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Nuclear must be being distorted upwards in price because of excessive regulatory burden though, right? I’m reacting to the phrase ‘torturous planning process.’
by whiddershins 5y ago
Nuclear must be being distorted upwards in price because of excessive regulatory burden though, right? I’m reacting to the phrase ‘torturous planning process.’
- jandrese 5y agoNuclear is an industry in dire need of a disruptive startup. The fundamentals of building a plant aren’t so insane that it should take 20 years of impossible to recoup costs to build one. It feels like “old space” where a very small number of companies basically milked the customer indefinitely because they have an effective monopoly.
- endisneigh 5y agoChina is working on next gen sodium reactors that should be easier to deploy I believe
- pfdietz 5y agoAh, fast reactors. The reactors that contain a ton or so of plutonium fuel. Fuel that has to be dense because the fission cross section of fast neutrons is much smaller than thermal neutrons. Fuel that doesn't need a moderator to achieve a chain reaction. Fuel that, in an accident, might melt and move around into a configuration where some small part, maybe 5 or 10 kilograms, is prompt supercritical on fast neutrons. You thought Chernobyl was bad? Wait until your reactor really does become a close analogue of an atomic bomb (except with many times the long term radioactivity). Even Edward Teller was famously cautious about fast reactors for this reason. We might see fast reactors widely deployed, but if we do I think they'll be molten salt reactors where this sort of rearrangement would be much less plausible.
- brazzy 5y agoNo. "Nuclear" and "disruption" are words I do not want to see in the same sentence. Not when "disruptive startups" are based on bypassing regulations.
- jandrese 5y agoPeople said the same thing about space flight. The difference between an orbital rocket and an ICBM is the ICBM is slightly easier to make.