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Nuclear power can save the world.... If the US can build reactors at 1/10th the cost they do right now. That’s the solution. Not the much cheaper clean energy

Nuclear power can save the world.... If the US can build reactors at 1/10th the cost they do right now. That’s the solution. Not the much cheaper clean energy sources that already exist and are being built out in record numbers... Nuclear is great. It just loses out because it’s too expensive and worse, it gets more expensive with time. If the reasoning behind that is based on irrational human fears then first propose a solution for irrational community fears. You’ll also be able to solve the SF housing and homelessness crisis at one go then.

rargulati 8y ago
Can you give more information on why this is? Any recommended reading to better understand where and why the costs increase?
- DennisP 8y ago
  The article explains pretty well why it's expensive, and how to fix it.
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  Here's a recent report about what makes nuclear expensive and how to fix it [1]. [1] https://www.eti.co.uk/library/the-eti-nuclear-cost-drivers-project-summary-report https://www.eti.co.uk/library/the-eti-nuclear-cost-drivers-p...
istjohn 8y ago
FTA: New nuclear power plants are hugely expensive to build in the United States today. This is why so few are being built. But they don’t need to be so costly. The key to recovering our lost ability to build affordable nuclear plants is standardization and repetition. ... Currently, as M.I.T.’s Richard Lester, a nuclear engineer, has written, a company proposing a new reactor design faces “the prospect of having to spend a billion dollars or more on an open- ended, all‑or‑nothing licensing process without any certainty of outcomes.” We need government on the side of this clean-energy transformation, with supportive regulation, streamlined approval, investment in research and incentives that tilt producers and consumers away from carbon. ... [I]n 60 years of nuclear power, only three accidents have raised public alarm: Three Mile Island in 1979, which killed no one; Fukushima in 2011, which killed no one (many deaths resulted from the tsunami and some from a panicked evacuation near the plant); and Chernobyl in 1986, the result of extraordinary Soviet bungling, which killed 31 in the accident and perhaps several thousand from cancer, around the same number killed by coal emissions every day.
- pfdietz 8y ago
  The US never had the ability to build affordable nuclear plants. That's a major reason the first nuclear construction boom fizzled out here.
  - pdonis 8y ago
    > The US never had the ability to build affordable nuclear plants. Sure it has. They're just getting used by the Navy, not by civilians. There's no reason why the same methods that have been successfully used to control cost and schedule for those reactors couldn't be used for civilian reactors.
    - Retric 8y ago
      Navy reactors are extremely expensive. They are worth it because of logistics around oil. Even when comparing to oil, Nuclear is still more expensive. “Specifically, total life-cycle costs would be 19 percent higher for a fleet of nuclear destroyers.” https://www.cbo.gov/publication/41454 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/41454
      - village-idiot 8y ago
        Navy reactors are also designed differently due to the confined space in which they typically operate. This is why they use the much more expensive super grade plutonium, as it reduces the amount of heavy shielding required to protect crew who must live very close to their reactors.
        philipkglass 8y ago
        Super grade plutonium is for warheads that humans will spend a lot of time near, like those in submarine launched ballistic missiles. But American naval reactors do use highly enriched uranium, which is much more expensive and needs more safeguarding than the low enriched uranium used in power reactors.
      - 8y ago
Ericson2314 8y ago
The US cannot do infrastructure, or really any serious investment, period. Our laughable incompetance would seriously hinder any strategy. With other strategies, that is one of many impedements. With nuclear that is the only impedement. Hopefully US figures that our rampent cost diesese on sll the things is just embarrassing, and we need a "time out", a throwing away of the actuarial pessimism, and a command economy "probation" in these important matters. Get the costs under control, and then we earn the right to do capitalism for essential goods again.
- ineedasername 8y ago
  I don't think it's incompetence, it's a lack of political will. On energy, entrenched interests win out through regulatory capture and lobbying. On other infrastructure issues, most people and politicians simply don't care. Maybe once we get to a few bridge collapse per week.
  - cubano 8y ago
    Bingo. This is simply a political problem and nothing else. FUD and "not-in-my-backyard!" reigns supreme when it comes to the final approval process. As things currently stand, no group of politicians could survive the political fallout of getting a reactor build in their district. How can anything get done if doing so buys you unemployment from the ultimate cushy job of being an elected representative? Also, no one, not even the most ardent supporters, really wants a reactor built anywhere near them or their kids playgrounds. The anti-nuke-power crowd has just done too good a job on the older generation to ever hope things can change for them. Let's hope the Millennials can do a better job getting these things built.
    - amanaplanacanal 8y ago
      First: I'm not anti-nuclear. It's tons cleaner than coal, and coal kills people every year. But, if nat gas, wind, and solar are cheaper and faster to bring online, and can be build at pretty much any scale we want from single household to freaking huge, why would we build nuclear?
bilbo0s 8y ago
This. I don’t know much about how things work in other nations, but in the US, the government is not as readily liberal with the necessary subsidies. When you consider the slow motion train crash that is Vogtie, you can see the issue. Government doesn’t want to out and out pay for everything, so they set up structures that actually turn out to be more problematic than simply handing over 50 billion would be.
