5 ms·

This conversation seems to me a bit outdated: building a fission reactor takes one or two decades and its kWh is costlier than alternatives. To get something ch

by joak 4y ago

This conversation seems to me a bit outdated: building a fission reactor takes one or two decades and its kWh is costlier than alternatives. To get something cheaper, we need to wait for the next gen of technology, in one or two decades. Lucky if we can compete with the costs of solar, wind and batteries in a decade. Even with the support of greens, government, scientists, etc this is going no where. Nuclear fission is dead, why trying to revive it? What's the point?

JohnBooty 4y ago
building a fission reactor takes one or two decades and its kWh is costlier than alternatives It didn't and doesn't need to be that way. Obviously we need strong regulatory oversight over nuclear power, but a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations imposed by politicians who are (a) pandering to public fear (b) heavily influence by the fossil fuel industry. Also, talking about kWh cost in the short term is... missing a large portion of the point. Burning fossil fuels is only "cheap" if all the long term damage is ignored. Let's talk about how cheap it is once we start truly paying the price for climate change to the tune of billions of lives and many quadrillions of dollars.
- logifail 4y ago
  > > building a fission reactor takes one or two decades and its kWh is costlier than alternatives > It didn't and doesn't need to be that way [..] a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations [..] (Alleged over-)regulation is only part of the story. "analysis, done by a team of researchers at MIT, is remarkably comprehensive. For many nuclear plants, they have detailed construction records, broken out by which building different materials and labor went to, and how much each of them cost. There's also a detailed record of safety regulations and when they were instituted relative to construction. Finally, they've also brought in the patent applications filed by the companies who designed the reactors. The documents describe the motivations for design changes and the problems those changes were intended to solve."[0] "while safety regulations added to the costs, they were far from the primary factor. And deciding whether they were worthwhile costs would require a detailed analysis of every regulatory change in light of accidents like Three Mile Island and Fukushima" [0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...
  - JohnBooty 4y ago
    So how are other countries e.g. South Korea building them faster than the US, yet not suffering nuclear accidents? I presume the problem is not a lack of engineering talent in America.
- nl 4y ago
  I think you underestimate how much lobbying the nuclear industry does. Here's the former head of the US Nuclear regulator talking about how he worked to reduce safety regulations to make it easier to build nuclear plants. Now he thinks no new nuclear power should ever be built: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/i-oversaw-the-us-nuclear-power-industry-now-i-think-it-should-be-banned/2019/05/16/a3b8be52-71db-11e9-9eb4-0828f5389013_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/i-oversaw-the-us-nucl...
  - pawsforthought 4y ago
    It stands to reason that the nuclear lobby is out for its bottom line, but let’s not lose perspective on just how devastatingly deadly fossil fuel combustion is by comparison, killing an estimated 8.7 million people per year [1]. That’s 1 in 5 of all deaths globally. Our perceptions of risk are massively skewed by the (literally) explosive nature of nuclear disasters compared to this silent holocaust to which we’re shockingly normalized. From Our World in Data [2]: > Nuclear energy, for example, results in 99.9% fewer deaths than brown coal; 99.8% fewer than coal; 99.7% fewer than oil; and 97.6% fewer than gas. Wind and solar are just as safe. That’s per unit of energy generated. Curiously, while most can likely name Chernobyl and Fukushima (perhaps fewer Windscale and Three Mile Island), what of the Banqiao Dam disaster, which killed an estimated 171,000 people the 1970s? All that said, extrapolating the lethality of nuclear generation to a world with many more nuclear plants is fraught, precisely because there are so few data points. There’s no escaping the fact that these are incredibly complex and expensive machines, which can fail in unexpected ways, no matter how scrupulously they’re designed to be passively safe — especially when compared to a solar PV park. [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935121000487 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00139... [2]: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
- cycomanic 4y ago
  > building a fission reactor takes one or two decades > and its kWh is costlier than alternatives > It didn't and doesn't need to be that way. Obviously we need strong regulatory oversight over nuclear power, but a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations imposed by politicians who are (a) pandering to public fear (b) heavily influence by the fossil fuel industry. That is not true, there was an HN submission which broke down the cost of nuclear construction (am on mobile and can't easily find it right now) and cost is largely dominated by construction cost, which to a large degree (>50%) are the same as a regular thermal power plant. Regarding regulations, the nuclear lobby is actually very strong, they even managed to reduce regulations for the steam-generating cycle compared to other power plants (I think this was in the US). > Also, talking about kWh cost in the short term is... missing a large portion of the point. Burning fossil fuels is only "cheap" if all the long term damage is ignored. Let's talk about how cheap it is once we start truly paying the price for climate change to the tune of billions of lives and many quadrillions of dollars. But the comparison is not to fossil fuels, the comparison is to renewables. If renewables are cheaper and faster (which is the case) they will enable us to move of fossil sources faster than nuclear, so the overall emitted CO2 is less.
