[HN Gopher] Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it
___________________________________________________________________
Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it
Author : voydik
Score : 94 points
Date : 2022-08-26 19:46 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (americanaffairsjournal.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (americanaffairsjournal.org)
| Barrin92 wrote:
| who killed nuclear energy? Nobody did. The decline in nuclear
| energy utilization with very few exceptions is secular and
| global[1]. Two very mundane reasons, the high, largely stagnant
| cost of generating nuclear energy combined with the rapidly
| falling cost of renewables.
|
| It's amazing to me how everything in the United States can be
| turned into some weird culture war debate, ignoring the most
| material explanations, the article straight up ventures into
| conspiracy theory territory at the end
|
| _" The all-renewables dream was never about reducing greenhouse
| gasses, but about entrenching energy poverty to halt population
| growth, so as to spare the environment."_
|
| [1]https://www.dw.com/en/world-nuclear-industry-status-
| report-c...
| smm11 wrote:
| Three Mile Island/The China Syndrome killed nuclear energy in the
| US. That was an interesting few weeks.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Along with things like the requirements of 1,000,000 year
| storage of nuclear waste.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/11/26/the-stag...
|
| There's zero places even pretending to do this. There's one
| under construction that does 1/10th of that in Finland called
| Onkalo that's cost multiple billions and is years behind
|
| This waste procedure includes multi-decade long cooling
| requirements which require continuous power and water.
|
| Spent waste today won't be ready for storage here for about 120
| years - mid 22nd century.
|
| All for something you could get with some windmills or solar
| panels
|
| The blind nuclear boosterism on Hn is absurd. We are well on
| our way to fully decentralized renewable electricity that's so
| cheap it won't be metered and instead there's this fetish for
| centralized plants that take 10 years to construct, have waste
| that takes 120 years to process, and lead to multi-continent
| ecosystem disasters when predictable natural events happen.
| Cool tech...
|
| Existing and deployed solar is 1/7th the cost of not yet
| deployed hypothetical advanced nuclear btw:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc...
|
| Their best claimed future efforts make it 7x the cost. This is
| just about keeping power generation privatized metered
| monopolized centralized and boosted by the government while
| claiming it's a free market. Typical mindless libertarian
| drivel.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > Along with things like the requirements of 1,000,000 year
| storage of nuclear waste.
|
| That had jack shit to do with the failure of nuclear in the
| US. The back end of the fuel cycle is a trivial cost that had
| nothing to do with the financial failure of nuclear here. And
| it's the financial failure that stopped it.
| mwattsun wrote:
| The accident at Three Mile Island and the film "China Syndrome"
| turned the public against it in America. The prejudice still
| lingers. I was working as a reactor tech on a nuclear submarine
| shortly after and decide before I got out that there was no
| future in nuclear. I became a computer programmer instead. Alvin
| Toffler's book "The Third Wave" convinced me to do this.
| Lammy wrote:
| The saddest part of the TMI accident is that the entire thing
| could have been avoided if TMI had modified its cooling system
| with the lessons learned from an identical series of events
| that happened two years earlier at an identical Babcock&Wilcox
| BWR in Ohio, except Davis-Besse was operating at 9% power
| instead of at 100% like TMI in Pennsylvania in 1979:
| https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1920/ML19208C067.pdf#page=4
|
| "On September 24, 1977, Davis Besse Nuclear Power Station Unit
| No. 1 experienced a depressurization when a pressurizer power
| relief valve failed in the open position. The Reactor Coolant
| System (RCS) pressure was reduced from 2255 psig to 875 psig in
| approximately twenty-one (21) minutes. At the beginning of this
| event, steam was being bypassed to the condenser and the
| reactor thermal power was at 263 MW, or 9.5%. Electricity was
| not being generated. The following systems malfunctioned during
| the transient:
|
| a. Steam and Feedwater Rupture Control System (SFRCS).
|
| b. Pressurizer Pilot Actuated Relief Valve.
|
| c. No. 2 Steam Generator Auxiliary Feed Pump Turbine Governor"
|
| "At approximately 21 minutes into the transient, the operators
| discovered that the pressurizer power relief valve was stuck
| open. Blowdown via this valve was stopped by closing the block
| valve, thus terminating the reactor vessel depressurization.
| The RCS pressure recovered to normal and cooldown of the system
| followed."
|
| "The reason for the spurious 'half-trip' of the SFRCS has not
| yet been determined. An extensive investigation revealed
| several loose connections at terminal boards, but nothing
| conclusive. Investigation into the failure of the pressurizer
| pilot actuated relief valve revealed that a 'close' relay was
| missing from the control circuit. This missing relay would
| normally provide a 'seal-in' circuit which would hold the valve
| open until the pressure dropped to 2205 psig. Without the relay
| the power relief valve cycled open and closed each time the
| pressure of the RCS went above or below 2255 psig. The rapid
| cycling of the valve caused a failure of the pilot valve stem,
| and this failure caused the power relief valve to remain open."
| dctoedt wrote:
| Another ex-nuke here -- when I got out and went to law school,
| coincidentally right after Three Mile Island, my dad (neither a
| lawyer nor an engineer) tried to convince me that I should
| specialize in nuclear-energy law because I'd have a built-in
| advantage. I politely explained why I thought that would be a
| dead end, and that turned out to be correct.
| mwattsun wrote:
| Working in nuclear under normal operations is boring anyway
| and consists mostly of watching gauges and other indicators.
| At least on the submarine we'd scram the reactor and run
| drills. I'm sure civilian nuclear is less exciting than this.
| I had one buddy who did it for a career, but just one that I
| know of.
