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It's also sad that industry completely failed to convince the population that they can provide a safe solution. For all the credit we give BigCo for creating pr

It's also sad that industry completely failed to convince the population that they can provide a safe solution. For all the credit we give BigCo for creating propaganda, it's curious that they were unable to be successful here, given the stakes.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
They are up against big fossil fuel tycoons like the Kochs. If we are strictly talking corporate propaganda, the fossil fuel industry has plenty of that.
- powerhour 4y ago
  It seems to me that companies like GE and Westinghouse have tons of money. Add that to the billions pro-nuclear folks have in SV and you've got quite the war chest to fund effective pro-nuke campaigns.
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    Those folks might not want to waste that money in a propaganda race against the entire fossil fuel industry and the emerging renewable energy industry. GE and Westinghouse are large and successful companies, but is nuclear a major part of their portfolio such that they would take such a big risk (compared to fossil fuel industry which views clean energy as an existential threat)?
  - phonon 4y ago
    Westinghouse went bankrupt a few years ago[0]...and GE hasn't been doing well and is splitting up[1]... [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/westinghouse-toshiba-nuclear-bankruptcy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/westinghouse-tos... [1] https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2022-07-18/ge-reveals-identity-of-3-companies-after-historic-split https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2022-07-18/ge-...
    - powerhour 4y ago
      I'm out of date, lol. Well, GE, even post-breakup, has a huge energy business that would benefit from increasing nuclear production. Assuming they really can make safe, cost-effective power, anyway.
      - jabl 4y ago
        GE is one of the big names in gas turbines, and AFAIK they make wind turbines as well, in addition to nuclear power plants. So whatever the customer wants they can offer. ;)
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  As much as people portrayed an epic battle between renewables and nuclear the real winner from the move away from nuclear was natural gas fired gas turbines. The most obnoxious thing about the energy literature is that it frequently reads like a stopped clock. People still compare the cost of nuclear energy to the cost of coal, but it's no accident that the US stopped building coal plants at the same time it stopped building nuclear plants because it stopped both for the same reason... The capital cost of a gas turbine generator (even in a hybrid cycle including a steam turbine) is dramatically smaller than the steam turbines used in coal and nuclear plants. Since molten salt reactors run a lot hotter than LWRs they could drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-cycle_gas_turbine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-cycle_gas_turbine but it's a technology that is not very well developed. If nuclear energy is going to compete with natural gas, however, they need to ditch the steam turbine.
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    Do the gas turbines use the brayton cycle? As I understand gas turbines are around 64% efficient with various tricks. I recall a LFTR presentation talking about how they could use the Brayton cycle because of... ?high temps I think?. Is the closed cycle gas turbine also using a superior cycle like the Brayton? Oh it's in the third sentence, CTRL-F failed me.
    - jabl 4y ago
      > As I understand gas turbines are around 64% efficient with various tricks. These super-high efficiency gas turbines are not 'pure' gas turbines, but so-called combined cycle plants. Basically you first have a 'normal' gas turbine driving a generator (which, by itself, maybe gives you ~45% efficiency), but then you take the host exhaust of that gas turbine and use that to drive a secondary steam cycle driving another generator. I'm not sure such a thing is doable in a closed Brayton cycle, at least I haven't read anything about anything like that. An interesting thing with closed cycle Brayton is that instead of air you can use another fluid as the working fluid. Supercritical CO2, for instance, has some nice properties leading to extremely compact machinery. Of course there's an uphill battle in commercializing this technology; if you use air (or nitrogen) you can just adapt one of the many existing gas turbine cores with $zillions of R&D and decades of experience behind them.
wpietri 4y ago
For sure. In theory, I'm in favor of nuclear power; especially as we try get to zero/negative net carbon emissions, nuclear plants have real advantages. But when I think about American business culture, I have a hard time imagining the company I'd trust with something that requires an extremely long-term focus (plants run for decades) and deep social responsibility.
Galaxeblaffer 4y ago
Energy too cheap to meter doesn't sound like a good investment from a capitalistic viewpoint.
- preisschild 4y ago
  Not for the companies that build and design reactors
- bayesian_horse 4y ago
  You don't understand capitalism then. And you fell for propaganda and fantasy of the nuclear industry apparently. Nuclear power isn't that cheap. Certainly not without subsidies and once you price in all the externalities.
  - Galaxeblaffer 4y ago
