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We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. I understand that regulation is needed but we also

We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. I understand that regulation is needed but we also need nuclear energy, we have to find a streamlined way to get more plants up and running as soon as possible. I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California. My rates have doubled in a few years to over $0.40/kWh and up over $0.50/kWh after I go up a tier depending on usage.

epistasis 1y ago
Which are the fake costs from regulation? We have new builds in Europe of the EPR, in France and Finland, and it has had disastrous costs. China has built some too, presumably cheaper, since they keep on building more. What is the regulatory difference there? I have yet to find any concrete defense of the idea that costs are coming from regulation, rather than the costs of construction in advanced economies. If regulations are the cost, name them and a solution. Otherwise it seems like we are wasting efforts in optimizing the wrong thing for nuclear.
- reenorap 1y ago
  It takes 15 years to build a nuclear power plant. It shouldn't take this long at all and it's strictly because of regulations. If we cut down the time it takes to build a plant the cost plummets.
  - kachnuv_ocasek 1y ago
    But what are the specific regulations you would cut, dude?
    - avidiax 1y ago
      I have heard it claimed, at least for US construction, that a nuclear plant under construction has to implement new safety measures even if those measures were adopted after the design approval or construction start date. This means that the design can change multiple times during construction, which both slows construction and exposes the project to even more safety design changes. Ironically, the creaky old plants that were built long ago don't need to adopt such new safety requirements. They are grandfathered in, but can't be economically replaced because the costs of a replacement are artificially inflated. A car analogy would be that we continue driving 1955 Chevy Bel-Airs with no seat belts since an up-to-date car is too expensive to develop, since we can't start production until the latest LIDAR and AI has been added. Once the LIDAR is in, pray that there's no new self-driving hardware released before full production, or we'll have to include that too.
      - epistasis 1y ago
        Thank you for being specific! This is no longer the case under modern licensing. Look at Vogtle and Summer, who were so expensive and disastrous that the Summer build was abandoned with billions of dollars sunk in construction. Nothing was changed on the regulatory side, and it was licensed under a new regulatory model requested by industry, that let them start construction without everything fully designed yet. There were many super expensive changes during the build, but that was due to EPC, not regulatory stuff. The NRC has been extremely open to regulatory changes since the 2000s, especially with the "nuclear renaissance" push around 2008. I'm not aware of any suggested regulatory changes that were not adopted.
  - happosai 1y ago
    Nuclear regulations are no worse than aviation regulation. Yet planes manage to be cost competitive. Cutting regulations isn't necessary the win people think. If safety regulations are cut, it risks accidents in future. Nuclear needs to move from bespoke builds to serial production.
    - boringg 1y ago
      Thats not the full picture. Aviation exploded in growth -- you can easily expand operations and work to smaller margins. The US shut down the nuclear industry intentionally from the 80s until the last 5 years from regulations.
      - pfdietz 1y ago
        It's a bogus talking point that the nuclear industry in the US was shut down due to increase in regulation. The actual situation was that relentless 7%/year demand growth for electrical energy suddenly stalled, while at the same time a large amount of new capacity from cogeneration, made possible by the passage of PURPA in 1978, suddenly started to come on line. In this environment, and with the cost overruns and delays of the earlier nuclear builds, utilities could not make a case for new nuclear construction. High interest rates also didn't help.
  - epistasis 1y ago
    Which regulations? What would change in the construction process? China builds the same designs as the EU and US, yet faster. What is different? I saw toooooooons of reports of construction mishaps in the US at Vogtle and Summer. I didn't see anything about "oh if we changed this sort of regulation it would have saved us money." It's a very worthwhile to read the retrospectives on these builds. There are lots of plans of future builds of the AP1000 that would be cheaper, but none of the plans even indicate that a regulation change would help. I beg of people who say regulations are in the way: which regulations? Concretely, what should change to make construction cheaper? Pun intended.
    - RandomBacon 1y ago
      > What is different? All of the NIMBY roadblocks that ties up U.S. projects in court, that China doesn't give a F about considering they'll displace 1.3 million people to build a damn.
      - epistasis 1y ago
        We have recent examples of construction costs going through the roof in the US: Vogtle and Summer. Both projects were welcomed by their communities in Georgia and South Carolina. And at the state level, legislators were so enthusiastic for the projects that they passed new laws so that the costs of any overrun would get directly passed on to ratepayers, letting utilities escape financial risk for construction overruns. I have no doubt that constructing nuclear at a new site would run into many NIMBY complaints. But most (not all) existing nuclear sites have communities that welcome the nuclear reactors, and want new ones to replace the aging ones, and ensure continuity of jobs for the community.
      - pfdietz 1y ago
        The recent US builds were not tied up by "NIMBY roadblocks". It's interesting that in China, which you assert lacks roadblocks, renewables are being installed to a much greater extent than nuclear.
    - jay_kyburz 1y ago
      Perhaps the are talking about Unions and the regulations around minimum pay and working conditions. I don't know about big construction projects, but the costs to get an extension approved on my house is a drop in the ocean compared to paying tradies. (contractors in us speak.)
- darkamaul 1y ago
  All the safety and countermeasure costs here ultimately stem from regulation. If we allowed less safe power plants, they would likely be cheaper to build and operate. However, I’m not sure I want private for profits actor deciding the level of safety of such projects.
  - epistasis 1y ago
    We have one model for cheaper construction of nuclear, using exactly the same designs as in the US (AP1000) or EU (EPR), and that example is China. I don't think China is building them any less safe. I don't think the regulations are significantly different. I don't think any of the designers of the nuclear reactors want to build them any less safely, either, because they are not asking for that. Many of the "safety" stuff is also about prolonging longevity of the reactor as long as possible. Like really inspecting the welds on tubing, etc. Any reduction in safety there also ultimately increases costs by reducing the lifetime of the plant or heavily increasing maintenance costs. That's why I don't think this is a tradeoff between safety and cost. I think it's a tradeoff between construction/design competence and cost.
- krisoft 1y ago
  > If regulations are the cost, name them and a solution. That is a funny ask. Regulation doesnt have to be a single thing. It can very well be cost-overrun by a thousand paper cut. You can drown any project in endless paperwork, environmental and national security reviews. In fact unclear and contradictory requirements are much more conductive to drive costs up than a single Lets-make-nuclear-expensive-Act. That being said if you need to pick a single thing (which is silly) then the “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” principle of radiation protection is a prime candidate. When you have a safety limit you can design a system to remain under it. When you are designing a sytem for the ALARA principle that in itself will blow your costs up.
  - Matticus_Rex 1y ago
    You're getting downvoted, but you're correct. It's death by a thousand cuts, because ALARA forces radiation exposure-reduction expenditures to scale upward forever, despite the fact that radiation exposure from plants long ago reached levels far below those that result in any risk. There is no lower bound, so the regulators never stop reducing exposure further, raising costs further and further over time. Under ALARA, nuclear literally isn't allowed to reduce market electric costs, because the requirements for reducing exposure scale to what keeps it competitive with other forms of production! If all other electric costs doubled tomorrow, the NRC would respond by raising the requirements for plants to reduce radiation exposure. If that sounds insane, it's because it's insane. Our nuclear regulations are insane.
    - epistasis 1y ago
      ALARA would indicate that the increased costs from regulation are due to the design of the reactor. However, my example is of reactors that China can build cost effectively, but which Europe can not. (And the AP1000 is an example where China can build the design cost effectively, but the US can not.) That would indicate that nuclear reactors could be built cost effectively, with the same design, and without changing ALARA. Removing ALARA may provide some sort of cost savings, but without some concrete and specific indication of how that would change the design, and to what savings during construction, it's hard to agree that ALARA is at fault.
- boringg 1y ago
  Its multifold. 1. Regulations are a big asterisk to any project. If you don't think you will get licensed or your project will get axed halfway through or there is a risk (Which has been very high in the past). Investors who would put money up for the project won't do it OR they require a significantly higher cost of capital. 2. There is very little muscle memory in the fabrication of reactors and reactor components in north America because we de facto shut down the industry from 80s until 20s. Therefore the first projects will cost more money as we recover our abilities to fab. 3. The licensing and regulatory costs are also incredibly high - and you cant make any adjustments if you kick off the project or you restart the process. This leads to massive cost over runs. China and Korea are currently building reactors about 1/6 the costs of the US I believe.
  - epistasis 1y ago
    China is building US and EU designs of reactors at a fraction of the costs in the US and Europe. Your examples of regulatory asterisks are on the design side of things. I don't think that the cost of capital for Vogtle & Summer in the US, or Flamanville and Olkiluoto in the EU, were excessively high. As for your 3rd point, there were tons of adjustments during the build of Vogtle, which is a big reason for its large cost overruns. Regulation didn't necessitate those changes, they were all construction bungles. Which I think leads to your point 2, construction competence, being the primary cause, which aligns with everything else I have read on the subject. For example, another poster pointed to this paper: > We observe that nth-of-a-kind plants have been more, not less, expensive than first-of-a-kind plants. “Soft” factors external to standardized reactor hardware, such as labor supervision, contributed over half of the cost rise from 1976 to 1987. Relatedly, containment building costs more than doubled from 1976 to 2017, due only in part to safety regulations.
