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Nuclear is an industry that strangled itself with red tape and harmful PR, making every project fiendishly expensive and take so many decades that cost-of-capit

Nuclear is an industry that strangled itself with red tape and harmful PR, making every project fiendishly expensive and take so many decades that cost-of-capital costs are insane. I don't think it will ever again beat solar+wind+battery for grid scale carbon-free power pricing.

longor1996 1y ago
Wasn't all that bad PR mostly caused by the coal/oil industry, doing some serious astroturfing for a decade or so?
- toyg 1y ago
  If by "the coal industry" you mean people in charge of Chernobyl and Fukushima...
  - Angostura 1y ago
    And Windscale (now Sellafield) and Three Mile Island
  - longor1996 1y ago
    Oh, sorry! Shouldn't have said "all" there... :'D
- lysace 1y ago
  See also: Gazprom, Gerhard Schröder (”Putin’s man in Germany” according to NYT) and the German nuclear power shutdown. https://atomicinsights.com/gazprom-profiting-mightily-from-german-nuclear-exit/ https://atomicinsights.com/gazprom-profiting-mightily-from-g... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/world/europe/schroder-germany-russia-gas-ukraine-war-energy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/world/europe/schroder-ger...
- eucyclos 1y ago
  I think it was mostly caused by fear about nuclear Armageddon during the cold war - it's hard to feel like the world could end at any second due to nuclear bombs while also feeling grateful for nuclear electricity generation. Would be even if there was no overlap between military and civilian nuclear industries, which of course there is.
- fundatus 1y ago
  Well, at least for Germany it was the actual nuclear fallout over large areas of the country after Chernobyl. Which is btw still measurable today. [1] That's a pretty scary thing to happen to you and one just has to accept that these are the actual lived experiences of people that form their opinions. [1] https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mushrooms-game/mushrooms-game_node.html https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...
  - jabl 1y ago
    Radiation detectors can detect very low levels of radiation (far below any measurable health effects, for instance), so claiming we can still detect fallout from Chernobyl doesn't really say anything.
    - fundatus 1y ago
      To quote from the article I linked to: > In the last years values of up to several thousand becquerel per kilogram were measured in wild game and certain edible mushrooms. In Germany it is not permitted to market food with more than 600 becquerel caesium-137 per kilogram.
      - chickenbig 1y ago
        Another quote from the article is > If wild game or wild growing mushrooms are consumed in usual amounts, the additional radiation exposure is comparatively low. > The consumption of 200 grams of mushrooms with 1,000 becquerel caesium-137 per kilogram results in an exposure of 0.0025 millisievert.
        fundatus 1y ago
        The numbers and actual risks don't matter to change regular people's feelings about a technology. All they know is that there was actual nuclear fallout and now the mushrooms in their forests are radioactive.
Tabular-Iceberg 1y ago
This was my impression as well, both watching Smarter Every Day and visiting a nuclear power plant myself and taking the tour. Yes, safety is important, but I think they're far into diminishing returns territory, and we have to take the penalty in both energy cost and security.
michaelt 1y ago
> I don't think it will ever again beat solar+wind+battery for grid scale carbon-free power pricing. The problem the UK has is their climate: Northerly enough that solar makes 5x as much power in the summer as it does in the winter, and much more demand for heating in the winter than cooling in the summer. Batteries are fine for storing solar in the day and using it at night - but much less good for summer-to-winter storage. And the UK isn't exactly eager to start flooding desolate valleys for pumped storage reservoirs either. Oh, and they don't just need to decarbonise their existing electricity output - they also need to greatly increase their electricity output to hit their goals on EV and heat pump adoption; and they need to lower electricity prices too. I can see why they'd hedge their bets.
- stephen_g 1y ago
  The UK has massive wind resources up north. Absolutely no need for summer-to-winter storage, that would be madness!
eucyclos 1y ago
Even if it had never had those issues, nuclear power would still be the textbook example of a fragile system - capital-intensive, centralized projects that can be shut down by disruption to fuel shipments halfway round the world, droughts in the cooling system's water sources, or any of a dozen unions of specialized workers going on strike. Add to that iteration cycles measured in decades instead of years and it's hard to imagine how Nuclear could ever even close the gap, let alone pull ahead. I have a theory that smart financiers avoid nuclear because getting a new version done on time and under budget is so damn hard, and smart physicists gravitate to nuclear for the same reason. I wish the nuclear-curious factions would pivot to a project Orion style endeavor instead of powering a UK hamlet sometime in the 2030s. Now there's something insanely difficult and likely to fail that I wouldn't mind my tax dollars being spent on.
- blitzar 1y ago
  Capitalism is extremely poor at "fragile systems", and for whatever reason (water under the bride now) the nuclear industry never made the move to smaller modular systems - even for large installations (think a reactor hall with 20 small cores rather than a single large core). Even this project sounds like a custom on-site build, although at the moment it is still vapourware.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- wafflemaker 1y ago
  But the wind &solar is highly dependant on rare earth minerals that China can limit at any time. And their condition is for us to accept their highly subsidized products (cars, solar), which make our manufacturers go bankrupt. It also makes us lose manufacturing capacity for dual use products like drones etc.
  - pjc50 1y ago
    Not once it's installed! And no such conditionality exists.

