9 ms·

> fission reactors are today not competitive, and get less competitive by the day No, we are just incompetent idiots. This has nothing to do with fissions and

> fission reactors are today not competitive, and get less competitive by the day No, we are just incompetent idiots. This has nothing to do with fissions and everything to do with degradation of contruction and practical egnineering skills - now it takes 30 years and 100 billion dollars to make a small railway in California. Victorian England or China could do this without much trouble. The english-speaking western nations have definitively and measurably degraded - every time an airport or a port or any major piece of infrastructure needs to be built, its a source of drama and infighting for 30 years. A nuclear powerplant is just a big construction project, and nations that can build a railway without a fuss, have demonstrated their ability to build a reactor without a fuss. We are going to have to fix this if we don't want to decline into barbarity in the next 100 years. We can trade and launder the world's money and stocks but we can't build a bridge. Eventually the physical really will catch up to us "cough climate change', and you can't bribe laws of nature. Sure you can 'cheat' by buying pre-built solar panels and wind turbines made in China, but you will have to build storage for them, the only proven viable storage is large scale hydro, so you are back as square one. I have a suspicion that the layer of our society responsible for management and oversight of these projects, both in government and private sectors, is much more inconpetent than that of rival nations, and maybe that's an area to explore.

sdesalas 5y ago
> This has nothing to do with fissions and everything to do with degradation of contruction and practical egnineering skills - now it takes 30 years and 100 billion dollars to make a small railway in California. Victorian England or China could do this without much trouble. Not to mention over-regulation driven by a general lack of political will. Its easier to win some votes by bashing nuclear than stand by it, even if it is the most likely alternative for baseload power in a carbon-free energy mix.
ncmncm 5y ago
It is much simpler than that: fission is mature tech; its cost is not on the way down. Solar costs are still in free fall, wind almost as much so. The cheaper those get, the less competitive fission gets, just standing still. The corruption tax on fission projects just exacerbates its structural problem.
- ThomPete 5y ago
  most of that cost is politically based not technical
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    Fission is being built at all only for political reasons. People who build power plants on their own dime are shunning the technology. No merchant nuclear power plant selling into a competitive market has ever been built anywhere.
    - parkingrift 5y ago
      China will construct 150 fission reactors between now and 2035 to produce 200 gigawatts of power at a total cost of $440B. A similar buildout in the US would take 70 years and cost well over a trillion dollars. Do you think China is building all those reactors for political reasons as opposed to generating reliable power 24/7 for a century?
      - pfdietz 5y ago
        Do you think China does things without regard to politics? They have clear political motivation to continue to build nuclear power plants. For example, this keeps their nuclear sector occupied and preserves the technology against deterioration. Even if civilian NPPs are not military, the overall technology has direct connection to their military (as it does in France.) Even with that, they are installing more renewables than nuclear. And China is pushing aggressively to reduce the cost of hydrogen. They are now exporting electrolysers at < $300/kW, a fraction of the cost from elsewhere. Cheap electrolysers are a crucial technology for pairing with intermittent renewables to get to a 100% renewable grid and remove the last tenuous argument in favor of nuclear. I seriously doubt they will build that many reactors by 2035, btw.
