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We should be building far more nuclear. We wildly overengineered on safety regulations making them far more costly and risky to build than they actually need t

We should be building far more nuclear. We wildly overengineered on safety regulations making them far more costly and risky to build than they actually need to be. Even our older Gen II nuclear reactors from the 1990's are orders of magnitude safer than current fossil fuel power stations, in terms of both released radiation and lost human lifespan years. Moreover, the higher electricity prices that resulted from using non-nuclear power lead to ICE vehicles remaining more prevalent than they should be, and non-heat-pump heating remaining more prevalent than it should be, leading to millions more years of human lifespan lost. From a health perspective, blocking nuclear with overregulation was one of societies biggest health policy failures.

croes 2y ago
Who decides they are over engineered on safety? Didn’t we already learn better safe than sorry?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- markhahn 2y ago
  "better safe than sorry" is the definition of a slippery slope. but I'm curious: what event do you think taught us that? IMO, there's far mode damage being done to the world by, say, mercury in batteries than by nuclear accidents (of which chernobyl is the only serious one).
  - tmpz22 2y ago
    $PROBLEM_2 being worse than $PROBLEM_1 does not mean $PROBLEM_1 is over regulated. Nuclear Waste handling and disposal is a significant regulatory issue and includes many REACTIVE measures that have been hard-learned over the past century at sites like Pennsylvania, Fukushima, and Chernobyl. This blind lashing out at any and all forms of regulation is ignorant. Each of these situations needs to be considered thoughtfully and contextually to find a balance between short term and long term objectives.
    - Hammershaft 2y ago
      We do not thoughtfully balance regulatory costs on nuclear vs say coal... Nuclear regulatory compliance is orders of magnitude more expensive despite being orders of magnitude safer for human health (on top of the climate).
      - KennyBlanken 2y ago
        90% of new electricity generation in the US is solar or wind. Coal generation has generally trended downward since the mid 2000s. We don't need nuclear to replace coal.
        Recurecur 2y ago
        We certainly do need nuclear to replace coal. Coal and nuclear are both reliable sources of energy, unlike solar or wind. I'm sure you're about to go into some battery related hand waving, but that doesn't help in two ways. First, there will be intervals where the lull in production exceeds storage capacity, which means fatalities in many cases. Second, battery is expensive, so the total system cost can exceed the cost of nuclear (especially with sane regulation and continually improving engineering). Also, as far as "coal trending downward", that isn't the case outside the US. We're going to need a vastly increased energy supply in order to meet the world's needs. Nuclear fission absolutely needs to be part of that mix, as we work to master fusion and other advanced, safe, and environmentally responsible forms of energy production. Beyond that, high density energy sources are highly desirable off-planet. :-)
        myrmidon 2y ago
        > Nuclear fission absolutely needs to be part of that mix, as we work to master fusion and other advanced, safe, and environmentally responsible forms of energy production. Relying on fusion power to clean up electricity generation is highly irresponsible, because in every remotely credible scenario, rollout is MUCH too slow to meaningfully affect climate change. But I'm interested in trying to understand your view, and also which fusion power approach you put your faith in (and generally discussing this). I strongly believe that nuclear power has no future, because it performs very poorly in an energy market where the marginal cost of producing is very frequently near-zero (thanks to renewables). Nuclear power is already quite expensive-- only running the plants half the time ruins cost competitiveness completely. You can see this happening already in countries like France and China, where nuclear and coal power plants are increasingly operating in load-following mode (i.e. not 100% all-the-time), which makes them even less cost competitive than in the past. > I'm sure you're about to go into some battery related hand waving, but that doesn't help in two ways. First, there will be intervals where the lull in production exceeds storage capacity, which means fatalities in many cases. Second, battery is expensive, so the total system cost can exceed the cost of nuclear (especially with sane regulation and continually improving engineering). Tow points here: Intermittency is a problem that actually shrinks at scale: The more spread out your wind parks/panels are, the smaller the periods where they provide unexpectedly little power (=> you need less buffering than you