12 ms·

Cost, cost, cost. Point to a cost-effective, new-build nuclear in the USA and SHOW me that it's more cost-effective than renewables or LNG. Until we have a car

Cost, cost, cost. Point to a cost-effective, new-build nuclear in the USA and SHOW me that it's more cost-effective than renewables or LNG. Until we have a carbon tax or a massive policy shift in favor of extremely capital-intensive new-build nuclear, we will continue on our current path of renewables, batteries, and LNG dominating the grid. I'm all for nuclear, by the way, but let's not pretend that cultural attitudes (which haven't dented GOP denialism) and misinformed lefty greens (which haven't ended fracking or coal) are to blame here. Nuclear is just way too expensive and hard to do in the USA, it's as simple as dollars and cents.

CydeWeys 7y ago
And cost matters. More than anything else. Everyone pointing to nuclear power as the solution conveniently ignores how insanely expensive it is. New reactors cost many billions of dollars, and aren't cheap to operate either. We're at an inflection point where new solar and wind plus batteries is cheaper than new nuclear, so that's what's going to be built. It's a simple economic reality having nothing to do with whether fears of nuclear power are overblown or whatever.
- readams 7y ago
  Battery storage is not an option for large scale. Battery technology is good for bridging gaps measured in minutes while larger power plants spin up and react to demand. That's a real benefit, and helps to eliminate some expensive peaker power plants, but the technology is simply not even close to being able to fill in the gaps needed for a grid where large percentages of the energy is wind or solar. Nuclear is currently the only technology that exists that can do this.
  - cygx 7y ago
    Power-to-gas technology can possibly fill that niche.
    - readams 7y ago
      Power-to-gas would be a cool technology if we could figure it out, though honestly if we did it would make the argument for nuclear even stronger. Whatever the technology ends up being, it will benefit from large, efficient facilities fed by large amounts of clean, steady power. That means nuclear if you want the overall cycle to be carbon neutral.
  - unchocked 7y ago
    The back of my envelope disagrees. I'm distracted so LMK if there's a major flaw in this analysis. Nuclear power generation costs ~$6k per kW(1) Solar power generation costs ~$1k per kW(2) Solar capacity factor is ~25%, so ~4k/kW to compare with 24 hour baseload power. Storing 3 kW for ~12hrs requires ~36kW-h storage. Li-ion battery packs are getting to ~$100/kW-h (3) 36 kW-h storage is ~$3.6k Nuclear cost: ~6k per kW baseload Solar + battery cost: ~7.6k per kW baseload (~4k/kW generation, ~3.6k/kW storage) (1) https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-a... (2) https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/72133.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/72133.pdf (3) https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/09/100-kwh-tesla-battery-cells-this-year-100-kwh-tesla-battery-packs-in-2020/ https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/09/100-kwh-tesla-battery-c...
    - sovnade 7y ago
      Don't forget LiIon batteries only get a few hundred recharge cycles. Is that calculated in this kw-h figure?
    - manfredo 7y ago
      > Nuclear cost: ~6k per kW baseload > Solar + battery cost: ~7.6k per kW baseload (~4k/kW generation, ~3.6k/kW storage) So nuclear is cheaper than solar + storage?
      - briwang2050 7y ago
        China, South Korea are $2K-2.5K per kilowatt of baseload. A Nuclear kilowatt generates 70-95% of the time. A solar kilowatt generates 10-20% of the time. A Gigawatt of solar generates 1 Terawatt hour per year. A gigawatt of nuclear generates 6 to 8 terawatt hours per year. So nuclear generates an average of 7 times more. Solar lasts 15 years. Nuclear lasts 40-80 years. Solar needs to be rebuilt 3 to 5 times versus nuclear. There is no supply chain for matching battery storage at scale. They are just starting to build batteries for cars at the 200 gigawatt-hour levels. Solar and wind in California and many other places has only 10% of the generation during winter. There is no 90-day power storage and building one would be insanely expensive. You pay for electricity by the kilowatt-hour.
  - beat 7y ago
    Everyone says that, but no one who says that shows us their math or cites any sources. Show your work. Don't just say "can't". Consider variations in both output and load, both of which are well documented. Consider cost, which is also documented. Consider change in cost, which has been considerable. Don't just say "can't" without any justification except your sense of certainty.
