4 ms·

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/nuclear-dead-end-its-economics-stupid/ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/nuclear-dead-end-i... It is just not

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/nuclear-dead-end-its-economics-stupid/ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/nuclear-dead-end-i... It is just not economically feasible. Money makes the world go 'round and that's often a good thing. I wish you luck convincing a bank to give you a loan for a nuclear plant. They know the math.

HPsquared 2y ago
Technology can make things cheaper, often a tiny fraction of the previous unit cost. We have plenty of examples of this; why wouldn't it also be true for nuclear power?
- Mistletoe 2y ago
  Think about the opposite of your question. If it could it already would have, so why hasn’t it? It must not be possible. It doesn’t scale like a cpu or a website. You are still hiring extremely skilled welders, complying with regulations so you don’t Chernobyl half the country, figuring out where to put the waste that is radioactive for longer than modern humans have existed.
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    There are all sorts of technical solutions to those problems already on the drawing board. Even transuranic waste can be "burned" with neutrons leaving only the fission products (half-life of say 30 years, so 300 years is a 1000x reduction; 600 years is a million times reduction, basically harmless at that point). Molten salt reactors could in theory solve both problems at once at low cost. If we can build them. I just think there's so much promise it's worth putting some time into it. Definitely a more likely payoff than fusion research.
zizee 2y ago
The economics of nuclear power is dominated by a poorly designed regulatory environment (which can be changed if regulators are suitablely motivated). https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power-construction-370 https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...
- credit_guy 2y ago
  I dispute that. I'm as pro-nuclear as one can be, but I don't think the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) is doing a bad job, or that the regulations are unreasonable. In the end, a lot of the regulations came as a response to incidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, and others less well known. One way or another, nuclear reactors are extremely complex machines, with numerous failure modes. As various failure modes were learned (either the soft or the hard way), the regulations were updated. For example, after Fukushima, the NRC asked all the nuclear power plants in the US to undergo changes to make them more resilient to earthquakes. This does not mean the economics of nuclear power is an unsolvable problem. It is an engineering problem, and it is very solvable. But it can't be solved if one does not try. No problem in this world can be solved if everyone is convinced it's unsolvable and nobody is willing to try to solve it. Who is then supposed to solve this problem. It's an extremely capital intensive problem. A guy like Musk could do it, but Musk himself is uninterested in nuclear power (he likes to tell the fairly lame joke that we have a giant fusion reactor in the sky). Bill Gates has invested a lot of his money into nuclear power R&D, and this is good. But what Gates did not invest is his drive. Musk showed us that an extremely driven and competent manager can lower production costs by factors of 10 or 50. But just pouring money at a problem does not solve it, see Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin. Fortunately, governments have much deeper pockets than even Gates, Bezos or Musk. China is a leader in this area, and Russia is very advanced too. It looks like the US Government finally got the message, so there is a pretty good chance to see real progress on this front in the next 10 years.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    > ...I don't think the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) is doing a bad job... "He has a master's from Yale Divinity School and Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Religious Studies from Valparaiso University." Christopher Hanson, current chair of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_T._Hanson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_T._Hanson He's one of the better ones as he isn't actively trying to block new reactors going up. There are some gems on the other Chairperson wiki pages like "called for a global ban on nuclear power" (Gregory Jaczko if you want to look it up).

HPsquared 2y ago

Technology can make things cheaper, often a tiny fraction of the previous unit cost. We have plenty of examples of this; why wouldn't it also be true for nuclear power?

Mistletoe 2y ago
Think about the opposite of your question. If it could it already would have, so why hasn’t it? It must not be possible. It doesn’t scale like a cpu or a website. You are still hiring extremely skilled welders, complying with regulations so you don’t Chernobyl half the country, figuring out where to put the waste that is radioactive for longer than modern humans have existed.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  There are all sorts of technical solutions to those problems already on the drawing board. Even transuranic waste can be "burned" with neutrons leaving only the fission products (half-life of say 30 years, so 300 years is a 1000x reduction; 600 years is a million times reduction, basically harmless at that point). Molten salt reactors could in theory solve both problems at once at low cost. If we can build them. I just think there's so much promise it's worth putting some time into it. Definitely a more likely payoff than fusion research.

zizee 2y ago

The economics of nuclear power is dominated by a poorly designed regulatory environment (which can be changed if regulators are suitablely motivated). https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power-construction-370 https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...

credit_guy 2y ago
I dispute that. I'm as pro-nuclear as one can be, but I don't think the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) is doing a bad job, or that the regulations are unreasonable. In the end, a lot of the regulations came as a response to incidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, and others less well known. One way or another, nuclear reactors are extremely complex machines, with numerous failure modes. As various failure modes were learned (either the soft or the hard way), the regulations were updated. For example, after Fukushima, the NRC asked all the nuclear power plants in the US to undergo changes to make them more resilient to earthquakes. This does not mean the economics of nuclear power is an unsolvable problem. It is an engineering problem, and it is very solvable. But it can't be solved if one does not try. No problem in this world can be solved if everyone is convinced it's unsolvable and nobody is willing to try to solve it. Who is then supposed to solve this problem. It's an extremely capital intensive problem. A guy like Musk could do it, but Musk himself is uninterested in nuclear power (he likes to tell the fairly lame joke that we have a giant fusion reactor in the sky). Bill Gates has invested a lot of his money into nuclear power R&D, and this is good. But what Gates did not invest is his drive. Musk showed us that an extremely driven and competent manager can lower production costs by factors of 10 or 50. But just pouring money at a problem does not solve it, see Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin. Fortunately, governments have much deeper pockets than even Gates, Bezos or Musk. China is a leader in this area, and Russia is very advanced too. It looks like the US Government finally got the message, so there is a pretty good chance to see real progress on this front in the next 10 years.
- roenxi 2y ago
  > ...I don't think the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) is doing a bad job... "He has a master's from Yale Divinity School and Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Religious Studies from Valparaiso University." Christopher Hanson, current chair of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_T._Hanson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_T._Hanson He's one of the better ones as he isn't actively trying to block new reactors going up. There are some gems on the other Chairperson wiki pages like "called for a global ban on nuclear power" (Gregory Jaczko if you want to look it up).