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And that's why I left the nuclear industry. Nuclear power is the safest form of power production we've ever produced (more people are killed per MWh installing

And that's why I left the nuclear industry. Nuclear power is the safest form of power production we've ever produced (more people are killed per MWh installing and repairing wind turbines than in the nuclear industry) but it has never been anywhere near cost effective and no nuclear project has ever been completed anywhere near on-schedule. Every time I hear someone talk about how the world needs tons of new nuclear plants and solar and wind can't possibly meet the demand quickly enough, that person seems to imagine that none of the next wave of nuclear plants magically will not have any of the problems that every previous nuclear plant had. Meanwhile solar and wind are beating estimates year after year. I still love nuclear physics (and I am excited about several up-and-coming fusion projects) but I just don't believe in the nuclear (fission) power industry anymore.

mywittyname 3y ago
The sad part is, this is a solvable problem. If the nation really wanted to build a large number of safe, effective nuclear power plant, we could, and probably in a time frame of months, not years. But entrenched interest from natural gas and coal producers combined with anti-nuclear sentiment practically guarantee that will never happen. Nuclear power is held to too high of a standard to really be a viable source of power, especially in a democracy.
- breckenedge 3y ago
  > Nuclear power is held to too high of a standard to really be a viable source of power, especially in a democracy Don’t tell that to France.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    France can't do it these days either. Look at the fiasco of the EPR; it drove their nuclear corporation to insolvency.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  None of that is the root problem. Nuclear plants are too big, and we can't build big things cheaply in this country. The idle corruption of middle managers is what kills these kinds of projects.
  - mywittyname 3y ago
    It's not corruption; people in power don't want nuclear, and so the industry is regulated into its current quagmire. No other industry faces moving goalposts like nuclear does. The USA can move mountains if it really wants to. But as it stands, the country is doing everything it can to keep that mountain right where it is.
    - lamontcg 3y ago
      > The USA can move mountains if it really wants to. not cheaply, no.
    - Kon5ole 3y ago
      >people in power don't want nuclear, and so the industry is regulated into its current quagmire. No other industry faces moving goalposts like nuclear does. I think it's the other way around. We only have nuclear today because people in power wanted it for strategic reasons. Getting lots of energy now and paying for it later seemed like a good idea at the time, so the goalposts were artificially placed to make it look financially viable. "We'll figure out the waste thing later, let's go!" Politicians are tempted by the same thing today. Voters worry about electricity prices, so give them power today and let their grandchildren pay for it! France dictated the price of nuclear to a point that bankrupted the operator, even though the same operator basically neglected maintenance to a point where the plants have to be taken offline for - I kid you not - rust. The problem is that now we are the people having to pay, and nuclear has the unfortunate property that you have no choice but to pay, no matter how wrong the estimates have turned out to be you can't just abandon the project. Any other power plant can simply be abandoned if it turns out it was a bad idea, and the costs will stop.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  Doubtful. Nuclear is very specific tech. I don't think there's a whole bunch of companies out there sitting on their hands just waiting for a bunch of contracts to show up.
- blibble 3y ago
  > If the nation really wanted to build a large number of safe, effective nuclear power plant, we could, and probably in a time frame of months, not years. But entrenched interest from natural gas and coal producers combined with anti-nuclear sentiment practically guarantee that will never happen. meanwhile the Chinese have 22 power stations under construction and 70 planned
coldpie 3y ago
Interesting to hear an inside perspective! While they definitely aren't cheap, do you feel they're not worth the price, given the urgency and rapidly rising costs of climate change? It seems like they'd be competitive with, or even cheaper than, fossil fuel plants if we priced in their externalities, and nuclear can shore up the areas where renewables have difficult to solve gaps. Any thoughts?
- Retric 3y ago
  It’s hard to see projects that take ~14 years to produce the first kWh urgent solutions to anything. Spend the same money starting in the same year and the first solar project makes enough money to fund a second which then also comes online before your nuclear power plant is ready. Which doesn’t make nuclear useless, but it’s really disappointing if you’re in the industry.
  - coldpie 3y ago
    I feel like the root of the pro/against nuclear debate comes down to your outlook on storage :) I'm skeptical that storage can meet our needs (would love to be wrong! haven't seen a convincing analysis, yet), so I think we need a reliable form of continuous power. The only option currently on the table for that is nuclear, so, I boost nuclear. I dislike the nuclear nay-saying, because it further delays an already slow process. When (IMO) the optimistic plan for storage doesn't pan out, we're really going to regret not having started building those nukes ~14 years ago... so why not hedge our bets and get 'em started right now? In the grand scheme of climate change costs, they are absolutely dirt cheap.
    - Retric 3y ago
      What exactly do you find unconvincing? Just comparing grid storage needs vs EV’s suggests battery production capacity isn’t going to be an issue so it simplifies to cost across say 20+ years. There’s a lot of very simplistic analysis that makes things seem vastly worse but you don’t need crazy assumptions for things to look reasonable. Basically the more sources of energy you can add to the mix the cheaper things become as you only include them when you save money. Thus if you ignore Wind in an estimate adding wind can only lower costs, ditto for nuclear, geothermal, etc. Hydro is reliable and better than continuous power because it’s flexible enough you can fill in gaps based on what you forecast production will be across the next week. US only gets 6.2% of its power from hydro so the rest of the world actually looks better than these numbers. How much Solar to build is part of a complex optimization problem, simplify it 2c/kWh of capacity but 1/2 of all solar power is wasted over a year ~= 4c/kWh. Further, let’s assume 1/2 of all solar is used directly with the rest available to charge daily batteries again pessimistic with that kind of oversupply and HVDC lines etc but whatever. 50% - 5% (hydro) = 45% of total demand from batteries. (Wind drops this by a lot.) Projecting LCOE for batteries and Battery degradation is closely correlated with use so 120$/MWh is again high long term. Now our worst case is something like 4c/kWh (solar/hydro) + 12c/kWh (batteries) * 45% = 9.4c/kWh for 24/7/365 power with zero fossil fuels and zero nuclear. On the surface that might seem terrible or awesome depending on what your local rates look like, but this was a very pessimistic estimate. Our pro nuclear investor needs to be pessimistic in the other direction. Remember demand is shifted to cheaper nighttime rates, if daytime electricity is cheaper then nighttime use drops further. Baseline numbers of say 4c/kWh production + 80$/MWh batteries * 30% = 6.4c/kWh 24/7/365. If you’re considering building nuclear and projecting 60+ years out those kind of numbers represent a real threat without any dramatic breakthroughs. PS: You can plug your own assumptions in here, but remember people are trying to minimize costs and we already have existing infrastructure that isn’t being replaced that quickly. I doubt we’ll average under 20% natural gas within 20 years due to flexibility, which dramatically reduces the need for batteries and excess solar. That sounds bad, but mix in significant EV adoption and it still becomes a vast reduction in CO2 emissions, while even lower costs discourage Nuclear.
Kon5ole 3y ago
>>Nuclear power is the safest form of power production we've ever produced. This is a common claim but it abuses statistics. By looking only at the one metric (deaths) it ignores the enormous enterprise required to keep nuclear as safe as it has been. No other power source needs anything like it.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  It also ignores the statistical value of lives. From a policy point of view, a life saved is worth about $9 M in the US. The putative lives saved by nuclear (vs. renewables) cost much more than this. If one accepts that this was worthwhile, it also implies the NRC is not regulating nuclear sufficiently, since additional improvements (like filter containment venting systems) would pay off in expected lives saved.

