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Afaik, nuclear energy is more expensive only because it is regulated far beyond what any other form of energy for the same level of risk. Disposal of nuclear w

• cycomanic 6y ago
  That's simply not true. Nuclear has always and is still receiving significant indirect subsidies. A huge subsidy that nuclear power gets is that plants are not insured against incidents (because essentially nobody is willing to sell them insurance), so it's essentially the state that does it. Also many argue that the nuclear waste storage costs are significantly underestimated, I mean I understand estimating cost for safe storage for thousands of years is difficult. Interesting you mentioned France, the only project they are building is Flammanville 3 which started in 2007 with an estimated cost of ~3 billion euros, it is now estimated to go online in 2022 with an estimated cost of 19 billion euros. That's just construction cost. Regarding the cost for decommissioning, the European commission has actually called out France for currently significantly underfunding the cost by a factor of 3 or 4.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • trashface 6y ago
    I used to hear stories about using a breeder reactor to recycle used waste, which reduces the storage requirements for the remainder to a few centuries. Not sure if that is a pipe dream though.
    • pfdietz 6y ago
      Nuclear is uneconomical even if you totally ignore waste disposal costs.
  • PoignardAzur 6y ago
    Part of the problem with Flamanville is notoriously that France hasn't built a new nuclear reactor for 20 years, and a lot of the expertise has been lost; also, the ASN's safety regulations have become a lot stricter in that time. So I think overall GP's points apply.
• dismayedjim 6y ago
  You can't wipe a continent out with the worst case coal plant failure. A reactor going critical and exploding, however "impossible" would do just that. Look at the Saudi plant going up. It is jokingly referred to as "a car with no seatbelts".
  • lambda_obrien 6y ago
    Research what a critical fission reaction is, then come back and figure out why your sentence doesn't make sense.
  • ashtonkem 6y ago
    You’d be surprised how many people die every year from coal power exhaust. People naturally overweight low frequency high impact events like a nuclear meltdown but drastically undervalue high frequency low impact events. Someone dying early because they lived too close to a coal plant doesn’t make the news, but in terms of actual human impact it trounces nuclear’s impact by multiple orders of magnitude.
    • ben-schaaf 6y ago
      Coal power plants also carry a lot more radiation into their surrounding environment than nuclear power plants: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
      • EricE 6y ago
        Yes, the real irony - coal plants release more radiation into the environment than nuclear plants ever have - including Chernobyl.
        • ashtonkem 6y ago
          A great example of a low impact, high frequency event being underweighted.
  • 6y ago
• nl 6y ago
  > Afaik, nuclear energy is more expensive only because it is regulated far beyond what any other form of energy for the same level of risk. This is a (very) common misconception. A MIT study found that safety and regulatory increases contributes less than 1/3 of the cost increase in nuclear plants since 1975 (after adjusting for inflation): Since many of the researchers are in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at MIT, they are able to go through and connect the cost changes to specific motivations and check these connections by looking at patents and journal papers that describe the ideas driving these changes. Some of the driving factors are definitely regulatory. After the Three Mile Island accident, for example, regulators "required increased documentation of safety-compliant construction practices, prompting companies to develop quality assurance programs to manage the correct use and testing of safety-related equipment and nuclear construction material." Putting those programs in place and ensuring that documentation both added costs to the projects. But those were far from the only costs. They cite a worker survey that indicated that about a quarter of the unproductive labor time came because the workers were waiting for either tools or materials to become available. In a lot of other cases, construction procedures were changed in the middle of the build, leading to confusion and delays. Finally, there was the general decrease in performance noted above. All told, problems that reduced the construction efficiency contributed nearly 70 percent to the increased costs. https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...
  • petre 6y ago
    SMRs should change this because they'd be produced on an assembly line, just like vehicles or household boilers.
  • ncmncm 6y ago
    > This is a (very) common misconception. It is not just a misconception. It is a Big Lie, endlessly repeated, endlessly debunked. Continuing to repeat it makes one a Big Liar. When you need to lie to make your case, you don't have one. People started lying about nuclear power before it even existed: "Too cheap to meter", they said. Now with FOIA we have documentary evidence that they knew at the time it would always be a high-cost choice. But on the back of Red Scares and nuclear weapons tie-ins, they got and still get monstrous public subsidies, so we all pay, wherever we get our power. In recent years, the agency that had once collected payments from nuke operators for waste placement has instead been paying out huge amounts to remaining operators, who pocket it. The only bigger liar is fusion research. There, the only tech the feds will fund is hot-neutron fusion; that's the giveaway that it is really just a jobs program for hot-neutron physicists, to maintain a population to draw on for weapons work. There will never be one lonely erg of commercially-viable Tokamak fusion. It can never even begin to approach competitiveness with solar + wind + storage, even without counting the enormous sunk cost of decades of $billions/year with nothing meaningful to show for it. The continued hemmorhage of money for Tokamaks starves actually potentially-viable fusion programs. The reason administrators like huge centralized projects like nuke plants always are is that they provide almost unlimited scope for corruption: steady, year-over-year corruption. Cost overruns are not accidental; they are the whole point of the operation. Small modular nuke plants don't offer scope for as much corruption, so they would face an uphill battle even if they could be made compretitive. But even with huge subsidies and high pricing, they weren't competitive, nothing new has made them cheaper, and prices are still plummeting.
