4 ms·

"No matter how detailed your design, or solid your physics and mathematics, they cannot win an argument with someone who is simply afraid of the concept." Yes,

"No matter how detailed your design, or solid your physics and mathematics, they cannot win an argument with someone who is simply afraid of the concept." Yes, politics muddy the water rather badly for fission. Let me offer a much more rational drawback: Time. Nuclear plants take a decade to build (on paper; in reality they miss deadlines constantly and you're lucky if it's done within 20 years). A PV solar farm takes more like 2 years to build. Per Swanson's law, you can expect the price to halve by the time a nuclear plant with today's technology is built. Nuclear plants of today's tech are competing with the solar plants of (today + 8years)'s tech. More importantly, you don't get the return on investment until after the plant is built, So the same money that was dropped into a 10-year project needs to be a lot more profitable than a series of 2-year solar farm projects that bring in more money to be invested constantly. Hell, by the time we build our nuclear plant, battery tech might well have matured enough to make PV a cheap baseload power source. That makes nuclear even more financially risky.

avar 10y ago
> Nuclear plants take a decade to build That very much depends on the country & regulatory environment. If you browse through the ones China has been building [1] it seems to be taking them around 5-7 years from breaking first ground [2] and 5 years or so to add additional reactors to an existing site [3]. You can browse through other countries on that site & Wikipedia to see how long these things take to build. The only ones that take more than a decade are ones where the limiting factor is clearly not nuclear, but the regulatory environment. 1. https://www.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=CN https://www.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.a... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changjiang_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changjiang_Nuclear_Power_Plant 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuqing_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuqing_Nuclear_Power_Plant
- legulere 10y ago
  One example how the regulatory environment hinders faster construction: In olkiluoto some contractor used some cheap concrete instead of the special one that was supposed to be used for safety reasons. The concrete was pulled out again and the right one used afterwards. What of this would have happened differently in China do you think?
- jessaustin 10y ago
  Everything gets built faster and more cheaply in China than in e.g. USA. Nuclear plants aren't special in that sense. There are trade-offs involved, and probably we could build stuff a bit faster here, but let's figure out how to build highways cheap and fast before blithely assuming we have the answer for cheap and fast nuclear plants.

avar 10y ago

> Nuclear plants take a decade to build That very much depends on the country & regulatory environment. If you browse through the ones China has been building [1] it seems to be taking them around 5-7 years from breaking first ground [2] and 5 years or so to add additional reactors to an existing site [3]. You can browse through other countries on that site & Wikipedia to see how long these things take to build. The only ones that take more than a decade are ones where the limiting factor is clearly not nuclear, but the regulatory environment. 1. https://www.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=CN https://www.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.a... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changjiang_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changjiang_Nuclear_Power_Plant 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuqing_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuqing_Nuclear_Power_Plant

legulere 10y ago
One example how the regulatory environment hinders faster construction: In olkiluoto some contractor used some cheap concrete instead of the special one that was supposed to be used for safety reasons. The concrete was pulled out again and the right one used afterwards. What of this would have happened differently in China do you think?
jessaustin 10y ago
Everything gets built faster and more cheaply in China than in e.g. USA. Nuclear plants aren't special in that sense. There are trade-offs involved, and probably we could build stuff a bit faster here, but let's figure out how to build highways cheap and fast before blithely assuming we have the answer for cheap and fast nuclear plants.