        parkingrift 5y ago
        China doesn't need to build 150 nuclear reactors at breakneck speed to keep their nuclear sector occupied. They're making a massive investment in this technology from the education level all the way to the construction level. China isn't planning to realize a majority of their power supply from solar until after 2045. Like you, I doubt they'll hit that solar goal. Instead, they'll likely build more reactors.
parasubvert 5y ago
The west’s engineering skills are not in decline, though if you have a metric that indicates that, it would be interesting. Europe has not had USA-level problems with building a popular rail network, or other major works. The main differences in costs and time from 150 years ago are: (A) Accounting for Extrinsic Costs. as the nations have become more dense and more democratic, peoples voices need to be heard. Environmental, wildlife habitat, etc. are complex issues that have only become important in recent decades. People sometimes get tempted by authoritarian rule because they “get shit done cheaply”, but this is a ruse. By not engaging openly, there are often massive extrinsic costs, so the project is “cheap” by cheating and not counting the true costs. Europe seems to have streamlined this, the USA is still stuck in “might over right” political power struggles rather than compromises. (B) Cheap labor. Most infrastructure doesn’t require large numbers of high skilled labor, it needs a mix of skilled and unskilled labor. The railways in the 1800s we’re built with large quantities of immigrant labor. This is in rarer supply in the West these days, for a variety of reasons. (C) Labor rights and safety. Construction projects and rail projects were happy to bury dead workers by the wayside (or in the concrete of the Empire State Building). Or work them to unsustainable hours with limited pay. It took many strikes, some violent, to sort this out. Today’s standards don’t put up with that level of labor abuse. (D) Investment sources. Many large projects were state funded, or were funded by investors with a lot of patience. That kind of patience is in short supply, as is state funding in the USA due to Republicans being Republicans. Europe seems to be able to pull this kind of funding off. (E) Contract Grift. There is a lot more incentive and skill to slow roll and milk the cash flow of construction projects, given their complexity. Traditional large works were more vertically integrated and managed by those with incentive to see the job done, rather than paid by the hour. The solution to this is more vertical integration but that’s hard to pull off because of labor shortages. I’d also note that China has a vested interest in publishing propaganda about its engineering and public works prowess while hiding its extrinsic costs.
- yonaguska 5y ago
  I agree with everything you listed, except the political quip in point (D). Most of these large projects are funded with federal dollars, and both parties have no shame in clamoring for that money. The comment you're responding to was concerning a bloated project in a blue state. The issue isn't red vs blue- it's organizational. Politicians don't see the intrinsic value of such projects so much as they see the value of money intended for such projects. Unfortunately, grifting has become such an issue that people are opposed to the undertaking of infrastructure projects, but usually their objections only extend so far as their own state lines.
scythe 5y ago
>the only proven viable storage is large scale hydro Japan's experience with sodium-sulfur batteries stands in contrast. https://www.sandia.gov/ess-ssl/wp-content/uploads/2021/LDES/Tomio_Tamakoshi.pdf https://www.sandia.gov/ess-ssl/wp-content/uploads/2021/LDES/... Na-S is less popular for new projects these days because of rapid decreases in the price of lithium batteries, but that's not a fundamental limitation of the technology — and we have no risk of running out of sodium nor sulfur. In fairness, Japan's construction sector seems much healthier than that of the United States.

