19 ms·

Big money, nuclear subsidies, and systemic corruption (2021)

110 points by taubek 4y ago

noblewordsmith 4y ago
This definitely goes against the current narrative—nuclear power plants being shut down for no good reason. I wasn't aware of this type of corruption, but maybe someone with industry experience can speak to the gravity of this?
- j16sdiz 4y ago
  Nuclear as a technology is mature. Nuclear as an industry involve too much politics, bureaucracy and very long term commitment.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    I don't want mature power plants like Chernobyl or Fukushima.
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    The big problem with nuclear plants is that disaster can happen when they are mismanaged, very focused compact in time and space disasters that sound much more scary to the general public than the more substantial long term problems caused by coal. So you don’t really want even light corruption involved in their operation (which happened in Japan). Just imagine what will happen when China runs a bunch of these plants… you got to really hope they’ve beat their corruption problem or the results won’t be pretty.
Mrdarknezz 4y ago
"these renewables can generate electricity at much lower costs than fossil fuels and, especially, nuclear power. In the United States, unsubsidized wind power costs fell by 71 percent between 2009 and 2020, whereas unsubsidized utility scale solar energy costs declined by 90 percent during the same period." This was a weird take from the author since NPP aren't interchangeable with Wind/solar-parks. Seems more like a nuclear hit piece than an actual attack on lobbyism.
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  - Mrdarknezz 4y ago
    ... What?
- raphaelj 4y ago
  It's now actually cheaper to build wind/solar + some sort of storage than designing/building/operating/decommissioning a nuclear plant.
  - Mrdarknezz 4y ago
    You still need some sort of baseload to support wind/solar. That can come in the form of Hydro/nuclear if you want to decarbonize or do like germany and build massive amounts of gas.
    - ggm 4y ago
      No, you don't "need" this. You can overbuild renewable, or build batteries or PH but it's not "baseload" when you do this, for filling supply shortfall. There is no need for a continuous, constant output source of electricity if you have diverse sources, including storage and fast response. There are economic and timeline rationalisations why a baseload supply model will happen. It's about a different use of the word "need" -it benefits some actors in the problem space.
      - Mrdarknezz 4y ago
        So far there is no real life example of what you are suggesting. The only countries that has gone green include either nuclear or hydro in their mix. Storage + Intermittent is not enough to power a modern grid. Also yes you do need to always meet demand to ensure the frequency is stable, otherwise you'll have massive problems.
logifail 4y ago
> NPP aren't interchangeable with Wind/solar-parks In the 1950s nuclear was talked about as if it would be "too cheap to meter"[0], yet quickly we ended up "needing" the Price-Anderson Act[1] "to encourage private investment". So many decades later and yet we're still needing to subsidize new nuclear plants[2]. [0] https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/history-101/too-cheap-to-meter.html https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/history-10... [1] https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/nuclear-insurance.html https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c-dreadful-deal-behind-worlds-most-expensive-power-plant https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c...
- simonh 4y ago
  In the 1950s people talked about nuclear powered cars. Oh well. In one of the Foundation novels a character has a nuclear powered device clipped to their belt. I remember discussing with friends where on your belt you would put it. Definitely not the front.
  - adrianN 4y ago
    Nuclear-powered pacemakers are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery#Pacemakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery#Pacemakers
    - simonh 4y ago
      Cool! I think in the story it was powering a laser weapon or something.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> when there have been no mergers or acquisitions among these companies, 11 out of the 14 companies that own nuclear assets have consistently held market capitalization values well above the median (based on 36 companies in all) This article highlights compelling evidence of wrongdoing. But this sort of anti-capitalist nonsense undermines its credibility. Companies may trade at a premium for corruption. Or they may be better than their competition.
maliker 4y ago
Since it’s coming up a lot, here [0] is a good resource on levelized energy costs (i.e. per kWh). Energy costs are a tricky subject but in general new unsubsidized solar/wind is about the same cost or cheaper than operating existing nuclear (leaving out the issue that nuclear receives subsidies, which tilts things further in favor of renewables). And existing solar/wind operating costs are small, so their energy can be priced very low on day ahead and hour ahead markets, making it hard for fossil/nuclear to cover their operating costs. But renewables are intermittent, and adding storage pushes the costs of renewable + storage above existing nuclear operating costs and most new build nuclear options. And storage isn’t lossless—I wouldn’t bet on those batteries holding charge affordably for more than a couple days. We’ll probably muddle through with fossil + renewables for a while, which is the cheapest combo. When we get to the point of trying to take the last 20% of the fossil down is when we might regret not trying harder with nuclear, and in the meantime nukes will continue to struggle with selling energy at a competitive price. But hey, we’ve got another ten years until we phase out the last of the fossil (at the earliest) so maybe some storage cost declines will make it easier. Here’s hoping. Nukes are getting more expensive not less, so I don’t have much expectation they’ll be in the generation mix by the end of the century. [0] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
