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> All that risk ultimately just equates to a cost Right. My point though is that that cost is because of political decisions we make, not inherent in the techn

> All that risk ultimately just equates to a cost Right. My point though is that that cost is because of political decisions we make, not inherent in the technology. We could also choose to make solar projects equally risky in such ways; force solar projects to require to be baseline generators, not risk grid stability, and stop subsidizing home panel installations and see what happens to the solar industry. I’m not saying we should do that because solar is an important partner in the energy mix, but nuclear is more important to decarbonize as we still fail to see a drop in green house emissions on any grid that’s invested purely in renewables with only nuclear showing that it can offload carbon inputs; renewables have only generally shown the ability to level off growth of carbon inputs at the grid level (unless you look relatively small grids not in the richest nations, but the richest nations are the biggest polluters). > Also, costs rose not because of regulations in a vacuum. 3 mile island happened because of a lack of maintenance, you don’t solve that problem without spending more money on maintenance Just not true on several fronts. First the consequences of 3 mile island were wildly overblown and generated unnecessary fear. The cleanup cost was $1B which is negligible. In fact the plant is being restarted on the other reactor by 2028. Secondly, reactor design is hugely important. Fukushima and 3 mile island are Gen II reactors while Chernobyl was a Gen I reactor and we can see the drastically smaller issues we’ve had from such reactors. Gen III reactors are much safer and are cheaper while Gen IV reactors are generally completely fail-safe (i.e. doesn’t matter the quality of maintenance on the safety of the reactor). So pretending like nuclear has a constant maintenance cost that’s ever increasing ignores our ability to solve problems like this at the design stage. The problem is that regulations that remain stuck responding to Gen I designs being constantly applied to newer generations.

Retric 2y ago
> The cleanup cost was $1B which is negligible. “1 billion dollars” is not negligible when your company is paying it either directly or through insurance. They also lost a nuclear reactor (~$2.5 billion in 2018 dollars to build - depreciation) and lost revenue, so they were out far more than just 1B. Worse this isn’t a one off event, every single nuclear reactor was facing the same issue. Just from a pure economic perspective if someone says you need to spend say 20-30 m/year to avoid losing your nuclear power plant and paying 1B on top of this your going to do some internal calculations and figure out how much maintenance is worth 1B dollars and frankly it’s a lot of maintenance. But now every single nuclear reactor is now paying more every year on maintenance forever. The industry just got more expensive seemingly from thin air thus 3 mile island cost the nuclear industry a lot more than just what was spent on the island. Worse the same thing happens after basically every expensive incident. Almost never does the industry look at an expensive accident and say well that’s just the cost of doing business we don’t need to change anything. Which then means every year it just keeps getting more expensive.

Retric 2y ago

> The cleanup cost was $1B which is negligible. “1 billion dollars” is not negligible when your company is paying it either directly or through insurance. They also lost a nuclear reactor (~$2.5 billion in 2018 dollars to build - depreciation) and lost revenue, so they were out far more than just 1B. Worse this isn’t a one off event, every single nuclear reactor was facing the same issue. Just from a pure economic perspective if someone says you need to spend say 20-30 m/year to avoid losing your nuclear power plant and paying 1B on top of this your going to do some internal calculations and figure out how much maintenance is worth 1B dollars and frankly it’s a lot of maintenance. But now every single nuclear reactor is now paying more every year on maintenance forever. The industry just got more expensive seemingly from thin air thus 3 mile island cost the nuclear industry a lot more than just what was spent on the island. Worse the same thing happens after basically every expensive incident. Almost never does the industry look at an expensive accident and say well that’s just the cost of doing business we don’t need to change anything. Which then means every year it just keeps getting more expensive.