10 ms·

It has nothing to do with economics, nuclear energy is stagnant because the industry is a regulatory hell. From eia.gov: Of the 104 operating nuclear power rea

It has nothing to do with economics, nuclear energy is stagnant because the industry is a regulatory hell. From eia.gov: Of the 104 operating nuclear power reactors in the United States: The last construction permit for a nuclear power plant was issued in 1978 for Progress Energy Inc.'s Shearon Harris plant, near Raleigh, North Carolina. The last operating license for a nuclear power plant was issued in 1996 to the Tennessee Valley Authority's Watts Bar Unit 1, near Spring City, Tennessee after initial construction began in 1973.

jhgb 4y ago
> because the industry is a regulatory hell That's weird, since many believe that the US nuclear industry is a fine example of regulatory capture.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  You know that's the same thing, right?
  - jhgb 4y ago
    I thought it meant the opposite, especially in context. Surely the problem of US nuclear construction doesn't lie in the NRC making concessions.
    - fallingknife 4y ago
      The point of regulatory capture is that regulatory hell is actually good for the established businesses in an industry. Sure it costs them money to comply, but the regulatory hell keeps new entrants out of the market completely, so the protection from competition is well worth the price.
jeffbee 4y ago
These statements do not seem factual. Didn't the NRC issue a construction license for Virgil C. Summer units 2 and 3 in 2012? Which subsequently failed to be built despite spending 9 billion dollars, because companies like Westinghouse are structured solely for the purpose of robbing the American public blind.
- tbrownaw 4y ago
  AIUI new reactors at existing sites are slightly less headachey than entirely new sites.
- replygirl 4y ago
  $10 billion for a gigawatt of the cleanest, safest, most energy-dense, most thermally efficient, and most reliable power you can find vs $4 billion for a gigawatt wind farm that takes up 100-1000x the land, always has a few % of its installed capacity down for maintenance, and doesn't provide predictable output unless you mine about half a million pounds of lithium
  - epistasis 4y ago
    These points are either inaccurate or irrelevant We can not build nuclear at $10/GW, that's a fantasy. The use of the land is quite different too. When a wind farm "uses" 100x-1000x the land (and I am not accepting those numbers, just quoting you), that land is still available for other uses. The fraction of "used" land is so neglible as to not matter at all. So to discuss it in the same terms as a reactor doesn't make sense at all.
    - replygirl 4y ago
      my point is that the advantages of nuclear both outweigh its cost by a mile, and address most of the issues we're dealing with in transitioning to renewables and conservation. i'd throw hydro, desal, and terraforming projects like nawapa in that category too. even with mixed use i'd still say renewables have a footprint problem, but the bigger problem i see is that the output is unstable and too low relative to input, and we're already seeing blackouts in part because of just that. we can't move down the energy ladder if we want to keep improving everyone's standard of living, and we have a moral imperative to do that
      - epistasis 4y ago
        Another thing about the land assessment is that nuclear requires extremely specific land: either access to a massive body of water, or a huge resource of wastewater (e.g. Arizona's reactor) This severely limits the amount of nuclear we can use in the biosphere, as every TWh of useful energy results in roughly a TWh of heating that needs to be dumped somewhere without negatively impacting the environment. Meanwhile, solar and wind do not have that scaling problem, and there is way more spare land available to generate more energy that we can currently imagine what to do with. As for intermittency, we will simply design the future electrical grid exactly the same we design it now: we build our minimum capacity to the the maximum usage. We haven't done that yet with renewables because we are still building. Anti-renewables nuclear advocates never seem to realize that about our current grid, that we have huge huge huge capacity that is almost never used. It will be the same in the future, with renewables, to an even greater degree. The difference is that renewables