would naively assume). Second point: a 100kWh battery is already affordable for a single household right now (thats basically big electric car battery). Price trends only go one direction there... > Second, battery is expensive, so the total system cost can exceed the cost of nuclear (especially with sane regulation and continually improving engineering). From this I assume you believe that nuclear reactors are not cost competitive mainly because of safety regulations, and "simply" fixing those regulations would make them able to compete on cost? This is likely incorrect. Consider: Coal power plants are basically a minimally regulated, built-at-scale, super-simplified variant of a thermal power plant. They are the "ideal" that hyper-optimized nuclear reactor designs will never be able to reach (disregarding fuel costs here!). Even so: They struggle to compete with renewable on price already (disregarding fuel costs!). What are your thoughts on this? My personal favorite: Tax carbon emission, use gas turbines as peaker plants, store energy long term via synthetic hydrogen, which is needed for carbon-free steel production anyway (and can also be used by gas peaker plants). Then just let the market find out which fraction of batteries, wind, solar, carbon-taxed gas/coal, nuclear etc. works best.
- adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
  Specifically, the current regulatory framework requires not just minimization of accident, but also minimization of radiation (to levels well below that of other powerplant types like coal). There probably could be a pretty notable cost savings in nuclear plant construction if they were allowed to regularly leak as much radiation into the environment to that which we already consider acceptable from other power sources.
  - 7952 2y ago
    So if we just do something politically unacceptable and probably morally unacceptable then nuclear will be viable? And of course you could apply the same thing to other sources of energy and they will equally get cheaper. Wind turbines in beauty spots. Remove the air quality equipment from fossil fuel plants. Dam evey river.
    - fsflover 2y ago
      It's the other way around. We should apply equal regulations to coal making nuclear more competing.
    - kergonath 2y ago
      > So if we just do something politically unacceptable and probably morally unacceptable then nuclear will be viable? I think you missed the point. Coal-fired plants leak radiation significantly. If this is not morally unacceptable in one case, why would it be in another? They did not say that nuclear should have a free pass, just that the regulations should be consistent. > And of course you could apply the same thing to other sources of energy and they will equally get cheaper. Different technologies have different downsides and advantages. The parent was talking about 2 technologies having inconsistent expectations for the same metric. Personally, I do not want wind turbines everywhere or a nuclear plant in a city centre, but I think that both technologies (plus solar and hydro) need to be developed, because both have much smaller ecological and human costs than the alternative. > Dam evey river. That is counter-productive as there are diminishing returns, and not every river is worth daming.
- Hammershaft 2y ago
  Even if you account for chernobyl and fukushima the death count from nuclear is orders of magnitudes less than the death count from coal, oil, solar, etc. We overregulated nuclear because the risk of nuclear disasters feels scarier than the real risk of deaths downstream of airborne particulates. There are tradeoffs to every safety regulation on nuclear and those tradeoffs include more climate induced disasters, a sicker population, long term higher energy costs, etc.
  - margalabargala 2y ago
    Tell us more about the death count from solar. Is it all people falling off roofs?
    - dmoy 2y ago
      Pretty much yea. So not exactly a fair comparison because e.g. grid level solar doesn't necessarily involve roof climbing. But given current installation base, it's like 3x more deaths per unit energy than wind.
      - hgomersall 2y ago
        I don't know how reliable it is, but the first link I clicked on contradicts your assertion: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
      - margalabargala 2y ago
        Got a source for that?
  - kristiandupont 2y ago
    >nuclear disasters feels scarier I am in favor of more nuclear power and I know very little about the field, but this argument never resonated with me. If the Chernobyl series paints a reasonably realistic image of what could have happened had they not contained the melt down, we are talking "better part of a continent being uninhabitable for thousands of years". When that is the potential risk, comparing death counts from non-catastrophic scenarios isn't what we should be looking at.
burnished 2y ago
What do you mean over engineered? Genuinely very curious, I thought the problem boiled down essentially to 'lack of will' and that there exist very safe reactor designs.
