"One leading theory is that his stomach blocked the view of the control panel" I wonder if this is why the creators of the Simpsons decided Homer Simpson should be a safety inspector at a nuclear power plant.

The most frustrating part about the Three Mile Island accident is that the automatic systems would have prevented the meltdown, but the operators suppressed those actions due to their misinterpretation of the conflicting information.

Pretty much everyone who talks about Onkalo, the Finnish nuclear waste storage, misses one VERY crucial factor: It is built in a Craton. A craton is part of earths crust and is always going to be the oldest due to the way it is formed. Craton is twice as thick and has long tendrils that extend deep in the magma. They are not really like plates, but more like islands floating in a sea of rock.. They are lighter in density so they float on top of everything. What this means is that they are extremely stable formations, with no volcanic activity, no earthquakes. They are solid lumps of gneiss and granite, the bedrock is 4 billion years old and may even be here when the sun devours the Earth. If there is anything permanent in this ball of ours, it is the cratons. Other crust formations may push them around, for ex Baltic Shield was one located near where South Africa is now, just pushed up north but has remained intact. This is why parts of Finland and Sweden can build safe storages in the bedrock, they sit partially on top of the Baltic Shield. You drill a hole in it and it will be there, millions of years from now without any additional maintenance. Other cratons in the world are for ex north-east Canada and south-west Australia. Those locations are perfect for storing stuff for hundreds of thousands of years. They are also excellent for any kind of caves and storage space, Finland uses it for national defence, for ex there is a bomb proof second city under Helsinki that can withstand a nuclear blast that can house 600 000 people. Finland and Sweden dominate underground excavation equipment market, not really a surprise after knowing what the bedrock is like here.. We could build Moria here, several times over.

The most frustrating part of the fukushima disaster isnt just that the four reactors were built on a fault line on the pacific side (most at risk of tsunami) of japan, its that the reactor was built from a design meamt for the midwest united states where tornados are common, and thus generators are safest underground beneath the building. Not safe for a place that is prone to earthquakes and at risk of flooding from anticipated tsunamis. Managerial and architectural neglegence is what ultimately caused the fukushima disaster, that's what made it so vulnerable. it was working class heroes that responded to it, and they will probably never be adequately recognized

Molten salt has fundamental challenges that haven't been addressed and are generally glossed over in videos like this, and it goes far beyond "not ready for commercialization". With existing reactors, all of the nasty fission products are hermetically contained by the zircalloy cladding on the solid fuel rods. This lets us manage the waste safely and economically. We park it in a pool of water for a few months while the short-lived isotopes decay away, then the fuel rods get cool enough for dry cask storage, where they can sit for 100+ years without bothering anyone (you can walk next to a dry cask w/o any risk). Dry casks are big concrete things that don't need any electricity or maintenance other than basic monitoring and security (is it still there? Is it cracked? Is anyone actively drilling into it? OK, great, back to sleep), which is why many nuclear plants decide keep all of the waste they generate during their 60 year operational life, at ... an on-site parking lot inside their existing security perimeter (it's a tiny volume of material). People obsess about 30,000 year storage, but the reality is that the vast majority of the radioactivity is released within the first 100 years and the danger beyond that point is far less significant, and thus, easier to manage. Fuel reprocessing gets easier when all but two of the radioactive elements are gone (Sr and Cs). If global civilization is destroyed to the point where we can't monitor a handful of unpowered dry casks, then the hunter gatherers living in the detritus of civilization will have bigger problems to deal with than a few mildly radioactive fuel rods that didn't get their UN-sponsored pictograph explaining that radiation=bad. For example 9 degC of climate change is a far bigger burden to future hunter-gatherer tribes than anything we could do with our nuclear waste. Now imagine that the fuel is a molten salt. Fission products contain dozens of different radioactive elements. Some are solids that precipitate out of the salt. Others are solids that dissolve in the salt. Others are liquids. Others are gasses the bubble out of the salt and must be captured. In particular, Xenon-131 is a dangerous short-lived gaseous isotope that's tricky to capture. So we just "scrub the fission products from the fuel salt"... um, ok. That "scrubbing" is a chemical reprocessing plant, and the only examples we have of doing this are massive sprawling facilities that cost many billions of dollars and are THE source of the vast majority of the difficult to handle nuclear waste problems. Hanford. Chelyabinsk. It's an inherently difficult problem. Every chemical reagent becomes contaminated with radioactive isotopes, generating large volumes of low-level waste, much of it in liquid form. Every piece of equipment becomes low-level waste. Most of the processes have to be operated robotically. It's then difficult / expensive to maintain the now-radioactive machinery or to fix problems. Oh, and there's a near 100% overlap with the technology needed to extract weapons grade Plutonium for a bomb program, so there's inherent proliferation concerns with commercializing any form of "fuel scrubbing". It's also illegal in the US, so you have to get the law changed. None of this is easy, technically or politically, yet it gets hand-waived down to a single "scrub the fission products" sentence while the trivial challenges with solid fuel rods are portrayed some kind of disadvantage. Update: while my post addresses the molten fuel salt designs referenced in the video, several of the comments underneath have pointed out that there are interesting solid fuel designs that use molten salt as a coolant, such as Berkley's PB-FHR project (design studies; not hardware). I find these designs quite intriguing, especially their claims of fully passive decay heat management, which addresses what I view as the hard problem of nuclear safety. From digging through Berkeley's PDFs, one of their biggest remaining challenges seems to be that their coolant salt breeds Tritium when exposed to neutron radiation, which it absolutely will be inside a reactor core. I skimmed extensive discussions on methods to sequester the resulting tritium before it can work its way into structural metals and make them both embrittled and radioactive. That's not great, but it seems much closer to becoming a practical reality than molten fuel salt designs. And it attacks an important problem. There's a company named Kairos working on a commercial design, but they have almost no public info that I can find. Best of luck to them.

