38 ms·

Nuclear power is too slow

201 points by jseliger 4y ago

PaulHoule 4y ago
Japan led the world in nuclear accidents long before Fukushima. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/dudzinski1/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/dudzinski1/ https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/1913786/monju-other-japanese-nuclear-reactor-disaster https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/1913786/mon... In fact after reading some detailed descriptions of Monju I can only ask "what were they smoking?" because the design of the plant didn't seem to take seismic risks seriously at all. I was watching a documentary the other day that described how bad their habits were at Fukushima. That generation of BWR has an "isolation condenser" that is supposed to help cool the reactor in an accident, when it operates a huge amount of steam blows out of two pipes that are called the "Pig's nose". At 9 mile point in upstate NY they regularly test the isolation condenser so everyone there knows what it is like when it is working. At Fukushima they had never tried it so when it produced just a trickle of steam they thought it was working. Similarly they had a pipe that was supposed to deliver water to the reactor core but when they really pumped water into it they found out it went someplace else. If they'd been responsible (like nuclear operators in the US) they would have practiced emergency procedures ahead of time.
- api 4y ago
  Japanese companies have been great at other things like manufacturing and decent at stuff like software. What gives when it comes to nuclear plant operation?
  - pigsty 4y ago
    There’s been lots of fraud revealed lately. Japan has been simply covering it up very well. Just a few examples that I recall this past year or two include faking emissions tests for vehicles, faking steel quality tests, faking GDP by counting construction costs up to four times, and faking about 99% of clams from Kumamoto and local fishermen were apparently aware of this for decades. All of these issues went on for several years. Corruption at all levels has been revealed lately, and when you stack this up, all these things passed of as “good enough. Nobody will know” can end up in total disasters when quality matters. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/japan-revoke-hinos-engine-certification-over-false-emissions-data-2022-03-18/ https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/japan-revoke-hino... https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44763905.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44763905.amp https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/14769587 https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/14769587 https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/14502921 https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/14502921 https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/14538401 https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/14538401
  - duxup 4y ago
    Is it a Japan thing or more a human / "industry culture" thing where you had bad apples operating and that became the SoP?
    - PaulHoule 4y ago
      I think it is different in different countries. I think the US has a much tougher attitude about health and safety than most places. Maybe we pay a cost for that, but it is for real. I spent a year living in Europe and was surprised at how much worse nutrition labels were in Europe at the time. In Dresden, Germany they still had cigarette vending machines all over town and frequently had a candy vending machine mounted next to the cigarette machines to get the little ones started. The US has been reluctant to license MOX fabrication plants in the US because of the fear of the the danger of plutonium dust poses to workers. France has been confident that it has it under control. It is a subject that people have talked about for a long time without a lot of data, but a relatively recent study shows the dangers are real https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28520643/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28520643/ even if they aren't catastrophic like they were at the vermiculite mine in Libby, MT.
      - dmitriid 4y ago
        > the US has a much tougher attitude about health and safety than most places. Attitude? Maybe. In reality? Often not. No idea why you think nutrition labels are worse and how they factor in "health and safety" when corn syrup is everywhere in the food in the States and 42% of population is obese. On the other end of the spectrum you have underinvestment in critical infrastructure. For example, dams: https://e360.yale.edu/features/in-an-era-of-extreme-weather-concerns-grow-over-dam-safety https://e360.yale.edu/features/in-an-era-of-extreme-weather-... There are very few (developed) countries which are as lax about health and safety as the US.
      - themitigating 4y ago
        I feel like you associate concern with safety to making people aware or restrictions. In other words if a country has a higher drinking age, better education, and more labels then that country cares more about safety. I think that the actions of the population are a better example. Maybe you mean is "the US government is more concerned about safety " but that could be because the population doesn't care. To be fair, Germany has a higher rate of people who smoke (around 23% vs 12%)
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    You would think that the quality movement ideas that have made Japanese cars so good would apply to safety but the UAW will point out that a US car factory is a much safer workplace than a Japanese car factory. Some of that is the UAW being a strong union that looks out for its members, some of it is the adversarial legal culture in the US. Japanese workers, for instance, like to make changes to their workstations to improve their performance (for instance, complete the job more quickly.) In a normal workplace that's a great idea, but when you are working with solutions of fissionable elements there are many details you need to control to prevent a criticality accident, and they evaded those controls.
    - eternityforest 4y ago
      For all the talk about Europe and Asia being ahead of us, I think we have the about correct amount of adversarial legal culture, maybe only slightly too much, and everyone else doesn't have enough. I hear people saying the hot coffee lawsuit should have been thrown out , and to me that's just crazy that anyone would want to allow safety standards to go on ignored to that level. Outside of safety related stuff our laws are a bit messed up, but I do appreciate the fact that we make an effort to keep people safe.
      - nerdawson 4y ago
        > I hear people saying the hot coffee lawsuit should have been thrown out , and to me that's just crazy that anyone would want to allow safety standards to go on ignored to that level. I think it's a matter of taking personal responsibility rather than finding someone to blame when you make a mistake.
        yellowapple 4y ago
        I personally don't think it's reasonable to assume that something intended for human consumption would be served hot enough to fuse one's labia to one's thigh if spilled on one's lap. In light of that, "personal responsibility" doesn't seem to be very applicable in that particular case.
  - rurounijones 4y ago
    TEPCO has an atrocious safety culture. the operators of the Onagawa plant (closer to the epicenter) had a very safety-first culture and it showed.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    I am absolutely out of my depth here, but isn’t Japan very “agist” (not sure of the correct word)? Just basing it on a previous HN thread about Japanese website design, a commenter mentioned software company higher managers, who can’t use a computer and the like. Some tendency of placing elderly people in important roles simply based on respect and not knowledge sounds like a plausible explanation, especially when one, high-enough people can wreak absolute havoc in a very top-down control flow. But I’m talking out of my ass here, don’t take anything seriously.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  It's still a testament to how safe nuclear power plants really are. - Bad operators? Check - Earthquake? Check - Tsunami? Check ... - "There were no deaths from radiation exposure in the immediate aftermath of the incident, though there were a number of (around 1600 non-radiation related) deaths during the evacuation of the nearby population" Wikipedia
  - BurningFrog 4y ago
    Biggest Earthquake in known history (1000+ years) even!
    - mikeyouse 4y ago
      Nah, not even the biggest in the past 20 years (Sumatra was larger).
      - BurningFrog 4y ago
        Sorry, I meant to say Japanese history. It's the 4th biggest recorded on the Richter scale.
  - BurningFrog 4y ago
    There were maybe 1600 drowning deaths in the area from the tsunami. What would evacuation deaths even be?
    - sampo 4y ago
      > What would evacuation deaths even be? I think some deaths occurred when evacuating hospital patients.
      - BurningFrog 4y ago
        1600 people is an enormous number of deaths. It would have been reported. I've followed Fukushima news since it happened, and never heard of this before.
melling 4y ago
“The French were able to hold their build times below 6 years up to about 1985” You’d think if the future depended on it, build times could be reduced. 8500 global coal power plants produce 20% of emissions. Retiring coal power plants was a no-brainer decades ago. Instead we’ve been building more.
- technicalbard 4y ago
  The very first nuclear reactor went from idea to operating in 2 years. In the middle of WW2. The only reason nuclear projects take longer than other industrial projects is regulatory capture.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    During WW2 the US could build a ship in 39 days. Now it takes 10 years.
