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Growing share of Americans favor more nuclear power

251 points by freedude 3y ago

tpmx 3y ago
In favor of more nuclear power plants in 2023 (2020 numbers in parentheses): Average US adults: 57% (43%) Republican/Republican-leaning: 67% (53%) Democrats/Democratic-leaning: 50% (37%)
- paulddraper 3y ago
  Those are huge gains for only three years
  - tpmx 3y ago
    Yeah. Quite dramatic. Thanks, Vladimir Putin, for your continued efforts to make the world use less (Russian) fossil fuels.
- chrisco255 3y ago
  Great news, let's finally agree on something and ship it.
  - asynchronous 3y ago
    Don’t worry, we won’t for whatever reason.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  It's a short time difference, but I wonder how much of it can be attributed to a shift in the generation being interviewed, since I'd imagine that younger people are more in favor of nuclear power than older people who might still have qualms associated with disasters they might've seen reporting on (regardless of how rational those concerns might be).
pseudosavant 3y ago
I don't know about others, but I have had a lot of stuff about nuclear power make its way into my YouTube feed in the last few years. Once I learned more about it, it is clear that it is by far the cleanest energy we currently know how to capture. Everything has a footprint: solar power has panels and other components that last 10-30 years, hydroelectric is often terrible for local biodiversity, windmills have huge blades that wear out, etc. Nuclear creates far less waste and spent nuclear fuel can be recycled even. I wish the US had gone all in on nuclear like France.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  It'll cost several trillion dollars more to switch the US to nuclear electricity than it would to switch to renewable electricity. Those trillions of dollars could clean up a lot of waste if that is your primary concern.
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    Will we be able to replace current loads with renewable power? All I know is that France has effectively been GHG neutral for decades because they invested in this. I know renewables have gotten way cheaper, but if GHG neutral is so achievable with them why haven't we just done it?
    - bryanlarsen 3y ago
      We are doing it. We're doing it at a rate of about 5% per year, and that rate is increasing every year. Given how big our grid is, 5% per year is pretty massive.
      - coding123 3y ago
        Nuclear is at 20% of total US grid power. So 4 years ago it was 0%? This graph is showing nuclear as being pretty flat GW production last 10 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...
mhb 3y ago
US trade policy is also doing its part to make alternatives to wind more attractive: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/08/19/business/waters-off-massachusetts-hunt-foreign-ships-building-wind-farms/ https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/08/19/business/waters-off-m...
tpmx 3y ago
Observation: It seems like americans don't really care that much about electricity/energy production. If this post had been been up 12 hours earlier there would have been hundreds of comments by now. /A yuropean staying up late.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  I was recently using HN on vacation in Asia and noticed how many more articles about energy there were. This is a real effect I think.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  North America has been pretty insulated from a lot of the global energy instability occuring in the aftermath of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine along with the coups in the Sahel. Canada, US, and Mexico have enough resources and capital to be largely self sufficient, or fill any holes with imports from other American nations like Brazil or Venezuela. Most of the Middle East's energy exports are sold to India, China, Japan, and South Korea and most of Europe's are sourced from a mix of North Africa, Eastern+Southern Europe, and the Middle East. This means Eurasia is heavily impacted by instability in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
XorNot 3y ago
The thing we really need is to just keep building plants. The problem nuclear power has faced is that since no industry which commonly exercises itself exists, the engineering experience and knowledge about how to run power plant construction projects hasn't matured - hence the cost overruns and delays. Like the thing to do after the expense of the Vogtle project is to take the learned lessons there, and start working work on the next reactor (there were some really stupid things on that project too - i.e. commencing construction without finishing design work on the major components, which led to a lot of unnecessary rework).
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  There isn’t time for a “just keep working on the next reactor.” We have to decarbonize the entire economy in a ridiculously short time, and that means either (1) focusing on technologies that already have an exponential adoption/price curve, or (2) making decisive and massive investments in nuclear to get the technology onto such a curve. Anything else is going to be mostly irrelevant.
  - hedora 3y ago
    We need to do both, and also capture CO2 at an unprecedented scale. We’re going to need a ridiculous amount of electricity to fix the atmosphere.
adamredwoods 3y ago
The partisan split is interesting. >> The 17-point partisan difference on nuclear power is smaller than those for other energy sources, including fossil fuel sources such as offshore oil and gas drilling (48 points) and coal mining (47 points). I hope this means we can get the US government to continue to invest in nuclear. While it may not be the final step for human energy generation, it can be an effective stepping stone away from fossil fuels. My fear is the decreased reliance on coal and natural gas will cause unwanted political strife. Although solar and wind are not at the capacity as nuclear is, it makes sense to continue to head in that direction. Consider this list, and how much coal is still in use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_stations_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_stations...
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  Saddened to see my party behind the curve on this.
  - Aachen 3y ago
    Isn't identifying with "my party" part of what causes these sorts of splits down the middle? As opposed to considering everything an option to vote for if they announce plans that align with what one thinks is needed in the country/region it concerns
    - whimsicalism 3y ago
      As long as closed primaries exist, it doesn't seem objectionable to me. I am just describing the reality of the American system. I've never lived under any jurisdiction where any other party got more than like 15% of the vote so this is effectively the party that runs the elections I care about, the party that governs the place I live, the party I am registered as. I am describing a reality.
      - Aachen 3y ago
        "I'm just describing reality" is what I hear an awful lot in response to "wouldn't it be better if we..."s. My issue with them is that it's not mutually exclusive. Just because you've got one realistic option per election (namely: second-worst, such that first-worst doesn't get to win) doesn't mean that the same party is always going to be "yours". I think this line of thinking is part of the cause. It's compatible with "reality" to not think of either party as something one needs to be loyal to and, instead, look at your options. It's not a package deal
