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This is interesting to hear about somebody approaching nuclear with a start-up type approach. As a lay person I hear about reactor designs that can reduce nucl

This is interesting to hear about somebody approaching nuclear with a start-up type approach. As a lay person I hear about reactor designs that can reduce nuclear waste and make a truck load more energy off it at the same time, which leaves me wondering why these things don't get made. Is it all institutional politics as this article makes out, or is there a safety/proliferation issue there as well? If the institutional inertia has a large part to play then a startup model would be very promising.

pdkl95 11y ago
Short answer: it's politics, NIMBY nonsense, and radiophobia. Longer answer: Yes, there are obviously safety and proliferation concerns with nuclear power, but a lot of these are solvable problems. Many industries solve difficult/dangerous problem all the time. Unfortunately, paranoia and misleading (or simply wrong) information about radiation made a lot of people treat the very idea of nuclear power as something that is "always bad". This, and the usual political stupidity, has kept nuclear power restricted to the same designs for decades. Imagine if the computer industry was was never able to move past the relay and vacuum tube designs made in the WW2 era; today we might have very good vacuum tubes instead of the integrated circuit. Newer reactors like the Westinghouse AP1000 are a nice improvement in safety and cost, but it's still basically the same solid uranium alloy fueled, pressurized light water reactor we've always used. Newer designs are never always considered "too risky" in either money or physics.
- api 11y ago
  Monstrously capital intensive industries are conservative for obvious reasons. Computers were never as capital intensive as a large power plant, and transistors and ICs made them exponentially less. When a project that costs twenty billion dollars fails companies go bankrupt and politicians lose their careers. Lots of pressure to stick with what you know will work. Also everyone blames the hippies for nuclear stagnation but nobody looks at the fossil fuel industry. The latter has far more money and political influence and is more than happy for nukes to get stuck in the 50s.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    There isn't much else that is more capital intensive than a modern chip factory, the costs are - roughly - comparable to a nuclear power plant.
    - chopin 11y ago
      But this haven't been true in the 60's or early 70's.
    - api 11y ago
      They're just as conservative too. They'll go to .22nm from .32nm but they're not going to invest billions up front in a fab to produce a completely untested chip technology based on graphene and optics or something. Not unless someone (like the government) coughs up the money risk-free. Same with nukes. Gradual evolution of the overgrown 50s submarine reactor is the AP1000. To really make fission work and scale would require something like the liquid thorium cycle or accelerator driven reactors or pebble beds... something not an evolution of 50s tech.
      - jacquesm 11y ago
        Indeed. So, now with Moore's law coming to an end there will be an incentive to try 'strange' and off-the-beaten-path technology, it will in a way be the most interesting time for semiconductors in many decades. There is just a chance that we'll hit on something that would not even be considered only 10 years ago that will actually make a huge difference. Before that all you could pretty much set the clock by was a predictable speed increase, now we're going to either get stuck or there will be something revolutionary in computing to move us to the next level. Some of the options: - 3D (heat issues, but biology got that one solved to some extent by using massive parallel low power, extremely slow and clockless architectures) - Quantum Computing - biological computing - exotic semiconductors (for instance: GaAs) - optical computing - Totally new software architectures to take advantage of existing hardware in an un-foreseen way - non Von-Neumann machinery (for instance, computing memory) And a whole raft of even lesser known and researched tech. I'm really very curious what the next decade will bring.
- ifdefdebug 11y ago
