4 ms·

Yup. For all the people boosting nuclear power, the reality on the ground seems to be that it just does not work anymore. It's way too expensive and never get

Yup. For all the people boosting nuclear power, the reality on the ground seems to be that it just does not work anymore. It's way too expensive and never gets done, and this problem is global, not just in the US; see e.g. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a33499619/france-nuclear-reactor-epr-expensive-mess/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a33499619/fr... At some point the results have to speak for themselves, and solar/wind plus battery storage is actually working and being built. That seems a more realistic path forward than nuclear power, which is demonstrably failing over and over.

api 6y ago
Nuclear is superior in some ways, but battery and renewable is small, can be incrementally built, simple, safe, and is experiencing exponential cost reductions due to mass production scaling. It reminds me of TSMC leapfrogging Intel because of mobile volume or PCs vs custom Unix workstations.
- magicsmoke 6y ago
  The incremental build is probably a big part of it. More volume and minor failures = more practice time and experience. How does someone "practice" building a nuclear power plant when failure can be so catastrophic?
  - api 6y ago
    Oh yeah... it's hard to get industrial scaling of expertise, production tech, and hands on experience when you're building a few monuments. If we do make nuclear fission work it will be with modular reactors and standardized fuel form factors, etc. Fusion won't fly even if we get over unity fusion unless we adopt a similar approach. Fusion reactors like to be big, but I can see them being composed of mass producible smaller modules and parts. Settling on a standard design that can be mass produced could make it work. Thing is: as the nuclear people work to try to make anything above a reality, we are experiencing iterative rapid development in solar, wind, and batteries, with all of these getting geometrically cheaper until they approach the naked cost of the materials and the energy required to refine them... and the latter cost (energy) will drop as we get better at making these things. In the long term I would not be surprised if Earth is almost 100% solar/wind/hydro/geothermal powered. You might see nuclear used in niche markets that combine high population density with low insolation and insufficient other resources and where geopolitical concerns make reliance on long distance power transport problematic. Earth is pretty close to a giant free fusion reactor that we don't need to worry about maintaining for at least two billion years. Nuclear power will be for space settlements further from the sun and deep space travel. I could see Mars eventually relying on fusion in the far future. Mars is further from the sun, and most people who talk about settling there drastically underestimate the massive amounts of energy that will be needed to refine and purify literally every single material all the way down to the air and the water. The total energy footprint of your average Martian will be at least 10-20X your average Texan with a giant raised pickup and a 4000 square foot house.
kurthr 6y ago
Yes, but what will we do if/when wind and solar just "doesn't work anymore". In the US trains "don't work anymore"... but they do in other countries. This gradual erosion of technical capability is a generic problem the US needs to solve. Nuclear is a case study of what is wrong and where the problems are (political, business, education).
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  It's a good point, but I think we can fix trains more easily than nuclear power plants, because as you point out at least the trains are a solved problem in many other countries that would simply just emulate. And passenger trains have serviceable enough fallbacks (planes, Megabus, etc.), like solar/wind are proving to be fallbacks for nuclear.
- coredog64 6y ago
  This is a mischaracterization of the state of US rail. The US has prioritized freight rail over passenger rail. That’s not a terrible choice given the long distances and the lower sensitivity to slower, more efficient speeds.
- manicdee 6y ago
  The way the US chose to address accidents in rail was to armour plate their rail cars. In Europe they worked on better processes to ensure trains don’t run into each other in the first place. The erosion of technical capability in rail is driven by the legislature. You have many states that will need to work together to completely abandon the US regulations on rail, adopt European regulations, and replace every piece of rolling stock to comply with the new regulations. That’s quite the undertaking, but achievable since the required expertise still exists outside the USA. The erosion of technical capability in nuclear power is likely unsolvable. There is no brains trust outside the USA from which to borrow the knowledge of metallurgy, concrete, site preparation, building design, or even design for manufacture. This is rebooting the entire industry from scratch to produce an unprofitable product.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
enaaem 6y ago
People have been saying for 30 years that solar/wind are going to take off and that we don't need nuclear. We are now in a climate crisis, and solar/wind is still a fraction of the energy portfolio. We als can't build nuclear anymore, because we have lost decades of experience. I really hope you are correct this time.
- ldiracdelta 6y ago
  The economics are changing though. An idealized stock market return is (used to be) 11.8%/year. This interest, compounded, doubles your position every 7 years. Once solar has a break even period of less than 7 years, the investment in solar beats a rosy, idealized stock market. When the payoff period drops to 4 years, you'd be an idiot _not_to do solar, because you're looking at an investment returning numbers in the credit card interest rate range. I bought my current system for $45k four years ago. I only did it because the investment math worked in my case. (Yes, yes yes. It was for sure subsidized and the investment math _didn't_ work without the subsidies.) Now, however, that same system would cost me ~$20k. I checked when my coworker was looking into solar and wanted to run the numbers. The economics of solar are approaching beat-the-[idealized]-stock market investment. 4 years is a rule-of-thumb number for many businesses for investing in capital. That is, if a capital investment breaks even in 4 years, you pull the trigger. Once the economics hits 4 years for break even, you'll see a lot of CFO's start pulling the trigger, not to mention the encouragement from the marketing department for the optics. Anyways, I think it is coming and for many of us, it is already here.
zackees 6y ago
I love how people here are trying to say that technology simply does not progress forward for nuclear, as it does for every other technolgy.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  It's a factual, descriptive argument. Nuclear takes so long to build and is so expensive that it's not really being built anymore, and thus the progress isn't happening.
manigandham 6y ago
It's expensive because it includes much more of the externalities in the price with much longer time-frames for ROI, as compared to other sources like coal or natural gas. Nuclear as a power source is fantastic. One of the biggest operators is the US Navy which has been running reactors in military vessels for decades without incident. The problem is politics, ignorance and lack of will to actually see it through, not fundamental science or tech.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > One of the biggest operators is the US Navy which has been running reactors in military vessels for decades without incident. AFAICT, none publicly acknowledged since a bunch in the 1970s, but that may mean less than it seems since the US government has a history of covering up nuclear incidents for decades (like a whole slew at the Hanford site from the 1940s-1980s that weren't acknowledged until the 1980s.)
  - manigandham 6y ago
    Hanford was for nuclear production, not power generation, and was created during the early days of nuclear weapons research. Modern reactors are in an entirely different league with an incredible safety record. [1] Considering how easy it is to detect nuclear failures and the consequences in a tightly-enclosed ship, it's unlikely that there are any serious incidents. It's clear that they're experience and technology is continuing to get better every year though. 1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/12/23/americas-nuclear-navy-still-the-masters-of-nuclear-power/#5ee0d3466bcd https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/12/23/americas-...
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > Hanford was for nuclear production, not power generation, and was created during the early days of nuclear weapons research. I'm not saying that Hanford has the same risk profile as Naval reactors, I’m saying that it demonstrates that the US government has a propensity for covering up nuclear incidents that it can get away with covering up (note that it also acknowledged other incidents at Hanford in the decades it was concealing many of them), so the fact that it hasn't acknowledged any related to naval power generation since a bunch in the 1970s is absence of evidence of such incidents, but not reliable evidence of absence of such incidents.

