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> 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

by 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.
- Retric 1y ago
  None of what I said really relates to safety. 3 mile island was a complete non issue when it comes to safety, but one day the nuclear reactor went from a useful tool to an expensive cleanup.
  - theptip 1y ago
    Agreed, you are talking about non-safety factors. I don’t think they necessitate the price levels we see; for example, look at how cheaply China can build reactors. I think it’s quite clear that we pay a high safety / regulatory premium in the west for Nuclear. My point about safety is that we are over-indexing on regulation. We should reduce (not remove!) regulations on nuclear projects, this would make them more affordable. I don’t think this is a controversial point, if you look into post-mortems on why US projects overrun by billions you always see issues with last-minute adaptations requiring expensive re-certification of designs, ie purely regulatory (safety-motivated) friction.
    - bobthepanda 1y ago
      The notable thing is that more or less China has kept ramping up solar and wind targets whereas nuclear has been much slower to grow. China's energy requirements are so large that this still represents an absolute number increase, but it's telling that even with as heavy handed an industrial policy's as China's that nuclear has not really lifted off. > Authorities have steadily downgraded plans for nuclear to dominate China's energy generation. At present, the goal is 18 per cent of generation by 2060. China installed 1GW of nuclear last year, compared to 300GW of solar and wind, Mr Buckley said. > https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewable-energy-boom-breaks-records/104086640 https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa...
nicce 1y ago
> 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. Etc etc. Without the fear of dual use, we could just enrich the fuel to higher levels and refuel once per 30 years.
lclarkmichalek 1y ago
I think if you regulated coal on a linear no threshold risk model, you'd find the costs to be somewhat closer.
- Retric 1y ago
  Coal is already losing, and things are only getting worse for steady state production. Grid solar drives wholesale rates for most of the day really low long before new nuclear gets decommissioned. If nighttime rates rise above daytime rates a great deal of demand is going to shift to the day. Which then forces nuclear to try and survive on peak pricing, but batteries cap peak pricing over that same timescale. Nuclear thus really needs to drop significantly below current coal prices or find some way to do cheap energy storage. I’m somewhat hopeful on heat storage, but now you need to have a lot of turbines and cooling that’s only useful for a fraction of the day. On top of that heat storage means a lower working temperature costing you thermodynamic efficiency.
quotemstr 1y ago
> Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. You have to take scale into account. This is 20 years of spent fuel. https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/cca0b8d/2147483647/strip/true/crop/824x621+0+0/resize/1760x1326!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F0b%2Feb%2Fb2f4d17e499b9951788ce9db59f5%2Fsf-nukewaste-ep3.JPG https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/cca0b8d/21474836... That's it. 20 years. Just that, for a constant, quiet output of just about a gigawatt. And that's an old, decommissioned reactor. You're right about nuclear fuel refinement, packaging, and so on being non-trivial, but the amount of it that you need is so miniscule that if you don't talk about volume you paint a misleading picture. > small modular reactors are only making heat they don’t actually drive costs down meaningfully. Mass production makes anything cheaper. Ask the French about their efficient reactor program.
- Izikiel43 1y ago
  Reminds me of: https://xkcd.com/1162/ https://xkcd.com/1162/
  - Retric 1y ago
    Would have been even funnier if they included sunlight, that’s 100% E=MC^2 baby.
- godelski 1y ago
  If anyone is interested, here's a picture of decades worth of it[0]. I used to have a video of Russia's, but it seems to have gone down. If somehow you can way back it, here's the link[1]. For more comparison, France produces about 2kg of radioactive waste per year, which delivers 70% of the country's electricity. If you removed all nuclear power reactors you'd still be generating 0.8kg of radioactive waste[2]. It'll work it's way out to on the order of (i.e. approximately) a soda can per person per year. I think people grossly underestimate the scale of waste in many things. Coal produces train loads a day (including radioactive and heavy metals), while nuclear produces like a Costco's worth over decades. The current paradigm of "we'll store it on sight and figure it out later" isn't insane when we're talking about something smaller than a water tower and having about 300 years to figure out a better solution. On the flip side, people underestimate the waste of many other things. There are things much worse than nuclear waste too. We spend a lot of time talking about nuclear waste yet almost none when it comes to heavy metals and long lived plastics. Metals like lead stay toxic forever and do not become safer through typical reactions. We should definitely be concerned with nuclear waste, but when these heavy metal wastes are several orders of magnitude greater, it seems silly. When it comes to heavy metals (lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, etc) we're talking about millions of tonnage. These things are exceptionally long lived, have shown to enter both our water supply and atmosphere (thanks leaded gasoline!), and are extremely toxic. It's such a weird comparison of scale. Please take nuclear waste seriously, but I don't believe anyone if they claim to be concerned with nuclear waste but is unconcerned with other long lived hazardous wastes that are produced in billions of times greater quantities and with magnitudes lower safety margins. [0] https://x.com/Orano_usa/status/1182662569619795968 https://x.com/Orano_usa/status/1182662569619795968 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uN0bZBOic&t=105s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uN0bZBOic&t=105s [2] https://www.orano.group/en/unpacking-nuclear/all-about-radioactive-waste-in-france https://www.orano.group/en/unpacking-nuclear/all-about-radio...