pete762 3y ago
Berkshire Hathaway Energy said they would, from a financial point of view, never build a nuclear plant and keep increasing renewables. And they're not known to be bad capital allocators.
- erentz 3y ago
  Buffet also said, "I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire's tax rate.” … “For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them. They don't make sense without the tax credit."
  - Aachen 3y ago
    From what I heard, they also make sense without subsidies (about the same as solar panels which everyone is throwing onto their roofs now, except an efficient unit doesn't cost millions to get started), but I suppose this guy's logic for "worth it" includes outperforming sticking his money into an index fund Also, what surprised me to learn is how much money goes into subsidies for fossil fuel companies. I really didn't think they needed that
  - SamBam 3y ago
    Oil also doesn't make sense without subsidies. If renewables are going to compete, they currently need subsidies. He's simply saying that they wouldn't cover their own costs without the credits. Not that the credits somehow pay for more than the price of the wind farm.
- celestialcheese 3y ago
  I'd expect that to be because of the current regulatory hurdles and associated costs. If policy shifts to make it easier (thus cheaper) to build, I'm sure berkshire would jump in.
  - missedthecue 3y ago
    There are a lot of countries that are building or have tried to build nuclear in the last ten years. In the US, the major nuclear projects are long running boondoggles, going way over. In France, nuclear is so expensive that the national electricity company had to be nationalized to avoid bankruptcy, and plants are being closed. Finland's Olkiluoto plant is 10 years over-schedule and has 300% cost overrruns. South Korea had major cost overruns and is set to close half their plants China isn't kind enough to share cost figures, but has reduced planned plants by a major percentage, indicating that the investment return is not very good. They do not have regulatory hurdles. Maybe the only country on earth capable of building competitive nuclear is Russia of all places. They steadily increase the number of plants under construction and do not see to go over-schedule, though we don't know what the budgets look like. While the US has a bad reputation for make infrastructure building ability, it seems to be global problem.
karaterobot 3y ago
Probably too late to make much of a difference for climate change. We're just clawing our way back to our senses after decades of backwards movement caused by mostly well-intentioned protesters. Unfortunately, global warming did not wait for us to catch up. Whoops!
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  Its too late to keep climate change below 1.5 degrees. It's not too late to keep it below 2 degrees.
  - hedora 3y ago
    With aggressive deployment atmospheric carbon capture, we might still be able to get it back down below 1.5 before the Atlantic currents collapse.
- chihuahua 3y ago
  "mostly well-intentioned protesters" The useful idiots of the coal/gas industry
Racing0461 3y ago
That's fine. I don't see why nuclear power should be viewed from a profit seeking lense. In the same way we pay 1T for Defense, 3T for medicare/medicaid/SS, i don't mind paying XT for Nuclear Power. conspirary hat on: I think big city governments/urbanists/feds don't want nuclear since it would enable a large swathe of the country to continue suburban/rural lifestyles (SFH and electric cars powered by nuclear). I bet they were hoping high gas prices/high electric prices would force them back into dense urban areas (kind of a reverse white flight) where they can be "goverened", taxed and have their surplus "redistributed". conspirary hat off.
- andbberger 3y ago
  this is the worst conspiracy theory i've ever heard have you been to an american city?? they're terrible. there are like five habitable cities in the US, only one really good one which is not capable of building transit infrastructure at sane costs (cuomo train hall, no through running at penn station, the world's most expensive bridge per mile, 2nd avenue subway). oh and there's no housing so it's incredibly expensive to live in one of those five cities
  - psunavy03 3y ago
    Good. Then keep your arrogant ass elsewhere; we don't want it anyway.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    Not really getting your priorities if you think the good one is one of the ones that is so hilariously expensive that even rent is obscene. Also, NYCs transit system (and NYC in general) is in a state of decay. They've added the shiny new station in Manhattan, but the decay is so blatant over in Queens, ancient metro stations with flickering or broken lights, the few renovated stations being blatantly cheap jobs, it's pretty depressing to compare to the money they burned on some of the stations in recent years in Manhattan.
- projektfu 3y ago
  Someone certainly will be paying for it. I've lived in two locations where the utilities invested in nuclear and ratepayers get to pay for the difference between the cost of the energy and what they can sell it for. In Pittsburgh, we at least received some of the overpriced power we subsidized. In Atlanta, the nuclear plant is selling power to a different market, but we pay for it nonetheless.
crote 3y ago
I am not surprised. Over the last few years, social media has been absolutely flooded with people claiming that nuclear is the "one weird trick THEY don't want you to know about" to solving climate change. It is supposed to solve every single problem, and probably even cure cancer in the process - often relying on theoretical or experimental concepts which have never been tried in practice. Meanwhile, the reactors currently / recently constructed are massively over budget and years behind schedule. Nobody is willing to invest in them unless the government is willing to guarantee a massive subsidy on the electricity produced. Additional reactors will at best come online in a decade or two. And during all this solar and wind are rapidly increasing their market share while being weaned off the initial subsidies. Literally everyone wants to build it and in many areas we are now seeing problems because too many people are building it, leading to overcapacity. Nuclear was a great idea in the 70s, but got a significant reputation hit due to high-profile nuclear incidents, cost overruns, and long construction delays. It was essentially killed by cheap coal becoming available with the rise of surface mining, just like coal is now being killed by cheap gas. In 2023 the economic reality is that nuclear simply isn't a viable option anymore, and it would be quite foolish to rely on it to solve climate change in any way.
- SamBam 3y ago
  While this is the standard answer that people who have looked into it deeper give, it still surprises me. The largest solar farm in the US is about 570 MW. Some have calculated that we're going to need to build two 400 MW farms every week for the next 30 years to reach a "middle-road renewable energy scenario." [1] That's insane. (Or we could be building one 400 MW solar farm and one 400 MW wind farm every week instead for 30 years. Point is, though, we're far from being able to do that.) So we're still going to be struggling in 20 years. Wouldn't we be in a better position then if we had also started the process of building new nuclear plants 20 years prior? "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is today," etc. 1. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4443474 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4443474
