Cyril R says:
March 3, 2024 at 7:34 AM

A good writeup Michael. A couple of poimts though.

Actually water without precise chemistry control is very corrosive. All reactors require good chemistry control (there’s no such thing as pure helium). Davis Besse shows that borated water isn’t too nice either. And 155 bar borated water at 320C doesn’t qualify as “no hazard”.

Fluoride salts are stable, don’t generate hydrogen, and corrosion control rests on having the salt reducing toward the structural alloy rather than the passivation layer required with water. Fluoride salts also do not cause stress corrosion. So it ends up a simple matter of allowance thicknesses.

I like LWRs. Much better than coal plants. But they are basically glass cannons. The power goes out, the core melts down, generating explosive hydrogen in the process that detonates the containment and spreads radionuclides all over the country. Or someone thinks there is water in the core when there isn’t and the core melts down. A glass cannon like that just begs for military grade bureacracy not unlike a nuclear missile silo. Said bureaucracy is very expensive and results in all manner of bloat that inflated prices and build times. With advanced reactors focussing on inherent safety you at least have a case for a more rational regulatory approach.

A 3000 MWt LWR gets you 1000 MWe. An advanced reactor of 3000 MWt gets you 1500 MWe. That’s a quarter billion bucks a year more revenue.

By the way, 3 outages in 10 years is very good. Solar power stations have 365 outages a year.