thangalin 8y ago
> It just loses out because it’s too expensive and worse, it gets more expensive with time. "The estimated cost of the remaining border wall segments are between $15 and $25 billion, with each mile of fencing costing $16 million." [1] "The total investment for the stellarator itself over 1997–2014 amounted to €370 million, while the total cost for the IPP site in Greifswald including investment plus operating costs (personnel and material resources) amounted to [$1.2 billion USD] for that 18-year period." [2] It's more a matter of funding than cost, IMO. [1]: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/cost-of-border-wall https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/cost-of-... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X#Financing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X#Financing
- pfdietz 8y ago
  Stellarators (and fusion in general) will be notable for being an energy source that makes even nuclear fission look cheap.
- lispm 8y ago
  Wendelstein is an experiment, many decades away from a practical application. The ITER is expected to cost >20bn €
  - pfdietz 8y ago
    If ITER were augmented with a blanket and turbine to turn its gross fusion output into electrical power at 40% efficiency, the cost would be just ~$100/W(e), or two orders of magnitude higher than PV. Even adjusting for capacity factor (stipulating the fusion reactor at 100%), it would be ludicrously uncompetitive. Part of the reason for this is just how massive ITER is. The power density of the reactor is 0.05 MW/m^3, some 400 times lower than the power density of the reactor vessel of a commercial PWR.
    - lispm 8y ago
      It's a really complex machine and it hasn't been designed to produce any electricity yet. So it's a fusion experiment and not a power plant. The hope is that this device leads to another one which might be able to sustain operation and produce electricity. But how much will that cost? Will one be able to mass produce such a machine at competitive costs? Will we see larger and smaller designs?
DennisP 8y ago
"Nuclear is expensive in the U.S." seems like an inadequate rebuttal to an article that spends so much time explaining why it's expensive in the U.S. and how to fix it. Some countries are able to do nuclear at much lower cost, e.g. South Korea.
sampo 8y ago
> clean energy sources that already exist and are being built out in record numbers What is the fastest, new renewable power capacity any country has at any time build, in added W/year/capita? In both nominal and actual power generation? Or the fastest you can see or hope will happen in near future? Sweden built 10850MW nuclear in 20 years from 1965 to 1985. This means about 68W per year per capita. How do the already existing, and potential future endeavors in building renewal capacity compare to this number? The number is nominal, but for nuclear I'd guess the actual long term power output is about 90% of the nominal.
- hokuem 8y ago
  I looked quickly for fun, and Quebec/Newfoundland built 22855MW hydro in 20 years from 1971-1991: http://www.hydroquebec.com/production/centrale-hydroelectrique.html http://www.hydroquebec.com/production/centrale-hydroelectriq... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill_Falls_Generating_Station https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill_Falls_Generating_S...
emmelaich 8y ago
I'm in favour of nuclear. But two other things against them ... 1. They take a long time to build 2. They provide a large base power and are costly to stop and start.
rladd 8y ago
The only reason there are commercial nuclear power plants in the USA is because their liability was artificially limited to $450M per plant by the Price Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...). Without that law there wouldn't be any. The law was passed because no insurance company would agree to insure a nuclear plant, precisely because of the crazy exposure if anything went wrong. I think the insurers have a good point. And that's why I don't think we should subject our civilian population to risks which the experts in risk (actuaries) have decided are so bad that they refused to touch them.
- gruez 8y ago
  >their liability was artificially limited to $450M per plant [...] The law was passed because no insurance company would agree to insure a nuclear plant, precisely because of the crazy exposure if anything went wrong. Is there a reason why coal powerplants which emit pollution (known to cause lung cancer) as part of normal operation aren't liable? It seems like the legal system punishes catastrophic failures, but something like slightly increasing the rate of cancer doesn't get any punishment because the damage is so spread out and not worthwhile to prosecute/sue. Given this, I would argue that coal power plants also have their liabilities "artificially limited".
  - kristopolous 8y ago
    Alright sure. Coal is also a terrible idea for energy and we also shouldn't be having coal. Pro nuclear people have this bizarre dichotomy as if it's either Charles Dickens 1840 style coal or Star Trek style nuclear. In reality, cost in storage and renewables are dropping like Moore's law (they have their own thing called Swanson's law) and even if you did everything right with nuclear you'd be losing money on it in the lifetime of the plant compared to things like wind. Pennsylvania had a bill recently to keep some nuclear plants open... It would involve an increase in the cost of electricity because it's more expensive. That's why investors have run away from it. The writing is on the wall. Renewables are increasingly cheaper and easier to deploy and scale and the future trajectories heavily favor them. The only thing nuclear has is a centralization of power, capital, control, and ownership. You have one robber baron waving his scepter over the entire energy consuming public because nuclear is extraordinarily centralized. It keeps energy being run as feudal monarchies and that's a power the industry doesn't want to cede.
hellllllllooo 8y ago
Exactly, people can't agree on basic stuff that will help people at a small scale. This is beyond a technical problem but more a problem with a disfunctional processes. We could solve lots of current problems if there was the collective will to.