    - remarkEon 4y ago
      I know this point is made a lot but I’m not sure it’s that meaningful. WW2 boats were not the enormously complex network and sensor systems that today’s are. While, yeah, 10 years is extreme, but I don’t think 39 days is physically possible.
      - bryanlarsen 4y ago
        The 39 day boats built in WW2 were probably more similar in complexity to a modern boat than a WW2 reactor is to a modern reactor.
        eternityforest 4y ago
        I would be surprised if some of the systems were actually harder to work on back then. Old battleships always seemed to have insane amounts of wiring and cabling, because they used the nightmarish one signal per wire protocol in the pre digital age.
prottog 4y ago
> The truly unique feature of US nuclear power is the unlimited power that was given to federal regulators. > [...] Congress had effectively told the regulator make the rules up as you go. This meant the regulator had no problem changing the rules. A design that was legal at the start of construction, could be declared illegal any time thereafter. No capital project would ever break ground with these conditions in place. Who would invest billions of dollars in something that could be made illegal any day with no recourse? I'm surprised that any new nuclear power plants were built at all.
- Gwypaas 4y ago
  They were only built with massive subsidies or through legal means being able to shift the costs to the ratepayers like the now cancelled Virgil C. Summer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    So you don't think we should subsidize technology that decarbonizes power production?
    - Gwypaas 4y ago
      Sure, spend money on solving energy storage even for the 99% case and I'm all in! That would be agtual R&D and not putting another round of subsidies in the nuclear companies pockets.
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    I'd much rather we be spending massive subsidies on nuclear power (and space exploration, and science in general) than on an increasingly-bloated military-industrial complex.
- makotech221 4y ago
julianeon 4y ago
To me this is what made the recent fusion news exciting. As far as I’m concerned, the verdict is in for nuclear plants generating highly radioactive long-lasting waste: people don’t want them. You won’t be able to overcome their opposition. What more is there to say? Let’s move on. If fusion can get to a point where it can solve the long-lasting radioactive waste problem - that would resolve the problem. That would get nuclear power adopted by the masses. We might as well aim for that, however long it takes, because that’s the only politically viable solution.
- SSJPython 4y ago
  > As far as I’m concerned, the verdict is in for nuclear plants generating highly radioactive long-lasting waste: people don’t want them. You won’t be able to overcome their opposition. What more is there to say? Let’s move on. Why should public opinion override the need for energy security, which is a national security issue? Sometimes, the public makes the wrong decision. The public generally has trouble when it comes to differentiating between the short-term and long-term. Energy sovereignty should not be subject to the democratic will of the populace. Leave it to the experts and the technocrats, not the average Joe and Jane who operate with asymmetric information.
  - Mistletoe 4y ago
    Because we live in a democracy?
    - SSJPython 4y ago
      But that's my point: just because a society has a democratic political system does not mean everything has to be run through the same mechanism. Sometimes, the experts need to override the people, no matter how much of a fit they throw.
      - danenania 4y ago
        This is already the case. Unpopular decisions are made regularly by all three branches of the Federal government, as well as by local governments at every level. But even if you can get unpopular policies through, there's still the risk that you'll face consequences at the next election.
bryanlarsen 4y ago
This is only measuring the time from first shovel to completion. In reality, the period before first shovel is often much longer. Best case scenario is China, where it takes them about 3 years to do the planning and then 2 years to do the build. In the US it seems to be about 20 + 20. I can see the build phase coming down to about 5 years, but it's hard to imagine the planning phase taking less than 10... And it's not the nuclear part of the regulation that makes it slow in the US. In a country where it takes over 30 years to go from initial planning to completion of High Speed Rail, every big project seems to take forever and cost way too much. Nuclear specific regulation doesn't help, but I don't think it's the primary problem.
- sct202 4y ago
  Even in China it takes a while, China's Sanman power plant uses the same Westinghouse reactor design as Vogtle in Georgia. Both started plants construction in 2009, and Sanman finished 9 years late, while Vogtle is slated to finish next year.
  - ShredKazoo 4y ago
    Why can't we just hire companies from whichever country builds nuclear the best to build plants in our country?
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      Price wise, that's China, and most countries rightly don't want to have an ongoing absolute dependence on China for their energy. Second best is Russia, a bunch of countries did this and now a big chunk of Europe depends on a hostile power for half of their nuclear fuel and for parts. Third best is South Korea and they just charged Saudi Arabia $5/W with an extra $4/W in mandatory service fees (no labour included). Their plants at home are also not great reliability wise and their nuclear industry keeps getting caught forging documents. Fourth by price or tied first by effectiveness is the US, they can't do it for under $10 and they're famously good sports about controlling other countries' energy infrastructure. Then there's Japan and France, and they're in the news a bunch for some reason lately. Finland and UK bought the latest French model and they are going just peachy. Taishan (another EPR) was also pretty dismal for a Chinese plant, but was at least mostly on time when it started leaking. Alternatively buy renewables which are generally below the (much smaller) budget and on time from China, South Korea, USA or many places in Europe. The whole intermittency thing is largely just a scare campaign from coal, and the emissions avoided per dollar are far better.
acidburnNSA 4y ago
The author is a shipbuilder who wants to use shipyards to mass produce large reactors. This is a truly great idea. I just wish he focused on regular water cooled reactors for this first rather than highly exotic fluid fuel ones. See also the time we came very close to actually implementing this: https://whatisnuclear.com/offshore-nuclear-plants.html https://whatisnuclear.com/offshore-nuclear-plants.html
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pydry 4y ago
tl;dr safe, cheap, quick. pick one and a half.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  Despite the idiotic downvotes you are absolutely right.
LorenDB 4y ago
When I saw the title I immediately thought of the nuclear engines in Kerbal Space Program, which have a famously low amount of thrust (although they are efficient) :)
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
  Yeah, nuclear-thermal is low thrust because you don't have the rocket exhaust to cool your system. You have to deal with the waste heat and that severely limits your power to weight ratio. I think all low-thrust KSP engines are way, way above real world numbers (necessary as the game engine can't handle burns in time warp and players aren't going to be able to plot them without MechJeb type assistance anyway) but I'm not sure on the nuclear-thermal stuff.
shawndrost 4y ago
The article talks about learning curves, but learning curves apply to airplanes, not airports. Nuclear is the latter.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  So make reactors more like airplanes, then. Or rather, ships.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  It seems you missed the conclusion in which they state that there is unlikely to be a learning curve beyond the build of the first unit or two as evidenced by France and Japan's build times. They also did a decent job of showing that the average build time should be around 4 years which is equivalent to the build of a coal power plant and that the time it takes in both cases is determined by how long it takes to build the boiler and turbine. The swelling of timelines appears only when large changes in regulation enter the picture.
giardini 4y ago
Wouldn't the USA do better to build small "pluggable" nuclear power generation plants similar to those on nuclear submarines? Periodically the fuel would be replaced. https://www.ussjpkennedyjr.org/nuclear-reactors-on-submarines-a-reliable-source-of-power/ https://www.ussjpkennedyjr.org/nuclear-reactors-on-submarine... Big power plants are "one-offs", with little/no interchangeability of parts and each having a unique set of problems, costly construction and maintenance.
- yellowapple 4y ago
  I suspect a big part of the reason why submarine reactors are able to be so small is because they sit on a planet-covering heatsink. Terrestrial plants accomplish the same with artificial lakes and large cooling towers; the actual "nuclear" parts are already pretty small in comparison. But yes, assuming the cooling systems could be similarly mass-produced, it would make sense to mass-produce small-scale nuclear plants as well.
rich_sasha 4y ago