  - solraph 3y ago
    > (Or we could be building one 400 MW solar farm and one 400 MW wind farm every week instead for 30 years. Point is, though, we're far from being able to do that.) That's actually lower than what the USA is doing right now. "The US solar industry installed 6.1 gigawatts-direct current (GWdc) of capacity in the first quarter of 2023"[0] That is approx 469 MW of power being installed every week. [0]https://www.seia.org/us-solar-market-insight https://www.seia.org/us-solar-market-insight (first link I could find)
robviren 3y ago
Worked in nuclear power for five years and wish people could divorce themselves of bias when considering power. When you plug things in it has a cost greater than the dollars you are paying. In raw deaths per megawatt nuclear wins above all else. I'm not saying we should avoid solar and wind. I'm saying we should dive headlong into every form of power that seems a reasonable risk to human life and the environment before 1000+ human death wildfires, starvation, and every other natural disaster becomes common place. Belching coal exhaust or gas turbine exhaust into the air seems a careless act when I have personally sat inside, on top of, under, and to the side of nuclear reactors and have yet to fall over dead. Spent fuel can be handled and most import you don't need to breath it and it doesn't warm the planet. Everything has a cost and I would gladly bare the cost of nuclear for a world worth living in.
- midoridensha 3y ago
  >In raw deaths per megawatt nuclear wins above all else. Just a quibble here: your post is obviously pro-nuclear-power, however this sentence seems to claim that nuclear power causes more deaths than any other power source, which is not what I think you meant.
  - mcronce 3y ago
    I think that depends on your perspective - specifically, whether you think more deaths or fewer deaths is winning:)
    - robviren 3y ago
      Death, the heavy metal solution to climate change.
  - arcticbull 3y ago
    I believe the OP is saying that it "wins" by having the fewest deaths per TWh, and it does - it's the same as solar and wind. [1] By far the worst is coal which [1] has conservatively at 25 deaths per TWh vs nuclear at 0.04. The worst nuclear incident of all time killed 4000 people, and Fukushima killed exactly 1 person. The third-worst, Three Mile Island killed 0. This isn't even low sample size. Nuclear has generated 20% of the entire US power demand for decades. Even if you attribute all the deaths from the bungled evacuation of Fukushima to nuclear power (2300), 10X more people would have died in the normal course of operating a coal power plant at the site over the course of the reactor's life (1485TWh from 1979 to 2011 @ 25 deaths/TWh = 37,000). [1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
psunavy03 3y ago
If you don't take nuclear power seriously, you don't take climate change seriously. Period, dot, full stop. We should have gone all-in on nuclear in the 1970s and 1980s but for a few screeching NIMBY so-called "environmentalists." Yes, if you screw up badly enough, you can have a disaster. If I drove drunk and ran my Jeep down a crowded city sidewalk, you would also have a disaster, but I would never be that negligent, callous, and stupid. The US Navy has run reactors for 65 years with a flawless safety record . . . it can be done.
- XorNot 3y ago
  Upvoting this because this is where I end up. Nobody proposing solar, wind and storage ever wants to back it up with hard numbers. They back it up with soft numbers - lies of omission. "Look how expensive nuclear is compared to solar!" they say, ignoring capacity factors, reliability or storage. "Look how many gigawatts of batteries were installed last year" while ignoring that the energy-storage of those batteries is maybe 3 hours and the total power of batteries scales alongside energy. "We'll just overbuild" they say, ignoring that the 4x the solar is now within a stone's throw of being the same capex as equivalent nuclear, but still needs storage. Everyone has some just-so narrative which omits numbers. Because you can make green hydrogen they assume it must be cost-effective to do so. Because someone said "solar is cheap" they assume it must be too cheap to meter. As though you can wave away multiple 50% energy loss steps as insignificant. I'm open to being convinced I'm wrong, but show me the numbers which prove it. Show me that you're talking about a today technology, not "by 2028 it's expected costs will reduce..." while saying nuclear will "take too long to build". Don't tell me power-to-methane exists, show me the numbers saying it works and include the costs of storing it (stored methane is superb on energy density for the grid, but about 30% efficient panels-to-power plant and has a cost per kWh in storage...and has a suspicious paucity of information surrounding operating costs of plants versus "future projections").
  - Qwertious 3y ago
    Focusing on batteries is thinking too long-term IMO. If you have 50% renewables or less in the grid, you basically don't need batteries yet, and our deadline isn't time here but greenhouse gases emitted - getting to 50% renewables will give us more time to tackle the rest of our emissions. I expect nuclear to easily beat solar/wind+batteries for the last 10% of the grid, but frankly the last 10% of the grid almost doesn't matter - if we've reduce our emissions by 90%, then we have 10x the time to tackle the rest. Of course, I've been wildly conflating electricity with all emissions, but I think the low-hanging fruit argument still applies.
rgmerk 3y ago
Rooftop solar power is roughly as popular as puppies and kittens. But the USA has very little of it because it’s expensive in the US (due mostly to regulation and utilities being obstructionist). By contrast, rooftop solar is very cheap in Australia, so it’s everywhere. Nuclear is safe and clean, but until it’s cheaper nobody is going to go near building any more of it, and the nuclear industry has been incapable so far of making it cheaper.
- asynchronous 3y ago
  Is it cheaper in Australia because it’s publicly subsidized? From what I understand in the states the only reason it’s even remotely affordable is because it’s already subsidized.
  - epistasis 3y ago
    No, not at all. The reason it's expensive in the US is all regulatory, and because of the ever changing patchwork of utility rules that make it economical or not to attach your own generation to the grid. Last I heard, roughly 30% of the cost of solar in the US is spent merely on customer acquisition. Because the only forms that survive are those that swoop in when there's a window of economic plausibility for solar to work for homeowners, before the utility in a particular small area changes their mind and buys off the regulators to make it cost infeasible for homeowners to generate. There's a huge advantage to the grid of having generation be more local: more than half of energy costs are transmission and distribution, and these are costs that utilities can reliable charge a profit for, so they try to make these costs as high as possible. When customers install their own solar, this reduces the peak daytime need for T&D, and the grid is sized for peak usage. So everyone would be better off with far more local solar, except for the utility.