rargulati 8y ago

Can you give more information on why this is? Any recommended reading to better understand where and why the costs increase?

DennisP 8y ago
The article explains pretty well why it's expensive, and how to fix it.
acidburnNSA 8y ago
Here's a recent report about what makes nuclear expensive and how to fix it [1]. [1] https://www.eti.co.uk/library/the-eti-nuclear-cost-drivers-project-summary-report https://www.eti.co.uk/library/the-eti-nuclear-cost-drivers-p...

istjohn 8y ago

FTA: New nuclear power plants are hugely expensive to build in the United States today. This is why so few are being built. But they don’t need to be so costly. The key to recovering our lost ability to build affordable nuclear plants is standardization and repetition. ... Currently, as M.I.T.’s Richard Lester, a nuclear engineer, has written, a company proposing a new reactor design faces “the prospect of having to spend a billion dollars or more on an open- ended, all‑or‑nothing licensing process without any certainty of outcomes.” We need government on the side of this clean-energy transformation, with supportive regulation, streamlined approval, investment in research and incentives that tilt producers and consumers away from carbon. ... [I]n 60 years of nuclear power, only three accidents have raised public alarm: Three Mile Island in 1979, which killed no one; Fukushima in 2011, which killed no one (many deaths resulted from the tsunami and some from a panicked evacuation near the plant); and Chernobyl in 1986, the result of extraordinary Soviet bungling, which killed 31 in the accident and perhaps several thousand from cancer, around the same number killed by coal emissions every day.