I feel like currently nuclear power is like early space flight. It works, it is fairly safe, but super expensive and very bespoke. NASA cost+ model comes to mind. What we need is SpaceX for nuclear, maybe without Musk's volatile narcissism. It seems like the business of building nukes, challenging as it is, is eminently doable, just bogged down by a plethora of processes not optimised for viability. As much as solar and wind are nice, people who live in sunny windy places seem to struggle to imagine a north European winter with no sunshine or wind, and massive energy requirements. Good job we have vapourware
- kilroy123 4y ago
  Isn't that what https://www.nuscalepower.com/ https://www.nuscalepower.com/ is trying to be?
  - rich_sasha 4y ago
    Mostly, yes. Them and a few other startups in this area. It feels though like they only nibble at a few of the problems. If at the core it is a regulation problem, then you can't just fix it with technology.
MikeCapone 4y ago
The US Navy could be quite quick building reactors and innovating, because it didn't have to go through the same amount of regulation. They've operated lots and lots of reactors with very little problems for decades.
- warmwaffles 4y ago
  Go figure when the government owns the reactor and hires technicians to maintain them, they can be built "quickly". In an earlier post here > The truly unique feature of US nuclear power is the unlimited power that was given to federal regulators. > [...] Congress had effectively told the regulator make the rules up as you go. This meant the regulator had no problem changing the rules. A design that was legal at the start of construction, could be declared illegal any time thereafter. The solution may be that the federal government owns the plant and contracts out the work. Ultimately, the government would have to answer to itself about regulation changes.
  - MikeCapone 4y ago
    It's because the US Navy can just decide to do it without years of red tape and mountains of paperwork. National security cuts through the red tape. I don't think the government owning civilian reactors would help if they don't reform the process that means it takes 10+ years and millions of pages of documentation to get anything done.
mkl95 4y ago
It's crazy to think it would only take a few thousand plants to power the entire world, or about 15 times the ones we have today. But even another few hundred plants could completely change the geopolitical landscape. Nuclear power is a cheatcode we refuse to use.
- RobertRoberts 4y ago
  Waste storage. If zealous supporters of nuclear asked for nuclear waste to be stored in their neighborhoods, I'd be on board for more nuclear power right now.
  - adamsb6 4y ago
    Your terms are agreeable.
  - jbverschoor 4y ago
    So instead we just pump energy waste / byproducts in the air?
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    There are a lot of problem related to nuclear, including its cost, the centralization of political power and the centralization of the energy grid.
    - S201 4y ago
      > the centralization of political power and the centralization of the energy grid. Sounds a lot better to me than relying on the middle east and Russia for fossil fuels.
      - goodpoint 4y ago
        That's called false dichotomy.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
rpep 4y ago
In the early 2010s, a lobbying campaign against new nuclear in the U.K. basically started, including people like the deputy prime minister [1] complaining that it was too slow and renewables would be faster and it wasn’t necessary. Fast forward to 2022 and we still don’t have enough renewables, the UK is not very windy at the moment so there’s not enough base load capacity, and we only have 3 active coal fired power stations left. Oh, and we’re in an energy crisis and France, which is normally a net exporter to the U.K., is needing to import energy, making the crisis even closer. It would have been pretty useful to have had a new nuclear power station online right about now. [1] https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2011/03/nuclear-power-clegg-britain https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2011/03/nuclear-power-...
- simfree 4y ago
  There has been plenty of noteworthy pushback against renewable energy has been significant, even for offshore wind farms that would have minimal view impact. Pushback against new infrastructure is high in general, causing society to lean on inefficient and dirty sources of energy. We need more modern nuclear reactors, renewables and storage since neither can load follow like hydroelectric dams or combined cycle natural gas can.
  - klabb3 4y ago
    If you wanna put the tinfoil hat on, having a political flamewar between renewables and nuclear is so ideal for fossil fuel companies that it almost looks deliberately architected. Nuclear proponents are rarely if ever against renewables on principle, but rather claim they aren’t delivering on their promises. The environmentalists OTOH have been radicalized to be opposed to nuclear in a dogmatic way, are entirely against improving it by lifting research bans etc. The “nuclear is not economically viable” argument seen in recent years is dishonest from the majority of critics; they were against nuclear before and will be in the future, independent of economics and regional viability of wind & solar. Meanwhile, coal, gas and oil are doing absolutely splendid – even countries with a strong environmentalist ethos can easily be convinced to expand their fossil fuel dependencies during a crisis, when their citizens can’t afford to heat their homes in the winter.
LastTrain 4y ago
The author blames regulation without weighing any benefits, as if regulation were there for regulation itself. I am willing to listen to an argument that less regulation is needed, but it needs to take the benefits of regulation into consideration as well.
gcanyon 4y ago
For anyone who is (morbidly) curious, the "grisly suicide" -- described at the time as bizarre, was slashing his ankles and neck in a (dry) bathtub http://www.strategosinc.com/downloads/nuclear_fizzle-dl1.pdf http://www.strategosinc.com/downloads/nuclear_fizzle-dl1.pdf That article also has a ton more information on how Babcock and Wilcox failed.
hinkley 4y ago
The common reaction to "this process is too slow" is to ask the question, "what if we made it fast"? As I mentioned the last couple of times this topic came up, I am concerned that the answers to that question that have already been offered are ignoring how the statistics of scalable system work and particularly where they overlap with the Rule of Large Numbers. It's been suggested that if we want to go fast what you do is make a bunch of small reliable reactors and then co-locate them, but if you make something that's 10x as reliable, the assumption is that having 10x as many of them results in the same failure rate, and the same consequences. But that's not quite how statistics work, or for that matter equipment. When you have 100 of something, there is always preventative maintenance or repairs going on. We have storage array designs specifically to deal with this problem in data centers by just letting equipment fail and then replacing whole units, because the labor involved with reacting to each event is simply too high. That's not particularly unique to IT. That's just a fact of large scale operations. You keep spare tools because some of them are going to break every week. You swap them out and -maybe- someone repairs them, or cannibalizes them. With mechanical equipment, maintenance materially affects the reliability and safety of the job site. Suspending maintenance and repairs because you've been pre-empted by the failure of other equipment leads to risks stacking up higher and higher. Can I do scheduled maintenance on Reactor 3 if Reactor 50 ate itself yesterday? At some number of reactors, every plant has experienced one catastrophic failure. What do you do with that? What can you do with that?
- angry_octet 4y ago
  Exactly correct. The techniques for repair of radioactive equipment are still in their infancy, and seem to progress only with each accident (due to their inherent costs). Robots die in minutes in a hard radiation environment, and we don't make any new microprocessors with rad hard techniques (though maybe RISC V will change that). From a safety critical analysis POV there has been a huge change in technical capacity over the last 20 years, but no one in the field would say we're close to strong safety, especially now in regards to software intensive systems. IoT just isn't going to be the same with radiation, you can leap from a correct state to an unsafe one at any point, dozens of bits being flipped every second, transistors misbehaving, faults between silicon layers... Completely unrelated logic is in the same fault compartment of critical trusted logic. So if you have 50 reactors, that's 50 control systems, plus the shared infrastructure (water/electricity/data/fuel in and out, fire suppression). If you remove one for refuelling you're moving/vibrating a radioactive system with lots of pipes which are now fragile due to radiation. All the stress analysis techniques we use on planes are very hard to use on plants due to lack of access. It seems to me like we're just beginning to understand the complexity of SMRs and, contrary to the PR, they will take a long time to mature. Everything about nuclear is nonlinear and coupled. Production line techniques are all about equipment that operates in the known region, and the consequences are not too bad when it departs from that because the operator is at fault.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
> Figure 4. French and Chinese nuclear electricity production. Source BP Energy Review. Is shown to demonstrate that nuclear isn't slow. Yet China has added more solar, and more wind, in that same period. So it is slower than either on their own, and much slower than both, even at nuclear historical high. Meanwhile, solar and wind get cheaper and faster each year.
garbagecoder 4y ago
The same people making it too slow say it's slow. QED.
greenthrow 4y ago
