3 ms·

It is being held back by being objectively worse, that is, expensive and slow to build. If it made money, it could be used to overcome the political problems.

It is being held back by being objectively worse, that is, expensive and slow to build. If it made money, it could be used to overcome the political problems. Just look at oil. Huge ecological disasters and it still keeps on chugging because it makes lots of $$$ for lots of people.

theptip 3y ago
It’s expensive largely because of regulatory requirements to be 10x safer (in deaths per MWh) than fossil fuels. You’d have to look at less-regulated countries like China to get the “apples to apples” comparison of how much it would cost without crippling regulation.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  Nobody ever actually explains what requirements would be reasonable to drop and still maintain safety. Because it turns out a whole lot of them are expensive and necessary. Skimp on containment building? You get Chernobyl. Skimp on wall and backup power? Fukushima. Skimp on relief valve? You get TMI, which while overall harmless was still expensive. Thanks to Fukushima it got even more expensive, because now they concluded that backup power must be available quickly in the event of a disaster. Which means the availability of the required parts close enough and the ability to bring them by helicopter, if I recall correctly.
  - p1mrx 3y ago
    Rather than relax safety requirements, it's better to design reactors to meet those requirements without backup power or human action. If you can throw the "off" switch and take a vacation, then safety gets fundamentally cheaper. High-temperature reactors based on molten salt or TRISO can generally be air cooled, so a ship-based version 'just' needs to survive the worst-case hurricane or tsunami without sinking.
    - dale_glass 3y ago
      That's probably not going to happen at this rate. The proposition here is to throw a lot of time and money into a design that might not even work satisfactorily, and might not ever make any money even if it does. The first is for practical reasons. I'm sure the theory works. But what if the practice is something like a pipe leaking, a liter of highly material spilling on the floor, and it being too contaminated to touch for a year? Yeah, that won't kill anyone, but won't be good business either. There's lots of possibilities for it working perfectly as promised, but just having various issues that make it non-viable anyway. And I have a very hard time imagining a design that could compete with renewables. Because no matter how you slice it, nuclear has complex requirements that say, solar can just completely ignore. This is especially so when you start talking about not yet production designs, so maybe the first one will be built in 15 years from now.
      - p1mrx 3y ago
        Assuming that humanity actually has enough collective sense to stop burning fossil fuels and scrap the infrastructure, maintaining 99.999% grid uptime will be very challenging. There are theoretically possible ways for renewables to meet that challenge, but until that actually happens, I think nuclear can remain competitive. On the other hand, if we continue to burn fossil fuels without paying for carbon emissions, then nuclear is economically doomed.
        dale_glass 3y ago
        Nuclear already isn't competitive. Nobody is building anything new, they only maintain what was built, and even that is going down and not being replaced. The problem is that nuclear is heavy on capital costs, and cheap renewables dig in very badly into its business model, making it even worse. Also, nuclear isn't completely reliable either. Plants do go down. Spare capacity is still needed. IMO the long term future is a mix of renewables supplemented by something like gas, batteries, other storage, overprovisioning and interconnection (eg, Europe).
        3y ago
  - theptip 3y ago