don't have fuel, so unlike all those peaker gas plants, the cost of using that additional energy capacity is near zero, as long as there is transmission capacity. A grid powered by renewable energy is one where we will have incredibly energy abundance, huge amounts of curtailed energy that are not used because the energy is not in the right time or place. The amount of excess energy will be determined by the relative cost of generation capacity versus arbitrage capacity for place (transmission capacity) or time (storage). A renewables powered grid is a huge step up on the energy ladder, and will enable far far cheaper and more abundant energy than a nuclear grid ever could. Which isn't to say I'm against nuclear; if the industry ever gains some basic competence and can keep their promises, and the promises are competitive or complementary to storage plus renewables, let's build more. But it is the responsibility of the industry to improve, and prove to others that it has finally improved. And as long as people are running around blaming nuclear's decades of failure on everything except the true root cause, poor construction, nuclear will never have a chance to improve.
kyrra 4y ago
Not an expert here, but from a commentary piece from 2021: https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-regulatory-council-nrc-energy-regulator-radiation-climate-change-11632257020 https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-regulatory-council-nrc-... > In 1957 the internationally recommended limit for radiation exposure was about 15 times the natural background radiation that people absorb from rocks and cosmic rays. Without evidence of harm from exposures within the 1957 limits, the U.S. had by 1991 ratcheted its public limits down to less than a third of natural background radiation. This is a common theme that the WSJ opinion pages push. Much of the regulation put out by Washington isn't about safety, but more about bureaucrats protecting themselves from every being too loose with regulation. It's rare, if ever, that a federal agency gets in trouble for having rules that are too strict. They do get blamed if something happens in an industry they regulate, and people scream that more regulation is needed.
- maccam94 4y ago
  I think the root cause here is that people are afraid to live near nuclear plants, and would get mad at their political representatives if they got built in their area. Making these limits more stringent makes it look like the politicians are forcing the plants to be safer, when really they are just blocking the plants from being built in their districts at all.
  - bamboozled 4y ago
    Would you like to live near one ?
    - emteycz 4y ago
      I live near one, it's the best environment I've ever lived within, especially compared to the coal thermal plant that was near where I used to live.
    - RealityVoid 4y ago
      Yes. It would just be hard to persuade my girlfriend.
pvarangot 4y ago
Considering how difficult it is to build just a house without the magical "pre approved plans" from the contracting agency or the realtors I don't even want to take a glimpse at nuclear regulatory code. If someone manages to build a new reactor we should also research how to create energy from lawsuits, because everyone in the country will sue them for absolutely every illness they get.
pmoriarty 4y ago
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that nuclear power plants are uninsurable without government subsidies. Why is that?
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  Imagine if fossil and biofuel combustion plants had to insure themselves against the air pollution deaths they are known to directly cause. 4.2 million dead per year, year after year, according to the WHO [1]. And then there's climate change. It's wild that nuclear has to insure against things that may happen while 80% of our primary energy sources don't have to pay at all for the deaths and climate change they cause during normal operation. Heh yeah if we did apples to apples, then compared to that nuclear insurance would be an amazing bargain. [1] https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1 https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - iamcurious 4y ago
    >Imagine if fossil and biofuel combustion plants had to insure themselves against the air pollution deaths they are known to directly cause. Such a good dream
    - trashtester 4y ago
