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>We need 70x more nuclear power than we have today A nuclear fission world will never happen due to the economics of it. Fission plants are hugely expensive,

>We need 70x more nuclear power than we have today A nuclear fission world will never happen due to the economics of it. Fission plants are hugely expensive, and take a decade or more to construct. Investors would prefer to bring 100MW a year online every year than wait 10 years for 1GW to come online and hope the power produced is still competitive. Then after the plant has lived its useful life, it cannot simply be demolished like a gas plant or wind turbine. It takes specialists a good few years and more money to decommission the plant.

mavhc 7y ago
If we're building 70x more than today, are there any economies of scale? Problem is we can't wait for research into better designs, have to act yesterday
- imtringued 7y ago
  That entirely depends on your time frame. If you're willing to wait 70 years then sure there will be economies of scale to be exploited. If you want to do it in 20 then you will have to build more highly specialized factories that produce the custom parts needed by nuclear plants. After that the factories will be useless for the next 50 years after which you need them again because the 50 year old plants are about to be decommissioned and replaced with never plants.
roenxi 7y ago
> A nuclear fission world will never happen due to the economics of it. 'Economics of it' means different things to different people, but I'm just looking through the wiki page for electricity costs [0]. I'd bet when a lot of older people talked about solar being too expensive they set their expectations based on prices in the 80s [1]. Or they mean that renewables are horrible value technically for the money spent because they have highly cyclical output vs. consistent controllable output of a thermal plant. The economics of nuclear aren't the best, but they also aren't that bad. Government policy routinely changes the price of things by 10-30%. We can cope with that easily, and that brings a fully nuclear world well into the realm of the possible. Investors aren't scared of the high upfront cost of nuclear. They are scared by the risk of spending the high upfront cost of nuclear then having the rug pulled out from under them by hostile government policy. If there was no risk of government interference and a supportive policy environment (eg, blanket ban on competition from fossil fuels) investors would be more than happy to invest. They are looking to park their money somewhere. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Price_history_of_silicon_PV_cells_since_1977.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Price_history_of_silicon_...
- Jedd 7y ago
  > Investors aren't scared of the high upfront cost of nuclear. They are scared by the risk of spending the high upfront cost of nuclear then having the rug pulled out from under them by hostile government policy. You peddle this line every time the subject of nuclear (fission) power comes up. My usual response is to point to all the countries that have administrations that are pro fission nuclear -- the UK being the most magnificent example -- and observe that the relentless scheduling delays, cost blowouts, and logistical problems, combined with the equally relentless growth of deployment (and reduction in cost) of renewables in that isle. In any case, no one's interest in jumping onto the fission nuclear bandwagon around the world can't entirely be down to some policy wobbling going on within the USA.
  - DennisP 7y ago
    And yet, France converted their grid to 80% nuclear in twenty years. Maybe we should do whatever they did.
    - jjoonathan 7y ago
      The US is 20% nuclear, maybe we should do whatever we did. Congrats to solar, btw, for finally breaking into the single digit percentages.
    - Jedd 7y ago
      And yet five years ago the French government committed to dropping their nuclear power generation from 75% to 50% by 2025. Last year this was revised out by ten years -- same target, though, but aiming for 50%. So one country briefly had three quarters of their power coming from nuclear, and this country's typically held up as the poster child of nuclear fission, and they're moving away from it.
      - petre 7y ago
        50% nuclear is enough to achieve 100% clean energy today. It wasn't enough 50 years ago when renewables were expensive. Basically it has to provide base load power which is supplemented with renewables and peaker plants.
godelski 7y ago
> A nuclear fission world will never happen due to the economics of it. I'm not sure why this keeps being said. France's prices for electricity are cheaper than Germany. In fact they are cheaper than most European countries [0]. Nuclear does have a lot of upfront costs, but they are cheap to run once built. But the construction price will never drop if we stop building. Doing so has already made prices go up. What really matters is 1) can the company that made the plant make a profit? 2) If we need to subsidize to make 1=yes then is that price cheaper than the cost of not doing it (cost by economic damage done by increased CO2 during that period). But the irony of this is that your argument is very similar to that which many have made about solar. I expect the same thing will happen when fusion becomes a thing. In reality it is all about the S curve. [0] https://1-stromvergleich.com/electricity-prices-europe/ https://1-stromvergleich.com/electricity-prices-europe/