    Fukushima is a great example because the takeaway should have been “these systems are already over-engineered”, instead of “we need more regulations”. Recall that more than 10k people died from the tsunami, of which on the order of 100 from the reactors when you account for lifetime exposure to radiation. I’d call that safe enough. (Maybe a better analysis around cost of cleanup, I haven’t run those numbers.) More generally, I think a big part of the cost overruns come from the regulatory environment changing mid-project, requiring construction to rework things, or waiting for inspections. I think it’s a false dichotomy to say our only choices are strict and ever-increasing regulation, or Chernobyl. 10% less regulation would be positive, and you can bet the engineers working in the industry know which 10% is the most stupid.
    - dale_glass 3y ago
      > Fukushima is a great example because the takeaway should have been “these systems are already over-engineered”, instead of “we need more regulations”. Absolutely not. There were a serious number of fuckups that were completely avoidable, had the proper rules been in place, and been followed, and had the right people been available. It would have been far cheap than dealing with the mess. It was known the seawall was too low. We have stories with heroic measures like workers collecting and hooking up car batteries to get equipment working. That's clearly an improvised effort, not a serious backup plan! Apparently TEPCO refused US military generators, tried to send their own, and they got stuck in traffic. There were multiple explosions, which resulted in broken equipment and evacuated workers. Point is, it wasn't that some stuff got damaged in an ultimately harmless way, and everyone around just ran around like headless chickens for no good reason. Things indeed were serious, people were working around the clock to keep things together, and the situation was far from ideal. Without hard work it could have gotten considerably worse. So it absolutely wasn't over-engineered. Things held up, with a lot of effort and some good luck. They could have not worked out as well as they did. And there were plenty instances in which the right measures and the right people could have saved a lot of trouble and made the whole thing go a whole lot smoother.
- philipkglass 3y ago
  It's difficult to use China for a comparison. Chinese labor is cheaper. If I know that Chinese solar farms or hydroelectric dams cost only $M per megawatt, I can't assume that the West should also be able to build those for about $M per megawatt. It is difficult to search primary sources if you aren't fluent in Chinese. I personally can only search English-language information about China, the availability of which is influenced by the interests of the bilingual people who understand and translate primary sources. China doesn't have anything like the press freedom or government transparency of the US. In the US we know when a nuclear project goes over budget because the press and government watchdogs both sound the alarm [1]. In China that may not be possible. We do have some proxy measures relevant to the Chinese nuclear industry. The number of operating reactors is known and the time between construction start and initial operation is known. We also know the electrical output of each reactor. But turning those numbers into cost numbers requires a lot of guessing or assuming about unknown quantities. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal
  - throwaway4aday 3y ago
    You can also compare Japan or France both of which built out a lot of nuclear power. When you say "Chinese labor is cheaper" it sounds like an assumption based on comparing wages in the US with wages in China which is not how you would figure the cost for a Chinese business to build a reactor in China and sell the power to Chinese citizens and Chinese industry because all of those entities are within the same economy.
pydry 3y ago
This is the reason. The only reasons nuclear plants are built at all is to 1) let civilians share the cost of maintaining an existing nuclear military (US, Russia) or 2) for countries that want to be able to build a nuke in a hurry (Iran, Sweden). There are about 5-6 countries like Iran, each with a geopolitical imperative to want a bomb in a hurry.

