12 ms·

Nuclear power capital requirements (up front) are one of the biggest roadblocks to building new plants, followed by regulatory complexity and cruft that hasn’t

• xroche 6y ago
  Nuclear power requirements (up front) has also a big issue: the cost of money. The only viable solution is to have state-owned nuclear energy, because only states can borrow cheap money (ie. even at negative rates), where private companies are required to bleed interests during decades. Nuclear is the cheapest energy when state-owned, but struggle to compete against coal/gaz otherwise.
  • toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Have the Navy run them, make the land Navy bases (Crane Naval Support [1] near Bloomington, IN comes to mind). Encourage efficiency, require transparency, but have no tolerance for safety deficiencies or shortcuts. [1] https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Home/Warfare-Centers/NSWC-Crane/ https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Home/Warfare-Centers/NSWC-Crane/
    • Spartan-S63 6y ago
      Or have the government own the plants and lease out operation to a qualified commercial operator with rigorous certification requirements and regular recertification requirements.
      • toomuchtodo 6y ago
        I have more faith in the military chain of command versus a contractor who isn’t going to give AF if they lose a contract and the US gov has to pay out to rehabilitate a facility that wasn’t properly maintained. Contractors have less fear than someone who can be jailed (and let’s be honest, contractors and other commercial entities are never held accountable when they cut corners for profit and pollute with wild abandon leaving us with Superfund sites).
        • danans 6y ago
          > when they cut corners for profit and pollute with wild abandon leaving us with Superfund sites The military doesn't have a great track record on Superfund sites i.e: https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0902731 https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0... However, I agree that at least the military has the culture that will follow orders if asked, and more importantly, it's the only government program that the US population is willing to put unchecked amounts of money towards. As Reagan said: "trust, but verify".
      • minikites 6y ago
        Why does it need to be run by a commercial operator at all? What advantage does that confer?
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    • fsh 6y ago
      The US Navy is not exactly known for great cost efficiency or safety.
      • winkeltripel 6y ago
        [Citation needed]
        • jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
          Google USS Fitzgerald as well as Fat Leonard, that will put you on the path to understanding the pervasive problems in 7th fleet. They've chopped off heads in leadership, so maybe things are moving towards better, but it's undeniable there's been a huge problem festering for ages. Familiarize yourself with the Zumwalt and LCS procurement programs. Both are nearly total failures, with the Navy grasping at straws to find ways to make the ships that have been constructed useful. Congress bears some of the blame here, particularly in relation to Zumwalt, but it's also clear Navy leadership has been often incompetent in planning future acquisitions. Those two programs cost US tax payers about $50 billion.
    • throwaway8581 6y ago
      It's probably time to abandon the 90s mental model of the military as effective and efficient. The cultural rot has reached them too. The officer corp will virtue signal all day about paying for sex changes for their soldiers, but the affirmative action hires that run the place can't get anything right anymore. And no one is dumb enough or courageous enough to try to fire them. The wastefulness of the military budget is at this point legendary. Consider the comical flop of the F35 and other such boondoggles.
      • toomuchtodo 6y ago
        When was the last time there was a safety incident on a nuclear Navy vessel? Or a loss of radiological material? I am aware of the culture causing loss of life due to overwork and hubris on their non nuclear vessels, but nuke specialists run a tight ship, and reactors on land are stationary and need nuke folks (not sailors).
        • throwaway8581 6y ago
          Just wait for it. The nuclear submarines were one of the last holdouts from woke politics and affirmative action, but that ended in the last five years. Within a decade they will be as woke and mismanaged as the rest of the military.
          • deleted 6y ago
            [deleted]
          • selimthegrim 6y ago
            So did Trump make any improvements on this score? Not from what I’ve seen. It may be more no shooting wars lead to degradation.
            • throwaway8581 6y ago
              Trump was basically unable to do anything about any part of the federal bureaucracy, including the military, which is entrenched through a combination of civil service laws and Supreme Court decisions that make it impossible for the President to effectively control the bureaucracy if they don't see eye to eye.