- epistasis 7y ago
  Your link is about residential prices, not about the cost to build the reactors. There are two key questions: 1) what was the subsidy level for construction of the French generation of reactors, and 2) can we do this again? That second question is of course the most important one, and the answer seems to be a resounding and hard no, at least if the French are constructing it, based on their recent attempts. South Korea is also cited as another country that may have figured out how to build reactors cheaply. However recent news is that it was all cartels and corruption and there's likely massive amounts of fraud. That leaves what, Canada and Russia? Canada I kind of trust, and Russia not at all. CANDUs were pretty great, but we can't exactly order more of them now. It seems that the age of the Rankine cycle's efficiency is coming to an end, at least in terms of cost effectiveness. Even natural gas uses a combined cycle to compete these days, as new tech finally usurps what has been the champion for over a century.
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    Canada gave up on CANDU. The ACR got no buyers, and the remnants of AECL were sold for a mere $15M.
- gridlockd 7y ago
hedora 7y ago
Ironically, the environmental movement in the US intentionally sabotages clean, cheap nuclear power. France does fine on both counts. They standardized on a now-antique reactor design, and just kept stamping it out and backporting safety and process improvements to existing plants. I suspect China has / will have a similar track record, but with newer designs.
- cannonedhamster 7y ago
  Because clean is only if you don't include the waste and you never have a disaster. Literally the only way nuclear is clean is in the best possible case scenario, which happens for the most part because of the training and safety that are in place in most countries, but when it doesn't it's bad and impacts huge chunks of the planet. We have had nearly 100 accidents, most occurring in the United States according to Wikipedia. That's not a small number of accidents considering how long nuclear power has been around, it's more than one a year with the majority within the last 40. Most aren't major events, but I'm not sure how minor you can really claim a nuclear event to be. This isn't too say the fossil fuel alternatives are better, but nuclear boosters aren't really doing themselves any favors by glossing over the negatives.
  - roenxi 7y ago
    > Because clean is only if you don't include the waste and you never have a disaster It is clean after accounting for those things. At a guess you haven't grappled with exactly how tiny the volumes of waste are compared to the scale of what is achieved. 100 accidents is a very small number. You haven't linked your source so I don't know what the standard or timeframe is, but it is a safe bet that whatever an accident is that 100 number is irrelevant. > I'm not sure how minor you can really claim a nuclear event to be Very minor. I recall an incident at a remote (uranium mining) minesite reporting to the regulator because a vat had broken open. Very concerning to the mine management - biggest incident they'd had in years. It would be like getting worried because a gold mine's cyanide tank had split open - a big problem if you might have been standing under the tank. Not a concern to HN posters. > nuclear boosters aren't really doing themselves any favors by glossing over the negatives. I agree, my problem is people keep talking about the negatives and then bringing out these statistics that say that nuclear is at worst about the same as the alternatives. The negatives are that the cost of a meltdown is highly concentrated in time and space, and people might have to move to a different city if it happens near them. At the minute scale of risk that is dealing with I just don't think that is very concerning. Especially since there are persistent rumours that we've improved our design capabilities since 1980 (we have computers now!) and that the new generations of reactor technology can't fail in the way the old ones did.
atupis 7y ago
There is also realpolitik reason why it would not happen. widespread fission reactors means more countries have access to nuclear weapons.
- godelski 7y ago
  This is a very common misnomer. Mainly because weapons require so much more enriched uranium. Enrichment plants have to be much bigger. A size difference you can usually tell just from satellite imagery.
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    Nuclear weapons can be built with plutonium, not enriched uranium. And plutonium from power reactors can be used, although it's not ideal.
- _Tev 7y ago
  There's an order of magnitude difference between enrichment levels for reactors and for nuclear weapons. It's like saying that any nation with orbital rockets can throw asteroids at you.