    And you fell for the fossil fuels propaganda claiming nuclear is too expensive to without subsidies. Seriously.. new nuclear is on the drawing board with huge investments in the UK, France and Sweden. Nuclear will be cheap when the industry grows and reactor designs are standardized. It's really simply the superior technology any way you look at it and the "nuclear is too expensive" is just a tired and arguably false argument against it. I'm so sick and tired of people saying that it's too expensive to save the planet..
    - bayesian_horse 4y ago
      In reality there is a lot of research pointing to nuclear power certainly not being anywhere near as cheap as "too cheap to meter". Claiming this is all "fossil fuel propaganda" is stupid and lazy. So far, there has rarely ever been a nuclear power plant built on budget and on time. Most run way over. And often the costs for cleanup and decommissioning are not priced in properly or even at all. Most industries have to pay insurance for their risks, the - actually uncomputable - risk of nuclear power rests on the whole society, while the profits accumulate with the shareholders of the power company. Ask Japan how that is working out for them currently... "Drawing board" is the operational term. Nuclear power is always late and it's always more expensive than promised. Why is the nuclear power industry subsidized so much everywhere when it's actually a good investment? Have government agencies suddenly become good at investing or are they just charities for corporate interests? I'm not even saying it's "too expensive", by the way. I'm not totally against nuclear power, I do see the benefits. It has its place, probably. But I know about fat tail distributions and the unpredictability of the future. You really don't want anybody shooting rockets and artillery shells around a nuclear facility a few hundred miles near you. Today that's Ukraine and much of eastern Europe, who says that in the next fourty or fifty years, the lifespan of a typical plant, that's not you either? In Mossul ISIS hunted around for nuclear material to build a dirty bomb, luckily they didn't find the stuff that actually was there. Who says your country will not have a rogue militia like that in the next fifty years? And then the nuclear industry is unwieldy. It requires a large and expensive specialized infrastructure. Which can be amortized eventually, yes. But much of that investment is upfront and the recuperation is dependent on a lot of things going exactly right for a very long time. Also it requires a huge labor force that has to be trained for this specific task and then can hardly do anything else. France has the problem of a shortage. In short: It's hard and expensive to get into nuclear technology and it's even harder to get out of it. And in order to solve the climate crisis using nuclear power there are two major problems: First, it's already too late, because nuclear power is so slow. Secondly, you'd need to nuclearize much of the world, including countries with questionable regulatory regimes to say the least. This makes all the problems we see now a lot worse...
pfdietz 4y ago
The problem wasn't the safety, the problem was they couldn't deliver a cheap solution. And recently when they tried to come back they completely fucked it up.
hanniabu 4y ago
Safety isn't a technical problem, it's a human problem. Over long periods safety measures end up being cut and introduce risk. There's also design decisions revolved around cost even though better solutions exist. Then there's just plain oversights. For example we all know earthquakes and tsunamis exist and yet the Fukushima still happened.
panick21_ 4y ago
> It's also sad that industry completely failed to convince the population that they can provide a safe solution. I don't really think the population matters. The problem is that after the NRC was replaced AEC was replaced, regulation became totally technology depended. Doing anything other then PWR was essentially impossible. The DoD is only now undertaking efforts to change this, but its turning a large ship.
bayesian_horse 4y ago
The existing technology isn't actually that safe. The safe technology isn't that existing, actually. The "population" tends to not believe claims about certain accidents being impossible if they keep happening. The safety of nuclear power is a fantasy. No, the track record is not enough. Given the enormous potential for catastrophe and the timespans for nuclear power project, questioning assumptions like "nobody is going to shoot rockets and shells around the plant" is entirely valid.
- asdff 4y ago
  OTOH if you used bayesian reasoning like your username suggests, you'd understand that nuclear energy is the safest form of energy there is. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
  - bayesian_horse 4y ago
    And that's exactly the wrong reasoning in this case. Because you want to predict the future from the past, over a really long time span and with the adverse events being extremely catastrophic. Just read up on how the Fukushima cleanup is going and how the cost estimates have risen... Bayesian reasoning would require you to argue about priors. You want to take priors from the past. Fine and dandy, when trying to predict the weather or even where the stock market is going. But when talking about how likely it is that something blows up and contaminates a huge area, maybe there are higher standards. And philosophizing about the average is all nice and well, until you happen to live near the site of an accident. And in Ukraine the assumption "nobody is going to shoot around a nuclear plant", which most assurance of nuclear safety depend upon, doesn't hold anymore.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