      If that happened overnight, energy prices would rise by a factor of 10-100 the next day.
EarthMephit 4y ago
One of the points that the article brings up is that a nuclear power plant takes around ten years to build, and that's ignoring the political red tape that you mentioned which would add on another 5+ years, plus the huge upfront capex costs. With the energy industry changing so rapidly at the moment, that's a huge risk for anyone wanting to invest. In that ten years for construction its likely that battery, solar, and wind prices all drop by two or three times. So by the time that the nuclear plant is completed its very likely to be far too expensive. As the article mentions, the only future for nuclear is going to be small, cheaper reactors that are quick to construct.
- pdonis 4y ago
  > the only future for nuclear is going to be small, cheaper reactors that are quick to construct But even those will be nonstarters unless the regulatory environment is fixed. Nuclear has always been held to much, much stricter standards than any other energy source, for no good reason.
  - WheatM 4y ago
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    That's a myth. Regulatory requirements for all large scale power generation have to deal with very similar regulatory requirements, which typically scales with size of the project. In fact wind had likely to deal with more restrictions than nuclear (largely to protect the nuclear investments of operators), let's not even talk about certain housing communities not allowing rooftop solar for aesthetic reasons.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      Indeed. One of the first big rulings that nuclear fans complained about was that nuclear had to comply with a law that applied generally to all industrial activities, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The AEC had interpreted their responsibilities under this act very narrowly, and lost in court on that when sued. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvert_Cliffs%27_Coordinating_Committee,_Inc._v._Atomic_Energy_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvert_Cliffs%27_Coordinating...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bezospen15 4y ago
Look no further than how Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) tried to cover up Three Mile Island. Catastrophic failure within 3 months and they hid it from the public for fear of nuclear backlash. Here we are 40 years later
Maursault 4y ago
> It has nothing to do with economics Nuclear power is not profitable. It has nothing to do with regulation and everything to do with economics. If nuclear power were profitable, you could not stop it. If nuclear power were profitable, the regulations would change with a quickness, because motivated investors remove any and all roadblocks to their money. If it wasn't for the absurdly bad economics, bad track record proven bad for 7 decades bad, you could not stop investors from building a nuclear power plant in every county in the US. I promise you that you can have all the nuclear power plants you want, but all you need to do is make it make money. Make nuclear power profitable, and the world is your oyster. Because we need it, and the pronuke crowd is stuck in the mud moaning about regulations and doing nothing but being annoying. It isn't the regulations. Even if the nuclear industry were entirely unregulated, it still couldn't generate profit. There is a huge problem, and it isn't the regulations. Every new plant design is more expensive than the last. Make cheaper nuclear plants. It is that simple. Scale it down or scale it up, I don't know, but do something other than allow it to be unprofitable and keep bitching about regulations... rather than design a plant that has a sane build and operating cost, draw in investors, let them deal with the regulations, and retire with a fortune. But no, instead we get blaming and finger pointing. It is the money, and that is all it is. Make it make money, please, make it make money.
- CyanBird 4y ago
  > Make nuclear power profitable I mean, I would like to say that "people have made them profitable" "but then they blew up" But I would be being too hyperbolic, as I would not say per se that the rmbk reactors where all that profitable at the time, tho they were certainly cheap tho But yeah, issue with nuclear is a cursed triad of Having nuclear reactors be cheap Having nuclear reactors be on schedule Having nuclear reactors be safe Choose 2 from above Even the AP1400 fail the test above, as more than a couple of them at least in China have been build over/close by seismic faults and in shores with tsunami risk The fact that Toshiba nearly went bankrupt trying to build ap1000 nuclear reactors ought say it all