- tekknik 7y ago
  You need to give size if you’re gonna start quoting build prices. “billions of dollars” would be a plant in the gigawatt range. The US currently uses about 400GW so we’re looking at a couple of trillion USD to replace the entire US grid with nuclear. What’s the surface area required for 400GW of solar / wind? Napkin math suggests around a million acres needed for solar (assuming internet sources are correct)
jjeaff 7y ago
I'm not disagreeing, but it's worth pointing out that a large amount of the initial capital cost of nuclear plants is the regulation and public outcry that you have to overcome in order to even get started. And some of that regulation is based on that same public outcry as well.
- mbostleman 7y ago
  My issue is that I have a hard time putting costs like regulation and overcoming public sentiment in the equation because they're self-imposed. I know they're real but they seem to distract from the evaluation of the actual tech. I am not an expert at the engineering or physics, but I did work at a leading PV manufacturer for 8 years, and I was amazed at the effort required to coax even the tiniest improvements in conversion efficiency out of the devices in a way that is both manufacturable and a benefit to the cost-per-watt. Then after all that, every PV platform has a theoretical limit anyway. So the whole enterprise seemed like pulling teeth. Especially when you think about how demand will increase in the future. On the other hand, it seems like with nuclear the potential energy is so overwhelmingly high that the primary effort is holding it back (hence the dangers) - not trying to squeeze out tiny drops. Given this, just intuitively, nuclear seems like the preferable starting point. We can deal with the obstacles as we go. Seems like humans have done a pretty good job at turning what once appeared to be insurmountable risks into things we take for granted. Skyscrapers and air travel come to mind.
  - nicoburns 7y ago
    The sun is much bigget energy source than nuclear. You don't need to increase panel efficiency (although we might as well try), you just need to build more panels.
manfredo 7y ago
Yes, nuclear power is less cost effective than fossil fuels. But nuclear, when built at scale in serialized production, can be cost effective. France generates it's electricity at half the cost of Germany, while simultaneously emitting less carbon. The total cost of the nuclear transition program was 400 billion 1993 francs which is ~150 billion USD according to my conversions: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france.aspx#ECSArticleLink2 https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr... One of the crucial things to account for is that nuclear's cost is overwhelming overhead cost. So prematurely closing plants vastly inflates the price of nuclear power. This is why nuclear energy costs are so much more expensive in the US, Japan, and Germany. These countries prematurely closed nuclear plants, thus increasing $/MHW.
- robocat 7y ago
  Germany shows that even if your cost of building a reactor was zero, you could still have the reactor shut down due to other issues. "Following the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, Germany has permanently shut down eight of its 17 reactors and pledged to close the rest by the end of 2022." - Wikipedia Edit: This might just be because Germany is as close to the Ukraine as California is to Texas. Also removed dumb sentence.
  - manfredo 7y ago
    That's a problem caused by politicians. The same could be said of any energy source.
- beat 7y ago
  There are nuclear reactors closing in the US not because of regulation, but because they cannot compete with much cheaper wind and fracked gas sources. There is little difference in operational cost between running a nuclear plant at 50% and running it at 100%. So when they start losing key customers to cheaper power, pretty soon they're operating the plant in the red. The real interesting part of this is that modern power is so much cheaper that it's less expensive to eat the capital losses and shut down nuclear plants early than it is to continue to operate them.
readams 7y ago
The argument here is that we need to streamline the regulatory environment for nuclear, invest in it, and convince people not to fear it, if we hope to make a real dent in climate change. Solar and wind are great technologies, but they cannot be the sole basis for a power grid without positing some new energy storage technology that does not exist today and for which there is nothing on the horizon. Nuclear technology has stagnated horribly because of the fears. Even the newest reactors are using old designs because it's impossible to move forward with new ones.