- helaoban 1y ago
  Shouldn't the burden of proof belong to those that claim that regulation isn't the cost, when it is so extremely obvious to anybody who has ever had to build anything that it is? Just look at building costs in California vs Texas. Both are nominally constituents of the same "advanced economy".
  - epistasis 1y ago
    If you're proposing a change, shouldn't the change be specifiable? Why is the burden of proof on those asking "what change?" to demonstrate that no change is possible? That's a complete inversion of responsibility. I have a whole host of clearly specifiable changes to California building law that will make it cheaper, and am actively working on them both locally and at the state level! This is clear! As somebody who is very interested in making Calforina housing cheaper, and in particular housing construction cheaper, it is my duty to say what should change, why, and convince others of it. If I go out and advocate for "change" without being able to specify a single change, I would get jack shit done. It doesn't work that way. Every single nuclear advocate that I have ever met that says "regulations should change" can still not yet specify how those regulations should change. That's the minimal bar for holding an opinion. Reading the DoE LPO report on how nuclear can scale up and get cheaper, it wasn't regulations doing the work. It was learning how to build.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- jjk166 1y ago
  > I have yet to find any concrete defense of the idea that costs are coming from regulation, rather than the costs of construction in advanced economies. One of the main drivers of excessive costs of construction in advanced economies are from excessive regulations, so it's really one in the same. Nuclear is obviously more regulated than other industries, and it routinely faces more frequent, longer delays and higher cost overruns than projects of comparable scale and complexity. This study [1] goes into a lot more detail. Digging more into the details, it's all linked. The lack of regulatory clarity means that designs have to be changed more after construction starts, requirements for redundancy increase complexity, changing regulations prevents standardization, etc. Prescriptive regulations which were created decades ago limit the cost savings possible with newer technologies, like improved reinforced concrete. This study [1] goes into a lot more detail. > Our retrospective and prospective analyses together provide insights on the past shortcomings of engineering cost models and possible solutions for the future. Nuclear reactor costs exceeded estimates in engineering models because cost variables related to labor productivity and safety regulations were underestimated. These discrepancies between estimated and realized costs increased with time, with changing regulations and variable construction site-specific characteristics. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243512030458X#:~:text=Cost%20increases%20have%20been%20associated,governance%20compared%20to%20other%20technologies. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243512...
  - epistasis 1y ago
    > The lack of regulatory clarity Oddly enough, that sounds like a request for more regulation. And I have heard many people say that if the regulators had made sure that if approval had gone beyond mere safety, into constructibility and other areas, that Vogtle would have been closer to the initial budget, and that Summer might have completed. Thank you for the link, and I will read it in detail later, but at a high level, I think it's great support for my point that it's construction productivity that's the key driver of cost, not regulation (emphasis mine): > Relatedly, containment building costs more than doubled from 1976 to 2017, due only in part to safety regulations. Costs of the reactor containment building more than doubled, primarily due to declining on-site labor productivity. Productivity in recent US plants is up to 13 times lower than industry expectations. A prospective analysis of the containment building suggests that improved materials and automation could increase the resilience of nuclear construction costs to variable conditions.
yellowapple 1y ago
> I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California. I grew up a few miles away from SMUD's Rancho Seco nuclear power plant; I maintain that shutting it down was SMUD's worst decision. There were problems motivating that shutdown, yes, but nothing that couldn't have been solved.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 1y ago
  Yeah it seems like having State control is not a silver bullet
carstenhag 1y ago
I am pretty sure governments around the world want it to be cheaper, but at the same time know that it must be very strictly regulated. Even if that makes it pricier, one can't call that "fake costs". Also, it takes decades to build them, very often then also getting delayed. Why even consider it nowadays?
- diordiderot 1y ago
  Maybe roll back regulation to when France rolled out the Messmer plan? They spent 1/4th of what we do today.
acidburnNSA 1y ago
This is said a lot but I don't think regs as written are necessarily the major cost driver. I did a nuclear industry survey to ask what specific regulations people would want changed recently. The one where using commercial grade QA instead of nuclear grade is very interesting. I think industry overreaction to the regs is possibly as large or larger of a problem than the regs themselves. https://whatisnuclear.com/news/2025-05-23-regulatory-reforms-nuclear-wants.html https://whatisnuclear.com/news/2025-05-23-regulatory-reforms...
- zdragnar 1y ago
  I'm a bit miffed I can't find the article now, but I recall hearing it was more the reactor design approval process than the operational process regulations that interfered with and drove up costs. Every tiny detail of a site has to be taken into account, forcing modifications to existing designs such that every build ends up being bespoke anyway. On top of that, many of the rules around the design approval process are geared towards older generation reactors and newer generation reactors end up being cost ineffective because they need to account for things that don't apply to them. If anyone remembers that article, I'd love to cite it here. If not, feel free to ignore what is otherwise unfounded speculation I guess.
  - acidburnNSA 1y ago
    Maybe this article? https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power-construction https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power... There is some regulatory burden for sure. But the NRC has been very conducive to standardization, and approved construction and operation licenses of like 20 brand new latest generation water-cooled reactors in the first nuclear Renaissance (2006). It was Fukushima and fracking that killed that Renaissance, not regulations. https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/large-lwr/col-holder https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/large-lwr/col-hold... The NRC has also been generous with advanced reactor licenses, granting construction licenses for the Kairos Hermes 1 and 2 molten salt cooled test reactors recently. And one for the Abilene Christian university's molten salt fueled reactor too! https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nrc-approves-construction-hermes-reactor https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nrc-approves-construction... A lot of the tech world got it in their heads that nuclear regs are the main issue in nuclear when in reality it is still megaprojects construction management. The small advanced reactors are likely to be very expensive per kWh
ahmeneeroe-v2 1y ago
You should look more closely at your PG&E bill. There are some hidden CA taxes in there. Also PG&E was forced to divest most of their generation assets, so I believe that much of the grid power down there is not under PG&E's control Edit: Finally, any Western US utility needs to bear the cost of wildfire liability. Whether that is a state-owned utility or private, the cost is still there.
- reenorap 1y ago
  PG&E is in no way a victim here. Their CEO is being paid $50M a year, and our rates got increased 6 times last year. Nevada the next state over, the prices are 20% of California's.
  - Ajedi32 1y ago
    Victim, no. Being over regulated doesn't necessarily hurt a company if all their competitors are subject to the same regulations. It's consumers who pay the price. 5x the price, apparently, if Nevada is any indication.
    - epistasis 1y ago
      It is under regulation that is the problem here. PG&E has caused multiple huge disasters through negligence that have caused deaths and billions in damages that they pass on to rate payers. And this is after they redirected funds for maintenance directly to executive compensation. The regulators should have thrown the hammer down on PG&E then, but after the disaster happens the money has to come from somewhere. Even if PG&E declares bankruptcy, the grid must run, and people must be able to rebuild their destroyed homes. A public utility would be better than this sort of parasitic investor owned utility. Or, lots more regulation, and lots more jail time.
      - Ajedi32 1y ago
        I see. So Nevada and the 46 other states with electricity cheaper than California[1] all have stricter regulation than California then? That's why their electricity is so much cheaper? [1]: https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/ https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/
lawn 1y ago
Another big reason for the high costs is the lack of experience building the plants.
SCUSKU 1y ago
The reason PGE is so expensive is because it's a privately owned monopoly with a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns. Additionally, the urban areas of California are subsidizing the fire prone rural areas of the state. The "fake costs" are not primarily from regulation as much as it is from the need to squeeze profit. For comparison, look at Silicon Valley Power which is owned and operated by the city of Santa Clara. SVP charges $0.175/kwh vs PGE $0.425/kwh. [1] [1] - https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees
- ahmeneeroe-v2 1y ago
  >the urban areas of California are subsidizing the fire prone rural areas of the state Meanwhile Rural California is where the electricity is actually generated[1]; they're "subsidizing" urban use. >SVP vs PG&E This has nothing to do with the ownership model and everything to do with not being obligated to serve rural areas. They get to serve only lower cost dense areas [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Cali...
  - SCUSKU 1y ago
    True that SVP benefits from not serving a rural area, but we also need to consider again that PGE is a for-profit organization that in 2024 posted $2.5B in profits, which were distributed to shareholders[1]. If PGE were owned by the state with no such fiduciary duty, this money could instead be used to lower rates and/or invest in infrastructure. [1] - https://www.zacks.com/stock/quote/PCG/income-statement?icid=quote-stock_overview-quote_nav_tracking-zcom-left_subnav_quote_navbar-income_statement https://www.zacks.com/stock/quote/PCG/income-statement?icid=...