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  That's certainly a funny phrase, since it ought to mean that too much engineering effort was put in to getting something right but what it's actually used to mean is that someone got the trade-offs wrong. In this case it's being used to mean that the regulations are overly restrictive or complicated, and impose higher costs than are reasonable for the benefits they provide. (Or potentially that being overcomplicated actually makes them less effective than if they were done properly.)
jltsiren 2y ago
When a major nuclear disaster happens, it can cause hundreds of billions of damage. To make it worse from a liability perspective, that damage can be attributed to a specific power plant. We know from natural disasters that insurance is usually insufficient to cover the true damage. Either governments have to step in, or the victims have to bear the costs. If the government has to pay for damages but someone else pays for safety features, there are clear incentives for overregulation. The company operating the reactor obviously cannot pay. As long as shareholders are shielded from liability, it's easy enough to structure the company to ensure that it has no major assets beyond the power plant.
- scarab92 2y ago
  It's overall beneficial for society to switch to nuclear. The problem you posed is just a market structure implementation detail. Government could operate the plants, or they could offer insurance to private sector operators.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - vasco 2y ago
    I'm pro-nuclear but the idea that insurance fixes everything is strange to me. How much insurance money fixes you getting killed, would you say?
    - boxedemp 2y ago
      I missed where they say insurance solves everything. I understood it as the government running it solves many of the issues introduced by the private sector, and the insurance was another thought.
    - tbrownaw 2y ago
      This is not a novel question. If someone gets killed at work, how much do they get from workers' comp? What is a micromort and how much does one usually sell for? What did weregeld used to be back when it was still a thing?
notTooFarGone 2y ago
How about we build this stuff in deserts where you can just plaster everything with solar in like 10% of time and 30% of money investment. You now have 70% of budget to build battery/wind and still got enough time. This is solved with current renewable prices without ideological preferences.
- ikr678 2y ago
  Unfortunately, data centers also need access to considerable amounts of water.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
  No thank you. Build it in your backyard, not mine.
js8 2y ago
Nuclear is not economically viable compared to renewables (wind & solar), and it's rightfully on its way out. What is really needed is for humanity to say "enough" and stop using fossil fuels. Would it be a problem if training AI models (or running any other analytics) be lot more expensive in winter than summer? I doubt it. There is no reason not to use more renewables for this use case, then.
- scarab92 2y ago
  Nuclear has a far lower LCOE than renewables, when you mass produce them rather than do ad-hoc bespoke builds. For example, the Gen II+ plants built in the 90's had an (inflation adjusted) price of about $500 million per GWe. Whereas, the cost of the recent Vogtl build was $15 billion per GWe! Renewables proponents point to the cost of Vogtl (or similar) when they say that Nuclear has a higher cost than renewables, which is dishonest. The incremental cost of new reactors is far lower when you build many of them. The recent projects are mostly learning curve costs because of how long it's been. The other part of this is that expensive silicon is not going to sit idle. It needs baseload power, and for solar that means adding batteries, and also downrating the nameplate capacity to it's wintertime capacity. These factors increase the real world cost of renewable power significantly. Don't get me wrong, I think we should be investing in renewable as well, but it's still a substantially more expensive way to generate power than a serious roll out of nuclear would be.
  - drysine 2y ago
    >The other part of this is that expensive silicon is not going to sit idle. It needs baseload power Why not? Just have the excess of computational capacity in many different regions and compute where the sun is shining bright now.
    - scarab92 2y ago
      Because amortised capital cost > operational (power) cost It's cheaper to build a 1 GW baseload power plant to sit beside your existing GPUs, than to buy another 1 GW of GPUs to place on the other side of the planet. Also, latency. Also, a large scale roll out of nuclear would be cheaper than solar regardless. Most of the cost of recent nuclear builds is learning cost. We build them so infrequently that people retire or move on before the next one is built, so we have to learn how to build them from scratch, and develop the supply chains from scratch each time.

