5 ms·

> This sort of typical overrun is why US utilities stopped building more nuclear in the 80s. Thats some revisionist history to fit the current zeitgeist, right

> This sort of typical overrun is why US utilities stopped building more nuclear in the 80s. Thats some revisionist history to fit the current zeitgeist, right there. What stopped nuclear construction in the United States was the complete overreaction to Three Mile Island and the disaster at Chernobyl

LiamMcCalloway 7y ago
No new decisions to build nuclear 10 years prior to three mile island.
thrillgore 7y ago
False. In 2007 construction on Watts Bar unit 2 resumed after years of waiting. Similar work began on Vogtle around the same time. Stop blaming Chernobyl when the truth is clear: the costs of retrofitting most reactor designs to absolve fault tolerance make them inherent unprofitable compared to wind, geothermal, and solar.
pfdietz 7y ago
Nuclear had started running off the rails as early as 1968. TMI was just the cherry on top of the financial crap sundae. http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2016/02/16/nuclear-plant-cost-escalation-a-look-back-and-ahead/ http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2016/02/16/nuclear-plant-cost-esca... The major regulatory hit that that first wave of US nuclear plants took wasn't specific to nuclear: the Calvert Cliffs decision held that the National Environmental Policy Act applied broadly, including to the regulatory process of the AEC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvert_Cliffs_Coordinating_Committee,_Inc._v._Atomic_Energy_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvert_Cliffs_Coordinating_Co...
- kryogen1c 7y ago
  Boy do i appear to be wrong. This was not my underatanding at all. As you and siblings pointed out, nuclear seems to have been frought with problems for a long time. Wikipedia, if it is to be believed, paints an even more dire picture than you say: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_... I find this so counterintuitive having safely operated naval nuclear reactors. More research is needed from me!
  - manfredo 7y ago
    Your comment above was not entirely wrong. The majority of nuclear energy's costs are overhead costs of plant construction. If a plant is not operated for its intended service life, $/MWH will skyrocket. Opposition to nuclear power (which existed prior to Three Mile Island, and increased thereafter) caused plants to be closed prematurely. This drove up the effective cost of nuclear energy, fueling the push for more closures on the basis of higher costs, and so on. Curiously, these sorts of high nuclear costs are not experienced by every country. France's electricity (70-80% nuclear) is a fraction of the cost of Germany's electricity production, while simultaneously emitting less carbon. Countries like South Korea, and Japan (until they cancelled nuclear plants following the tsunami) had cost effective nuclear industries. Cost overruns happened, but not as large as compared to the US. The main explanations for this that I have encountered is that US nuclear plants have tended to be one-off projects, whereas other countries implemented serialized production of a handful of designs. Building 10 instances of the same plant is easier than building 10 different plants.
    - pfdietz 7y ago
      Germany decided, as an act of global charity, to buy renewables when they were much more expensive (they were the top global market for PV ten years ago, when PV was far more expensive than it is now), to drive them down their learning curves. This was spectacularly successful, but they are still paying for that. It says nothing about what someone else would have to pay NOW to install the same renewable capacity. At the same time, France has tried to get its nuclear industry going again with new reactors, to disastrous result. So if you want to build energy infrastructure in 1980, sure, go ahead and choose nuclear over renewables. If you want to do it now, that choice would be crazy.
      - manfredo 7y ago
        It was not spectacularly successful. Germany continues to pollute more than France, with roughly 65% of its electricity generation coming from fossil fuels [1]. In France, nuclear power generates 72% of electricity and fossil fuels account for 9% [2]. And yet, Germans pay twice the rate of France for electricity. It is the worst of both worlds: higher costs and higher carbon emissions. > So if you want to build energy infrastructure in 1980, sure, go ahead and choose nuclear over renewables. If you want to do it now, that choice would be crazy. Did technology magically get worse from 1980? Did the French somehow forget how to build power plants? Nuclear energy projects were cheap during the 1980s because France built a large number of a handful of plant designs. Modern plants are usually one-off projects with a single digit number of plants built of a given design. Building a dozen of the same reactors, turbines, etc. is much cheaper than building one. Political opposition has meant that only small allocations of funds have been dedicated towards nuclear power, so serialized production has not been done recently. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France
epistasis 7y ago
Absolutely not, the history and timelines do not support the narrative of TMI and Chernobyl stopping construction. They certainly didn't help, but go back and read this pre-Chernobyl analysis that lays the blame squarely on mismanagement: https://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-article-reference-nuclear.html?m=1 https://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-article-... Or look at when new projects were started, and you see nuclear starts dramatically fall even before we had TMI and Chernobyl. The revisionist history is to say that we stopped building nuclear because we are scared of it. The reality is that economics and bad management make it extremely unattractive to build, then and now.

