Why are there no viable nuclear power plants for the home?
By @edent
· Climate Crisis electricity energy · 17 comments · 700 words
Whenever you talk about renewable energy, it's impossible to avoid a very particular strain of reply-guy. The "Nuclear is really good actually" dude is convinced that you have critically misunderstood Our-Lord-And-Saviour Uranium.
Nukes are clean! They are cheap! They are safe and healthy! They are brilliant! Nuclear power will save us all!
Look, I 100% agree that nuclear power is theoretically better than every renewable power source. Nuclear totally clean0! Fewer people die of nuclear radiation poisoning than fall from roofs installing solar. Governments never need to cover-up the true cost of nuclear fall-out and decontamination1. Why can't people get it through their thick skulls that nuclear power is just so fricking cool?!
I agree! Harnessing the power of spicy rocks is a pretty nifty way of making electrons flow.
But here's my real test for nuclear power. Why can't I have a mini-nuke at home?
I'm quite serious.
On my roof I have 5kWp of solar panels which provide 100% of my electrical needs throughout the year. I also have 4.8kWh of battery storage. This technology exists. It works.
If I wanted, I could install a wind turbine. I don't think I need planning permission for that. It might not be cost effective - but plenty of people will sell me one. Again, totally feasible.
I have an incoming gas supply which I use for heat. I suppose I could buy a mini turbine to turn that into electricity. Or I could use a thermoelectric device to turn gas heat into electricity. Bit of a faff, but doable.
Similarly, I can burn wood (or coal) at home and use that for energy. I can go into the woods right now and pick up some sticks which will turn into lovely heat.
I could even buy a petrol / diesel generator and - although the fumes would be disgusting - I could make electricity that way.
Finally, if there were a river running through my property, I could install a hydroelectric generator. There isn't, so I can't. And I don't think my domestic water pressure could do more than power a few LEDs.
So where's my home-nuke kit?
Every other form of electricity generation has a version which can be reasonably installed in the home. Some of them have to be installed by a competent and qualified person. Some of them need yearly check ups. Some of them require planning permission or emissions controls. But they all provably work.
Except nuclear.
Is it because it isn't cheap enough at a smaller scale?
Would the risk of a small nuclear explosion be that much worse than the occasional gas explosions we have?
If my solar panels fell from the roof, they're fairly light but would still give you a nasty bump on the head. A fly-away wind turbine could probably kill someone nearby.
Burning wood, coal, oil, and other combustibles can create some pretty noxious pollution. Would a micro-nuclear reactor be better?
Perhaps there's an alternate future where Chernobyl and Windscale and Three-Mile Island never happened and we're all driving around with Mr Fusion reactors on our cars2.
I would be perfectly comfortable living next door to a large, well-managed nuclear power station. But would you sleep soundly knowing your neighbour had a small Generation IV reactor in their basement?
In 1954, the first grid-tied nuclear power station went online. It's 70 years later and nuclear power is no closer to a domestic version. Perhaps the pro-nuclear dudes have an answer for that?
@Edent I’m ok with home nuclear reactors as long as government provides enough people to service them, makes penalties for those who don’t get their reactors checked regularly and requires all reactors to be registered.
As I don’t see #1 happening and I don’t trust my neighbors not to be a-holes when opportunity presents itself, there shouldn’t home reactors
@Edent An excellent point, but there at loads of places where you aren't allowed to burn coal or wood to heat your home, let alone generate electricity.
Smoke control areas: the rules
@Edent great article.
I’m definitely one of those “dudes” - to me it’s a question of scale - like most things if cheaper / similar options exist then it’s hard to push something economically.
I suspect that the cost to install and operate a home nuke outweighs other forms of electricity. There’s a lot of maintenance that goes into nuclear to keep this safe so perhaps these efforts only scale when we are doing it for millions of homes at a time?
@blog Makes me wonder about that other leg of the Trousers of Time where every home is both heated and powered by an RTG in the basement. "Don't dig up the big box of plutonium, Mark!"
@thecodingbeard
Why does it need to be kept safe?
I thought nuclear was safe.
My solar panels require zero maintenance, no guards, and no sensors.
Angus Hollands says:
@Edent I'm not sure I follow. Domestic power generation is useful, and will probably be an integral part of our future grid. But, it has tradeoffs. I don't have time for citations, but I think you can appreciate the argument; scaling things up is usually more efficient. Just because we can't have a nuclear reactor in our basement doesn't (in my view) say anything about it's qualities as a solution. The same argument applies to fusion (it probably requires breeding) for one thing. A similar argument applies to heating; one can have their own at-home heating system. But, many houses will benefit from distributed heating schemes in areas where it makes sense. So, the practical scale in my view isn't just "smaller is better".
The argument against micro-nuclear is both efficiency and safety; neutron leakage (which plays a part in the safety from activation) is an inverse function of reaction dimension (surface:volume). As such, SMRs have a higher shielding burden than conventional reactors.
The safety question is also complex — safe for whom? Under what conditions? Nuclear is safe, statistically. In no small part because of the regulations ensuring it to be. Air travel might be considered to have the same profile; inherently dangerous if things go wrong, but we design-out the risks. The risk threshold for a reactor is probably a lot higher than aeroplanes (but I haven't looked at the safety cases in a while), and we still fly because it's convenient and solves a problem.
No real direction to this reply, just chiming into the noise! 🙂
@Edent At the end of my street is a locked and closed off area dug into the hillside with an electricity sub-station that supplies ~1000 homes. Why couldn't they put in a nice little nuclear power plant out of a sub or aircraft carrier and generate the electricity locally? And use the waste heat to provide hot water to the surrounding houses?
