Aalo Atomics reposted this
This week Aalo visited a 1 GW natural gas plant! The difference between this and an equivalent nuclear plant was stark. Here’s what stood out to us: ➡️ Natural gas plants are staffed by only a handful of people (typically < 20 at a given time). In an equivalent nuclear plant, there would be ~500 people on site. ➡️ The security at natural gas plants includes keycard access and security cameras. The equivalent nuclear plants have sniper rifle towers and ~100 armed guards. ➡️ Operational costs can range between 1.5-4.5 cents / kWh. It’s incredible how low this is considering the huge amount of natural gas that must constantly be mined, refined, and transported to the site. This speaks to the maturity of the infrastructure built out for natural gas over the past 100 years. ➡️ Turbines typically require maintenance every 30k-50k hours, or 3-6 years. We went inside the turbine room and it was like being inside the belly of a dragon. Incredible engineering to get the turbine to last that long without maintenance under those conditions (more extreme than what a steam turbine is subjected to at a nuclear plant). ➡️ Natural gas plant owners do sometimes perform remote centralized operations for a fleet of turbines. Good inspiration for a micro-reactor company. ➡️ When most US natural gas plants were built, coal was the largest source of electricity in the US. But natural gas surpassed coal as the largest energy producer in the country in 2016. Very impressive to see the growth that natural gas has had in the past 30 years. Time will tell what this looks like for nuclear over the next 30! Thanks to Wheeler Gibson for setting this up for the team Aalo Atomics.