- njarboe 7y ago
  We could have used our educational system in the US to teach people about radiation so they would not be so afraid of it. That would have been great and could have paved the way to the use of nuclear power about 30-50 years later.
  - m0zg 7y ago
    I'd like to point out that the current extremely paranoid (and expensive) regulatory environment was brought to you by people who were "taught" about radiation during the cold war. I was taught of the dangers of radiation in the 80s. I kind of just translated it into ways to protect myself against alpha, beta and gamma, but I can guarantee most of my school mates only recall that gamma radiation penetrates a meter thick slab of concrete, and don't want any part of it anywhere near, even at the background levels they are already experiencing when flying to their vacations. These same people also don't realize that a coal fired power plant emits about 100x more radiation than a nuclear plant does, and if asked which they prefer would prefer coal. Even if you tell them that coal is more radioactive, most of them will not change their mind. You have too generous a view of the ability of an average person to understand and think rationally about such concepts. In the absence of understanding, fear takes its place. This is TL;DR of why nuclear power stations aren't profitable in the US today.
    - beat 7y ago
      Math matters. Nuclear energy is not substantially cheaper in other countries than it is in the US (feel free to provide cites otherwise) - even countries like China where environmentalist rabble-rousers can find themselves in prison. This suggests to me that the regulations for the ignorant paranoid treehuggers are not actually the problem.
merpnderp 7y ago
Your "in the USA" part is cheating unless you believe France builds inferior nuclear plants. Nuclear is only uncompetitive in the US because of lawfare at every single step of construction.
- beat 7y ago
  France isn't building plants, though. (Technically, they're building one...) And they're life-extending the plants they have now, but that won't work indefinitely, and it isn't free.
iroor9nj 7y ago
Regulatory capture are why costs are high. There’s publicly available government record of wheeling and dealing, leveraging public fear of accidents, and the US not being invested in nuclear weapons development, to regulate us in a direction of favoring weapons development, and abandoning subsidy of nuclear energy development. As usual, the cost scenario is entirely artificial, existing only in deference to decades old political decisions. Deference to allowing those decisions to continue to rule is a public apathy problem. The political class isn’t going to shift on such things without public pressure at scale.
theptip 7y ago
I think the counter-argument here would be that nuclear is way over-regulated, and that's why it's so expensive. You could multiply the deaths-per-TWh by 100 from the stats quoted in the GP's link and still compare favourably to non-renewable options, or 10x and compare with renewables. That safety record is very clearly due to the public being (irrationally?) terrified of nuclear anything, and constantly ratcheting up the regulatory requirements. Most people don't think about the world in this way though. Saying "we should increase the death rate of this technology by 100x" would immediately destroy the career of any politician. "Joe Politician wants 100x as many children to die" would be the obvious attack ad in response. This is a shame, because if you could reduce the cost of nuclear by 10x by increasing the death rate by 100x (still ending up with a moderate death rate), and in so doing produce a radically cheaper and zero-carbon power source, then you might save thousands or even millions of lives from climate-related deaths over the next century. (To be clear, the "might" is important; I'm not making claims about how much of a win there is by taking this path. In this paragraph I'm making the meta-level point that no matter how much is to be gained from this path, we would not go down it.)
- SquishyPanda23 7y ago
  Whose neighborhood do you propose to build these in? HN talks frequently about how opposed to NIMBYism it is, but I imagine they'd sing a different tune if the politicians told them "yo we ratcheted up the death rate 100x and we're building a new plant near you!"
  - njarboe 7y ago
    Far from any population centers, just like large coal power plants.
- beat 7y ago
  Are you arguing we should make nuclear power less safe, then? Why? So it can finally be cheaper than wind and solar? What's the advantage of that?
