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Of all of the things to entrust to the invisible hand of the private sector, I would put nuclear power generation dead fucking last on the list. If you thought

Of all of the things to entrust to the invisible hand of the private sector, I would put nuclear power generation dead fucking last on the list. If you thought Bhopal and Exxon Valdez were bad, wait until some CEO decides to juice The Atomic Corporation's Q4 earnings by skipping a few safety inspections and half the Eastern seaboard no longer needs streetlights because everyone's tumors glow in the dark.

pfdietz 3y ago
Oh, I don't mean these merchant plants would be unregulated. It's just that if they were such great ideas, why aren't the power plant builders just going ahead and doing it themselves? According to the nuclear proponents, there's so much potential profit just going uncollected.
- pdonis 3y ago
  > why aren't the power plant builders just going ahead and doing it themselves? Because they would still have to build the plants somewhere, and the legal environment in the US is such that anywhere you build your project will be snowed under by NIMBY Lawsuits and your investment will never pay back anything. So nobody wants to try.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Except that's not true. NIMBY lawsuits are not what has affected recent nuclear builds. There are strict limits on what such lawsuits can do.
    - pdonis 3y ago
      > NIMBY lawsuits are not what has affected recent nuclear builds. Can you give some examples? > There are strict limits on what such lawsuits can do. On paper that might be true. But the actual law rarely matches the law on paper.
      - pfdietz 3y ago
        Here's a timeline for what happened at Vogtle. No NIMBY lawsuits in there; plenty of screw ups and back and forth lawsuits among the participants though. https://www.powermag.com/how-the-vogtle-nuclear-expansions-costs-escalated/ https://www.powermag.com/how-the-vogtle-nuclear-expansions-c...
        pdonis 3y ago
        This looks like adding reactors to an already existing site. That kind of project won't have the same exposure to NIMBY lawsuits because the site is already there. The kind of project I had in mind was standing up a new site that had not previously had any reactors located there. That said, I did not mean to imply that such lawsuits are the only issue that drives up costs for nuclear plants. From the article you reference it seems like various forms of government meddling in the process is a major factor, not to mention corporations being more interested in jockeying for position than getting a job done.
        natmaka 3y ago
        > No NIMBY lawsuits in there; plenty of screw ups and back and forth lawsuits among the participants though. This is also true for the French project (Flamanville-3, an EPR). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36258182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36258182
- 7952 3y ago
  The answer is that companies have limited cash reserves and need external capital to do anything. Particularly when you are looking to build something hugely expensive that cannot generate revenue for years. The real "plant builder" is not the organisation with the technical expertise. It is the one that can pursuade banks and investors to take the risk.
  - Brotkrumen 3y ago
    I don't think you are disagreeing with parent. As you are explaining, "the market" thinks nuclear power plants to be too risky and too expensive compared to other power sources, which is exactly the reason why they shouldn't be build by public agencies anymore either.
pdonis 3y ago
> If you thought Bhopal and Exxon Valdez were bad ...then you have learned a valuable lesson, not about failures of the private sector, but about failures of government regulation. Of all the things to entrust to government regulation, I would put critical infrastructure of any sort last on the list. The reason our infrastructure is such a mess is that governments insist on regulating it up one side and down the other, and regulatory capture is a thing. It's much easier for nefarious private companies to buy government regulations that allow them to cut corners, than it would be if they had to actually sell their wares in a true competitive free market with actual liability for any damage done.
- munificent 3y ago
  > with actual liability for any damage done. Where does that liability come from if not regulation?
- zztop44 3y ago
  Uh, why? Why is “buying government regulations” that allow you to cut corners easier than just cutting corners where no regulations exist. Like, if there’s a true competitive free market, are consumers of petroleum products going to choose to pay a premium for ethically sourced petroleum? No, right? Otherwise they’d be doing that now. So how would it be better with fewer regulations? There’s no logic or analysis presented in your comment, just a series of assertions. I’d love it if you could unpack your argument a little bit about how deregulating (eg: the oil and gas sector) might make disasters like Exxon Valdez less likely.
  - brigandish 3y ago
    > Why is “buying government regulations” that allow you to cut corners easier than just cutting corners where no regulations exist. Because of competition. If you have regulatory capture you avoid competition that then allows the cutting of corners. Without that regulatory capture you have, in your straw man example, no regulations, and hence zero barrier to entry which actually should prevent at least some cutting of corners. Though I'd go for regulation that doesn't prevent competition, but that's just me.
dctoedt 3y ago