api 6y ago

Nuclear is superior in some ways, but battery and renewable is small, can be incrementally built, simple, safe, and is experiencing exponential cost reductions due to mass production scaling. It reminds me of TSMC leapfrogging Intel because of mobile volume or PCs vs custom Unix workstations.

magicsmoke 6y ago
The incremental build is probably a big part of it. More volume and minor failures = more practice time and experience. How does someone "practice" building a nuclear power plant when failure can be so catastrophic?
- api 6y ago
  Oh yeah... it's hard to get industrial scaling of expertise, production tech, and hands on experience when you're building a few monuments. If we do make nuclear fission work it will be with modular reactors and standardized fuel form factors, etc. Fusion won't fly even if we get over unity fusion unless we adopt a similar approach. Fusion reactors like to be big, but I can see them being composed of mass producible smaller modules and parts. Settling on a standard design that can be mass produced could make it work. Thing is: as the nuclear people work to try to make anything above a reality, we are experiencing iterative rapid development in solar, wind, and batteries, with all of these getting geometrically cheaper until they approach the naked cost of the materials and the energy required to refine them... and the latter cost (energy) will drop as we get better at making these things. In the long term I would not be surprised if Earth is almost 100% solar/wind/hydro/geothermal powered. You might see nuclear used in niche markets that combine high population density with low insolation and insufficient other resources and where geopolitical concerns make reliance on long distance power transport problematic. Earth is pretty close to a giant free fusion reactor that we don't need to worry about maintaining for at least two billion years. Nuclear power will be for space settlements further from the sun and deep space travel. I could see Mars eventually relying on fusion in the far future. Mars is further from the sun, and most people who talk about settling there drastically underestimate the massive amounts of energy that will be needed to refine and purify literally every single material all the way down to the air and the water. The total energy footprint of your average Martian will be at least 10-20X your average Texan with a giant raised pickup and a 4000 square foot house.

kurthr 6y ago

Yes, but what will we do if/when wind and solar just "doesn't work anymore". In the US trains "don't work anymore"... but they do in other countries. This gradual erosion of technical capability is a generic problem the US needs to solve. Nuclear is a case study of what is wrong and where the problems are (political, business, education).