- skrtskrt 4y ago
  Is it possible that we could have a permanent (small) presence of fossil fuel energy to smooth out capacity?
  - adrianN 4y ago
    Not if we want to stop global warming. What we can do instead is store renewable power as methane or hydrogen and burn that when batteries are insufficient to cover. But perhaps advances in grid scale batteries will make even that obsolete.
    - Retric 4y ago
      There is some leeway in global warming as on net the earth sequesters more carbon the higher the atmospheric CO2 levels, it’s just nowhere near fast enough to keep up with current output.
Shadonototra 4y ago
- breadloaf 4y ago
  Eastern Europe saw it first hand what will happen when you make money worthless and success undesirable. Whole society has fallen into economical apathy between 1950-1990.
  - Shadonototra 4y ago
    i never said communism is the solution and i never said "success to become undesirable" success in our society isn't even desirable, what is desirable is generating profit you can generate profit by burning and cutting all the trees in our planet, is that your definition of successful? why should we reward that behavior with wealth? our society needs to be reinvented, taking into account the impact of your action on the society, its people, and how it can help advance humankind rewarding people with wealth is not helping achieve that goal, since to get something, you must take it away from somebody else, otherwise you generate infinite inflation if you keep print money green energies, social work, scientific research, education etc all of that already is the fruit of social policies (health through government funding, science through government funded universities etc) do you really think we can use our current model when the time of space travel / colonies will come? we must prepare and invent a society that promotes the inclusion of everyone towards the same goal, the advance of humankind and its preservation, rather than the preservation of the individualism
    - visarga 4y ago
      > our society needs to be reinvented, taking into account the impact of your action on the society Those are called externalities and you're right, they should be accounted for. You are against abusive externalities not money. > rewarding people with wealth is not helping achieve that goal, since to get something, you must take it away from somebody else So you believe economy is a zero sum game? If it were so, society would not grow and develop over decades. Due to scientific discoveries, engineering, computing, logistics and automation we get more for the same effort. Life in a self reliant community or in an isolated country like N Korea or Russia is hard because it's closer to a zero sum game.
vonadz 4y ago
We're currently working on including the lobbying costs of each provider on our website (https://findenergy.com https://findenergy.com), because we believe consumers should be aware of what providers are spending their money on. We've also begun building a full industry map of who owns which power plants and the chain of parent companies / subsidiaries. Quite amazing how deep the rabbit hole goes on the thing that all of our modern lives rely on but many of us take for granted. For example here: https://findenergy.com/providers/first-energy/#overview https://findenergy.com/providers/first-energy/#overview you can see all of the companies tied to the company at the beginning of the article. If any journalist or fellow dev is interested in this space, feel free to drop me and the team a note at alex@findenergy.com
- zbrozek 4y ago
  Where does the pricing data come from? The page for my own utility, PG&E, says the average residential rate is around $0.12, but no plan exists anywhere close to that. Residential plans start at $0.32.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    EIA says the average retail price was 18¢ in California in 2020, and though not all of California is PG&E territory, that is a data point.
    - wumpus 4y ago
      The residential rate I pay in Palo Alto is 16 cents. PG&E is one of the most expensive providers in the state. That's why bay area datacenters are concentrated in Santa Clara and use Silicon Valley Power.
      - zbrozek 4y ago
        I hope that if V2G happens we'll start seeing electricity arbitrage from Santa Clara to nearby communities. We desperately need competition in that market.
  - deleted 4y ago
blablabla123 4y ago
I think the only reason nuclear is in such high regard is because it's so risky and complicated so it must have an enormous efficiency.
- sanderjd 4y ago
  In what world is nuclear "in high regard"? The primary problem with nuclear power is that people are scared of it. To the extent that there are even efforts to rebrand it to some other name (eg. "elemental power"). This isn't evidence of a thing that is highly regarded...
- carapace 4y ago
  XKCD has your back: https://xkcd.com/1162/ https://xkcd.com/1162/

