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Nuclear power has spent its entire life being forced into existence using subsidies. A technology agnostic subsidy market for green power leads to exactly zero

Nuclear power has spent its entire life being forced into existence using subsidies. A technology agnostic subsidy market for green power leads to exactly zero new nuclear power being built. Thus the huge push from the nuclear lobby and fossil lobby loving a power source not generating a single kWh for 20 years to create targeted subsidies only for nuclear power.

roenxi 2y ago
Sure. What if we remove the nonsensical barriers and then let it fail on its own in the market? Like, say it only has to be 2x safer than the next safest popular form of energy? That always seemed like a reasonable compromise to me. A radical reduction in the standard of safety we hold nuclear to.
- ViewTrick1002 2y ago
  The problem is who is affected by the accidents. For solar and wind the general public generally can’t be affected by any accidents so the deaths are general work place hazards coming from working aloft with heavy equipment. For nuclear power the public is on the hook for cleanup fees from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars and the large scale accidents we have seen caused hundreds of thousands to get evacuated. It is not even comparable. If I chose to not work in the solar and wind industry my chance of harm is as near zero as it gets. Meanwhile about all consequences from nuclear power afflicts the general public. Both in terms of costs, injuries and life changing evacuations. The playbook of trying to equate nuclear safety problems with the competition is quite sad to see because it relies on people only seeing a number. Not the real world implications of it.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    > Not the real world implications of it. What real-world implications? One of my favourite lines of questioning in nuclear debates is trying to figure out what exactly the anti-nuclear crowd are worried about in terms of real-world implications. The real world implications seem to be minor enough that nobody can point them out. Even your comment, deploring real world implications, doesn't articulate what they are. The only real world implications I've seen are people panicking over negligible issues. And I'm happy to believe there are actual problems, but it'd be fantastic if someone knew what they were.
    - ViewTrick1002 2y ago
      I love how the multiple hydrogen explosions when the reactors were going through uncontrolled meltdowns in Fukushima now are “negligible issues”. Everything to frame nuclear in a positive light.
      - roenxi 2y ago
        Are you going to run through what the problem with that was that makes it internationally important? Industrial explosions are an common event. Usually they make local news or whatever then people move on. We don't usually ban technologies because they can explode. Fertiliser explodes. Did these kill anyone? Did they harm anyone? If the evacuations didn't happen what was the risk?
    - beej71 2y ago
      TMI, Fukushima, Chernobyl. Those are the problems and "minor" real-world implications. That's why no one wants a nuclear plant in their backyard. If those never happened, I suspect we'd have far more nuclear energy today.
      - plorkyeran 2y ago
        If you could choose to live next to TMI with the knowledge that the TMI accident would happen at some point while you were living there or next to a coal power plant, TMI would be the correct choice.
        ViewTrick1002 2y ago
        The great thing is that coal plants are not the alternative in 2024. It is renewables. Thus no need to compare with coal, compare against your neighbor’s rooftop solar.
      - pfdietz 2y ago
        The first nuclear build out in the US was already running into serious problems before TMI. Its collapse is due more to cost problems and the unleashing of market forces on the grid via PURPA than it was to TMI. Fukushima had little to do with the collapse of the Nuclear Renaissance; it was the advent of cheap natural gas from fracking. New nuclear made absolutely no sense in an environment where NG was under $3/GJ and combined cycle power plants with a thermal efficiency of 60% could be built for $1/W(e). Cheap gas is also a big part of why everyone stopped building new coal power plants in the US. The last large (> 100 MW) coal power plant to come online in the US was in 2013.
snapplebobapple 2y ago
Your first statement is factually untrue. You could say it was initially forced into existence to generate the fuel for nuclear weapons but beyond that it's way more accurate to say it has spent the last ~50 years having the utter insanity of the regulatory body overridden by large subsidies with the last 30 or so of those years having people that don't like nuclear point at the subsidy and say nuclear is uncompetitive while ignoring the massive cost and uncertainty created by the nuclear regulator. There is no real free market here, most real innovation has been utterly destroyed by the regulator driving massive uncertainty into private investment by removing any certainty of the effectiveness of a company structure containing the cost liability of problems (this is not the same as liability flowing through to management/the board for obvious dereliction of duty, this is flow through happening automatically if you don't do every stupid thing the regulator comes up with, which is mostly unecessary and highly cost additive to your project). This has stopped any sort of commodification of reactor construction and kept every project a bespoke, highly expensive, one off. Further, throwing solar panels everywhere ignores the total cost of solar because it ignores the large ancillaries cost having a non demand resource causes so it's incorrect to compare the two directly, you need to look at total cost including ancillary costs of grid connection (which is much closer, especially when looking at asian construction costs where the regulators are much less idiotic but still excessive and where production of these bespoke installations continued so skills of the labor force were maintained). If we get the stupidity of the regulator out of the way we could have commodity built new generator designs with drastically cheaper total costs and eventually much better technology like molten salt that should be dramatically safer and that would be a fair comparison to solar, which has had the support to commodify and drive production cost into the ground over the last thirty years and is still questionably competitive when the total cost of running including ancillary costs is included against the worst version of nuclear (what we currently have). This is starting to become a national security concern because China is going hard on these newer, better technologies and they could end up owning the market on a decade or two timescale, which is a huge strategic issue since their main achilles heal right now is energy imports.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  The idea that it's all the fault of "a regulatory body" doesn't explain the global failure of nuclear. It's run into problems everywhere, including in China. There is no global regulatory body.

roenxi 2y ago

Sure. What if we remove the nonsensical barriers and then let it fail on its own in the market? Like, say it only has to be 2x safer than the next safest popular form of energy? That always seemed like a reasonable compromise to me. A radical reduction in the standard of safety we hold nuclear to.