They are up against big fossil fuel tycoons like the Kochs. If we are strictly talking corporate propaganda, the fossil fuel industry has plenty of that.

powerhour 4y ago
It seems to me that companies like GE and Westinghouse have tons of money. Add that to the billions pro-nuclear folks have in SV and you've got quite the war chest to fund effective pro-nuke campaigns.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  Those folks might not want to waste that money in a propaganda race against the entire fossil fuel industry and the emerging renewable energy industry. GE and Westinghouse are large and successful companies, but is nuclear a major part of their portfolio such that they would take such a big risk (compared to fossil fuel industry which views clean energy as an existential threat)?
- phonon 4y ago
  Westinghouse went bankrupt a few years ago[0]...and GE hasn't been doing well and is splitting up[1]... [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/westinghouse-toshiba-nuclear-bankruptcy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/westinghouse-tos... [1] https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2022-07-18/ge-reveals-identity-of-3-companies-after-historic-split https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2022-07-18/ge-...
  - powerhour 4y ago
    I'm out of date, lol. Well, GE, even post-breakup, has a huge energy business that would benefit from increasing nuclear production. Assuming they really can make safe, cost-effective power, anyway.
    - jabl 4y ago
      GE is one of the big names in gas turbines, and AFAIK they make wind turbines as well, in addition to nuclear power plants. So whatever the customer wants they can offer. ;)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
PaulHoule 4y ago
As much as people portrayed an epic battle between renewables and nuclear the real winner from the move away from nuclear was natural gas fired gas turbines. The most obnoxious thing about the energy literature is that it frequently reads like a stopped clock. People still compare the cost of nuclear energy to the cost of coal, but it's no accident that the US stopped building coal plants at the same time it stopped building nuclear plants because it stopped both for the same reason... The capital cost of a gas turbine generator (even in a hybrid cycle including a steam turbine) is dramatically smaller than the steam turbines used in coal and nuclear plants. Since molten salt reactors run a lot hotter than LWRs they could drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-cycle_gas_turbine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-cycle_gas_turbine but it's a technology that is not very well developed. If nuclear energy is going to compete with natural gas, however, they need to ditch the steam turbine.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  Do the gas turbines use the brayton cycle? As I understand gas turbines are around 64% efficient with various tricks. I recall a LFTR presentation talking about how they could use the Brayton cycle because of... ?high temps I think?. Is the closed cycle gas turbine also using a superior cycle like the Brayton? Oh it's in the third sentence, CTRL-F failed me.
  - jabl 4y ago
    > As I understand gas turbines are around 64% efficient with various tricks. These super-high efficiency gas turbines are not 'pure' gas turbines, but so-called combined cycle plants. Basically you first have a 'normal' gas turbine driving a generator (which, by itself, maybe gives you ~45% efficiency), but then you take the host exhaust of that gas turbine and use that to drive a secondary steam cycle driving another generator. I'm not sure such a thing is doable in a closed Brayton cycle, at least I haven't read anything about anything like that. An interesting thing with closed cycle Brayton is that instead of air you can use another fluid as the working fluid. Supercritical CO2, for instance, has some nice properties leading to extremely compact machinery. Of course there's an uphill battle in commercializing this technology; if you use air (or nitrogen) you can just adapt one of the many existing gas turbine cores with $zillions of R&D and decades of experience behind them.

wpietri 4y ago

For sure. In theory, I'm in favor of nuclear power; especially as we try get to zero/negative net carbon emissions, nuclear plants have real advantages. But when I think about American business culture, I have a hard time imagining the company I'd trust with something that requires an extremely long-term focus (plants run for decades) and deep social responsibility.