amarant 1y ago
This statistic is very relevant here, and surprising to many! Deaths per kWh produced for all energy sources. Solar and nuclear both really stand out immensely as the safer alternatives. People tend to think of nuclear as dangerous, but that's just propaganda. There has been a lot of anti-nuclear propaganda over the years. But the numbers speak truth: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
- pfdietz 1y ago
  If one tries to quantify the value of those deaths, using the "statistical value of a human life" (somewhere around $12M/death), one finds in the case of both wind/solar and nuclear, using those numbers, the value of those lives contributes negligibly to the cost of energy. This is unlike with coal. This means that in choosing between solar/wind and nuclear, one cannot use the deaths/TWh to choose between them unless they are almost dead even in other costs (and they are not).
  - amarant 1y ago
    Aye, but with the amount of coal plants still running, I think the choice is between solar+nuclear or solar+coal I don't think anyone is arguing nuclear instead of solar. It's both. We need both.
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      No, I don't think we need both. In particular, building new nuclear plants would be worse than just putting all that money into renewables + storage. The latter displaces fossil fuels more quickly and more cheaply.
      - amarant 1y ago
        As someone who's lived at latitude 52N, I can tell you for a fact that solar isn't always an option. You might think wind is a good alternative, but Greta Thunberg will vehemently protest that notion [1](and she's got a point, believe it or not) We have more hydro per capita than almost anywhere in the world, and that's still not enough! Sure, if you live near the equator, you can get all the power you need by putting solar panels on your roof. If you don't.... Nuclear is the best option. [1] https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/10/12/greta-thunberg-and-norwegian-activists-stand-firm-against-wind-farm-on-sami-reindeer-herdi https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/10/12/greta-thunberg-and...
Izikiel43 1y ago
Regarding fuel: https://xkcd.com/1162/ https://xkcd.com/1162/
- Retric 1y ago
  IMO it would have been funnier if he added sunlight on that graph.
godelski 1y ago
> nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. True, but you also get large amounts of electricity in return. You're over simplifying and cherry-picking. Is it a big deal if it costs 10x more if it produces 20x more power? What about 10x the cost, 10x the power (so equal $/MWhr) but 0.1x the land? What about 10x cost, 10x power, 1x land, but 10x more power stability? As in fewer outages. How much will you pay for 99.999 than 99.99? The problem with the vast majority of these energy conversions is that people act like all these costs are captured in the monetary metric. I'm sorry, the real world is complex and a spreadsheet only takes you so far. There's no one size fits all power source. The best one to use depends on many factors, including location. If you ignore everything and hyper focus on one metric you're not making an informed decision that's "good enough" you're arrogantly making an uninformed conjecture. I'm surprised how often this needs to be said (even to pro nuclear folks), but nuclear physics is complicated. Can we just stop this bullshit of pretentiousness masquerading as arrogance?
AnthonyMouse 1y ago
> 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. It's true that a pound of nuclear fuel costs more than a pound of coal. But it also has a million times more energy content, which is why fuel is only 15-20% of the operating costs compared to >60% for coal. And that's for legacy nuclear plants designed to use moderately high enrichment rates, not newer designs that can do without that. > Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop. You're describing a heat exchanger and some pipes. If this is the thing that costs a billion dollars, you're making the argument that this is a regulatory cost problem. > You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond. Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive. Equipment to move things is something you need at refueling intervals, i.e. more than a year apart. If this is both expensive and rarely used then why does each plant need its own instead of being something that comes on the truck with the new fuel and then goes back to be used at the next plant? > Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions. This is the regulatory asymmetry again. When a hydroelectric dam messes up bad enough, the dam breaks and it can wipe out an entire city. When oil companies mess up, Deep Water Horizon and Exxon Valdez. When coal companies just operate in their ordinary manner as if this is fine, they leave behind a sea of environmental disaster sites that the government spends many billions of dollars in superfund money to clean up. That stuff costs as much in real life as nuclear disasters do in theory. And that's before we even consider climate change. But then one of them is required to carry that amount of insurance when the others aren't. It should either be both or neither, right?
- roenxi 1y ago
  > Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive. Well, anything is expensive in enough quantity. But there is a bit of a tell not covered where of regulatory problems because nuclear plant projects keep going way over budget. Even stupid planners can notice trends of that magnitude and account for them, there is something hitting plant builds that isn't a technical factor and it is driving up costs.
- virtue3 1y ago