ViewTrick1002 2y ago
The problem is who is affected by the accidents. For solar and wind the general public generally can’t be affected by any accidents so the deaths are general work place hazards coming from working aloft with heavy equipment. For nuclear power the public is on the hook for cleanup fees from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars and the large scale accidents we have seen caused hundreds of thousands to get evacuated. It is not even comparable. If I chose to not work in the solar and wind industry my chance of harm is as near zero as it gets. Meanwhile about all consequences from nuclear power afflicts the general public. Both in terms of costs, injuries and life changing evacuations. The playbook of trying to equate nuclear safety problems with the competition is quite sad to see because it relies on people only seeing a number. Not the real world implications of it.
- roenxi 2y ago
  > Not the real world implications of it. What real-world implications? One of my favourite lines of questioning in nuclear debates is trying to figure out what exactly the anti-nuclear crowd are worried about in terms of real-world implications. The real world implications seem to be minor enough that nobody can point them out. Even your comment, deploring real world implications, doesn't articulate what they are. The only real world implications I've seen are people panicking over negligible issues. And I'm happy to believe there are actual problems, but it'd be fantastic if someone knew what they were.
  - ViewTrick1002 2y ago
    I love how the multiple hydrogen explosions when the reactors were going through uncontrolled meltdowns in Fukushima now are “negligible issues”. Everything to frame nuclear in a positive light.
    - roenxi 2y ago
      Are you going to run through what the problem with that was that makes it internationally important? Industrial explosions are an common event. Usually they make local news or whatever then people move on. We don't usually ban technologies because they can explode. Fertiliser explodes. Did these kill anyone? Did they harm anyone? If the evacuations didn't happen what was the risk?
  - beej71 2y ago
    TMI, Fukushima, Chernobyl. Those are the problems and "minor" real-world implications. That's why no one wants a nuclear plant in their backyard. If those never happened, I suspect we'd have far more nuclear energy today.
    - plorkyeran 2y ago
      If you could choose to live next to TMI with the knowledge that the TMI accident would happen at some point while you were living there or next to a coal power plant, TMI would be the correct choice.
      - ViewTrick1002 2y ago
        The great thing is that coal plants are not the alternative in 2024. It is renewables. Thus no need to compare with coal, compare against your neighbor’s rooftop solar.
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      The first nuclear build out in the US was already running into serious problems before TMI. Its collapse is due more to cost problems and the unleashing of market forces on the grid via PURPA than it was to TMI. Fukushima had little to do with the collapse of the Nuclear Renaissance; it was the advent of cheap natural gas from fracking. New nuclear made absolutely no sense in an environment where NG was under $3/GJ and combined cycle power plants with a thermal efficiency of 60% could be built for $1/W(e). Cheap gas is also a big part of why everyone stopped building new coal power plants in the US. The last large (> 100 MW) coal power plant to come online in the US was in 2013.

snapplebobapple 2y ago

Your first statement is factually untrue. You could say it was initially forced into existence to generate the fuel for nuclear weapons but beyond that it's way more accurate to say it has spent the last ~50 years having the utter insanity of the regulatory body overridden by large subsidies with the last 30 or so of those years having people that don't like nuclear point at the subsidy and say nuclear is uncompetitive while ignoring the massive cost and uncertainty created by the nuclear regulator. There is no real free market here, most real innovation has been utterly destroyed by the regulator driving massive uncertainty into private investment by removing any certainty of the effectiveness of a company structure containing the cost liability of problems (this is not the same as liability flowing through to management/the board for obvious dereliction of duty, this is flow through happening automatically if you don't do every stupid thing the regulator comes up with, which is mostly unecessary and highly cost additive to your project). This has stopped any sort of commodification of reactor construction and kept every project a bespoke, highly expensive, one off. Further, throwing solar panels everywhere ignores the total cost of solar because it ignores the large ancillaries cost having a non demand resource causes so it's incorrect to compare the two directly, you need to look at total cost including ancillary costs of grid connection (which is much closer, especially when looking at asian construction costs where the regulators are much less idiotic but still excessive and where production of these bespoke installations continued so skills of the labor force were maintained). If we get the stupidity of the regulator out of the way we could have commodity built new generator designs with drastically cheaper total costs and eventually much better technology like molten salt that should be dramatically safer and that would be a fair comparison to solar, which has had the support to commodify and drive production cost into the ground over the last thirty years and is still questionably competitive when the total cost of running including ancillary costs is included against the worst version of nuclear (what we currently have). This is starting to become a national security concern because China is going hard on these newer, better technologies and they could end up owning the market on a decade or two timescale, which is a huge strategic issue since their main achilles heal right now is energy imports.

pfdietz 2y ago
The idea that it's all the fault of "a regulatory body" doesn't explain the global failure of nuclear. It's run into problems everywhere, including in China. There is no global regulatory body.