Nuclear reactors take ages to ramp up and down. It's basically going to be generating the same amount of power 24x7, but demand is going to fluctuate. The more other areas you're connected to, the more opportunity there is to send that power to someone who can use it.
Obviously there's a law of diminishing returns at some point, so maybe the grid doesn't need to be as large as possible.
There are alternatives like energy storage (batteries, etc.), but you'd have to compare all the costs and benefits.
solar can do the same sort of thing.
Naval reactors are apparently very fast in this regard, so it's evidently not an inherent property of nuclear power.
(The USN also has an unparalleled record of safely operating reactors; more that 5,000 reactor-years clocked without major incident.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1 https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/67718734/richard-carlton...
Ramping up is easy, ramping down... not so much.
It's not as much of an issue if you swim in your coolant, hence naval reactors are unique in being able to ramp both up, and down quickly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant#Nuc...
Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope.
Still, I wonder if the economics don't favor running near 100%. You've already paid the high up-front cost of the equipment, and fuel costs are low, so I assume you're better off selling excess power when possible.
Future grids with more intermittent renewables will have increasingly volatile prices, but not necessarily lower on average. So generators that can produce during high price periods (e.g. if wind and solar aren't producing much) can make a lot of money then, compensating for less income during low price periods.
Run them at full blast and dump the extra energy into direct air carbon capture? Of course that would require building the CC plants but it could be planned for.
On a grid with enough opportunistic loads, you'd never need to ramp down reactors.
No, they aren't. They are more expensive per unit of power produced, by far bigger than any other powerplant in practical use.
The only way I see nuclear getting economical is it getting bigger. Nuclear's biggest advantage after the cost of fuel is its huuuuuuge power density, and power scalability. With currently technology level, it's possible to generate multiple gigawatts from a single reactor.
> it dramatically reduces the need to maintain a massive nationwide grid
It would not. Grid maintenance are quite non-linear, and high voltage lines are actually much cheaper per unit of electricity transferred than residential links.
Very high voltage DC transfer is very economical, efficient enough for intercontinental connections, but very expensive.
Mass production is a no-brainer.
This is very much an unproven assumption. There is nothing in the history of nuclear technology to suggest that what most industries experience, an industrial learning curve that lowers production cost, will be found for these reactors. In fact, just the opposite - the more experience we get with them the more likely we are to find problems that are very expensive to fix. This is even more true now that they've given up on doing serial production in a single factory.
Congrats to NuScale for making it through to the other side of US nuclear regulatory purgatory. Optimism is warranted ("all of the above" to replace fossil fuels), but cautious optimism. It's not real until a commercial reactor is generating. Vogtle is still not done [4]. I hope I get to see a factory churning out prefab reactors ready for shipment.
EDITs (to not pollute thread with replies): A carbon tax in the US is very unlikely, and you cannot count on economies of scale until you have arrived at scale.
[1] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019
[2] https://www.nuscalepower.com/benefits/cost-competitive
For example, right now we have a pretty serious externality with CO2 for coal and other sources, what are the costs that folks would assign to CO2 to clear to needed target? That could bring comparative cost (with CO2 impact) down a bit.
I don't think NuScale will have much trouble competing with traditional PWR, but if they can compete in the overall market is a huge question.
We have radically different construction skill sets now than we did in the 1970s, so the economics may be different now, and it could have been that the planners were wrong before.
But I'm any case, until a few of these have shipped, I'm not sure we'll know the true cost.
These are manufactured like airplanes, a few at a time. Whereas solar has massive plants with hundreds of thousands of the same part assembled and shipped. I'm hopeful that they will provide another tool in the fight against climate change, but not super optimistic. There are many many technologies that are at a similar stage of development that could be used instead, such as cheap hydrogen electrolyzers, long-duration storage flow batteries, etc. And if these other techs succeed, they will also help SMR nuclear, assuming SMR nuclear can compete with renewables on cost!
If NuScale can build hundreds or thousands of these small reactors, they should be able to perfect a turnkey installation playbook that would hopefully reduce costs significantly, and perhaps more importantly, reduce variance on project spend/timelines. I think an unpredictable total cost of ownership is one of the things hurting nuclear projects.
The big question in my mind is whether they can deploy enough of these to get to that scale, given that there's a fairly universal NIMBYism against nuclear power, even where this would be displacing CO2-emitting sources.
A nuclear power generator is a complex beast, that requires a ton of material, of very different kinds, worked into some detailed and non-repetitive patterns. (Have you looked at a steam turbine?)
PV is a simple pattern of a few different substances, repeated over and over again.
Even if scale was all going into the PV price, nuclear will never be able to achieve the same amount of it.
Experience to date has been the opposite. They have diseconomies of scale in construction and operation. The proponents claim they will make up for this somehow, for example by making the reactors in factories, but note that NuScale has given up on that and is going to have the parts fabricated by others and assembled on site, just like larger reactors.
The major module subcomponents will be manufactured at multiple manufacturer locations and shipped to a single location for assembly prior to installing into the facility.” This signifies the failure of one of the major cost-saving features of the Nuscale project, which was to forestall this exact scenario."
https://losalamosreporter.com/2020/08/22/get-out-of-the-fluo...
I'm guessing that official line, accurate or not, is future larger deployments may be constructed differently, and this reneging is just for the initial run.