mavhc 7y ago

If we're building 70x more than today, are there any economies of scale? Problem is we can't wait for research into better designs, have to act yesterday

imtringued 7y ago
That entirely depends on your time frame. If you're willing to wait 70 years then sure there will be economies of scale to be exploited. If you want to do it in 20 then you will have to build more highly specialized factories that produce the custom parts needed by nuclear plants. After that the factories will be useless for the next 50 years after which you need them again because the 50 year old plants are about to be decommissioned and replaced with never plants.

roenxi 7y ago

> A nuclear fission world will never happen due to the economics of it. 'Economics of it' means different things to different people, but I'm just looking through the wiki page for electricity costs [0]. I'd bet when a lot of older people talked about solar being too expensive they set their expectations based on prices in the 80s [1]. Or they mean that renewables are horrible value technically for the money spent because they have highly cyclical output vs. consistent controllable output of a thermal plant. The economics of nuclear aren't the best, but they also aren't that bad. Government policy routinely changes the price of things by 10-30%. We can cope with that easily, and that brings a fully nuclear world well into the realm of the possible. Investors aren't scared of the high upfront cost of nuclear. They are scared by the risk of spending the high upfront cost of nuclear then having the rug pulled out from under them by hostile government policy. If there was no risk of government interference and a supportive policy environment (eg, blanket ban on competition from fossil fuels) investors would be more than happy to invest. They are looking to park their money somewhere. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Price_history_of_silicon_PV_cells_since_1977.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Price_history_of_silicon_...

Jedd 7y ago
> Investors aren't scared of the high upfront cost of nuclear. They are scared by the risk of spending the high upfront cost of nuclear then having the rug pulled out from under them by hostile government policy. You peddle this line every time the subject of nuclear (fission) power comes up. My usual response is to point to all the countries that have administrations that are pro fission nuclear -- the UK being the most magnificent example -- and observe that the relentless scheduling delays, cost blowouts, and logistical problems, combined with the equally relentless growth of deployment (and reduction in cost) of renewables in that isle. In any case, no one's interest in jumping onto the fission nuclear bandwagon around the world can't entirely be down to some policy wobbling going on within the USA.
- DennisP 7y ago
  And yet, France converted their grid to 80% nuclear in twenty years. Maybe we should do whatever they did.
  - jjoonathan 7y ago
    The US is 20% nuclear, maybe we should do whatever we did. Congrats to solar, btw, for finally breaking into the single digit percentages.
  - Jedd 7y ago
    And yet five years ago the French government committed to dropping their nuclear power generation from 75% to 50% by 2025. Last year this was revised out by ten years -- same target, though, but aiming for 50%. So one country briefly had three quarters of their power coming from nuclear, and this country's typically held up as the poster child of nuclear fission, and they're moving away from it.
    - petre 7y ago
      50% nuclear is enough to achieve 100% clean energy today. It wasn't enough 50 years ago when renewables were expensive. Basically it has to provide base load power which is supplemented with renewables and peaker plants.

godelski 7y ago

> A nuclear fission world will never happen due to the economics of it. I'm not sure why this keeps being said. France's prices for electricity are cheaper than Germany. In fact they are cheaper than most European countries [0]. Nuclear does have a lot of upfront costs, but they are cheap to run once built. But the construction price will never drop if we stop building. Doing so has already made prices go up. What really matters is 1) can the company that made the plant make a profit? 2) If we need to subsidize to make 1=yes then is that price cheaper than the cost of not doing it (cost by economic damage done by increased CO2 during that period). But the irony of this is that your argument is very similar to that which many have made about solar. I expect the same thing will happen when fusion becomes a thing. In reality it is all about the S curve. [0] https://1-stromvergleich.com/electricity-prices-europe/ https://1-stromvergleich.com/electricity-prices-europe/

