A new reactor at a nuclear power plant in Georgia has entered commercial operation. Georgia Power Co. announced Monday that Unit 3 at Plant Vogtle, southeast of Augusta, has completed testing and is now sending power to the grid reliably.

ATLANTA (AP) — A new reactor at a nuclear power plant in Georgia has entered commercial operation, becoming the first new American reactor built from scratch in decades.

  • NotMyOldRedditName@kbin.social
    4·
    11 months ago

    The future won’t be these massive reactors, they’ll be the small modular ones that can be built in a factory and brought to location.

    Lots of smaller micro grids that will be substantially easier to bring online

    • Wirrvogel@feddit.deEnglish
      5·
      11 months ago

      https://news.stanford.edu/2022/05/30/small-modular-reactors-produce-high-levels-nuclear-waste/

      “Our results show that most small modular reactor designs will actually increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal, by factors of 2 to 30 for the reactors in our case study,” said study lead author Lindsay Krall, a former MacArthur Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). “These findings stand in sharp contrast to the cost and waste reduction benefits that advocates have claimed for advanced nuclear technologies.”

      and

      https://cleantechnica.com/2023/01/18/the-nuclear-fallacy-why-small-modular-reactors-cant-compete-with-renewable-energy/

      “Small modular reactors won’t achieve economies of manufacturing scale, won’t be faster to construct, forego efficiency of vertical scaling, won’t be cheaper, aren’t suitable for remote or brownfield coal sites, still face very large security costs, will still be costly and slow to decommission, and still require liability insurance caps. They don’t solve any of the problems that they purport to while intentionally choosing to be less efficient than they could be. They’ve existed since the 1950s and they aren’t any better now than they were then.”