    - dalyons 3y ago
      But Australia has private grids too, so everything you say about utilities would also be true there. No?
Jedd 3y ago
If someone rang me and asked a question like 'am I in favour of throwing vast sums of money towards research and build of nuclear power plants?', it'd be a resounding yes with a strict qualification of 'fusion, not fission'. (Neither word appears in TFA.) I realise the distinction probably isn't well understood in the general population, but I'm confident a huge part of that is due to every news story conflating the two.
- Qwertious 3y ago
  Fusion is a waste of money, it's hype is based on lies/mistruths and it's not going to work in time to address climate change. In particular, they constantly conflate different definitions of energy. There's energy in/energy out, there's laser energy in/energy out (lasers currently being 0.5% efficient, so it's a lie of 2 orders of magnitude), there's energy in/out per pellet versus including warmup time, etc. Even if fusion is possible within two decades, it might be prohibitively expensive to build for another decade or two, and we'd need to build a first commercial reactor before we can properly scale it, so I don't see fusion being possible before 2050. So I'd rather that money be sent straight to fission plants, since we know they'll actually work on time.
  - Jedd 3y ago
    I agree with the thrust of your arguments around fusion, though I would disagree on some of the conspiracy theory implications. Your pessimism may turn out to be well placed, but with the piddling amount of investment thrown into the subject, it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that comes back to my point - I'd be very happy to have a lot more budget thrown at the problem, because a) it seems extremely unlikely at this point that the technology is outright infeasible, and b) the payoff will be monumental. Your claim: > So I'd rather that money be sent straight to fission plants, since we know they'll actually work on time. is contra-indicated by reality, unfortunately. (If you're going to drop phrases like 'if it's even possible', and 'might be expensive', and so on for your fusion predictions, I'll point at the actual failures of fission nuclear power plant deployments over the past few decades.)
TheCaptain4815 3y ago
Can someone explain why France has insane nuclear capacity (75%+ of their energy), yet their energy isn’t too cheap to meter?
- akvadrako 3y ago
  Until recently they had some of the cheapest electricity in western Europe. But they haven't been building new plants for a while and it's gotten more expensive.
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  It's actually 70%. And recently a bit less because a lot of their ancient reactors were down for extensive maintenance in the middle of an energy crisis. The reason their energy is not cheap is because nuclear is actually really expensive; also for the French. Instead of charging via electricity bills, the French just rolled that into their taxes. The energy bills don't quite cover the cost. The EDF, which runs their nuclear plants and is state owned, has a lot of debt, and has had some record losses recently. But it's OK; they are too big to fail and the French government will bail them out as needed as they have done for decades. At great cost to tax payers of course. But it keeps the electricity bills low. The French have a nuclear industry for the same reason the US and the British and other nuclear powers do: it serves their military goals to have a functioning nuclear industry so they can maintain their status as a nuclear power. That means a lot of state funding has historically been available to keep these industries going. Without public funding, it's not really that attractive financially to be involved with nuclear.
- evilos 3y ago
  The French government has been trying to kill their fleet for over a decade now. They've only recently come around.
ponorin 3y ago
I live in the spitting distance from the world's largest nuclear plant complex in the world. I do not live in a daily fear. In fact it's very easy to forget. The current government is very bullish on nuclear. The government however is also betting on oil and gas and have recently annoucned, with funding from saudi arabia, the nation's largest oil refinary project. They are also redirecting funds from renewable energy like solar and wind to nuclear, citing fraud and immaturity of the technology. The plant operator has been under constant scrutiny from the locals for construction faults, waste fuel management, etc. What people seem to forget here is that nuclear isn't a panacea. Just because a country builds nuclear doesn't mean it's succeeding at reducing carbon emmission. The world's 2nd largest, and also the fastest growing, nuclear energy producer by power is china, which still depends largely on coal for its electricity. Also consider nations too volatile to have nuclear power. If you argue that net zero is "impossible" without nuclear, you're basically arguing those countries don't deserve its existence.
botanical 3y ago
Nuclear costs too much, but if small modular reactors can be built quickly and cheaply like what South Africa was trying with the Pebble bed modular reactor¹, (now those people are at X-energy² and Stratek Global), then it would be beneficial in the long run to have consistent output without the need for batteries and energy storage. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_modular_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_modular_reactor [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-energy
- kevincox 3y ago
  I think smaller reactors are a great idea. It allows us to iterate and learn. Also making many similar reactors will help drive down the costs more quickly due to economies of scale. I think the biggest mistake was stopping building. If we can slowly build small reactors constantly it will ensure that the knowledge stays fresh. Ontario has recently started doing this and I think it is a great restart to the nuclear program (https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1003248/ontario-building-more-small-modular-reactors-to-power-provinces-growth https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1003248/ontario-building-...). It may be a bit too late as it isn't expected to be done before the plants that currently provide 1/3 to 1/2 of our power (https://www.ieso.ca/power-data https://www.ieso.ca/power-data) hit end-of-life. But at least it is some progress to something that isn't just replacing them with natural gas.
Alifatisk 3y ago
I don’t get it, is there any good reason people are against Nuclear power?
JohnFen 3y ago
I've done a complete 180 on nuclear power. I used to oppose it because of the problem of the waste. However, the climate crisis overrides everything. If we're going to have even a chance of man being able to live relatively decently in the future, then we need to make some radical changes, and nuclear is an obvious source of energy that contributes far less to climate change. So I've come to think that whatever the potential environmental hazards of nuclear waster, they are miniscule compared to the environmental disaster that we're currently in. Every tool we have to help mitigate that is essential.

