15 ms·

Our nations were far less wealthy when the existing stock of nuclear power plants were built, the technology available for building them have improved since the

Our nations were far less wealthy when the existing stock of nuclear power plants were built, the technology available for building them have improved since then, and the raw resources needed as their inputs aren't a constraint, so why have costs risen so much relative to what we are willing to spend on it? Environmental and safety regulations are supposed to be explanations for this rise in cost, not rival explanations to "cost is the issue" (since they take that as given).

KptMarchewa 4y ago
>the technology available for building them have improved since then Broadly, construction is the singular industry where productivity hasn't improved with modern technology. https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/sketch-of-a-theory-of-construction https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/sketch-of-a-theor...
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  In fact, the opposite, there’s been a noticeable productivity decline in the US in most of the construction industry.
- towaway15463 4y ago
  Concrete infrastructure projects in particular seem to have gotten more expensive and time consuming.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    I imagine moving all that mass and the energy intensive process to form and break concrete directly scale with rising oil prices. Plus price of labor going up.
LatteLazy 4y ago
They built them only for non economic reasons. Either because they wanted material for bombs, or as national vanity projects or because they convinced themselves it would be cheap. If you want those reasons, go for it. Iran for instance is pursuing at least one of these goals when it works towards nuclear "power". Just don't expect affordable electricity at the end...
crote 4y ago
- Nuclear power plants are rare enough that each project is basically unique. - Nuclear power plants are very complex. They are more "engineered" than "constructed", with hundreds of kilometers of tubes and wires. Pouring the concrete is the easy part. - Nuclear power plants deal with an incredibly dangerous environment: high pressures, high temperatures, radioactivity, hazardous chemicals. Everything has to be tested, re-tested, and certified. Many parts will be near impossible to replace once it enters production, and the plant is supposed to be operational for decades. - Nuclear power plants are safety-critical. Contrary to many other structures of similar complexity, things can get way worse than a big explosion. They have the potential to contaminate the site (or even the surrounding country) for decades or centuries. Failure is simply not acceptable. - Safety regulations have been getting stricter over the years, because supposedly "100% safe" plants keep having accidents and the population is not very happy about that. The existing stock of nuclear power plants is an offshoot of several military programs. The most common design is pretty much a submarine power plant on steroids, which turned out to be less than ideal. Things like "safety" and "profit" were almost seen as a suggestion more so than a requirement. Newly-built power plants are required to incorporate over 50 years of innovation, but it turns out almost nobody has the skills to actually build them. They have simply gotten too complex to construct!
- ncmncm 4y ago
  All of the above is true enough, but it is not the full story on why US nukes cost like they do. The ones attempted recently in South Carolina and Georgia cost so much because people in a position to block building them want it that way. Once a nuke project starts, a torrent of money starts flowing. Everybody with a stake expects a share, and none want it ever to end. Finishing a plant would plug that flow. If it looks like the flow will dry up regardless, they might deliver something at the end. We see the same process with urban tunnels and big military procurements. It is all perfectly legal. It is probably not fixable. Thus far, wind and solar projects have mostly avoided it, maybe in part because their legitimate costs are easy to estimate. Existing nukes also cost more than renewables to operate, because they actually have operating costs. Big steam turbines, in particular, need regular overhauls. So, it is hard for anything with a steam turbine to compete with something that has none. Reactors need also operation, inspections, refueling, security, compliance monitoring... the list goes on. Solar panels might need to be dusted off, or replaced. The worst that can happen to a wind turbine is to catch fire.
nine_k 4y ago
* Technology makes machines cheaper, and makes human work more expensive in comparison. Nuclear projects involve a lot of highly qualified human work. * Technology makes repetitive operations cheaper. You build a factory for hundred million dollars, make a billion gadgets on it, and every gadget costs you ten cents to make. Nuclear projects lack the economy of scale: even the Navy is going to order reactors by a dozen, and civil power plant reactors may see even fewer installations per model. Thus the huge costs of the R&D and the factory are amortized over but a few reactors, making each of them very expensive. * Due to small production scale, various custom materials needed for nuclear reactors, like special steels, are much more expensive than more widely used materials. Nuclear is now in a position similar to solar cells 15 years ago: a promising technology which is too expensive due to small scale and bespoke nature of their production. It took a decade of betting on them, pouring money into them, and giving various discounts to the customers to get where we are now, with solar panels which are efficient, affordable, and available. I suppose nuclear tech would need the same to become cost-efficient. France did / does something along these lines; the US does not.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Solar experience relentless experience effects, with cost dropping by about 20% for each doubling of cumulative production. Nuclear has not shown good experience effects.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Nuclear's learning rate is about the same magnitude! ...In the opposite direction, but about the same magnitude.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      hmmm, I've never thought about magnitude being signed or unsigned. Is it little-endian or big-endian I'm now wondering