johnebgd 1y ago
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250908384960/en/Deep-Fission-Nuclear-Completes-%2430M-Financing-in-a-Go-Public-Transaction https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250908384960/en/Dee...
Reason077 1y ago
> "It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate." Not just to operate, but to clean up and decommission at their end of life. In the UK, for example, early reactors were built cheaply without much consideration/provision for eventual decommissioning. This has left an enormous burden on future taxpayers, estimated to exceed £260 billion, much of it related to the handling and cleanup of vast quantities of nuclear waste [1]. Thankfully new reactors are being financed with eventual decommissioning costs "priced in", but this is another reason why they've become so expensive. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/23/uk-nuclear-waste-cleanup-decommissioning-power-stations https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/23/uk-nucle...
- naasking 1y ago
  > cleanup of vast quantities of nuclear waste The total high level, dangerous nuclear waste of the entire world since we started playing with nuclear power 70 years ago fits in an American football stadium with plenty of room to spare. "Vast quantities" is a serious exaggeration.
  - Reason077 1y ago
    The UK alone had the following inventory of nuclear waste as of 2022: ~1,470 m³ "high level" waste totalling ~14,000,000 TBq at year 2100. "High level" waste is that which generates enough heat to require specially designed and managed storage facilitates to prevent spontaneous fires etc. ~496,000 m³ intermediate level waste totalling ~1,000,000 TBq at 2100 ~1,340,000 m³ low level waste totalling ~130 TBq at 2100 ~2,750,000 m³ very low level waste totalling ~12 TBq at 2100. VLLW is considered safe enough to be disposed at landfill sites subject to certain special considerations. But not until the radioactivity drops below a certain threshold, of course - it still has to be stored at special facilities for many decades until then. It's a pretty vast and costly problem even if you don't consider this a "vast quantity". Source for these figures: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-radioactive-waste-and-material-inventory-2022/uk-radioactive-waste-inventory-2022 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-radioactive-wa...
llsf 1y ago
Regulation still plays a role in the final cost. Sure it has to be safe. But we need to draw the line. Nuclear is arguably way too safe currently (zero death for a long time). Some regulations could be relaxed to speed up the construction, and make the operations cheaper. We should have a discussion and review all the regulations surrounding nuclear.
naasking 1y ago
> 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. This is based on reactors with poor efficiencies that leave a lot of unburned Uranium in their waste. Fast reactors and thorium reactors burn 90% of fissile material, so mining costs are significantly lower for the same power output. > Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions. Total death count from nuclear is lower than the death count of wind and solar. Falling off roofs happens a lot more frequently than nuclear accidents. This is a nothingburger, particularly given new reactor designs are meltdown proof.
- Retric 1y ago
  > Total death count from nuclear Total death count is a straw man argument, what matters here is the economic costs. Mining isn’t the major cost, nuclear fuel is expensive for other reasons. Refining gets rid of even more uranium before it gets to the reactor. CANDU tried to get around that by using unenriched uranium, but ran into other issues. And that’s what pro nuclear people seem to miss, really smart people have been trying to solve this issue for decades there’s no easy solutions with well understood downsides. Let’s quickly build some new design isn’t a solution it’s a big part of why nuclear construction costs are so high.
  - naasking 1y ago
    > Total death count is a straw man argument, what matters here is the economic costs. Paying out lawsuits is an economic cost. Regardless, disposing of low level radioactive components of the reactor had to happen at some point, and the cases where it's not offset by decades of recouping on that investment is are incredibly rare. Regardless, this is mostly moot in new designs because they are considerably safer, as I said. What's left is really the regulatory burden. In France and China, they build reactors in less than a decade. Can't happen here in America. > Mining isn’t the major cost, nuclear fuel is expensive for other reasons. Which is besides the point, as I said, you get a lot more energy per gram of fuel with modern designs or fast reactors, which mostly mitigates the objection about fuel cost, regardless of what stage the highest cost to obtain fuel is incurred. Fast reactors weren't pursued because of nuclear weapon proliferation risk, which leaves the modern designs on the table where this risk is even lower than LWR.
8bitsrule 1y ago
As an expert remarked way back in a time when the nukes were conveniently making plutonium, and kids got free comic books promoting them, and the plans for handling waste seemed sound : "At present, atomic power presents an exceptionally costly and inconvenient means of obtaining energy which can be extracted much more economically from conventional fuels.… This is expensive power, not cheap power as the public has been led to believe." — C. G. Suits, Director of Research, General Electric, who was operating the Hanford reactors, 1951. (Hanford today, sitting on 56M gallons of leaking wastewater, is debating whether that newly-constructed vitrification plant should be allowed to operate, since it'll emit dangerous levels of toxic acetonitrile.)
BrtByte 1y ago
Bottom line: nuclear will never be "cheap and easy," but I think there is headroom to reduce costs meaningfully
m101 1y ago
The comment you reply to talk about regulatory costs but you choose to talk about cost in general. No one thinks its cost is 0.