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _and consists mostly of watching gauges and other
| indicators_
|
| And logs. You forgot taking logs* -- or is that done
| automatically these days? It's been decades since I've been
| in a nuclear plant, so I have no idea.
|
| * That is, recording readings of various indicators.
| mwattsun wrote:
| They're probably recorded automatically but logs are
| still taken as way to ensure human eyes are on the
| indicators, like security guards have to scan a
| waystation point to prove they were there. I haven't been
| in a plant for over three decades so I don't know either.
|
| One thing I carried with me through life was to "always
| trust your indicators." It's too easy to look at an
| anomaly and conclude the gauge is broken.
| viburnum wrote:
| The Washington Public Power Supply System was the biggest
| municipal default in US history.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| >Yet the results of their victory have been calamitous. Last year
| in America, the shortcomings of green energy policy were on full
| display. During the 2021 Uri storm, Texas's $66 billion in
| renewable energy investments failed to perform in a time of
| crisis, which, when coupled with the poor market design of the
| grid, created blackouts.
|
| This is where I dropped off. Renewables were generating as
| reliably as other energy sources; the problem was that ERCOT's
| grid wasn't designed for the kind of freak snowstorm Texas got
| hit with.
|
| The through-line between racists to 70s environmentalism is eye-
| opening, but probably not in the way the article expected. It
| explains, say, why a lot of right-libertarians like to equivocate
| between authoritarian communists and Nazis. But today's
| environmentalists are about as vehemently opposed to Nazis as you
| can get, and global warming has way more scientific proof than
| the "population bomb" nonsense that veiled racists were spouting
| back then.
|
| There's also plenty of _not_ racist reasons for supporting
| renewables? Like, energy centralization has inherent risk to it
| and renewables are cheap enough to serve as a useful backup
| generation source[0] if the power grid goes down.
|
| The article also failed to explain how renuclearizing is supposed
| to work. The environmentalists came in and killed nuclear _after_
| utilities hit a scaling wall with reactors, after all. It 's one
| thing to repeal moratoria and drop safety standards that are too
| high, but it won't help if the reactors we need to replace coal
| _can 't be built_.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhTDneoDUdc
| hindsightbias wrote:
| There should be a meme for not very serious articles about
| nuclear issues.
|
| "We need fewer, clearer, and more sensible regulations."
|
| And not a single example of which regulations to drop. How about
| redlining the appropriate docs and posting those? If they're all
| so bad it should be a trivial excercise.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Effective CO2 reduction can only happen if a sensible and
| effective policy is taken, to wit:
|
| 1. a tax on the carbon content of fuels
|
| 2. nuclear plants for base load power
|
| and the rest will be taken care of by natural market forces.
|
| Green energy will never be practical without nuclear power:
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-energy-transition-will-...
| rglover wrote:
| Thank you. This is a dirt simple and obvious track that would
| create a wealth of jobs and potential for everyone. It's the
| ultimate pro-humanity solution to our concerns around
| energy/pollution.
| fundatus wrote:
| It's literally natural market forces that are "killing" nuclear
| energy. It's simply too expensive compared to modern, emission-
| free alternatives.
| qqqwerty wrote:
| That is an opinion piece from a conservative talking head.
| Maybe try linking to primary sources next time.
| epistasis wrote:
| The climate efforts of the past 20 years refute both of these
| claims decisively.
|
| First, carbon taxes, when they have been enacted they have not
| been effective. And there are massive barriers to enacting
| them, because there is no constituency that advocates for them.
| The progress we have made with reducing emissions has been
| through industrial policy of various sorts, rather than through
| single taxes. For every problem, there is a solution which is
| simple, obvious, and wrong. And I think that the history of
| carbon taxes has shown them to be this obvious and
| unfortunately wrong solution.
|
| Similarly, baseload, or more properly firm energy supply, can
| come from all sorts of carbon free sources. From storage (hydro
| or battery), to geothermal, to advanced geothermal, to
| hydrogen, to ammonia storage, to who knows what will be
| developed over the next few decades. We have a rich portfolio
| of solutions, and most of them are reducing in cost quickly.
| However nuclear is not reducing in cost, and it's not clear
| that it will ever be able to compete again. Attach 12 hours of
| storage to a solar array and you'll get a "baseload" source,
| and it will be cheaper than new nuclear.
| fi358 wrote:
| At least in countries like here in Finland, you get almost no
| energy from solar panels during winter months. 12 hours of
| storage to a solar array is not going to work at least here.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Finland is one of the worst places in the world for
| renewables. This means that any industry using significant
| amounts of energy is going to move away from Finland, once
| fossil fuels are no longer used.
| epistasis wrote:
| Here is what I suggested in my comment:
|
| > storage (hydro or battery), to geothermal, to advanced
| geothermal, to hydrogen, to ammonia storage, to who knows
| what will be developed over the next few decades
|
| With storage on solar thrown in as only one option at the
| end. And though it will probably be a dominant solution
| because it will be by far the cheapest most locations, it
| won't work everywhere. So look to other tech.
|
| I desperately hope Olkiluoto comes online soon, but it's
| also a pretty clear indication that nuclear is not a
| spectacular option for Finland either. But it may be your
| best option!
| jmyeet wrote:
| I'm familiar with the argument that nuclear power is the answer
| to greenhouse gas emissions. Still, this article is the next
| level of pro-nuclear propaganda as it launches into quite the
| anti-environmentalist screed. For example:
|
| > The postwar American environmental movement began as an
| outgrowth from the eugenaics movement.
|
| and
|
| > Having fallen out of favor during World War II due to its
| associations with Nazism, eugenics returned with gusto under the
| banner of "population control" after the war.
|
| The pro-nuclear lobby has no argument against Chernobyl, which
| has created an absolute exclusion zone of (literally) 1,000
| square miles nearly 40 years later with no end in sight, other
| than to simply ignore it as an outlier that isn't relevant
| because the USSR doesn't exist anymore.
|
| Likewise, Fukushima, which along with Chernobyl is the only other
| level seven nuclear incident, is simply written off:
|
| > No one was harmed by nor did anyone receive lethal doses of
| radiation.
|
| All the same arguments against nuclear power still apply: nuclear
| waste from fuel processing, nuclear waste from fuel, transporting
| of fuel and waste, trusting people in corporations and
| governments to adequately build and maintain such plants and the
| very fact that not a single nuclear power plant in the world
| hasn't been built without significant government help (which is
| why the pro-nuclear lobby will focus on operational costs rather
| than capital or total costs).
| Georgelemental wrote:
| Chernobyl happened because the Soviet Union did insane things
| with an insane reactor design never used anywhere else. Nuclear
| reactors built and operated by organizations that are not as
| murderous and psychotic as the USSR literally cannot fail in
| the same way. We ignore it as an irrelevant outlier because it
| is one.
|
| And even if we do _not_ ignore Chernobyl, nuclear power is
| still by far the safest way to produce energy. Fossil fuels
| release deadly smog, dams can break, solar panels leach nasty
| chemicals. Every option has some risk, but nuclear has the
| least by far.
| jdasdf wrote:
| >The pro-nuclear lobby has no argument against Chernobyl~
|
| We could have a chernobyl every year for the next hundred
| years, and you would cause less environment damage, and human
| deaths than we did by operating fossil fuel plants in 2021.
|
| There is no argument against chernobyl because chernobil is
| quite frankly irrelevant beyond an economic cost to cleanup and
| contain, both of which can be accounted for, and arguably are
| already accounted for to a far greater extent than the normal
| operation of fossil fuel plants.
| throw827474737 wrote:
| Yes, tell that those chernobyl children who still suffer
| visibly today?
|
| Not every country has that much square meters for landfills
| or nuclear wastelands, too.
|
| Nuclear won't save us from not realizing we cannot grow
| forever and resources are finite.
|
| > arguably are already accounted
|
| wtf?