110 points by taubek 4y ago

This definitely goes against the current narrative—nuclear power plants being shut down for no good reason. I wasn't aware of this type of corruption, but maybe someone with industry experience can speak to the gravity of this?

j16sdiz 4y ago
Nuclear as a technology is mature. Nuclear as an industry involve too much politics, bureaucracy and very long term commitment.
- imtringued 4y ago
  I don't want mature power plants like Chernobyl or Fukushima.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  The big problem with nuclear plants is that disaster can happen when they are mismanaged, very focused compact in time and space disasters that sound much more scary to the general public than the more substantial long term problems caused by coal. So you don’t really want even light corruption involved in their operation (which happened in Japan). Just imagine what will happen when China runs a bunch of these plants… you got to really hope they’ve beat their corruption problem or the results won’t be pretty.

Mrdarknezz 4y ago

"these renewables can generate electricity at much lower costs than fossil fuels and, especially, nuclear power. In the United States, unsubsidized wind power costs fell by 71 percent between 2009 and 2020, whereas unsubsidized utility scale solar energy costs declined by 90 percent during the same period." This was a weird take from the author since NPP aren't interchangeable with Wind/solar-parks. Seems more like a nuclear hit piece than an actual attack on lobbyism.

DeathArrow 4y ago
- Mrdarknezz 4y ago
  ... What?
raphaelj 4y ago
It's now actually cheaper to build wind/solar + some sort of storage than designing/building/operating/decommissioning a nuclear plant.
- Mrdarknezz 4y ago
  You still need some sort of baseload to support wind/solar. That can come in the form of Hydro/nuclear if you want to decarbonize or do like germany and build massive amounts of gas.
  - ggm 4y ago
    No, you don't "need" this. You can overbuild renewable, or build batteries or PH but it's not "baseload" when you do this, for filling supply shortfall. There is no need for a continuous, constant output source of electricity if you have diverse sources, including storage and fast response. There are economic and timeline rationalisations why a baseload supply model will happen. It's about a different use of the word "need" -it benefits some actors in the problem space.
    - Mrdarknezz 4y ago
      So far there is no real life example of what you are suggesting. The only countries that has gone green include either nuclear or hydro in their mix. Storage + Intermittent is not enough to power a modern grid. Also yes you do need to always meet demand to ensure the frequency is stable, otherwise you'll have massive problems.

logifail 4y ago

> NPP aren't interchangeable with Wind/solar-parks In the 1950s nuclear was talked about as if it would be "too cheap to meter"[0], yet quickly we ended up "needing" the Price-Anderson Act[1] "to encourage private investment". So many decades later and yet we're still needing to subsidize new nuclear plants[2]. [0] https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/history-101/too-cheap-to-meter.html https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/history-10... [1] https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/nuclear-insurance.html https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c-dreadful-deal-behind-worlds-most-expensive-power-plant https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c...

simonh 4y ago
In the 1950s people talked about nuclear powered cars. Oh well. In one of the Foundation novels a character has a nuclear powered device clipped to their belt. I remember discussing with friends where on your belt you would put it. Definitely not the front.
- adrianN 4y ago
  Nuclear-powered pacemakers are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery#Pacemakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery#Pacemakers
  - simonh 4y ago
    Cool! I think in the story it was powering a laser weapon or something.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> when there have been no mergers or acquisitions among these companies, 11 out of the 14 companies that own nuclear assets have consistently held market capitalization values well above the median (based on 36 companies in all) This article highlights compelling evidence of wrongdoing. But this sort of anti-capitalist nonsense undermines its credibility. Companies may trade at a premium for corruption. Or they may be better than their competition.

maliker 4y ago

Since it’s coming up a lot, here [0] is a good resource on levelized energy costs (i.e. per kWh). Energy costs are a tricky subject but in general new unsubsidized solar/wind is about the same cost or cheaper than operating existing nuclear (leaving out the issue that nuclear receives subsidies, which tilts things further in favor of renewables). And existing solar/wind operating costs are small, so their energy can be priced very low on day ahead and hour ahead markets, making it hard for fossil/nuclear to cover their operating costs. But renewables are intermittent, and adding storage pushes the costs of renewable + storage above existing nuclear operating costs and most new build nuclear options. And storage isn’t lossless—I wouldn’t bet on those batteries holding charge affordably for more than a couple days. We’ll probably muddle through with fossil + renewables for a while, which is the cheapest combo. When we get to the point of trying to take the last 20% of the fossil down is when we might regret not trying harder with nuclear, and in the meantime nukes will continue to struggle with selling energy at a competitive price. But hey, we’ve got another ten years until we phase out the last of the fossil (at the earliest) so maybe some storage cost declines will make it easier. Here’s hoping. Nukes are getting more expensive not less, so I don’t have much expectation they’ll be in the generation mix by the end of the century. [0] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

