US Congress Passes Bill To Help Advanced Nuclear Power (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last week, the House passed a bipartisan bill that originated in the Senate called the Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act (S. 97), which will allow the private sector to partner with U.S. National Laboratories to vet advanced nuclear technologies. The bill also directs the Department of Energy (DOE) to lay the ground work for establishing "a versatile, reactor-based fast neutron source." The Senate also introduced a second bill called the Nuclear Energy Leadership Act (S. 3422) last Thursday, which would direct the DOE to actually establish that fast neutron reactor. That bill also directs the DOE to "make available high-assay, low-enriched uranium" for research purposes. The Nuclear Energy Leadership Act has not yet made it past a Senate vote. The report also mentions a recent U.S. Court of Appeals ruling to keep older reactors online. "The court said that subsidies for nuclear energy proposed by Illinois don't cause any interference with federal control over interstate power markets, which is prohibited," reports Ars.

"In 2017 the state of Illinois agreed to offer a Zero Emissions Credit that included nuclear energy (PDF). The credit was opposed by fossil fuel generators and by the Electric Power Supply Association, who sued the director of the Illinois Power Agency. But the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the Department of Justice filed a joint brief in the case several months ago, saying those federal agencies had no problem with Illinois' credit system, according to Utility Dive."

Comments

Re:U.S. only country really fighting climate chang

[tk77]

It's ironic that Trump is derided for leaving the Paris accord, when he's the only one taking actions to significantly improve the climate.

You mean like rolling back pollution rules to help coal plants? https://abcnews.go.com/Health/...

I'm all for advancing nuclear power technology, but I wouldn't give Trump any credit for it. The bill was passed by Congress. The Trump administration was only mentioned once in the article and even that was about nuclear being bundled with his attempts to save the coal plants.

SMR

[JBMcB]

So what you are looking for is a Small Modular Reactor. These are relatively small reactors that can be produced on an assembly line and shipped to the installation site, so they are cheaper than conventional nuclear designs. Most don't require active cooling, which means you don't get meltdowns. Also, you can bury them in a vault for protection from attack or sabotage. They require no maintenance. You run them until their fuel is spent, then you pull one out of service and recycle it. You end up with a few pounds of waste material per unit over the course of it's lifespan, which is a couple of decades.

Russia has been actively developing these things for decades, and are piloting several models.

NuScale has an interesting design ready for licensing, and TerraPower has a design that uses liquid sodium cooling and depleted uranium fuel, which makes it essentially impossible to melt down.

Think of it this way. The expensive part of old water-cooled nuclear reactors is maintaining the elaborate water cooling system. It's also the primary point of failure. Getting rid of active cooling makes reactors cheaper to build and maintain, AND makes them safer.

Re:I say this on every nuke thread

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assess...

Lifetime emissions of a nuclear plant are around 100g/kWh. Better than coal but considerably worse than wind/solar+battery.

Every once in a while I see a citation and a fact that challenges what I know. I follow the source. 9 times out of 10 the "fact" is a misleading representation of the citation. This is one of those misleading representations. The document has a table that provides the assessed minimum/median/maximum carbon emissions for a power source. This table gives following values for nuclear (in gCO2eq/kWh):

minimum: 3.7
median: 12
maximum: 110

Suffice it to say that the parent post, by approximately citing the maximum number, is quite misleading.

In comparison, here are a few other sources (in terms of min/median/max gCO2eq/kWh):

Nuclear: 3.7/12/110
Coal: 740/820/910
Gas (Combined Cycle): 410/490/650
Geothermal: 6.0/38/79
Hydropower: 1.0/24/2200
Concentrated Solar Power: 8.8/27/63
Solar PV—utility: 18/48/180
Wind onshore: 7.0/11/56

Based on these numbers (purely considering lifetime CO2 emissions--from your source), nuclear appears to be pretty competitive with wind/solar, etc.

Please help keep /. factual. Mod parent down or this post up. Thank you.