    - avidiax 1y ago
      My napkin math is that the $2.5B in profits accounts for about $0.14/kWH. This is based on total electrical energy production of 17,301 GWh, since PG&E doesn't seem to publish their total distributed energy. https://www.google.com/search?q=%242.5+billion+%2F+17%2C301+GWh+in+dollars+per+kWh https://www.google.com/search?q=%242.5+billion+%2F+17%2C301+... https://www.eia.gov/state/print.php?sid=CA#tabs-1 https://www.eia.gov/state/print.php?sid=CA#tabs-1
raverbashing 1y ago
> the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation Regulation yes but I wonder how much of it is just "boomer engineering" Nuclear efforts should be directed into the safest and simplest designs. Designs that need water pumps to cool (like Fukushima) are the type of unnecessary risk and complexity that nobody needs
mixdup 1y ago
A major reason nuclear plants are super expensive is because we do it so rarely Every reactor and every plant is bespoke, even if they are based on a common "design" each instance is different enough that every project has to be managed from the ground up as a new thing, you get certified only on a single plant, operators can't move from plant to plant without recertification, etc Part of that is because they are so big and massive, and take a long time to build. If we'd build smaller, modular reactors that are literally exactly the same every single time you would begin to get economies of scale, you'd be able to get by without having to build a complete replica for training every time, and by being smaller you'd get to value delivery much quicker reducing the finance costs, which would then let you plow the profits from Reactor A into Reactor B's construction
- nicce 1y ago
  It isn't that rare in general - if the U.S. opens the secrets of nuclear submarines - we had had mini reactors for decades.
  - _aavaa_ 1y ago
    The problem is economics. Just because the Us built a fleet does not mean that they are economical once put in a non-military application.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - tick_tock_tick 1y ago
    I'd be fine with us just having the USA navy operate them we build them for carriers and subs just double or triple the order and plug em into the grid.
  - fmajid 1y ago
    And the technology is incredibly mature, submarine reactors were some of the first reactors, period.
jsbisviewtiful 1y ago
[flagged]
- boringg 1y ago
  Nuclear safety to provide safety is important but not to stifle any innovation or deployment which is what it has been.
- monocularvision 1y ago
  It’s always funny to me to see folks with the “HN leans _________” comments every few days with the blank spot filled in with every single political position one can think of.
  - psychoslave 1y ago
    HN leans to perfect diversity: power distribution is so boring. :D
    - marcosdumay 1y ago
      It's not diverse. Whoever you are, HN always leans in perfect opposition to your ideas.
      - reilly3000 1y ago
        If there’s something we can all agree on, that’s our blind spot.
  - peterfirefly 1y ago
    Different people react to different topics. Some bring out strident autistic commies, some bring out psycho druggies, some bring out extreme capitalist dreamers (also likely autistic), some bring out furries and trannies (also likely autistic and definitely strident). They rarely all met in a single thread.
- bawolff 1y ago
boringg 1y ago
This should be a quick reminder to the crowd -- Nuclear is almost always a public/private partnership to manage the project development costs and to keep the cost of capital in a reasonable range. The costs are large for a private company to put up the capital with the risk involved.
- pfdietz 1y ago
  In other words: nuclear is not viable unless the risks are offloaded to the public. Privatize profits, socialize risks.
  - boringg 1y ago
    Its the same with any massive infrastructure investment - only governments have the balance sheet to build them.
    - epistasis 1y ago
      It is not that way with other similar types of power production.
  - ezst 1y ago
    Or, you know, socialize risks, socialise profits. I don't know why we would have to put up with this abuse and corruption any longer.
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      It's precious that you think a socialized system wouldn't be rife with corruption.
      - ezst 1y ago
        You only really have two options there: - a system of lords and peasants, where the lords are held accountable and kept in check by the peasants, as the social contract obliges, or - a system of lords and peasants, with no checks and balances Obviously, corruption can creep in any system, but the one that states "let's give it all to the lords with nothing in return" seems asinine to me.
YeahThisIsMe 1y ago
Your rates aren't doing insane shit because you don't have nuclear energy. Renewables are way way way cheaper.
- RandomBacon 1y ago
  How much of that rate is because China is flooding the market with wind turbine blades and solar panels? How much would it cost if China turns off that supply?
  - rootusrootus 1y ago
    To use wind turbines as an example, more than 50% of the various bits are manufactured here in the US. For turbines destined US wind farms, at least.
  - fulafel 1y ago
    What's the evidence that there's "flooding the market" going on? It seems to me wind turbine prices have followed a plausible looking downwards hill and there's no sign of dumping excess inventory or otherwise unsustainably low prices.
  - triceratops 1y ago
    > How much would it cost if China turns off that supply? Buy them while they're selling cheap. They're good for at least 20 years. Plenty of time to stand up domestic manufacturing if they cut you off.
bryanlarsen 1y ago
A nuclear fission power plant is never going to be cheaper than a coal plant, and coal plants are very expensive. They're superficially similar types of plants: they heat water and then use a steam turbine to convert it to electricity. Coal plants use higher temperatures and pressures, so they can use smaller turbines. That turbine is a massive part of the cost. Yes, there's room to drive down the cost of nuclear. No, it's never going to be cost competitive with solar/wind/batteries, no matter how much you drive down the cost or eliminate regulations.
- beeflet 1y ago
  It can be cheaper to run a nuclear plant than a conventional power plant, due to lower fuel costs. But what kills nuclear is the capital costs of building the plant. It takes a while to reap the reward
  - bryanlarsen 1y ago
    I'm talking about capital costs, not operating costs. $3B/GW for a coal plant is about 5X as much as natgas.
  - s1mplicissimus 1y ago
    Does that calculation include the cost of storing the nuclear waste after use? I'd be curious to see a reference for your claim.
    - Llamamoe 1y ago
      You need to look up how much nuclear waste is actually produced. It's a minuscule amount relative to the energy produced, and it doesn't actually need more than to be transported and then encased in concrete.
      - Jedd 1y ago
        It's not the volume of the waste that's the challenge - it's handling and storage that remain mostly unsolved. By unsolved I mean - not convincingly solved, and certainly not yet tested over the expected duration that material needs to be safely contained.
ViewTrick1002 1y ago
That is what we did 20 years ago when the renewable industry barely existed. What has happened since is that the nuclear industry essentially collapsed given the outcome of Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinklkey Point C and can't build new plants while renewables and storage are delivering over 90% of new capacity in the US. Being the cheapest energy source in human history. We've gone past the "throw stuff at the wall" phase, now we know what sticks and that is renewables and storage.
zer00eyz 1y ago
> I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California. If you think PG&E jacking up prices has anything other than greed, hubris and decades of short term thinking behind it, I have news for you. And thats is why people look at nuclear and say "no thanks". The same corporate structures that hid data about smoking, PFAS and oxycodone are the ones you want running a nuclear plant? Can you make a nuclear plant safe, small and useful: yes. The navy has been doing it for decades now with nary an incident. That doesn't mean you can do it outside a rigid structure where safety and efficiency are above costs. The moment you make that other constraint a factor something else has to give.
- jay_kyburz 1y ago
  > The same corporate structures that hid data about smoking, PFAS and oxycodone are the ones you want running a nuclear plant? Thanks for expressing my concerns over nuclear so clearly. It's not the technology I fear, its the people in charge. Combined with democracy, it means that even if we trusted our governments today to police nuclear companies, they are replaced every few years. Nobody knows who will be in charge in 10 or 20 years time. We should simply not build this large dangerous technology because rules and regulations will not keep us safe.
  - ezst 1y ago
    You should fix your model of governance, because by that measure, any hope for progress is futile. The simple fact that we were better a few decades ago should be comforting. Enough of the shirt term profiteering sociopaths running the show, we can certainly cautiously swing back towards more technocracy and careful strategic planning.
    - zer00eyz 1y ago
      > You should fix your model of governance, What model of governance, of language, of human culture is going to last longer than the elephants foot will be dangerous to human beings?
GloriousKoji 1y ago
As someone also served by PG&E I don't think cheaper electricity will help. At peak hours electricity is $0.13/kwh but the delivery charge is $0.50/kwh.
- justahuman74 1y ago
  At some point the electricity will be near-free, and we'll just pay transmission fees
  - qwertox 1y ago
    Companies certainly won't pay for the maintenance. They'll let them degrade and then the government will have to take over. So we get charged twice, that is the real price.
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    Or, customer site storage will become so good they just drop off the grid.
- theptip 1y ago
  The goal of making nuclear cheaper isn’t to lower consumer costs. It’s to displace CO2 emitting baseload sources like coal and gas.
  - chermi 1y ago
    Why not not both?
    - theptip 1y ago
      Sure, but one comes first.
      - jayd16 1y ago
        And it's going to end up being price.
deleted 1y ago
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bsenftner 1y ago
Found the fatal flaw, and right here it is in glorious action: > and strong regulations and safety culture ensure that it remains one of the safest forms of energy available to humanity. It is thinking like the comment above why nuclear power is unsafe and will be unsafe as long as the drive to reduce the expense is viewed as "fake costs due to regulation." No, that person does not understand larger human culture and how it destroys anything with a nuance to understand, such as the need for regulations.
Retric 1y ago
> Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop. You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond. Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions. Decommissioning could be a little cheaper with laxer standards, but it’s never going to be cheap. Etc etc. Worse, all those capital costs mean you’re selling most of your output 24/7 at generally low wholesale spot prices unlike hydro, natural gas, or battery backed solar which can benefit from peak pricing. That’s not regulations that’s just inherent requirements for the underlying technology. People talk about small modular reactors, but small modular reactors are only making heat they don’t actually drive costs down meaningfully. Similarly the vast majority of regulations come from lessons learned so yea they spend a lot of effort avoiding foreign materials falling into the spent fuel pool, but failing to do so can mean months of downtime and tens of millions in costs so there isn’t some opportunity to save money by avoiding that regulation.
- gruez 1y ago
  >> Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. >It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days Maybe it can't be as cheap as coal, but at the very least it shouldn't be absurdly expensive compared to what South Korea and China can do. https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20250906_WBC303.png https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20250906_WBC...
  - Retric 1y ago
    That’s fair, but everything else is outcompeting coal these days. So even if we can drop prices down to what China pays, nuclear still loses in China.
- theptip 1y ago
  It really is. Nuclear is 100-1000x safer than coal. By insisting on such an aggressive safety target, we force prices up and actually incur much higher levels of mortality - just delivered in the boring old ways of pollution and climate-driven harms. See https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy for detailed stats. I think we should target “risk parity with Gas” until climate change is under control.
grafmax 1y ago
Regulations on nuclear power protect us from nuclear waste and meltdowns. Meltdowns are rare but catastrophic when they occur.
wnevets 1y ago
> We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. I shouldn't be surprised by this comment. There are so many people who believe we should allow more pollution in the air we breathe and water we drink [1] just to increase the profit margins for shareholders. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/05/14/nx-s1-5398061/the-environmental-protection-agency-delays-limits-on-pfas-in-drinking-water https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/05/14/nx...
cdavid 1y ago
Since the OT is about EU, it is important to keep in mind that costs per MW are much lower in EU than in the US (or the UK). E.g. according to https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/infrastructure-costs-nuclear-edition https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/infrastructure-costs-nuclear-e..., UK/US is ~10 millions GBP, France ~4.5, and China/Korea/Japan around 2.5. I don't know much about nuclear plan, but I doubt UK are much safer in practice than French ones, or even Korean/Japanese ones. I suspect most of the cost difference across countries of similar development to be mostly regulation. And it is a nice example that sometimes EU can be better than the US at regulations :) (I don't know how much nuclear-related regulations are EU vs nation-based though).
tstrimple 1y ago
Ah. The brilliant argument that nuclear power is perfectly safe and if we just eliminate all these pesky safety regulations it will be cheaper too! I often wonder what it would take for me to maintain a belief against literally all published evidence. Nuclear power evangelicals are basically trying to spread a religion at this point. Right along side flat earthers and antivaxxers. We just have to take on faith all of these things that they claim and ignore decades of actual evidence about the economics of power generation.
s1mplicissimus 1y ago
What about long term environmental cost? I might consider your preference if you agree to have all the nuclear waste dumped in your families backyard. Until then, I'd rather not have that waste produced in the first place.
- unturned3 1y ago
  > if you agree to have all the nuclear waste dumped in your families backyard What an unnecessary strawman. Nobody's gonna have nuclear waste in their backyards. It's all gonna get stored safety in glass vials under geologically inactive mountains.
  - s1mplicissimus 1y ago
    Thanks for the downvote and not being able to distinguish hyperbole from strawman. I guess the former is the price for getting the amusement of the latter.
notherhack 1y ago
Maybe there’s a deal to be made where France builds and operates nuke plants in the US and handles the spent fuel as well. They’ve gotten quite good at it, and that could bypass a lot of the regulatory quagmire tied to a new home grown design and the reprocessing hazard.
Hilift 1y ago
Or acknowledge the true cost of $10 billion to build a reactor. Look at recent implementations. Finland was complaining that they had to deal with the mafia. The plant cost €11 billion, original proposal: €3 billion. Yikes. "... 3,800 employees from 500 companies. 80% of the workers are foreigners, mostly from eastern European countries. In 2012 it was reported that one Bulgarian contracting firm is owned by the mafia, and that Bulgarian workers have been required to pay weekly protection fees to the mafia, wages have been unpaid, employees have been told not to join a union and that employers also reneged on social security payments." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant
- kergonath 1y ago
  > Or acknowledge the true cost of $10 billion to build a reactor. Look at recent implementations. Finland was complaining that they had to deal with the mafia. The plant cost €11 billion, original proposal: €3 billion. Yikes. This particular plant is a terrible example. It was the first of its kind, so it was bound to be more difficult than as part of a series. For example, there were issues with contractors that would not have happened if it had been the 5th reactor with the same specs. There were also issues with project management and changing regulations, which prompted some extensive tweaking of the reactor core almost as it was built. This is not representative of the difficulty of building a reactor that is par tof a fleet with identical designs.
  - ViewTrick1002 1y ago
    It is not like nth of a kind Hinkley Point C, EPR reactor number 5 and 6, at $32.5B per reactor is going any better? Also do note that no one knows the true cost of Olkiluoto 3. The $11B figure is from a settlement many years before it was completed as interest and construction costs kept accumulating.
    - Hilift 1y ago
      It is probably infuriating to many that costs are that significant and that important. France should be the model for nuclear, but mismanaged EDF which now has €54.3 billion debt and is years behind in maintenance. (2022 debt was €64.5 billion). And the public and politicians pitch a fit if the PM proposes a balanced budget with cuts. Nuclear doesn't make the cut when there are multiple competing interests of nitwits.
jayd16 1y ago
It's regulation holding back nuclear power...in every country?
gioele 1y ago
We need to drive down the cost of dealing with nuclear waste. Possibly to zero, because that is a cost that will have to be paid basically forever. Between 1961 and 2023 «5,600 TWh of electricity were generated from nuclear energy in Germany». [1] Every year Germany spends (and will have to spend until the end of time) at least 2 billion Euros just to keep the existing nuclear waste safe [2] (more than half of the yearly budget of the ministry of the environment and about 0.5% of the yearly government budget). That's a drag. Think about it: it's all unproductive money, that does not produce any new energy, and stopping these payments will cause irreparable damage to the environment. Forever. [1] https://kernd.de/en/nuclear-energy-in-germany/ https://kernd.de/en/nuclear-energy-in-germany/ [2] https://www.bundesumweltministerium.de/ministerium/struktur/finanzen https://www.bundesumweltministerium.de/ministerium/struktur/...
- lstodd 1y ago
  This is bullshit. Radioactivity is exponential. If something is very active at start, it will fade quickly. If it is not, it is not dangerous to begin with. So whatever they do spend, they need to optimize instead of hiding from cost-cutting behind this.
jrk 1y ago
Many people see top-line rate increases and assume the issue is supply cost, but transmission and distribution have become over 50% of cost everywhere I’ve lived, and are growing fast, regardless of underlying generation or fuel costs. Distribution alone (the neighborhood/local grid) is now roughly matching the supply cost on my MA bill, and though I last lived in CA in 2019, I would be surprised if PG&E weren’t similar.
Kon5ole 1y ago
>Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. Which costs are you thinking about here? Please be specifc, provide details about regulations which are not needed, why they're not needed, and what they add to the cost of a nuclear plant. Sorry for the tone, but I think your statement is extraordinarily wrong - and at the same time it's being repeated very often lately but never with any specifics. I'm genuinely curious what it is based on.
7bit 1y ago
People like you believe uranium is growing on trees. Have you actually looked up how it's retrieved? The costs are insane and the ecological damage unrepairable.
zeroq 1y ago
I can see a future where everyone can have free access to nuclear power. I'm not an expert but I recall watching documentary on the eve of personal computing and someone saying that the phrase "personal computer" sounded as alien as "personal space station". Sure, won't happen tomorrow, but it's nice thing to dream of.
GeekyBear 1y ago
> We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. Chernobyl melted down and exploded. Three Mile Island melted down and the regulatorily mandated containment vessel protected the public. I wouldn't call that a fake cost.
- knorker 1y ago
  More people die every single year from the radiation parts of coal power (excluding accidents), than have died from radiation of nuclear power's entire decades long history, including accidents. Yes, they should be made safe, but we need some perspective here.
deaddodo 1y ago
SoCal Edison was as low as .06usd/kwh when the nuclear plants were operating. As soon as they started shutting them down it shot up to ~.25-30usd/kWh.
DarkNova6 1y ago
Nuclear energy requires high-end engineering and manufactoring skills. Both vanish in the west more and more, particularly in the US. China can build nuclear plants just fine because they have the manufactoring and engineering quality and quantity. Where did they get that? We gave it to them and even financed it. The crisis of the west is a crisis of production. To bury regulations just means to keep a failing system afloat for another short while. Regulations exist to prevent another Chernobyl, thanks.
llsf 1y ago
A big part of the cost is financing the project. It is capital intensive, and even few interest points more impact a lot the cost over time. Those project should be finance with the cheapest money possible (usually government backed loans). UK is an example of nuclear getting expensive due to private investment instead of government.
pfdietz 1y ago
> We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. This is not true. It might be nice to drive down the cost, but there's no need to do it. Adequate, even preferable, alternatives exist.
BrtByte 1y ago
A lot of the cost isn't the tech, it's the years of delays, endless permitting, and political whiplash
tcfhgj 1y ago
No, we don't really need it though