  - just_boost_it 4y ago
    Fuel diversification is important too. That's something Germany seems to have forgotten when they went all in on natural gas.
  - samatman 4y ago
    Not only are the costs comparable to a carbon thermal plant, the generating equipment is identical, and the cooling needs are also identical. Solution: build nuclear cores as close to existing coal plants as possible, shut the coal plant down, and move everything from the steam boiler to the wires to the nuclear plant. Repeat until no coal.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      The cooling needs on a LWR are actually a bit higher, per unit of electrical power output, because the steam temperature is lower than that of a coal plant. The discrepancy is much larger for combined cycle plants.
- moogly 4y ago
  > a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations imposed by politicians who are (a) pandering to public fear (b) heavily influence by the fossil fuel industry People keep on parroting this, but could you list what these "incredibly hostile regulations" entail? The only "new" thing I know of is the requirement in certain places (like in Sweden) to have ICSS, Independent Core Cooling System, to prevent a Fukushima situation, plus to prevent a meltdown caused by what happened at Forsmark Nuclear Plant in Sweden 2006[1] ICSS isn't that expensive BTW. Vattenfall cited the cost of adding ICSS to their 5 reactors to about 3 billion SEK in 2020. That's about 300 million US dollars with today's exchange rate.[2] [1]: https://analys.se/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/forsmark-incident-bakgrund2007-1.pdf https://analys.se/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/forsmark-incide... [2]: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Swedish-reactors-meet-new-emergency-cooling-requir https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Swedish-reactors...
  - endominus 4y ago
    >ICSS isn't that expensive BTW. Vattenfall cited the cost of adding ICSS to their 5 reactors to about 3 billion SEK in 2020. That's about 300 million US dollars with today's exchange rate. $300m seems pretty expensive to me as a cost to add to what is already the safest energy source in the world by terawatt-hour produced[0]. One-fifth the death rate of rooftop solar. 0.025% as dangerous as oil. Every terawatt-hour of energy a coal power plant produces results in as many deaths as one hundred Fukushima "situations." [0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
    - moogly 4y ago
      Rubbish. Considering a single reactor costs €11-19 billion[1][2] to build in Western Europe currently (Olkiluoto 3, Flamanville (we haven't seen the final bill for that one yet)), an additional 300 million dollars is a drop in the bucket and not the thing that will make the project go from viable to nonviable. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#... (final) [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Unit_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan... (projected, not final)
manmal 4y ago
The problem is that the sun is not always shining (and half the year not at the right angle), and wind is not always blowing. Unless a country has access to always-on sources (like sea currents), energy must be stored or things must be burned. Storage is hard and energy intensive to build, and many countries would need a few months worth of storage to never bother about burning stuff again. And that’s _a lot_, you wouldn’t believe the kind of power needed to support some branches of industry, and they won’t shut down in winter of course.
- adrianN 4y ago
  Storage is certainly not harder to build than nuclear power plants. Power-to-Gas is technologically quite straightforward. The research that's currently happening is just to make it cheaper until we have enough renewables for grid-scale storage to make sense. The really hard part of becoming carbon neutral is the sectors other than electricity, e.g. heating and transportation, but nuclear power won't help you there.
  - depressedpanda 4y ago
    Why do you think fission can't help with heating? Heat is one of the by-products of running a reactor. E.g.: https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-power-could-heat-your-home-cogeneration-district-heating-energy-steam-china-ap1000-11657734413?mod=latest_headlines https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-power-could-heat-your-h... https://www.powermag.com/district-heating-supply-from-nuclear-power-plants/ https://www.powermag.com/district-heating-supply-from-nuclea...
    - adrianN 4y ago
      Because the problematic part is switching millions and millions of buildings from gas and oil to either heat pumps or district heating, not generating heat or electricity.
  - manmal 4y ago
    Power to gas (incl reverse) is terribly lossy right now.
delroth 4y ago
> building a fission reactor takes one or two decades This is not universally true. Looking at South Korea's construction times for example[1], you'll see that it's averaging between 5-7 years per reactor, all the way into the 2000s and 2010s. Japan shows similar numbers[2], and they're currently in the process of restarting their nuclear investments following the accident at Fukushima Daiichi. Same story for China[3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_South_Korea#Breakdown_by_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_South_Korea#B... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_reactors#Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_reactors#China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
- moogly 4y ago
  I feel you are cherry-picking those South Korean numbers. If you look at the latest ones that started construction in 2009-2012, it's taken 10 years (and some are still not started). That's "one decade". Extrapolating the construction time inflation, you could imagine any future developments will take longer still.
V1ndaar 4y ago
> What's the point? Energy density.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Oh look, a metric no one cares about.

