4 ms·

The great tragedy is that we already have a practically unlimited and environmentally safe source of energy, which is nuclear fission. And we simply don't use i

The great tragedy is that we already have a practically unlimited and environmentally safe source of energy, which is nuclear fission. And we simply don't use it at a significant scale because of irrational fears about meltdowns.

dalyons 10mo ago
No, it’s mainly because it costs too much.
- ETH_start 10mo ago
  The cost is almost entirely due to overly cautious rules for nuclear power generation.
  - dalyons 10mo ago
    That’s not true. They are physically massive, incredibly complicated machines with all kinds of large scale pressure welding, forging, containment systems, 100s of miles of plumbing, and other serious large scale engineering. They will never be anywhere close to as cheap as something as dead simple & mass manufacturable as solar.
    - ETH_start 10mo ago
      If they were intrinsically costly, they would have been costly in the U.S. in the 1960s, or in France in the 1970s-90s, or in South Korea today. It is because of regulatory ratcheting, and the effects of that (both direct and second order), that costs escalated.
      - dalyons 10mo ago
        NPPs are intrinsically Big Projects. The western world is almost universally suffering from Baumol’s cost disease - we cannot build Big Projects at a reasonable price anymore. Subways, bridges, NPPs, you name it - all cost many multiples of their inflation adjusted 1970 cost. And that’s before they inevitably blow their budget by 2-3x. Until you can somehow fix the labor / housing / management cost issues NPPs will not be affordable, even if you relax nuclear specific regs. Mass manufactured things like solar and wind turbines do not suffer this.
        ETH_start 10mo ago
        Since the 1970s, large construction projects have been layered with several major regulatory regimes that didn’t exist when most affordable infrastructure was built. In the U.S., NEPA (1970) dramatically expanded pre-construction environmental review and litigation risk, causing planning timelines to extend by years. Around the same time, OSHA began rapidly increasing the degree to which workplace processes were regimented, which permanently increased labor-hours and limited on-site automation. For nuclear specifically, this was compounded by post-Three Mile Island regulatory response. This increased the tendency to use bespoke designs, i.e. discouraged standardization, which prevented automation and the benefits of learning curves. That's why Baumol-style cost dynamics took over. This same pattern shows up in subways and bridges. It’s not that 'big things can’t be built cheaply anymore", it’s that we changed the rules under which big things are built.
pfdietz 10mo ago
Rational aversion to financial meltdown, you mean. The idea that nuclearphobia is to blame is a defensive fantasy.
- ETH_start 10mo ago
  It is not rational aversion. Nuclear is currently 10,000 less dangerous per unit of energy produced than the largest sources of energy: coal, oil and natural gas. We could afford to let nuclear get 10x less safe, so that it becomes vastly less costly to deploy, and a very possible result would be that it would replace the largest sources of energy, and would still be three orders of magnitude less dangerous than the sources of energy it replaced.
  - pfdietz 10mo ago
    Regulation is inescapable, because the maximum damage from a nuclear accident would exceed the value of the company operating the reactor. A rational business treats any liabilities larger that what it could pay as equivalent, regardless of how large they could become, and hence will underinvest in safety measures. And I'm sure you will agree there is a great and sorry history of nuclear efforts failing to achieve their cost targets. At this point, it is clear that such targets are sales numbers, not something one should actually believe. One cannot make this history go away just by wishing, as nuclear advocates like yourself seem wont to do. I agree fossil fuels should go, but that's not an argument they should be replaced by nuclear. It's the argument nuclear advocates used to be able to lie back and comfort themselves with, but then you all got blindsided by renewables and storage zooming past you. You have to address those now, not the old competition you wished you were still running against.
    - ETH_start 10mo ago
      Of course regulation is necessary. My point is that current nuclear regulation is disproportionate to actual risk, and that this mismatch has made nuclear uncompetitive relative to energy sources that are demonstrably far more dangerous on a per-unit-of-energy basis. Even compared to solar, nuclear has a stronger safety record when measured by deaths per TWh, and this is when taking into account the worst nuclear catastrophe, Chernobyl. I am not arguing that the future should be all nuclear, or even predominantly nuclear. I am arguing that the present regulatory regime reflects a mispricing of risk, particularly relative to hydrocarbons, and that this has pushed us into a suboptimal energy mix. On cost overruns: the strongest correlation is with regulatory ratcheting, which also had harmful second order consequences for cost control from failing to reach larger scale construction, like bespoke designs and loss of construction continuity.

dalyons 10mo ago

No, it’s mainly because it costs too much.