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| I believe you missed the point. They acknowledged the
| terrible cost of Chernobyl but the point is it can happen
| every year for a long time before causing the same amount
| of harm and suffering that fossil burning did just last
| year.
| jmyeet wrote:
| > ... irrelevant beyond an economic cost to cleanup and
| contain, both of which can be accounted for
|
| In the US at least it's "accounted for" by shifting those
| costs onto the public [1].
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuc
| lear...
| fundatus wrote:
| After Chernobyl clouds containing radioactive material where
| blown westwards by the wind and eventually those clouds
| rained down over parts of Germany. To this day if you go out
| hunting for example wild boards in those areas they have to
| be tested for radioactivity before they can be processed
| further, since their diet mostly consists of mushrooms and
| plants that contain a lot of Caesium-137 from that rainfall
| back in 1986.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Hundreds of thousands of people dying per year vs mild
| inconvenience for wild boar hunters is hardly a difficult
| choice.
| fundatus wrote:
| my point obviously being that this still affects plants,
| animals and humans in a much larger area than just the
| surrounding area - which makes the argument "We could
| have a chernobyl every year for the next hundred years"
| not very compelling
| jjk166 wrote:
| And my point is that the alternative also affects plants,
| animals, and humans in a much larger area (infact
| worldwide) and too such a significantly greater degree
| that the comparison is laughable. If there was a button
| that would cause us to have a chernobyl every day and
| eliminate fossil fuels immediately, every minute that
| button went unpressed would kill 15 people. The actual
| breakeven point is a chernobyl every 3 hours.
| throw827474737 wrote:
| Yeah it is ridiculous, and this still completely ignores that
| e.g. France's plants age quicker than they can renew them, that
| nuclear will never be safe (not talking the ""normal safe"" but
| what's the threat in Ukraine right now), that Europe just
| learns that also nuclear is of not much help during heat and
| drought (lol, nuclear for base power load), and that whatever
| will need to happen that going nuclear fully is just not
| feasible, time-left-wise, economical-wise, supply-wise..
| hh3k0 wrote:
| Boggles my mind how people can witness Russia taking Europe
| hostage by occupying a nuclear power plant and making vague
| threats that accidents just happen sometimes and think "you
| know, the world really needs more of those looming threats".
| Let alone that extreme weather events are potentially
| dangerous for nuclear power plants -- and extreme weather
| events are, thanks to climate change, happening more and more
| often.
| fallingknife wrote:
| > The pro-nuclear lobby has no argument against Chernobyl
|
| > Likewise, Fukushima, which along with Chernobyl is the only
| other level seven nuclear incident, is simply written off
|
| So let's not ignore Chernobyl. Let's say hypothetically that we
| build our entire power grid out of nuclear power plants that
| use the exact same design as the reactors at Chernobyl. Still
| better than using fossil fuels. And it's a stupid comparison
| because nuclear is only needed for base load, not the whole
| grid, and we have much better designs.
|
| Fukushima, I absolutely do write off for the exact reason you
| quote "No one was harmed by nor did anyone receive lethal doses
| of radiation."
|
| > nuclear waste from fuel processing, nuclear waste from fuel,
| transporting of fuel and waste
|
| Don't care about the waste issue, because current power sources
| are dumping the waste into the atmosphere continuously. Don't
| care that it lasts 100K years. Don't care that someone in 10K
| years could be killed. I don't care because the alternative
| carbon based power is killing people right now, so nuclear is
| better than that.
|
| > trusting people in corporations and governments to adequately
| build and maintain such plants
|
| Don't care because of the aforementioned fact that nuclear
| meltdowns are much less harmful than global warming, which is
| the side effect of our current power generation system.
|
| > not a single nuclear power plant in the world hasn't been
| built without significant government help
|
| Don't care that it's more expensive and needs govt subsidies.
| Don't care because it's better than using fossil fuels and
| causing more global warming. Happy to have my taxes go up for
| this purpose.
|
| But what about solar/wind/storage?
|
| Don't care because doesn't exist (yet). Show me one reasonably
| sized area where this powers 100% of the grid (areas w/ hydro
| don't count), and then I'll care. Using existing tech now is
| the lower risk option. Don't care about predictions that large
| scale storage will be ready in X years because predicting when
| new tech will be ready is basically impossible.
| jmyeet wrote:
| > Fukushima, I absolutely do write off
|
| The only thing that prevented Fukushima from having a
| Chernobyl like impact was that the radiation leakage was into
| the ocean [1]. The ocean ironically is being treated as a
| dumping ground that can be ignored by the pro-nuclear lobby
| just as they claim the pro-fossial fuel lobby os treating the
| atmosphere.
|
| [1]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/fukushima-
| radiation-con...
| fallingknife wrote:
| Your source contains no number for the amount of radiation
| released into the ocean in absolute terms or relative to
| Chernobyl. It only says that a higher percentage made it to
| the ocean, which is meaningless because Chernobyl is
| inland. It also doesn't say what tangible effects the
| radiation release had on the ocean.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > Don't care because doesn't exist (yet).
|
| A nuclear powered world economy also doesn't exist yet (it
| couldn't use today's burner reactors unless we have massively
| larger uranium supplies, such as seawater uranium extraction
| that doesn't exist yet; it could use breeder reactors but
| they also don't exist yet in a form even competitive with
| burner reactors.)
|
| The "it doesn't exist yet" argument condemns nuclear even
| more than it does renewables.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| I don't have a real opinion on this subject, but wanted to
| point out that 1,000 square miles is not really as big as it
| sounds: a square 31.6 miles on each side. About the size of
| Rhode Island's land area.
| jmyeet wrote:
| That depends on where the 1,000 suqare miles is. If it's in
| the Nevada desert, I might agree (although the fallout from
| Chernobyl did fall over Europe so the initial impact is well
| beyond the long-term 1,000 square miles) but that's not where
| you need to build nuclear power plants [1]:
|
| > To obtain the best value from nuclear power stations, they
| should be built close to the cities
|
| [1]: https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/ma
| gazi...
| jwie wrote:
| Anti nuclear fearmongering is based on ignorance for the most
| part, and a kind of exploitative cynicism on the other.