    • LorenPechtel 6y ago
      We do *not* want naval reactors! Normal civilian reactors work on low enrichment uranium or even natural uranium--stuff that has no potential to go boom. Even reprocessing isn't the danger it's made out to be. First, the plutonium from spent reactor fuel has a lot of Pu-240 in it. Bombs need Pu-239, too much Pu-240 will make them malfunction. (If you are trying to make Pu-239 you switch out the fuel rods much more frequently.) Second, the reprocessing plant has access to a lot of very hot stuff. All you actually need to do in reprocessing is strip out the waste products that poison the reaction, a fuel rod heavily "contaminated" with something like Cobalt-60 won't interfere with reactor operation, but it will ensure no thief will make off with it. Naval reactors, however, are built to be as small as possible. That means very highly enriched uranium. Building a gun-type uranium bomb is easily within the range of what Al Qaeda can do, the limiting factor is obtaining the materials. Thus naval reactor fuel needs to be treated with extreme security.
      • toomuchtodo 6y ago
        Apologies if my thesis wasn't clear. I'm advocating for Navy administration of the commercial nuclear fleet being subsidized by the federal gov, not Naval reactors of the same design you'd put at sea. The value is in accountability and chain of command ("safety culture"), not the marine vessel reactor design.
  • minikites 6y ago
    Having state-owned utilities also removes the profit motive, which is always at odds with safety and reliability.
  • epistasis 6y ago
    I think nuclear might have been the cheapest in the past, but it needs to be compared to modern technologies again and reassessed if it's going to have that crown now. It never got as cheap as it was claimed it would be, accounting for loan interest or not. And now we have just experienced a decade where intermittent renewables have plummeted in cost to below that of fuel-base energy. And storage is on that trend too, with storage being added to most solar and wind projects these days to increase profitability. Nuclear is characterized by very low opex compared to capex, but that ratio is even higher with renewables. If we are going to give nuclear the benefit of low capital costs, we should also give renewables that same cheap capital when comparing to nuclear.
    • xroche 6y ago
      > It never got as cheap as it was claimed it would be, accounting for loan interest or not. I would say "citation needed". France typically had a documented public investment plan for nuclear energy, and is enjoying one of the cheapest and low-carbon emission electricity in Europe. > And now we have just experienced a decade where intermittent renewables have plummeted in cost to below that of fuel-base energy I still read this here and there, but strangely, solar/wind still need large subsidiaries to exist. How so ? Other renewable such as hydro are fine, though, but they tend to be already at their max everywhere. > And storage is on that trend too, with storage being added to most solar and wind projects these days We don't have real storage solutions for now. Batteries ? Won't scale. Reversible dams ? Doable if you have the chance to have a lot of hydro.
      • epistasis 6y ago
        I would love to see some documented costs for France, so I agree 100% with "citation needed". As for the US, the historical document I read that gave me the impression that it never got as cheap as claimed was this 1985 article in Forbes: https://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-article-reference-nuclear.html?m=1 https://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-article-... > but strangely, solar/wind still need large subsidies to exist Citation needed here, too! The unsubsidized costs of solar and wind are still the cheapest sources, so they don't "need" subsidies to be deployed. The existence of tax breaks subsidies for wind/solar doesn't mean that the subsidies are needed, any more than the special tax break subsidies for oil/gas/coal are needed for those sources to keep on going. > Batteries? Won't scale This is a very strange claim! Not only do batteries scale beautifully in theory, we already have scaled them for deployment, with GWh grid batteries that can be scaled at the same site to 5-6GWh (Moss Landing, CA). Batteries can be deployed in homes, at distribution substations, underneath utility scale solar or wind farms, at old decommissioned fossil fuel sites so that the transmission capacity can be reused, on one side of a congested transmission line to avoid massive upgrade costs... Batteries are practically defined by their beautiful scalability, a real Swiss Army knife for any grid application Current global production capacity for the lithium ion types of batteries is 285GWh, which on a GW completely dwarfs global nuclear deployment. Projections from the battery industry are for this amount to increase 10x every five years. And though lithium ion tech is by far in the lead, there are many other chemistries perfectly suited to grid use (but perhaps not cars), if lithium ion's improvement pace ever slows to let them catch up. We are in a new era for energy, an era that is far more like tech, and less like the staid commodity industry that energy has been for the past century. Depreciation of grid assets is very slow, far slower than the tech change of energy tech, so we need to start paying very close attention to tech change curves if we don't want to waste massive amounts of money and screw up our fight against climate change.