  I'd be interested in hearing which "newer designs" exactly you think got postponed for stupid political reasons. As far as I know, nuclear power did evolve over the last decades as far as it could and if it's "still basically the same", then just nobody came up with something really new in the field. Basically, uranium alloy fueled, pressurized light water reactor is what you can get. Fusion? Was said to be ready in 20 years - 40 years ago, and today? Still 20 years to go...
  - jessriedel 11y ago
    > As far as I know, nuclear power did evolve over the last decades as far as it could and if it's "still basically the same", then just nobody came up with something really new in the field. The nation that should have been the primary driver of nuclear technologies (the US) saw an explosion in the cost of development. This was not seen in other countries, which is evidence that it's because of cultural/institutional problems rather than fundamental technical ones. http://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-us-france-korea http://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-us... > Fusion? Was said to be ready in 20 years - 40 years ago, and today? Still 20 years to go... This is a common misconception. In fact, the authoratative government body on energy research made it very clear 40 years ago what it would cost to develop fusion power. Fusion power never got the required funding so it never materialized -- as predicted. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8311566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8311566
    - crdoconnor 11y ago
      >Nuclear construction costs in the US did spiral out of control, especially after the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979. But this wasn't universal. Countries like ... Japan kept costs fairly stable during this period So if we keep costs down like Japan did we can experience the same cost savings they did? Where do I sign up?
      - vidarh 11y ago
        Compared to the radiation deaths caused by coal power plants, Fukushima was a little inconsequential blip, so even if we assume that it represented what you get if you follow Japanese regulations, it'd still be a plus.
- pvorb 11y ago
  While running nuclear power plants might be manageable, reliably storing the nuclear waste for the next 1,000,000 is almost impossible. No other industry has a similar problem.
  - DennisP 11y ago
    The long-term waste is transuranics, like plutonium. Fission products are much shorter-lived. Some advanced reactor types, including fast reactors and molten salt reactors, produce very little transuranic waste, and can use our existing transuranic wastes as fuel, converting them to fission products. These reactors produce a much lower volume of waste, which goes back to the radioactivity of the original ore within three centuries. Russia has two large fast reactors connected to their electric grid, one since the 1980s. The U.S. nearly completed its Integral Fast Reactor before the program was shut down by the Clinton administration. Half a dozen startups around the world are working on molten salt reactors, and China has a billion-dollar R&D program for them.
jessriedel 11y ago
Many other countries did not see the same explosion in the cost of nuclear as the US did, which is evidence that it's because of cultural/institutional problems rather than fundamental technical ones. http://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-us-france-korea http://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-us...
- ifdefdebug 11y ago
  From your link: "Nuclear construction costs in the US did spiral out of control, especially after the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979. But this wasn't universal. Countries like France, Japan, and Canada kept costs fairly stable during this period." Well now Japan had it's own meltdown and keeping the costs stable after seeing it happen in America and, worse, Ukraine, didn't help preventing it. And I don't know about Canada, but France has some good candidates for the next meltdown all over the place...
  - jessriedel 11y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... "Coal Kills 4,000 Times More People Per Unit of Energy than Nuclear" http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/coal_kills_4000_times_more_peo http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/coal_kills_4000_times_mor...