/s
@Edent Good question but I'm not sure why a home needs a nuke rather than a neighbourhood. A certain amount of scale is useful.
But why use uranium for a nuke, it's dangerous, long lived and produces plutonium, only good for weapons? Oh, maybe that's why...
Thorium is much better (and there are other options).
Why use very high pressure steam and intense heat that needs massive control systems? Instead of a nice, flowing liquid salt system.
The main thing holding back affordable, small scale liquid salt thorium reactors is a raft of regulations largely sponsored by certain vested interests. But there are signs of change, especially in the US. So coming soon...?
James says:
Could you link to any estimates of what the Levelized Cost of Energy[1] (LCoE) for thorium reactors could be, compared to existing generation methods?
I'd also be curious about the amount of time and investment required for them to become feasible to build.
They do seem to offer some improvements, in theory - but I think it's possible that the time when they could have been the future has alredy passed, and that it's time to invest more heavily in electricity generation schemes that are intrinsically cheaper, safer, easier and renewable.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
[2] - https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost-of-energyplus/
@blog A long time ago there was a mostly-not-very-good book called Science Made Stupid, and the best thing it it by far - really the only genuinely funny part - was the DIY home nuclear reactor directions which would've absolutely worked. And killed you. But you'd've had plenty of hot water for your hot tub, and all the electricity you could want! xD
When I was doing Fallout cosplay (as a Vault-Tec Regional Sales Representative - I had business cards, brochures, it was so much fun) I used that in my kit. 😀
@Edent There are guys too who hijack threads and go on forever about hydrogen being better than every other sort of heating AND cooling than electric in all applications.
They say battery vehicles are dangerous and only hydrogen based ones are safe etc.
Hydrogen has its place in decarbonisation but you need to pick the correct use cases and not try to push it everywhere.
There is one person I've encountered here on Mastodon who is either a monomaniac or a paid troll.
#troll #hydrogen hydrogen troll
Sam says:
I'd say that you need to make fair comparisons. I wouldn't advocate that we stop spending public money on expensive things like public transport, because I have a bicycle at home (buses are far more expensive that a bike, make lots of pollution, and have caused some terrible accidents. I could not afford a bus nor operate one safely).
You have home solar and a battery, but you also still have a hook up to the national grid and still use gas for heating. What would it cost for you to be fully energy self sufficient from a home set up? Could store enough energy in the summer to heat you home in the winter? Are batteries safe? What's the solution for the vast number of people in the UK who don't own a roof (renters and flat dwellers)?
I struggle to image fossil free solution to UK energy that does not involve a national grid, and some large scale generation. What sort of mix of generation and storage we use for that depends on what works at the GW scale, so it makes sense to evaluate cost and safety at that scale.
I don't want to be a reply-guy. I love your blog and want good discussion. Your recent posts on the e-ink agile pricing inspired me to put my home energy data into pandas, and realised that I could have saved about 20% on my bills last year. Now switched to agile and have set my ASHP to not run in the expensive hours.
@edent says:
Thanks for the comment, Sam. I think you might have slightly misinterpreted my post.
I'm not saying that home-generation is the only way forward. I'm merely asking why there isn't a home-sized Nuclear power generation box.
To go on your analogy - anyone can buy a cheap bike and ride it without an official licence. A motorised car, truck, or minibus is available to anyone who can pass a test and can be driven as long as it is certified as roadworthy. There are all manner of cheap boats suitable for individual crew-members. Technology has progressed so that even aircraft are available to domestic owners if they really want to fly them.
Hey, there's even a company which will sell you a jetpack!
Every mode of transport is democratised. So why isn't every mode of energy generation?
Sam says:
I think we are stretching the transport analogy a bit far now :-), but there is no way for an individual to have a train that is anything beyond a toy.
I guess my question is why is it important for something to scale down to something anyone could have at home. Yes its cool. I like that I can run Nextcloud on a home server rather than use commercial services. Its fun to grow vegetables in the garden.
But is the pharmaceutical industry bad because anyone can make herbal remedies at home?
For me the real question is: can this technology play a big part in decarbonising at a national/international scale. If every advanced industrial nation had followed France in its electricity generation, the world would be in a lot less of a mess right now.
The scaling laws in nuclear reactors favour big systems. If you are broad in your definition of nuclear power, then there have been lots of small reactors used in space exploration. But they are expensive and you need a decent amount of shielding between them and the nearest human. The sweet spot for a reactor seems to be about 1GW, and that matches pretty well with effective national electricity grids.
Wind turbines also favour scaling up, hence them getting larger and larger. Still a great technology even if small ones are a bit rubbish. I've never seen a home mounted wind turbine in the uk, even though permitted development would allow it (for a detached home with a bit of space around).
@edent says:
I think you've hit the nail on the head. We restrict people from manufacturing and selling their own medicines because of the huge danger it presents. Similarly, most places prohibit the distillation of (strong) alcohol. As a society we recognise the extreme risk to human health.
But, crucially, there's no particular technical reason stopping people from doing either.
Wind farms and solar farms are undoubtedly more efficient than home installations. But home installations are viable.
That's the crux of my question. Could Nuclear power ever be safe to use in a domestic setting? If so, could it ever be efficient enough at a small scale?
Most tech gets cheaper, smaller, and safer over time. Nuclear bucks that trend.
Sam says:
Betavolt BV100 3V nuclear battery aims to deliver 100 microwatts for over 50 years https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/01/15/betavolt-bv100-3v-nuclear-battery-50-years/
@edent says:
That's nice. But it still isn't commercially available even though it has been in development for several years. And, while it is great for powering microelectronics, it isn't going to power a home.
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