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The problem is not deaths per megawatt. Nor bias. Look at the economic disaster that is Vogtie. People need to be reasonable. If we want nuclear, the governme
by bilbo0s 3y ago
The problem is not deaths per megawatt. Nor bias.
Look at the economic disaster that is Vogtie.
People need to be reasonable. If we want nuclear, the government will need to pay for it. Right now everyone's waiting for energy investors and the financial engineering that backs them to throw money into nuclear. It won't happen. We want rich people to throw their billions at nuclear for a return years and years from now, instead of spending it just slapping up some windmills and getting a return next month.
T Boone Pickens was one of the most conservative energy investors that ever lived, and he was slapping up windmills left and right. That won't stop until the tax payer agrees to insulate investors from any losses.
Everyone's saying, "We want nuclear." But when we give them the financial consequences of nuclear like we did at Vogtie, they get pissed. You can't have it both ways. You want it? Cool. Don't complain about being told you have to pay off your region's reactors.
A little more cooperation from everyone on the finances would go a long way here.
- TheDudeMan 3y agoGet rid of the red tape and nuclear becomes much cheaper (over time).
- bamboozled 3y agoFukushima is what happens when you get rid of the red tape, go look at the cause of the accident and you will see why the red tape exists [1]. The Japanese tax payer is still paying for this disaster, and the environment is paying in more ways imaginable, all of the cleanup operation so far has been running on fossil fuels and it's an significant amount of cleanup still going onto this day, hundreds of thousands of tons of top soil have been moved around the country and stored in disintegrating plastic bags which end up in rivers, for example. People avoid buying produce and seafood from the area too which has had enormous impact on the economy and tens of thousands of people have been displaced with little to no compensation or anywhere to go. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster#2000_and_2008:_Tsunami_studies_ignored https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster#200...
- TheDudeMan 3y agoFukushima is what happens when it is prohibitively expensive to replace your known-unsafe reactor with a new one.
- MostlyStable 3y agoYou mean the disaster that killed between 0 (from radiation) and 2000 (from the evacuation) people? Compared do the literal millions that die every year from fossil fuel pollution? It would take about 10x the amount of nuclear power plants that we currently have for global energy to be totally nuclear. If we therefore 10x every single nuclear reactor disaster from the past 70 years (~ how long since the first production plant came on line in the USSR), global deaths would be between between 80,000 and 40,000,000 (using the implausibly high Greenpeace estimate of Chernobyl associated deaths). I think that all of those estimates are implausibly high, but even if we just take the 40,000,000 number, the most ridiculously, obviously wrong number, the estimated deaths every year from fossil fuel pollution (not climate change...direct particulate matter air pollution) is between 2 and 8 million every year. So go ahead, tell me again how we can't afford to relax safety standards on nuclear power.
- lamontcg 3y agoZero deaths is debatable, and it is only possible due to a trillion dollar cleanup cost.
- endominus 3y agoPer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup, "In 2016, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry estimated the total cost of dealing with the Fukushima disaster at ¥21.5 trillion (US$187 billion)" (with breakdown following). Hyperbole does not serve to convince intelligent people of your point, much less your objectivity in the matter.
- lamontcg 3y ago
- hayst4ck 3y agoAdmiral Rickover (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover), the father of the nuclear navy would disagree with you, but probably in a much more nuanced way than direct contradiction. It is not the red tape, but the difference between oversight and culture. You can not regulate safety and expect safety. Safety does not come from oversight. Safety comes from culture and a shared culture of responsibility for safety. Therefore the adversarial nature of red tape, implying an entity that does taping and therefore bears primary responsibility for safety, encodes within it the set of incentives that will result in eventual doom because alignment is always for cheaper and not for the long term. Safety requires individual responsibility and therefore a culture of responsibility, not to shareholders or next quarters profits, but to a set of values such as safety and competence. This hearing where the head of the nuclear navy tells congress about their philosophy of safety is very much worth a read: https://web.archive.org/web/20060629082752/https://www.navy.mil/navydata/testimony/safety/bowman031029.txt https://web.archive.org/web/20060629082752/https://www.navy.... The end result is that if you are talking about red tape at all then you have not reached a state of understanding because you must breach the topic of culture and alignment. Capitalist alignment of nuclear energy directly results in disaster. A culture that venerates next quarters profits should not run 30 year+ programs for which failure can result in centuries of contamination. Do you want people cut from the same cloth that the people who run BP are cut from running nuclear? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill A congress that asks for cheaper will get cheaper. Unfortunately what is cheap in dollars can be expensive in property, lives, and well-being. A simple word like cheaper is too naive.