by joak 4y ago

JohnBooty 4y ago

building a fission reactor takes one or two decades and its kWh is costlier than alternatives It didn't and doesn't need to be that way. Obviously we need strong regulatory oversight over nuclear power, but a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations imposed by politicians who are (a) pandering to public fear (b) heavily influence by the fossil fuel industry. Also, talking about kWh cost in the short term is... missing a large portion of the point. Burning fossil fuels is only "cheap" if all the long term damage is ignored. Let's talk about how cheap it is once we start truly paying the price for climate change to the tune of billions of lives and many quadrillions of dollars.

logifail 4y ago
> > building a fission reactor takes one or two decades and its kWh is costlier than alternatives > It didn't and doesn't need to be that way [..] a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations [..] (Alleged over-)regulation is only part of the story. "analysis, done by a team of researchers at MIT, is remarkably comprehensive. For many nuclear plants, they have detailed construction records, broken out by which building different materials and labor went to, and how much each of them cost. There's also a detailed record of safety regulations and when they were instituted relative to construction. Finally, they've also brought in the patent applications filed by the companies who designed the reactors. The documents describe the motivations for design changes and the problems those changes were intended to solve."[0] "while safety regulations added to the costs, they were far from the primary factor. And deciding whether they were worthwhile costs would require a detailed analysis of every regulatory change in light of accidents like Three Mile Island and Fukushima" [0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  So how are other countries e.g. South Korea building them faster than the US, yet not suffering nuclear accidents? I presume the problem is not a lack of engineering talent in America.
nl 4y ago
I think you underestimate how much lobbying the nuclear industry does. Here's the former head of the US Nuclear regulator talking about how he worked to reduce safety regulations to make it easier to build nuclear plants. Now he thinks no new nuclear power should ever be built: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/i-oversaw-the-us-nuclear-power-industry-now-i-think-it-should-be-banned/2019/05/16/a3b8be52-71db-11e9-9eb4-0828f5389013_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/i-oversaw-the-us-nucl...
- pawsforthought 4y ago
  It stands to reason that the nuclear lobby is out for its bottom line, but let’s not lose perspective on just how devastatingly deadly fossil fuel combustion is by comparison, killing an estimated 8.7 million people per year [1]. That’s 1 in 5 of all deaths globally. Our perceptions of risk are massively skewed by the (literally) explosive nature of nuclear disasters compared to this silent holocaust to which we’re shockingly normalized. From Our World in Data [2]: > Nuclear energy, for example, results in 99.9% fewer deaths than brown coal; 99.8% fewer than coal; 99.7% fewer than oil; and 97.6% fewer than gas. Wind and solar are just as safe. That’s per unit of energy generated. Curiously, while most can likely name Chernobyl and Fukushima (perhaps fewer Windscale and Three Mile Island), what of the Banqiao Dam disaster, which killed an estimated 171,000 people the 1970s? All that said, extrapolating the lethality of nuclear generation to a world with many more nuclear plants is fraught, precisely because there are so few data points. There’s no escaping the fact that these are incredibly complex and expensive machines, which can fail in unexpected ways, no matter how scrupulously they’re designed to be passively safe — especially when compared to a solar PV park. [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935121000487 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00139... [2]: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
cycomanic 4y ago
> building a fission reactor takes one or two decades > and its kWh is costlier than alternatives > It didn't and doesn't need to be that way. Obviously we need strong regulatory oversight over nuclear power, but a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations imposed by politicians who are (a) pandering to public fear (b) heavily influence by the fossil fuel industry. That is not true, there was an HN submission which broke down the cost of nuclear construction (am on mobile and can't easily find it right now) and cost is largely dominated by construction cost, which to a large degree (>50%) are the same as a regular thermal power plant. Regarding regulations, the nuclear lobby is actually very strong, they even managed to reduce regulations for the steam-generating cycle compared to other power plants (I think this was in the US). > Also, talking about kWh cost in the short term is... missing a large portion of the point. Burning fossil fuels is only "cheap" if all the long term damage is ignored. Let's talk about how cheap it is once we start truly paying the price for climate change to the tune of billions of lives and many quadrillions of dollars. But the comparison is not to fossil fuels, the comparison is to renewables. If renewables are cheaper and faster (which is the case) they will enable us to move of fossil sources faster than nuclear, so the overall emitted CO2 is less.
- just_boost_it 4y ago
  Fuel diversification is important too. That's something Germany seems to have forgotten when they went all in on natural gas.
- samatman 4y ago
  Not only are the costs comparable to a carbon thermal plant, the generating equipment is identical, and the cooling needs are also identical. Solution: build nuclear cores as close to existing coal plants as possible, shut the coal plant down, and move everything from the steam boiler to the wires to the nuclear plant. Repeat until no coal.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    The cooling needs on a LWR are actually a bit higher, per unit of electrical power output, because the steam temperature is lower than that of a coal plant. The discrepancy is much larger for combined cycle plants.
moogly 4y ago
> a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations imposed by politicians who are (a) pandering to public fear (b) heavily influence by the fossil fuel industry People keep on parroting this, but could you list what these "incredibly hostile regulations" entail? The only "new" thing I know of is the requirement in certain places (like in Sweden) to have ICSS, Independent Core Cooling System, to prevent a Fukushima situation, plus to prevent a meltdown caused by what happened at Forsmark Nuclear Plant in Sweden 2006[1] ICSS isn't that expensive BTW. Vattenfall cited the cost of adding ICSS to their 5 reactors to about 3 billion SEK in 2020. That's about 300 million US dollars with today's exchange rate.[2] [1]: https://analys.se/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/forsmark-incident-bakgrund2007-1.pdf https://analys.se/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/forsmark-incide... [2]: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Swedish-reactors-meet-new-emergency-cooling-requir https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Swedish-reactors...
- endominus 4y ago
  >ICSS isn't that expensive BTW. Vattenfall cited the cost of adding ICSS to their 5 reactors to about 3 billion SEK in 2020. That's about 300 million US dollars with today's exchange rate. $300m seems pretty expensive to me as a cost to add to what is already the safest energy source in the world by terawatt-hour produced[0]. One-fifth the death rate of rooftop solar. 0.025% as dangerous as oil. Every terawatt-hour of energy a coal power plant produces results in as many deaths as one hundred Fukushima "situations." [0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
  - moogly 4y ago
    Rubbish. Considering a single reactor costs €11-19 billion[1][2] to build in Western Europe currently (Olkiluoto 3, Flamanville (we haven't seen the final bill for that one yet)), an additional 300 million dollars is a drop in the bucket and not the thing that will make the project go from viable to nonviable. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#... (final) [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Unit_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan... (projected, not final)