LiamMcCalloway 7y ago

No new decisions to build nuclear 10 years prior to three mile island.

thrillgore 7y ago

False. In 2007 construction on Watts Bar unit 2 resumed after years of waiting. Similar work began on Vogtle around the same time. Stop blaming Chernobyl when the truth is clear: the costs of retrofitting most reactor designs to absolve fault tolerance make them inherent unprofitable compared to wind, geothermal, and solar.

pfdietz 7y ago

Nuclear had started running off the rails as early as 1968. TMI was just the cherry on top of the financial crap sundae. http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2016/02/16/nuclear-plant-cost-escalation-a-look-back-and-ahead/ http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2016/02/16/nuclear-plant-cost-esca... The major regulatory hit that that first wave of US nuclear plants took wasn't specific to nuclear: the Calvert Cliffs decision held that the National Environmental Policy Act applied broadly, including to the regulatory process of the AEC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvert_Cliffs_Coordinating_Committee,_Inc._v._Atomic_Energy_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvert_Cliffs_Coordinating_Co...

kryogen1c 7y ago
Boy do i appear to be wrong. This was not my underatanding at all. As you and siblings pointed out, nuclear seems to have been frought with problems for a long time. Wikipedia, if it is to be believed, paints an even more dire picture than you say: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_... I find this so counterintuitive having safely operated naval nuclear reactors. More research is needed from me!
- manfredo 7y ago
  Your comment above was not entirely wrong. The majority of nuclear energy's costs are overhead costs of plant construction. If a plant is not operated for its intended service life, $/MWH will skyrocket. Opposition to nuclear power (which existed prior to Three Mile Island, and increased thereafter) caused plants to be closed prematurely. This drove up the effective cost of nuclear energy, fueling the push for more closures on the basis of higher costs, and so on. Curiously, these sorts of high nuclear costs are not experienced by every country. France's electricity (70-80% nuclear) is a fraction of the cost of Germany's electricity production, while simultaneously emitting less carbon. Countries like South Korea, and Japan (until they cancelled nuclear plants following the tsunami) had cost effective nuclear industries. Cost overruns happened, but not as large as compared to the US. The main explanations for this that I have encountered is that US nuclear plants have tended to be one-off projects, whereas other countries implemented serialized production of a handful of designs. Building 10 instances of the same plant is easier than building 10 different plants.
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    Germany decided, as an act of global charity, to buy renewables when they were much more expensive (they were the top global market for PV ten years ago, when PV was far more expensive than it is now), to drive them down their learning curves. This was spectacularly successful, but they are still paying for that. It says nothing about what someone else would have to pay NOW to install the same renewable capacity. At the same time, France has tried to get its nuclear industry going again with new reactors, to disastrous result. So if you want to build energy infrastructure in 1980, sure, go ahead and choose nuclear over renewables. If you want to do it now, that choice would be crazy.
    - manfredo 7y ago
      It was not spectacularly successful. Germany continues to pollute more than France, with roughly 65% of its electricity generation coming from fossil fuels [1]. In France, nuclear power generates 72% of electricity and fossil fuels account for 9% [2]. And yet, Germans pay twice the rate of France for electricity. It is the worst of both worlds: higher costs and higher carbon emissions. > So if you want to build energy infrastructure in 1980, sure, go ahead and choose nuclear over renewables. If you want to do it now, that choice would be crazy. Did technology magically get worse from 1980? Did the French somehow forget how to build power plants? Nuclear energy projects were cheap during the 1980s because France built a large number of a handful of plant designs. Modern plants are usually one-off projects with a single digit number of plants built of a given design. Building a dozen of the same reactors, turbines, etc. is much cheaper than building one. Political opposition has meant that only small allocations of funds have been dedicated towards nuclear power, so serialized production has not been done recently. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France

epistasis 7y ago

Absolutely not, the history and timelines do not support the narrative of TMI and Chernobyl stopping construction. They certainly didn't help, but go back and read this pre-Chernobyl analysis that lays the blame squarely on mismanagement: https://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-article-reference-nuclear.html?m=1 https://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-article-... Or look at when new projects were started, and you see nuclear starts dramatically fall even before we had TMI and Chernobyl. The revisionist history is to say that we stopped building nuclear because we are scared of it. The reality is that economics and bad management make it extremely unattractive to build, then and now.