- liveoneggs 3y agoVotgle 3 has been running for almost a month. It started construction August 26, 2009 and is finishing $17B over budget so far, total about $30B. It bankrupted "Westinghouse Electric Company". Compared to the forever/oil wars it seems like a pretty good deal, to be honest. If we had not invaded Iraq we could have built 30 Votgles. USA has spent 2-3 votgles on Ukraine so far since the war began.
- ttul 3y agoInteresting analysis. Indeed without the need for oil and gas, Russia would not have the cash to invade Ukraine.
- whatshisface 3y agoOr a motive to secure the resources lying beneath the east of the country.
- bamboozled 3y agoBut there is money in oil and gas, big money, which is why you don't get nuclear...
- knowaveragejoe 3y ago> USA has spent 2-3 votgles on Ukraine so far since the war began. We all know this isn't even remotely the case, right?
- jakeinspace 3y agoPeople might not be aware, but the bulk of the support given to Ukraine has been military surplus gear, rather than cash. The US has sent tens of billions in cash for humanitarian and some military support as well, but the bulk of what’s counted in the $100B+ of aid has been in the form of weapons and ammunition and vehicles.
- JamesBarney 3y ago
- jdadj 3y ago> That won't stop until the tax payer agrees to insulate investors from any losses. What does this mean? Are corporate structures (corporations, LLCs, etc.) insufficient as liability shields?
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoIf nuclear is going to happen it should be a campaign to improve & get better. Today & long term. Systems like Integral Fast Reactor & then PRISM & S-PRISM & so many others show huge promise at being absurdly safe & being able to help us burn existing waste, without having to deeply enrich: a huge win. But no one is going to foot the bill, no one is going to take risk on advanced nuclear, when we're not even sure about the plodding low effort ultra-lofi nuclear we still can't do cost effectively today. I agree so much, this needs to be a bigger collectivized effort if it's going to happen. Ideally it should be something we can as a civilization improve on, where we keep improving together. Making a bunch of new proprietary designs then having 20 years of patent protection before anyone else can try & iterates or improve is a death knell for the industry as a whole. But no commercial entity is going to choose to participate in this prisoners dilemma today.
- Accujack 3y agoThis is the classic anti-nuclear rhetoric Always bring up the cost of nuclear power plants and the time to build them, but ignore that all the power plants built in the US in recent years use 1950s technology and are made expensive by 50 years of excessive regulation driven by fear.
- pstuart 3y agoTheoretically the regulation was known at bidding time and factored in. Or they didn't understand them and were caught by surprise. Or perhaps they did understand and lied by underbidding? I was anti-nuke when I was younger but recognize we fucked up terribly by not getting nuclear right and have now cooked the planet. The appealing solution (to me) is to get SMRs into play with their associated promises of cost control and safety. My understanding is the blocker is really the existing insiders of the nuclear industry who see it as a threat to their work.
- imperfectcats 3y agoI wish regulation worked that way! Regulations change all the time - if not in law certainly in practice/interpretation. That is what makes industries with heavy regulation such risky investments.
- pstuart 3y agoI searched for info on the cost overruns and it appears that management failures contributed significantly. An anti-nuke lawsuit didn't help but appeared to be $1B in impact. We see consistently that big projects never come in on time and budget, which is why SMRs are the only economical way forward.
- BenFranklin100 3y agoTo further your point, almost all nuclear power plants to date have essentially been customized, one-off projects built by inexperienced teams. If we built exactly the same design tens to the low hundreds of times by the same handful of teams, the cost per unit would be dramatically lower. This is especially true of the modern, safer, and more cost effective designs.
- robviren 3y agoCompletely agree those costs are insane. The US cranked out the currently functional reactors at a fraction of the cost. We have collectively offshored all knowledge and skill on massive building projects and have become weak at dedicating ourselves to tackling complex projects. I don't have a solution to the human problem of building these things, but it is a human problem, not a problem of the technology. I would not be surprised if it is eventually found that oil and gas secretly crippled the building of all modern reactors to keep people dependent. Though incompetence is probably a more likely answer. We have a simple problem. Either we shift our power supply to something that won't kill us or we all start getting used to the idea of living on a hostile planet. I feel that this problem should be taken on as seriously as defending against a hostile nation and pour the resources of the state into a solution. Only when we rebuild our knowledge and skill can we tackle this. I have some hopes in small reactors we could factory build and crank out of an assembly line. But I think the politics of this are still too difficult to even matter. People would rather throw their hands in the air giving up and die in a fire than have the risk of radiation in their neighborhood. Only the kids growing up today watching the world end will probably get their will together to change what is happening. We have failed them