  - Filligree 7y ago
PaulHoule 7y ago
People don't talk about it, but what killed the Light Water Reactor is the same thing that killed coal burning power plants -- the size and cost of the steam turbine. Gas turbines revolutionized power generation in the 1970s and since because the power density is so much higher than steam turbines, greatly lowering the capital costs of a power plant. For a while coal still competed based on cheap fuel, but after fracking came along the fuel is cheap and the power plant is cheap so natural gas overtook coal quickly. A reactor that runs at a higher temperature than an LWR can operate a Brayton cycle gas turbine using Helium, Carbon Dioxide or Nitrogen Tetroxide as a working fluid. Some possibilities are liquid metal reactors (metal coolant), liquid salt reactors (liquid fuel!), HTGR (carbide fuel) or GCFR (nitride fuel). It is a lot of technology to perfect, but as long as a nuclear heat source is coupled to a huge expensive steam turbine, the economics are going to bad even if we learn how to build reactors right the first time.
- njarboe 7y ago
  This is also a problem for any future fusion power plants. Using the fusion power as a dumb heat source to create steam is not going to be economically competitive.
lisper 7y ago
> LNG It is baffling to me that LNG is often cited as a potential solution to the carbon crisis. It's not. LNG is a hydrocarbon, and burning it releases CO2 just like any other hydrocarbon.
- haihaibye 7y ago
  LNG has 1/3 to 1/2 less CO2 per MWh than coal. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
  - lisper 7y ago
    Sure, every little bit helps. But to avoid long-term catastrophe we have to get net carbon emissions down to pre-industrial levels. A 50% reduction sounds good on paper, but it's a trap. Suppose we achieved it. Then what? We're still increasing the overall CO2 concentration, just at a slower pace. That won't help us avoid catastrophe, it just delays it for a while, and probably not for very long. LNG is not a step towards a solution, it's a detour that leads back to catastrophe by slightly longer route.
  - thatfrenchguy 7y ago
    50% is not good enough.
briwang2050 7y ago
I wrote the second article (nextbigfuture) referenced in the nuclear safety citations. It is irrelevant that the recent nuclear reactor projects in the USA and Europe are expensive. A weighted average of cost and completion times for global nuclear reactor construction would be dominated by the 90% of the nuclear reactors built by China, Russia, South Korea and India. Do you based your analysis on the price cars based upon the price of a Rolls Royce? Do you price bridges based upon the cost of the Bay Bridge? Tunnels based upon the Big Dig? Rockets based upon the Space Launch System? Also, nuclear got expensive because constantly increasing regulations and bureaucracy drove up costs in the USA. Reactors without accidents built in China and South Korea for 4 times less. Also, the systemic failure of large construction projects in the US. Skycrapers, bridges, subways and highway costs went up. High-speed rail in California versus China for costs and completions. China generates as much electricity this year as USA and Europe combined. China will double again within 20 years. Natural gas will dominate US energy mix. The solar and wind will not scale well beyond 10%. The US will need massive buildout of energy storage and massive energy grid modifications. This will run into the big project incompetence of the USA.
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  China builds all of it's large infrastructure projects like high speed rail for about a third of what it costs in the States. It might be regulations and bureaucracy accounting for that difference, but it's not specific to nuclear.
- m0zg 7y ago
  I wouldn't call it "incompetence". The US is clearly able to build large projects when it really has to. It's simple third-world style corruption that gets in the way. That's how congresspeople become multimillionaires on $170k/yr in a super high CoL area. Someone should look into that, and it's sure as hell not going to be Congress itself.
- core-questions 7y ago
  > the systemic failure of large construction projects in the US I would love to hear any theories or speculation you have on why this is the case.
fuckyah 7y ago
No private company ever would build nuclear if they had to insure for disaster. Nuclear disasters cannot be insured hence it is a no brained to me to not support nuclear
simonebrunozzi 7y ago
Don't forget energy storage costs, as solar only works for ~half a day, and wind is intermittent. You need to have an on-demand source of energy in addition to renewables.