> If you thought Bhopal and Exxon Valdez were bad, wait until some CEO decides to juice The Atomic Corporation's Q4 earnings by skipping a few safety inspections Perhaps things are different now, but when I was going through the Navy's cram course for the [chief] engineer exam after two years of pretty-intensive sea duty, we worked through some what-if scenarios that they hadn't exposed us to in the year-long basic nuclear-propulsion course. That experience was a real eye-opener — especially coupled with having seen shipyard workers in "action" during my ship's in-port maintenance periods. I still remember the exact moment in the cram course — sitting in a conference room at a Navy base on a gorgeous San Diego day — when I thought, oh, s__t, civilian workers shouldn't be running nuclear-power plants that are located anywhere near civilization. This was about a year before Three Mile Island and about eight years before Chernobyl. To be clear, I was comfortable with the Navy's operating practices, which — thanks to the Rickover culture — were ferociously focused on safety and on second-checking everything in sight. Supposedly there are inherently-safer civilian reactor designs out there now that are less vulnerable to human f*-ups; I haven't kept up and wouldn't be competent to judge.
- XorNot 3y ago
  Three Mile Island however was probably in part caused by the operations team on duty at the time being former Navy nukes: their instincts for what they needed to prevent going wrong were completely mismatched to the difference of design and scale - a 50MW navy reactor has basically no decay heat, whereas a 1GW electricity station is still putting out about that much in thermal energy even after its "shutdown" - which is proposed as an explanation for why they were so willing to keep overriding various automatic reactor cooling systems, since they just didn't internalize how much heat was actually still being produced.
  - dctoedt 3y ago
    > a 50MW navy reactor has basically no decay heat Not necessarily: It depends on the power level the reactor was run at, and for what period of time. [0] > they just didn't internalize how much heat was actually still being produced It's not apparent that this was actually the case. I found this explanation, which makes sense to me (although I stress I have no particular knowledge of the incident): "... the [TMI] plant crew’s response was guided by wisdom received from another domain [i.e., Navy submarine plants]. ... They were under strict guidelines to never let the pressurizer go solid [which can be catastrophic in a submarine], and yet it was. The internal stress to meet this guideline was so severe, they left the rails and violated another guideline (shutting down the ECCS)." [1] This actually reinforces my basic point above about the undesirability of putting pressurized-water reactors near civilian population centers: Human error is inevitable, and it's undesirable to have a system where such errors would be catastrophic if compounded — and human error can indeed come in multiples, with each error compounding the effects of earlier ones. Here's a follow-up piece from the same author, about the effect confirmation bias at TMI and Fukushima (quoting another person): "Every reading that was true and really bad, they thought of as erroneous. Every reading that was erroneous but really good, they relied upon. That’s a trend that I always see in emergency response. Operators want to believe the instruments that lead them to the conclusion they want to get to." [2] [0] https://www.quora.com/How-much-time-does-it-take-for-a-nuclear-reactor-to-cool-down-after-a-shutdown-What-will-be-the-source-of-heat-as-fission-will-not-occur-after-the-shutdown https://www.quora.com/How-much-time-does-it-take-for-a-nucle... [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2016/may/editor-s-note-going-solid https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2016... [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2016/june/editor-s-note-cognitive-bias https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2016...
pinewurst 3y ago
Bhopal failures were at least as much Indian politics (e.g. restrictions on safety automation out of fear it’d reduce constituent/patronage jobs) as it was the evil hands of capitalism.
Etrnl_President 3y ago
It already is in private hands; Government leases from, or contracts out to corporations after all; Which means the nuclear arsenal is in private hands. Technically.
Simulacra 3y ago
Of all things to trust to the invisible hand of government, I would put nuclear power generation dead fucking last on that list.
- XorNot 3y ago
  Who do you think runs the Navy's fleet of floating and submersible nuclear reactors?
thedrbrian 3y ago
it's already happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_River_Nuclear_Plant?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_River_Nuclear_Plant?us... I'm sure I read an article about this plant/procedure and they were looking to save 30 million dollars on a billion dollar plant.
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  > CR-3 went offline in September 2009 for RFO-16. While the reactor was down, the old steam generators were to be replaced. There are 426 steel tendons within the concrete walls of the reactor containment dome which reinforce the dome. Plan developer Sargent & Lundy specified that 97 tendons be loosened. Progress rejected that number as excessive. The next proposal was to loosen 74 tendons, which was typical of other nuclear plants doing the procedure. According to a Progress employee, "de-tensioning the tendons is a very expensive and time-consuming effort", so the number was further reduced to 65. Progress engaged Bechtel to provide a 3rd party review, which agreed that 65 was appropriate. However, when the work was performed, only 27 tendons were loosened, and a foreman and supervisor sent emails questioning the way the tendons were loosened.
  - kennyadam 3y ago
    Awful and yet totally unsurprising. Yet there will be people still calling for private profit-motivated companies to run everything and this will be dismissed as a one-off, never-happen-again sort of event. edit: I think it's worth including this quote too: Gregory Jaczko, former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, stated, "That's a multi-billion dollar asset that had to be shut down because of improper work planning, improper understanding of how to properly do this containment retrofit".
asdff 3y ago
Many civilian plants in the US are ran by the private sector today. The safety record still speaks for itself, its a very safe form of energy.