epistasis 1y ago

Which are the fake costs from regulation? We have new builds in Europe of the EPR, in France and Finland, and it has had disastrous costs. China has built some too, presumably cheaper, since they keep on building more. What is the regulatory difference there? I have yet to find any concrete defense of the idea that costs are coming from regulation, rather than the costs of construction in advanced economies. If regulations are the cost, name them and a solution. Otherwise it seems like we are wasting efforts in optimizing the wrong thing for nuclear.

reenorap 1y ago
It takes 15 years to build a nuclear power plant. It shouldn't take this long at all and it's strictly because of regulations. If we cut down the time it takes to build a plant the cost plummets.
- kachnuv_ocasek 1y ago
  But what are the specific regulations you would cut, dude?
  - avidiax 1y ago
    I have heard it claimed, at least for US construction, that a nuclear plant under construction has to implement new safety measures even if those measures were adopted after the design approval or construction start date. This means that the design can change multiple times during construction, which both slows construction and exposes the project to even more safety design changes. Ironically, the creaky old plants that were built long ago don't need to adopt such new safety requirements. They are grandfathered in, but can't be economically replaced because the costs of a replacement are artificially inflated. A car analogy would be that we continue driving 1955 Chevy Bel-Airs with no seat belts since an up-to-date car is too expensive to develop, since we can't start production until the latest LIDAR and AI has been added. Once the LIDAR is in, pray that there's no new self-driving hardware released before full production, or we'll have to include that too.
    - epistasis 1y ago
      Thank you for being specific! This is no longer the case under modern licensing. Look at Vogtle and Summer, who were so expensive and disastrous that the Summer build was abandoned with billions of dollars sunk in construction. Nothing was changed on the regulatory side, and it was licensed under a new regulatory model requested by industry, that let them start construction without everything fully designed yet. There were many super expensive changes during the build, but that was due to EPC, not regulatory stuff. The NRC has been extremely open to regulatory changes since the 2000s, especially with the "nuclear renaissance" push around 2008. I'm not aware of any suggested regulatory changes that were not adopted.
- happosai 1y ago
  Nuclear regulations are no worse than aviation regulation. Yet planes manage to be cost competitive. Cutting regulations isn't necessary the win people think. If safety regulations are cut, it risks accidents in future. Nuclear needs to move from bespoke builds to serial production.
  - boringg 1y ago
    Thats not the full picture. Aviation exploded in growth -- you can easily expand operations and work to smaller margins. The US shut down the nuclear industry intentionally from the 80s until the last 5 years from regulations.
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      It's a bogus talking point that the nuclear industry in the US was shut down due to increase in regulation. The actual situation was that relentless 7%/year demand growth for electrical energy suddenly stalled, while at the same time a large amount of new capacity from cogeneration, made possible by the passage of PURPA in 1978, suddenly started to come on line. In this environment, and with the cost overruns and delays of the earlier nuclear builds, utilities could not make a case for new nuclear construction. High interest rates also didn't help.
- epistasis 1y ago
  Which regulations? What would change in the construction process? China builds the same designs as the EU and US, yet faster. What is different? I saw toooooooons of reports of construction mishaps in the US at Vogtle and Summer. I didn't see anything about "oh if we changed this sort of regulation it would have saved us money." It's a very worthwhile to read the retrospectives on these builds. There are lots of plans of future builds of the AP1000 that would be cheaper, but none of the plans even indicate that a regulation change would help. I beg of people who say regulations are in the way: which regulations? Concretely, what should change to make construction cheaper? Pun intended.
  - RandomBacon 1y ago
    > What is different? All of the NIMBY roadblocks that ties up U.S. projects in court, that China doesn't give a F about considering they'll displace 1.3 million people to build a damn.
    - epistasis 1y ago
      We have recent examples of construction costs going through the roof in the US: Vogtle and Summer. Both projects were welcomed by their communities in Georgia and South Carolina. And at the state level, legislators were so enthusiastic for the projects that they passed new laws so that the costs of any overrun would get directly passed on to ratepayers, letting utilities escape financial risk for construction overruns. I have no doubt that constructing nuclear at a new site would run into many NIMBY complaints. But most (not all) existing nuclear sites have communities that welcome the nuclear reactors, and want new ones to replace the aging ones, and ensure continuity of jobs for the community.
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      The recent US builds were not tied up by "NIMBY roadblocks". It's interesting that in China, which you assert lacks roadblocks, renewables are being installed to a much greater extent than nuclear.
  - jay_kyburz 1y ago
    Perhaps the are talking about Unions and the regulations around minimum pay and working conditions. I don't know about big construction projects, but the costs to get an extension approved on my house is a drop in the ocean compared to paying tradies. (contractors in us speak.)
darkamaul 1y ago
All the safety and countermeasure costs here ultimately stem from regulation. If we allowed less safe power plants, they would likely be cheaper to build and operate. However, I’m not sure I want private for profits actor deciding the level of safety of such projects.
- epistasis 1y ago
  We have one model for cheaper construction of nuclear, using exactly the same designs as in the US (AP1000) or EU (EPR), and that example is China. I don't think China is building them any less safe. I don't think the regulations are significantly different. I don't think any of the designers of the nuclear reactors want to build them any less safely, either, because they are not asking for that. Many of the "safety" stuff is also about prolonging longevity of the reactor as long as possible. Like really inspecting the welds on tubing, etc. Any reduction in safety there also ultimately increases costs by reducing the lifetime of the plant or heavily increasing maintenance costs. That's why I don't think this is a tradeoff between safety and cost. I think it's a tradeoff between construction/design competence and cost.
krisoft 1y ago
> If regulations are the cost, name them and a solution. That is a funny ask. Regulation doesnt have to be a single thing. It can very well be cost-overrun by a thousand paper cut. You can drown any project in endless paperwork, environmental and national security reviews. In fact unclear and contradictory requirements are much more conductive to drive costs up than a single Lets-make-nuclear-expensive-Act. That being said if you need to pick a single thing (which is silly) then the “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” principle of radiation protection is a prime candidate. When you have a safety limit you can design a system to remain under it. When you are designing a sytem for the ALARA principle that in itself will blow your costs up.
- Matticus_Rex 1y ago
  You're getting downvoted, but you're correct. It's death by a thousand cuts, because ALARA forces radiation exposure-reduction expenditures to scale upward forever, despite the fact that radiation exposure from plants long ago reached levels far below those that result in any risk. There is no lower bound, so the regulators never stop reducing exposure further, raising costs further and further over time. Under ALARA, nuclear literally isn't allowed to reduce market electric costs, because the requirements for reducing exposure scale to what keeps it competitive with other forms of production! If all other electric costs doubled tomorrow, the NRC would respond by raising the requirements for plants to reduce radiation exposure. If that sounds insane, it's because it's insane. Our nuclear regulations are insane.
  - epistasis 1y ago
    ALARA would indicate that the increased costs from regulation are due to the design of the reactor. However, my example is of reactors that China can build cost effectively, but which Europe can not. (And the AP1000 is an example where China can build the design cost effectively, but the US can not.) That would indicate that nuclear reactors could be built cost effectively, with the same design, and without changing ALARA. Removing ALARA may provide some sort of cost savings, but without some concrete and specific indication of how that would change the design, and to what savings during construction, it's hard to agree that ALARA is at fault.
boringg 1y ago
Its multifold. 1. Regulations are a big asterisk to any project. If you don't think you will get licensed or your project will get axed halfway through or there is a risk (Which has been very high in the past). Investors who would put money up for the project won't do it OR they require a significantly higher cost of capital. 2. There is very little muscle memory in the fabrication of reactors and reactor components in north America because we de facto shut down the industry from 80s until 20s. Therefore the first projects will cost more money as we recover our abilities to fab. 3. The licensing and regulatory costs are also incredibly high - and you cant make any adjustments if you kick off the project or you restart the process. This leads to massive cost over runs. China and Korea are currently building reactors about 1/6 the costs of the US I believe.
- epistasis 1y ago
  China is building US and EU designs of reactors at a fraction of the costs in the US and Europe. Your examples of regulatory asterisks are on the design side of things. I don't think that the cost of capital for Vogtle & Summer in the US, or Flamanville and Olkiluoto in the EU, were excessively high. As for your 3rd point, there were tons of adjustments during the build of Vogtle, which is a big reason for its large cost overruns. Regulation didn't necessitate those changes, they were all construction bungles. Which I think leads to your point 2, construction competence, being the primary cause, which aligns with everything else I have read on the subject. For example, another poster pointed to this paper: > We observe that nth-of-a-kind plants have been more, not less, expensive than first-of-a-kind plants. “Soft” factors external to standardized reactor hardware, such as labor supervision, contributed over half of the cost rise from 1976 to 1987. Relatedly, containment building costs more than doubled from 1976 to 2017, due only in part to safety regulations.
helaoban 1y ago
Shouldn't the burden of proof belong to those that claim that regulation isn't the cost, when it is so extremely obvious to anybody who has ever had to build anything that it is? Just look at building costs in California vs Texas. Both are nominally constituents of the same "advanced economy".
- epistasis 1y ago
  If you're proposing a change, shouldn't the change be specifiable? Why is the burden of proof on those asking "what change?" to demonstrate that no change is possible? That's a complete inversion of responsibility. I have a whole host of clearly specifiable changes to California building law that will make it cheaper, and am actively working on them both locally and at the state level! This is clear! As somebody who is very interested in making Calforina housing cheaper, and in particular housing construction cheaper, it is my duty to say what should change, why, and convince others of it. If I go out and advocate for "change" without being able to specify a single change, I would get jack shit done. It doesn't work that way. Every single nuclear advocate that I have ever met that says "regulations should change" can still not yet specify how those regulations should change. That's the minimal bar for holding an opinion. Reading the DoE LPO report on how nuclear can scale up and get cheaper, it wasn't regulations doing the work. It was learning how to build.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
jjk166 1y ago
> I have yet to find any concrete defense of the idea that costs are coming from regulation, rather than the costs of construction in advanced economies. One of the main drivers of excessive costs of construction in advanced economies are from excessive regulations, so it's really one in the same. Nuclear is obviously more regulated than other industries, and it routinely faces more frequent, longer delays and higher cost overruns than projects of comparable scale and complexity. This study [1] goes into a lot more detail. Digging more into the details, it's all linked. The lack of regulatory clarity means that designs have to be changed more after construction starts, requirements for redundancy increase complexity, changing regulations prevents standardization, etc. Prescriptive regulations which were created decades ago limit the cost savings possible with newer technologies, like improved reinforced concrete. This study [1] goes into a lot more detail. > Our retrospective and prospective analyses together provide insights on the past shortcomings of engineering cost models and possible solutions for the future. Nuclear reactor costs exceeded estimates in engineering models because cost variables related to labor productivity and safety regulations were underestimated. These discrepancies between estimated and realized costs increased with time, with changing regulations and variable construction site-specific characteristics. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243512030458X#:~:text=Cost%20increases%20have%20been%20associated,governance%20compared%20to%20other%20technologies. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243512...
- epistasis 1y ago
  > The lack of regulatory clarity Oddly enough, that sounds like a request for more regulation. And I have heard many people say that if the regulators had made sure that if approval had gone beyond mere safety, into constructibility and other areas, that Vogtle would have been closer to the initial budget, and that Summer might have completed. Thank you for the link, and I will read it in detail later, but at a high level, I think it's great support for my point that it's construction productivity that's the key driver of cost, not regulation (emphasis mine): > Relatedly, containment building costs more than doubled from 1976 to 2017, due only in part to safety regulations. Costs of the reactor containment building more than doubled, primarily due to declining on-site labor productivity. Productivity in recent US plants is up to 13 times lower than industry expectations. A prospective analysis of the containment building suggests that improved materials and automation could increase the resilience of nuclear construction costs to variable conditions.

