
| need for a thorough and timely review."_
|
| (phew, that PDF does not copy/paste text cleanly, at least
| not in Safari. Had to re-type it.)
| halpert wrote:
| That sounds reasonable to me.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| What are the gaps?
|
| Asking for more information until the other party gives
| up is a tactic -- as is refusing to provide damning
| information. It's hard to say which game is being played,
| or even if any game is being played at all, without
| knowing details.
| wesoff wrote:
| From Rod Adams: Oklo's COL application is part of an
| effort to achieve a difficult, but important goal. The
| company has challenged the standard way of doing things
| and designed a nuclear power system that is as different
| from a conventional reactor as a gasoline powered scooter
| is from a 100 MW slow speed diesel pushing a large
| container ship. Oklo submitted a license application they
| believe satisfies the letter and the intent of the
| governing regulations in a form appropriate for its
| proposed system. The NRC reviewers are not yet satisfied
| with the information provided and left open the
| opportunity to modify the application to fill in the gaps
| it believes exist. The NRC chose to deny the application
| instead of continuing the process of obtaining additional
| information. That might have been stimulated by a
| legislative timeline of 3 years from docketing to final
| determination. I expect Oklo will be resubmitting its
| application before the end of the summer.
|
| Longer explanation
|
| Oklo's application doesn't follow the Standard Review
| Plan format. That 4,500 page document of regulatory
| guidance fits the large light water reactor systems,
| structures, components, and processes it was designed
| for. But it is unwieldy and inappropriate for Oklo's
| reactor design. Reviewers are used to the SRP and the
| applications produced using its specified format; they
| are not yet comfortable with the way that the Oklo
| application provides required information.
|
| The NRC's denial of Oklo's novel COL application is a
| disappointment, but it's not a complete surprise. Oklo is
| doing something that is difficult by pushing change in a
| federal regulatory agency whose processes and procedures
| have been developed over decades to focus on a particular
| kind of reactor. Oklo's 1.5 MWe reactor uses liquid metal
| filled heat pipes to passively move heat energy out of a
| few dozen assemblies containing metallic alloy fuel rods.
| That is a completely different machine than a 1,000 MWe
| reactor that pumps high pressure water through a core
| made up of hundreds of assemblies consisting of a bundle
| of hundreds of thin walled tubes filled with UO2 pellets.
| Oklo and the NRC review team have worked diligently to
| come to an agreement that the COL contained information
| required for a complete safety review. Oklo has answered
| every request for information it has received, but the
| NRC has judged those responses to be not yet complete.
| The NRC had the option of obtaining information it
| thought was missing through another, more focused round
| of RAIs and response. Under the pressure of a
| Congressionally mandated deadline of 3 years for
| reviewing a docketed application, it chose to deny the
| application "without prejudice." This gives the NRC the
| opportunity, outside of a formal license review process,
| to communicate what they believe is missing from the
| application. It gives Oklo the opportunity to produce a
| better application that fills those information gaps.
| Karunamon wrote:
| Pertinent info FTA:
|
| _Oklo co-founder and COO Caroline Cochran pointed out the
| stunning fact that no nuclear plant that has submitted an
| application since the formation of the NRC in 1975 has yet
| commenced operation._
|
| Assuming accuracy, that's a damning statistic. I don't believe
| for a minute that _every single application_ that 's crossed
| their desk for nearly _half a century_ was so flawed or unsafe
| that it was unworkable.
|
| Knowing what I know of governments and bureaucrats, I'd
| speculate that they're being asked for a bunch of irrelevant or
| impossible (i.e. doesn't apply to their design) information,
| and the people in the bureau are being useless and obstructive
| about it since there's no downsisde for false negatives.
| thesausageking wrote:
| None have commenced operation, but NRC has approved
| applications for new nuclear plants.