by Retric 1y ago

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.

Retric 1y ago
None of what I said really relates to safety. 3 mile island was a complete non issue when it comes to safety, but one day the nuclear reactor went from a useful tool to an expensive cleanup.
- theptip 1y ago
  Agreed, you are talking about non-safety factors. I don’t think they necessitate the price levels we see; for example, look at how cheaply China can build reactors. I think it’s quite clear that we pay a high safety / regulatory premium in the west for Nuclear. My point about safety is that we are over-indexing on regulation. We should reduce (not remove!) regulations on nuclear projects, this would make them more affordable. I don’t think this is a controversial point, if you look into post-mortems on why US projects overrun by billions you always see issues with last-minute adaptations requiring expensive re-certification of designs, ie purely regulatory (safety-motivated) friction.
  - bobthepanda 1y ago
    The notable thing is that more or less China has kept ramping up solar and wind targets whereas nuclear has been much slower to grow. China's energy requirements are so large that this still represents an absolute number increase, but it's telling that even with as heavy handed an industrial policy's as China's that nuclear has not really lifted off. > Authorities have steadily downgraded plans for nuclear to dominate China's energy generation. At present, the goal is 18 per cent of generation by 2060. China installed 1GW of nuclear last year, compared to 300GW of solar and wind, Mr Buckley said. > https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewable-energy-boom-breaks-records/104086640 https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa...

nicce 1y ago

> 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. Etc etc. Without the fear of dual use, we could just enrich the fuel to higher levels and refuel once per 30 years.

lclarkmichalek 1y ago

I think if you regulated coal on a linear no threshold risk model, you'd find the costs to be somewhat closer.