yellowapple 1y ago

> I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California. I grew up a few miles away from SMUD's Rancho Seco nuclear power plant; I maintain that shutting it down was SMUD's worst decision. There were problems motivating that shutdown, yes, but nothing that couldn't have been solved.

ahmeneeroe-v2 1y ago
Yeah it seems like having State control is not a silver bullet

carstenhag 1y ago

I am pretty sure governments around the world want it to be cheaper, but at the same time know that it must be very strictly regulated. Even if that makes it pricier, one can't call that "fake costs". Also, it takes decades to build them, very often then also getting delayed. Why even consider it nowadays?

diordiderot 1y ago
Maybe roll back regulation to when France rolled out the Messmer plan? They spent 1/4th of what we do today.

acidburnNSA 1y ago

This is said a lot but I don't think regs as written are necessarily the major cost driver. I did a nuclear industry survey to ask what specific regulations people would want changed recently. The one where using commercial grade QA instead of nuclear grade is very interesting. I think industry overreaction to the regs is possibly as large or larger of a problem than the regs themselves. https://whatisnuclear.com/news/2025-05-23-regulatory-reforms-nuclear-wants.html https://whatisnuclear.com/news/2025-05-23-regulatory-reforms...

zdragnar 1y ago
I'm a bit miffed I can't find the article now, but I recall hearing it was more the reactor design approval process than the operational process regulations that interfered with and drove up costs. Every tiny detail of a site has to be taken into account, forcing modifications to existing designs such that every build ends up being bespoke anyway. On top of that, many of the rules around the design approval process are geared towards older generation reactors and newer generation reactors end up being cost ineffective because they need to account for things that don't apply to them. If anyone remembers that article, I'd love to cite it here. If not, feel free to ignore what is otherwise unfounded speculation I guess.
- acidburnNSA 1y ago
  Maybe this article? https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power-construction https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power... There is some regulatory burden for sure. But the NRC has been very conducive to standardization, and approved construction and operation licenses of like 20 brand new latest generation water-cooled reactors in the first nuclear Renaissance (2006). It was Fukushima and fracking that killed that Renaissance, not regulations. https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/large-lwr/col-holder https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/large-lwr/col-hold... The NRC has also been generous with advanced reactor licenses, granting construction licenses for the Kairos Hermes 1 and 2 molten salt cooled test reactors recently. And one for the Abilene Christian university's molten salt fueled reactor too! https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nrc-approves-construction-hermes-reactor https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nrc-approves-construction... A lot of the tech world got it in their heads that nuclear regs are the main issue in nuclear when in reality it is still megaprojects construction management. The small advanced reactors are likely to be very expensive per kWh

ahmeneeroe-v2 1y ago

You should look more closely at your PG&E bill. There are some hidden CA taxes in there. Also PG&E was forced to divest most of their generation assets, so I believe that much of the grid power down there is not under PG&E's control Edit: Finally, any Western US utility needs to bear the cost of wildfire liability. Whether that is a state-owned utility or private, the cost is still there.

reenorap 1y ago
PG&E is in no way a victim here. Their CEO is being paid $50M a year, and our rates got increased 6 times last year. Nevada the next state over, the prices are 20% of California's.
- Ajedi32 1y ago
  Victim, no. Being over regulated doesn't necessarily hurt a company if all their competitors are subject to the same regulations. It's consumers who pay the price. 5x the price, apparently, if Nevada is any indication.
  - epistasis 1y ago
    It is under regulation that is the problem here. PG&E has caused multiple huge disasters through negligence that have caused deaths and billions in damages that they pass on to rate payers. And this is after they redirected funds for maintenance directly to executive compensation. The regulators should have thrown the hammer down on PG&E then, but after the disaster happens the money has to come from somewhere. Even if PG&E declares bankruptcy, the grid must run, and people must be able to rebuild their destroyed homes. A public utility would be better than this sort of parasitic investor owned utility. Or, lots more regulation, and lots more jail time.
    - Ajedi32 1y ago
      I see. So Nevada and the 46 other states with electricity cheaper than California[1] all have stricter regulation than California then? That's why their electricity is so much cheaper? [1]: https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/ https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/

lawn 1y ago

Another big reason for the high costs is the lack of experience building the plants.

SCUSKU 1y ago

The reason PGE is so expensive is because it's a privately owned monopoly with a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns. Additionally, the urban areas of California are subsidizing the fire prone rural areas of the state. The "fake costs" are not primarily from regulation as much as it is from the need to squeeze profit. For comparison, look at Silicon Valley Power which is owned and operated by the city of Santa Clara. SVP charges $0.175/kwh vs PGE $0.425/kwh. [1] [1] - https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees

ahmeneeroe-v2 1y ago
>the urban areas of California are subsidizing the fire prone rural areas of the state Meanwhile Rural California is where the electricity is actually generated[1]; they're "subsidizing" urban use. >SVP vs PG&E This has nothing to do with the ownership model and everything to do with not being obligated to serve rural areas. They get to serve only lower cost dense areas [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Cali...
- SCUSKU 1y ago
  True that SVP benefits from not serving a rural area, but we also need to consider again that PGE is a for-profit organization that in 2024 posted $2.5B in profits, which were distributed to shareholders[1]. If PGE were owned by the state with no such fiduciary duty, this money could instead be used to lower rates and/or invest in infrastructure. [1] - https://www.zacks.com/stock/quote/PCG/income-statement?icid=quote-stock_overview-quote_nav_tracking-zcom-left_subnav_quote_navbar-income_statement https://www.zacks.com/stock/quote/PCG/income-statement?icid=...
  - avidiax 1y ago
    My napkin math is that the $2.5B in profits accounts for about $0.14/kWH. This is based on total electrical energy production of 17,301 GWh, since PG&E doesn't seem to publish their total distributed energy. https://www.google.com/search?q=%242.5+billion+%2F+17%2C301+GWh+in+dollars+per+kWh https://www.google.com/search?q=%242.5+billion+%2F+17%2C301+... https://www.eia.gov/state/print.php?sid=CA#tabs-1 https://www.eia.gov/state/print.php?sid=CA#tabs-1