• godelski 6y ago
  You can often run these numbers in ways with varying hyper parameters that can get you to nuclear or others as cheaper. I know Brookings did one such analysis in 2014 (note higher solar and wind prices back then)[0] where they included carbon costs at $50/ton and found nuclear to be fairly cheap in that respect. I've also seen some do health and that gives nuclear an edge too. But these are difficult to accurately do and honestly exemplify the complexity of the issue at hand. The major problem with these comparisons is that people are treating sources as if they are equal and placed on an arbitrary piece of land. As you kinda elude to in your comment with the batteries, that has to be taken into account with wind and solar, but just making it through the duck curve isn't enough since storms exist and everywhere isn't as sunny as southern california. Land mass also matters. Materials for the batteries, etc. This is an extremely complex issue that everyone is overly simplifying and are pulling articles that they don't realize are making simplifications that the authors and experts understand but the linkers don't. The reason I hate these conversations on HN (and Reddit) is because people are comparing things as if they are equal (I'd expect HN to know that this is the first rule of analysis: compare apples to apples) and then getting really aggressive about a singular metric (anti-nuclear: costs, anti-renewables: batteries, etc. Please don't let these become dog whistles). Being pro nuclear isn't "nuclear vs renewables" it is "nuclear + renewables vs fossil fuels". It is simply not taking it off the table. It is "if the experts think that would be best for the situation then I, as a member of the public and not an expert, am okay with trusting the experts and letting them do what they need to do." If there is an area where nuclear fits best, use it. If it doesn't, don't. One power source for everything is just an idiotic idea. It literally comes down to trusting the experts or not. [0] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/planetpolicy/2014/05/20/why-the-best-path-to-a-low-carbon-future-is-not-wind-or-solar-power/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/planetpolicy/2014/05/20/why-t...
  • runarberg 6y ago
    Personally I get defensive when people pit nuclear as a solution to the climate disaster because I am skeptical that it is. And worse I think considering nuclear as a solution to be harmful to the effort to combat the climate emergency. It reminds me of how people would pit GMO as a solution for world hunger, when better food distribution is a better solution; or when people pit self driving cars to combat traffic congestion when public transit infrastructure is a better solution. I consider this harmful because in some cases it might affect public policy. See example of city governments delaying or canceling needed public transit infrastructure because of the promise of the self driving car, or hyperloop and whatnot. New nuclear sounds to me like a similar pipe dream. It is not a good solution to combat the climate disaster (renewables are), and people advocating for it risk affecting public policy that might get much needed renewable infrastructure delayed or cancelled.
• rstuart4133 6y ago
  > Afaik, nuclear energy is more expensive only because it is regulated far beyond what any other form of energy for the same level of risk. Nuclear's problems are neatly encapsulated by one number. It's called the learning rate. The learning rate is how the unit cost of production changes as production increases. As a general rule the more you make, the better you get at it and so the costs reduces. The fast the cost reduces the greater the learning rate. This is a good a summary of learning rates for various ways of producing electricity as any: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421515002293 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014... Here are some figures from that paper: - Coal: 2.5% ... 20% - Gas Turbine: 10% ... 22% - Onshore wind: –11% ... 32% - Offshore wind: 5% ... 19% - Solar PV: 10% ... 47% - Nuclear: –38% ... 6% The point the paper was making is "gosh, we are bad at measuring learning rates". Even so, you could make two predictions based on those 2015 ranges: - Solar PV is going to crush everything else, - Nuclear is totally screwed. And that's now looking like how it will turn out. It's nice to see predictions come true. Getting worse do doing something the more you do it is difficult to imagine, getting -38% worse demands an explanation. As it turns out -38% is the figure for the USA. Other countries returned +6%, so perhaps regulation is it as you suggest. But now turn your attention to the other end of the range. Nuclear is +6%, even in the best country. Everything is better than that. Solar is +47%. No matter how you look at it, Nuclear is still screwed on cost. It's not hard to understand guess reasons why it's a low +6% either. Gas, wind, solar - they churn out thousands to millions of units a year, so there is lot of opportunity for experimentation and learning. For nuclear it's maybe 10 units a year.
  • stjohnswarts 6y ago
    Solar is great but until you can store a week's worth of backup power while the weather makes demand spike and while clouds block 70% of the sunlight not accounting for snow and ice covering it I think we are going to need fossil fuel unless OR nuclear. Unless you want to see what happened in Texas last week X10
    • jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
      The intermittency of renewables was not what happened to Texas. Texas made a conscious choice to build their own isolated grid. Then they failed to invest in winterization of their grid sufficiently. The rolling blackouts were caused by gas turbine plants going offline, though the intermittency of solar and wind in Texas didn't help.