|
| It's easy to blame regulators, but a big factor is simply
| cost. For the last 20-30 years, low fossil fuel costs in the
| US have meant that the huge investment needed to get a
| nuclear plant from application to operations didn't make
| sense. Westinghouse Electric went bankrupt in 2017 because of
| it. Add in that nuclear has been very out of favor with the
| public, it makes it really hard to get a reactor built.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| Not really, it is very specifically worded to paint the NRC
| in bad light. Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer and company have
| gotten the applications regarding their designs approved.
| They just haven't managed to bring the construction to a
| finish yet.
|
| The NRC may be the culprit there also, but that is a
| completely different question.
| samwillis wrote:
| There was an interesting discussion of this on Twitter the
| other day when Patrick Collison posted about it:
|
| https://mobile.twitter.com/patrickc/status/14807290103257661.
| ..
| burkaman wrote:
| It's pretty carefully worded, even if that's true it's
| possible that NRC has approved lots of applications that
| haven't commenced operation for other reasons. It's bad
| regardless, but unclear if NRC is rejecting everything or if
| projects are failing because of other factors.
| Karunamon wrote:
| I'd imagine that the initial application is not the only
| touch point.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| It's not that the applications are denied, it's that they
| haven't started operation. Below that quote it mentions
| another company that has gotten approval.
| imglorp wrote:
| Also part of bureaucracy is cronyism. There's a lot of big
| contractors working for and with the NRC who might not like
| any new competition.
| sct202 wrote:
| It's a little misleading since the expansions at Vogtle in
| Georgia are scheduled to finish this year and next year.
| barney54 wrote:
| That's still 47 years assuming the Vogtle is actually
| finished this year.
| voz_ wrote:
| You call it an issue, I call it a boon.
|
| I do not want nuclear power approved quickly, or easily. I want
| it to be burdensome, difficult, and with a massive requirement
| for proving out safety in even the most unlikely of scenarios.
|
| This area does not need Silicon Valley style disruption at the
| cost of endangering lives and destroying the earth.
| blhack wrote:
| >This area does not need Silicon Valley style disruption at
| the cost of endangering lives and destroying the earth.
|
| We are _currently_ destroying the earth because we are stuck
| using technology from the 1800s to power our 21st century
| society. Yes we do need silicon valley style disruption.
|
| Give them a pacific atoll, or an old oil drilling platform,
| and let them do whatever they want.
| worik wrote:
| We have the tools we need, already, to avert the
| catastrophe.
|
| Problem is it will cost the rich and powerful a little
| opportunity cost and a bit of wealth.
|
| The looming climate catastrophe has political and social
| solutions. Not technical ones.
| losvedir wrote:
| This is very much "status quo" bias, as if the current state
| of the world were not endangering lives and destroying the
| earth.
|
| People talk about climate change in apocalyptic terms until
| it actually matters in real world decisions for things other
| than the things they wanted to do anyway.
| [deleted]
| erdos4d wrote:
| This is one area where the normal Silicon Valley strategy of
| "fake it til you make it" just won't fly. I deeply hope NRC keeps
| shooting this down until they actually do it right. Sounds like
| this company doesn't really have the chops to play this game, but
| maybe they are just sloppy, we'll see.
| trixie_ wrote:
| I want to support this company, but their website is empty and
| finding any details on their reactor design is tough. Looking
| through their application and correspondence with the NRC
| https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/col/aurora-oklo/do... I
| can't even find a diagram of their system.
| [deleted]
| notananthem wrote:
| Literally says its a terrible application. Oklo more like
| inkomplete
| worik wrote:
| There is nothing here that deals with the fundamental problems of
| nuclear power
|
| * Long term waste. Must be contained for hundreds of thousands of
| years
|
| * Decommissioning. Nothing lasts for ever. What do we do with an
| old reactor vessel and the land it stood on?
|
| There are many much better ways of producing energy. But
| unfortunately for the greed heads they are mostly decentralised
| (wind and solar are ready now) which means big industrial cash
| generators do not result from them.
|
| This is a boondoggle. I wish I could say it is the last gasp of
| the desperate, but it is the core of the military industrial
| complex heaving its weight around.
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