Nuclear plants absolutely should take longer to build than a coal plant. Of course coal plants are awful and can cause environmental disasters, but when there is a flaw in their design or construction they don't make an entire area uninhabitable for a generation or more. Once more for the people in the back; we do not need nuclear. Renewables and storage are cheaper, faster and less risky.
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
  Storage has nothing viable on the horizon, let alone in production. I will agree it's less risky--because risk is an unknown and thus a certain failure isn't a risk.
  - greenthrow 4y ago
    Storage is here and working and cheaper than nuclear. Try again.
    - LorenPechtel 4y ago
      What storage are you talking about? We use batteries for very small scale storage, just long enough to spin up something better. To actually store power for night is several times as expensive as the power in the first place.
Julesman 4y ago
The arguments around this are always weak and spurious. I've been at this too long to take the bait from any trolls who 'have it all figured out.' By no measure or justification is splitting the atom a good idea. There are few things more short sighted than arguing we should figure out what to do with nuclear waste because we haven't quite nailed solutions with ZERO waste. People who minimize the significance of both nuclear waste and absolutely inevitable nuclear disasters just aren't thinking with any foresight or vision about the core concepts of sustainability. But then that's it. A lot of people advancing Nuclear power aren't environmentalists at all. Learned that the hard way. No nukes!
- steeve 4y ago
  It's sad you didn't spend that same energy educating yourself about geological storage or Gen IV. Oh well.
- stopping 4y ago
  Nuclear is going to have to play a significant role if we want to get off fossil fuels. By all accounts nuclear is far safer and cleaner than fossil fuels (even amortizing the disasters), and so it is a suitable replacement if we can make it economically viable and publicly acceptable like it used to be. Solar and wind are already economically viable (even compared to fossil fuels), but still leave some key problems unsolved (e.g. baseline power at night). We might be able to solve this with batteries and other grid storage solutions, but these aren't yet scalable in the way that nuclear energy can be.
- albertopv 4y ago
  Considering coal power plants emit more radioactivity than nuclear ones [1], having 8500 coal plants instead of nuclear doesn't seem to be a great deal anyway. You could tell me even coal plants shouldn't exist, but they do, new ones are built, basically unopposed compared to nuclear even if they are far more dangerous. [1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2022-003567_EN.html#:~:text=Studies%20show%20that%20ash%20from,than%20a%20nuclear%20power%20plant https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2022-00356....
aj7 4y ago
The contractors slowly learned, and then at an increasing rate, that profit was higher when construction was strung out over time.
amanaplanacanal 4y ago
How about we just tax carbon and let the power companies build whatever they think will be cheapest? Let the market do its job. All this bullshit arguing about it accomplishes exactly nothing.
- jpgvm 4y ago
  Because all commercial enterprises operate on timescales too short to be relevant to long term climate and energy needs. We should have state owned power generation, transmission and storage. It makes the most sense and can function optimally if it's optimised as a state run monopoly.
skedaddle 4y ago
Probably want to spell check and also say something more about the Fukushima Daiichi units. Highlight them positively like this is very bizarre.
jpgvm 4y ago
So many folks overlook the impact of China on todays energy landscape. First of all renewables. People keep talking about how solar is now so economical and it's price has fallen 90%+ in a decade. How did this happen when US and Australia (previously solar research juggernauts) threw their solar industries under the bus to protect oil and coal interests? Simple. China. When everyone else was bitching over whos pocket the energy budget should go into China didn't have a choice but to simply build everything at once just to try keep up with demand (they still failed the last few winters to go without blackouts of industrial workloads). As a result they simply dogpiled money into solar, nuclear, coal, everything. Their eventual goal is to be self-sufficient on energy which they are still a huge chunk away from and will also necessitate sunsetting the coal plants because they don't have the thermal coal necessary to keep going down that path. So China almost single-handedly (I say almost because there are other players involved) willed the current solar prices into existence. They are going to do the same with nuclear whether people believe it or not. Maybe not as dramatic as the price drops we have seen from solar (because it benefits much greater from mass production efficiencies) but they are going to build a ton of nuclear plants all with a few common designs. I hope my home country of Australia wakes up to this and leverages our strong trade (and hopefully improved relations) with China to negotiate technology transfer of Chinese nuclear to Australia at some point. No amount of renewables is going to be enough for Australia because we simply don't have the geography necessary for renewable baseload or storage. Nuclear would change the game entirely for Australia, with an abundance of cheap energy we could build desalination plants to overcome our susceptibility to drought, use electric arc furnaces to revive our steel mills which have largely been chased out of Australia because coking coal is too polluting, etc.
radu_floricica 4y ago
The core of the problem is, as almost always, incentives. The agencies set up to write the rulebook and supervise and the people in them gain nothing by having nuclear plants built. Their mandate is to prevent accidents - and you can't have accidents if you don't have power plants.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
Why are we pretending nuclear is cheap?
r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
What proponents of the "Well if we just removed all the regulatory requirements we could build loads of nuclear much faster than renewables" argument fail to take into account is that the building of renewables is also massively constrained by regulatory requirements, that if removed would lower the cost and make roll out much more rapid. In the UK the Tories have essentially banned building on shore wind for the past several years, removed subsidies for household solar (and insulation and other energy efficiency measures), and threatened to legislate against solar panels on farmland. Remove these obstacles and you could build out more renewables more easily, in the same way as if you removed regulatory obstacles to new nuclear. We need a mix of solutions that can be rolled out rapidly, and it is probably easier to roll out wind, solar and improve energy efficiency than it is to persuade people to build new nuclear reactors. As it is we seem to be locked into this ridiculous "I demand a perfect, preferably macho big science solution" attitude towards actually doing anything.
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  US renewables are terribly constrained by regulation as well. Someone here on HN linked this post the other day: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-big-nepa-roundup https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-big-nepa-roundup
Mildlypolite 4y ago
Well the forth gen nuclear power plants will take so many years to build that we will have surpassed some fundamental tipping points. I am not opposed to nuclear, I think that anyone who is does not understand the severity of the climate crisis. Problem will also be drought which will affect hydroelectric, we had this problem in Italy this summer.
LorenPechtel 4y ago
He's missing parts of the problem. Yes, nukes are too slow and expensive--let's look at why in a bit more detail: Slow: There are two big factors here. First, they aren't using stock designs. Most of the design time goes away if you're using an off-the-shelf design. Second, litigation. The greens figured out how to tie things up in court to the point that power companies won't touch nuke. Especially with things like regulators telling them they can't operate their newly-built plant (nothing wrong with it) and can't pass it along to customers in their rates. Costly: As he says, ALARA guarantees nuke is too expensive because it automatically precludes any actual improvements. There's no reason to come up with a better design because in the end it will cost just as much because of the extra safety systems they will have to pile on it. There's also the delays caused by litigation that can really drive up the bill. My fixes: 1) One bite at the apple. Once a plan has been approved that's it, the government doesn't get to say no unless what's actually built has a meaningful deviation from what was approved or there have been major changes in understanding of the risks. 2) Scrap ALARA. Instead, require nuke plants to be 10x safer than the next safest *competitive* source of power. This is natural gas which is currently approximately 50x as dangerous. (Solar and wind are intermittent--to be competitive you need to count their storage systems also. The storage systems don't exist, thus they can't be counted. Hydro is limited by available sites--and pretty much every worthwhile place already has a dam. I haven't seen safety numbers on geothermal but it has the same problem--it can't be scaled up.) (And I would apply this principle to industry in general--the government can't impose safety requirements on something that's too far above the alternative.)