mywittyname 3y ago

The sad part is, this is a solvable problem. If the nation really wanted to build a large number of safe, effective nuclear power plant, we could, and probably in a time frame of months, not years. But entrenched interest from natural gas and coal producers combined with anti-nuclear sentiment practically guarantee that will never happen. Nuclear power is held to too high of a standard to really be a viable source of power, especially in a democracy.

breckenedge 3y ago
> Nuclear power is held to too high of a standard to really be a viable source of power, especially in a democracy Don’t tell that to France.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  France can't do it these days either. Look at the fiasco of the EPR; it drove their nuclear corporation to insolvency.
lamontcg 3y ago
None of that is the root problem. Nuclear plants are too big, and we can't build big things cheaply in this country. The idle corruption of middle managers is what kills these kinds of projects.
- mywittyname 3y ago
  It's not corruption; people in power don't want nuclear, and so the industry is regulated into its current quagmire. No other industry faces moving goalposts like nuclear does. The USA can move mountains if it really wants to. But as it stands, the country is doing everything it can to keep that mountain right where it is.
  - lamontcg 3y ago
    > The USA can move mountains if it really wants to. not cheaply, no.
  - Kon5ole 3y ago
    >people in power don't want nuclear, and so the industry is regulated into its current quagmire. No other industry faces moving goalposts like nuclear does. I think it's the other way around. We only have nuclear today because people in power wanted it for strategic reasons. Getting lots of energy now and paying for it later seemed like a good idea at the time, so the goalposts were artificially placed to make it look financially viable. "We'll figure out the waste thing later, let's go!" Politicians are tempted by the same thing today. Voters worry about electricity prices, so give them power today and let their grandchildren pay for it! France dictated the price of nuclear to a point that bankrupted the operator, even though the same operator basically neglected maintenance to a point where the plants have to be taken offline for - I kid you not - rust. The problem is that now we are the people having to pay, and nuclear has the unfortunate property that you have no choice but to pay, no matter how wrong the estimates have turned out to be you can't just abandon the project. Any other power plant can simply be abandoned if it turns out it was a bad idea, and the costs will stop.
dale_glass 3y ago
Doubtful. Nuclear is very specific tech. I don't think there's a whole bunch of companies out there sitting on their hands just waiting for a bunch of contracts to show up.
blibble 3y ago
> If the nation really wanted to build a large number of safe, effective nuclear power plant, we could, and probably in a time frame of months, not years. But entrenched interest from natural gas and coal producers combined with anti-nuclear sentiment practically guarantee that will never happen. meanwhile the Chinese have 22 power stations under construction and 70 planned