pfdietz 3y ago

Oh, I don't mean these merchant plants would be unregulated. It's just that if they were such great ideas, why aren't the power plant builders just going ahead and doing it themselves? According to the nuclear proponents, there's so much potential profit just going uncollected.

pdonis 3y ago
> why aren't the power plant builders just going ahead and doing it themselves? Because they would still have to build the plants somewhere, and the legal environment in the US is such that anywhere you build your project will be snowed under by NIMBY Lawsuits and your investment will never pay back anything. So nobody wants to try.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Except that's not true. NIMBY lawsuits are not what has affected recent nuclear builds. There are strict limits on what such lawsuits can do.
  - pdonis 3y ago
    > NIMBY lawsuits are not what has affected recent nuclear builds. Can you give some examples? > There are strict limits on what such lawsuits can do. On paper that might be true. But the actual law rarely matches the law on paper.
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      Here's a timeline for what happened at Vogtle. No NIMBY lawsuits in there; plenty of screw ups and back and forth lawsuits among the participants though. https://www.powermag.com/how-the-vogtle-nuclear-expansions-costs-escalated/ https://www.powermag.com/how-the-vogtle-nuclear-expansions-c...
      - pdonis 3y ago
        This looks like adding reactors to an already existing site. That kind of project won't have the same exposure to NIMBY lawsuits because the site is already there. The kind of project I had in mind was standing up a new site that had not previously had any reactors located there. That said, I did not mean to imply that such lawsuits are the only issue that drives up costs for nuclear plants. From the article you reference it seems like various forms of government meddling in the process is a major factor, not to mention corporations being more interested in jockeying for position than getting a job done.
      - natmaka 3y ago
        > No NIMBY lawsuits in there; plenty of screw ups and back and forth lawsuits among the participants though. This is also true for the French project (Flamanville-3, an EPR). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36258182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36258182
7952 3y ago
The answer is that companies have limited cash reserves and need external capital to do anything. Particularly when you are looking to build something hugely expensive that cannot generate revenue for years. The real "plant builder" is not the organisation with the technical expertise. It is the one that can pursuade banks and investors to take the risk.
- Brotkrumen 3y ago
  I don't think you are disagreeing with parent. As you are explaining, "the market" thinks nuclear power plants to be too risky and too expensive compared to other power sources, which is exactly the reason why they shouldn't be build by public agencies anymore either.

pdonis 3y ago

> If you thought Bhopal and Exxon Valdez were bad ...then you have learned a valuable lesson, not about failures of the private sector, but about failures of government regulation. Of all the things to entrust to government regulation, I would put critical infrastructure of any sort last on the list. The reason our infrastructure is such a mess is that governments insist on regulating it up one side and down the other, and regulatory capture is a thing. It's much easier for nefarious private companies to buy government regulations that allow them to cut corners, than it would be if they had to actually sell their wares in a true competitive free market with actual liability for any damage done.

munificent 3y ago
> with actual liability for any damage done. Where does that liability come from if not regulation?
zztop44 3y ago
Uh, why? Why is “buying government regulations” that allow you to cut corners easier than just cutting corners where no regulations exist. Like, if there’s a true competitive free market, are consumers of petroleum products going to choose to pay a premium for ethically sourced petroleum? No, right? Otherwise they’d be doing that now. So how would it be better with fewer regulations? There’s no logic or analysis presented in your comment, just a series of assertions. I’d love it if you could unpack your argument a little bit about how deregulating (eg: the oil and gas sector) might make disasters like Exxon Valdez less likely.
- brigandish 3y ago
  > Why is “buying government regulations” that allow you to cut corners easier than just cutting corners where no regulations exist. Because of competition. If you have regulatory capture you avoid competition that then allows the cutting of corners. Without that regulatory capture you have, in your straw man example, no regulations, and hence zero barrier to entry which actually should prevent at least some cutting of corners. Though I'd go for regulation that doesn't prevent competition, but that's just me.

dctoedt 3y ago

> If you thought Bhopal and Exxon Valdez were bad, wait until some CEO decides to juice The Atomic Corporation's Q4 earnings by skipping a few safety inspections Perhaps things are different now, but when I was going through the Navy's cram course for the [chief] engineer exam after two years of pretty-intensive sea duty, we worked through some what-if scenarios that they hadn't exposed us to in the year-long basic nuclear-propulsion course. That experience was a real eye-opener — especially coupled with having seen shipyard workers in "action" during my ship's in-port maintenance periods. I still remember the exact moment in the cram course — sitting in a conference room at a Navy base on a gorgeous San Diego day — when I thought, oh, s__t, civilian workers shouldn't be running nuclear-power plants that are located anywhere near civilization. This was about a year before Three Mile Island and about eight years before Chernobyl. To be clear, I was comfortable with the Navy's operating practices, which — thanks to the Rickover culture — were ferociously focused on safety and on second-checking everything in sight. Supposedly there are inherently-safer civilian reactor designs out there now that are less vulnerable to human f*-ups; I haven't kept up and wouldn't be competent to judge.