201 points by jseliger 4y ago

Japan led the world in nuclear accidents long before Fukushima. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/dudzinski1/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/dudzinski1/ https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/1913786/monju-other-japanese-nuclear-reactor-disaster https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/1913786/mon... In fact after reading some detailed descriptions of Monju I can only ask "what were they smoking?" because the design of the plant didn't seem to take seismic risks seriously at all. I was watching a documentary the other day that described how bad their habits were at Fukushima. That generation of BWR has an "isolation condenser" that is supposed to help cool the reactor in an accident, when it operates a huge amount of steam blows out of two pipes that are called the "Pig's nose". At 9 mile point in upstate NY they regularly test the isolation condenser so everyone there knows what it is like when it is working. At Fukushima they had never tried it so when it produced just a trickle of steam they thought it was working. Similarly they had a pipe that was supposed to deliver water to the reactor core but when they really pumped water into it they found out it went someplace else. If they'd been responsible (like nuclear operators in the US) they would have practiced emergency procedures ahead of time.

api 4y ago
Japanese companies have been great at other things like manufacturing and decent at stuff like software. What gives when it comes to nuclear plant operation?
- pigsty 4y ago
  There’s been lots of fraud revealed lately. Japan has been simply covering it up very well. Just a few examples that I recall this past year or two include faking emissions tests for vehicles, faking steel quality tests, faking GDP by counting construction costs up to four times, and faking about 99% of clams from Kumamoto and local fishermen were apparently aware of this for decades. All of these issues went on for several years. Corruption at all levels has been revealed lately, and when you stack this up, all these things passed of as “good enough. Nobody will know” can end up in total disasters when quality matters. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/japan-revoke-hinos-engine-certification-over-false-emissions-data-2022-03-18/ https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/japan-revoke-hino... https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44763905.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44763905.amp https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/14769587 https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/14769587 https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/14502921 https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/14502921 https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/14538401 https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/14538401
- duxup 4y ago
  Is it a Japan thing or more a human / "industry culture" thing where you had bad apples operating and that became the SoP?
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    I think it is different in different countries. I think the US has a much tougher attitude about health and safety than most places. Maybe we pay a cost for that, but it is for real. I spent a year living in Europe and was surprised at how much worse nutrition labels were in Europe at the time. In Dresden, Germany they still had cigarette vending machines all over town and frequently had a candy vending machine mounted next to the cigarette machines to get the little ones started. The US has been reluctant to license MOX fabrication plants in the US because of the fear of the the danger of plutonium dust poses to workers. France has been confident that it has it under control. It is a subject that people have talked about for a long time without a lot of data, but a relatively recent study shows the dangers are real https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28520643/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28520643/ even if they aren't catastrophic like they were at the vermiculite mine in Libby, MT.
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      > the US has a much tougher attitude about health and safety than most places. Attitude? Maybe. In reality? Often not. No idea why you think nutrition labels are worse and how they factor in "health and safety" when corn syrup is everywhere in the food in the States and 42% of population is obese. On the other end of the spectrum you have underinvestment in critical infrastructure. For example, dams: https://e360.yale.edu/features/in-an-era-of-extreme-weather-concerns-grow-over-dam-safety https://e360.yale.edu/features/in-an-era-of-extreme-weather-... There are very few (developed) countries which are as lax about health and safety as the US.
    - themitigating 4y ago
      I feel like you associate concern with safety to making people aware or restrictions. In other words if a country has a higher drinking age, better education, and more labels then that country cares more about safety. I think that the actions of the population are a better example. Maybe you mean is "the US government is more concerned about safety " but that could be because the population doesn't care. To be fair, Germany has a higher rate of people who smoke (around 23% vs 12%)
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  You would think that the quality movement ideas that have made Japanese cars so good would apply to safety but the UAW will point out that a US car factory is a much safer workplace than a Japanese car factory. Some of that is the UAW being a strong union that looks out for its members, some of it is the adversarial legal culture in the US. Japanese workers, for instance, like to make changes to their workstations to improve their performance (for instance, complete the job more quickly.) In a normal workplace that's a great idea, but when you are working with solutions of fissionable elements there are many details you need to control to prevent a criticality accident, and they evaded those controls.
  - eternityforest 4y ago
    For all the talk about Europe and Asia being ahead of us, I think we have the about correct amount of adversarial legal culture, maybe only slightly too much, and everyone else doesn't have enough. I hear people saying the hot coffee lawsuit should have been thrown out , and to me that's just crazy that anyone would want to allow safety standards to go on ignored to that level. Outside of safety related stuff our laws are a bit messed up, but I do appreciate the fact that we make an effort to keep people safe.
    - nerdawson 4y ago
      > I hear people saying the hot coffee lawsuit should have been thrown out , and to me that's just crazy that anyone would want to allow safety standards to go on ignored to that level. I think it's a matter of taking personal responsibility rather than finding someone to blame when you make a mistake.
      - yellowapple 4y ago
        I personally don't think it's reasonable to assume that something intended for human consumption would be served hot enough to fuse one's labia to one's thigh if spilled on one's lap. In light of that, "personal responsibility" doesn't seem to be very applicable in that particular case.
- rurounijones 4y ago
  TEPCO has an atrocious safety culture. the operators of the Onagawa plant (closer to the epicenter) had a very safety-first culture and it showed.
- kaba0 4y ago
  I am absolutely out of my depth here, but isn’t Japan very “agist” (not sure of the correct word)? Just basing it on a previous HN thread about Japanese website design, a commenter mentioned software company higher managers, who can’t use a computer and the like. Some tendency of placing elderly people in important roles simply based on respect and not knowledge sounds like a plausible explanation, especially when one, high-enough people can wreak absolute havoc in a very top-down control flow. But I’m talking out of my ass here, don’t take anything seriously.
dmitriid 4y ago
It's still a testament to how safe nuclear power plants really are. - Bad operators? Check - Earthquake? Check - Tsunami? Check ... - "There were no deaths from radiation exposure in the immediate aftermath of the incident, though there were a number of (around 1600 non-radiation related) deaths during the evacuation of the nearby population" Wikipedia
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  Biggest Earthquake in known history (1000+ years) even!
  - mikeyouse 4y ago
    Nah, not even the biggest in the past 20 years (Sumatra was larger).
    - BurningFrog 4y ago
      Sorry, I meant to say Japanese history. It's the 4th biggest recorded on the Richter scale.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  There were maybe 1600 drowning deaths in the area from the tsunami. What would evacuation deaths even be?
  - sampo 4y ago
    > What would evacuation deaths even be? I think some deaths occurred when evacuating hospital patients.
    - BurningFrog 4y ago
      1600 people is an enormous number of deaths. It would have been reported. I've followed Fukushima news since it happened, and never heard of this before.

melling 4y ago

“The French were able to hold their build times below 6 years up to about 1985” You’d think if the future depended on it, build times could be reduced. 8500 global coal power plants produce 20% of emissions. Retiring coal power plants was a no-brainer decades ago. Instead we’ve been building more.

technicalbard 4y ago
The very first nuclear reactor went from idea to operating in 2 years. In the middle of WW2. The only reason nuclear projects take longer than other industrial projects is regulatory capture.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  During WW2 the US could build a ship in 39 days. Now it takes 10 years.
  - remarkEon 4y ago
    I know this point is made a lot but I’m not sure it’s that meaningful. WW2 boats were not the enormously complex network and sensor systems that today’s are. While, yeah, 10 years is extreme, but I don’t think 39 days is physically possible.
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      The 39 day boats built in WW2 were probably more similar in complexity to a modern boat than a WW2 reactor is to a modern reactor.
      - eternityforest 4y ago
        I would be surprised if some of the systems were actually harder to work on back then. Old battleships always seemed to have insane amounts of wiring and cabling, because they used the nightmarish one signal per wire protocol in the pre digital age.

prottog 4y ago

> The truly unique feature of US nuclear power is the unlimited power that was given to federal regulators. > [...] Congress had effectively told the regulator make the rules up as you go. This meant the regulator had no problem changing the rules. A design that was legal at the start of construction, could be declared illegal any time thereafter. No capital project would ever break ground with these conditions in place. Who would invest billions of dollars in something that could be made illegal any day with no recourse? I'm surprised that any new nuclear power plants were built at all.

