4 ms·

As builds go, a power plant isn't really all that big. Even nuclear ones.

epistasis 5y ago
$5-$15B isn't big in your opinion?! What sort of construction project is bigger? Miles of high precision welding, massive concrete pours that don't really happen in the same way anywhere else... Have you followed any nuclear construction? Which projects? What project do you consider to be bigger? Nuclear is insanely complex and large and difficult, I can't imagine what your basis for comparison could be here.
- indymike 5y ago
  Submarines (lol, nuclear reactor + weapons systems all in a hull that can withstand insane pressure and protect and support 100 people), aircraft carriers (airport + nuclear reactor, support 5,000 people, weapons systems, air traffic control), electric car plants, large industrial parks (like the 30M SF one they built in 1 year in my hometown). The only thing holding nuclear back is a tether made of paper. I used to operate a reactor and I now make software. The internals of your average video game or relational database are orders of magnitude more complex than a reactor. A reactor is a big machine, and the process involved is somewhat novel, but ultimately, it's making steam to turn a turbine with heat from decaying metal. It's not magic or even all that high-tech. Honestly, this stuff has been around for close to 80 years now. That means we can construct them using tech my great granddad would have been very familiar with.
  - epistasis 5y ago
    Large shop floors like 30M sq ft industrial parks are trivial engineering, not anything at all like a large nuclear reactor. Even check out the pictures here, this is the simpler stuff, the big pieces. The tubing pulling it all together is insanely more complex: https://www.postandcourier.com/business/vc_summer_nuclear_project/ https://www.postandcourier.com/business/vc_summer_nuclear_pr... Similarly, the military reactors are not of the same size, cost efficiency, fuel source, or manufacture as civilian reactors. People always bring them up, but if it's so easy to do the same thing in the civilian sphere, why didn't Westinghouse or literally anybody else do it? There are so many deep dives into the failures at VC Summer now, and not a single one of them says there's some regulatory switch that could be flipped. What is this particular tether made of paper holding back nuclear? If it's a regulation, name it. I've looked, and looked, and found none. Yet you still haven't even talked about the most relevant nuclear experience, that of the past 15 years in the US and Europe. You have strong intuition and feelings, but can you back them up with some documentation?
    - indymike 5y ago
      > There are so many deep dives into the failures at VC Summer now, and not a single one of them says there's some regulatory switch that could be flipped. Just last week the NRC shot down a VC funded reactor project citing inadequate documentation. I believe it was coverd here on HN. The issue isn't a magic switch, the issue is the whole regimen is impossible even for some of the world's largest companies, foreign or domestic, let alone a well funded startup. If you can't even get the NRC to certify an existing design for construction, how would you ever get a new one off the ground?
      - epistasis 5y ago
        And the consensus among everyone with experience was that the rejection was a just one, they didn't bother documenting basic stuff that had been asked for. > If you can't even get the NRC to certify an existing design for construction, how would you ever get a new one off the ground? Im not sure what you are talking about here. I keep on bringing up the AP1000 design that was certified for construction in Vogtle and VC Summer, using a new certification process specifically requested by industry where they could start building earlier. Nobody is bothering to look at why these reactors failed construction, because it does not validate their pre-conceived notions about regulatory inhibition of nuclear. Fine, eliminate the NRC and all regulation of nuclear. What's going to be built? Nothing, because nobody can figure out how to to do it in the US, and no utility wants to take the financial risk because of our lack of basic construction capacity. Maybe Rosatom could bring in a construction crew, or we could contract with China, and somehow bring their methods to the US. But nobody is even suggesting that route to build new nuclear, they are hung up on false political battles rather than the true technical challenges. And even if we bring in outside design and construction management, how quickly can we scale that process? Not fast enough to even replace our current fleet of reactors before it ages out. The attempted "nuclear renaissance" that was attempted back in the mid-2000s has failed miserably, and people who claim to advocate for nuclear aren't even bothering to examine what went wrong or how to fix it. Which means that attempting nuclear again will have the same problem. SMRs are the next wave from actual nuclear entrepreneurs, but at least one of them has revealed themselves to be a sham, based on their inability to document standard parts of their design that everybody else can. The problem with nuclear is that there are far too many grifters in it. Most (but not all!) smart people have moved on to more promising tech, and the people left have not purged the dead weight, and the dead weight is killing projects, and killing the reputation.