|
| Most people just don't know how safe nuclear power is. I worked
| on a nuclear reactor personally. We used to joke that the safest
| thing we had in the power plant was the radiation. I received
| less operational exposure in 6 years than typical nuclear
| medicine procedures create.
|
| The other source is entrenched players in the power industry hate
| nuclear power because it works, and can credibly produce post
| scarcity levels of power production.
|
| It is unfortunate that the green energy movement has been lies to
| and co-opted against this genuinely fantastic energy source.
| arez wrote:
| tell that to france and their inability to generate power with
| many reactors because either the rivers are dry or too hot. How
| is that a sustainable solution
| rglover wrote:
| Depends on perspective. I hadn't heard about this but looking
| it up quick and the reason it's considered too hot [1] is:
|
| > After the 2003 heatwave, France's nuclear safety authority
| (ASN) set temperature and river flow limits beyond which
| power stations must reduce their production, to ensure the
| water used to cool the plants will not harm wildlife when it
| is released back into the rivers.
|
| And also...
|
| > Since 2000, production losses due to high river
| temperatures and low river flows have represented an average
| of 0.3% of annual production. However, half of EDF's 56
| nuclear reactors are offline due to planned maintenance and
| work to repair corrosion which was delayed by the pandemic,
| just as Europe faces an energy crunch following Russia's
| invasion of Ukraine.
|
| So, in essence the inability to use the water appears to be a
| regulatory/timing issue, not a technical one, as far as I can
| gather.
|
| While I wouldn't advocate for harming wildlife, I'd say the
| answer to your question is "locate nuclear plant developments
| in areas that will have the least impact on wildlife (or,
| where wildlife can easily be relocated and protected from
| potential harm)."
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/03/edf-to-
| redu...
| nullc wrote:
| ... as if the alternative energy solutions don't harm
| wildlife (including solar and wind). Is this again an
| example of expecting nuclear to mitigate its externalities
| while ignoring them for everything else?
| desindol wrote:
| Ah yes, the strawman argument... possibility to kill the
| entire planet vs killing some birds.
| jwie wrote:
| This is a very important point. The externalities of
| nuclear are actually containable because they are so
| small. Hundreds of kilos of waste product compared to
| billions in spent fuel products.
|
| The heavy industry footprints of logistics to create the
| plant and equipment also are more efficient.
|
| How many solar panels or wind turbines would you need to
| produce to generate a nuclear reactor's worth of power?
| How expensive would that process be comparatively? These
| factors weigh heavily in nuclear power's favor because it
| is so energy dense.
| epistasis wrote:
| While this is a compelling tale of culture war in the US, I think
| that the culture war aspect has little to do with nuclear's
| failure, if anything at all. I am continually offended as I
| encounter people with Ehrlich's 1970s Malthusianism, but these
| are not the folks stopping nuclear.
|
| Look to France, which has a huge nuclear fleet. Look at what's
| happened at Flamanville, with a supportive population. What sort
| of culture war or regulatory arguments could be made to explain
| France's failures with the EPR design, that so closely mirror the
| US's failure with the AP1000 design in the past decade?
|
| By focusing on culture war, we miss a bigger story: perhaps
| nuclear construction is not compatible with modern economies? And
| perhaps it never was a great fit, according to this quote from
| the article?
|
| > At first, nuclear energy was too expensive and so less
| attractive to utilities. But once General Electric and
| Westinghouse spurred the industry onward by becoming loss leaders
| (they collectively lost around $1 billion building plants) the
| race was on.18 A herd mentality soon developed as utilities lined
| up to take advantage of government benefits to build new
| reactors. So many orders came in that "[w]ith only two companies
| building plants, a rapid increase in orders escalated costs for
| major components and strained the limited supply of qualified
| labor."19
| zackees wrote:
| alerighi wrote:
| Nuclear energy may seem expensive, because it has a big initial
| cost to get started, and we tend not to factor the long term
| effects of what we do. What is the cost of using fossil fuels?
| What is the cost and the damage done by climate change? An
| amount of money that we can't even quantify. So sure, burning
| coal/oil/gas may be cheap now, but it has an enormous long term
| cost that we just now are starting to pay.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Nuclear energy stays a bad fit when you factor in that it
| needs to combine:
|
| - sustained political will and capital
|
| - high morale (contractors and controllers need to not
| collude to hide flaws/cut corners/inflate prices)
|
| - excelent design and on par execution
|
| - excelent risk assesment and long term vision
|
| - stable geopolitical situation
|
| No country currently has a combination of all the above, all
| the nuclear plants we build are basically a failure waiting
| to happen. e.g. France has a set of plants that should have
| been decommissioned and replaced long ago, yet it didn't due
| to the first point. Japan hit the second and fourth point.
| We're seeing Ukraine hit by the last. The US could be the
| only country that fails at less than half the point.
| nullc wrote:
| We need to stop looking at coal/gas, etc. as fuel. They're
| not. They are part of an atmosphere/carbon-sink battery.
|
| When we get energy from carbon emitting sources we're
| discharging the atmosphere/carbon-sink battery. Eventually
| we're going to have to charge it again, and to do so it will
| take substantially more energy than we got from discharging
| it.
|
| Beyond CO2, coal in particular produces a large amount of
| radioactive and particulate atmospheric pollution. We expect
| nuclear to capture most of its externalities but we ignore
| those of most other ways we obtain energy.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| The alternative is not fossil fuels, that's arguing a
| strawman, it is renewables.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| As long as we have fossil fuel power plants, adding nuclear
| plants makes it possible to close them.
|
| That makes them alternatives!
| Krasnol wrote:
| Yes we don't factor the long term effects because we don't
| know what might happen in a thousand years when some madman
| digs out our nuclear waste to do some madman stuff for
| example.
|
| This is not about nuclear vs. fossil. Both are from the past.
| It is nuclear vs. fast improving and cheap technologies
| around renewable energy sources. It loses that battle and
| will keep on losing it because everything around renewables
| is getting better and cheaper while everything around nuclear
| is getting more and more expensive and takes much longer than
| expected.
|
| It's time to face the future.
| conviencefee999 wrote:
| You know that we can launch nuclear waste into space right?
| The thing that's infinitely large. As for renewables the
| issue is scale and renewables have limitations that
| investments in fusion and existing fission do not.
| Krasnol wrote:
| > You know that we can launch nuclear waste into space
| right?
|
| Sure we can. That's why it's so popular eh?