251 points by freedude 3y ago

tpmx 3y ago

In favor of more nuclear power plants in 2023 (2020 numbers in parentheses): Average US adults: 57% (43%) Republican/Republican-leaning: 67% (53%) Democrats/Democratic-leaning: 50% (37%)

paulddraper 3y ago
Those are huge gains for only three years
- tpmx 3y ago
  Yeah. Quite dramatic. Thanks, Vladimir Putin, for your continued efforts to make the world use less (Russian) fossil fuels.
chrisco255 3y ago
Great news, let's finally agree on something and ship it.
- asynchronous 3y ago
  Don’t worry, we won’t for whatever reason.
dotnet00 3y ago
It's a short time difference, but I wonder how much of it can be attributed to a shift in the generation being interviewed, since I'd imagine that younger people are more in favor of nuclear power than older people who might still have qualms associated with disasters they might've seen reporting on (regardless of how rational those concerns might be).

pseudosavant 3y ago

I don't know about others, but I have had a lot of stuff about nuclear power make its way into my YouTube feed in the last few years. Once I learned more about it, it is clear that it is by far the cleanest energy we currently know how to capture. Everything has a footprint: solar power has panels and other components that last 10-30 years, hydroelectric is often terrible for local biodiversity, windmills have huge blades that wear out, etc. Nuclear creates far less waste and spent nuclear fuel can be recycled even. I wish the US had gone all in on nuclear like France.

bryanlarsen 3y ago
It'll cost several trillion dollars more to switch the US to nuclear electricity than it would to switch to renewable electricity. Those trillions of dollars could clean up a lot of waste if that is your primary concern.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  Will we be able to replace current loads with renewable power? All I know is that France has effectively been GHG neutral for decades because they invested in this. I know renewables have gotten way cheaper, but if GHG neutral is so achievable with them why haven't we just done it?
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    We are doing it. We're doing it at a rate of about 5% per year, and that rate is increasing every year. Given how big our grid is, 5% per year is pretty massive.
    - coding123 3y ago
      Nuclear is at 20% of total US grid power. So 4 years ago it was 0%? This graph is showing nuclear as being pretty flat GW production last 10 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...

mhb 3y ago

US trade policy is also doing its part to make alternatives to wind more attractive: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/08/19/business/waters-off-massachusetts-hunt-foreign-ships-building-wind-farms/ https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/08/19/business/waters-off-m...

tpmx 3y ago

Observation: It seems like americans don't really care that much about electricity/energy production. If this post had been been up 12 hours earlier there would have been hundreds of comments by now. /A yuropean staying up late.

whimsicalism 3y ago
I was recently using HN on vacation in Asia and noticed how many more articles about energy there were. This is a real effect I think.
alephnerd 3y ago
North America has been pretty insulated from a lot of the global energy instability occuring in the aftermath of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine along with the coups in the Sahel. Canada, US, and Mexico have enough resources and capital to be largely self sufficient, or fill any holes with imports from other American nations like Brazil or Venezuela. Most of the Middle East's energy exports are sold to India, China, Japan, and South Korea and most of Europe's are sourced from a mix of North Africa, Eastern+Southern Europe, and the Middle East. This means Eurasia is heavily impacted by instability in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

XorNot 3y ago

The thing we really need is to just keep building plants. The problem nuclear power has faced is that since no industry which commonly exercises itself exists, the engineering experience and knowledge about how to run power plant construction projects hasn't matured - hence the cost overruns and delays. Like the thing to do after the expense of the Vogtle project is to take the learned lessons there, and start working work on the next reactor (there were some really stupid things on that project too - i.e. commencing construction without finishing design work on the major components, which led to a lot of unnecessary rework).

matthewdgreen 3y ago
There isn’t time for a “just keep working on the next reactor.” We have to decarbonize the entire economy in a ridiculously short time, and that means either (1) focusing on technologies that already have an exponential adoption/price curve, or (2) making decisive and massive investments in nuclear to get the technology onto such a curve. Anything else is going to be mostly irrelevant.
- hedora 3y ago
  We need to do both, and also capture CO2 at an unprecedented scale. We’re going to need a ridiculous amount of electricity to fix the atmosphere.

adamredwoods 3y ago

The partisan split is interesting. >> The 17-point partisan difference on nuclear power is smaller than those for other energy sources, including fossil fuel sources such as offshore oil and gas drilling (48 points) and coal mining (47 points). I hope this means we can get the US government to continue to invest in nuclear. While it may not be the final step for human energy generation, it can be an effective stepping stone away from fossil fuels. My fear is the decreased reliance on coal and natural gas will cause unwanted political strife. Although solar and wind are not at the capacity as nuclear is, it makes sense to continue to head in that direction. Consider this list, and how much coal is still in use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_stations_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_stations...

whimsicalism 3y ago
Saddened to see my party behind the curve on this.
- Aachen 3y ago
  Isn't identifying with "my party" part of what causes these sorts of splits down the middle? As opposed to considering everything an option to vote for if they announce plans that align with what one thinks is needed in the country/region it concerns
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    As long as closed primaries exist, it doesn't seem objectionable to me. I am just describing the reality of the American system. I've never lived under any jurisdiction where any other party got more than like 15% of the vote so this is effectively the party that runs the elections I care about, the party that governs the place I live, the party I am registered as. I am describing a reality.
    - Aachen 3y ago
      "I'm just describing reality" is what I hear an awful lot in response to "wouldn't it be better if we..."s. My issue with them is that it's not mutually exclusive. Just because you've got one realistic option per election (namely: second-worst, such that first-worst doesn't get to win) doesn't mean that the same party is always going to be "yours". I think this line of thinking is part of the cause. It's compatible with "reality" to not think of either party as something one needs to be loyal to and, instead, look at your options. It's not a package deal

pete762 3y ago

Berkshire Hathaway Energy said they would, from a financial point of view, never build a nuclear plant and keep increasing renewables. And they're not known to be bad capital allocators.

