5 ms·

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 stat

by xroche 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
    Why does it need to be run by a commercial operator at all? What advantage does that confer?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- fsh 5y ago
  The US Navy is not exactly known for great cost efficiency or safety.
  - winkeltripel 5y ago
    [Citation needed]
    - jasonwatkinspdx 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - selimthegrim 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
Having state-owned utilities also removes the profit motive, which is always at odds with safety and reliability.
epistasis 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.

by xroche 5y ago

toomuchtodo 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
  Why does it need to be run by a commercial operator at all? What advantage does that confer?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
fsh 5y ago
The US Navy is not exactly known for great cost efficiency or safety.
- winkeltripel 5y ago
  [Citation needed]
  - jasonwatkinspdx 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - selimthegrim 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago

Having state-owned utilities also removes the profit motive, which is always at odds with safety and reliability.

epistasis 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.