|
| > As for renewables the issue is scale and renewables
| have limitations
|
| What "scale" is supposed to be the problem there?
| https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/wind-power-in-
| europe-...
|
| And yeah...investment into fusion is limitless. The
| results however are quite disappointing. Meanwhile
| investments into renewables actually do something. They
| produce actual products which actually produce energy. In
| the real world. And they even get better. Imagine that.
| epistasis wrote:
| Fossil fuels are not on the table, IMHO, so there's no point
| in comparing to them at all.
|
| Sure, nuclear is CapEx heavy, with low OpEx. But storage and
| wind and solar have lower CapEx and OpEx. And they also scale
| much better, and are falling in cost, so when they need to be
| replaced, they will be replaced at even lower costs than
| their initial builds. And investing in the technology now
| only drives down future costs even more.
|
| We have ~100 nuclear reactors in the US, and they are
| reaching their end of life. If we could start building 10
| replacement reactors tomorrow, and we can't, because we don't
| have a design or the labor force or the supply chains or the
| EPC capability, we could maybe hold on to about 2% of future
| electricity in the US as nuclear. And those 10 reactors would
| take 10-15 years to complete, even if we had the proper
| economic requisites.
|
| None of the advocates for nuclear seem to ever run the
| numbers on what it would take to actually build nuclear. They
| don't model the needs of the grid, they don't look at where
| nuclear has failed during construction and do a root cause
| analysis, they don't try to change specific regulations, they
| don't try to figure out what could actually make nuclear work
| in the US. Instead we get vague wishes and hand waving, and
| we are missing any of the hustle that would be required to
| actually make positive change in the world.
|
| And I have a feeling that the reason for this lack of
| practical attention to detail, and this lack of this
| entrepreneurial hustle, if because when you start paying
| attention to details and the maze of action needed to get
| nuclear built, nuclear is not compelling compared to the
| alternatives.
| qqqwerty wrote:
| This isn't about nuclear vs coal. It is about nuclear vs
| renewables. And what it really comes down to is that nuclear
| is really expensive and takes way too long to build. For
| every nuclear plant you build, we can build the exact same
| generation capabilities for about half the cost and it can be
| built in a quarter of the time[1]. That means that the
| renewable solution will have already mostly paid for itself
| before the nuclear plant delivers its first electron.
|
| I am 100% in support of nuclear where it make sense. But
| there has been this weird strain of FUD being spread around
| painting renewable advocates as some sort of crazed anti-
| nuclear zealot. Some of this is coming from pro oil and gas
| groups looking to spread uncertainty and doubt to disrupt
| decarbonization efforts. But it is also getting picked up by
| a certain subset of "contrarians" that think they know better
| than everybody else, but are clearly not doing their
| research.
|
| [1]https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/08/05/youve-
| got-30-billion-...
| SECProto wrote:
| > What sort of culture war or regulatory arguments could be
| made to explain France's failures with the EPR design, that so
| closely mirror the US's failure with the AP1000 design in the
| past decade?
|
| Nuclear plants are massive, complex, tightly regulated capital
| projects. These require strong project management capacity.
| Most Western democracies have spent decades systematically
| outsourcing project management to various consultants (who are
| great for reducing cost on small projects with short timelines,
| but not good for major projects with a lot of schedule and
| budget uncertainty). Couple that with the fact that the US and
| France haven't built a nuclear plant in decades (France started
| two in the 1984-2007 gap), causing the loss of most
| institutional knowledge. I think these are the root cause of
| price and schedule escalations.
|
| Same problems have caused cost and schedule escalations in the
| Site C dam and the Lower Churchill hydro project in Canada.
| High speed rail in California has similar issues. Similar
| causes have affected the Berlin airport, and the Stuttgart
| railway station reconstruction.
| epistasis wrote:
| I agree, and think that this is one of the primary causes of
| nuclear failing.
|
| Advanced economies have higher labor costs, but far lower
| manufacturing costs. Nuclear construction requires massive
| amounts of highly skilled labor, not only because of the
| miles upon miles of piping that require super-high precision
| welding that will last in extreme conditions for decades but
| even down to things like concrete pours.
|
| My hypothesis on nuclear is that it only makes sense for a
| very very narrow window of economic advancement, where labor
| costs are still low, but there is still enough technological
| capacity to design and build a hugely complex beast of a
| project. But I don't have any numbers to back my hunch yet...
| frozencell wrote:
| > What sort of culture war or regulatory arguments could be
| made to explain France's failures with the EPR design, that so
| closely mirror the US's failure with the AP1000 design in the
| past decade?
|
| There is no scientific failure but economic war by the US.
| pintxo wrote:
| I am curious, was there ever a time were insurance companies did
| offer risk insurance for nuclear power plants? If not, then
| nuclear has been killed by it's risk profile.
| moogly wrote:
| Nuclear plants tend to be underinsured; the bulk of the
| financial burden of a cleanup after a potential accident will
| be carried by tax payers. I am not sure if that is true
| everywhere, but at least in the US (the federal government
| takes over after the first $15 bn) and parts of Europe. Japan
| technically not, but practically yes. [0][1][2]
|
| It gets even trickier with plants bordering other countries.
|
| [0]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
| [1]:
| https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=51672335&itype=CMS...
| [2]: https://theconversation.com/five-years-after-fukushima-
| there... |
| https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/04/08/national/fukush...
| fundatus wrote:
| Who Killed Nuclear Energy? The absurd cost to build this
| technology and the emergence of much more cost-effective and
| emission-free alternatives. It's as simple as that. It wasn't the
| tree-huggers or a big conspiracy.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Except it's not an absurd cost to build. In South Korea LCOE of
| nuclear is less than half that of solar, at approximately
| $0.05/kwh. In most of the world, the cost of nuclear power has
| remained constant or decreased adjusted for inflation since the
| 60s, only in the US has the cost skyrocketed. This suggests a
| political issue, not a technological one.
| fundatus wrote:
| Hinkley Point C, PS23 billion for a measly ~3.000 MW. you
| could literally build ten+ times the capacity using modern,
| emission-free alternatives.
| alerighi wrote:
| Except they aren't cheaper than nuclear in any way. Nuclear
| power has a big cost to get started, it's a fact, but then a
| reactor, especially a modern one, can continue to function for
| nearly a century. If you factor that, the cost is risible given
| the benefit that nuclear power gives you.