sdesalas 5y ago

> This has nothing to do with fissions and everything to do with degradation of contruction and practical egnineering skills - now it takes 30 years and 100 billion dollars to make a small railway in California. Victorian England or China could do this without much trouble. Not to mention over-regulation driven by a general lack of political will. Its easier to win some votes by bashing nuclear than stand by it, even if it is the most likely alternative for baseload power in a carbon-free energy mix.

ncmncm 5y ago

It is much simpler than that: fission is mature tech; its cost is not on the way down. Solar costs are still in free fall, wind almost as much so. The cheaper those get, the less competitive fission gets, just standing still. The corruption tax on fission projects just exacerbates its structural problem.

ThomPete 5y ago
most of that cost is politically based not technical
- pfdietz 5y ago
  Fission is being built at all only for political reasons. People who build power plants on their own dime are shunning the technology. No merchant nuclear power plant selling into a competitive market has ever been built anywhere.
  - parkingrift 5y ago
    China will construct 150 fission reactors between now and 2035 to produce 200 gigawatts of power at a total cost of $440B. A similar buildout in the US would take 70 years and cost well over a trillion dollars. Do you think China is building all those reactors for political reasons as opposed to generating reliable power 24/7 for a century?
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      Do you think China does things without regard to politics? They have clear political motivation to continue to build nuclear power plants. For example, this keeps their nuclear sector occupied and preserves the technology against deterioration. Even if civilian NPPs are not military, the overall technology has direct connection to their military (as it does in France.) Even with that, they are installing more renewables than nuclear. And China is pushing aggressively to reduce the cost of hydrogen. They are now exporting electrolysers at < $300/kW, a fraction of the cost from elsewhere. Cheap electrolysers are a crucial technology for pairing with intermittent renewables to get to a 100% renewable grid and remove the last tenuous argument in favor of nuclear. I seriously doubt they will build that many reactors by 2035, btw.
      - parkingrift 5y ago
        China doesn't need to build 150 nuclear reactors at breakneck speed to keep their nuclear sector occupied. They're making a massive investment in this technology from the education level all the way to the construction level. China isn't planning to realize a majority of their power supply from solar until after 2045. Like you, I doubt they'll hit that solar goal. Instead, they'll likely build more reactors.

parasubvert 5y ago

The west’s engineering skills are not in decline, though if you have a metric that indicates that, it would be interesting. Europe has not had USA-level problems with building a popular rail network, or other major works. The main differences in costs and time from 150 years ago are: (A) Accounting for Extrinsic Costs. as the nations have become more dense and more democratic, peoples voices need to be heard. Environmental, wildlife habitat, etc. are complex issues that have only become important in recent decades. People sometimes get tempted by authoritarian rule because they “get shit done cheaply”, but this is a ruse. By not engaging openly, there are often massive extrinsic costs, so the project is “cheap” by cheating and not counting the true costs. Europe seems to have streamlined this, the USA is still stuck in “might over right” political power struggles rather than compromises. (B) Cheap labor. Most infrastructure doesn’t require large numbers of high skilled labor, it needs a mix of skilled and unskilled labor. The railways in the 1800s we’re built with large quantities of immigrant labor. This is in rarer supply in the West these days, for a variety of reasons. (C) Labor rights and safety. Construction projects and rail projects were happy to bury dead workers by the wayside (or in the concrete of the Empire State Building). Or work them to unsustainable hours with limited pay. It took many strikes, some violent, to sort this out. Today’s standards don’t put up with that level of labor abuse. (D) Investment sources. Many large projects were state funded, or were funded by investors with a lot of patience. That kind of patience is in short supply, as is state funding in the USA due to Republicans being Republicans. Europe seems to be able to pull this kind of funding off. (E) Contract Grift. There is a lot more incentive and skill to slow roll and milk the cash flow of construction projects, given their complexity. Traditional large works were more vertically integrated and managed by those with incentive to see the job done, rather than paid by the hour. The solution to this is more vertical integration but that’s hard to pull off because of labor shortages. I’d also note that China has a vested interest in publishing propaganda about its engineering and public works prowess while hiding its extrinsic costs.

yonaguska 5y ago
I agree with everything you listed, except the political quip in point (D). Most of these large projects are funded with federal dollars, and both parties have no shame in clamoring for that money. The comment you're responding to was concerning a bloated project in a blue state. The issue isn't red vs blue- it's organizational. Politicians don't see the intrinsic value of such projects so much as they see the value of money intended for such projects. Unfortunately, grifting has become such an issue that people are opposed to the undertaking of infrastructure projects, but usually their objections only extend so far as their own state lines.

scythe 5y ago

>the only proven viable storage is large scale hydro Japan's experience with sodium-sulfur batteries stands in contrast. https://www.sandia.gov/ess-ssl/wp-content/uploads/2021/LDES/Tomio_Tamakoshi.pdf https://www.sandia.gov/ess-ssl/wp-content/uploads/2021/LDES/... Na-S is less popular for new projects these days because of rapid decreases in the price of lithium batteries, but that's not a fundamental limitation of the technology — and we have no risk of running out of sodium nor sulfur. In fairness, Japan's construction sector seems much healthier than that of the United States.