Galaxeblaffer 4y ago

Energy too cheap to meter doesn't sound like a good investment from a capitalistic viewpoint.

preisschild 4y ago
Not for the companies that build and design reactors
bayesian_horse 4y ago
You don't understand capitalism then. And you fell for propaganda and fantasy of the nuclear industry apparently. Nuclear power isn't that cheap. Certainly not without subsidies and once you price in all the externalities.
- Galaxeblaffer 4y ago
  And you fell for the fossil fuels propaganda claiming nuclear is too expensive to without subsidies. Seriously.. new nuclear is on the drawing board with huge investments in the UK, France and Sweden. Nuclear will be cheap when the industry grows and reactor designs are standardized. It's really simply the superior technology any way you look at it and the "nuclear is too expensive" is just a tired and arguably false argument against it. I'm so sick and tired of people saying that it's too expensive to save the planet..
  - bayesian_horse 4y ago
    In reality there is a lot of research pointing to nuclear power certainly not being anywhere near as cheap as "too cheap to meter". Claiming this is all "fossil fuel propaganda" is stupid and lazy. So far, there has rarely ever been a nuclear power plant built on budget and on time. Most run way over. And often the costs for cleanup and decommissioning are not priced in properly or even at all. Most industries have to pay insurance for their risks, the - actually uncomputable - risk of nuclear power rests on the whole society, while the profits accumulate with the shareholders of the power company. Ask Japan how that is working out for them currently... "Drawing board" is the operational term. Nuclear power is always late and it's always more expensive than promised. Why is the nuclear power industry subsidized so much everywhere when it's actually a good investment? Have government agencies suddenly become good at investing or are they just charities for corporate interests? I'm not even saying it's "too expensive", by the way. I'm not totally against nuclear power, I do see the benefits. It has its place, probably. But I know about fat tail distributions and the unpredictability of the future. You really don't want anybody shooting rockets and artillery shells around a nuclear facility a few hundred miles near you. Today that's Ukraine and much of eastern Europe, who says that in the next fourty or fifty years, the lifespan of a typical plant, that's not you either? In Mossul ISIS hunted around for nuclear material to build a dirty bomb, luckily they didn't find the stuff that actually was there. Who says your country will not have a rogue militia like that in the next fifty years? And then the nuclear industry is unwieldy. It requires a large and expensive specialized infrastructure. Which can be amortized eventually, yes. But much of that investment is upfront and the recuperation is dependent on a lot of things going exactly right for a very long time. Also it requires a huge labor force that has to be trained for this specific task and then can hardly do anything else. France has the problem of a shortage. In short: It's hard and expensive to get into nuclear technology and it's even harder to get out of it. And in order to solve the climate crisis using nuclear power there are two major problems: First, it's already too late, because nuclear power is so slow. Secondly, you'd need to nuclearize much of the world, including countries with questionable regulatory regimes to say the least. This makes all the problems we see now a lot worse...

pfdietz 4y ago

The problem wasn't the safety, the problem was they couldn't deliver a cheap solution. And recently when they tried to come back they completely fucked it up.

hanniabu 4y ago

Safety isn't a technical problem, it's a human problem. Over long periods safety measures end up being cut and introduce risk. There's also design decisions revolved around cost even though better solutions exist. Then there's just plain oversights. For example we all know earthquakes and tsunamis exist and yet the Fukushima still happened.

panick21_ 4y ago

> It's also sad that industry completely failed to convince the population that they can provide a safe solution. I don't really think the population matters. The problem is that after the NRC was replaced AEC was replaced, regulation became totally technology depended. Doing anything other then PWR was essentially impossible. The DoD is only now undertaking efforts to change this, but its turning a large ship.

bayesian_horse 4y ago

The existing technology isn't actually that safe. The safe technology isn't that existing, actually. The "population" tends to not believe claims about certain accidents being impossible if they keep happening. The safety of nuclear power is a fantasy. No, the track record is not enough. Given the enormous potential for catastrophe and the timespans for nuclear power project, questioning assumptions like "nobody is going to shoot rockets and shells around the plant" is entirely valid.

asdff 4y ago
OTOH if you used bayesian reasoning like your username suggests, you'd understand that nuclear energy is the safest form of energy there is. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
- bayesian_horse 4y ago
  And that's exactly the wrong reasoning in this case. Because you want to predict the future from the past, over a really long time span and with the adverse events being extremely catastrophic. Just read up on how the Fukushima cleanup is going and how the cost estimates have risen... Bayesian reasoning would require you to argue about priors. You want to take priors from the past. Fine and dandy, when trying to predict the weather or even where the stock market is going. But when talking about how likely it is that something blows up and contaminates a huge area, maybe there are higher standards. And philosophizing about the average is all nice and well, until you happen to live near the site of an accident. And in Ukraine the assumption "nobody is going to shoot around a nuclear plant", which most assurance of nuclear safety depend upon, doesn't hold anymore.