They've got the money, but I wouldn't expect the oil companies to get into nuclear power. Historically companies don't seem to do that. I expect them to stick with oil for as long as it lasts and then disappear.
Jeroen van der Veer said:
Judging from society’s experience with nuclear power and other technologies, new energy sources take at least 25 years to reach significant scale.
We have had more than 25 years of experience with this technology, and it has reached significant scale. Methinks it is now time for us to push it to the leading energy source via innovative reactor designs.
Modularity is going to blindside Jeroen van der Veer.
I'm old enough to have lived through the "Motherboard - Daughterboard" revolution that changed the world of electronics. Like the integrated circuit, it took several months before the implications of these developments sank in enough to make me realize I had to learn them and use them or become a very endangered species - I learned mostly tubes in college.
NuScale's web site drawing explainations are spooky in how they resemble early explainations about the internal architecture of Altair personal computers. (That was in the time before Apple.)
At the time, things like the S-100 bus were the exception and almost no one understood how it was that the processor logic defined (and locked the customer into) the motherboard's bus logic. The S-100 was the ancestor of the IBM PC motherboard.
NuScale and Babcock & Wilcox have just made "Big Nuclear" the equivalent of the old huge Univac, Philco-Ford, and IBM mainframes. In the long run, the economics of modularity can be overwhelming.
Modularity turns power plants into very robust electricity factories.
Strange as it may seem, NuScale and B&W are the 800 pound nuclear gorillas in the room that no one is noticing at the moment.
When a CEO pointed ignores a competing technology, that actually speaks very loudly. That's the one technology that he and his staff worry about.
Let's not forget that the nuclear industry had the stated goal, back in the 70s, of eliminating all coal powered plants. People have forgotten. The US really was on the verge of eliminating coal completely. 30 years ago.
Instead, the hydrocarbon industry very cleverly funded the anti nuclear movement and pulled off one of the great reversal plays of modern history. But the hydrcarbon people haven't forgotten...they are smart people. Eventually nuclear power is going to wipe them out.
They will use every trick, every rhetorical manipulation and evasion, to delay that process as much as they can.
Tom - I agree. You have apparently been won over to the suspicious side.
We must also not forget that the official projections of the US government body assigned the task of tracking energy consumption and production patterns also predicted that coal would be pushed out of the electric power market (essentially the only one left for that fossil fuel) by 2000. There was plenty of motivation for the supporters of that fuel to rally and defend.
Since many of the marketers in the fossil fuel business are Sun Tzu readers, it is not surprising that they took a few pages from his campaign planning guidance.
I would be curious to know at what point opposition to fossil fuels (e.g., mountain top removal, hydraulic fracturing, etc.) will convince the oil companies to try nuclear again. My guess is that they do not want to get into nuclear until they absolutely have to.
R. Margolis:
You wrote:
"My guess is that they do not want to get into nuclear until they absolutely have to."
And that would be never.
Basically there are 3 ways to make money:
1) You make something of higher value from lower value commodities. E.g. machines from steel and so on. To make money from that your added value must be higher than that from other people with the same capability. Meaning your skills must be better, which requires hard work.
2) You have some commodity that's rare, but in high demand, and thus you can get a high price. To continue that scheme, you must make sure the demand stays high and the commodity stays rare.
3) You create a perceived need by exploiting the greed impulse of people, and then sell them "virtual goods" or value on paper. That's what wall street does.
Oil companies rely on 2). The US as a whole is more or less getting out of 1).
Nuclear energy does not fit in 2), more in 1), as the basic commodity, Uranium and Thorium are too ubiquitous to ever be rare. But if you do produce reactors, you are more and more shutting down possibility 2 in regards to energy, which is the entire business the oil companies are in. They can make money ONLY as long as energy is perceived to be rare.
Even synfuel production using nuclear primary energy does not fit into their scheme.
Does this mean that nuclear is more difficult to do than oil and gas? If t is yes, then is it that additional difficulty that has held up nuclear? Otherwise, the oil companies would buy into nuclear rather than fight it.
No,
It means that it requires a different skillset, organisational structure and business model, and it means there's less money potential. With nuclear there's no possibility to "game" or "corner" the market and thus increase your profits. Basically any country or organisation that attracts well educated people in the nuclear field can build reactors. Nuclear energy is not a monopolisable commodity. But if your business model is built on being a monopoly (albeit with a few peers) you will loose.
@KLA and Robert - part of the skillset that leads to enormous success in the multinational oil business is an ability to work with anyone who controls access to underground or underwater resources - even if they are dictators with horrible human rights records.
Capital assets built up over many decades in the oil business also have no value in atomic energy. Tankers, tank farms, rail cars, pipelines, drilling rigs, leases, refineries, service stations, and the trained people who operate or build them would not translate to the nuclear energy business.
From Rod's last comment, it sounds like the going forward cost of nuclear is still higher than maintaining the current infrastructure. This sounds similar to previous energy transitions in histroy where essentially you have to run out of the older fuel before the newer one really takes off.
R - I am not sure where you found that interpretation in my comment. What I was TRYING to say was that the OWNERS of the capital assets I listed have no competitive advantage in a nuclear energy business. Therefore they use some of their other assets, including political capital, to keep atomic fission tied down. My visual image of this situation dates back to my senior project in college where I compared Catch 22 against Gulliver's Travels
The scene is when Gulliver washes up unconscious on the shores of Lilliput. When he wakes up, he finds that he is tied down by hundreds of threads and surrounded by self-important bureaucrats. It is only when he realizes that there is nothing stopping him from rising up that he achieves his natural position of dominance in the country.
I fully believe that organizations starting from scratch - entrepreneurial companies - or those like B&W and Areva that have all of the pieces needed to build atomic fission plants will find it far cheaper to enter the energy market as atomic fission suppliers and they will be able to compete head on with the fossil fuel dominated establishment.
This is quite analogous to the way that Apple, Intel, Microsoft and hundreds of other companies rose up again IBM, Digital Equipment, NCR and other mainframe suppliers and forced open the computing world. They recognized the growth capability of the microprocessor and understood that EVERYONE wants access to computing power.
IBM thought fast computing should be reserved for big business. They also had a large sales force that continuously asserted "the economy of scale" with an equation that said that as the power of a computer increased by a factor of 4 the cost only increased by a factor of 2. (I got that tidbit from watching a video of Metcalfe giving a lecture at MIT.)
My apologies for misreading your post. 
I was thinking of the fossil companies large amounts of capital they have. Especially after Exxon's experience in the nuclear arena, they probably feel they should stick to oil for now.
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