erentz 3y ago
Buffet also said, "I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire's tax rate.” … “For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them. They don't make sense without the tax credit."
- Aachen 3y ago
  From what I heard, they also make sense without subsidies (about the same as solar panels which everyone is throwing onto their roofs now, except an efficient unit doesn't cost millions to get started), but I suppose this guy's logic for "worth it" includes outperforming sticking his money into an index fund Also, what surprised me to learn is how much money goes into subsidies for fossil fuel companies. I really didn't think they needed that
- SamBam 3y ago
  Oil also doesn't make sense without subsidies. If renewables are going to compete, they currently need subsidies. He's simply saying that they wouldn't cover their own costs without the credits. Not that the credits somehow pay for more than the price of the wind farm.
celestialcheese 3y ago
I'd expect that to be because of the current regulatory hurdles and associated costs. If policy shifts to make it easier (thus cheaper) to build, I'm sure berkshire would jump in.
- missedthecue 3y ago
  There are a lot of countries that are building or have tried to build nuclear in the last ten years. In the US, the major nuclear projects are long running boondoggles, going way over. In France, nuclear is so expensive that the national electricity company had to be nationalized to avoid bankruptcy, and plants are being closed. Finland's Olkiluoto plant is 10 years over-schedule and has 300% cost overrruns. South Korea had major cost overruns and is set to close half their plants China isn't kind enough to share cost figures, but has reduced planned plants by a major percentage, indicating that the investment return is not very good. They do not have regulatory hurdles. Maybe the only country on earth capable of building competitive nuclear is Russia of all places. They steadily increase the number of plants under construction and do not see to go over-schedule, though we don't know what the budgets look like. While the US has a bad reputation for make infrastructure building ability, it seems to be global problem.

karaterobot 3y ago

Probably too late to make much of a difference for climate change. We're just clawing our way back to our senses after decades of backwards movement caused by mostly well-intentioned protesters. Unfortunately, global warming did not wait for us to catch up. Whoops!

bryanlarsen 3y ago
Its too late to keep climate change below 1.5 degrees. It's not too late to keep it below 2 degrees.
- hedora 3y ago
  With aggressive deployment atmospheric carbon capture, we might still be able to get it back down below 1.5 before the Atlantic currents collapse.
chihuahua 3y ago
"mostly well-intentioned protesters" The useful idiots of the coal/gas industry

Racing0461 3y ago

That's fine. I don't see why nuclear power should be viewed from a profit seeking lense. In the same way we pay 1T for Defense, 3T for medicare/medicaid/SS, i don't mind paying XT for Nuclear Power. conspirary hat on: I think big city governments/urbanists/feds don't want nuclear since it would enable a large swathe of the country to continue suburban/rural lifestyles (SFH and electric cars powered by nuclear). I bet they were hoping high gas prices/high electric prices would force them back into dense urban areas (kind of a reverse white flight) where they can be "goverened", taxed and have their surplus "redistributed". conspirary hat off.

andbberger 3y ago
this is the worst conspiracy theory i've ever heard have you been to an american city?? they're terrible. there are like five habitable cities in the US, only one really good one which is not capable of building transit infrastructure at sane costs (cuomo train hall, no through running at penn station, the world's most expensive bridge per mile, 2nd avenue subway). oh and there's no housing so it's incredibly expensive to live in one of those five cities
- psunavy03 3y ago
  Good. Then keep your arrogant ass elsewhere; we don't want it anyway.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  Not really getting your priorities if you think the good one is one of the ones that is so hilariously expensive that even rent is obscene. Also, NYCs transit system (and NYC in general) is in a state of decay. They've added the shiny new station in Manhattan, but the decay is so blatant over in Queens, ancient metro stations with flickering or broken lights, the few renovated stations being blatantly cheap jobs, it's pretty depressing to compare to the money they burned on some of the stations in recent years in Manhattan.
projektfu 3y ago
Someone certainly will be paying for it. I've lived in two locations where the utilities invested in nuclear and ratepayers get to pay for the difference between the cost of the energy and what they can sell it for. In Pittsburgh, we at least received some of the overpriced power we subsidized. In Atlanta, the nuclear plant is selling power to a different market, but we pay for it nonetheless.

crote 3y ago

I am not surprised. Over the last few years, social media has been absolutely flooded with people claiming that nuclear is the "one weird trick THEY don't want you to know about" to solving climate change. It is supposed to solve every single problem, and probably even cure cancer in the process - often relying on theoretical or experimental concepts which have never been tried in practice. Meanwhile, the reactors currently / recently constructed are massively over budget and years behind schedule. Nobody is willing to invest in them unless the government is willing to guarantee a massive subsidy on the electricity produced. Additional reactors will at best come online in a decade or two. And during all this solar and wind are rapidly increasing their market share while being weaned off the initial subsidies. Literally everyone wants to build it and in many areas we are now seeing problems because too many people are building it, leading to overcapacity. Nuclear was a great idea in the 70s, but got a significant reputation hit due to high-profile nuclear incidents, cost overruns, and long construction delays. It was essentially killed by cheap coal becoming available with the rise of surface mining, just like coal is now being killed by cheap gas. In 2023 the economic reality is that nuclear simply isn't a viable option anymore, and it would be quite foolish to rely on it to solve climate change in any way.

