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> Yes, I have cherry picked 100% of the current era new nuclear construction projects in France and the US. How selective of me! /s Yup, precisely. You've conv

> Yes, I have cherry picked 100% of the current era new nuclear construction projects in France and the US. How selective of me! /s Yup, precisely. You've conveniently ignored successful projects elsewhere, like the Hanul nuclear power plant and the Taishan nuclear plant. Also, you're incorrect that Votgle is the only nuclear project in the US, Turkey Point is installing two more AP1000 reactors. > It includes such things as instrumentation, enrichment, fuel fabrication, and (most importantly) manpower and expertise. Enrichment is not a substantial portion of nuclear power's cost. Almost all of it is in construction and fabrication of the plant. I'm also not sure why you think building a nuclear warhead translates into running a nuclear plant. A nuclear weapons designer wants a very violent runaway nuclear reaction. This is what a nuclear plant designer wants to avoid. Nuclear power and nuclear weapons don't use the same fuel. That's not quite true with recent plants: a few of the newer nuclear plants can mix in some weapons-grade plutonium - but the mix is still mostly uranium. This more about dismantling plutonium, as it's the only way we know how to get ride of weapons-grade fissile material - well, besides detonating the nuclear weapon. > Investments are made on expected payoff. The expectation that renewables will do well is high. The off chance that they do not, oh well! Nuclear could be a backup in that case. There is no need to pump trillions into nuclear now to restore your putative golden age. You continue to miss the point. With renewables and storage, we're talking in terms of hypothetical costs. What we think it will cost. Projected costs are cheap, because by definition they exclude the costs of unforeseen issues. Historical costs do include the costs of unforeseen issues that emerged in implementation. Nuclear costs are historical costs. We know what nuclear costs, because we've built it before. And we've built it at scale. The cost of proposed storage technologies are hypothetical costs. Nobody has built a 1TWh storage facility, let alone a 10 TWh storage facility. We can make educated guesses at what this will cost, but they're still guesses. We'll only know the real cost after it's been built. And projected costs are almost always optimistic. Comparing historical costs to projected costs is comparing apples to oranges. > (I'd actually put carbon capture over nuclear as the backup plan. Nuclear would be the backup to the backup.) You seem to be particularly determined to avoid the one solution that is actually proven to work. 1. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-storage-80-percent-wind-solar/#:~:text=Team-,12%20hours%20of%20energy%20storage%20enough%20for%20U.S.%20to%20run,3%20weeks%20of%20energy%20storage https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora....

audunw 6y ago
> Nuclear costs are historical costs. We know what nuclear costs, because we've built it before. And we've built it at scale. Do we really know the real costs? How many countries outside of Canada has designed and built reactor cores without a nuclear weapons programme? How do you untangle the huge amount of money poured into nuclear weapons programmes from nuclear energy? Do you account for education/training of nuclear engineers and scientists? I know what you'll say - that we must account for it with the alternatives too. But those educations are more general purpose, so it's not directly comparable. You don't need to educate lots of "wind power scientists" to continue to scale wind power, and their education wouldn't be wasted if it turned out that wind power reached a dead end. The costs of future nuclear power is absolutely hypothetical costs. You simply can't just magically reproduce the exact same conditions as the mid/late 1900s. At the very least, I'm sure that most countries will demand reactors that are fundamentally more safe than the reactors built during the golden area of nuclear power. So the reactor technology will not be the same. You might call it irrational, and I'd be inclined to agree. Most reactors of that era was incredibly safe. But you can't wish away human irrationality. Maybe you can educate people, but not without massive resources poured into education and public relations. Add that to the indirect costs. We don't have strong government countries in the west anymore, governments that can just push through huge multi-decade bets like that. And I don't see any chance of that changing. So the most likely path for a nuclear renaissance is through small modular reactors, since you might find applications with shorter return on investments, and then gradually scale it up. But that's a a fundamentally different model from the golden area of nuclear power, so historical lessons about costs do not apply.
- Manfredo_1 6y ago
  Germany, Japan, Sweden, Korea, Ukraine, Belgium, Spain, Finland, and Argentina form a non-exhaustive list of countries that have built reactors without weapons. The reactor designs are often licensed, but reactors are constructed on site. I'm not sure why you seem to think that nuclear weapons are connected with nuclear power. These are very different technologies. You don't need control rods, pressure vessels, and heat exchangers to build nuclear weapons. You don't need precise blasting plugs and explosive lenses to build nuclear power plants. The only shared technology is nuclear enrichment, but enrichment infrastructure already exists and countries can buy enriched fuel from other countries.

audunw 6y ago

> Nuclear costs are historical costs. We know what nuclear costs, because we've built it before. And we've built it at scale. Do we really know the real costs? How many countries outside of Canada has designed and built reactor cores without a nuclear weapons programme? How do you untangle the huge amount of money poured into nuclear weapons programmes from nuclear energy? Do you account for education/training of nuclear engineers and scientists? I know what you'll say - that we must account for it with the alternatives too. But those educations are more general purpose, so it's not directly comparable. You don't need to educate lots of "wind power scientists" to continue to scale wind power, and their education wouldn't be wasted if it turned out that wind power reached a dead end. The costs of future nuclear power is absolutely hypothetical costs. You simply can't just magically reproduce the exact same conditions as the mid/late 1900s. At the very least, I'm sure that most countries will demand reactors that are fundamentally more safe than the reactors built during the golden area of nuclear power. So the reactor technology will not be the same. You might call it irrational, and I'd be inclined to agree. Most reactors of that era was incredibly safe. But you can't wish away human irrationality. Maybe you can educate people, but not without massive resources poured into education and public relations. Add that to the indirect costs. We don't have strong government countries in the west anymore, governments that can just push through huge multi-decade bets like that. And I don't see any chance of that changing. So the most likely path for a nuclear renaissance is through small modular reactors, since you might find applications with shorter return on investments, and then gradually scale it up. But that's a a fundamentally different model from the golden area of nuclear power, so historical lessons about costs do not apply.

Manfredo_1 6y ago
Germany, Japan, Sweden, Korea, Ukraine, Belgium, Spain, Finland, and Argentina form a non-exhaustive list of countries that have built reactors without weapons. The reactor designs are often licensed, but reactors are constructed on site. I'm not sure why you seem to think that nuclear weapons are connected with nuclear power. These are very different technologies. You don't need control rods, pressure vessels, and heat exchangers to build nuclear weapons. You don't need precise blasting plugs and explosive lenses to build nuclear power plants. The only shared technology is nuclear enrichment, but enrichment infrastructure already exists and countries can buy enriched fuel from other countries.