CydeWeys 7y ago

And cost matters. More than anything else. Everyone pointing to nuclear power as the solution conveniently ignores how insanely expensive it is. New reactors cost many billions of dollars, and aren't cheap to operate either. We're at an inflection point where new solar and wind plus batteries is cheaper than new nuclear, so that's what's going to be built. It's a simple economic reality having nothing to do with whether fears of nuclear power are overblown or whatever.

readams 7y ago
Battery storage is not an option for large scale. Battery technology is good for bridging gaps measured in minutes while larger power plants spin up and react to demand. That's a real benefit, and helps to eliminate some expensive peaker power plants, but the technology is simply not even close to being able to fill in the gaps needed for a grid where large percentages of the energy is wind or solar. Nuclear is currently the only technology that exists that can do this.
- cygx 7y ago
  Power-to-gas technology can possibly fill that niche.
  - readams 7y ago
    Power-to-gas would be a cool technology if we could figure it out, though honestly if we did it would make the argument for nuclear even stronger. Whatever the technology ends up being, it will benefit from large, efficient facilities fed by large amounts of clean, steady power. That means nuclear if you want the overall cycle to be carbon neutral.
- unchocked 7y ago
  The back of my envelope disagrees. I'm distracted so LMK if there's a major flaw in this analysis. Nuclear power generation costs ~$6k per kW(1) Solar power generation costs ~$1k per kW(2) Solar capacity factor is ~25%, so ~4k/kW to compare with 24 hour baseload power. Storing 3 kW for ~12hrs requires ~36kW-h storage. Li-ion battery packs are getting to ~$100/kW-h (3) 36 kW-h storage is ~$3.6k Nuclear cost: ~6k per kW baseload Solar + battery cost: ~7.6k per kW baseload (~4k/kW generation, ~3.6k/kW storage) (1) https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-a... (2) https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/72133.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/72133.pdf (3) https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/09/100-kwh-tesla-battery-cells-this-year-100-kwh-tesla-battery-packs-in-2020/ https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/09/100-kwh-tesla-battery-c...
  - sovnade 7y ago
    Don't forget LiIon batteries only get a few hundred recharge cycles. Is that calculated in this kw-h figure?
  - manfredo 7y ago
    > Nuclear cost: ~6k per kW baseload > Solar + battery cost: ~7.6k per kW baseload (~4k/kW generation, ~3.6k/kW storage) So nuclear is cheaper than solar + storage?
    - briwang2050 7y ago
      China, South Korea are $2K-2.5K per kilowatt of baseload. A Nuclear kilowatt generates 70-95% of the time. A solar kilowatt generates 10-20% of the time. A Gigawatt of solar generates 1 Terawatt hour per year. A gigawatt of nuclear generates 6 to 8 terawatt hours per year. So nuclear generates an average of 7 times more. Solar lasts 15 years. Nuclear lasts 40-80 years. Solar needs to be rebuilt 3 to 5 times versus nuclear. There is no supply chain for matching battery storage at scale. They are just starting to build batteries for cars at the 200 gigawatt-hour levels. Solar and wind in California and many other places has only 10% of the generation during winter. There is no 90-day power storage and building one would be insanely expensive. You pay for electricity by the kilowatt-hour.
- beat 7y ago
  Everyone says that, but no one who says that shows us their math or cites any sources. Show your work. Don't just say "can't". Consider variations in both output and load, both of which are well documented. Consider cost, which is also documented. Consider change in cost, which has been considerable. Don't just say "can't" without any justification except your sense of certainty.
tekknik 7y ago
You need to give size if you’re gonna start quoting build prices. “billions of dollars” would be a plant in the gigawatt range. The US currently uses about 400GW so we’re looking at a couple of trillion USD to replace the entire US grid with nuclear. What’s the surface area required for 400GW of solar / wind? Napkin math suggests around a million acres needed for solar (assuming internet sources are correct)

jjeaff 7y ago

I'm not disagreeing, but it's worth pointing out that a large amount of the initial capital cost of nuclear plants is the regulation and public outcry that you have to overcome in order to even get started. And some of that regulation is based on that same public outcry as well.

mbostleman 7y ago
My issue is that I have a hard time putting costs like regulation and overcoming public sentiment in the equation because they're self-imposed. I know they're real but they seem to distract from the evaluation of the actual tech. I am not an expert at the engineering or physics, but I did work at a leading PV manufacturer for 8 years, and I was amazed at the effort required to coax even the tiniest improvements in conversion efficiency out of the devices in a way that is both manufacturable and a benefit to the cost-per-watt. Then after all that, every PV platform has a theoretical limit anyway. So the whole enterprise seemed like pulling teeth. Especially when you think about how demand will increase in the future. On the other hand, it seems like with nuclear the potential energy is so overwhelmingly high that the primary effort is holding it back (hence the dangers) - not trying to squeeze out tiny drops. Given this, just intuitively, nuclear seems like the preferable starting point. We can deal with the obstacles as we go. Seems like humans have done a pretty good job at turning what once appeared to be insurmountable risks into things we take for granted. Skyscrapers and air travel come to mind.
- nicoburns 7y ago
  The sun is much bigget energy source than nuclear. You don't need to increase panel efficiency (although we might as well try), you just need to build more panels.

manfredo 7y ago

Yes, nuclear power is less cost effective than fossil fuels. But nuclear, when built at scale in serialized production, can be cost effective. France generates it's electricity at half the cost of Germany, while simultaneously emitting less carbon. The total cost of the nuclear transition program was 400 billion 1993 francs which is ~150 billion USD according to my conversions: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france.aspx#ECSArticleLink2 https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr... One of the crucial things to account for is that nuclear's cost is overwhelming overhead cost. So prematurely closing plants vastly inflates the price of nuclear power. This is why nuclear energy costs are so much more expensive in the US, Japan, and Germany. These countries prematurely closed nuclear plants, thus increasing $/MHW.