pfdietz 8y ago
The US never had the ability to build affordable nuclear plants. That's a major reason the first nuclear construction boom fizzled out here.
- pdonis 8y ago
  > The US never had the ability to build affordable nuclear plants. Sure it has. They're just getting used by the Navy, not by civilians. There's no reason why the same methods that have been successfully used to control cost and schedule for those reactors couldn't be used for civilian reactors.
  - Retric 8y ago
    Navy reactors are extremely expensive. They are worth it because of logistics around oil. Even when comparing to oil, Nuclear is still more expensive. “Specifically, total life-cycle costs would be 19 percent higher for a fleet of nuclear destroyers.” https://www.cbo.gov/publication/41454 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/41454
    - village-idiot 8y ago
      Navy reactors are also designed differently due to the confined space in which they typically operate. This is why they use the much more expensive super grade plutonium, as it reduces the amount of heavy shielding required to protect crew who must live very close to their reactors.
      - philipkglass 8y ago
        Super grade plutonium is for warheads that humans will spend a lot of time near, like those in submarine launched ballistic missiles. But American naval reactors do use highly enriched uranium, which is much more expensive and needs more safeguarding than the low enriched uranium used in power reactors.
    - 8y ago

Ericson2314 8y ago

The US cannot do infrastructure, or really any serious investment, period. Our laughable incompetance would seriously hinder any strategy. With other strategies, that is one of many impedements. With nuclear that is the only impedement. Hopefully US figures that our rampent cost diesese on sll the things is just embarrassing, and we need a "time out", a throwing away of the actuarial pessimism, and a command economy "probation" in these important matters. Get the costs under control, and then we earn the right to do capitalism for essential goods again.

ineedasername 8y ago
I don't think it's incompetence, it's a lack of political will. On energy, entrenched interests win out through regulatory capture and lobbying. On other infrastructure issues, most people and politicians simply don't care. Maybe once we get to a few bridge collapse per week.
- cubano 8y ago
  Bingo. This is simply a political problem and nothing else. FUD and "not-in-my-backyard!" reigns supreme when it comes to the final approval process. As things currently stand, no group of politicians could survive the political fallout of getting a reactor build in their district. How can anything get done if doing so buys you unemployment from the ultimate cushy job of being an elected representative? Also, no one, not even the most ardent supporters, really wants a reactor built anywhere near them or their kids playgrounds. The anti-nuke-power crowd has just done too good a job on the older generation to ever hope things can change for them. Let's hope the Millennials can do a better job getting these things built.
  - amanaplanacanal 8y ago
    First: I'm not anti-nuclear. It's tons cleaner than coal, and coal kills people every year. But, if nat gas, wind, and solar are cheaper and faster to bring online, and can be build at pretty much any scale we want from single household to freaking huge, why would we build nuclear?

bilbo0s 8y ago

This. I don’t know much about how things work in other nations, but in the US, the government is not as readily liberal with the necessary subsidies. When you consider the slow motion train crash that is Vogtie, you can see the issue. Government doesn’t want to out and out pay for everything, so they set up structures that actually turn out to be more problematic than simply handing over 50 billion would be.

thangalin 8y ago

> It just loses out because it’s too expensive and worse, it gets more expensive with time. "The estimated cost of the remaining border wall segments are between $15 and $25 billion, with each mile of fencing costing $16 million." [1] "The total investment for the stellarator itself over 1997–2014 amounted to €370 million, while the total cost for the IPP site in Greifswald including investment plus operating costs (personnel and material resources) amounted to [$1.2 billion USD] for that 18-year period." [2] It's more a matter of funding than cost, IMO. [1]: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/cost-of-border-wall https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/cost-of-... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X#Financing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X#Financing

pfdietz 8y ago
Stellarators (and fusion in general) will be notable for being an energy source that makes even nuclear fission look cheap.
lispm 8y ago
Wendelstein is an experiment, many decades away from a practical application. The ITER is expected to cost >20bn €
- pfdietz 8y ago
  If ITER were augmented with a blanket and turbine to turn its gross fusion output into electrical power at 40% efficiency, the cost would be just ~$100/W(e), or two orders of magnitude higher than PV. Even adjusting for capacity factor (stipulating the fusion reactor at 100%), it would be ludicrously uncompetitive. Part of the reason for this is just how massive ITER is. The power density of the reactor is 0.05 MW/m^3, some 400 times lower than the power density of the reactor vessel of a commercial PWR.
  - lispm 8y ago
    It's a really complex machine and it hasn't been designed to produce any electricity yet. So it's a fusion experiment and not a power plant. The hope is that this device leads to another one which might be able to sustain operation and produce electricity. But how much will that cost? Will one be able to mass produce such a machine at competitive costs? Will we see larger and smaller designs?