Retric 1y ago
Coal is already losing, and things are only getting worse for steady state production. Grid solar drives wholesale rates for most of the day really low long before new nuclear gets decommissioned. If nighttime rates rise above daytime rates a great deal of demand is going to shift to the day. Which then forces nuclear to try and survive on peak pricing, but batteries cap peak pricing over that same timescale. Nuclear thus really needs to drop significantly below current coal prices or find some way to do cheap energy storage. I’m somewhat hopeful on heat storage, but now you need to have a lot of turbines and cooling that’s only useful for a fraction of the day. On top of that heat storage means a lower working temperature costing you thermodynamic efficiency.

quotemstr 1y ago

> Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. You have to take scale into account. This is 20 years of spent fuel. https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/cca0b8d/2147483647/strip/true/crop/824x621+0+0/resize/1760x1326!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F0b%2Feb%2Fb2f4d17e499b9951788ce9db59f5%2Fsf-nukewaste-ep3.JPG https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/cca0b8d/21474836... That's it. 20 years. Just that, for a constant, quiet output of just about a gigawatt. And that's an old, decommissioned reactor. You're right about nuclear fuel refinement, packaging, and so on being non-trivial, but the amount of it that you need is so miniscule that if you don't talk about volume you paint a misleading picture. > small modular reactors are only making heat they don’t actually drive costs down meaningfully. Mass production makes anything cheaper. Ask the French about their efficient reactor program.

Izikiel43 1y ago
Reminds me of: https://xkcd.com/1162/ https://xkcd.com/1162/
- Retric 1y ago
  Would have been even funnier if they included sunlight, that’s 100% E=MC^2 baby.
godelski 1y ago
If anyone is interested, here's a picture of decades worth of it[0]. I used to have a video of Russia's, but it seems to have gone down. If somehow you can way back it, here's the link[1]. For more comparison, France produces about 2kg of radioactive waste per year, which delivers 70% of the country's electricity. If you removed all nuclear power reactors you'd still be generating 0.8kg of radioactive waste[2]. It'll work it's way out to on the order of (i.e. approximately) a soda can per person per year. I think people grossly underestimate the scale of waste in many things. Coal produces train loads a day (including radioactive and heavy metals), while nuclear produces like a Costco's worth over decades. The current paradigm of "we'll store it on sight and figure it out later" isn't insane when we're talking about something smaller than a water tower and having about 300 years to figure out a better solution. On the flip side, people underestimate the waste of many other things. There are things much worse than nuclear waste too. We spend a lot of time talking about nuclear waste yet almost none when it comes to heavy metals and long lived plastics. Metals like lead stay toxic forever and do not become safer through typical reactions. We should definitely be concerned with nuclear waste, but when these heavy metal wastes are several orders of magnitude greater, it seems silly. When it comes to heavy metals (lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, etc) we're talking about millions of tonnage. These things are exceptionally long lived, have shown to enter both our water supply and atmosphere (thanks leaded gasoline!), and are extremely toxic. It's such a weird comparison of scale. Please take nuclear waste seriously, but I don't believe anyone if they claim to be concerned with nuclear waste but is unconcerned with other long lived hazardous wastes that are produced in billions of times greater quantities and with magnitudes lower safety margins. [0] https://x.com/Orano_usa/status/1182662569619795968 https://x.com/Orano_usa/status/1182662569619795968 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uN0bZBOic&t=105s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uN0bZBOic&t=105s [2] https://www.orano.group/en/unpacking-nuclear/all-about-radioactive-waste-in-france https://www.orano.group/en/unpacking-nuclear/all-about-radio...

amarant 1y ago

This statistic is very relevant here, and surprising to many! Deaths per kWh produced for all energy sources. Solar and nuclear both really stand out immensely as the safer alternatives. People tend to think of nuclear as dangerous, but that's just propaganda. There has been a lot of anti-nuclear propaganda over the years. But the numbers speak truth: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