    - mkesper 11y ago
      http://m.greenpeace.org/international/en/high/press/releases/2016/Fukushima-nuclear-disaster-will-impact-forests-rivers-and-estuaries-for-hundreds-of-years-warns-Greenpeace-report-/ http://m.greenpeace.org/international/en/high/press/releases...
    - ifdefdebug 11y ago
      I did not want to engage into another discussion about which technology kills more people. I wanted to point out that nuclear is expensive. Very expensive. And the USA maybe did a good job requiring that money to be paid. And if nuclear doesn't pay out when the real costs are to be paid, then that's it. Because losing, let's say, a major city to a nuclear disaster, that would be several orders of magnitude more expensive.
DennisP 11y ago
Last year I got to sit in a meeting with people from various nuclear fission startups, along with a former director of the NRC. The startup people said their biggest problem was the NRC's regulatory model. All the current regulations are written for conventional reactors, with mandates that don't make sense for other reactor types. If you want to build something else, you can, but you have to spend a couple hundred million dollars on up-front design. Once you have that, you submit it to the NRC, which only then decides whether you can move forward and actually run some experiments. That's a pretty difficult environment for investors. The startup people said if we at least had a staged process, giving them some kind of hint about whether the NRC might approve the project before spending all that money, then they'd have a much easier time getting investment. Because of all this, reactor startups have been going to other countries. Terrapower is building a demo in China, Thorcon in Indonesia. Terrestrial Energy's in Canada and has good things to say about regulators there. Congress is starting to move towards reforming the system, but it's slow going. Some of these designs have dramatic safety and proliferation advantages. Some other interesting startups are Transatomic and Moltex.
- TheSpiceIsLife 11y ago
  When people claims newer designs have "dramatic safety and proliferation advantages" they make it sound like existing reactor technology is subject to poor safety record and proliferation problems. We just isn't true. The nuclear reactor technology that's been in use for the past 50 years has killed fewer people per kilowatt hour than any of solar, wind, or hydro power [1]. And despite all the proliferation concerns there are only 9 states states with nuclear weapons[2]. You don't magically get nuclear weapons by having domestic nuclear power. 1. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#23c9332849d2 http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_weapons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_we...
  - vidarh 11y ago
    That's true, but part of this is because of the extreme level of safety and security measures, many of which aren't needed for newer designs. E.g. for a long time the waste was seen as a positive because it could go to weapons manufacture. Yes, you don't magically get weapons that way, but you get raw materials. Security and safety features for these plants must be designed accordingly to prevent accidents and to prevent theft of exceedingly dangerous materials. Especially after the end of the nuclear arms race meant most of this waste wasn't of use any more. Reactors that produces much less dangerous waste can get away without a lot of those issues. Likewise, a lot of the regulatory regime is based on reactors where a mistake or accident can lead to a runaway reaction, but are totally wasted on reactors that are "walk-away safe" because they require an outside, powered, neutron source to keep running for example. Nuclear is amazingly safe, and I like to point that out to people too. But old-style nuclear reactors are that safe thanks to an array of extensive and expensive countermeasures against very real dangers, while at least some of the newer designs, assuming the various claims holds, are safe because the failure scenarios themselves are far more benign. That's the point of these designs. A large proportion of the price of nuclear today is because of these safety features. Remove the need for a good chunk of them, and nuclear becomes far cheaper.