SamBam 3y ago
While this is the standard answer that people who have looked into it deeper give, it still surprises me. The largest solar farm in the US is about 570 MW. Some have calculated that we're going to need to build two 400 MW farms every week for the next 30 years to reach a "middle-road renewable energy scenario." [1] That's insane. (Or we could be building one 400 MW solar farm and one 400 MW wind farm every week instead for 30 years. Point is, though, we're far from being able to do that.) So we're still going to be struggling in 20 years. Wouldn't we be in a better position then if we had also started the process of building new nuclear plants 20 years prior? "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is today," etc. 1. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4443474 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4443474
- solraph 3y ago
  > (Or we could be building one 400 MW solar farm and one 400 MW wind farm every week instead for 30 years. Point is, though, we're far from being able to do that.) That's actually lower than what the USA is doing right now. "The US solar industry installed 6.1 gigawatts-direct current (GWdc) of capacity in the first quarter of 2023"[0] That is approx 469 MW of power being installed every week. [0]https://www.seia.org/us-solar-market-insight https://www.seia.org/us-solar-market-insight (first link I could find)

robviren 3y ago

Worked in nuclear power for five years and wish people could divorce themselves of bias when considering power. When you plug things in it has a cost greater than the dollars you are paying. In raw deaths per megawatt nuclear wins above all else. I'm not saying we should avoid solar and wind. I'm saying we should dive headlong into every form of power that seems a reasonable risk to human life and the environment before 1000+ human death wildfires, starvation, and every other natural disaster becomes common place. Belching coal exhaust or gas turbine exhaust into the air seems a careless act when I have personally sat inside, on top of, under, and to the side of nuclear reactors and have yet to fall over dead. Spent fuel can be handled and most import you don't need to breath it and it doesn't warm the planet. Everything has a cost and I would gladly bare the cost of nuclear for a world worth living in.

midoridensha 3y ago
>In raw deaths per megawatt nuclear wins above all else. Just a quibble here: your post is obviously pro-nuclear-power, however this sentence seems to claim that nuclear power causes more deaths than any other power source, which is not what I think you meant.
- mcronce 3y ago
  I think that depends on your perspective - specifically, whether you think more deaths or fewer deaths is winning:)
  - robviren 3y ago
    Death, the heavy metal solution to climate change.
- arcticbull 3y ago
  I believe the OP is saying that it "wins" by having the fewest deaths per TWh, and it does - it's the same as solar and wind. [1] By far the worst is coal which [1] has conservatively at 25 deaths per TWh vs nuclear at 0.04. The worst nuclear incident of all time killed 4000 people, and Fukushima killed exactly 1 person. The third-worst, Three Mile Island killed 0. This isn't even low sample size. Nuclear has generated 20% of the entire US power demand for decades. Even if you attribute all the deaths from the bungled evacuation of Fukushima to nuclear power (2300), 10X more people would have died in the normal course of operating a coal power plant at the site over the course of the reactor's life (1485TWh from 1979 to 2011 @ 25 deaths/TWh = 37,000). [1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

psunavy03 3y ago

If you don't take nuclear power seriously, you don't take climate change seriously. Period, dot, full stop. We should have gone all-in on nuclear in the 1970s and 1980s but for a few screeching NIMBY so-called "environmentalists." Yes, if you screw up badly enough, you can have a disaster. If I drove drunk and ran my Jeep down a crowded city sidewalk, you would also have a disaster, but I would never be that negligent, callous, and stupid. The US Navy has run reactors for 65 years with a flawless safety record . . . it can be done.

XorNot 3y ago
Upvoting this because this is where I end up. Nobody proposing solar, wind and storage ever wants to back it up with hard numbers. They back it up with soft numbers - lies of omission. "Look how expensive nuclear is compared to solar!" they say, ignoring capacity factors, reliability or storage. "Look how many gigawatts of batteries were installed last year" while ignoring that the energy-storage of those batteries is maybe 3 hours and the total power of batteries scales alongside energy. "We'll just overbuild" they say, ignoring that the 4x the solar is now within a stone's throw of being the same capex as equivalent nuclear, but still needs storage. Everyone has some just-so narrative which omits numbers. Because you can make green hydrogen they assume it must be cost-effective to do so. Because someone said "solar is cheap" they assume it must be too cheap to meter. As though you can wave away multiple 50% energy loss steps as insignificant. I'm open to being convinced I'm wrong, but show me the numbers which prove it. Show me that you're talking about a today technology, not "by 2028 it's expected costs will reduce..." while saying nuclear will "take too long to build". Don't tell me power-to-methane exists, show me the numbers saying it works and include the costs of storing it (stored methane is superb on energy density for the grid, but about 30% efficient panels-to-power plant and has a cost per kWh in storage...and has a suspicious paucity of information surrounding operating costs of plants versus "future projections").
- Qwertious 3y ago
  Focusing on batteries is thinking too long-term IMO. If you have 50% renewables or less in the grid, you basically don't need batteries yet, and our deadline isn't time here but greenhouse gases emitted - getting to 50% renewables will give us more time to tackle the rest of our emissions. I expect nuclear to easily beat solar/wind+batteries for the last 10% of the grid, but frankly the last 10% of the grid almost doesn't matter - if we've reduce our emissions by 90%, then we have 10x the time to tackle the rest. Of course, I've been wildly conflating electricity with all emissions, but I think the low-hanging fruit argument still applies.

rgmerk 3y ago

Rooftop solar power is roughly as popular as puppies and kittens. But the USA has very little of it because it’s expensive in the US (due mostly to regulation and utilities being obstructionist). By contrast, rooftop solar is very cheap in Australia, so it’s everywhere. Nuclear is safe and clean, but until it’s cheaper nobody is going to go near building any more of it, and the nuclear industry has been incapable so far of making it cheaper.

asynchronous 3y ago
Is it cheaper in Australia because it’s publicly subsidized? From what I understand in the states the only reason it’s even remotely affordable is because it’s already subsidized.
- epistasis 3y ago
  No, not at all. The reason it's expensive in the US is all regulatory, and because of the ever changing patchwork of utility rules that make it economical or not to attach your own generation to the grid. Last I heard, roughly 30% of the cost of solar in the US is spent merely on customer acquisition. Because the only forms that survive are those that swoop in when there's a window of economic plausibility for solar to work for homeowners, before the utility in a particular small area changes their mind and buys off the regulators to make it cost infeasible for homeowners to generate. There's a huge advantage to the grid of having generation be more local: more than half of energy costs are transmission and distribution, and these are costs that utilities can reliable charge a profit for, so they try to make these costs as high as possible. When customers install their own solar, this reduces the peak daytime need for T&D, and the grid is sized for peak usage. So everyone would be better off with far more local solar, except for the utility.
  - dalyons 3y ago
    But Australia has private grids too, so everything you say about utilities would also be true there. No?