XorNot 3y ago
Three Mile Island however was probably in part caused by the operations team on duty at the time being former Navy nukes: their instincts for what they needed to prevent going wrong were completely mismatched to the difference of design and scale - a 50MW navy reactor has basically no decay heat, whereas a 1GW electricity station is still putting out about that much in thermal energy even after its "shutdown" - which is proposed as an explanation for why they were so willing to keep overriding various automatic reactor cooling systems, since they just didn't internalize how much heat was actually still being produced.
- dctoedt 3y ago
  > a 50MW navy reactor has basically no decay heat Not necessarily: It depends on the power level the reactor was run at, and for what period of time. [0] > they just didn't internalize how much heat was actually still being produced It's not apparent that this was actually the case. I found this explanation, which makes sense to me (although I stress I have no particular knowledge of the incident): "... the [TMI] plant crew’s response was guided by wisdom received from another domain [i.e., Navy submarine plants]. ... They were under strict guidelines to never let the pressurizer go solid [which can be catastrophic in a submarine], and yet it was. The internal stress to meet this guideline was so severe, they left the rails and violated another guideline (shutting down the ECCS)." [1] This actually reinforces my basic point above about the undesirability of putting pressurized-water reactors near civilian population centers: Human error is inevitable, and it's undesirable to have a system where such errors would be catastrophic if compounded — and human error can indeed come in multiples, with each error compounding the effects of earlier ones. Here's a follow-up piece from the same author, about the effect confirmation bias at TMI and Fukushima (quoting another person): "Every reading that was true and really bad, they thought of as erroneous. Every reading that was erroneous but really good, they relied upon. That’s a trend that I always see in emergency response. Operators want to believe the instruments that lead them to the conclusion they want to get to." [2] [0] https://www.quora.com/How-much-time-does-it-take-for-a-nuclear-reactor-to-cool-down-after-a-shutdown-What-will-be-the-source-of-heat-as-fission-will-not-occur-after-the-shutdown https://www.quora.com/How-much-time-does-it-take-for-a-nucle... [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2016/may/editor-s-note-going-solid https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2016... [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2016/june/editor-s-note-cognitive-bias https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2016...

pinewurst 3y ago

Bhopal failures were at least as much Indian politics (e.g. restrictions on safety automation out of fear it’d reduce constituent/patronage jobs) as it was the evil hands of capitalism.

Etrnl_President 3y ago

It already is in private hands; Government leases from, or contracts out to corporations after all; Which means the nuclear arsenal is in private hands. Technically.

Simulacra 3y ago

Of all things to trust to the invisible hand of government, I would put nuclear power generation dead fucking last on that list.

XorNot 3y ago
Who do you think runs the Navy's fleet of floating and submersible nuclear reactors?

thedrbrian 3y ago

it's already happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_River_Nuclear_Plant?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_River_Nuclear_Plant?us... I'm sure I read an article about this plant/procedure and they were looking to save 30 million dollars on a billion dollar plant.

ZeroGravitas 3y ago
> CR-3 went offline in September 2009 for RFO-16. While the reactor was down, the old steam generators were to be replaced. There are 426 steel tendons within the concrete walls of the reactor containment dome which reinforce the dome. Plan developer Sargent & Lundy specified that 97 tendons be loosened. Progress rejected that number as excessive. The next proposal was to loosen 74 tendons, which was typical of other nuclear plants doing the procedure. According to a Progress employee, "de-tensioning the tendons is a very expensive and time-consuming effort", so the number was further reduced to 65. Progress engaged Bechtel to provide a 3rd party review, which agreed that 65 was appropriate. However, when the work was performed, only 27 tendons were loosened, and a foreman and supervisor sent emails questioning the way the tendons were loosened.
- kennyadam 3y ago
  Awful and yet totally unsurprising. Yet there will be people still calling for private profit-motivated companies to run everything and this will be dismissed as a one-off, never-happen-again sort of event. edit: I think it's worth including this quote too: Gregory Jaczko, former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, stated, "That's a multi-billion dollar asset that had to be shut down because of improper work planning, improper understanding of how to properly do this containment retrofit".

asdff 3y ago

Many civilian plants in the US are ran by the private sector today. The safety record still speaks for itself, its a very safe form of energy.