Gwypaas 4y ago
They were only built with massive subsidies or through legal means being able to shift the costs to the ratepayers like the now cancelled Virgil C. Summer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  So you don't think we should subsidize technology that decarbonizes power production?
  - Gwypaas 4y ago
    Sure, spend money on solving energy storage even for the 99% case and I'm all in! That would be agtual R&D and not putting another round of subsidies in the nuclear companies pockets.
- yellowapple 4y ago
  I'd much rather we be spending massive subsidies on nuclear power (and space exploration, and science in general) than on an increasingly-bloated military-industrial complex.
makotech221 4y ago

julianeon 4y ago

To me this is what made the recent fusion news exciting. As far as I’m concerned, the verdict is in for nuclear plants generating highly radioactive long-lasting waste: people don’t want them. You won’t be able to overcome their opposition. What more is there to say? Let’s move on. If fusion can get to a point where it can solve the long-lasting radioactive waste problem - that would resolve the problem. That would get nuclear power adopted by the masses. We might as well aim for that, however long it takes, because that’s the only politically viable solution.

SSJPython 4y ago
> As far as I’m concerned, the verdict is in for nuclear plants generating highly radioactive long-lasting waste: people don’t want them. You won’t be able to overcome their opposition. What more is there to say? Let’s move on. Why should public opinion override the need for energy security, which is a national security issue? Sometimes, the public makes the wrong decision. The public generally has trouble when it comes to differentiating between the short-term and long-term. Energy sovereignty should not be subject to the democratic will of the populace. Leave it to the experts and the technocrats, not the average Joe and Jane who operate with asymmetric information.
- Mistletoe 4y ago
  Because we live in a democracy?
  - SSJPython 4y ago
    But that's my point: just because a society has a democratic political system does not mean everything has to be run through the same mechanism. Sometimes, the experts need to override the people, no matter how much of a fit they throw.
    - danenania 4y ago
      This is already the case. Unpopular decisions are made regularly by all three branches of the Federal government, as well as by local governments at every level. But even if you can get unpopular policies through, there's still the risk that you'll face consequences at the next election.

bryanlarsen 4y ago

This is only measuring the time from first shovel to completion. In reality, the period before first shovel is often much longer. Best case scenario is China, where it takes them about 3 years to do the planning and then 2 years to do the build. In the US it seems to be about 20 + 20. I can see the build phase coming down to about 5 years, but it's hard to imagine the planning phase taking less than 10... And it's not the nuclear part of the regulation that makes it slow in the US. In a country where it takes over 30 years to go from initial planning to completion of High Speed Rail, every big project seems to take forever and cost way too much. Nuclear specific regulation doesn't help, but I don't think it's the primary problem.

sct202 4y ago
Even in China it takes a while, China's Sanman power plant uses the same Westinghouse reactor design as Vogtle in Georgia. Both started plants construction in 2009, and Sanman finished 9 years late, while Vogtle is slated to finish next year.
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  Why can't we just hire companies from whichever country builds nuclear the best to build plants in our country?
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Price wise, that's China, and most countries rightly don't want to have an ongoing absolute dependence on China for their energy. Second best is Russia, a bunch of countries did this and now a big chunk of Europe depends on a hostile power for half of their nuclear fuel and for parts. Third best is South Korea and they just charged Saudi Arabia $5/W with an extra $4/W in mandatory service fees (no labour included). Their plants at home are also not great reliability wise and their nuclear industry keeps getting caught forging documents. Fourth by price or tied first by effectiveness is the US, they can't do it for under $10 and they're famously good sports about controlling other countries' energy infrastructure. Then there's Japan and France, and they're in the news a bunch for some reason lately. Finland and UK bought the latest French model and they are going just peachy. Taishan (another EPR) was also pretty dismal for a Chinese plant, but was at least mostly on time when it started leaking. Alternatively buy renewables which are generally below the (much smaller) budget and on time from China, South Korea, USA or many places in Europe. The whole intermittency thing is largely just a scare campaign from coal, and the emissions avoided per dollar are far better.

acidburnNSA 4y ago

The author is a shipbuilder who wants to use shipyards to mass produce large reactors. This is a truly great idea. I just wish he focused on regular water cooled reactors for this first rather than highly exotic fluid fuel ones. See also the time we came very close to actually implementing this: https://whatisnuclear.com/offshore-nuclear-plants.html https://whatisnuclear.com/offshore-nuclear-plants.html

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

pydry 4y ago

tl;dr safe, cheap, quick. pick one and a half.

goodpoint 4y ago
Despite the idiotic downvotes you are absolutely right.

LorenDB 4y ago

When I saw the title I immediately thought of the nuclear engines in Kerbal Space Program, which have a famously low amount of thrust (although they are efficient) :)

LorenPechtel 4y ago
Yeah, nuclear-thermal is low thrust because you don't have the rocket exhaust to cool your system. You have to deal with the waste heat and that severely limits your power to weight ratio. I think all low-thrust KSP engines are way, way above real world numbers (necessary as the game engine can't handle burns in time warp and players aren't going to be able to plot them without MechJeb type assistance anyway) but I'm not sure on the nuclear-thermal stuff.

shawndrost 4y ago

The article talks about learning curves, but learning curves apply to airplanes, not airports. Nuclear is the latter.

rootusrootus 4y ago
So make reactors more like airplanes, then. Or rather, ships.
throwaway4aday 4y ago
It seems you missed the conclusion in which they state that there is unlikely to be a learning curve beyond the build of the first unit or two as evidenced by France and Japan's build times. They also did a decent job of showing that the average build time should be around 4 years which is equivalent to the build of a coal power plant and that the time it takes in both cases is determined by how long it takes to build the boiler and turbine. The swelling of timelines appears only when large changes in regulation enter the picture.

giardini 4y ago

Wouldn't the USA do better to build small "pluggable" nuclear power generation plants similar to those on nuclear submarines? Periodically the fuel would be replaced. https://www.ussjpkennedyjr.org/nuclear-reactors-on-submarines-a-reliable-source-of-power/ https://www.ussjpkennedyjr.org/nuclear-reactors-on-submarine... Big power plants are "one-offs", with little/no interchangeability of parts and each having a unique set of problems, costly construction and maintenance.

yellowapple 4y ago
I suspect a big part of the reason why submarine reactors are able to be so small is because they sit on a planet-covering heatsink. Terrestrial plants accomplish the same with artificial lakes and large cooling towers; the actual "nuclear" parts are already pretty small in comparison. But yes, assuming the cooling systems could be similarly mass-produced, it would make sense to mass-produce small-scale nuclear plants as well.

rich_sasha 4y ago

I feel like currently nuclear power is like early space flight. It works, it is fairly safe, but super expensive and very bespoke. NASA cost+ model comes to mind. What we need is SpaceX for nuclear, maybe without Musk's volatile narcissism. It seems like the business of building nukes, challenging as it is, is eminently doable, just bogged down by a plethora of processes not optimised for viability. As much as solar and wind are nice, people who live in sunny windy places seem to struggle to imagine a north European winter with no sunshine or wind, and massive energy requirements. Good job we have vapourware

kilroy123 4y ago
Isn't that what https://www.nuscalepower.com/ https://www.nuscalepower.com/ is trying to be?
- rich_sasha 4y ago
  Mostly, yes. Them and a few other startups in this area. It feels though like they only nibble at a few of the problems. If at the core it is a regulation problem, then you can't just fix it with technology.