raverbashing 1y ago

> the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation Regulation yes but I wonder how much of it is just "boomer engineering" Nuclear efforts should be directed into the safest and simplest designs. Designs that need water pumps to cool (like Fukushima) are the type of unnecessary risk and complexity that nobody needs

mixdup 1y ago

A major reason nuclear plants are super expensive is because we do it so rarely Every reactor and every plant is bespoke, even if they are based on a common "design" each instance is different enough that every project has to be managed from the ground up as a new thing, you get certified only on a single plant, operators can't move from plant to plant without recertification, etc Part of that is because they are so big and massive, and take a long time to build. If we'd build smaller, modular reactors that are literally exactly the same every single time you would begin to get economies of scale, you'd be able to get by without having to build a complete replica for training every time, and by being smaller you'd get to value delivery much quicker reducing the finance costs, which would then let you plow the profits from Reactor A into Reactor B's construction

nicce 1y ago
It isn't that rare in general - if the U.S. opens the secrets of nuclear submarines - we had had mini reactors for decades.
- _aavaa_ 1y ago
  The problem is economics. Just because the Us built a fleet does not mean that they are economical once put in a non-military application.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- tick_tock_tick 1y ago
  I'd be fine with us just having the USA navy operate them we build them for carriers and subs just double or triple the order and plug em into the grid.
- fmajid 1y ago
  And the technology is incredibly mature, submarine reactors were some of the first reactors, period.

jsbisviewtiful 1y ago

[flagged]

boringg 1y ago
Nuclear safety to provide safety is important but not to stifle any innovation or deployment which is what it has been.
monocularvision 1y ago
It’s always funny to me to see folks with the “HN leans _________” comments every few days with the blank spot filled in with every single political position one can think of.
- psychoslave 1y ago
  HN leans to perfect diversity: power distribution is so boring. :D
  - marcosdumay 1y ago
    It's not diverse. Whoever you are, HN always leans in perfect opposition to your ideas.
    - reilly3000 1y ago
      If there’s something we can all agree on, that’s our blind spot.
- peterfirefly 1y ago
  Different people react to different topics. Some bring out strident autistic commies, some bring out psycho druggies, some bring out extreme capitalist dreamers (also likely autistic), some bring out furries and trannies (also likely autistic and definitely strident). They rarely all met in a single thread.
bawolff 1y ago

boringg 1y ago

This should be a quick reminder to the crowd -- Nuclear is almost always a public/private partnership to manage the project development costs and to keep the cost of capital in a reasonable range. The costs are large for a private company to put up the capital with the risk involved.

pfdietz 1y ago
In other words: nuclear is not viable unless the risks are offloaded to the public. Privatize profits, socialize risks.
- boringg 1y ago
  Its the same with any massive infrastructure investment - only governments have the balance sheet to build them.
  - epistasis 1y ago
    It is not that way with other similar types of power production.
- ezst 1y ago
  Or, you know, socialize risks, socialise profits. I don't know why we would have to put up with this abuse and corruption any longer.
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    It's precious that you think a socialized system wouldn't be rife with corruption.
    - ezst 1y ago
      You only really have two options there: - a system of lords and peasants, where the lords are held accountable and kept in check by the peasants, as the social contract obliges, or - a system of lords and peasants, with no checks and balances Obviously, corruption can creep in any system, but the one that states "let's give it all to the lords with nothing in return" seems asinine to me.

YeahThisIsMe 1y ago

Your rates aren't doing insane shit because you don't have nuclear energy. Renewables are way way way cheaper.

RandomBacon 1y ago
How much of that rate is because China is flooding the market with wind turbine blades and solar panels? How much would it cost if China turns off that supply?
- rootusrootus 1y ago
  To use wind turbines as an example, more than 50% of the various bits are manufactured here in the US. For turbines destined US wind farms, at least.
- fulafel 1y ago
  What's the evidence that there's "flooding the market" going on? It seems to me wind turbine prices have followed a plausible looking downwards hill and there's no sign of dumping excess inventory or otherwise unsustainably low prices.
- triceratops 1y ago
  > How much would it cost if China turns off that supply? Buy them while they're selling cheap. They're good for at least 20 years. Plenty of time to stand up domestic manufacturing if they cut you off.

bryanlarsen 1y ago

A nuclear fission power plant is never going to be cheaper than a coal plant, and coal plants are very expensive. They're superficially similar types of plants: they heat water and then use a steam turbine to convert it to electricity. Coal plants use higher temperatures and pressures, so they can use smaller turbines. That turbine is a massive part of the cost. Yes, there's room to drive down the cost of nuclear. No, it's never going to be cost competitive with solar/wind/batteries, no matter how much you drive down the cost or eliminate regulations.

beeflet 1y ago
It can be cheaper to run a nuclear plant than a conventional power plant, due to lower fuel costs. But what kills nuclear is the capital costs of building the plant. It takes a while to reap the reward
- bryanlarsen 1y ago
  I'm talking about capital costs, not operating costs. $3B/GW for a coal plant is about 5X as much as natgas.
- s1mplicissimus 1y ago
  Does that calculation include the cost of storing the nuclear waste after use? I'd be curious to see a reference for your claim.
  - Llamamoe 1y ago
    You need to look up how much nuclear waste is actually produced. It's a minuscule amount relative to the energy produced, and it doesn't actually need more than to be transported and then encased in concrete.
    - Jedd 1y ago
      It's not the volume of the waste that's the challenge - it's handling and storage that remain mostly unsolved. By unsolved I mean - not convincingly solved, and certainly not yet tested over the expected duration that material needs to be safely contained.

ViewTrick1002 1y ago

That is what we did 20 years ago when the renewable industry barely existed. What has happened since is that the nuclear industry essentially collapsed given the outcome of Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinklkey Point C and can't build new plants while renewables and storage are delivering over 90% of new capacity in the US. Being the cheapest energy source in human history. We've gone past the "throw stuff at the wall" phase, now we know what sticks and that is renewables and storage.

zer00eyz 1y ago

> I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California. If you think PG&E jacking up prices has anything other than greed, hubris and decades of short term thinking behind it, I have news for you. And thats is why people look at nuclear and say "no thanks". The same corporate structures that hid data about smoking, PFAS and oxycodone are the ones you want running a nuclear plant? Can you make a nuclear plant safe, small and useful: yes. The navy has been doing it for decades now with nary an incident. That doesn't mean you can do it outside a rigid structure where safety and efficiency are above costs. The moment you make that other constraint a factor something else has to give.

jay_kyburz 1y ago
> The same corporate structures that hid data about smoking, PFAS and oxycodone are the ones you want running a nuclear plant? Thanks for expressing my concerns over nuclear so clearly. It's not the technology I fear, its the people in charge. Combined with democracy, it means that even if we trusted our governments today to police nuclear companies, they are replaced every few years. Nobody knows who will be in charge in 10 or 20 years time. We should simply not build this large dangerous technology because rules and regulations will not keep us safe.
- ezst 1y ago
  You should fix your model of governance, because by that measure, any hope for progress is futile. The simple fact that we were better a few decades ago should be comforting. Enough of the shirt term profiteering sociopaths running the show, we can certainly cautiously swing back towards more technocracy and careful strategic planning.
  - zer00eyz 1y ago
    > You should fix your model of governance, What model of governance, of language, of human culture is going to last longer than the elephants foot will be dangerous to human beings?

GloriousKoji 1y ago

As someone also served by PG&E I don't think cheaper electricity will help. At peak hours electricity is $0.13/kwh but the delivery charge is $0.50/kwh.

justahuman74 1y ago
At some point the electricity will be near-free, and we'll just pay transmission fees
- qwertox 1y ago
  Companies certainly won't pay for the maintenance. They'll let them degrade and then the government will have to take over. So we get charged twice, that is the real price.
- pfdietz 1y ago
  Or, customer site storage will become so good they just drop off the grid.
theptip 1y ago
The goal of making nuclear cheaper isn’t to lower consumer costs. It’s to displace CO2 emitting baseload sources like coal and gas.
- chermi 1y ago
  Why not not both?
  - theptip 1y ago
    Sure, but one comes first.
    - jayd16 1y ago
      And it's going to end up being price.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

bsenftner 1y ago

Found the fatal flaw, and right here it is in glorious action: > and strong regulations and safety culture ensure that it remains one of the safest forms of energy available to humanity. It is thinking like the comment above why nuclear power is unsafe and will be unsafe as long as the drive to reduce the expense is viewed as "fake costs due to regulation." No, that person does not understand larger human culture and how it destroys anything with a nuance to understand, such as the need for regulations.