  - charlieyu1 4y ago
    And China isn’t building major nuclear plants anywhere near the capital. All on southeast.
bsder 4y ago
> It has nothing to do with economics, nuclear energy is stagnant because the industry is a regulatory hell. Except that San Onofre just shut down because we couldn't engineer the water tubes in the system properly in the face of being irradiated. The real problem is that we have poured orders of magnitude more subsidy at fossil fuels than we have at fission or fusion. If it weren't for the fact that it can ride the semiconductors R&D gravy train, solar would be in the same bad shape as nuclear.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
Well, the article makes a fine point that that regulatory hell is the logical consequence of real life incidents with nuclear. Either way, it's part of the cost equation. Deregulating nuclear is not something that is very likely to happen.
Meph504 4y ago
It takes billions to stand up one of these plants, and decades for the projects to pay for themselves with a nearly a 38% projects failing to be completed. And let's not forget that we haven't really ever built a nuclear plant (outside of academic or the military) that hasn't been double if not triple the estimated cost. And the article is a bit misleading in that, sure there has been new permits, for new plants, but there are several plants being added on to most notable Vogtle which has been for the last 10 years building 2 new generation units. they are currently some $15 billion dollars over budget. and still not fully operational. And attempting to building nuclear plants in N.C. and Georgia, bankrupted Shaw, and Westinghouse in 2008-20013. it honestly seems that it is an unappealing investment, that only applies to those that look at profits over decades not quarters and are willing to gamble billions on projects that nearly 1 in 3 fail.
cycomanic 4y ago
So you say: don't look believe the researched article which has plenty of researched evidence, but instead believe my one meaningless data point instead. If you read the article, it goes through the cost analysis and even calculates the numbers for heavy deregulated, it still does not add up.
jayd16 4y ago
If it's just about regulation why hasn't China (or anyone) broken the stagnation? It's unwarranted regulations in every country?
- FooBarWidget 4y ago
  Actually China seems to be the only country where nuclear is alive and thriving. There were some hiccups for some years due to lack of experience with 3G designs, as well as US sanctions (forcing some companies to drop France's AP-1000 design and to design their own), but they have now solved those problems and are ramping up nuclear fast because they are serious about 2030 peak carbon target. Source: David Fishman, who's an expert on the energy sector in China. You can find a lot of info on his Twitter, for example https://twitter.com/pretentiouswhat/status/1293961095892279296 https://twitter.com/pretentiouswhat/status/12939610958922792...
  - froglets 4y ago
    UAE are building nuclear plants as well.
    - colinmhayes 4y ago
      I believe the UAE's plants are being built by the south Koreans, who have been the biggest builders this century. Unfortunately even with so many plants being built south Korea has been unable to lower costs.
      - natmaka 4y ago
        In Korea, around the date of the deal with the UAE, there was quite a scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      UAE's plants are, certainly in retrospect and probably earlier, a mistake. They produce output at something like 5x the cost per kWh of what utility scale solar can achieve there (about $0.013/kWh for large utility scale solar). In the time between the process to build those plants was started and when they came online, solar has crashed in cost by nearly an order of magnitude.
concordDance 4y ago
Indeed. As the article points out, reactors used to be under $2000/kw. The UK electricity wholesale price is currently at £100/MWh, so at current prices your new plant will make back its construction costs (ignoring operating costs for now) in two years of operation. Regulation has increased the cost of new nuclear sixfold (see Hinkley Point C).