pfdietz 1y ago
If one tries to quantify the value of those deaths, using the "statistical value of a human life" (somewhere around $12M/death), one finds in the case of both wind/solar and nuclear, using those numbers, the value of those lives contributes negligibly to the cost of energy. This is unlike with coal. This means that in choosing between solar/wind and nuclear, one cannot use the deaths/TWh to choose between them unless they are almost dead even in other costs (and they are not).
- amarant 1y ago
  Aye, but with the amount of coal plants still running, I think the choice is between solar+nuclear or solar+coal I don't think anyone is arguing nuclear instead of solar. It's both. We need both.
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    No, I don't think we need both. In particular, building new nuclear plants would be worse than just putting all that money into renewables + storage. The latter displaces fossil fuels more quickly and more cheaply.
    - amarant 1y ago
      As someone who's lived at latitude 52N, I can tell you for a fact that solar isn't always an option. You might think wind is a good alternative, but Greta Thunberg will vehemently protest that notion [1](and she's got a point, believe it or not) We have more hydro per capita than almost anywhere in the world, and that's still not enough! Sure, if you live near the equator, you can get all the power you need by putting solar panels on your roof. If you don't.... Nuclear is the best option. [1] https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/10/12/greta-thunberg-and-norwegian-activists-stand-firm-against-wind-farm-on-sami-reindeer-herdi https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/10/12/greta-thunberg-and...

Izikiel43 1y ago

Regarding fuel: https://xkcd.com/1162/ https://xkcd.com/1162/

Retric 1y ago
IMO it would have been funnier if he added sunlight on that graph.

godelski 1y ago

> nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. True, but you also get large amounts of electricity in return. You're over simplifying and cherry-picking. Is it a big deal if it costs 10x more if it produces 20x more power? What about 10x the cost, 10x the power (so equal $/MWhr) but 0.1x the land? What about 10x cost, 10x power, 1x land, but 10x more power stability? As in fewer outages. How much will you pay for 99.999 than 99.99? The problem with the vast majority of these energy conversions is that people act like all these costs are captured in the monetary metric. I'm sorry, the real world is complex and a spreadsheet only takes you so far. There's no one size fits all power source. The best one to use depends on many factors, including location. If you ignore everything and hyper focus on one metric you're not making an informed decision that's "good enough" you're arrogantly making an uninformed conjecture. I'm surprised how often this needs to be said (even to pro nuclear folks), but nuclear physics is complicated. Can we just stop this bullshit of pretentiousness masquerading as arrogance?

AnthonyMouse 1y ago

> 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. It's true that a pound of nuclear fuel costs more than a pound of coal. But it also has a million times more energy content, which is why fuel is only 15-20% of the operating costs compared to >60% for coal. And that's for legacy nuclear plants designed to use moderately high enrichment rates, not newer designs that can do without that. > Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop. You're describing a heat exchanger and some pipes. If this is the thing that costs a billion dollars, you're making the argument that this is a regulatory cost problem. > You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond. Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive. Equipment to move things is something you need at refueling intervals, i.e. more than a year apart. If this is both expensive and rarely used then why does each plant need its own instead of being something that comes on the truck with the new fuel and then goes back to be used at the next plant? > Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions. This is the regulatory asymmetry again. When a hydroelectric dam messes up bad enough, the dam breaks and it can wipe out an entire city. When oil companies mess up, Deep Water Horizon and Exxon Valdez. When coal companies just operate in their ordinary manner as if this is fine, they leave behind a sea of environmental disaster sites that the government spends many billions of dollars in superfund money to clean up. That stuff costs as much in real life as nuclear disasters do in theory. And that's before we even consider climate change. But then one of them is required to carry that amount of insurance when the others aren't. It should either be both or neither, right?

roenxi 1y ago
> Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive. Well, anything is expensive in enough quantity. But there is a bit of a tell not covered where of regulatory problems because nuclear plant projects keep going way over budget. Even stupid planners can notice trends of that magnitude and account for them, there is something hitting plant builds that isn't a technical factor and it is driving up costs.
virtue3 1y ago

johnebgd 1y ago

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250908384960/en/Deep-Fission-Nuclear-Completes-%2430M-Financing-in-a-Go-Public-Transaction https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250908384960/en/Dee...