|
| Talking about renewable, how much does it cost to remain
| without energy? We take it for granted, but it's not,
| especially these day. Without energy we cannot work, the whole
| economy stops. I live in Italy and it's becoming pretty much a
| disaster. Companies close because the energy price is not
| sustainable and they will lose money if they operate. Does
| still nuclear seem expensive? We are talking about loosing
| hundreds of millions of euros every day, something that will
| pay the construction of a nuclear plant in a week. All of that
| because people voted against nuclear power plants, and we are
| in this situation. Now this winter when we will not have enough
| gas to heat our houses we well thank them for saving us from
| the enormous risk of nuclear power.
| pfdietz wrote:
| It turns out this is not the case. Many nuclear reactors in
| the US have been shut down because they couldn't even make an
| operating profit. The remaining reactor at Three Mile Island
| was cash flow negative for the last six years it was in
| operation.
| musha68k wrote:
| Yes, it's interesting to watch consensus switch over to pro-
| nuclear again. I'm not only referring to power generation by
| the way.
|
| In terms of global warming I'm still conflicted myself. It's a
| complex topic. Going nuclear probably would be a pragmatic last
| minute band-aid if it had been applied 20 years ago. Now I'm
| not so sure anymore. Future plants will also likely meet more
| wars and other shocks to the system. You only have to read
| about current fears surrounding Zaporizhzhia.
|
| Green energy and changing consumption patterns might be the
| safest solution at this point.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The consensus is not switching over to pro-nuclear again.
| There's a PR effort to make it seem like that might be
| happening, but follow the money.
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| It's not so much consensus as what will keep the fossil fuel
| players in business as long as possible. Both in delaying
| renewables and finding a new monopoly to fuck everyone with.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| My thinking boils down to this question. What if storage,
| smart grids, and conservation don't pan out? Batteries may
| reach some practical limits and not end up being feasible for
| global grid scale storage.
|
| Would we rather live in a world where we grind out building
| more nuclear capacity, one with rolling blackouts in the
| OECD, or runaway climate change?
| pfdietz wrote:
| > What if storage, smart grids, and conservation don't pan
| out?
|
| The worst case is they end up more expensive than we'd
| like. There is no chance they won't work out in the sense
| of not working at all.
|
| So, it's just a financial risk. If one is talking about
| financial risks, one must look at the chance nuclear
| construction will be much more expensive than promised (for
| example, in the estimates used to compare renewables and
| nuclear). This risk historically has been very real.
| synotna2 wrote:
| Wind and solar aren't baseload
| ben_w wrote:
| They can be made so for similar cost to nuclear in at least
| two distinct ways.
|
| An aluminium rod with a cross section of a few square metres
| is enough for global power needs, PV is cheap enough that the
| resistance loses don't alter that equation even antipodally.
| Take a while to mine that much aluminium, but it also takes a
| while to make even one reactor.
|
| The batteries we need to build anyway for the electric cars
| (or the hydrogen production, storage, and fuel cells if we
| decide to go back to those) are the same scale we need for
| grid storage, and it makes sense to repurpose car batteries
| as grid batteries before full refurbishment. Last I checked
| the cost for batteries was close to, IIRC slightly better
| than, equivalent nuclear.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Wind and solar, combined with various kinds of storage, can
| be used to supply "synthetic baseload", and likely at a cost
| less than doing so with new nuclear.
|
| https://model.energy/
| pvorb wrote:
| And the absurd cost to _maintain_ nuclear power plants. Also,
| they have other bad effects on the environment like heating up
| rivers. It 's a real problem this year in Europe at least. It's
| really hot this summer and there's not much rain, so there is
| not enough water in rivers for cooling, so more and more plants
| need to be shut down.
|
| This technology definitely isn't flawless.
| BMc2020 wrote:
| Shhh, don't disturb the pro-nuke narrative with 'facts'.
| Elsewhere in this thread they try to blame regulations. US
| regulations don't apply in China and Russia, but they can't
| make it economic either.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| China is planning to build 150 reactors by 2035, and has not
| then doubled the nuclear share in a decade, so economic or
| not, there's evidently some appeal there.
| credit_guy wrote:
| Pro-nuke here.
|
| I'm happy with NRC. I think they are doing their job. I'd
| rather NRC be too conservative than have a Fukushima or
| Chernobyl event.
|
| But nuclear is just technology. There is no fundamental
| reason for nuclear technology to not be 10 times or 100 times
| cheaper. In particular the naval nuclear reactors appear to
| be quite inexpensive. And keep in mind, they are designed to
| be able to work in conditions of combat (hopefully they won't
| need to). If someone were to just build them on land, they
| could be cheaper still.
|
| I (along with almost all pro-nuke guys) am not pro-expensive-
| nukes. I'm pro-cheap-nukes. But refusing to even consider
| nukes is a perfect way to never get cheap nukes.
|
| Oh, and by the way, I'm really happy that solar and wind are
| cheap and getting cheaper. Solar energy generation has
| increased by about 20% or more every year for the last decade
| (except for one year). I really think the trend will
| continue.
|
| The idea that investing in nuclear technology is taking away
| money from renewables is just silly. In 2021 more than $100
| billion were invested in renewables in the US. The
| investments in nuclear are simply insignificant compared to
| that.
| dundercoder wrote:
| I worked in commercial nuclear power for a while, including a
| stint at three mile island. The regulatory compliance burden
| alone, from the NRC and DOE, is crippling financially.
| ortusdux wrote:
| Exactly. Regulation has led to larger plants, and longer
| construction times.
|
| https://i.redd.it/djub5auudfj91.png
|
| I really hope pre-approved, pre-built modular reactors lower
| costs, delays, and regulatory overhead.
|
| https://www.nuscalepower.com/
|
| I'm also hopefully that molten salt reactors, once viable, are
| different enough to not be hampered by the full breath of
| traditional reactor regulations.
| epistasis wrote:
| That seems to conflict with the low operating expenses of
| nuclear reactors. Once they are built, what is the crippling
| aspect?
| desindol wrote:
| low operating expenses over the whole lifetime of the plant
| including deconstruction or just the fun part?
| gene-h wrote:
| "During the 2021 Uri storm, Texas's $66 billion in renewable
| energy investments failed to perform in a time of crisis" So did
| nuclear. A nuclear reactor in texas went offline for two days
| during the crisis due to cold weather taking 1.3 GW of capacity
| with it. The linked article the author cites mentions that the
| outage was primarily caused by the failure of thermal plants
| which hadn't been winterized rather than lack of wind power.
|
| [0]https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-
| insight...
| genericone wrote:
| The Simpsons 3 eyed fish was the closer.