jhgb 4y ago

> because the industry is a regulatory hell That's weird, since many believe that the US nuclear industry is a fine example of regulatory capture.

fallingknife 4y ago
You know that's the same thing, right?
- jhgb 4y ago
  I thought it meant the opposite, especially in context. Surely the problem of US nuclear construction doesn't lie in the NRC making concessions.
  - fallingknife 4y ago
    The point of regulatory capture is that regulatory hell is actually good for the established businesses in an industry. Sure it costs them money to comply, but the regulatory hell keeps new entrants out of the market completely, so the protection from competition is well worth the price.

jeffbee 4y ago

These statements do not seem factual. Didn't the NRC issue a construction license for Virgil C. Summer units 2 and 3 in 2012? Which subsequently failed to be built despite spending 9 billion dollars, because companies like Westinghouse are structured solely for the purpose of robbing the American public blind.

tbrownaw 4y ago
AIUI new reactors at existing sites are slightly less headachey than entirely new sites.
replygirl 4y ago
$10 billion for a gigawatt of the cleanest, safest, most energy-dense, most thermally efficient, and most reliable power you can find vs $4 billion for a gigawatt wind farm that takes up 100-1000x the land, always has a few % of its installed capacity down for maintenance, and doesn't provide predictable output unless you mine about half a million pounds of lithium
- epistasis 4y ago
  These points are either inaccurate or irrelevant We can not build nuclear at $10/GW, that's a fantasy. The use of the land is quite different too. When a wind farm "uses" 100x-1000x the land (and I am not accepting those numbers, just quoting you), that land is still available for other uses. The fraction of "used" land is so neglible as to not matter at all. So to discuss it in the same terms as a reactor doesn't make sense at all.
  - replygirl 4y ago
    my point is that the advantages of nuclear both outweigh its cost by a mile, and address most of the issues we're dealing with in transitioning to renewables and conservation. i'd throw hydro, desal, and terraforming projects like nawapa in that category too. even with mixed use i'd still say renewables have a footprint problem, but the bigger problem i see is that the output is unstable and too low relative to input, and we're already seeing blackouts in part because of just that. we can't move down the energy ladder if we want to keep improving everyone's standard of living, and we have a moral imperative to do that
    - epistasis 4y ago
      Another thing about the land assessment is that nuclear requires extremely specific land: either access to a massive body of water, or a huge resource of wastewater (e.g. Arizona's reactor) This severely limits the amount of nuclear we can use in the biosphere, as every TWh of useful energy results in roughly a TWh of heating that needs to be dumped somewhere without negatively impacting the environment. Meanwhile, solar and wind do not have that scaling problem, and there is way more spare land available to generate more energy that we can currently imagine what to do with. As for intermittency, we will simply design the future electrical grid exactly the same we design it now: we build our minimum capacity to the the maximum usage. We haven't done that yet with renewables because we are still building. Anti-renewables nuclear advocates never seem to realize that about our current grid, that we have huge huge huge capacity that is almost never used. It will be the same in the future, with renewables, to an even greater degree. The difference is that renewables don't have fuel, so unlike all those peaker gas plants, the cost of using that additional energy capacity is near zero, as long as there is transmission capacity. A grid powered by renewable energy is one where we will have incredibly energy abundance, huge amounts of curtailed energy that are not used because the energy is not in the right time or place. The amount of excess energy will be determined by the relative cost of generation capacity versus arbitrage capacity for place (transmission capacity) or time (storage). A renewables powered grid is a huge step up on the energy ladder, and will enable far far cheaper and more abundant energy than a nuclear grid ever could. Which isn't to say I'm against nuclear; if the industry ever gains some basic competence and can keep their promises, and the promises are competitive or complementary to storage plus renewables, let's build more. But it is the responsibility of the industry to improve, and prove to others that it has finally improved. And as long as people are running around blaming nuclear's decades of failure on everything except the true root cause, poor construction, nuclear will never have a chance to improve.

kyrra 4y ago

Not an expert here, but from a commentary piece from 2021: https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-regulatory-council-nrc-energy-regulator-radiation-climate-change-11632257020 https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-regulatory-council-nrc-... > In 1957 the internationally recommended limit for radiation exposure was about 15 times the natural background radiation that people absorb from rocks and cosmic rays. Without evidence of harm from exposures within the 1957 limits, the U.S. had by 1991 ratcheted its public limits down to less than a third of natural background radiation. This is a common theme that the WSJ opinion pages push. Much of the regulation put out by Washington isn't about safety, but more about bureaucrats protecting themselves from every being too loose with regulation. It's rare, if ever, that a federal agency gets in trouble for having rules that are too strict. They do get blamed if something happens in an industry they regulate, and people scream that more regulation is needed.

maccam94 4y ago
I think the root cause here is that people are afraid to live near nuclear plants, and would get mad at their political representatives if they got built in their area. Making these limits more stringent makes it look like the politicians are forcing the plants to be safer, when really they are just blocking the plants from being built in their districts at all.
- bamboozled 4y ago
  Would you like to live near one ?
  - emteycz 4y ago
    I live near one, it's the best environment I've ever lived within, especially compared to the coal thermal plant that was near where I used to live.
  - RealityVoid 4y ago
    Yes. It would just be hard to persuade my girlfriend.

pvarangot 4y ago

Considering how difficult it is to build just a house without the magical "pre approved plans" from the contracting agency or the realtors I don't even want to take a glimpse at nuclear regulatory code. If someone manages to build a new reactor we should also research how to create energy from lawsuits, because everyone in the country will sue them for absolutely every illness they get.