ETH_start 10mo ago
The cost is almost entirely due to overly cautious rules for nuclear power generation.
- dalyons 10mo ago
  That’s not true. They are physically massive, incredibly complicated machines with all kinds of large scale pressure welding, forging, containment systems, 100s of miles of plumbing, and other serious large scale engineering. They will never be anywhere close to as cheap as something as dead simple & mass manufacturable as solar.
  - ETH_start 10mo ago
    If they were intrinsically costly, they would have been costly in the U.S. in the 1960s, or in France in the 1970s-90s, or in South Korea today. It is because of regulatory ratcheting, and the effects of that (both direct and second order), that costs escalated.
    - dalyons 10mo ago
      NPPs are intrinsically Big Projects. The western world is almost universally suffering from Baumol’s cost disease - we cannot build Big Projects at a reasonable price anymore. Subways, bridges, NPPs, you name it - all cost many multiples of their inflation adjusted 1970 cost. And that’s before they inevitably blow their budget by 2-3x. Until you can somehow fix the labor / housing / management cost issues NPPs will not be affordable, even if you relax nuclear specific regs. Mass manufactured things like solar and wind turbines do not suffer this.
      - ETH_start 10mo ago
        Since the 1970s, large construction projects have been layered with several major regulatory regimes that didn’t exist when most affordable infrastructure was built. In the U.S., NEPA (1970) dramatically expanded pre-construction environmental review and litigation risk, causing planning timelines to extend by years. Around the same time, OSHA began rapidly increasing the degree to which workplace processes were regimented, which permanently increased labor-hours and limited on-site automation. For nuclear specifically, this was compounded by post-Three Mile Island regulatory response. This increased the tendency to use bespoke designs, i.e. discouraged standardization, which prevented automation and the benefits of learning curves. That's why Baumol-style cost dynamics took over. This same pattern shows up in subways and bridges. It’s not that 'big things can’t be built cheaply anymore", it’s that we changed the rules under which big things are built.

pfdietz 10mo ago

Rational aversion to financial meltdown, you mean. The idea that nuclearphobia is to blame is a defensive fantasy.

ETH_start 10mo ago
It is not rational aversion. Nuclear is currently 10,000 less dangerous per unit of energy produced than the largest sources of energy: coal, oil and natural gas. We could afford to let nuclear get 10x less safe, so that it becomes vastly less costly to deploy, and a very possible result would be that it would replace the largest sources of energy, and would still be three orders of magnitude less dangerous than the sources of energy it replaced.
- pfdietz 10mo ago
  Regulation is inescapable, because the maximum damage from a nuclear accident would exceed the value of the company operating the reactor. A rational business treats any liabilities larger that what it could pay as equivalent, regardless of how large they could become, and hence will underinvest in safety measures. And I'm sure you will agree there is a great and sorry history of nuclear efforts failing to achieve their cost targets. At this point, it is clear that such targets are sales numbers, not something one should actually believe. One cannot make this history go away just by wishing, as nuclear advocates like yourself seem wont to do. I agree fossil fuels should go, but that's not an argument they should be replaced by nuclear. It's the argument nuclear advocates used to be able to lie back and comfort themselves with, but then you all got blindsided by renewables and storage zooming past you. You have to address those now, not the old competition you wished you were still running against.
  - ETH_start 10mo ago
    Of course regulation is necessary. My point is that current nuclear regulation is disproportionate to actual risk, and that this mismatch has made nuclear uncompetitive relative to energy sources that are demonstrably far more dangerous on a per-unit-of-energy basis. Even compared to solar, nuclear has a stronger safety record when measured by deaths per TWh, and this is when taking into account the worst nuclear catastrophe, Chernobyl. I am not arguing that the future should be all nuclear, or even predominantly nuclear. I am arguing that the present regulatory regime reflects a mispricing of risk, particularly relative to hydrocarbons, and that this has pushed us into a suboptimal energy mix. On cost overruns: the strongest correlation is with regulatory ratcheting, which also had harmful second order consequences for cost control from failing to reach larger scale construction, like bespoke designs and loss of construction continuity.