• epistasis 6y ago
  I hear about regulatory cruft, but have never heard of examples of what would be changed. We have two recent build sites in the US, one failed entirely, and the other is hobbling along. I've read lots of analyses and postmortems, and the only regulation-related criticisms I've found are that the NRC doesn't regulate enough. By only looking for safety of the design, Westinghouse was able to submit designs that were safe, but not particularly buildable. If the regulators had checked the work of Westinghouse to include basic build ability in addition to safety, tens of billions of dollars might have been saved, and we might have been building more nuclear reactors. But I would like to hear more specific complaints about how regulations could change, if it has the chance to improve nuclear.
  • R0b0t1 6y ago
    > By only looking for safety of the design, Westinghouse was able to submit designs that were safe, but not particularly buildable. Because the commission is biased towards safety above all else. They need to be more realistic and not cave in to fearmongering. The design needs to be safe, but against a realistic threat model. The designs also need to be assembly line and not so highly customized. French style reactor designs are good for this reason. Part that holds the reactor? Fine, evaluate for weather and calamity resistance and build per location. The reactor? Hope you like black.
    • epistasis 6y ago
      What is an example of this fearmongering, and what expense did it cause?
      • agloeregrets 6y ago
        From the outside, you have large-scale accidents that caused a lot of fear that killed the drive for us. Notably Three Mile Island in the US and the effects of seeing what happened in Chernobyl that was drummed up by the US government to show failures by the Soviets (even though the Soviet reactor design was far more dangerous). Additionally, I live near a plant and they hold extreme safety training on iodine distribution and such to school children that makes kids fear the plant.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• jkingsbery 6y ago
  Whether subsidies are a good idea or not in general for nuclear is an interesting question. The article states that the current plan is to give production tax credits - tax credits for energy produced. Such a subsidy, which does not help mitigate the up front capital costs, would therefore not really address the root problem in the US. To the more general question though: subsidies are to incentivize people (or companies) to do a thing (or do more of a thing). In the case of nuclear power, the timelines involved in building a power plant are so long, and given the uncertainty of having the same tax credits staying in place for long enough to impact financial plans, it seems unlikely that it would actually have the effect we'd want on nuclear power production.
• EricE 6y ago
  So don’t build big plants. Micro reactors are far cheaper, easier to maintain and a distributed network of micro reactors would greatly reduce the burden on our already archaic national electric grid. Kill two birds with one stone and all that…
  • dukeyukey 6y ago
    I love the idea, but how much energy to micro-reactors provide today, on a commercial basis?
    • EricE 6y ago
      As much as you need. Modern designs are modular - chain together as many as you need to provide base load and also provide some overage so you have coverage when they do inevitably need servicing. Or since they are modular if significant long term loads shift geographically, you can easily move them around to where needed too. I agree the concepts of massive plants aren’t desireable - luckily there are alternatives if we can ever get past the emotional arguments and actually discuss things rationally.
      • dukeyukey 6y ago
        They sound awesome, but as far as I know they still haven't been commercialised so their potential is still largely unknown.
        • jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
          NuScale is still moving, but they have slipped on schedule and budget, far enough some of their project partners have pulled out. So far everyone who's pursued this small modular reactors built by factories approach has failed in the ambition. Doesn't mean it's impossible but just maybe we should be a bit more bearish than bullish on the idea of this sparking a revolution in the capital costs and time scales of nuclear power.
    • thinkcontext 6y ago
• wffurr 6y ago
  This isn't about new reactors, it's about operating subsidies to keep existing ones running.