| xaduha wrote:
| I blame Naked Gun 21/2
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSJZjBC-Dd8
| dctoedt wrote:
| Nuclear power is expensive in no small part because of the
| safeguards needed to try to avert catastrophic accidents. Humans
| are fallible, and our best intentions can be subverted by
| inadequate training; fatigue; inattention; laziness; or what we
| used to call "a loss-of-brain accident." As a result, we can
| f[oul] up at any stage of design, construction, operation, or
| maintenance of a nuclear reactor. (Neither Three Mile Island [0]
| nor Chernobyl [1] would have been so disastrous had it not been
| for cascading sequences of human error.) _Expecting_ nominal
| performance by people or machinery is ... unwise; as Admiral
| Rickover famously said, "you get what you INspect, not what you
| EXpect."
|
| All that adds to costs.
|
| Source: Former Navy nuclear engineering officer, qualified as
| [chief] engineer officer aboard the eight-reactor aircraft
| carrier USS Enterprise.
|
| [0] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-facts-know-about-
| three-...
|
| [1] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/focus/chernobyl/faqs
| tuatoru wrote:
| Strong safeguards are also needed in iron smelters and steel
| foundries, in ammonia synthesis, and in making aluminum. In the
| mining of coal and extraction of oil and natural gas.
|
| Yet all these materials are cheap.
| philipkglass wrote:
| The LD50 for arsenic in rats is 15 mg/kg: http://whs.rocklinu
| sd.org/documents/Science/Lethal_Dose_Tabl...
|
| The LD50 for strontium 90 in hamsters (90 day survival) is 2
| millicuries per kilogram: http://whs.rocklinusd.org/documents
| /Science/Lethal_Dose_Tabl...
|
| Given strontium 90's specific activity of 142 curies/gram
| (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19680020487), in mass terms
| that's 14 micrograms/kg for the LD50. Gram for gram,
| strontium 90 is about 1000 times as acutely deadly as
| arsenic, or 3 times as acutely deadly as the chemical warfare
| agent sarin. A commercial power reactor of 1000 MWe output
| can have an inventory of tens of kilograms of strontium 90 in
| the core [1] along with even more acutely dangerous shorter-
| lived fission products.
|
| Nuclear reactors are safe because there is careful defense-
| in-depth in their engineering and operation. They need
| deeper, more stringent safety systems than steel plants or
| ammonia plants because they contain substances much more
| toxic than found in steel plants or ammonia plants. You also
| see extreme safety practices in facilities that handle non-
| radioactive poisons, if the poisons are potent enough:
|
| "Inside Fort Botox"
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-10-26/inside-
| fo...
|
| [1] https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/6822946 See table 2.2
| "Fission product inventories"
| chickenchicken wrote:
| Thanks for this insight and explanation.
| lnsru wrote:
| Add semiconductor foundries. They have tons of nasty
| materials there. Enough to make inhabitants of the next
| bigger city not alive anymore.
| [deleted]
| pfdietz wrote:
| In all those cases if something goes wrong workers can be
| sent in afterwards to rebuild things. If something goes
| seriously wrong in a nuclear power plant the owner is out one
| nuclear power plant.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Yet all these materials are cheap.
|
| Yes, in large part because the safeguards are not nearly as
| strong. (And a lot of the rest is because the safeguards
| impede research on how to make nuclear cheaper.)
| tuatoru wrote:
| Arguable, but I won't. The strength of the safeguards is
| not the problem.
|
| The surface problem is that the rules keep changing. That's
| part of the expense: repeated redesign, over and over.
|
| The underlying problem that causes that, is that western
| societies _do not want_ nuclear power. More: they _actively
| dislike_ it.
|
| It's all academic now anyway, at least as far as stationary
| electric power generation is concerned. PV power and
| storage is far cheaper, and the growth of the gap is
| accelerating.
| pdonis wrote:
| Newer reactor designs with entirely passive safety features
| remove the need for operators to take particular actions in the
| event of a problem, so "loss of brain accidents" are no longer
| possible. (Whether those designs can support the requirements
| for military use, which are quite different from those for
| civilian power generation, is a different question.)
|
| That said, civilian nuclear power, at least in the US, was
| never operated with the same attention to detail and the same
| intolerance for f[oul]ups as Navy nuclear power; the kinds of
| mistakes that operators made at TMI (don't even start about
| Chernobyl, that's a whole other level of insanity) would have
| gotten Navy nuclear trainees kicked out of the program long
| before they were allowed to do anything with an actual reactor.
| (When I was an Engineering Duty Officer working at Norfolk
| Naval Shipyard, I saw a reactor officer get fired for an
| administrative error that probably would not even have been on
| the radar in a civilian plant.) So that can't be a significant
| part of the explanation of why civilian nuclear power is so
| costly in the US.
|
| The high cost of civilian nuclear power in the US has always
| been primarily due to politics: things like unreasonable waste
| storage requirements imposed by the government (you don't need
| to store waste for 10,000 years if you reprocess it, like every
| other nuclear energy using country does) and endless lawsuits
| delaying plant construction being allowed to proceed even
| though they were based on no valid technical data whatever.
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _Newer reactor designs with entirely passive safety
| features remove the need for operators to take particular
| actions in the event of a problem, so "loss of brain
| accidents" are no longer possible._
|
| That would be excellent -- although color me doubtful; people
| always seem to find new and innovative ways to f[oul] up ....
| pdonis wrote:
| _> people always seem to find new and innovative ways to
| f[oul] up_
|
| That's why the passive safety features I referred to don't
| depend on people at all; they depend on the laws of
| physics, which are certainly more reliable than people. :-)
| bluejekyll wrote:
| I assume people are still building those things, and I
| also bet they require some regular amount of maintenance.
| Arnt wrote:
| Digressing, perhaps... do you know anything about why the
| passive designs weren't built? There are something like 500
| nuclear reactors, of which approximately zero use entirely
| passive safety features. Not 250, not even 50.
| xaduha wrote:
| I wonder what you think of these
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov
| pfdietz wrote:
| Not competitive.
| silexia wrote:
| Who really killed nuclear power? I bet if you traced all the
| financial donations to all the environmental groups and people
| who have opposed nuclear power, you will find a lot of oil
| dictatorships and oil companies.
|
| Follow the money...
| Symmetry wrote:
| As regulated utilities the operators of nuclear power plants
| sold electricity to the grid on a cost plus basis. The larger
| their costs, the more their profit. So a lot of it was these
| operators rather than oil companies pushing for ALARA
| standards. Normally regulators would prevent huge, useless
| expenditures on their parts but now they weren't able to.