Dry storage casks are not dangerous. One of the most famous examples of just how safe those things are had the testers ram it with an entire TRAIN, and it barely budged. They then proceeded to drop that same cask from several hundred feet, and set it so that it hit the ground with the corner(aka the point of most likely failure), and nothing happened to it(or it was drop test first followed by train ramming, not sure, but point still stands). Those things are literally the safest things humanity has ever designed.

The above ground containers that hold nuclear waste are extremely safe to the point where the people who designed it can be seen hugging the containers full of the stuff because they are so confidant in its design

Correction: Liquid water is NOT a great conductor of heat. It is a good store of calorific enerygy with lesser change in temperature, hence can be used to move heat energy from one place to otehr safely

Its a slight shame you didn't mention the UK's funding of Rolls Royce's SMR project , a government funded SMR project like you suggested. Rolls Royce also already have large factories and a huge employee base, plus they're a trusted name for customers.

4:50 I would like Real Engineering to do a video on these "dangerous interum storage facilities" like dry cask storage. You may find it to be more nuanced than simply calling them dangerous.

My wife's grandfather was the vp of electrical generation at met ed when tmi happened. I inherited all of his engineering related items he saved throughout his career and by far the coolest thing is his documentation on the melt down. The transcripts from his debrief with the NRC are brutal. What has always confused me is the mystery aspect of the event. The maintenance supervisor knew exactly what happened and what had unfortunately already resulted from the loss of feed water.I can tell you this. He was literally the first point of contact and it took him roughly 40 minutes to arrive on site and the first note he took was the wind heading and mph....

Fukushima also had a massive human element to it; greed. The company in charge of the plant was warned by multiple agencies, including their own engineers, that massive improvements to the plant were needed to make it safe in case it was hit by a tsunami of that level. All of those warnings were ignored. At other, more up to date plants in the disaster zone of the tsunami, there wasn't the devastation that you saw at Fukushima. In fact, some housed people left homeless from the tidal wave.

What hasn't been mentioned in this video is... One safety failure at 3 Mile Island was the control room lights were only connected to the switches and not the actual valves in the pipework. So when an Operator selected a switch to close a vent valve, the control panel showed it as "Closed" but the valve failed to move. Therefore the Operators had no way of knowing the real position of the vent valves. What should have been the design, was the control panel lights should be connected directly to the valves and machinery that its display represents

2:10 His stomach blocked the view. This is the most American way of causing a nuclear disaster.

Molten Salt Reactor has a signifficant problem: insane potential corrosion of internals, caused by (duh) molten salt

Near my hometown in Ontario CA, a nuclear power station called Bruce Power recently announced that their third power station will be modular. They already operate 8 CANDU reactors undergoing life extension modifications. I think this site would be an interesting case study for you to check out.

The three mile island incident blows my mind. I spent a decade working at a tier 3 data center owned by a huge financial institution. The possibility of downtime was so terrifying to them due to the millions of dollars per minute they'd lose that our SOPs were basically idiot proof and it was the senior engineer's job to make sure every step was followed in the correct order. Whoever was in charge of the SOP during a given power transfer or maintenance operation would 100% lose their job if their was a fuckup. I can't understand how a nuclear power plant would be any less meticulous.

I am an engineer on a project called the Natrium Demo Plant. The design is not an SMR but we are using sodium in the core for heat transfer and a molten salt storage system to allow the power generation of the plant to match grid loads. I would recommend googling the name if you are interested in this technology.

Alarms are not a minor concern as mentioned in the video!! They are one of the first safety layers to avoid industrial hazards

The NuScale SMR project (the ONLY SMR project in the U.S.) was to come online starting in 2029 and was supposed to replace electricity from coal plants that are closing. Instead, NuScale and the Utah utilities announced Wednesday (11/ 8/23) they're terminating the project after a decade of working on it. The cancellation comes amid supply chain problems, high interest rates and a failure to obtain the desired tax credits.

I work in the nuclear industry in Canada. I can tell you that money is the reason that many of these issues arise. The fight between production/supervision and quality control means that some things get rushed or blind-eyed to make "everybody happy". The client only pays X, and any hiccups in time or production schedule mean more cost to the customer. You need to make the customer happy because if they took their contracts to your competition after the current contract completes, a lot of people would be out of work. It's absolutely not how the nuclear industry should function.