- cycomanic 4y ago
  > Nuclear is now in a position similar to solar cells 15 years ago: a promising technology which is too expensive due to small scale and bespoke nature of their production. It took a decade of betting on them, pouring money into them, and giving various discounts to the customers to get where we are now, with solar panels which are efficient, affordable, and available. I suppose nuclear tech would need the same to become cost-efficient. France did / does something along these lines; the US does not. Unlike solar 15 years ago, nuclear has been around 60 years already and received huge amounts of subsidies (much more than solar, excluding all the extra military subsidies). So what is fundamentally different now that would change the essentially linear scaling to an exponential scaling and why should we not invest into the tech where we see ongoing exponential scaling of cost already with no indication of slowing (solar and wind)?
kragen 4y ago
My best guess is what Freeman Dyson said in his autobiography Disturbing the Universe: he stopped working on nuclear reactors after TRIGA (01958) and Project Orion (01957 to 01961) because it stopped being fun. It became a question of bureaucracy and national security and empire-building and whatnot. So people like Dyson, who learned calculus by spending his Christmas vacation working his way through a textbok for fun, were no longer available to design reactors. So progress on, for example, thorium reactors ended in the US in 01966 (thorium BWR is from 01960, thorium LWBR is from 01962, thorium MSR is from 01964, thorium HTGR is from 01966). In other countries it took a few more years. Teller, who worked on TRIGA with Dyson, seems to have stopped working on reactor design in 01960. The elves left Middle Earth. So hospitals still use TRIGA today for nuclear medicine. I don't see the key issue here as being that Dyson and Teller were brilliant, though they were brilliant. Rather, it's that Dyson and Teller were curious and playful. I think curious and playful people exploring the possibilities of nuclear reactors will come up with many improvements, even if they are the ordinary kind of stupid people. It might take them five times as long as it would have taken people like Dyson, and there might be more accidental deaths along the way, but they will get there. But today the occasional curious and playful person who tries to investigate nuclear reactors is likely to get arrested, even if they pose less risk to their neighbors than Marie Curie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Handl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Handl (or assassinated by the Mossad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Iranian_nuclear_scientists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Iranian_nucle...) and so the Navy is still using reactors very similar to the ones they used 60 years ago. I see questions like "the technology available has improved, so why have costs risen?" as symptomatic of the worldview that anything can be bought. Teller, Dyson, and Handl were not optimizing their life decisions to maximize their earning power; they were curious about the world and wanted to preserve liberal democracy. You can't buy that. If you announce that you are going to spend a lot of money on nuclear reactor development, it will attract people who optimize their life decisions to maximize their earning power, not people who are curious about the world. You maximize your earning power by owning things, not by learning things or figuring things out. People who optimize their life decisions to maximize their earning power will be no good at ferreting out possible improvements that can be made to nuclear reactors, because you don't get paid any more for making breakthroughs than you do for just plodding along. Less, in fact, because nine tenths of the time when you're doing the kind of things that lead to breakthroughs, the things you try don't work, so you aren't delivering anything of value to anybody. The other issue is that "Why can't we build nuclear power plants?" is a subset of "Why can't we build?" and I think the answer to that is basically that people aren't free to build. But nuclear power plants are probably the kind of building that people are least free to build.
cycomanic 4y ago
That argument should apply to houses as well, but building houses has become more expensive in the last 50 years not less. Generally construction does not significantly benifit from economies of scale, while fabrication does. Now we could build lots of small scale reactors, but while construction costs might come down (so far completely unproven) running costs most definitely would go up. You don't want to run even a small scale nuclear reactor without qualified staff, security etc..
imtringued 4y ago
As I said, the problem with nuclear power are all these ragtag powerplants that were hastily built at a time people didn't understand the potential for catastrophic failure. If you get rid of these ancient power plants, the risk of failure goes down dramatically and the need for further regulation disappears. Meanwhile everywhere you keep hearing how e.g. Germany should keep obsolete power plants even though this will ruin the long term reputation of nuclear further.