Reason077 1y ago

> "It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate." Not just to operate, but to clean up and decommission at their end of life. In the UK, for example, early reactors were built cheaply without much consideration/provision for eventual decommissioning. This has left an enormous burden on future taxpayers, estimated to exceed £260 billion, much of it related to the handling and cleanup of vast quantities of nuclear waste [1]. Thankfully new reactors are being financed with eventual decommissioning costs "priced in", but this is another reason why they've become so expensive. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/23/uk-nuclear-waste-cleanup-decommissioning-power-stations https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/23/uk-nucle...

naasking 1y ago
> cleanup of vast quantities of nuclear waste The total high level, dangerous nuclear waste of the entire world since we started playing with nuclear power 70 years ago fits in an American football stadium with plenty of room to spare. "Vast quantities" is a serious exaggeration.
- Reason077 1y ago
  The UK alone had the following inventory of nuclear waste as of 2022: ~1,470 m³ "high level" waste totalling ~14,000,000 TBq at year 2100. "High level" waste is that which generates enough heat to require specially designed and managed storage facilitates to prevent spontaneous fires etc. ~496,000 m³ intermediate level waste totalling ~1,000,000 TBq at 2100 ~1,340,000 m³ low level waste totalling ~130 TBq at 2100 ~2,750,000 m³ very low level waste totalling ~12 TBq at 2100. VLLW is considered safe enough to be disposed at landfill sites subject to certain special considerations. But not until the radioactivity drops below a certain threshold, of course - it still has to be stored at special facilities for many decades until then. It's a pretty vast and costly problem even if you don't consider this a "vast quantity". Source for these figures: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-radioactive-waste-and-material-inventory-2022/uk-radioactive-waste-inventory-2022 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-radioactive-wa...

llsf 1y ago

Regulation still plays a role in the final cost. Sure it has to be safe. But we need to draw the line. Nuclear is arguably way too safe currently (zero death for a long time). Some regulations could be relaxed to speed up the construction, and make the operations cheaper. We should have a discussion and review all the regulations surrounding nuclear.

naasking 1y ago

> 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. This is based on reactors with poor efficiencies that leave a lot of unburned Uranium in their waste. Fast reactors and thorium reactors burn 90% of fissile material, so mining costs are significantly lower for the same power output. > Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions. Total death count from nuclear is lower than the death count of wind and solar. Falling off roofs happens a lot more frequently than nuclear accidents. This is a nothingburger, particularly given new reactor designs are meltdown proof.

Retric 1y ago
> Total death count from nuclear Total death count is a straw man argument, what matters here is the economic costs. Mining isn’t the major cost, nuclear fuel is expensive for other reasons. Refining gets rid of even more uranium before it gets to the reactor. CANDU tried to get around that by using unenriched uranium, but ran into other issues. And that’s what pro nuclear people seem to miss, really smart people have been trying to solve this issue for decades there’s no easy solutions with well understood downsides. Let’s quickly build some new design isn’t a solution it’s a big part of why nuclear construction costs are so high.
- naasking 1y ago
  > Total death count is a straw man argument, what matters here is the economic costs. Paying out lawsuits is an economic cost. Regardless, disposing of low level radioactive components of the reactor had to happen at some point, and the cases where it's not offset by decades of recouping on that investment is are incredibly rare. Regardless, this is mostly moot in new designs because they are considerably safer, as I said. What's left is really the regulatory burden. In France and China, they build reactors in less than a decade. Can't happen here in America. > Mining isn’t the major cost, nuclear fuel is expensive for other reasons. Which is besides the point, as I said, you get a lot more energy per gram of fuel with modern designs or fast reactors, which mostly mitigates the objection about fuel cost, regardless of what stage the highest cost to obtain fuel is incurred. Fast reactors weren't pursued because of nuclear weapon proliferation risk, which leaves the modern designs on the table where this risk is even lower than LWR.

8bitsrule 1y ago

As an expert remarked way back in a time when the nukes were conveniently making plutonium, and kids got free comic books promoting them, and the plans for handling waste seemed sound : "At present, atomic power presents an exceptionally costly and inconvenient means of obtaining energy which can be extracted much more economically from conventional fuels.… This is expensive power, not cheap power as the public has been led to believe." — C. G. Suits, Director of Research, General Electric, who was operating the Hanford reactors, 1951. (Hanford today, sitting on 56M gallons of leaking wastewater, is debating whether that newly-constructed vitrification plant should be allowed to operate, since it'll emit dangerous levels of toxic acetonitrile.)

BrtByte 1y ago

Bottom line: nuclear will never be "cheap and easy," but I think there is headroom to reduce costs meaningfully

m101 1y ago

The comment you reply to talk about regulatory costs but you choose to talk about cost in general. No one thinks its cost is 0.