The CANDU reactors have had many of the mentioned features since the inception of the design. Fuel bundles can be replace without the need to shutdown the reactor, lack of a pressure vessel, the use of non-enriched uranium, shutoff rods that deploy under gravity if power should be interrupted, etc.

no matter how advanced the reactor is it's still very impressive to me that we keep going back to steam turbines

I was disappointed that he didn't mention the GE-Hitachi bwrx300, it's entered pre-licensing in the USA and phase 2 testing in Canada. This isn't a design that needs to be developed, it's a fully functional platform that is going through approval steps leading up to deployment. GE estimates a cost of 2250$ per kw or 68 million per reactor.

I started working in an R&D department an year or so ago and I can tell you that developing something brand new without experience in a newly developing are is FUCKING EXPENSIVE! You pour money to learn by making mistakes, all the time at any step. You just can't imagine what challenges lie ahead of you and the costs just skyrocket.

10:53 technically the volume goes up and the density goes down. The decreased density is what reduces the reactivity as there is more distance between the fissile materials and neutron generators.

Small nitpick in the molten salt reactor: as the temperature rises, the density in the core lowers (instead of volume). Great video!

I would love to see you cover not only the lab as a whole but the accident a lot of people forget about, Chalk River just outside of Ottawa

dry cask storage is neither “dangerous” nor an “imminent ecological threat.” would really love if they could reprocess that fuel and use it but for right now it sits there, protected

May I suggest that the human error at Fukishima was the placement of the backup generators for the cooling pumps in the basement, a design cchoice made by a human. In the basement, at the seaside in a typhoon and earthquake and tsunami prone area. As the reactor building survived the wave, having the backup power source on the roof may have been worth the extra cost.

The whole point of transmission lines is that home made electricity was not available. The transmission grid is just off broke, it is so fragile and extremely expensive. Massive increase in grid capacity is economically stupid. Unloading the grid is critical for the economy.

would be interesting to know if the costs would go down if these small modular reactors were deployed on a larger scale. in my opinion these are more niche products for special circumstances like a research station on antarctica or a hidden underground facility

I think another challenging area relating to the topic is the lack of education initiatives, which in turn is influenced by politics and government policies, which further tends to shift depending on which political block is in power. To give an example: during my university studies for my bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering in 2019, we were told that there was no point studying nuclear energy as the only work opportunities in that field was basically deconstructing nuclear power plants. This was in Sweden (a big producer of nuclear energy!) while the center-left-wing political block was in power. Now, the right-wing block is in power and they are pumping money and praise into nuclear energy. This creates a situation where the economics and education becomes extremely volatile depending on which political block is in power since the topic has become political, and given the huge construction time and budget, volatility in workforce and LCoE is quite far from what you want.

I wouldn't say NuScaleare the best bet for the first commercially viable SMR by a long shot. At this point of everyone getting heavily delayed I'm actually starting to lean towards Copenhagen Atomics for our best shot. Their reactor is much more complicated which SHOULD normally mean it's further in the future than others but at this point the others should have already been running their experimental reactors and instead they're all waiting for licenses. All the while the engineering problems facing Copenhagen are slowly but surely being chipped away at. Also your MSR presentation is somewhat outdated. For instance the "freeze plug" technology is obsolete now. The widely adopted solution is a CONTINUOUS drain away from the reactor which is counteracted by actively pumping the fuel back into the reactor. Thus in case of a total failure you don't wait for the freeze plug to melt and fuel is already draining at a known rate using pipes which are known to work into an area where it can passively cool indefinitely.

A huge flaw we've learned from in the TMI incident isn't discussed enough, which is the use of zirconium as a cladding material for uranium fuel rods. Cladding prevents water (coolant) from coming into contact with the uranium fuel rods, which prevents radioactivity from leaking. A short note, uranium dioxide melts at ~2,880°C, which is usually difficult to reach inside the pessurized reactors of nuclear power plants. Unfortunately, zirconium alloys are easily oxidized at higher temperatures (~1,500 °C), which was reached when inadequate water was entering the reactor. Oxidation is generally exothermic, and for zirconium alloys, it is extremely so. When it happened, it released enough heat that caused the uranium fuel to partially melt in TMI and release radioactivity. On the other hand, when it oxidized, the substance it formed had melted over the uranium fuel rods and kept it from being further in contact with water.

Open question: Has nuclear power and desalination technically been combined? One makes power, the other requires it, and both involve water. If you could use salt water as a coolent in a nuclear plant, the evaporated steam could be captured and used as drinking water. Designed in such a way where excess water could be simply used to dilute the waste water or that excess power processes more water, one should be able to develop a decent system. There's probably a stigma about drinking nuclear water, but it should be safe enough right?

