6 ms·

That only solves part of the problem, the civilian reactors are still too expensive to build. Nuclear is great, I went through the Naval Nuclear Power Program s

• kinghajj 4y ago
  Even assuming that's the case, isn't the counterargument "Fine, then governments need to subsidize investment into nuclear power plants, just as we do with other green technologies."
  • orangecat 4y ago
    Right. It's fascinating how this is the one area where so-called environmentalists suddenly become very concerned about fiscal responsibility.
    • epistasis 4y ago
      Environmentalists have pretty much zero impact on the ability of nuclear plants to be started and demonstrate feasibility. In the US, Georgia and South Carolina started building with nary a peep. France started building again without any environmental objections. Yet these builds are all catastrophic failures, to the point that any other financial backer is scared away from even touching nuclear. The decision makers are those with the dollars to invest, not the environmentalists.
      • andbberger 4y ago
        "environmentalists" in california have succesfully prevented at least 6GW from coming online, and were directly responsible for plans that shutter california's last operating reactor. They lobbied PG&E with a study they paid for that, under the insane assumption that california's energy use would _decrease_ in the future, concluded renewables would be cheaper. Meanwhile CAISO issued increasingly urgent press releases warning of the catastrophic consequences to grid stability were diablo canyon to close. A disaster which was narrowly avoided a few weeks ago by newsom. don't underestimate the negative influence of "environmentalists"
        • epistasis 4y ago
          > They lobbied PG&E with a study they paid for that, under the insane assumption that california's energy use would _decrease_ in the future, concluded renewables would be cheaper Usage in California has gone down, and renewables are cheaper, just look at the blog series in the original article. Calling these well-known and irrefutable facts "insane" does not bode well for the plethora of other questionable assertions in your comment. For the usage: https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/2021-total-system-electric-generation https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
          • andbberger 4y ago
            energy austerity is incompatible with climate change mitigations. eg thermal industrial processes currently powered by fossil fuels need to be moved to grid power. their proposal was to spend $2B to lose 2GW of carbon free baseline power everything in my statement is true and based on documents in the public record
            • epistasis 4y ago
              I have followed the documents carefully, doing a deep dive on Diablo Canyon around 2020, but I do not recognize your framing of the situation as anywhere close to accurate. I'm also not sure what you mean when you are referring to energy austerity in your comment, of what $2B you are talking about.
              • andbberger 4y ago
                $2B is the cost to decommission diablo canyon. energy austerity is planning to use less energy when we know for a fact we're going to need more.
    • IncRnd 4y ago
      Environmentalists have not been, are not now, and will likely never be the decision makers for building nuclear power plants.
  • dale_glass 4y ago
    I think not really. It depends on why you think subsidizing is a good thing. My personal take is that we should subsidize tech to take it from an early stage to a production stage as soon as possible. We need better power sources yesterday, not next century. So we can't sit around waiting for some sort of Elon Musk to get really passionate and dump heaps of cash into it. But the assumption there is that once the tech is developed and mature, it'll be good enough to stand on its own. Because if it'll never not be expensive, we're just artifically choosing a power source that's permanently more expensive than the alternatives, and that's an unstable situation. Eventually people will get tired of dumping money into it, or there will be some other urgent matter to throw money at, and then we have a bunch of expensive tech that's falling out of use, and underdeveloped alternatives. Subsidizing nuclear forever also doesn't make any sense economically. Money is fungible. There's no real difference between say, paying $200/month to your power company, or paying $100/month to your power company, and $100 in taxes that ends up going to the power company. The amount you have to spend at the end of the month is the same either way. Now paying $200/month for 5 years so that then your power bill drops to $50/month afterwards, that's a different proposition. So, I support subsidizing solar, wind and storage because I believe that in their perfected, mass produced versions they're cheap and competitive. They just need a push now. I don't support subsidizing nuclear because I believe it'll always be expensive because it's a fundamentally complex technology that's not amenable to mass production and will always lose to brute force mass applications of simpler technologies.
    • stormbrew 4y ago
      The US government makes a steady stream of trillions of dollars appear in order to, among other things, build single use missiles for millions of dollars each and jets that have never seen real combat for billions each. The idea that any durable public work is somehow "too expensive" in the face of that is comically absurd.
      • epistasis 4y ago
        Putting aside the wisdom of such massive defense spending, the question is what is the alternate good that could perform the job? If we spend $12B on a 1GW reactor, we have far far better alternatives. A 1GW nuclear reactor has a 90% capacity factor of undispatchable, hard to throttle electricity. At today's prices, thay $12B could instead buy 6GW of solar at 20% capacity factor, and 24GWh of batteries. This combined solar plus storage is more flexible, more responsive, and delivers 30% more overall energy. And this is with a stupid design of splitting the cash to half storage half solar. A smarter design more tailored to the actual demand curve would remove some flexibility but become far cheaper. There's zero reason to build nuclear unless you want to line Bechtel's pockets.
  • epistasis 4y ago
    The amount of subsidy required for nuclear is at least an order of magnitude larger than renewables. Switching to renewable energy with massive amounts of storage is a world of cheaper energy than today. There has been zero learning curve for oil, and coal, and nuclear. If anything nuclear gets more expensive rather than less. In contrast, renewables and storage are technologies that behave like semiconductors, or hard disks. There's a fairly predictable improvement in costs over time, resulting in massive changes in capabilities over the course of decades. So not only is switching to renewables and storage cheaper than our current every sources, the faster we perform the change, the more money we save, the more of our resources we can devote to improving the quality of human lives, instead of devoting all that effort to make-work of welding pipes and pouring concrete.