longor1996 1y ago

Wasn't all that bad PR mostly caused by the coal/oil industry, doing some serious astroturfing for a decade or so?

toyg 1y ago
If by "the coal industry" you mean people in charge of Chernobyl and Fukushima...
- Angostura 1y ago
  And Windscale (now Sellafield) and Three Mile Island
- longor1996 1y ago
  Oh, sorry! Shouldn't have said "all" there... :'D
lysace 1y ago
See also: Gazprom, Gerhard Schröder (”Putin’s man in Germany” according to NYT) and the German nuclear power shutdown. https://atomicinsights.com/gazprom-profiting-mightily-from-german-nuclear-exit/ https://atomicinsights.com/gazprom-profiting-mightily-from-g... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/world/europe/schroder-germany-russia-gas-ukraine-war-energy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/world/europe/schroder-ger...
eucyclos 1y ago
I think it was mostly caused by fear about nuclear Armageddon during the cold war - it's hard to feel like the world could end at any second due to nuclear bombs while also feeling grateful for nuclear electricity generation. Would be even if there was no overlap between military and civilian nuclear industries, which of course there is.
fundatus 1y ago
Well, at least for Germany it was the actual nuclear fallout over large areas of the country after Chernobyl. Which is btw still measurable today. [1] That's a pretty scary thing to happen to you and one just has to accept that these are the actual lived experiences of people that form their opinions. [1] https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mushrooms-game/mushrooms-game_node.html https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...
- jabl 1y ago
  Radiation detectors can detect very low levels of radiation (far below any measurable health effects, for instance), so claiming we can still detect fallout from Chernobyl doesn't really say anything.
  - fundatus 1y ago
    To quote from the article I linked to: > In the last years values of up to several thousand becquerel per kilogram were measured in wild game and certain edible mushrooms. In Germany it is not permitted to market food with more than 600 becquerel caesium-137 per kilogram.
    - chickenbig 1y ago
      Another quote from the article is > If wild game or wild growing mushrooms are consumed in usual amounts, the additional radiation exposure is comparatively low. > The consumption of 200 grams of mushrooms with 1,000 becquerel caesium-137 per kilogram results in an exposure of 0.0025 millisievert.
      - fundatus 1y ago
        The numbers and actual risks don't matter to change regular people's feelings about a technology. All they know is that there was actual nuclear fallout and now the mushrooms in their forests are radioactive.

Tabular-Iceberg 1y ago

This was my impression as well, both watching Smarter Every Day and visiting a nuclear power plant myself and taking the tour. Yes, safety is important, but I think they're far into diminishing returns territory, and we have to take the penalty in both energy cost and security.

michaelt 1y ago

> I don't think it will ever again beat solar+wind+battery for grid scale carbon-free power pricing. The problem the UK has is their climate: Northerly enough that solar makes 5x as much power in the summer as it does in the winter, and much more demand for heating in the winter than cooling in the summer. Batteries are fine for storing solar in the day and using it at night - but much less good for summer-to-winter storage. And the UK isn't exactly eager to start flooding desolate valleys for pumped storage reservoirs either. Oh, and they don't just need to decarbonise their existing electricity output - they also need to greatly increase their electricity output to hit their goals on EV and heat pump adoption; and they need to lower electricity prices too. I can see why they'd hedge their bets.

stephen_g 1y ago
The UK has massive wind resources up north. Absolutely no need for summer-to-winter storage, that would be madness!

eucyclos 1y ago

Even if it had never had those issues, nuclear power would still be the textbook example of a fragile system - capital-intensive, centralized projects that can be shut down by disruption to fuel shipments halfway round the world, droughts in the cooling system's water sources, or any of a dozen unions of specialized workers going on strike. Add to that iteration cycles measured in decades instead of years and it's hard to imagine how Nuclear could ever even close the gap, let alone pull ahead. I have a theory that smart financiers avoid nuclear because getting a new version done on time and under budget is so damn hard, and smart physicists gravitate to nuclear for the same reason. I wish the nuclear-curious factions would pivot to a project Orion style endeavor instead of powering a UK hamlet sometime in the 2030s. Now there's something insanely difficult and likely to fail that I wouldn't mind my tax dollars being spent on.

blitzar 1y ago
Capitalism is extremely poor at "fragile systems", and for whatever reason (water under the bride now) the nuclear industry never made the move to smaller modular systems - even for large installations (think a reactor hall with 20 small cores rather than a single large core). Even this project sounds like a custom on-site build, although at the moment it is still vapourware.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
wafflemaker 1y ago
But the wind &solar is highly dependant on rare earth minerals that China can limit at any time. And their condition is for us to accept their highly subsidized products (cars, solar), which make our manufacturers go bankrupt. It also makes us lose manufacturing capacity for dual use products like drones etc.
- pjc50 1y ago
  Not once it's installed! And no such conditionality exists.