I understanding trying to simplify some of the concepts, but everytime light water reactors were referenced, the content that was shared was almost exclusively about pressurized light water reactors. Boiling water reactors are the other type of light water reactor, and while they are more complicated in engineering, they are more flexible designs with different constraints compared to those shared in the video. Also the fuel cycle discussion is more complex but in a good way. The US does use an open fuel cycle largely because of policymakers. Spent fuel reprocessing faces two challenges: fission gas release (ie xenon) and non proliferation concerns (presence of high quality plutonium in spent fuel). The first really isn't that bad, there is math that shows reprocessing all fuel used in the whole world for 100 years would still not bring background radiation effects high enough to be a measurable diifference, it's just a fear tactic. France is a mostly closed fuel cycle and it doesn't raise the cost nearly as high as the video may lead you to believe. And for plutonium, non-proliferation science has improved significantly over the last few decades and honestly is just more of a regulatory issue now more than a weapons issue. Refering to cask storage as "dangerous", as was said in the video, is not very informative or truthful. Cask storage has been used almost the entire time we've had commercial nuclear reactors. It is not dangerous in any measureable way, the video is very misleading there. Geological repositories will be the best long term solution, it's mostly been an issue of politics and not an issue of engineering or safety. Now for SMR talk "Thousands of reactors will need to be built before economies of scale kick in." Wrong, it'll take less then 10 of any one SMR type to see the effects of economy of scale. Research into these SMRs is the big cost driver but once they're being built they will be paid for quickly. I appreciate the acknowledgement that it's mostly just trying to get utilities on board. No one wants to be the first one to adopt new technology and that honestly is the biggest issue facing SMRs. There are a few SMR companies that are discussing funding their own construction without orders from utilities just so the early adopter issue isn't passed on to a utility. As for the NuScale project. It is happening. It's not necessarily the "most promising" but it is the first to go through the NRC approval process and is so important in setting the ground work for how regulators will evaluate SMRs. The NRC is one of the most inefficient and slow regulatory bodies in the world. They're kindof a necessary evil, but they're honestly the reason we don't have new technologies built and operating in the US. X-Energy has orders for the PNW. NuScale is building a demonstration project in the next couple of years. China is also building all types of reactors at a rate that makes the rest of the world look like it's at a standstill. Copenhagen atomics, Rolls Royce, and a handful of others are also making great progress in integrating SMR and other flexible nuclear projects. Government funding Saying that nuclear might not succeed without government funding and then comparing to wind and solar is honestly pretty funny. Wind and solar have succeeded because of government subsidy. If nuclear recieved the same amount of subsidy as wind and solar, we'd have more utilities adopting nuclear. Regardless, wind and solar are not nearly as environmentally friendly as they're made out to be and there will be a day when people begin to realize that and nuclear will again be brought in to solve those issues. Wind and solar are also not effective as baseload energy for a grid, there has to be other sources. Nuclear is the best fit, hyrdo is the next best fit for that role if we are to take out fossil fuel options. Wind and solar are also a huge pain to integrate into electrical grids. I'm not an electrical engineer, so I don't remember all the terms, but current and voltage regulation from wind and solar is a pain in the rear. They are also not effective for "islanding" which is necessary for critical infrastructure, putting the electrical grid at risk. Texas a couple of winters ago is an excellent example of what happens in first world countries when the power suddenly gets shut off and your grid isn't built in a safe way. People died, you need to the ability to have electrical islands and methods for restarting the grid. I think one of the best things that could get governments on board is the ability for nuclear to be a solution to space travel and space colonies. The US and others have expressed interest in setting up more permanant extraterrestrial stations, and they will likely look at using nuclear as their energy sources. Might be enough to get more funding towards those projects. Other notes Gen IV reactors are going to start going through approvals this decade and hopefully be commercially available next decade. There are so many improvements over the plant designs we've been using for 50+ years, they will change the game for nuclear in a good way and likely bring in private investment like we've never seen. Gen III+ will make a continued impact as well as we are adopting "old" technologies in ways that are more efficient and safer. SMRs also have huge potential for solving grid integration issues with things such as high-energy factories (like silicon fabs) and data centers (think Facebook, Amazon, etc). These types of facilities could potentially be serviced by their own SMRs and be independent of the commercial grid, alleviating huge concerns for grid operators and utilities. Nuclear is also important in things like medical isotopes and hydrogen production (alternative fuel source), so it's unlikely to just disappear. Fusion could be commercially available as early as 2035 the way they're moving right now. If that happens, humanities only option will be to adopt it, there is nothing better for clean energy. There are companies, like TerraPower, who are planning on repurposing old coal plant sites to benefit from grid infrastructure that's already set up. There are many people upset about taking away coal infrastructure, but if it's going away than nuclear presents the best option for repurposing those sites. I've already typed too much but I have two more things. Nuclear's biggest disadvantage is upfront capital investment. It takes a lot of money to start a nuclear plant but nuclear plants have excellent lifetimes and are very cost effective over time. The other thing is there are simply not enough minds in nuclear right now. There is a huge need for skilled and educated labor in nuclear. We need more nuclear welders, more engineers, more designers, more analysts, better regulators, and perhaps most importantly, we need lobbyists and advocates. Get educated, get involved, don't let someone else's fear run your life.

BWRX-300 ... Ontario Power Generation (Canada), Tennessee Valley Authority (USA), Orlen-Synthos Green Energy (Poland), Fermi Energeia (Estonia) already signed on for significant deployments. All working together with GE Hitachi (the reactor and fuel vendor) and other partners to achieve a common design deployable in all 4 countries. Using a lot of off-the-shelf parts and a fully developed supply chain, including the nuclear fuel: a standard fuel design (GNF2) that has already seen significant use in the industry. Name another SMR with that level of experience, support, supply chain... you can't. NuScale doesn't even come close. Yet you didn't mention it.