KptMarchewa 4y ago

>the technology available for building them have improved since then Broadly, construction is the singular industry where productivity hasn't improved with modern technology. https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/sketch-of-a-theory-of-construction https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/sketch-of-a-theor...

MichaelZuo 4y ago
In fact, the opposite, there’s been a noticeable productivity decline in the US in most of the construction industry.
towaway15463 4y ago
Concrete infrastructure projects in particular seem to have gotten more expensive and time consuming.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  I imagine moving all that mass and the energy intensive process to form and break concrete directly scale with rising oil prices. Plus price of labor going up.

LatteLazy 4y ago

They built them only for non economic reasons. Either because they wanted material for bombs, or as national vanity projects or because they convinced themselves it would be cheap. If you want those reasons, go for it. Iran for instance is pursuing at least one of these goals when it works towards nuclear "power". Just don't expect affordable electricity at the end...

crote 4y ago

- Nuclear power plants are rare enough that each project is basically unique. - Nuclear power plants are very complex. They are more "engineered" than "constructed", with hundreds of kilometers of tubes and wires. Pouring the concrete is the easy part. - Nuclear power plants deal with an incredibly dangerous environment: high pressures, high temperatures, radioactivity, hazardous chemicals. Everything has to be tested, re-tested, and certified. Many parts will be near impossible to replace once it enters production, and the plant is supposed to be operational for decades. - Nuclear power plants are safety-critical. Contrary to many other structures of similar complexity, things can get way worse than a big explosion. They have the potential to contaminate the site (or even the surrounding country) for decades or centuries. Failure is simply not acceptable. - Safety regulations have been getting stricter over the years, because supposedly "100% safe" plants keep having accidents and the population is not very happy about that. The existing stock of nuclear power plants is an offshoot of several military programs. The most common design is pretty much a submarine power plant on steroids, which turned out to be less than ideal. Things like "safety" and "profit" were almost seen as a suggestion more so than a requirement. Newly-built power plants are required to incorporate over 50 years of innovation, but it turns out almost nobody has the skills to actually build them. They have simply gotten too complex to construct!

ncmncm 4y ago
All of the above is true enough, but it is not the full story on why US nukes cost like they do. The ones attempted recently in South Carolina and Georgia cost so much because people in a position to block building them want it that way. Once a nuke project starts, a torrent of money starts flowing. Everybody with a stake expects a share, and none want it ever to end. Finishing a plant would plug that flow. If it looks like the flow will dry up regardless, they might deliver something at the end. We see the same process with urban tunnels and big military procurements. It is all perfectly legal. It is probably not fixable. Thus far, wind and solar projects have mostly avoided it, maybe in part because their legitimate costs are easy to estimate. Existing nukes also cost more than renewables to operate, because they actually have operating costs. Big steam turbines, in particular, need regular overhauls. So, it is hard for anything with a steam turbine to compete with something that has none. Reactors need also operation, inspections, refueling, security, compliance monitoring... the list goes on. Solar panels might need to be dusted off, or replaced. The worst that can happen to a wind turbine is to catch fire.

nine_k 4y ago

* Technology makes machines cheaper, and makes human work more expensive in comparison. Nuclear projects involve a lot of highly qualified human work. * Technology makes repetitive operations cheaper. You build a factory for hundred million dollars, make a billion gadgets on it, and every gadget costs you ten cents to make. Nuclear projects lack the economy of scale: even the Navy is going to order reactors by a dozen, and civil power plant reactors may see even fewer installations per model. Thus the huge costs of the R&D and the factory are amortized over but a few reactors, making each of them very expensive. * Due to small production scale, various custom materials needed for nuclear reactors, like special steels, are much more expensive than more widely used materials. Nuclear is now in a position similar to solar cells 15 years ago: a promising technology which is too expensive due to small scale and bespoke nature of their production. It took a decade of betting on them, pouring money into them, and giving various discounts to the customers to get where we are now, with solar panels which are efficient, affordable, and available. I suppose nuclear tech would need the same to become cost-efficient. France did / does something along these lines; the US does not.