epistasis 7y ago
Your link is about residential prices, not about the cost to build the reactors. There are two key questions: 1) what was the subsidy level for construction of the French generation of reactors, and 2) can we do this again? That second question is of course the most important one, and the answer seems to be a resounding and hard no, at least if the French are constructing it, based on their recent attempts. South Korea is also cited as another country that may have figured out how to build reactors cheaply. However recent news is that it was all cartels and corruption and there's likely massive amounts of fraud. That leaves what, Canada and Russia? Canada I kind of trust, and Russia not at all. CANDUs were pretty great, but we can't exactly order more of them now. It seems that the age of the Rankine cycle's efficiency is coming to an end, at least in terms of cost effectiveness. Even natural gas uses a combined cycle to compete these days, as new tech finally usurps what has been the champion for over a century.
- pfdietz 7y ago
  Canada gave up on CANDU. The ACR got no buyers, and the remnants of AECL were sold for a mere $15M.
gridlockd 7y ago

hedora 7y ago

Ironically, the environmental movement in the US intentionally sabotages clean, cheap nuclear power. France does fine on both counts. They standardized on a now-antique reactor design, and just kept stamping it out and backporting safety and process improvements to existing plants. I suspect China has / will have a similar track record, but with newer designs.

cannonedhamster 7y ago
Because clean is only if you don't include the waste and you never have a disaster. Literally the only way nuclear is clean is in the best possible case scenario, which happens for the most part because of the training and safety that are in place in most countries, but when it doesn't it's bad and impacts huge chunks of the planet. We have had nearly 100 accidents, most occurring in the United States according to Wikipedia. That's not a small number of accidents considering how long nuclear power has been around, it's more than one a year with the majority within the last 40. Most aren't major events, but I'm not sure how minor you can really claim a nuclear event to be. This isn't too say the fossil fuel alternatives are better, but nuclear boosters aren't really doing themselves any favors by glossing over the negatives.
- roenxi 7y ago
  > Because clean is only if you don't include the waste and you never have a disaster It is clean after accounting for those things. At a guess you haven't grappled with exactly how tiny the volumes of waste are compared to the scale of what is achieved. 100 accidents is a very small number. You haven't linked your source so I don't know what the standard or timeframe is, but it is a safe bet that whatever an accident is that 100 number is irrelevant. > I'm not sure how minor you can really claim a nuclear event to be Very minor. I recall an incident at a remote (uranium mining) minesite reporting to the regulator because a vat had broken open. Very concerning to the mine management - biggest incident they'd had in years. It would be like getting worried because a gold mine's cyanide tank had split open - a big problem if you might have been standing under the tank. Not a concern to HN posters. > nuclear boosters aren't really doing themselves any favors by glossing over the negatives. I agree, my problem is people keep talking about the negatives and then bringing out these statistics that say that nuclear is at worst about the same as the alternatives. The negatives are that the cost of a meltdown is highly concentrated in time and space, and people might have to move to a different city if it happens near them. At the minute scale of risk that is dealing with I just don't think that is very concerning. Especially since there are persistent rumours that we've improved our design capabilities since 1980 (we have computers now!) and that the new generations of reactor technology can't fail in the way the old ones did.

atupis 7y ago

There is also realpolitik reason why it would not happen. widespread fission reactors means more countries have access to nuclear weapons.

godelski 7y ago
This is a very common misnomer. Mainly because weapons require so much more enriched uranium. Enrichment plants have to be much bigger. A size difference you can usually tell just from satellite imagery.
- pfdietz 7y ago
  Nuclear weapons can be built with plutonium, not enriched uranium. And plutonium from power reactors can be used, although it's not ideal.
_Tev 7y ago
There's an order of magnitude difference between enrichment levels for reactors and for nuclear weapons. It's like saying that any nation with orbital rockets can throw asteroids at you.