In the US, it’s not just safety concerns that limit nuclear power. Significant cost and lack of experience in nuclear reactor construction and installation are the primary reasons no governments want to invest in new reactors. The only nuclear plants in construction are in Georgia and have taken twice as long and twice as much as originally budgeted. It also bankrupted Westinghouse. The experience in Georgia is why no other states will consider planning for new reactor installs. The United States just doesn’t have the resources required to effectively and affordably implement nuclear power. It’s extremely disappointing.

6:44 "Recycling spent nuclear fuel is just a matter of separating unused uranium from the fission products" - so what happens to the fission products? To my understanding this is still radioactive. So recycling just reduces the volume of fuel we need to store long term?

2:06 "unknown reasons" Could it be the operator was sleeping off a box of donuts and a rocking toy bird was operating the control panel? I saw this scenario in a documentary on a nuclear power station.

Nuclear energy is underestimated and underappreciated. It is one of the cleanest energy sources we have.

Another potential benefit of SMRs is that they can be used for industrial process heat. A chemical plat that needs a few MW of power to drive reactions could get that directly from an SMR (at near 100% efficiency) rather than running electric heaters or burning fuel.

"... Uranium was thought to be a limited resource" It IS a limited resource. It will always remain a limited resource. It is therefore not possible to replace all fossil fuel dependent power production with nuclear power, it will all eventually have to be replaced with something else. There is just a vast industry earning huge money with nuclear power.

The one thing id be worried about is security. The nuclear plants I know of are massive and have literal world-class SWAT-type teams with tanks and other intense weapons. I dunno about costs of security and all that, but I would imagine it makes alot more sense to heavily secure an extremely large region-power-providing reactor vs a smaller reactor. Not that they'd just be left in the open or anything, but the more common and easy to get something is, and the more places it can be, the less secure we are from single events.

The fear mongering of nuclear energy in response to TMI, Chernobyl and Fukushima has drastically set back nuclear energy development and economies of scale by decades, how many tons of CO2 might have not entered our atmosphere had we kept on the nuclear path we were on before these disasters

pressurized water reactor is mature and arguablly the only economically viable option for commercial use so far ,but I don't think any further dive into this kind of reactors, especially small types in general, will yield any promising result, simply because the neutron-economy and fuel economy goes down as reactor size shrinks, let along the already complicated primary components in current water reactor design. intrinsic safety features, good fuel economy and resonable system complexity are vital to a realistic new design.

Super video! But can we please change the color scheme for the graph at 16:20 in future videos? This was is not as bad as others I've seen, but why use 3 shades of yellow/orange and 3 shades of purple in a diagram that only has 8 colors? I understand it was probably a default color setting, but these similar colors cause the graph to be much harder than necessary to interpret.

At 5:35, its name is “Forsmark” not “Frostmark”. “Frostmark” would translate to English as “ground frost”. On a fun note: I’ve visited one of the storage sites near Forsmark, it was really cool seeing what they would let you see.

11:07 couldn't the emergency dump tanks also contain more of the salt, but without the uranium or other fuel? When the melt plug melts and dumps the molten salt into the dump tanks, the salt there is melted and dilutes the fuel, thereby further inhibiting any remaining chain reactions. Melting the extra salt would also help cool it quicker. The only extra cost would be somewhat larger tanks and some extra salt.

SMR is economically less effective than large reactors, there is no work around. What we need is to apply serial production and volume cost savings on building large reactors. That means to build one every month. We do have use for that volume world wide. Today large reactors became so expensive because there is only one build in 5 to 15 years so it's basically one off being reinvented, developed and projected from scratch each time.

4:41 To be fair it's should be said that temporary storage are worst compared to a definitinive storage but aren't inherintly dangerous and also are troughfully tested to be missile proof, also already at this point we have acces to techonolgies to reuse radioactive waste, you can either reprocess it to do MOX like in france (as said in the video) or use a 4th gen design that uses fast neutrons to "burn" attinids (long lasting chemical compunds) and produce energy (tranforming a waste in a resource). Also nuclear generation are rather strange (IAEA also advise against it) that is due to most people thinking a 4th gen is inherintly better than a 3rd or 3rd+ when in reality is like comparing a fighter jet with an airliner they are designed in a completely differnt way to achive the same basic function (fly). Another thing regarding price, it's true that latest project especially in EU have surpassed allocated budget and time by a lot, but this is also due to the extremely strictly regulation, every single bolts in a nuclear reactor must be certified from extraction to final manifactury (they must pass a total of 7 test) the only other field with this maniacal level of control is manned space operation. Also it has happen that regulation have changed while construction was still underway, so they had to recertify all components to start to finish again! (and this happened multiple time). Also another thing regarding renew and price per MW, it does not take into consideration interconnesion (cable needed for a more diffused production which is inevitable with renew and storage, it's true that it is cheap, but it not avaible 24/7 and the price for consumer is still set to that of gas due to coupling with the other energy source that can do baseload. Another problem of different metric such as LCOE is that it does not take into account diminishing return of continuing installing renew. There is no system who can ride 100% intermitent renew, so the best solution is a mix of both techologies nuclear for baseload, renew for peak load.

