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Comment by hwillis | Hacker News Reader

> We should be able to build plants much more cheaply than 50 years ago.

Negatory- access to heavy industry is far more constrained in the US than it used to be. Nuclear plants require huge forges, which are now nearly unavailable in the US. The ones that still exist[1] are used for aircraft and military purposes. In short the increasing size, popularity and profit in large/high performance (fighter jet spars) aircraft has driven the price of the heaviest industry up much higher in the US.

It's a double whammy because heavy industry abroad is also kind of meh, and the complications of shipping cause month or year delays in construction that are incredibly expensive.

IMO the best way to combat this is with small modular reactors, but advanced nuclear is not that. Still, it is better in a number of ways.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program

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How does the Navy acquire nuclear powerplants for their vessels? I assume maritime powerplants are much smaller.

Maritime power plants are tiny, but they typically require much more enriched uranium, which is frowned upon for civilian programs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion#Diff...

Which is another policy decision - we could allow civilian plants with richer fuel.

The closer civilian fuel is to weapons grade, the easier it is to convert civilian fuel into bombs.

I like the current policy.

Why not have a branch of the military / DoE run plants for power production? Or at least provide security at the plants and clearances for working at them?

There's a mash of entities involved, including numerous contractors, the Department of Energy, etc. Bettis Atomic Power Labs for example has been run since 2008 by Bechtel Marine Propulsion Corp., under the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program. Westinghouse previously ran it for 50 years until 1998.

https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/missions/powering-navy

There are plenty of presses that can make pressure vessels that small. That's why smaller civilian reactors are such a good idea!

The current state of nuclear reactors is largely thanks to one man , Admiral Hyman G. Rickover. A quite interesting character who through his work for building up a nuclear powered fleet had to build up the entire supply chain of suppliers from uranium mining, transportation through reactor development,construction , operation and maintenance. Tasks where he had to fight as much for through internal navy policy and the congress as he had to for the technical and scientific challenges.

Why don't we build more heavy forges? Seems like there's plenty of demand and limited competition.

Those huge forges are needed for conventional reactors, which operate with at least 90 atmospheres of pressure, and sometimes up to 150 or so.

They're not needed for fast reactors or molten salt reactors, which operate at atmospheric pressure. That's one of many reasons they're expected to be cheaper. The purpose of this law is to support R&D for those types of reactors.

Too be fair the article is discussing 2 separate bills. One is to support R&D for advanced reactors and one is to help subsidize current designs so some of this discussion is a little confusing from the different contexts.

I'm not sure subsidizing our current tech in the US will make a difference, but the amount of money in public and private sectors right now for advanced designs needs to be more collectively focused towards building demostration reactors such as the fast neutron reactor being proposed.

It is also difficult for American companies (despite having designed and built a majority of factors globally) to currently compete against state actors like China or the Russian government. That is another critical reason we should be developing leading technology because we don't necessarily have good reason to trust other countries to design and build these safely globally which could lead to more nuclear disasters. The best example is Chernobyl which was a wildly dangerous avoidable accident that should have never happened.

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