croes 2y ago

Who decides they are over engineered on safety? Didn’t we already learn better safe than sorry?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
markhahn 2y ago
"better safe than sorry" is the definition of a slippery slope. but I'm curious: what event do you think taught us that? IMO, there's far mode damage being done to the world by, say, mercury in batteries than by nuclear accidents (of which chernobyl is the only serious one).
- tmpz22 2y ago
  $PROBLEM_2 being worse than $PROBLEM_1 does not mean $PROBLEM_1 is over regulated. Nuclear Waste handling and disposal is a significant regulatory issue and includes many REACTIVE measures that have been hard-learned over the past century at sites like Pennsylvania, Fukushima, and Chernobyl. This blind lashing out at any and all forms of regulation is ignorant. Each of these situations needs to be considered thoughtfully and contextually to find a balance between short term and long term objectives.
  - Hammershaft 2y ago
    We do not thoughtfully balance regulatory costs on nuclear vs say coal... Nuclear regulatory compliance is orders of magnitude more expensive despite being orders of magnitude safer for human health (on top of the climate).
    - KennyBlanken 2y ago
      90% of new electricity generation in the US is solar or wind. Coal generation has generally trended downward since the mid 2000s. We don't need nuclear to replace coal.
      - Recurecur 2y ago
        We certainly do need nuclear to replace coal. Coal and nuclear are both reliable sources of energy, unlike solar or wind. I'm sure you're about to go into some battery related hand waving, but that doesn't help in two ways. First, there will be intervals where the lull in production exceeds storage capacity, which means fatalities in many cases. Second, battery is expensive, so the total system cost can exceed the cost of nuclear (especially with sane regulation and continually improving engineering). Also, as far as "coal trending downward", that isn't the case outside the US. We're going to need a vastly increased energy supply in order to meet the world's needs. Nuclear fission absolutely needs to be part of that mix, as we work to master fusion and other advanced, safe, and environmentally responsible forms of energy production. Beyond that, high density energy sources are highly desirable off-planet. :-)
        myrmidon 2y ago
        > Nuclear fission absolutely needs to be part of that mix, as we work to master fusion and other advanced, safe, and environmentally responsible forms of energy production. Relying on fusion power to clean up electricity generation is highly irresponsible, because in every remotely credible scenario, rollout is MUCH too slow to meaningfully affect climate change. But I'm interested in trying to understand your view, and also which fusion power approach you put your faith in (and generally discussing this). I strongly believe that nuclear power has no future, because it performs very poorly in an energy market where the marginal cost of producing is very frequently near-zero (thanks to renewables). Nuclear power is already quite expensive-- only running the plants half the time ruins cost competitiveness completely. You can see this happening already in countries like France and China, where nuclear and coal power plants are increasingly operating in load-following mode (i.e. not 100% all-the-time), which makes them even less cost competitive than in the past. > I'm sure you're about to go into some battery related hand waving, but that doesn't help in two ways. First, there will be intervals where the lull in production exceeds storage capacity, which means fatalities in many cases. Second, battery is expensive, so the total system cost can exceed the cost of nuclear (especially with sane regulation and continually improving engineering). Tow points here: Intermittency is a problem that actually shrinks at scale: The more spread out your wind parks/panels are, the smaller the periods where they provide unexpectedly little power (=> you need less buffering than you would naively assume). Second point: a 100kWh battery is already affordable for a single household right now (thats basically big electric car battery). Price trends only go one direction there... > Second, battery is expensive, so the total system cost can exceed the cost of nuclear (especially with sane regulation and continually improving engineering). From this I assume you believe that nuclear reactors are not cost competitive mainly because of safety regulations, and "simply" fixing those regulations would make them able to compete on cost? This is likely incorrect. Consider: Coal power plants are basically a minimally regulated, built-at-scale, super-simplified variant of a thermal power plant. They are the "ideal" that hyper-optimized nuclear reactor designs will never be able to reach (disregarding fuel costs here!). Even so: They struggle to compete with renewable on price already (disregarding fuel costs!). What are your thoughts on this? My personal favorite: Tax carbon emission, use gas turbines as peaker plants, store energy long term via synthetic hydrogen, which is needed for carbon-free steel production anyway (and can also be used by gas peaker plants). Then just let the market find out which fraction of batteries, wind, solar, carbon-taxed gas/coal, nuclear etc. works best.
adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
Specifically, the current regulatory framework requires not just minimization of accident, but also minimization of radiation (to levels well below that of other powerplant types like coal). There probably could be a pretty notable cost savings in nuclear plant construction if they were allowed to regularly leak as much radiation into the environment to that which we already consider acceptable from other power sources.
- 7952 2y ago
  So if we just do something politically unacceptable and probably morally unacceptable then nuclear will be viable? And of course you could apply the same thing to other sources of energy and they will equally get cheaper. Wind turbines in beauty spots. Remove the air quality equipment from fossil fuel plants. Dam evey river.
  - fsflover 2y ago
    It's the other way around. We should apply equal regulations to coal making nuclear more competing.
  - kergonath 2y ago
    > So if we just do something politically unacceptable and probably morally unacceptable then nuclear will be viable? I think you missed the point. Coal-fired plants leak radiation significantly. If this is not morally unacceptable in one case, why would it be in another? They did not say that nuclear should have a free pass, just that the regulations should be consistent. > And of course you could apply the same thing to other sources of energy and they will equally get cheaper. Different technologies have different downsides and advantages. The parent was talking about 2 technologies having inconsistent expectations for the same metric. Personally, I do not want wind turbines everywhere or a nuclear plant in a city centre, but I think that both technologies (plus solar and hydro) need to be developed, because both have much smaller ecological and human costs than the alternative. > Dam evey river. That is counter-productive as there are diminishing returns, and not every river is worth daming.
Hammershaft 2y ago
Even if you account for chernobyl and fukushima the death count from nuclear is orders of magnitudes less than the death count from coal, oil, solar, etc. We overregulated nuclear because the risk of nuclear disasters feels scarier than the real risk of deaths downstream of airborne particulates. There are tradeoffs to every safety regulation on nuclear and those tradeoffs include more climate induced disasters, a sicker population, long term higher energy costs, etc.
- margalabargala 2y ago
  Tell us more about the death count from solar. Is it all people falling off roofs?
  - dmoy 2y ago
    Pretty much yea. So not exactly a fair comparison because e.g. grid level solar doesn't necessarily involve roof climbing. But given current installation base, it's like 3x more deaths per unit energy than wind.
    - hgomersall 2y ago
      I don't know how reliable it is, but the first link I clicked on contradicts your assertion: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
    - margalabargala 2y ago
      Got a source for that?
- kristiandupont 2y ago
  >nuclear disasters feels scarier I am in favor of more nuclear power and I know very little about the field, but this argument never resonated with me. If the Chernobyl series paints a reasonably realistic image of what could have happened had they not contained the melt down, we are talking "better part of a continent being uninhabitable for thousands of years". When that is the potential risk, comparing death counts from non-catastrophic scenarios isn't what we should be looking at.