Whenever nuclear is brought up, people always mention Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima. But those are kind of my argument for why nuclear isn't really a big issue for the massive advantages it gives. There's a clear trend that each generation is massively more safe than the previous. Take Fukushima, for example. People can bring up all the lives that were lost, and it's horrible without a doubt. But, take into context that this is one of the biggest earthquakes recorded. The death-toll attributed to the nuclear meltdown is about 1/10 the death-toll of the earthquake itself. Fukushima is a well-known disaster, but it seems to dwarf the *actual* disaster that was the earthquake in a lot of people's minds.

Wind and solar appear cheaper, if measured on a $ / kW but what is not taken into account is the cost of the rest of the grid which must be changed to accept power from a different location. A moduler reactor can be placed on the same location as a redundant coal-fired plant. This requires no change to the grid. A massive cost saving.

My main confusion about SMRs is the nuclear reactor may be smaller but the infrastructure to use it's power looks to me just as big as older style reactors.

50% of energy generated by a heat engine is lost to waste heat rejected to a heat sink (ex: cooling towers). This heat could be pumped to municipalities to provide district heating and improve efficiency.

You know its a good day when real engineering uploads a video

Cheap prices of renewable energy sources are always deceptive if storage cost to deal with intermittency are not taken into account

SMRs are shown to be less expensive, not more expensive per KW than full-scale. Economies of scale argument does not apply to large scale nuclear plants, which all run over budget and target completion dates. SMR Cost can be managed and contained because the unit is modular significantly less concrete and in some cases 90%. SMR’s because they are modular and actually built offsite economies of scale argument does apply here.

Never forget that it's the French ecologists that, through the First Minister, closed down Phénix, Superphénix and most importantly Astrid which were the leading edge of fast neutron research. That was more than 20 years ago. We would probably be already building AND selling these reactors everywhere, providing for 100s of years of cheap, safe and clean energy, if it was not for the ecologists.

I think the most viable SMR is GEs BWRX-300. It’s big enough to scale, it uses half the materials per MWe as current reactors (which is a scaling advantage), it’s still modular and at 300MWe it’s about the same size as most existing Coal Fired reactors. As far as waste goes burn it up in next gen molten salt reactors when they become available.

As @Achmedsander said, the volume of the molten salt increases as the temperature rises but the volume of the molten salt inside the reactor doesn't change, since the reactor interior has a fixed volume. As the molten salt volume increases increases the density inside the reactor core decreases, reducing the amount fission material inside the reactor. The weaknesses are the reaction doesn't stop, it just drops to a lower level, and that he extra volume of molten salt has to overflow into some other place. A freeze plug is probably a better safety mechanism than just relying on the volume of the molten salt increasing, and a overflow system..

The safety of the storage barrels are extremely safe. And only less than 1 percent of radioactive materials produced are highly dangerous. The rest is almost negligible. To put things into perspective: a charcoal powerplant is more radioactive than a nuclear one because of the uranium ore in the charcoal

It's the most American thing ever that lardo's belly stopped him seeing the warning light.

The question arises as to how much process heat a wind turbine or a solar plant generates for industry. Industry, for example the chemical industry, needs huge amounts of process heat to be able to manufacture products that are demanded by the markets. Wind turbines and solar plants do not produce heat, neither process heat nor heat for heating homes. The new generation of nuclear reactors operates at a much higher temperature than the 300°C of light water reactors. This means that this new generation of nuclear reactors can not only produce large amounts of electrical energy, but also large amounts of process heat. Unfortunately, this fact is always swept under the carpet and forgotten! The Dual Fluid Reactor, for example, operates at about 1000° C. This also means that at these very high temperatures, thermochemical splitting of water into hydrogen and oxygen is possible. A dual fluid reactor not only generates large amounts of electrical energy, but also thermal energy for the required process heat and for the splitting of water into hydrogen and oxygen. In addition, a Dual Fluid Reactor can also convert salt water into drinking water with its residual heat. The fact that a Dual Fluid Reactor can even use the previously accumulated nuclear waste as fuel makes this patented reactor concept the most promising, since the production costs for electrical energy, i.e. electricity, and thermal energy, i.e. heat, as well as for the production of hydrogen and fresh water are significantly reduced. It is not surprising that the Dual Fluid Reactor is referred to as a 5th generation reactor type, as it combines the advantages of a molten salt reactor with those of a lead-cooled reactor design. As the name Dual Fluid Reactor suggests, the fuel and the liquid lead flow in two separate circuits. Since lead is an excellent heat conductor and a very good radiation absorber, the efficiency of the reactor is increased. Safety is also increased, as lead has a melting point as low as about 328° C and a boiling point of about 1748° C. The advantage of the separate circuits, fuel circuit and cooling circuit with liquid lead, further increases efficiency and safety. High-purity and very valuable rhodium, ruthenium and molybdenum-99, which is used in nuclear medicine, are also produced as fission products.

Molten salt heaters are considered obsolete technology in hydrocarbon processing because of their high maintenance costs and low efficiency. We are pulling ours out and replacing them all with direct-fired heaters. It’s interesting to see them as cutting-edge tech in the nuclear industry.