theptip 3y ago

It’s expensive largely because of regulatory requirements to be 10x safer (in deaths per MWh) than fossil fuels. You’d have to look at less-regulated countries like China to get the “apples to apples” comparison of how much it would cost without crippling regulation.

dale_glass 3y ago
Nobody ever actually explains what requirements would be reasonable to drop and still maintain safety. Because it turns out a whole lot of them are expensive and necessary. Skimp on containment building? You get Chernobyl. Skimp on wall and backup power? Fukushima. Skimp on relief valve? You get TMI, which while overall harmless was still expensive. Thanks to Fukushima it got even more expensive, because now they concluded that backup power must be available quickly in the event of a disaster. Which means the availability of the required parts close enough and the ability to bring them by helicopter, if I recall correctly.
- p1mrx 3y ago
  Rather than relax safety requirements, it's better to design reactors to meet those requirements without backup power or human action. If you can throw the "off" switch and take a vacation, then safety gets fundamentally cheaper. High-temperature reactors based on molten salt or TRISO can generally be air cooled, so a ship-based version 'just' needs to survive the worst-case hurricane or tsunami without sinking.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    That's probably not going to happen at this rate. The proposition here is to throw a lot of time and money into a design that might not even work satisfactorily, and might not ever make any money even if it does. The first is for practical reasons. I'm sure the theory works. But what if the practice is something like a pipe leaking, a liter of highly material spilling on the floor, and it being too contaminated to touch for a year? Yeah, that won't kill anyone, but won't be good business either. There's lots of possibilities for it working perfectly as promised, but just having various issues that make it non-viable anyway. And I have a very hard time imagining a design that could compete with renewables. Because no matter how you slice it, nuclear has complex requirements that say, solar can just completely ignore. This is especially so when you start talking about not yet production designs, so maybe the first one will be built in 15 years from now.
    - p1mrx 3y ago
      Assuming that humanity actually has enough collective sense to stop burning fossil fuels and scrap the infrastructure, maintaining 99.999% grid uptime will be very challenging. There are theoretically possible ways for renewables to meet that challenge, but until that actually happens, I think nuclear can remain competitive. On the other hand, if we continue to burn fossil fuels without paying for carbon emissions, then nuclear is economically doomed.
      - dale_glass 3y ago
        Nuclear already isn't competitive. Nobody is building anything new, they only maintain what was built, and even that is going down and not being replaced. The problem is that nuclear is heavy on capital costs, and cheap renewables dig in very badly into its business model, making it even worse. Also, nuclear isn't completely reliable either. Plants do go down. Spare capacity is still needed. IMO the long term future is a mix of renewables supplemented by something like gas, batteries, other storage, overprovisioning and interconnection (eg, Europe).
        3y ago
- theptip 3y ago
  Fukushima is a great example because the takeaway should have been “these systems are already over-engineered”, instead of “we need more regulations”. Recall that more than 10k people died from the tsunami, of which on the order of 100 from the reactors when you account for lifetime exposure to radiation. I’d call that safe enough. (Maybe a better analysis around cost of cleanup, I haven’t run those numbers.) More generally, I think a big part of the cost overruns come from the regulatory environment changing mid-project, requiring construction to rework things, or waiting for inspections. I think it’s a false dichotomy to say our only choices are strict and ever-increasing regulation, or Chernobyl. 10% less regulation would be positive, and you can bet the engineers working in the industry know which 10% is the most stupid.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    > Fukushima is a great example because the takeaway should have been “these systems are already over-engineered”, instead of “we need more regulations”. Absolutely not. There were a serious number of fuckups that were completely avoidable, had the proper rules been in place, and been followed, and had the right people been available. It would have been far cheap than dealing with the mess. It was known the seawall was too low. We have stories with heroic measures like workers collecting and hooking up car batteries to get equipment working. That's clearly an improvised effort, not a serious backup plan! Apparently TEPCO refused US military generators, tried to send their own, and they got stuck in traffic. There were multiple explosions, which resulted in broken equipment and evacuated workers. Point is, it wasn't that some stuff got damaged in an ultimately harmless way, and everyone around just ran around like headless chickens for no good reason. Things indeed were serious, people were working around the clock to keep things together, and the situation was far from ideal. Without hard work it could have gotten considerably worse. So it absolutely wasn't over-engineered. Things held up, with a lot of effort and some good luck. They could have not worked out as well as they did. And there were plenty instances in which the right measures and the right people could have saved a lot of trouble and made the whole thing go a whole lot smoother.
philipkglass 3y ago
It's difficult to use China for a comparison. Chinese labor is cheaper. If I know that Chinese solar farms or hydroelectric dams cost only $M per megawatt, I can't assume that the West should also be able to build those for about $M per megawatt. It is difficult to search primary sources if you aren't fluent in Chinese. I personally can only search English-language information about China, the availability of which is influenced by the interests of the bilingual people who understand and translate primary sources. China doesn't have anything like the press freedom or government transparency of the US. In the US we know when a nuclear project goes over budget because the press and government watchdogs both sound the alarm [1]. In China that may not be possible. We do have some proxy measures relevant to the Chinese nuclear industry. The number of operating reactors is known and the time between construction start and initial operation is known. We also know the electrical output of each reactor. But turning those numbers into cost numbers requires a lot of guessing or assuming about unknown quantities. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal
- throwaway4aday 3y ago
  You can also compare Japan or France both of which built out a lot of nuclear power. When you say "Chinese labor is cheaper" it sounds like an assumption based on comparing wages in the US with wages in China which is not how you would figure the cost for a Chinese business to build a reactor in China and sell the power to Chinese citizens and Chinese industry because all of those entities are within the same economy.

pydry 3y ago

This is the reason. The only reasons nuclear plants are built at all is to 1) let civilians share the cost of maintaining an existing nuclear military (US, Russia) or 2) for countries that want to be able to build a nuke in a hurry (Iran, Sweden). There are about 5-6 countries like Iran, each with a geopolitical imperative to want a bomb in a hurry.