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> The same thing was done with nuclear: electricity too cheap to meter. Only it never materialized. When I worked for a power company as a teenager, they saw t
by bb88 3y ago
> The same thing was done with nuclear: electricity too cheap to meter. Only it never materialized.
When I worked for a power company as a teenager, they saw the one nuclear power plant they owned as a lead weight around their necks.
If you wanted to keep it running, there was investment required to upgrade it to new regulations.
If you didn't want to keep it running, that was a multi-year decommissioning project, for which there would be no profit, only a major cost center.
Nuclear regulations are no joke, and like the airline regulations, the electrical safety code, etc, they're written in blood.
What worked in the 1950s, won't work today, since we know more about all the ways a nuclear plant can fail.
- throw0101d 3y ago> When I worked for a power company as a teenager, they saw the one nuclear power plant they owned as a lead weight around their necks. The problem is that they had one plant. If they had a dozen then knowledge could be amortized between them (see France, Japan, Canada-Ontario: all fairly standardized designs). Part of the problem in with US nuclear: a whole bunch of one-offs, with little-to-no economies of scale to leverage.
- bb88 3y agoI don't know. Regulations require labor. And there's no amount of economies of scale that's going to overcome that. Just to get started there's years of understanding the regulations. Then there's the super high levels of security needed. The super high levels of monitoring needed to run the reactor, etc, etc. People say "Nuclear" because TINA (There is no alternative). But given what's going on with this plant, even if they can recoup the $35B in 20 years, given the risk and the debt load on the company, I wouldn't be surprised if they cancelled it before it went online. And generally, after watching enough documentaries about nuclear power plant disasters, I think I don't want to live anywhere near one. Truth is the first casualty during an accident.