CydeWeys 6y ago
It's a good point, but I think we can fix trains more easily than nuclear power plants, because as you point out at least the trains are a solved problem in many other countries that would simply just emulate. And passenger trains have serviceable enough fallbacks (planes, Megabus, etc.), like solar/wind are proving to be fallbacks for nuclear.
coredog64 6y ago
This is a mischaracterization of the state of US rail. The US has prioritized freight rail over passenger rail. That’s not a terrible choice given the long distances and the lower sensitivity to slower, more efficient speeds.
manicdee 6y ago
The way the US chose to address accidents in rail was to armour plate their rail cars. In Europe they worked on better processes to ensure trains don’t run into each other in the first place. The erosion of technical capability in rail is driven by the legislature. You have many states that will need to work together to completely abandon the US regulations on rail, adopt European regulations, and replace every piece of rolling stock to comply with the new regulations. That’s quite the undertaking, but achievable since the required expertise still exists outside the USA. The erosion of technical capability in nuclear power is likely unsolvable. There is no brains trust outside the USA from which to borrow the knowledge of metallurgy, concrete, site preparation, building design, or even design for manufacture. This is rebooting the entire industry from scratch to produce an unprofitable product.
- bobthepanda 6y ago

enaaem 6y ago

People have been saying for 30 years that solar/wind are going to take off and that we don't need nuclear. We are now in a climate crisis, and solar/wind is still a fraction of the energy portfolio. We als can't build nuclear anymore, because we have lost decades of experience. I really hope you are correct this time.

ldiracdelta 6y ago
The economics are changing though. An idealized stock market return is (used to be) 11.8%/year. This interest, compounded, doubles your position every 7 years. Once solar has a break even period of less than 7 years, the investment in solar beats a rosy, idealized stock market. When the payoff period drops to 4 years, you'd be an idiot _not_to do solar, because you're looking at an investment returning numbers in the credit card interest rate range. I bought my current system for $45k four years ago. I only did it because the investment math worked in my case. (Yes, yes yes. It was for sure subsidized and the investment math _didn't_ work without the subsidies.) Now, however, that same system would cost me ~$20k. I checked when my coworker was looking into solar and wanted to run the numbers. The economics of solar are approaching beat-the-[idealized]-stock market investment. 4 years is a rule-of-thumb number for many businesses for investing in capital. That is, if a capital investment breaks even in 4 years, you pull the trigger. Once the economics hits 4 years for break even, you'll see a lot of CFO's start pulling the trigger, not to mention the encouragement from the marketing department for the optics. Anyways, I think it is coming and for many of us, it is already here.

zackees 6y ago

I love how people here are trying to say that technology simply does not progress forward for nuclear, as it does for every other technolgy.

CydeWeys 6y ago
It's a factual, descriptive argument. Nuclear takes so long to build and is so expensive that it's not really being built anymore, and thus the progress isn't happening.

manigandham 6y ago

It's expensive because it includes much more of the externalities in the price with much longer time-frames for ROI, as compared to other sources like coal or natural gas. Nuclear as a power source is fantastic. One of the biggest operators is the US Navy which has been running reactors in military vessels for decades without incident. The problem is politics, ignorance and lack of will to actually see it through, not fundamental science or tech.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> One of the biggest operators is the US Navy which has been running reactors in military vessels for decades without incident. AFAICT, none publicly acknowledged since a bunch in the 1970s, but that may mean less than it seems since the US government has a history of covering up nuclear incidents for decades (like a whole slew at the Hanford site from the 1940s-1980s that weren't acknowledged until the 1980s.)
- manigandham 6y ago
  Hanford was for nuclear production, not power generation, and was created during the early days of nuclear weapons research. Modern reactors are in an entirely different league with an incredible safety record. [1] Considering how easy it is to detect nuclear failures and the consequences in a tightly-enclosed ship, it's unlikely that there are any serious incidents. It's clear that they're experience and technology is continuing to get better every year though. 1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/12/23/americas-nuclear-navy-still-the-masters-of-nuclear-power/#5ee0d3466bcd https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/12/23/americas-...
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Hanford was for nuclear production, not power generation, and was created during the early days of nuclear weapons research. I'm not saying that Hanford has the same risk profile as Naval reactors, I’m saying that it demonstrates that the US government has a propensity for covering up nuclear incidents that it can get away with covering up (note that it also acknowledged other incidents at Hanford in the decades it was concealing many of them), so the fact that it hasn't acknowledged any related to naval power generation since a bunch in the 1970s is absence of evidence of such incidents, but not reliable evidence of absence of such incidents.