Jedd 3y ago

If someone rang me and asked a question like 'am I in favour of throwing vast sums of money towards research and build of nuclear power plants?', it'd be a resounding yes with a strict qualification of 'fusion, not fission'. (Neither word appears in TFA.) I realise the distinction probably isn't well understood in the general population, but I'm confident a huge part of that is due to every news story conflating the two.

Qwertious 3y ago
Fusion is a waste of money, it's hype is based on lies/mistruths and it's not going to work in time to address climate change. In particular, they constantly conflate different definitions of energy. There's energy in/energy out, there's laser energy in/energy out (lasers currently being 0.5% efficient, so it's a lie of 2 orders of magnitude), there's energy in/out per pellet versus including warmup time, etc. Even if fusion is possible within two decades, it might be prohibitively expensive to build for another decade or two, and we'd need to build a first commercial reactor before we can properly scale it, so I don't see fusion being possible before 2050. So I'd rather that money be sent straight to fission plants, since we know they'll actually work on time.
- Jedd 3y ago
  I agree with the thrust of your arguments around fusion, though I would disagree on some of the conspiracy theory implications. Your pessimism may turn out to be well placed, but with the piddling amount of investment thrown into the subject, it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that comes back to my point - I'd be very happy to have a lot more budget thrown at the problem, because a) it seems extremely unlikely at this point that the technology is outright infeasible, and b) the payoff will be monumental. Your claim: > So I'd rather that money be sent straight to fission plants, since we know they'll actually work on time. is contra-indicated by reality, unfortunately. (If you're going to drop phrases like 'if it's even possible', and 'might be expensive', and so on for your fusion predictions, I'll point at the actual failures of fission nuclear power plant deployments over the past few decades.)

TheCaptain4815 3y ago

Can someone explain why France has insane nuclear capacity (75%+ of their energy), yet their energy isn’t too cheap to meter?

akvadrako 3y ago
Until recently they had some of the cheapest electricity in western Europe. But they haven't been building new plants for a while and it's gotten more expensive.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
It's actually 70%. And recently a bit less because a lot of their ancient reactors were down for extensive maintenance in the middle of an energy crisis. The reason their energy is not cheap is because nuclear is actually really expensive; also for the French. Instead of charging via electricity bills, the French just rolled that into their taxes. The energy bills don't quite cover the cost. The EDF, which runs their nuclear plants and is state owned, has a lot of debt, and has had some record losses recently. But it's OK; they are too big to fail and the French government will bail them out as needed as they have done for decades. At great cost to tax payers of course. But it keeps the electricity bills low. The French have a nuclear industry for the same reason the US and the British and other nuclear powers do: it serves their military goals to have a functioning nuclear industry so they can maintain their status as a nuclear power. That means a lot of state funding has historically been available to keep these industries going. Without public funding, it's not really that attractive financially to be involved with nuclear.
evilos 3y ago
The French government has been trying to kill their fleet for over a decade now. They've only recently come around.

ponorin 3y ago

I live in the spitting distance from the world's largest nuclear plant complex in the world. I do not live in a daily fear. In fact it's very easy to forget. The current government is very bullish on nuclear. The government however is also betting on oil and gas and have recently annoucned, with funding from saudi arabia, the nation's largest oil refinary project. They are also redirecting funds from renewable energy like solar and wind to nuclear, citing fraud and immaturity of the technology. The plant operator has been under constant scrutiny from the locals for construction faults, waste fuel management, etc. What people seem to forget here is that nuclear isn't a panacea. Just because a country builds nuclear doesn't mean it's succeeding at reducing carbon emmission. The world's 2nd largest, and also the fastest growing, nuclear energy producer by power is china, which still depends largely on coal for its electricity. Also consider nations too volatile to have nuclear power. If you argue that net zero is "impossible" without nuclear, you're basically arguing those countries don't deserve its existence.

botanical 3y ago

Nuclear costs too much, but if small modular reactors can be built quickly and cheaply like what South Africa was trying with the Pebble bed modular reactor¹, (now those people are at X-energy² and Stratek Global), then it would be beneficial in the long run to have consistent output without the need for batteries and energy storage. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_modular_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_modular_reactor [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-energy

kevincox 3y ago
I think smaller reactors are a great idea. It allows us to iterate and learn. Also making many similar reactors will help drive down the costs more quickly due to economies of scale. I think the biggest mistake was stopping building. If we can slowly build small reactors constantly it will ensure that the knowledge stays fresh. Ontario has recently started doing this and I think it is a great restart to the nuclear program (https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1003248/ontario-building-more-small-modular-reactors-to-power-provinces-growth https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1003248/ontario-building-...). It may be a bit too late as it isn't expected to be done before the plants that currently provide 1/3 to 1/2 of our power (https://www.ieso.ca/power-data https://www.ieso.ca/power-data) hit end-of-life. But at least it is some progress to something that isn't just replacing them with natural gas.

Alifatisk 3y ago

I don’t get it, is there any good reason people are against Nuclear power?

JohnFen 3y ago

I've done a complete 180 on nuclear power. I used to oppose it because of the problem of the waste. However, the climate crisis overrides everything. If we're going to have even a chance of man being able to live relatively decently in the future, then we need to make some radical changes, and nuclear is an obvious source of energy that contributes far less to climate change. So I've come to think that whatever the potential environmental hazards of nuclear waster, they are miniscule compared to the environmental disaster that we're currently in. Every tool we have to help mitigate that is essential.