robocat 7y ago
Germany shows that even if your cost of building a reactor was zero, you could still have the reactor shut down due to other issues. "Following the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, Germany has permanently shut down eight of its 17 reactors and pledged to close the rest by the end of 2022." - Wikipedia Edit: This might just be because Germany is as close to the Ukraine as California is to Texas. Also removed dumb sentence.
- manfredo 7y ago
  That's a problem caused by politicians. The same could be said of any energy source.
beat 7y ago
There are nuclear reactors closing in the US not because of regulation, but because they cannot compete with much cheaper wind and fracked gas sources. There is little difference in operational cost between running a nuclear plant at 50% and running it at 100%. So when they start losing key customers to cheaper power, pretty soon they're operating the plant in the red. The real interesting part of this is that modern power is so much cheaper that it's less expensive to eat the capital losses and shut down nuclear plants early than it is to continue to operate them.

readams 7y ago

The argument here is that we need to streamline the regulatory environment for nuclear, invest in it, and convince people not to fear it, if we hope to make a real dent in climate change. Solar and wind are great technologies, but they cannot be the sole basis for a power grid without positing some new energy storage technology that does not exist today and for which there is nothing on the horizon. Nuclear technology has stagnated horribly because of the fears. Even the newest reactors are using old designs because it's impossible to move forward with new ones.

njarboe 7y ago
We could have used our educational system in the US to teach people about radiation so they would not be so afraid of it. That would have been great and could have paved the way to the use of nuclear power about 30-50 years later.
- m0zg 7y ago
  I'd like to point out that the current extremely paranoid (and expensive) regulatory environment was brought to you by people who were "taught" about radiation during the cold war. I was taught of the dangers of radiation in the 80s. I kind of just translated it into ways to protect myself against alpha, beta and gamma, but I can guarantee most of my school mates only recall that gamma radiation penetrates a meter thick slab of concrete, and don't want any part of it anywhere near, even at the background levels they are already experiencing when flying to their vacations. These same people also don't realize that a coal fired power plant emits about 100x more radiation than a nuclear plant does, and if asked which they prefer would prefer coal. Even if you tell them that coal is more radioactive, most of them will not change their mind. You have too generous a view of the ability of an average person to understand and think rationally about such concepts. In the absence of understanding, fear takes its place. This is TL;DR of why nuclear power stations aren't profitable in the US today.
  - beat 7y ago
    Math matters. Nuclear energy is not substantially cheaper in other countries than it is in the US (feel free to provide cites otherwise) - even countries like China where environmentalist rabble-rousers can find themselves in prison. This suggests to me that the regulations for the ignorant paranoid treehuggers are not actually the problem.

merpnderp 7y ago

Your "in the USA" part is cheating unless you believe France builds inferior nuclear plants. Nuclear is only uncompetitive in the US because of lawfare at every single step of construction.

beat 7y ago
France isn't building plants, though. (Technically, they're building one...) And they're life-extending the plants they have now, but that won't work indefinitely, and it isn't free.

iroor9nj 7y ago

Regulatory capture are why costs are high. There’s publicly available government record of wheeling and dealing, leveraging public fear of accidents, and the US not being invested in nuclear weapons development, to regulate us in a direction of favoring weapons development, and abandoning subsidy of nuclear energy development. As usual, the cost scenario is entirely artificial, existing only in deference to decades old political decisions. Deference to allowing those decisions to continue to rule is a public apathy problem. The political class isn’t going to shift on such things without public pressure at scale.

theptip 7y ago

I think the counter-argument here would be that nuclear is way over-regulated, and that's why it's so expensive. You could multiply the deaths-per-TWh by 100 from the stats quoted in the GP's link and still compare favourably to non-renewable options, or 10x and compare with renewables. That safety record is very clearly due to the public being (irrationally?) terrified of nuclear anything, and constantly ratcheting up the regulatory requirements. Most people don't think about the world in this way though. Saying "we should increase the death rate of this technology by 100x" would immediately destroy the career of any politician. "Joe Politician wants 100x as many children to die" would be the obvious attack ad in response. This is a shame, because if you could reduce the cost of nuclear by 10x by increasing the death rate by 100x (still ending up with a moderate death rate), and in so doing produce a radically cheaper and zero-carbon power source, then you might save thousands or even millions of lives from climate-related deaths over the next century. (To be clear, the "might" is important; I'm not making claims about how much of a win there is by taking this path. In this paragraph I'm making the meta-level point that no matter how much is to be gained from this path, we would not go down it.)

