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Completely disagree. And I used to be strong nuclear proponent until 2015 or so. Nuclear power is no longer a viable pathway for a government to throw tax doll

Completely disagree. And I used to be strong nuclear proponent until 2015 or so. Nuclear power is no longer a viable pathway for a government to throw tax dollars at, and there are multiple reasons: 1) Nuclear power is not cost effective: Even right now, nuclear power is more expensive (LCOE) than solar or wind. 2) Nuclear power costs explode if the capacity factor of your plants decreases: Meaning that they are basically ONLY viable for baseload power (running at full tilt all the time), which makes them very unflexible and a really bad match with other renewables (=> which, again, are cheaper per MWh than the fission reactors). 3) Nuclear power failed to deliver on safety promises, mainly with the Fukushima incident: If a modern, technologically competent nation like Japan can not be expected to keep their reactors running incident-free, then how are you going to convince e.g. Italians, Indians or other nationalities with significant (perceived?) government corruption/incompetence that their government can be trusted with regulating nuclear tech?! 4) Building plants is slow, extremely expensive and a huge commitment: Considering how rapidly PV/wind/batteries decrease in cost currently, committing on nuclear power right now would be economically irresponsible, and also has huge latency on acutally delivering power, unlike PV or wind, which you can basically buy off the shelve, install and hook up within the year.

w1nst0nsm1th 4y ago
Not to mention nuclear waste, which is still an unresolved issue at current level of nuclear energy production.
- diordiderot 4y ago
  This is just false. Annual nuclear wast in the US in volume is "roughly equivalent to less than half the volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool." With more modern plants you could recycle that material and cut it down to a fifth the size. Its a political problem, forced by dishonest actors
  - treis 4y ago
    >still an unresolved issue >This is just false >Its a political problem
    - diordiderot 4y ago
      Touche But I would still argue it's an opaque argument at best, more likely intentionally deceptive.
  - w1nst0nsm1th 4y ago
    Le Monde (french) made a special Edition titled Atlas of Energy with a section on Nuclear power (and of course nuclear power waste). There is an article from science.org about finland plan to bury its own waste. https://www.science.org/content/article/finland-built-tomb-store-nuclear-waste-can-it-survive-100000-years https://www.science.org/content/article/finland-built-tomb-s... Tell me about olympic swiming pool. Monde Diplomatique made a documented article about France plan to bury its own nuclear waste in Meuse department... It has been a clownshow, with fire incident lasting weeks because an elevator tire went to flame, necessity to run a water pump for the next 10.000 or 100.000 years (no joke) because the underground storage facility would be underwater after 3 days and will probably leak radioactive materials in the surrounding aquifere and will go back to surface after a few hundred years. In short, they have no realistic plan for long term storage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meuse/Haute_Marne_Underground_Research_Laboratory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meuse/Haute_Marne_Underground_... There was also huge controvercy in germany about storage of nuclear waste in an old coal mine. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-takes-first-small-step-towards-finding-nuclear-waste-resting-place https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-takes-first-sma.... Maybe there is just an olympic swimming pool of radioactive waste in the US (I suppose so it's about 4000m3), but it is not the way you store it for tens thousand of years. And definitively not the cost of a swimming pool.
marcosdumay 4y ago
5) Most countries do not have access to them for political reasons, and this will not change, ever. A few government will even mass murder their people if they try to do it without authorization.
lettergram 4y ago
Have you ever been involved with building or maintaining a nuclear plant? I have family members who built plants back in the 80's and some still maintain them. They claim the main issue has to do with government regulation(s) and unions. I can dive into it further, but effectively the regulation(s) required inspection on ever weld a welder would make. This meant you needed two welders on site, one making a weld and one signing off. You'd have a pipe fitter line up the pipe(s), a different inspector would have to come around and sign off on that work. Sometimes they wouldn't show up, so you'd end up with a days work lost (everyone still getting paid). If someone who was part of a different union or not unionized tried to do the work, the union would strike / the person would be fired. Then at the end of it, the regulation(s) would change slightly and they'd have to cut out a large section and start all over. This happened at multiple plants in the 80's per my family members. Today, they're pushing the plants past where they're really safe to use. In the case of Fukushima, they didn't even have a cut-off switch. It was an earlier design. All that being said, Illinois has been running on mostly nuclear power for decades, as has France. No issue in terms of safety and relatively cheap power (natural gas being cheaper). An updated design, with a reduction in unionization and a loosening of regulations would make nuclear far better than any alternative. You can do the math yourself and it comes out cheaper and safer than wind or solar. The other thing to consider is what happens when the power goes out in a place like Texas for a week or two due to weather conditions -- people die. Solar, coal, wind, nuclear all have pros/cons. Thus far in the United States nuclear has caused far fewer casualties than per gigawatt than any alternative.
- intrasight 4y ago
  >the main issue has to do with government regulation(s) You can't have it both ways - but of course they want to. The Price-Anderson Nuclear Indemnity Act shifts the risk of nuclear accidents onto the tax payers. In return, the industry accepts regulations. Tell the nuclear industry that we're taking away your insurance caps and they'll say "we can't stay in business".
samatman 4y ago
mlindner 4y ago
> 1) Nuclear power is not cost effective: Even right now, nuclear power is more expensive (LCOE) than solar or wind. This argument is an important one, but most of the reasons that this is the case is a related problem to the ever lasting light bulb problem, they last too long. Because we're not building them they're expensive to build. Once we start building them the costs go down. > 3) Nuclear power failed to deliver on safety promises, mainly with the Fukushima incident: If a modern, technologically competent nation like Japan can not be expected to keep their reactors running incident-free, then how are you going to convince e.g. Italians, Indians or other nationalities with significant (perceived?) government corruption/incompetence that their government can be trusted with regulating nuclear tech?! Fukushima is the latest in scare tactics. The level of radiation released was low and the government overreacted to that danger. Further, it was built right next to the ocean which was itself right next to a major fault line running under that ocean, with backup generators that were at ground level. > 4) Building plants is slow, extremely expensive and a huge commitment: Considering how rapidly PV/wind/batteries decrease in cost currently, committing on nuclear power right now would be economically irresponsible, and also has huge latency on acutally delivering power, unlike PV or wind, which you can basically buy off the shelve, install and hook up within the year. See my response to point #1. Because we're not building them, we're not used to building them so they're slow to build.
- harimau777 4y ago
  Is the fact that Fukushima was built in a poor location with poorly designed generators part of nuclear's failure to deliver on safety promises? That is to say, if nuclear power cannot reliably avoid design failures then that sounds to me like it is failing to deliver on safety promises.
dTal 4y ago
1) I don't believe this for a moment, not when you include capacity factor and storage requirements for renewables to actually compete with on-demand power. What do you do when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow? How long can your storage solution sustain that? If it's anything less than "infinity", it's inferior to nuclear. 2) This is just trying to spin reliability as a disadvantage. You can throttle nuclear just fine. Overbuilding in order to have "peaker" nuclear plants is perfectly viable - France's grid does so. Pointing out the difficulties of integrating with flighty, unreliable renewables is a point against renewables, not nuclear - you are failing to account for grid storage, then complaining that nuclear is a poor grid storage solution. Well, yeah! 3) The safety record of nuclear vastly exceeds any other power generation technology, even if you factor in Chernobyl. We are making the perfect the enemy of the good. I daresay that India could weather a nuclear incident or two and still come out ahead of the 2 million people who die yearly there from air pollution, in large part from burning fossil fuels. 4) This just point 1 repeated, and again, you ignore grid storage. True, you can throw up PV or wind quickly enough, but it won't solve your energy problem. People were complaining about how slow it is to construct nuclear plants decades ago. If we'd ignored them and started building, we'd be in a much better situation now. The best time to build a nuclear plant is 20 years ago; the second best time is now.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  How many terawatt-years of electricity can the entirety of accessible uranium reserves produce? How many terawatt years of non-low-grade-heat energy do we need between now and 2030? Now that we know that PWRs are irrelevant, can we move on from the constant gaslighting about how 'the next one will he cheaper we swear' or 'it's totally safe if everything goes perfectly always, just ignore the mines'. Or are you just trying to distract from the only thing that can replace the majority of (or even a tiny minority of) fossil fuels?