coldpie 3y ago

Interesting to hear an inside perspective! While they definitely aren't cheap, do you feel they're not worth the price, given the urgency and rapidly rising costs of climate change? It seems like they'd be competitive with, or even cheaper than, fossil fuel plants if we priced in their externalities, and nuclear can shore up the areas where renewables have difficult to solve gaps. Any thoughts?

Retric 3y ago
It’s hard to see projects that take ~14 years to produce the first kWh urgent solutions to anything. Spend the same money starting in the same year and the first solar project makes enough money to fund a second which then also comes online before your nuclear power plant is ready. Which doesn’t make nuclear useless, but it’s really disappointing if you’re in the industry.
- coldpie 3y ago
  I feel like the root of the pro/against nuclear debate comes down to your outlook on storage :) I'm skeptical that storage can meet our needs (would love to be wrong! haven't seen a convincing analysis, yet), so I think we need a reliable form of continuous power. The only option currently on the table for that is nuclear, so, I boost nuclear. I dislike the nuclear nay-saying, because it further delays an already slow process. When (IMO) the optimistic plan for storage doesn't pan out, we're really going to regret not having started building those nukes ~14 years ago... so why not hedge our bets and get 'em started right now? In the grand scheme of climate change costs, they are absolutely dirt cheap.
  - Retric 3y ago
    What exactly do you find unconvincing? Just comparing grid storage needs vs EV’s suggests battery production capacity isn’t going to be an issue so it simplifies to cost across say 20+ years. There’s a lot of very simplistic analysis that makes things seem vastly worse but you don’t need crazy assumptions for things to look reasonable. Basically the more sources of energy you can add to the mix the cheaper things become as you only include them when you save money. Thus if you ignore Wind in an estimate adding wind can only lower costs, ditto for nuclear, geothermal, etc. Hydro is reliable and better than continuous power because it’s flexible enough you can fill in gaps based on what you forecast production will be across the next week. US only gets 6.2% of its power from hydro so the rest of the world actually looks better than these numbers. How much Solar to build is part of a complex optimization problem, simplify it 2c/kWh of capacity but 1/2 of all solar power is wasted over a year ~= 4c/kWh. Further, let’s assume 1/2 of all solar is used directly with the rest available to charge daily batteries again pessimistic with that kind of oversupply and HVDC lines etc but whatever. 50% - 5% (hydro) = 45% of total demand from batteries. (Wind drops this by a lot.) Projecting LCOE for batteries and Battery degradation is closely correlated with use so 120$/MWh is again high long term. Now our worst case is something like 4c/kWh (solar/hydro) + 12c/kWh (batteries) * 45% = 9.4c/kWh for 24/7/365 power with zero fossil fuels and zero nuclear. On the surface that might seem terrible or awesome depending on what your local rates look like, but this was a very pessimistic estimate. Our pro nuclear investor needs to be pessimistic in the other direction. Remember demand is shifted to cheaper nighttime rates, if daytime electricity is cheaper then nighttime use drops further. Baseline numbers of say 4c/kWh production + 80$/MWh batteries * 30% = 6.4c/kWh 24/7/365. If you’re considering building nuclear and projecting 60+ years out those kind of numbers represent a real threat without any dramatic breakthroughs. PS: You can plug your own assumptions in here, but remember people are trying to minimize costs and we already have existing infrastructure that isn’t being replaced that quickly. I doubt we’ll average under 20% natural gas within 20 years due to flexibility, which dramatically reduces the need for batteries and excess solar. That sounds bad, but mix in significant EV adoption and it still becomes a vast reduction in CO2 emissions, while even lower costs discourage Nuclear.

Kon5ole 3y ago

>>Nuclear power is the safest form of power production we've ever produced. This is a common claim but it abuses statistics. By looking only at the one metric (deaths) it ignores the enormous enterprise required to keep nuclear as safe as it has been. No other power source needs anything like it.

pfdietz 3y ago
It also ignores the statistical value of lives. From a policy point of view, a life saved is worth about $9 M in the US. The putative lives saved by nuclear (vs. renewables) cost much more than this. If one accepts that this was worthwhile, it also implies the NRC is not regulating nuclear sufficiently, since additional improvements (like filter containment venting systems) would pay off in expected lives saved.