manmal 4y ago

The problem is that the sun is not always shining (and half the year not at the right angle), and wind is not always blowing. Unless a country has access to always-on sources (like sea currents), energy must be stored or things must be burned. Storage is hard and energy intensive to build, and many countries would need a few months worth of storage to never bother about burning stuff again. And that’s _a lot_, you wouldn’t believe the kind of power needed to support some branches of industry, and they won’t shut down in winter of course.

adrianN 4y ago
Storage is certainly not harder to build than nuclear power plants. Power-to-Gas is technologically quite straightforward. The research that's currently happening is just to make it cheaper until we have enough renewables for grid-scale storage to make sense. The really hard part of becoming carbon neutral is the sectors other than electricity, e.g. heating and transportation, but nuclear power won't help you there.
- depressedpanda 4y ago
  Why do you think fission can't help with heating? Heat is one of the by-products of running a reactor. E.g.: https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-power-could-heat-your-home-cogeneration-district-heating-energy-steam-china-ap1000-11657734413?mod=latest_headlines https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-power-could-heat-your-h... https://www.powermag.com/district-heating-supply-from-nuclear-power-plants/ https://www.powermag.com/district-heating-supply-from-nuclea...
  - adrianN 4y ago
    Because the problematic part is switching millions and millions of buildings from gas and oil to either heat pumps or district heating, not generating heat or electricity.
- manmal 4y ago
  Power to gas (incl reverse) is terribly lossy right now.

delroth 4y ago

> building a fission reactor takes one or two decades This is not universally true. Looking at South Korea's construction times for example[1], you'll see that it's averaging between 5-7 years per reactor, all the way into the 2000s and 2010s. Japan shows similar numbers[2], and they're currently in the process of restarting their nuclear investments following the accident at Fukushima Daiichi. Same story for China[3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_South_Korea#Breakdown_by_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_South_Korea#B... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_reactors#Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_reactors#China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...

moogly 4y ago
I feel you are cherry-picking those South Korean numbers. If you look at the latest ones that started construction in 2009-2012, it's taken 10 years (and some are still not started). That's "one decade". Extrapolating the construction time inflation, you could imagine any future developments will take longer still.

V1ndaar 4y ago

> What's the point? Energy density.

pfdietz 4y ago
Oh look, a metric no one cares about.