w1nst0nsm1th 4y ago

Not to mention nuclear waste, which is still an unresolved issue at current level of nuclear energy production.

diordiderot 4y ago
This is just false. Annual nuclear wast in the US in volume is "roughly equivalent to less than half the volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool." With more modern plants you could recycle that material and cut it down to a fifth the size. Its a political problem, forced by dishonest actors
- treis 4y ago
  >still an unresolved issue >This is just false >Its a political problem
  - diordiderot 4y ago
    Touche But I would still argue it's an opaque argument at best, more likely intentionally deceptive.
- w1nst0nsm1th 4y ago
  Le Monde (french) made a special Edition titled Atlas of Energy with a section on Nuclear power (and of course nuclear power waste). There is an article from science.org about finland plan to bury its own waste. https://www.science.org/content/article/finland-built-tomb-store-nuclear-waste-can-it-survive-100000-years https://www.science.org/content/article/finland-built-tomb-s... Tell me about olympic swiming pool. Monde Diplomatique made a documented article about France plan to bury its own nuclear waste in Meuse department... It has been a clownshow, with fire incident lasting weeks because an elevator tire went to flame, necessity to run a water pump for the next 10.000 or 100.000 years (no joke) because the underground storage facility would be underwater after 3 days and will probably leak radioactive materials in the surrounding aquifere and will go back to surface after a few hundred years. In short, they have no realistic plan for long term storage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meuse/Haute_Marne_Underground_Research_Laboratory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meuse/Haute_Marne_Underground_... There was also huge controvercy in germany about storage of nuclear waste in an old coal mine. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-takes-first-small-step-towards-finding-nuclear-waste-resting-place https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-takes-first-sma.... Maybe there is just an olympic swimming pool of radioactive waste in the US (I suppose so it's about 4000m3), but it is not the way you store it for tens thousand of years. And definitively not the cost of a swimming pool.