Thank you!! This video is one I can follow and understand. I try to follow nuclear advancements because I knew future methods will be safer. But other videos sometimes jump right into university levels of science and loose me.

At 3:54 You mentioned "Liquid water is a great conductor heat" It should have been "Moving Water", as water has a low heat conductivity, but get specific heat energy. Combining this with fluid nature of water, on gets an excellent coolant (which you intended)

No mention of Thorium? And all its many advantages? Really. And wind and solar are NOT cheap, if you include the cost of the backup storage required. But all renewables are currently relying on gas as backup. The entire renewable system, including backup, with be 3x the present cost. R

i never understood why we have to choose between, solar, wind, hydro, nuclear. everything that lowers electricity cost and lowers emissions must be considered. as for germany, nuclear doesnt work because of political issues: to this day we have not figured out where to store nuclear waste long term. everybody wants nuclear, no one wants its waste nearby.

Nice explanation of the Oak Ridge MSR! The main hurdle for thorium as reactor fuel is currently regulatory, at least in Europe and the U.S. As long as it falls in the same category as uranium 235 and plutonium, plants are likely not being built.

9:50 "Salt reactors are not a risk of high temperature steam explosions." If the reactor leaks or is breached, wouldn't the molten salt explode on contact with water and catch fire on contact with air?

Romania will be the first country, outside of the United States, to build a commercial SMR plant together with NuScale, by repurposing an old coal plant (at Doicești). Also, we have 2 active CANDU type reactors at Cernavodă plant, with plans to construct 2 more, but I don't know of which type.

Another cool example of Gen 4 are MOX fueled reactors that run on nuclear waste, which would allow to turn a problem into a resource

Molten salt reaction have one mayor disadvantage: You need to build a power plant that is capable of dealing with high temperature and highly ionized and therefore acidic byproducts like hydrochloric acid. It is a huge challenge to deal with those byproducts and the fact, that a power plant should run for years without mayor maintenance worsens the problem

I really hope SMRs take off!

Imo for now nothing really points to SMR's reducing the cost of nuclear in the future other than promises or too general and optimistic assumptions of advantages, while potentially ignoring the disadvantages too much. It seems the closer they get to production phase, the more it becomes clear they might not even be able to compete with regular reactors or at best equal those. And quite some cost and difficulties not yet factored in might also come up during operation and end of life too. This doesn't mean that SMR's can't play a role anywhere, there are plenty of potential situations where SMR's might be really usefull. Like remote communities, industrial sites that need 24/7 guaranteed power, things like space travel in the future, ... If SMR's do become less costly per kW than the regular large reactors, great. Maybe they will once they get past the R&D and protoype phase. I just don't see it happening for anytime soon, definitely not before the new fleet of reactors will/should get rolled out to combat climate change in time. The project at 15:40 is essentially already quite a bit more expensive than the generation of new large scale reactors that France is ment to start building in the next 10-15 years. These plants are expected to be around 8-9B per 1600MW reactor (or at least it was before recent inflation spikes, but this article is also from 3 years ago), while this project according to this would be around 13,5B. This is similar to Flamanville 3, the first modern new modern reactor in France, essentially a kind of prototype/1st of what will be used to replace the older close to retiring old French reactors. Having learned from this "prototype" they'll be able to reduce cost and time for the future reactors in the fleet (normally) to the expected 8-9B cost. Anyway, I guess we'll see what the future brings regarding nuclear use and what SMR's will amount to.

I'd also like to point out that bottle of Fukushima reactor melted down another nuclear reactor was so safe and stable it became an emergency shelter. And there was a third emergency system at Fukushima that was activated but flooded the reactors with seawater. This system would have just the system was used and did destroy the reactor but it also stop the melt down. The corporation that ran the nuclear reactor refuse to use the the seawater Fail-Safe because it would have been expensive and it would have destroyed the reactor. Had the corporate office not hesitated and argue with their own staff about it the reactor would have been shut down earlier

My area has a Deep well style storage bunker deep in clay. Both delivered construction equipment and waste material at the site over the years.

All of this could be easily avoided with a CANDU reactor, that Canada has been operating safely for many many years. And no mention that Canada is already building SMR's? partnered with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, SNC-Lavalin, and Aecon to construct North America's first Small Modular Reactor (SMR) GE Hitachi’s BWRX-300 SMR

wake up honey, new real engineering just dropped

The reactor cannot solve the issues you have correctly pointed out. A liquid salt reactor can contribute to the safety of the system by eliminating the possiblity of meltdown. If the initial constrution is inadequate the reaction cannot start and, if left unsupervised, the reaction shuts itself off.

I Love This Channel For it's Videos And Content And See That SMRs Are Being Focused on. I Don't See Why The Topic of Fission is in the Spotlight And Fusion Should Also be Considered Important For the Future, it Ofcourse Has it's Own Advantages And Disadvantages As Well As Problems. I'd Love to See a Few Videos Emphasising Fusion And Encouraging People That it is Very Much Possible...

This helps explain Saskatchewan's (Canada) move towards SMR nuclear power plants. Thank you. This is both useful to know and very timely.