Retric 1y ago

> Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop. You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond. Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions. Decommissioning could be a little cheaper with laxer standards, but it’s never going to be cheap. Etc etc. Worse, all those capital costs mean you’re selling most of your output 24/7 at generally low wholesale spot prices unlike hydro, natural gas, or battery backed solar which can benefit from peak pricing. That’s not regulations that’s just inherent requirements for the underlying technology. People talk about small modular reactors, but small modular reactors are only making heat they don’t actually drive costs down meaningfully. Similarly the vast majority of regulations come from lessons learned so yea they spend a lot of effort avoiding foreign materials falling into the spent fuel pool, but failing to do so can mean months of downtime and tens of millions in costs so there isn’t some opportunity to save money by avoiding that regulation.

gruez 1y ago
>> Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. >It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days Maybe it can't be as cheap as coal, but at the very least it shouldn't be absurdly expensive compared to what South Korea and China can do. https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20250906_WBC303.png https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20250906_WBC...
- Retric 1y ago
  That’s fair, but everything else is outcompeting coal these days. So even if we can drop prices down to what China pays, nuclear still loses in China.
theptip 1y ago
It really is. Nuclear is 100-1000x safer than coal. By insisting on such an aggressive safety target, we force prices up and actually incur much higher levels of mortality - just delivered in the boring old ways of pollution and climate-driven harms. See https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy for detailed stats. I think we should target “risk parity with Gas” until climate change is under control.

grafmax 1y ago

Regulations on nuclear power protect us from nuclear waste and meltdowns. Meltdowns are rare but catastrophic when they occur.

wnevets 1y ago

> We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. I shouldn't be surprised by this comment. There are so many people who believe we should allow more pollution in the air we breathe and water we drink [1] just to increase the profit margins for shareholders. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/05/14/nx-s1-5398061/the-environmental-protection-agency-delays-limits-on-pfas-in-drinking-water https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/05/14/nx...

cdavid 1y ago

Since the OT is about EU, it is important to keep in mind that costs per MW are much lower in EU than in the US (or the UK). E.g. according to https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/infrastructure-costs-nuclear-edition https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/infrastructure-costs-nuclear-e..., UK/US is ~10 millions GBP, France ~4.5, and China/Korea/Japan around 2.5. I don't know much about nuclear plan, but I doubt UK are much safer in practice than French ones, or even Korean/Japanese ones. I suspect most of the cost difference across countries of similar development to be mostly regulation. And it is a nice example that sometimes EU can be better than the US at regulations :) (I don't know how much nuclear-related regulations are EU vs nation-based though).

tstrimple 1y ago

Ah. The brilliant argument that nuclear power is perfectly safe and if we just eliminate all these pesky safety regulations it will be cheaper too! I often wonder what it would take for me to maintain a belief against literally all published evidence. Nuclear power evangelicals are basically trying to spread a religion at this point. Right along side flat earthers and antivaxxers. We just have to take on faith all of these things that they claim and ignore decades of actual evidence about the economics of power generation.

s1mplicissimus 1y ago

What about long term environmental cost? I might consider your preference if you agree to have all the nuclear waste dumped in your families backyard. Until then, I'd rather not have that waste produced in the first place.

unturned3 1y ago
> if you agree to have all the nuclear waste dumped in your families backyard What an unnecessary strawman. Nobody's gonna have nuclear waste in their backyards. It's all gonna get stored safety in glass vials under geologically inactive mountains.
- s1mplicissimus 1y ago
  Thanks for the downvote and not being able to distinguish hyperbole from strawman. I guess the former is the price for getting the amusement of the latter.

notherhack 1y ago

Maybe there’s a deal to be made where France builds and operates nuke plants in the US and handles the spent fuel as well. They’ve gotten quite good at it, and that could bypass a lot of the regulatory quagmire tied to a new home grown design and the reprocessing hazard.

Hilift 1y ago

Or acknowledge the true cost of $10 billion to build a reactor. Look at recent implementations. Finland was complaining that they had to deal with the mafia. The plant cost €11 billion, original proposal: €3 billion. Yikes. "... 3,800 employees from 500 companies. 80% of the workers are foreigners, mostly from eastern European countries. In 2012 it was reported that one Bulgarian contracting firm is owned by the mafia, and that Bulgarian workers have been required to pay weekly protection fees to the mafia, wages have been unpaid, employees have been told not to join a union and that employers also reneged on social security payments." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant

kergonath 1y ago
> Or acknowledge the true cost of $10 billion to build a reactor. Look at recent implementations. Finland was complaining that they had to deal with the mafia. The plant cost €11 billion, original proposal: €3 billion. Yikes. This particular plant is a terrible example. It was the first of its kind, so it was bound to be more difficult than as part of a series. For example, there were issues with contractors that would not have happened if it had been the 5th reactor with the same specs. There were also issues with project management and changing regulations, which prompted some extensive tweaking of the reactor core almost as it was built. This is not representative of the difficulty of building a reactor that is par tof a fleet with identical designs.
- ViewTrick1002 1y ago
  It is not like nth of a kind Hinkley Point C, EPR reactor number 5 and 6, at $32.5B per reactor is going any better? Also do note that no one knows the true cost of Olkiluoto 3. The $11B figure is from a settlement many years before it was completed as interest and construction costs kept accumulating.
  - Hilift 1y ago
    It is probably infuriating to many that costs are that significant and that important. France should be the model for nuclear, but mismanaged EDF which now has €54.3 billion debt and is years behind in maintenance. (2022 debt was €64.5 billion). And the public and politicians pitch a fit if the PM proposes a balanced budget with cuts. Nuclear doesn't make the cut when there are multiple competing interests of nitwits.

jayd16 1y ago

It's regulation holding back nuclear power...in every country?

gioele 1y ago

We need to drive down the cost of dealing with nuclear waste. Possibly to zero, because that is a cost that will have to be paid basically forever. Between 1961 and 2023 «5,600 TWh of electricity were generated from nuclear energy in Germany». [1] Every year Germany spends (and will have to spend until the end of time) at least 2 billion Euros just to keep the existing nuclear waste safe [2] (more than half of the yearly budget of the ministry of the environment and about 0.5% of the yearly government budget). That's a drag. Think about it: it's all unproductive money, that does not produce any new energy, and stopping these payments will cause irreparable damage to the environment. Forever. [1] https://kernd.de/en/nuclear-energy-in-germany/ https://kernd.de/en/nuclear-energy-in-germany/ [2] https://www.bundesumweltministerium.de/ministerium/struktur/finanzen https://www.bundesumweltministerium.de/ministerium/struktur/...

lstodd 1y ago
This is bullshit. Radioactivity is exponential. If something is very active at start, it will fade quickly. If it is not, it is not dangerous to begin with. So whatever they do spend, they need to optimize instead of hiding from cost-cutting behind this.

jrk 1y ago

Many people see top-line rate increases and assume the issue is supply cost, but transmission and distribution have become over 50% of cost everywhere I’ve lived, and are growing fast, regardless of underlying generation or fuel costs. Distribution alone (the neighborhood/local grid) is now roughly matching the supply cost on my MA bill, and though I last lived in CA in 2019, I would be surprised if PG&E weren’t similar.

Kon5ole 1y ago

>Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. Which costs are you thinking about here? Please be specifc, provide details about regulations which are not needed, why they're not needed, and what they add to the cost of a nuclear plant. Sorry for the tone, but I think your statement is extraordinarily wrong - and at the same time it's being repeated very often lately but never with any specifics. I'm genuinely curious what it is based on.

7bit 1y ago

People like you believe uranium is growing on trees. Have you actually looked up how it's retrieved? The costs are insane and the ecological damage unrepairable.

zeroq 1y ago

I can see a future where everyone can have free access to nuclear power. I'm not an expert but I recall watching documentary on the eve of personal computing and someone saying that the phrase "personal computer" sounded as alien as "personal space station". Sure, won't happen tomorrow, but it's nice thing to dream of.

GeekyBear 1y ago

> We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. Chernobyl melted down and exploded. Three Mile Island melted down and the regulatorily mandated containment vessel protected the public. I wouldn't call that a fake cost.

knorker 1y ago
More people die every single year from the radiation parts of coal power (excluding accidents), than have died from radiation of nuclear power's entire decades long history, including accidents. Yes, they should be made safe, but we need some perspective here.

deaddodo 1y ago

SoCal Edison was as low as .06usd/kwh when the nuclear plants were operating. As soon as they started shutting them down it shot up to ~.25-30usd/kWh.

DarkNova6 1y ago

Nuclear energy requires high-end engineering and manufactoring skills. Both vanish in the west more and more, particularly in the US. China can build nuclear plants just fine because they have the manufactoring and engineering quality and quantity. Where did they get that? We gave it to them and even financed it. The crisis of the west is a crisis of production. To bury regulations just means to keep a failing system afloat for another short while. Regulations exist to prevent another Chernobyl, thanks.

llsf 1y ago

A big part of the cost is financing the project. It is capital intensive, and even few interest points more impact a lot the cost over time. Those project should be finance with the cheapest money possible (usually government backed loans). UK is an example of nuclear getting expensive due to private investment instead of government.

pfdietz 1y ago

> We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. This is not true. It might be nice to drive down the cost, but there's no need to do it. Adequate, even preferable, alternatives exist.

BrtByte 1y ago

A lot of the cost isn't the tech, it's the years of delays, endless permitting, and political whiplash

tcfhgj 1y ago

No, we don't really need it though