marcosdumay 4y ago

5) Most countries do not have access to them for political reasons, and this will not change, ever. A few government will even mass murder their people if they try to do it without authorization.

lettergram 4y ago

Have you ever been involved with building or maintaining a nuclear plant? I have family members who built plants back in the 80's and some still maintain them. They claim the main issue has to do with government regulation(s) and unions. I can dive into it further, but effectively the regulation(s) required inspection on ever weld a welder would make. This meant you needed two welders on site, one making a weld and one signing off. You'd have a pipe fitter line up the pipe(s), a different inspector would have to come around and sign off on that work. Sometimes they wouldn't show up, so you'd end up with a days work lost (everyone still getting paid). If someone who was part of a different union or not unionized tried to do the work, the union would strike / the person would be fired. Then at the end of it, the regulation(s) would change slightly and they'd have to cut out a large section and start all over. This happened at multiple plants in the 80's per my family members. Today, they're pushing the plants past where they're really safe to use. In the case of Fukushima, they didn't even have a cut-off switch. It was an earlier design. All that being said, Illinois has been running on mostly nuclear power for decades, as has France. No issue in terms of safety and relatively cheap power (natural gas being cheaper). An updated design, with a reduction in unionization and a loosening of regulations would make nuclear far better than any alternative. You can do the math yourself and it comes out cheaper and safer than wind or solar. The other thing to consider is what happens when the power goes out in a place like Texas for a week or two due to weather conditions -- people die. Solar, coal, wind, nuclear all have pros/cons. Thus far in the United States nuclear has caused far fewer casualties than per gigawatt than any alternative.

intrasight 4y ago
>the main issue has to do with government regulation(s) You can't have it both ways - but of course they want to. The Price-Anderson Nuclear Indemnity Act shifts the risk of nuclear accidents onto the tax payers. In return, the industry accepts regulations. Tell the nuclear industry that we're taking away your insurance caps and they'll say "we can't stay in business".

samatman 4y ago

mlindner 4y ago

> 1) Nuclear power is not cost effective: Even right now, nuclear power is more expensive (LCOE) than solar or wind. This argument is an important one, but most of the reasons that this is the case is a related problem to the ever lasting light bulb problem, they last too long. Because we're not building them they're expensive to build. Once we start building them the costs go down. > 3) Nuclear power failed to deliver on safety promises, mainly with the Fukushima incident: If a modern, technologically competent nation like Japan can not be expected to keep their reactors running incident-free, then how are you going to convince e.g. Italians, Indians or other nationalities with significant (perceived?) government corruption/incompetence that their government can be trusted with regulating nuclear tech?! Fukushima is the latest in scare tactics. The level of radiation released was low and the government overreacted to that danger. Further, it was built right next to the ocean which was itself right next to a major fault line running under that ocean, with backup generators that were at ground level. > 4) Building plants is slow, extremely expensive and a huge commitment: Considering how rapidly PV/wind/batteries decrease in cost currently, committing on nuclear power right now would be economically irresponsible, and also has huge latency on acutally delivering power, unlike PV or wind, which you can basically buy off the shelve, install and hook up within the year. See my response to point #1. Because we're not building them, we're not used to building them so they're slow to build.

harimau777 4y ago
Is the fact that Fukushima was built in a poor location with poorly designed generators part of nuclear's failure to deliver on safety promises? That is to say, if nuclear power cannot reliably avoid design failures then that sounds to me like it is failing to deliver on safety promises.

dTal 4y ago

1) I don't believe this for a moment, not when you include capacity factor and storage requirements for renewables to actually compete with on-demand power. What do you do when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow? How long can your storage solution sustain that? If it's anything less than "infinity", it's inferior to nuclear. 2) This is just trying to spin reliability as a disadvantage. You can throttle nuclear just fine. Overbuilding in order to have "peaker" nuclear plants is perfectly viable - France's grid does so. Pointing out the difficulties of integrating with flighty, unreliable renewables is a point against renewables, not nuclear - you are failing to account for grid storage, then complaining that nuclear is a poor grid storage solution. Well, yeah! 3) The safety record of nuclear vastly exceeds any other power generation technology, even if you factor in Chernobyl. We are making the perfect the enemy of the good. I daresay that India could weather a nuclear incident or two and still come out ahead of the 2 million people who die yearly there from air pollution, in large part from burning fossil fuels. 4) This just point 1 repeated, and again, you ignore grid storage. True, you can throw up PV or wind quickly enough, but it won't solve your energy problem. People were complaining about how slow it is to construct nuclear plants decades ago. If we'd ignored them and started building, we'd be in a much better situation now. The best time to build a nuclear plant is 20 years ago; the second best time is now.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
How many terawatt-years of electricity can the entirety of accessible uranium reserves produce? How many terawatt years of non-low-grade-heat energy do we need between now and 2030? Now that we know that PWRs are irrelevant, can we move on from the constant gaslighting about how 'the next one will he cheaper we swear' or 'it's totally safe if everything goes perfectly always, just ignore the mines'. Or are you just trying to distract from the only thing that can replace the majority of (or even a tiny minority of) fossil fuels?