MikeCapone 4y ago

The US Navy could be quite quick building reactors and innovating, because it didn't have to go through the same amount of regulation. They've operated lots and lots of reactors with very little problems for decades.

warmwaffles 4y ago
Go figure when the government owns the reactor and hires technicians to maintain them, they can be built "quickly". In an earlier post here > The truly unique feature of US nuclear power is the unlimited power that was given to federal regulators. > [...] Congress had effectively told the regulator make the rules up as you go. This meant the regulator had no problem changing the rules. A design that was legal at the start of construction, could be declared illegal any time thereafter. The solution may be that the federal government owns the plant and contracts out the work. Ultimately, the government would have to answer to itself about regulation changes.
- MikeCapone 4y ago
  It's because the US Navy can just decide to do it without years of red tape and mountains of paperwork. National security cuts through the red tape. I don't think the government owning civilian reactors would help if they don't reform the process that means it takes 10+ years and millions of pages of documentation to get anything done.

mkl95 4y ago

It's crazy to think it would only take a few thousand plants to power the entire world, or about 15 times the ones we have today. But even another few hundred plants could completely change the geopolitical landscape. Nuclear power is a cheatcode we refuse to use.

RobertRoberts 4y ago
Waste storage. If zealous supporters of nuclear asked for nuclear waste to be stored in their neighborhoods, I'd be on board for more nuclear power right now.
- adamsb6 4y ago
  Your terms are agreeable.
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  So instead we just pump energy waste / byproducts in the air?
- goodpoint 4y ago
  There are a lot of problem related to nuclear, including its cost, the centralization of political power and the centralization of the energy grid.
  - S201 4y ago
    > the centralization of political power and the centralization of the energy grid. Sounds a lot better to me than relying on the middle east and Russia for fossil fuels.
    - goodpoint 4y ago
      That's called false dichotomy.
- colechristensen 4y ago

rpep 4y ago

In the early 2010s, a lobbying campaign against new nuclear in the U.K. basically started, including people like the deputy prime minister [1] complaining that it was too slow and renewables would be faster and it wasn’t necessary. Fast forward to 2022 and we still don’t have enough renewables, the UK is not very windy at the moment so there’s not enough base load capacity, and we only have 3 active coal fired power stations left. Oh, and we’re in an energy crisis and France, which is normally a net exporter to the U.K., is needing to import energy, making the crisis even closer. It would have been pretty useful to have had a new nuclear power station online right about now. [1] https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2011/03/nuclear-power-clegg-britain https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2011/03/nuclear-power-...

simfree 4y ago
There has been plenty of noteworthy pushback against renewable energy has been significant, even for offshore wind farms that would have minimal view impact. Pushback against new infrastructure is high in general, causing society to lean on inefficient and dirty sources of energy. We need more modern nuclear reactors, renewables and storage since neither can load follow like hydroelectric dams or combined cycle natural gas can.
- klabb3 4y ago
  If you wanna put the tinfoil hat on, having a political flamewar between renewables and nuclear is so ideal for fossil fuel companies that it almost looks deliberately architected. Nuclear proponents are rarely if ever against renewables on principle, but rather claim they aren’t delivering on their promises. The environmentalists OTOH have been radicalized to be opposed to nuclear in a dogmatic way, are entirely against improving it by lifting research bans etc. The “nuclear is not economically viable” argument seen in recent years is dishonest from the majority of critics; they were against nuclear before and will be in the future, independent of economics and regional viability of wind & solar. Meanwhile, coal, gas and oil are doing absolutely splendid – even countries with a strong environmentalist ethos can easily be convinced to expand their fossil fuel dependencies during a crisis, when their citizens can’t afford to heat their homes in the winter.

LastTrain 4y ago

The author blames regulation without weighing any benefits, as if regulation were there for regulation itself. I am willing to listen to an argument that less regulation is needed, but it needs to take the benefits of regulation into consideration as well.

gcanyon 4y ago

For anyone who is (morbidly) curious, the "grisly suicide" -- described at the time as bizarre, was slashing his ankles and neck in a (dry) bathtub http://www.strategosinc.com/downloads/nuclear_fizzle-dl1.pdf http://www.strategosinc.com/downloads/nuclear_fizzle-dl1.pdf That article also has a ton more information on how Babcock and Wilcox failed.

hinkley 4y ago

The common reaction to "this process is too slow" is to ask the question, "what if we made it fast"? As I mentioned the last couple of times this topic came up, I am concerned that the answers to that question that have already been offered are ignoring how the statistics of scalable system work and particularly where they overlap with the Rule of Large Numbers. It's been suggested that if we want to go fast what you do is make a bunch of small reliable reactors and then co-locate them, but if you make something that's 10x as reliable, the assumption is that having 10x as many of them results in the same failure rate, and the same consequences. But that's not quite how statistics work, or for that matter equipment. When you have 100 of something, there is always preventative maintenance or repairs going on. We have storage array designs specifically to deal with this problem in data centers by just letting equipment fail and then replacing whole units, because the labor involved with reacting to each event is simply too high. That's not particularly unique to IT. That's just a fact of large scale operations. You keep spare tools because some of them are going to break every week. You swap them out and -maybe- someone repairs them, or cannibalizes them. With mechanical equipment, maintenance materially affects the reliability and safety of the job site. Suspending maintenance and repairs because you've been pre-empted by the failure of other equipment leads to risks stacking up higher and higher. Can I do scheduled maintenance on Reactor 3 if Reactor 50 ate itself yesterday? At some number of reactors, every plant has experienced one catastrophic failure. What do you do with that? What can you do with that?

angry_octet 4y ago
Exactly correct. The techniques for repair of radioactive equipment are still in their infancy, and seem to progress only with each accident (due to their inherent costs). Robots die in minutes in a hard radiation environment, and we don't make any new microprocessors with rad hard techniques (though maybe RISC V will change that). From a safety critical analysis POV there has been a huge change in technical capacity over the last 20 years, but no one in the field would say we're close to strong safety, especially now in regards to software intensive systems. IoT just isn't going to be the same with radiation, you can leap from a correct state to an unsafe one at any point, dozens of bits being flipped every second, transistors misbehaving, faults between silicon layers... Completely unrelated logic is in the same fault compartment of critical trusted logic. So if you have 50 reactors, that's 50 control systems, plus the shared infrastructure (water/electricity/data/fuel in and out, fire suppression). If you remove one for refuelling you're moving/vibrating a radioactive system with lots of pipes which are now fragile due to radiation. All the stress analysis techniques we use on planes are very hard to use on plants due to lack of access. It seems to me like we're just beginning to understand the complexity of SMRs and, contrary to the PR, they will take a long time to mature. Everything about nuclear is nonlinear and coupled. Production line techniques are all about equipment that operates in the known region, and the consequences are not too bad when it departs from that because the operator is at fault.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

> Figure 4. French and Chinese nuclear electricity production. Source BP Energy Review. Is shown to demonstrate that nuclear isn't slow. Yet China has added more solar, and more wind, in that same period. So it is slower than either on their own, and much slower than both, even at nuclear historical high. Meanwhile, solar and wind get cheaper and faster each year.

garbagecoder 4y ago

The same people making it too slow say it's slow. QED.

greenthrow 4y ago

Nuclear plants absolutely should take longer to build than a coal plant. Of course coal plants are awful and can cause environmental disasters, but when there is a flaw in their design or construction they don't make an entire area uninhabitable for a generation or more. Once more for the people in the back; we do not need nuclear. Renewables and storage are cheaper, faster and less risky.