DennisP 8y ago

"Nuclear is expensive in the U.S." seems like an inadequate rebuttal to an article that spends so much time explaining why it's expensive in the U.S. and how to fix it. Some countries are able to do nuclear at much lower cost, e.g. South Korea.

sampo 8y ago

> clean energy sources that already exist and are being built out in record numbers What is the fastest, new renewable power capacity any country has at any time build, in added W/year/capita? In both nominal and actual power generation? Or the fastest you can see or hope will happen in near future? Sweden built 10850MW nuclear in 20 years from 1965 to 1985. This means about 68W per year per capita. How do the already existing, and potential future endeavors in building renewal capacity compare to this number? The number is nominal, but for nuclear I'd guess the actual long term power output is about 90% of the nominal.

hokuem 8y ago
I looked quickly for fun, and Quebec/Newfoundland built 22855MW hydro in 20 years from 1971-1991: http://www.hydroquebec.com/production/centrale-hydroelectrique.html http://www.hydroquebec.com/production/centrale-hydroelectriq... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill_Falls_Generating_Station https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill_Falls_Generating_S...

emmelaich 8y ago

I'm in favour of nuclear. But two other things against them ... 1. They take a long time to build 2. They provide a large base power and are costly to stop and start.

rladd 8y ago

The only reason there are commercial nuclear power plants in the USA is because their liability was artificially limited to $450M per plant by the Price Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...). Without that law there wouldn't be any. The law was passed because no insurance company would agree to insure a nuclear plant, precisely because of the crazy exposure if anything went wrong. I think the insurers have a good point. And that's why I don't think we should subject our civilian population to risks which the experts in risk (actuaries) have decided are so bad that they refused to touch them.

gruez 8y ago
>their liability was artificially limited to $450M per plant [...] The law was passed because no insurance company would agree to insure a nuclear plant, precisely because of the crazy exposure if anything went wrong. Is there a reason why coal powerplants which emit pollution (known to cause lung cancer) as part of normal operation aren't liable? It seems like the legal system punishes catastrophic failures, but something like slightly increasing the rate of cancer doesn't get any punishment because the damage is so spread out and not worthwhile to prosecute/sue. Given this, I would argue that coal power plants also have their liabilities "artificially limited".
- kristopolous 8y ago
  Alright sure. Coal is also a terrible idea for energy and we also shouldn't be having coal. Pro nuclear people have this bizarre dichotomy as if it's either Charles Dickens 1840 style coal or Star Trek style nuclear. In reality, cost in storage and renewables are dropping like Moore's law (they have their own thing called Swanson's law) and even if you did everything right with nuclear you'd be losing money on it in the lifetime of the plant compared to things like wind. Pennsylvania had a bill recently to keep some nuclear plants open... It would involve an increase in the cost of electricity because it's more expensive. That's why investors have run away from it. The writing is on the wall. Renewables are increasingly cheaper and easier to deploy and scale and the future trajectories heavily favor them. The only thing nuclear has is a centralization of power, capital, control, and ownership. You have one robber baron waving his scepter over the entire energy consuming public because nuclear is extraordinarily centralized. It keeps energy being run as feudal monarchies and that's a power the industry doesn't want to cede.

hellllllllooo 8y ago

Exactly, people can't agree on basic stuff that will help people at a small scale. This is beyond a technical problem but more a problem with a disfunctional processes. We could solve lots of current problems if there was the collective will to.