burnished 2y ago

What do you mean over engineered? Genuinely very curious, I thought the problem boiled down essentially to 'lack of will' and that there exist very safe reactor designs.

tbrownaw 2y ago
That's certainly a funny phrase, since it ought to mean that too much engineering effort was put in to getting something right but what it's actually used to mean is that someone got the trade-offs wrong. In this case it's being used to mean that the regulations are overly restrictive or complicated, and impose higher costs than are reasonable for the benefits they provide. (Or potentially that being overcomplicated actually makes them less effective than if they were done properly.)

jltsiren 2y ago

When a major nuclear disaster happens, it can cause hundreds of billions of damage. To make it worse from a liability perspective, that damage can be attributed to a specific power plant. We know from natural disasters that insurance is usually insufficient to cover the true damage. Either governments have to step in, or the victims have to bear the costs. If the government has to pay for damages but someone else pays for safety features, there are clear incentives for overregulation. The company operating the reactor obviously cannot pay. As long as shareholders are shielded from liability, it's easy enough to structure the company to ensure that it has no major assets beyond the power plant.

scarab92 2y ago
It's overall beneficial for society to switch to nuclear. The problem you posed is just a market structure implementation detail. Government could operate the plants, or they could offer insurance to private sector operators.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- vasco 2y ago
  I'm pro-nuclear but the idea that insurance fixes everything is strange to me. How much insurance money fixes you getting killed, would you say?
  - boxedemp 2y ago
    I missed where they say insurance solves everything. I understood it as the government running it solves many of the issues introduced by the private sector, and the insurance was another thought.
  - tbrownaw 2y ago
    This is not a novel question. If someone gets killed at work, how much do they get from workers' comp? What is a micromort and how much does one usually sell for? What did weregeld used to be back when it was still a thing?

notTooFarGone 2y ago

How about we build this stuff in deserts where you can just plaster everything with solar in like 10% of time and 30% of money investment. You now have 70% of budget to build battery/wind and still got enough time. This is solved with current renewable prices without ideological preferences.

ikr678 2y ago
Unfortunately, data centers also need access to considerable amounts of water.
ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
No thank you. Build it in your backyard, not mine.

js8 2y ago

Nuclear is not economically viable compared to renewables (wind & solar), and it's rightfully on its way out. What is really needed is for humanity to say "enough" and stop using fossil fuels. Would it be a problem if training AI models (or running any other analytics) be lot more expensive in winter than summer? I doubt it. There is no reason not to use more renewables for this use case, then.

scarab92 2y ago
Nuclear has a far lower LCOE than renewables, when you mass produce them rather than do ad-hoc bespoke builds. For example, the Gen II+ plants built in the 90's had an (inflation adjusted) price of about $500 million per GWe. Whereas, the cost of the recent Vogtl build was $15 billion per GWe! Renewables proponents point to the cost of Vogtl (or similar) when they say that Nuclear has a higher cost than renewables, which is dishonest. The incremental cost of new reactors is far lower when you build many of them. The recent projects are mostly learning curve costs because of how long it's been. The other part of this is that expensive silicon is not going to sit idle. It needs baseload power, and for solar that means adding batteries, and also downrating the nameplate capacity to it's wintertime capacity. These factors increase the real world cost of renewable power significantly. Don't get me wrong, I think we should be investing in renewable as well, but it's still a substantially more expensive way to generate power than a serious roll out of nuclear would be.
- drysine 2y ago
  >The other part of this is that expensive silicon is not going to sit idle. It needs baseload power Why not? Just have the excess of computational capacity in many different regions and compute where the sun is shining bright now.
  - scarab92 2y ago
    Because amortised capital cost > operational (power) cost It's cheaper to build a 1 GW baseload power plant to sit beside your existing GPUs, than to buy another 1 GW of GPUs to place on the other side of the planet. Also, latency. Also, a large scale roll out of nuclear would be cheaper than solar regardless. Most of the cost of recent nuclear builds is learning cost. We build them so infrequently that people retire or move on before the next one is built, so we have to learn how to build them from scratch, and develop the supply chains from scratch each time.