LorenPechtel 4y ago
Storage has nothing viable on the horizon, let alone in production. I will agree it's less risky--because risk is an unknown and thus a certain failure isn't a risk.
- greenthrow 4y ago
  Storage is here and working and cheaper than nuclear. Try again.
  - LorenPechtel 4y ago
    What storage are you talking about? We use batteries for very small scale storage, just long enough to spin up something better. To actually store power for night is several times as expensive as the power in the first place.

Julesman 4y ago

The arguments around this are always weak and spurious. I've been at this too long to take the bait from any trolls who 'have it all figured out.' By no measure or justification is splitting the atom a good idea. There are few things more short sighted than arguing we should figure out what to do with nuclear waste because we haven't quite nailed solutions with ZERO waste. People who minimize the significance of both nuclear waste and absolutely inevitable nuclear disasters just aren't thinking with any foresight or vision about the core concepts of sustainability. But then that's it. A lot of people advancing Nuclear power aren't environmentalists at all. Learned that the hard way. No nukes!

steeve 4y ago
It's sad you didn't spend that same energy educating yourself about geological storage or Gen IV. Oh well.
stopping 4y ago
Nuclear is going to have to play a significant role if we want to get off fossil fuels. By all accounts nuclear is far safer and cleaner than fossil fuels (even amortizing the disasters), and so it is a suitable replacement if we can make it economically viable and publicly acceptable like it used to be. Solar and wind are already economically viable (even compared to fossil fuels), but still leave some key problems unsolved (e.g. baseline power at night). We might be able to solve this with batteries and other grid storage solutions, but these aren't yet scalable in the way that nuclear energy can be.
albertopv 4y ago
Considering coal power plants emit more radioactivity than nuclear ones [1], having 8500 coal plants instead of nuclear doesn't seem to be a great deal anyway. You could tell me even coal plants shouldn't exist, but they do, new ones are built, basically unopposed compared to nuclear even if they are far more dangerous. [1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2022-003567_EN.html#:~:text=Studies%20show%20that%20ash%20from,than%20a%20nuclear%20power%20plant https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2022-00356....

aj7 4y ago

The contractors slowly learned, and then at an increasing rate, that profit was higher when construction was strung out over time.

amanaplanacanal 4y ago

How about we just tax carbon and let the power companies build whatever they think will be cheapest? Let the market do its job. All this bullshit arguing about it accomplishes exactly nothing.

jpgvm 4y ago
Because all commercial enterprises operate on timescales too short to be relevant to long term climate and energy needs. We should have state owned power generation, transmission and storage. It makes the most sense and can function optimally if it's optimised as a state run monopoly.

skedaddle 4y ago

Probably want to spell check and also say something more about the Fukushima Daiichi units. Highlight them positively like this is very bizarre.

jpgvm 4y ago

So many folks overlook the impact of China on todays energy landscape. First of all renewables. People keep talking about how solar is now so economical and it's price has fallen 90%+ in a decade. How did this happen when US and Australia (previously solar research juggernauts) threw their solar industries under the bus to protect oil and coal interests? Simple. China. When everyone else was bitching over whos pocket the energy budget should go into China didn't have a choice but to simply build everything at once just to try keep up with demand (they still failed the last few winters to go without blackouts of industrial workloads). As a result they simply dogpiled money into solar, nuclear, coal, everything. Their eventual goal is to be self-sufficient on energy which they are still a huge chunk away from and will also necessitate sunsetting the coal plants because they don't have the thermal coal necessary to keep going down that path. So China almost single-handedly (I say almost because there are other players involved) willed the current solar prices into existence. They are going to do the same with nuclear whether people believe it or not. Maybe not as dramatic as the price drops we have seen from solar (because it benefits much greater from mass production efficiencies) but they are going to build a ton of nuclear plants all with a few common designs. I hope my home country of Australia wakes up to this and leverages our strong trade (and hopefully improved relations) with China to negotiate technology transfer of Chinese nuclear to Australia at some point. No amount of renewables is going to be enough for Australia because we simply don't have the geography necessary for renewable baseload or storage. Nuclear would change the game entirely for Australia, with an abundance of cheap energy we could build desalination plants to overcome our susceptibility to drought, use electric arc furnaces to revive our steel mills which have largely been chased out of Australia because coking coal is too polluting, etc.

radu_floricica 4y ago

The core of the problem is, as almost always, incentives. The agencies set up to write the rulebook and supervise and the people in them gain nothing by having nuclear plants built. Their mandate is to prevent accidents - and you can't have accidents if you don't have power plants.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

Why are we pretending nuclear is cheap?

r_hoods_ghost 4y ago

What proponents of the "Well if we just removed all the regulatory requirements we could build loads of nuclear much faster than renewables" argument fail to take into account is that the building of renewables is also massively constrained by regulatory requirements, that if removed would lower the cost and make roll out much more rapid. In the UK the Tories have essentially banned building on shore wind for the past several years, removed subsidies for household solar (and insulation and other energy efficiency measures), and threatened to legislate against solar panels on farmland. Remove these obstacles and you could build out more renewables more easily, in the same way as if you removed regulatory obstacles to new nuclear. We need a mix of solutions that can be rolled out rapidly, and it is probably easier to roll out wind, solar and improve energy efficiency than it is to persuade people to build new nuclear reactors. As it is we seem to be locked into this ridiculous "I demand a perfect, preferably macho big science solution" attitude towards actually doing anything.

ShredKazoo 4y ago
US renewables are terribly constrained by regulation as well. Someone here on HN linked this post the other day: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-big-nepa-roundup https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-big-nepa-roundup

Mildlypolite 4y ago

Well the forth gen nuclear power plants will take so many years to build that we will have surpassed some fundamental tipping points. I am not opposed to nuclear, I think that anyone who is does not understand the severity of the climate crisis. Problem will also be drought which will affect hydroelectric, we had this problem in Italy this summer.

LorenPechtel 4y ago

He's missing parts of the problem. Yes, nukes are too slow and expensive--let's look at why in a bit more detail: Slow: There are two big factors here. First, they aren't using stock designs. Most of the design time goes away if you're using an off-the-shelf design. Second, litigation. The greens figured out how to tie things up in court to the point that power companies won't touch nuke. Especially with things like regulators telling them they can't operate their newly-built plant (nothing wrong with it) and can't pass it along to customers in their rates. Costly: As he says, ALARA guarantees nuke is too expensive because it automatically precludes any actual improvements. There's no reason to come up with a better design because in the end it will cost just as much because of the extra safety systems they will have to pile on it. There's also the delays caused by litigation that can really drive up the bill. My fixes: 1) One bite at the apple. Once a plan has been approved that's it, the government doesn't get to say no unless what's actually built has a meaningful deviation from what was approved or there have been major changes in understanding of the risks. 2) Scrap ALARA. Instead, require nuke plants to be 10x safer than the next safest *competitive* source of power. This is natural gas which is currently approximately 50x as dangerous. (Solar and wind are intermittent--to be competitive you need to count their storage systems also. The storage systems don't exist, thus they can't be counted. Hydro is limited by available sites--and pretty much every worthwhile place already has a dam. I haven't seen safety numbers on geothermal but it has the same problem--it can't be scaled up.) (And I would apply this principle to industry in general--the government can't impose safety requirements on something that's too far above the alternative.)