  • manuel_w 4y ago
    Aren't governments subsidizing nuclear power plants a whole lot more than anything else? I heard without government subsidies, nuclear power plants would simply not be buildable. No insurance company would insure them. The cost in case of a nuclear fallout is just too high.
    • ncmncm 4y ago
      Strictly speaking, oil still gets almost all the subsidies. The rest are chicken scratch. But yes, nukes all rely heavily on subsidies, always have.
• orangecat 4y ago
  Ok, but France exists.
  • megaman821 4y ago
    I doubt Americans would be happy paying what France pays for electricity (both directly and government aid).
    • oceanplexian 4y ago
      I mean, if the choice is expensive electricity and rolling blackouts because the entire country relied on unreliable sources of energy, I'd take the former. The best energy source is one that's robust and dependable, not one that's theoretically cheaper in some ideal circumstances.
    • psd1 4y ago
      Right, but non-monetary negative outcomes are swept under the rug. It costs nothing for fossil plant operators to pump carbon and sulphur into the atmosphere; that's why it takes regulation to make them install scrubbers. Scrubbers help, but don't prevent the outcome. The outcome can be measured in human deaths and loss of arable land. That cost is hidden. The "free market" is a grim joke while these costs can be ignored.
  • jjoonathan 4y ago
    Also 20% of the US's electric grid for the last 30 years.
  • fweimer 4y ago
    EDF has recently been re-nationalized, and has always been under strong government influence. It's not a good example of a civilian/free market nuclear power plant operator.
    • dboreham 4y ago
      Electricity generation in the US isn't "under strong government influence"?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
  >I'll eat a roll of toilet paper covered in hot sauce if someday nuclear fission is financially viable enough to produce power for civilians at a decent scale. So all the world’s nuclear power plants operate at a loss? That’s a pretty strong proposition…
  • NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
    The problem is that people want to talk about fully-loaded life-cycle costs; and depending on who is doing the talking you get wildly different numbers.
    • dboreham 4y ago
      The life cycle cost associated with boiling the planet is also quite high.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • ok_dad 4y ago
    > at a decent scale More than a few old reactors here and there that are about to be decommissioned would be my idea of "at decent scale" here, so let's say that 10% of the new build power was nuclear (which would be equal to how much old, rotten nuclear fission infrastructure we have today, in the world). I would almost bet less than 2% of the current planned and contracted energy capacity was in nuclear and that probably a good part of that will never materialize.
  • pfdietz 4y ago
    There's never been a single merchant nuclear plant built to sell into a competitive market, anywhere in the world. So, all the nuclear plants around were built with a captive audience of customers who were to be forced to pay for them. In the US, the remainder of nuclear interest was down in the southeast where this sort of thing still exists.
• remarkEon 4y ago
  Can we better define what “financially viable” means? I don’t know that I need a nuclear power plant to “turn a profit”. That would be great, I suppose, but my view on electricity is a little more nuanced than a dogmatic adherence to market forces.
• insane_dreamer 4y ago
  Counterpoint: France gets over 70% of its total energy from nuclear power (and exports some to other EU countries).
  • epistasis 4y ago
    That doesn't counter the point above. France's fleet was built in the 70s, at difference costs. And what were those costs? Were they viable at the time, or was it a government program that would spend at any cost? Are today's costs viable now? Have you bothered to look at Flamanville or Olkiluoto? What happened when in the past when France built subsequent copies of a reactor design, and won't we expect similar costs rises with these already unviable reactors?
  • Retric 4y ago
    False, with heavy subsides ~70% of Frances electricity production for the power grid was nuclear but they exported a great deal of that nuclear power in non peak times such as nights and weekends to maintain even a 68% capacity factor. Further they imported a great deal of non nuclear power to cover their own peak demand. By comparison US reactors generally have over a 90% capacity factor which means generating ~30% more electricity from the same investment or in Frances case posting a ~30% premium on nuclear power. It’s hard to work out exact figures but around 60% of the grid’s electricity used in France came from nuclear reactors. To illiterate the difficulty, recently most of France’s nuclear power plant where undergoing maintenance however due to low seasonal demand other power plants where able to make up the difference. PS: To be really pedantic, total electricity production would include car alternators, home PV panels, diesel electric locomotive etc, but that’s yet another calculation.
• andbberger 4y ago
  there's a reference I can't find discussing the financials of hinkley point C, a wildly expensive reactor and concluding that even with the extreme cost overruns, the levelized cost would still be superior to renewables if not for aggressive interest rates by financiers.
• jacobsenscott 4y ago
  It is more viable than any other form of energy. You need to count the externalized costs of fossil fuel power plants. The cost of climate change has already exceeded the cost of building many nuclear plants, and that cost will continue to compound at an accelerating rate. One nuc plant costs less than twitter, and twitter is useless. So as a society we have more than enough resources, just not the will. Let it burn.
  • pfdietz 4y ago
    This is old thinking that considers nuclear as the only option to replacing fossil fuels. But this is now a broken world view, and you need to stop making this bad argument.
• ryan93 4y ago
  Expensive compared to the increase in national debt over last ten years?