| tomfunk wrote:
| iirc that's one of Michael Shellenberger's points in Apocalypse
| Never.
|
| i feel like he has a specific agenda so it's hard to take
| everything he says at face value but that point seems
| reasonable.
| karaterobot wrote:
| This is discussed in the article.
|
| >Instead of reexamining their energy vision, the greens have
| committed themselves to promoting energy poverty. In part,
| they've stayed the course because doing so has made them lots
| of money. The Environmental Defense Fund and the NRDC have a
| combined budget of nearly $384 million, for example... A recent
| study found that "tax-motivated investors in today's renewable
| energy deals are typically a highly restricted set of the US's
| largest banks, insurance companies, and financial institutions"
| who "have been joined more recently by a handful of giant
| corporations like Google and Amazon." Those who reap the
| rewards of the tax breaks are also some of the biggest donors
| to climate change causes that back renewables-only policies.
| locallost wrote:
| The article starts by praising the French nuclear program in the
| 70s. Yet, that same nuclear program is currently going through a
| complete debacle, failing to provide for its own country's needs,
| and is partially the reason prices are going into the
| stratosphere on the whole continent. If you can't factor in the
| reality of what is actually happening as we speak as a potential
| risk for your analysis, well...
|
| The French futures market is almost at 2000 Euros per MWh for the
| next two quarters [1]. You'd think the market is not anticipating
| those nuclear plants are coming back online any time soon.
|
| Can we not talk about this as a success story please?
|
| [1] https://www.eex.com/en/market-
| data/power/futures#%7B%22snipp...
| Georgelemental wrote:
| France's nuclear plants are failing to provide for the
| country's needs because incompetent politicians shut down
| perfectly functional plants like Fessenheim, and in general
| refused to invest to maintain the system and preserve
| expertise. French nuclear didn't fail on its own merits, it was
| sabotaged.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Not sure how politicians are directly responsible for a
| Europe wide drought making it close to impissible to get
| enough cooling water to nuclear plants to producr anywhere
| near nominal capacity.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Nuclear power is cheaper when built in serial production.
| That's the basic conclusion of any analysis of the history of
| nuclear power construction. There's nuance as to why, but the
| basic pattern is that putting an order of 40 steam generators
| [1] is cheaper than a run of just 4 of them. Similar deal with
| specialized pumps and other nuclear power components. Suppliers
| can re-use infrastructure and expertise, and get better deals
| on input materials by guaranteeing a stable demand.
|
| France's nuclear program in the 70s was much more effective
| than current nuclear projects because of that economy of scale.
| They build ~50 reactors of only a few types. The US is similar:
| many of its plants built in the late 1960 and 1970s delivered
| power at $2-3 billon USD per GW (adjusted for inflation), and
| some of them under $2 billion per GW. And these aren't equal to
| other forms of generation: nuclear power's capacity factor is
| among the highest:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor
|
| 1.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_power...
| fundatus wrote:
| > Nuclear power is cheaper when built in serial production.
| That's the basic conclusion of any analysis of the history of
| nuclear power construction. There's nuance as to why, but the
| basic pattern is that putting an order of 40 steam generators
| is cheaper than a run of just 4 of them. Similar deal with
| specialized pumps and other nuclear power components.
| Suppliers can re-use infrastructure and expertise, and get
| better deals on input materials by guaranteeing a stable
| demand.
|
| Unintuitively though, this is incorrect - both for France[1]
| and the US[2]. Building subsequent versions of the same
| reactor design increases the cost - instead of it staying the
| same or going down.
|
| [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03
| 014...
|
| [2] https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Not coincidentally, that study decided on 1976 for lower
| cutoff of its analysis. If I order 6 plants of the same
| design, then drop the next batch down to 4 plants for the
| next run, then 2 plants for the third run, then I should
| expect the cost to go up as scale goes down.
|
| Here's a publication that points this out: https://www.scie
| ncedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
|
| See that cluster in the late 60s and early 70s:
| https://ars.els-
| cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03014215163001...
|
| That's the benefits of scale. The slower pace of
| construction after that is accompanied by higher costs.
| qqqwerty wrote:
| From the article:
|
| So many orders came in that "[w]ith only two companies
| building plants, a rapid increase in orders escalated costs
| for major components and strained the limited supply of
| qualified labor."
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Plants built in the 1960s and 1970s did exceptionally well
| on a cost to energy ratio. They were also built in greater
| numbers than in the 1980s and onwards: https://ars.els-
| cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03014215163001...
|
| The source given for that sentence is: Steve Isser,
| _Electricity Restructuring in the United States: Markets
| and Policy from the 1978 Energy Act to the Present_. So
| whatever that sentence is talking about, it happened after
| the period of rapid construction and cheap costs.
| kingkawn wrote:
| The present day shelling of Zaporizhzhya is a sufficient argument
| alone to invest no further resources in the development of this
| technology and to remove it from the face of the earth.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| > France's nuclear buildout, beginning in the 1970s, achieved the
| greatest decarbonization in human history; ... In North America,
| the mantle belongs to Ontario, whose nuclear plants replaced its
| coal fleet.1
|
| I am dubious of this claim, but it probably depends on exactly
| how you define it. But switching from a country to a province
| immediately sends up red flags.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Ontario and France are not that dissimilar in surface area,
| though in population they are quite different.
|
| I think the author tried to focus on the former when of course
| it is the latter that should have been primary.
| jonnybgood wrote:
| Canada has 3 out of 4 currently operating nuclear plants in
| Ontario. France has them scattered throughout the country. I
| believe that's why Ontario is specifically mentioned.
| mcronce wrote:
| Ontario is also twice the size of France and 1/4 the
| population; they're at least in the same order of magnitude.
| I'd call it a reasonable comparison.
| ant6n wrote:
| > France's nuclear buildout, beginning in the 1970s, achieved
| the greatest decarbonization in human history
|
| I thought it was hydro in Quebec, or perhaps Norway.
| ska wrote:
| Doesn't decarbonation imply replacing something? Lots of
| places with the right distributions of water use
| hydroelectric, because it was cheaper to build out. Ontario
| has craploads of water (hello, great lakes) but not much
| elevation, at least not in the right places.
| salmo wrote:
| Funny enough, "electricity" and "hydro" were synonymous in
| Toronto when I lived there in the early 90's because of
| Ontario Hydro. It was named for the electricity coming from
| Niagara Falls, but then yeah... like you said.
| ska wrote:
| Oh I forgot about Niagara ! Well _one_ fortunately placed
| drop :)
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