pdkl95 11y ago

Short answer: it's politics, NIMBY nonsense, and radiophobia. Longer answer: Yes, there are obviously safety and proliferation concerns with nuclear power, but a lot of these are solvable problems. Many industries solve difficult/dangerous problem all the time. Unfortunately, paranoia and misleading (or simply wrong) information about radiation made a lot of people treat the very idea of nuclear power as something that is "always bad". This, and the usual political stupidity, has kept nuclear power restricted to the same designs for decades. Imagine if the computer industry was was never able to move past the relay and vacuum tube designs made in the WW2 era; today we might have very good vacuum tubes instead of the integrated circuit. Newer reactors like the Westinghouse AP1000 are a nice improvement in safety and cost, but it's still basically the same solid uranium alloy fueled, pressurized light water reactor we've always used. Newer designs are never always considered "too risky" in either money or physics.

api 11y ago
Monstrously capital intensive industries are conservative for obvious reasons. Computers were never as capital intensive as a large power plant, and transistors and ICs made them exponentially less. When a project that costs twenty billion dollars fails companies go bankrupt and politicians lose their careers. Lots of pressure to stick with what you know will work. Also everyone blames the hippies for nuclear stagnation but nobody looks at the fossil fuel industry. The latter has far more money and political influence and is more than happy for nukes to get stuck in the 50s.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  There isn't much else that is more capital intensive than a modern chip factory, the costs are - roughly - comparable to a nuclear power plant.
  - chopin 11y ago
    But this haven't been true in the 60's or early 70's.
  - api 11y ago
    They're just as conservative too. They'll go to .22nm from .32nm but they're not going to invest billions up front in a fab to produce a completely untested chip technology based on graphene and optics or something. Not unless someone (like the government) coughs up the money risk-free. Same with nukes. Gradual evolution of the overgrown 50s submarine reactor is the AP1000. To really make fission work and scale would require something like the liquid thorium cycle or accelerator driven reactors or pebble beds... something not an evolution of 50s tech.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      Indeed. So, now with Moore's law coming to an end there will be an incentive to try 'strange' and off-the-beaten-path technology, it will in a way be the most interesting time for semiconductors in many decades. There is just a chance that we'll hit on something that would not even be considered only 10 years ago that will actually make a huge difference. Before that all you could pretty much set the clock by was a predictable speed increase, now we're going to either get stuck or there will be something revolutionary in computing to move us to the next level. Some of the options: - 3D (heat issues, but biology got that one solved to some extent by using massive parallel low power, extremely slow and clockless architectures) - Quantum Computing - biological computing - exotic semiconductors (for instance: GaAs) - optical computing - Totally new software architectures to take advantage of existing hardware in an un-foreseen way - non Von-Neumann machinery (for instance, computing memory) And a whole raft of even lesser known and researched tech. I'm really very curious what the next decade will bring.
ifdefdebug 11y ago
I'd be interested in hearing which "newer designs" exactly you think got postponed for stupid political reasons. As far as I know, nuclear power did evolve over the last decades as far as it could and if it's "still basically the same", then just nobody came up with something really new in the field. Basically, uranium alloy fueled, pressurized light water reactor is what you can get. Fusion? Was said to be ready in 20 years - 40 years ago, and today? Still 20 years to go...
- jessriedel 11y ago
  > As far as I know, nuclear power did evolve over the last decades as far as it could and if it's "still basically the same", then just nobody came up with something really new in the field. The nation that should have been the primary driver of nuclear technologies (the US) saw an explosion in the cost of development. This was not seen in other countries, which is evidence that it's because of cultural/institutional problems rather than fundamental technical ones. http://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-us-france-korea http://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-us... > Fusion? Was said to be ready in 20 years - 40 years ago, and today? Still 20 years to go... This is a common misconception. In fact, the authoratative government body on energy research made it very clear 40 years ago what it would cost to develop fusion power. Fusion power never got the required funding so it never materialized -- as predicted. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8311566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8311566
  - crdoconnor 11y ago
    >Nuclear construction costs in the US did spiral out of control, especially after the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979. But this wasn't universal. Countries like ... Japan kept costs fairly stable during this period So if we keep costs down like Japan did we can experience the same cost savings they did? Where do I sign up?
    - vidarh 11y ago
      Compared to the radiation deaths caused by coal power plants, Fukushima was a little inconsequential blip, so even if we assume that it represented what you get if you follow Japanese regulations, it'd still be a plus.
pvorb 11y ago
While running nuclear power plants might be manageable, reliably storing the nuclear waste for the next 1,000,000 is almost impossible. No other industry has a similar problem.
- DennisP 11y ago
  The long-term waste is transuranics, like plutonium. Fission products are much shorter-lived. Some advanced reactor types, including fast reactors and molten salt reactors, produce very little transuranic waste, and can use our existing transuranic wastes as fuel, converting them to fission products. These reactors produce a much lower volume of waste, which goes back to the radioactivity of the original ore within three centuries. Russia has two large fast reactors connected to their electric grid, one since the 1980s. The U.S. nearly completed its Integral Fast Reactor before the program was shut down by the Clinton administration. Half a dozen startups around the world are working on molten salt reactors, and China has a billion-dollar R&D program for them.

jessriedel 11y ago

Many other countries did not see the same explosion in the cost of nuclear as the US did, which is evidence that it's because of cultural/institutional problems rather than fundamental technical ones. http://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-us-france-korea http://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-us...