pmoriarty 4y ago

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that nuclear power plants are uninsurable without government subsidies. Why is that?

acidburnNSA 4y ago
Imagine if fossil and biofuel combustion plants had to insure themselves against the air pollution deaths they are known to directly cause. 4.2 million dead per year, year after year, according to the WHO [1]. And then there's climate change. It's wild that nuclear has to insure against things that may happen while 80% of our primary energy sources don't have to pay at all for the deaths and climate change they cause during normal operation. Heh yeah if we did apples to apples, then compared to that nuclear insurance would be an amazing bargain. [1] https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1 https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- iamcurious 4y ago
  >Imagine if fossil and biofuel combustion plants had to insure themselves against the air pollution deaths they are known to directly cause. Such a good dream
  - trashtester 4y ago
    If that happened overnight, energy prices would rise by a factor of 10-100 the next day.

EarthMephit 4y ago

One of the points that the article brings up is that a nuclear power plant takes around ten years to build, and that's ignoring the political red tape that you mentioned which would add on another 5+ years, plus the huge upfront capex costs. With the energy industry changing so rapidly at the moment, that's a huge risk for anyone wanting to invest. In that ten years for construction its likely that battery, solar, and wind prices all drop by two or three times. So by the time that the nuclear plant is completed its very likely to be far too expensive. As the article mentions, the only future for nuclear is going to be small, cheaper reactors that are quick to construct.

pdonis 4y ago
> the only future for nuclear is going to be small, cheaper reactors that are quick to construct But even those will be nonstarters unless the regulatory environment is fixed. Nuclear has always been held to much, much stricter standards than any other energy source, for no good reason.
- WheatM 4y ago
- cycomanic 4y ago
  That's a myth. Regulatory requirements for all large scale power generation have to deal with very similar regulatory requirements, which typically scales with size of the project. In fact wind had likely to deal with more restrictions than nuclear (largely to protect the nuclear investments of operators), let's not even talk about certain housing communities not allowing rooftop solar for aesthetic reasons.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    Indeed. One of the first big rulings that nuclear fans complained about was that nuclear had to comply with a law that applied generally to all industrial activities, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The AEC had interpreted their responsibilities under this act very narrowly, and lost in court on that when sued. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvert_Cliffs%27_Coordinating_Committee,_Inc._v._Atomic_Energy_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvert_Cliffs%27_Coordinating...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

bezospen15 4y ago

Look no further than how Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) tried to cover up Three Mile Island. Catastrophic failure within 3 months and they hid it from the public for fear of nuclear backlash. Here we are 40 years later

Maursault 4y ago

> It has nothing to do with economics Nuclear power is not profitable. It has nothing to do with regulation and everything to do with economics. If nuclear power were profitable, you could not stop it. If nuclear power were profitable, the regulations would change with a quickness, because motivated investors remove any and all roadblocks to their money. If it wasn't for the absurdly bad economics, bad track record proven bad for 7 decades bad, you could not stop investors from building a nuclear power plant in every county in the US. I promise you that you can have all the nuclear power plants you want, but all you need to do is make it make money. Make nuclear power profitable, and the world is your oyster. Because we need it, and the pronuke crowd is stuck in the mud moaning about regulations and doing nothing but being annoying. It isn't the regulations. Even if the nuclear industry were entirely unregulated, it still couldn't generate profit. There is a huge problem, and it isn't the regulations. Every new plant design is more expensive than the last. Make cheaper nuclear plants. It is that simple. Scale it down or scale it up, I don't know, but do something other than allow it to be unprofitable and keep bitching about regulations... rather than design a plant that has a sane build and operating cost, draw in investors, let them deal with the regulations, and retire with a fortune. But no, instead we get blaming and finger pointing. It is the money, and that is all it is. Make it make money, please, make it make money.