One of the worrying things about nuclear for me is cost cutting power companies. When it eventually comes to large service intervals i can 100% see the opperatong companies cutting corners or extending the life by "just a little" to avoid spending money. And from that we get meltdows

Are those examples referring to energy prices or electricity production? In cold climates, there is a significant interest in SMRs to exclusively generate heat for district heating. At that point, only reaching approximately 110 degrees Celsius is sufficient.

The building next to the reactor is a temporary storage site for nuclear waste. It's due to be closed in 2050. Q - What will it be then? A - A permanent storage site for nuclear waste.

The problem is that nuclear and renewables don't complement each other well. You can scale a nuclear plant only down to 40%, but you can't turn it off and on easily to adjust to demand.

what I find crazy is that with it being the "space age" by then, they didn't have redundant systems for all the most important things

Levelized Cost Of Electricity (LCOE) is where the problem begins. Energy cost is not the only factor. Time or the ability to deliver power at any time it is needed is very important. You can't build a nations power grid on a unreliable power source. LCOE formula below; Sum of costs over lifetime --- devided by --- Sum of electrical energy over lifetime

Those are some serious SFX and VFX demn!! You've just raised another level of gold standard quality videos. #num1Fanof yourvids

Lots of anti-nuclear propaganda in this video. Every yellow barrel depicting nuclear waste in this video is propaganda, high-level nuclear waste is NEVER stored like that, NEVER. Nuclear waste is an asset, not a liability. At 16:35 he compares the cost of nuclear to wind and solar, they can not be compared one to one. Wind and solar need 100% backup from a reliable source and that is never included in their cost. When you do that nuclear is cheaper, more sustainable, and far less complicated. Wind and solar are a complete waste of time and money, they are slowing down the transition away from fossil fuels and this channel is helping with that.

Southern Ontario has a robust power grid of nuclear power plants, hydro electricity, wind turbines, fossil fuel power plants, and recently a company in Niagara Falls was awarded a contract to create SMR's for Ontario Power Generation, they should be a great addition to the power grid.

The nuclear waste stored at nuclear power plants is not dangerous. There has been no injury or accidents involving nuclear waste. Like if the stuff is chopped up and spread about it could be dangerous but in the containers it is stored in it is not dangerous. The stuff simply needs to be used in reactors that could use the 95% of the energy that's still in it.

Huge omission of this video - fast neutrino reactors that can fully utilize MOX fuel (Mixed Oxide fuel, which is essentially made from a biproduct of regular nuclear reactors). While regular reactors can, to some degree, utilize the MOX fuel when combined with their regular nuclear fuel (claimed up to 50% in rare cases), they cannot work on just MOX alone. Russians have built and are fully utilizing a fast neutrino reactor (Beloyarsk Power Plant) that is filled with 100% MOX fuel. That reactor is first in the world, and so far the only fast neutrino reactor capable of commercial power production. The significance of this is that Uranium ore contains 99.3% of Uranium 238 (which is not good for fuel) and only 0.7% of Uranium 235 - the primary fuel source of regular reactors. Fully utilizing the MOX fuel allows to burn up the now wasted Uranium 238, essentially reusing spent fuel from regular reactors and, in theory, cover the entire world's energy demands for over three thousand years (from nuclear fission alone).

If nuclear power has million fans, then I'm one of them. If nuclear power has one fan, then I'm THAT ONE. If nuclear power has no fans, that means I'm dead. (maybe from radiation idk)

Hey Real Engineering, I hope this comment finds you well! Your channel is amazing, and I'm a huge fan of your content. I wanted to suggest a topic that I think is gonna be good its about the Avro Vulcan. It's a masterpiece of engineering and design, and I'm sure you could create an incredible video about it!

12:30:"Standardization...reduces complexity and reliability". Having many more small units to monitor and maintain will increase the probability of one having the wrong problem in the wrong place. Nuclear plants all try to save by limiting maintenance and fighting regulation in the political sphere. When France discovered corrosion in their standardized reactors, they had to shut them all down at once for refurbishment, not reliable when you need it most because of standardization. The conclusions of this video are spot on. Mass Manufacturing without prototyping is unlikely to make any real difference in reliability or safety. Nuclear couldn't or should'nt be used be used to address climate change as the timescale is way too long. Wind, Solar, and storage are ready NOW.

Electrical engineer here. I work in the energy industry. I'm very glad to see these groundbreaking designs and safety breakthroughs get such a large audience. I did want to mention that the levelized cost of energy graph shown at 16:22 is always unfortunate to see. It gives the impression that all MW-hours produced can be compared as apples-to-apples. This is not true. Baseload and other dispatchable generation are significantly more valuable for energy balancing authorities, reduce the probability of rolling blackouts, and can provide reliability services. While wind and solar actively create reliability problems. One thing that is not clear to me from this graph is whether the wind and solar subsidies are included in these costs. Regardless, the government interference creates difficulties for dispatchable generation to make money, driving power plants (including some nuclear plants) out of business. As we discuss whether more government involvement is necessary to solve our energy problems, maybe we could try without so much government intervention first to see if the invisible hand of a free market economy will solve the problem more efficiently for us.

The meta is that subsidies are required for power systems to change. Politicians and their ability to even get elected is also determined by the money from industry. We have to remove corporations from politics and influence.