$5-$15B isn't big in your opinion?! What sort of construction project is bigger? Miles of high precision welding, massive concrete pours that don't really happen in the same way anywhere else... Have you followed any nuclear construction? Which projects? What project do you consider to be bigger? Nuclear is insanely complex and large and difficult, I can't imagine what your basis for comparison could be here.

indymike 5y ago
Submarines (lol, nuclear reactor + weapons systems all in a hull that can withstand insane pressure and protect and support 100 people), aircraft carriers (airport + nuclear reactor, support 5,000 people, weapons systems, air traffic control), electric car plants, large industrial parks (like the 30M SF one they built in 1 year in my hometown). The only thing holding nuclear back is a tether made of paper. I used to operate a reactor and I now make software. The internals of your average video game or relational database are orders of magnitude more complex than a reactor. A reactor is a big machine, and the process involved is somewhat novel, but ultimately, it's making steam to turn a turbine with heat from decaying metal. It's not magic or even all that high-tech. Honestly, this stuff has been around for close to 80 years now. That means we can construct them using tech my great granddad would have been very familiar with.
- epistasis 5y ago
  Large shop floors like 30M sq ft industrial parks are trivial engineering, not anything at all like a large nuclear reactor. Even check out the pictures here, this is the simpler stuff, the big pieces. The tubing pulling it all together is insanely more complex: https://www.postandcourier.com/business/vc_summer_nuclear_project/ https://www.postandcourier.com/business/vc_summer_nuclear_pr... Similarly, the military reactors are not of the same size, cost efficiency, fuel source, or manufacture as civilian reactors. People always bring them up, but if it's so easy to do the same thing in the civilian sphere, why didn't Westinghouse or literally anybody else do it? There are so many deep dives into the failures at VC Summer now, and not a single one of them says there's some regulatory switch that could be flipped. What is this particular tether made of paper holding back nuclear? If it's a regulation, name it. I've looked, and looked, and found none. Yet you still haven't even talked about the most relevant nuclear experience, that of the past 15 years in the US and Europe. You have strong intuition and feelings, but can you back them up with some documentation?
  - indymike 5y ago
    > There are so many deep dives into the failures at VC Summer now, and not a single one of them says there's some regulatory switch that could be flipped. Just last week the NRC shot down a VC funded reactor project citing inadequate documentation. I believe it was coverd here on HN. The issue isn't a magic switch, the issue is the whole regimen is impossible even for some of the world's largest companies, foreign or domestic, let alone a well funded startup. If you can't even get the NRC to certify an existing design for construction, how would you ever get a new one off the ground?
    - epistasis 5y ago
      And the consensus among everyone with experience was that the rejection was a just one, they didn't bother documenting basic stuff that had been asked for. > If you can't even get the NRC to certify an existing design for construction, how would you ever get a new one off the ground? Im not sure what you are talking about here. I keep on bringing up the AP1000 design that was certified for construction in Vogtle and VC Summer, using a new certification process specifically requested by industry where they could start building earlier. Nobody is bothering to look at why these reactors failed construction, because it does not validate their pre-conceived notions about regulatory inhibition of nuclear. Fine, eliminate the NRC and all regulation of nuclear. What's going to be built? Nothing, because nobody can figure out how to to do it in the US, and no utility wants to take the financial risk because of our lack of basic construction capacity. Maybe Rosatom could bring in a construction crew, or we could contract with China, and somehow bring their methods to the US. But nobody is even suggesting that route to build new nuclear, they are hung up on false political battles rather than the true technical challenges. And even if we bring in outside design and construction management, how quickly can we scale that process? Not fast enough to even replace our current fleet of reactors before it ages out. The attempted "nuclear renaissance" that was attempted back in the mid-2000s has failed miserably, and people who claim to advocate for nuclear aren't even bothering to examine what went wrong or how to fix it. Which means that attempting nuclear again will have the same problem. SMRs are the next wave from actual nuclear entrepreneurs, but at least one of them has revealed themselves to be a sham, based on their inability to document standard parts of their design that everybody else can. The problem with nuclear is that there are far too many grifters in it. Most (but not all!) smart people have moved on to more promising tech, and the people left have not purged the dead weight, and the dead weight is killing projects, and killing the reputation.