pfdietz 4y ago
Solar experience relentless experience effects, with cost dropping by about 20% for each doubling of cumulative production. Nuclear has not shown good experience effects.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Nuclear's learning rate is about the same magnitude! ...In the opposite direction, but about the same magnitude.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    hmmm, I've never thought about magnitude being signed or unsigned. Is it little-endian or big-endian I'm now wondering
cycomanic 4y ago
> Nuclear is now in a position similar to solar cells 15 years ago: a promising technology which is too expensive due to small scale and bespoke nature of their production. It took a decade of betting on them, pouring money into them, and giving various discounts to the customers to get where we are now, with solar panels which are efficient, affordable, and available. I suppose nuclear tech would need the same to become cost-efficient. France did / does something along these lines; the US does not. Unlike solar 15 years ago, nuclear has been around 60 years already and received huge amounts of subsidies (much more than solar, excluding all the extra military subsidies). So what is fundamentally different now that would change the essentially linear scaling to an exponential scaling and why should we not invest into the tech where we see ongoing exponential scaling of cost already with no indication of slowing (solar and wind)?

kragen 4y ago

My best guess is what Freeman Dyson said in his autobiography Disturbing the Universe: he stopped working on nuclear reactors after TRIGA (01958) and Project Orion (01957 to 01961) because it stopped being fun. It became a question of bureaucracy and national security and empire-building and whatnot. So people like Dyson, who learned calculus by spending his Christmas vacation working his way through a textbok for fun, were no longer available to design reactors. So progress on, for example, thorium reactors ended in the US in 01966 (thorium BWR is from 01960, thorium LWBR is from 01962, thorium MSR is from 01964, thorium HTGR is from 01966). In other countries it took a few more years. Teller, who worked on TRIGA with Dyson, seems to have stopped working on reactor design in 01960. The elves left Middle Earth. So hospitals still use TRIGA today for nuclear medicine. I don't see the key issue here as being that Dyson and Teller were brilliant, though they were brilliant. Rather, it's that Dyson and Teller were curious and playful. I think curious and playful people exploring the possibilities of nuclear reactors will come up with many improvements, even if they are the ordinary kind of stupid people. It might take them five times as long as it would have taken people like Dyson, and there might be more accidental deaths along the way, but they will get there. But today the occasional curious and playful person who tries to investigate nuclear reactors is likely to get arrested, even if they pose less risk to their neighbors than Marie Curie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Handl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Handl (or assassinated by the Mossad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Iranian_nuclear_scientists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Iranian_nucle...) and so the Navy is still using reactors very similar to the ones they used 60 years ago. I see questions like "the technology available has improved, so why have costs risen?" as symptomatic of the worldview that anything can be bought. Teller, Dyson, and Handl were not optimizing their life decisions to maximize their earning power; they were curious about the world and wanted to preserve liberal democracy. You can't buy that. If you announce that you are going to spend a lot of money on nuclear reactor development, it will attract people who optimize their life decisions to maximize their earning power, not people who are curious about the world. You maximize your earning power by owning things, not by learning things or figuring things out. People who optimize their life decisions to maximize their earning power will be no good at ferreting out possible improvements that can be made to nuclear reactors, because you don't get paid any more for making breakthroughs than you do for just plodding along. Less, in fact, because nine tenths of the time when you're doing the kind of things that lead to breakthroughs, the things you try don't work, so you aren't delivering anything of value to anybody. The other issue is that "Why can't we build nuclear power plants?" is a subset of "Why can't we build?" and I think the answer to that is basically that people aren't free to build. But nuclear power plants are probably the kind of building that people are least free to build.

cycomanic 4y ago

That argument should apply to houses as well, but building houses has become more expensive in the last 50 years not less. Generally construction does not significantly benifit from economies of scale, while fabrication does. Now we could build lots of small scale reactors, but while construction costs might come down (so far completely unproven) running costs most definitely would go up. You don't want to run even a small scale nuclear reactor without qualified staff, security etc..

imtringued 4y ago

As I said, the problem with nuclear power are all these ragtag powerplants that were hastily built at a time people didn't understand the potential for catastrophic failure. If you get rid of these ancient power plants, the risk of failure goes down dramatically and the need for further regulation disappears. Meanwhile everywhere you keep hearing how e.g. Germany should keep obsolete power plants even though this will ruin the long term reputation of nuclear further.