Discussion
@ilmari @davidgerard @henryk I thought they were 400MW_e each? Going by memory (from a site visit 20 years ago.) Either way, though, they're in the same ballpark, i.e. +/-25%.
And those things are bloody huge:
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/rants/nothing-like-this-will-be-buil.html
@cstross
The reason NPPs are huge is that it makes sense to build them like that. The painful bit is permitting, which is size independent, complexity is broadly size independent.
At some point size itself becomes a challenge, likely around the EPR dimension.
So the sweet spot is likely a series somewhat smaller than an EPR.
Definitely not a small reactor. otherwise the submarine designs would have been recycled a long time ago.
@davidgerard
Not so, French designs run on the same uranium as civilian plants.
@cstross @ilmari @henryk
@davidgerard @iinavpov @ilmari @henryk Also our experience of running marine reactors with drunken conscripts operating them (cough, the USSR) are not great. It's workable if you have highly trained volunteers with some sort of career path out of it.
Civilian shipping inevitably includes a proportion of sailors with "drunken conscript" equivalent levels of skill. Putting them in charge of reactors full of bomb juice and sailing them into our coastal cities is not an idea I can get behind.
@cstross @davidgerard @iinavpov @ilmari @henryk also, stealing military vessels is virtually impossible, while stealing civilian vessels is relatively easy, unless you assign a constant navy presence around them.
@iinavpov @ilmari @davidgerard @henryk I seem to remember a rule that big engineering projects have costs that scale as something insane like the fourth power of the project size? Which is why stuff like the EPR is so eye-bleedingly costly (but should be amortized over a century-plus running time—they're not designed for a 1960s 40 year life, they're designed to have all-replacable components).
@cstross
I don't know that there's such a scaling law: rather it's thresholds. Coordination is to the square, though.
It's just that when many of your components become first-of-a-kind (just because of scale), there *will* be delays.
@ilmari @davidgerard @henryk
@cstross @ilmari @davidgerard @henryk they are only small compared to an AGR in the sense that they are modular.
Back in the 1960s they beefed up the generators from 60 MW to 500MW because they were more efficient, though initially they weren't very reliable.
Bigger peower stations (nuclear, coal or gas) then just used a number of these but for the nuclear with only one big reactor.
I suppose RR are just proposing to size down the nuclear reactor size to match a minimum efficient generator and hence make a power station modular rather than monolithic. The idea is also that they can be mostly built off-site and then assembled on-site.
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