ifdefdebug 11y ago
From your link: "Nuclear construction costs in the US did spiral out of control, especially after the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979. But this wasn't universal. Countries like France, Japan, and Canada kept costs fairly stable during this period." Well now Japan had it's own meltdown and keeping the costs stable after seeing it happen in America and, worse, Ukraine, didn't help preventing it. And I don't know about Canada, but France has some good candidates for the next meltdown all over the place...
- jessriedel 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... "Coal Kills 4,000 Times More People Per Unit of Energy than Nuclear" http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/coal_kills_4000_times_more_peo http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/coal_kills_4000_times_mor...
  - mkesper 11y ago
    http://m.greenpeace.org/international/en/high/press/releases/2016/Fukushima-nuclear-disaster-will-impact-forests-rivers-and-estuaries-for-hundreds-of-years-warns-Greenpeace-report-/ http://m.greenpeace.org/international/en/high/press/releases...
  - ifdefdebug 11y ago
    I did not want to engage into another discussion about which technology kills more people. I wanted to point out that nuclear is expensive. Very expensive. And the USA maybe did a good job requiring that money to be paid. And if nuclear doesn't pay out when the real costs are to be paid, then that's it. Because losing, let's say, a major city to a nuclear disaster, that would be several orders of magnitude more expensive.

DennisP 11y ago

Last year I got to sit in a meeting with people from various nuclear fission startups, along with a former director of the NRC. The startup people said their biggest problem was the NRC's regulatory model. All the current regulations are written for conventional reactors, with mandates that don't make sense for other reactor types. If you want to build something else, you can, but you have to spend a couple hundred million dollars on up-front design. Once you have that, you submit it to the NRC, which only then decides whether you can move forward and actually run some experiments. That's a pretty difficult environment for investors. The startup people said if we at least had a staged process, giving them some kind of hint about whether the NRC might approve the project before spending all that money, then they'd have a much easier time getting investment. Because of all this, reactor startups have been going to other countries. Terrapower is building a demo in China, Thorcon in Indonesia. Terrestrial Energy's in Canada and has good things to say about regulators there. Congress is starting to move towards reforming the system, but it's slow going. Some of these designs have dramatic safety and proliferation advantages. Some other interesting startups are Transatomic and Moltex.

TheSpiceIsLife 11y ago
When people claims newer designs have "dramatic safety and proliferation advantages" they make it sound like existing reactor technology is subject to poor safety record and proliferation problems. We just isn't true. The nuclear reactor technology that's been in use for the past 50 years has killed fewer people per kilowatt hour than any of solar, wind, or hydro power [1]. And despite all the proliferation concerns there are only 9 states states with nuclear weapons[2]. You don't magically get nuclear weapons by having domestic nuclear power. 1. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#23c9332849d2 http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_weapons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_we...
- vidarh 11y ago
  That's true, but part of this is because of the extreme level of safety and security measures, many of which aren't needed for newer designs. E.g. for a long time the waste was seen as a positive because it could go to weapons manufacture. Yes, you don't magically get weapons that way, but you get raw materials. Security and safety features for these plants must be designed accordingly to prevent accidents and to prevent theft of exceedingly dangerous materials. Especially after the end of the nuclear arms race meant most of this waste wasn't of use any more. Reactors that produces much less dangerous waste can get away without a lot of those issues. Likewise, a lot of the regulatory regime is based on reactors where a mistake or accident can lead to a runaway reaction, but are totally wasted on reactors that are "walk-away safe" because they require an outside, powered, neutron source to keep running for example. Nuclear is amazingly safe, and I like to point that out to people too. But old-style nuclear reactors are that safe thanks to an array of extensive and expensive countermeasures against very real dangers, while at least some of the newer designs, assuming the various claims holds, are safe because the failure scenarios themselves are far more benign. That's the point of these designs. A large proportion of the price of nuclear today is because of these safety features. Remove the need for a good chunk of them, and nuclear becomes far cheaper.