skrtskrt 4y ago
Is it possible that we could have a permanent (small) presence of fossil fuel energy to smooth out capacity?
- adrianN 4y ago
  Not if we want to stop global warming. What we can do instead is store renewable power as methane or hydrogen and burn that when batteries are insufficient to cover. But perhaps advances in grid scale batteries will make even that obsolete.
  - Retric 4y ago
    There is some leeway in global warming as on net the earth sequesters more carbon the higher the atmospheric CO2 levels, it’s just nowhere near fast enough to keep up with current output.

Shadonototra 4y ago

breadloaf 4y ago
Eastern Europe saw it first hand what will happen when you make money worthless and success undesirable. Whole society has fallen into economical apathy between 1950-1990.
- Shadonototra 4y ago
  i never said communism is the solution and i never said "success to become undesirable" success in our society isn't even desirable, what is desirable is generating profit you can generate profit by burning and cutting all the trees in our planet, is that your definition of successful? why should we reward that behavior with wealth? our society needs to be reinvented, taking into account the impact of your action on the society, its people, and how it can help advance humankind rewarding people with wealth is not helping achieve that goal, since to get something, you must take it away from somebody else, otherwise you generate infinite inflation if you keep print money green energies, social work, scientific research, education etc all of that already is the fruit of social policies (health through government funding, science through government funded universities etc) do you really think we can use our current model when the time of space travel / colonies will come? we must prepare and invent a society that promotes the inclusion of everyone towards the same goal, the advance of humankind and its preservation, rather than the preservation of the individualism
  - visarga 4y ago
    > our society needs to be reinvented, taking into account the impact of your action on the society Those are called externalities and you're right, they should be accounted for. You are against abusive externalities not money. > rewarding people with wealth is not helping achieve that goal, since to get something, you must take it away from somebody else So you believe economy is a zero sum game? If it were so, society would not grow and develop over decades. Due to scientific discoveries, engineering, computing, logistics and automation we get more for the same effort. Life in a self reliant community or in an isolated country like N Korea or Russia is hard because it's closer to a zero sum game.

vonadz 4y ago

We're currently working on including the lobbying costs of each provider on our website (https://findenergy.com https://findenergy.com), because we believe consumers should be aware of what providers are spending their money on. We've also begun building a full industry map of who owns which power plants and the chain of parent companies / subsidiaries. Quite amazing how deep the rabbit hole goes on the thing that all of our modern lives rely on but many of us take for granted. For example here: https://findenergy.com/providers/first-energy/#overview https://findenergy.com/providers/first-energy/#overview you can see all of the companies tied to the company at the beginning of the article. If any journalist or fellow dev is interested in this space, feel free to drop me and the team a note at alex@findenergy.com

zbrozek 4y ago
Where does the pricing data come from? The page for my own utility, PG&E, says the average residential rate is around $0.12, but no plan exists anywhere close to that. Residential plans start at $0.32.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  EIA says the average retail price was 18¢ in California in 2020, and though not all of California is PG&E territory, that is a data point.
  - wumpus 4y ago
    The residential rate I pay in Palo Alto is 16 cents. PG&E is one of the most expensive providers in the state. That's why bay area datacenters are concentrated in Santa Clara and use Silicon Valley Power.
    - zbrozek 4y ago
      I hope that if V2G happens we'll start seeing electricity arbitrage from Santa Clara to nearby communities. We desperately need competition in that market.
- deleted 4y ago

blablabla123 4y ago

I think the only reason nuclear is in such high regard is because it's so risky and complicated so it must have an enormous efficiency.

sanderjd 4y ago
In what world is nuclear "in high regard"? The primary problem with nuclear power is that people are scared of it. To the extent that there are even efforts to rebrand it to some other name (eg. "elemental power"). This isn't evidence of a thing that is highly regarded...
carapace 4y ago
XKCD has your back: https://xkcd.com/1162/ https://xkcd.com/1162/