CyanBird 4y ago
> Make nuclear power profitable I mean, I would like to say that "people have made them profitable" "but then they blew up" But I would be being too hyperbolic, as I would not say per se that the rmbk reactors where all that profitable at the time, tho they were certainly cheap tho But yeah, issue with nuclear is a cursed triad of Having nuclear reactors be cheap Having nuclear reactors be on schedule Having nuclear reactors be safe Choose 2 from above Even the AP1400 fail the test above, as more than a couple of them at least in China have been build over/close by seismic faults and in shores with tsunami risk The fact that Toshiba nearly went bankrupt trying to build ap1000 nuclear reactors ought say it all
- charlieyu1 4y ago
  And China isn’t building major nuclear plants anywhere near the capital. All on southeast.

bsder 4y ago

> It has nothing to do with economics, nuclear energy is stagnant because the industry is a regulatory hell. Except that San Onofre just shut down because we couldn't engineer the water tubes in the system properly in the face of being irradiated. The real problem is that we have poured orders of magnitude more subsidy at fossil fuels than we have at fission or fusion. If it weren't for the fact that it can ride the semiconductors R&D gravy train, solar would be in the same bad shape as nuclear.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

Well, the article makes a fine point that that regulatory hell is the logical consequence of real life incidents with nuclear. Either way, it's part of the cost equation. Deregulating nuclear is not something that is very likely to happen.

Meph504 4y ago

It takes billions to stand up one of these plants, and decades for the projects to pay for themselves with a nearly a 38% projects failing to be completed. And let's not forget that we haven't really ever built a nuclear plant (outside of academic or the military) that hasn't been double if not triple the estimated cost. And the article is a bit misleading in that, sure there has been new permits, for new plants, but there are several plants being added on to most notable Vogtle which has been for the last 10 years building 2 new generation units. they are currently some $15 billion dollars over budget. and still not fully operational. And attempting to building nuclear plants in N.C. and Georgia, bankrupted Shaw, and Westinghouse in 2008-20013. it honestly seems that it is an unappealing investment, that only applies to those that look at profits over decades not quarters and are willing to gamble billions on projects that nearly 1 in 3 fail.

cycomanic 4y ago

So you say: don't look believe the researched article which has plenty of researched evidence, but instead believe my one meaningless data point instead. If you read the article, it goes through the cost analysis and even calculates the numbers for heavy deregulated, it still does not add up.

jayd16 4y ago

If it's just about regulation why hasn't China (or anyone) broken the stagnation? It's unwarranted regulations in every country?

FooBarWidget 4y ago
Actually China seems to be the only country where nuclear is alive and thriving. There were some hiccups for some years due to lack of experience with 3G designs, as well as US sanctions (forcing some companies to drop France's AP-1000 design and to design their own), but they have now solved those problems and are ramping up nuclear fast because they are serious about 2030 peak carbon target. Source: David Fishman, who's an expert on the energy sector in China. You can find a lot of info on his Twitter, for example https://twitter.com/pretentiouswhat/status/1293961095892279296 https://twitter.com/pretentiouswhat/status/12939610958922792...
- froglets 4y ago
  UAE are building nuclear plants as well.
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
    I believe the UAE's plants are being built by the south Koreans, who have been the biggest builders this century. Unfortunately even with so many plants being built south Korea has been unable to lower costs.
    - natmaka 4y ago
      In Korea, around the date of the deal with the UAE, there was quite a scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    UAE's plants are, certainly in retrospect and probably earlier, a mistake. They produce output at something like 5x the cost per kWh of what utility scale solar can achieve there (about $0.013/kWh for large utility scale solar). In the time between the process to build those plants was started and when they came online, solar has crashed in cost by nearly an order of magnitude.

concordDance 4y ago

Indeed. As the article points out, reactors used to be under $2000/kw. The UK electricity wholesale price is currently at £100/MWh, so at current prices your new plant will make back its construction costs (ignoring operating costs for now) in two years of operation. Regulation has increased the cost of new nuclear sixfold (see Hinkley Point C).