SquishyPanda23 7y ago
Whose neighborhood do you propose to build these in? HN talks frequently about how opposed to NIMBYism it is, but I imagine they'd sing a different tune if the politicians told them "yo we ratcheted up the death rate 100x and we're building a new plant near you!"
- njarboe 7y ago
  Far from any population centers, just like large coal power plants.
beat 7y ago
Are you arguing we should make nuclear power less safe, then? Why? So it can finally be cheaper than wind and solar? What's the advantage of that?
- Filligree 7y ago

PaulHoule 7y ago

People don't talk about it, but what killed the Light Water Reactor is the same thing that killed coal burning power plants -- the size and cost of the steam turbine. Gas turbines revolutionized power generation in the 1970s and since because the power density is so much higher than steam turbines, greatly lowering the capital costs of a power plant. For a while coal still competed based on cheap fuel, but after fracking came along the fuel is cheap and the power plant is cheap so natural gas overtook coal quickly. A reactor that runs at a higher temperature than an LWR can operate a Brayton cycle gas turbine using Helium, Carbon Dioxide or Nitrogen Tetroxide as a working fluid. Some possibilities are liquid metal reactors (metal coolant), liquid salt reactors (liquid fuel!), HTGR (carbide fuel) or GCFR (nitride fuel). It is a lot of technology to perfect, but as long as a nuclear heat source is coupled to a huge expensive steam turbine, the economics are going to bad even if we learn how to build reactors right the first time.

njarboe 7y ago
This is also a problem for any future fusion power plants. Using the fusion power as a dumb heat source to create steam is not going to be economically competitive.

lisper 7y ago

> LNG It is baffling to me that LNG is often cited as a potential solution to the carbon crisis. It's not. LNG is a hydrocarbon, and burning it releases CO2 just like any other hydrocarbon.

haihaibye 7y ago
LNG has 1/3 to 1/2 less CO2 per MWh than coal. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
- lisper 7y ago
  Sure, every little bit helps. But to avoid long-term catastrophe we have to get net carbon emissions down to pre-industrial levels. A 50% reduction sounds good on paper, but it's a trap. Suppose we achieved it. Then what? We're still increasing the overall CO2 concentration, just at a slower pace. That won't help us avoid catastrophe, it just delays it for a while, and probably not for very long. LNG is not a step towards a solution, it's a detour that leads back to catastrophe by slightly longer route.
- thatfrenchguy 7y ago
  50% is not good enough.

briwang2050 7y ago

I wrote the second article (nextbigfuture) referenced in the nuclear safety citations. It is irrelevant that the recent nuclear reactor projects in the USA and Europe are expensive. A weighted average of cost and completion times for global nuclear reactor construction would be dominated by the 90% of the nuclear reactors built by China, Russia, South Korea and India. Do you based your analysis on the price cars based upon the price of a Rolls Royce? Do you price bridges based upon the cost of the Bay Bridge? Tunnels based upon the Big Dig? Rockets based upon the Space Launch System? Also, nuclear got expensive because constantly increasing regulations and bureaucracy drove up costs in the USA. Reactors without accidents built in China and South Korea for 4 times less. Also, the systemic failure of large construction projects in the US. Skycrapers, bridges, subways and highway costs went up. High-speed rail in California versus China for costs and completions. China generates as much electricity this year as USA and Europe combined. China will double again within 20 years. Natural gas will dominate US energy mix. The solar and wind will not scale well beyond 10%. The US will need massive buildout of energy storage and massive energy grid modifications. This will run into the big project incompetence of the USA.

bryanlarsen 7y ago
China builds all of it's large infrastructure projects like high speed rail for about a third of what it costs in the States. It might be regulations and bureaucracy accounting for that difference, but it's not specific to nuclear.
m0zg 7y ago
I wouldn't call it "incompetence". The US is clearly able to build large projects when it really has to. It's simple third-world style corruption that gets in the way. That's how congresspeople become multimillionaires on $170k/yr in a super high CoL area. Someone should look into that, and it's sure as hell not going to be Congress itself.
core-questions 7y ago
> the systemic failure of large construction projects in the US I would love to hear any theories or speculation you have on why this is the case.

fuckyah 7y ago

No private company ever would build nuclear if they had to insure for disaster. Nuclear disasters cannot be insured hence it is a no brained to me to not support nuclear

simonebrunozzi 7y ago

Don't forget energy storage costs, as solar only works for ~half a day, and wind is intermittent. You need to have an on-demand source of energy in addition to renewables.