[HN Gopher] Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Pa...
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Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III - the
nuclear navy
Author : gmays
Score : 72 points
Date : 2022-09-30 19:28 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (constructionphysics.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (constructionphysics.substack.com)
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| I wrote a similar take here on the topic:
| https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html
| aidenn0 wrote:
| One comment on your sustainability argument, now that I know
| you are the author:
|
| Calculating "years of energy" based off of current usage seems
| silly to me given that global energy usage has been rising
| exponentially for centuries.
|
| For example, if you assume a 3% per-year increase in global
| energy usage, 12 billion years becomes a bit less than 1000
| years.
| bombcar wrote:
| Meanwhile California has increased population and kept their
| energy production relatively stable. We may have reached a
| peak.
| pstuart wrote:
| Thoughts on LFTR? The presentation that made the rounds many
| years ago made it seem like it was a solved problem (1965!).
| That made me rethink the value of nuclear and I'm curious if
| it's legit.
| godelski wrote:
| To give context to who acidburn is, he's been a long time HN
| user, has a PhD in nuclear engineering, has worked in fission
| and fusion for over a decade, and has blogged about it for
| years. The take here is the take of an expert and not just a
| nuclear bro.
| implements wrote:
| ("Acid Burn" was also Angelina Jolie's handle in _Hackers_ -
| if it was ringing anyone else's bell).
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Yeah I made my HN username on a whim years ago after
| watching that movie and didn't realize it was a dumb
| choice. I wanted it to be 'hackery' and anon. Oops.
| jmyeet wrote:
| This is a well-written series (Parts 1 and 2 are linked in this
| article). This last part makes comparisons to the reactors
| designed and used by the US Navy.
|
| If you read through all of this the message I got was that size
| is the enemy. In one part it notes that a 100MWe core meltdown
| could likely be contained by the vessel but a 1000MWe reactor
| meltdown likely wouldn't. This concern is part of why there are
| ever stricter requirements on civilian reactors.
|
| So you have opposing forces: bigger reactors produce more power
| and scale better. Smaller reactors are safer and easier and
| cheaper to build. Smaller reactors probably means more of them,
| each requiring separate planning permission, design approval and
| so on. It also probably means people living closer to the
| reactor, which many would and do oppose.
|
| This series makes a good case for regulation being a significant
| cost component but it doesn't really make the case (nor does it
| try to) that said regulation is overly onerous or otherwise
| unnecessary. A lot of regulation came about because of our
| experience with nuclear reactors, accidents and near-accidents
| and the bigger failur emodes of the larger reactors power
| supplies would likely want to build.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > Smaller reactors probably means more of them, each requiring
| separate planning permission, design approval and so on. It
| also probably means people living closer to the reactor, which
| many would and do oppose.
|
| The major selling point for smaller reactors is that you can
| make a mass produced design that doesn't need separate
| planning, permission, and design approval every time. You can
| still have large power plants to get the benefits of scale, you
| just put more of these small units together at the same site.
| In fact you get some bonuses as you can shut down some reactors
| for maintenance while still producing power. Indeed most
| nuclear power plants already have multiple cores for exactly
| this reason, but typically its 2-6 rather than 20-60 and thus
| they are still pretty big.
| tomComb wrote:
| Yes, cost is the issue.
|
| Everyone assumes that anyone hesitant about Nuclear power is
| focussed on the environmental or safety concerns, but that is
| wrong. The costs (and cost overruns) of the construction and
| maintenance of Nuclear reactors have been enough reason on their
| own to be bearish on Nuclear.
|
| I'm hopeful that new technologies, such as small nuclear
| reactions that can be built in a factory, will address this.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Nuclear is not fundamentally expensive[0], and most nuclear
| power plants currently in operation were cheap when they were
| built. The high costs of building new powerplants is a result
| of going decades without building any, leading to a loss of
| experience. Even still, nuclear remains competitive with other
| traditional power generation technologies like coal. Only with
| recent advancements in fracking did natural gas supplant coal
| as the go to fuel, and Wind and solar have become extremely
| inexpensive, but only in the past 10 years, in large part due
| to a concerted effort to scale up those industries. In other
| parts of the world where nuclear power did not have a decades
| long hiatus it remains extremely competitive with even these
| renewables, for example in South Korea where LCOE for nuclear
| is half that of solar.
|
| Of course you may have only became bearish on nuclear when the
| costs got high, but there are a large number of people who were
| bearish before then, which is what made costs high.
|
| [0]
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
| oliwary wrote:
| But the fact is that we did go years without building any,
| leading to nuclear power plants being more expensive. It is
| the path we chose (rightly or wrongly) and today solar and
| wind is cheaper in the western world. Even if continuing to
| invest in nuclear in the 1970s was the right choice, it may
| no longer be the case today that we have those. (see Path
| Dependence, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence)
|
| In my opinion, rather than spending the many years and
| billions of dollars on regaining the edge in nuclear, we
| should expand the capacity of the cheap and clean energy
| sources we have access to today.
| jjk166 wrote:
| That's a perfectly sensible argument, my point was just
| that for most of its history, the anti-nuclear movement was
| not making that argument.
| oliwary wrote:
| That is fair! I do wonder where we would be had we never
| stopped investing in nuclear. Probably much better from a
| global warming perspective - alas, here we are.
| BonoboIO wrote:
| Building it maybe can get cheaper ... destruction and
| disposal will be even more expensive.
|
| Look at Germany. They are the first to really destruct the
| first power plant and it will take 20 to 25 years. Everything
| has to be checked.
| jjk166 wrote:
| The cost of decommissioning is included
| aidenn0 wrote:
| TFA (if you include parts 1 and 2) addresses all of these
| points, though it's only answer for SK is:
|
| > The fact that South Korea is the only country to exhibit
| this trend has led some experts to speculate that the cost
| data (which comes directly from the utility and hasn't been
| independently audited) has been manipulated and we shouldn't
| draw conclusions from it.
| jjk166 wrote:
| If you read the paper, South Korea is clearly not the only
| country to exhibit this trend. Pretty much every non-
| western developed nation has nuclear power which is
| competitive with other nations. It makes perfect sense that
| South Korea, being an extremely advanced economy which also
| waited to go nuclear and thus did so with technologies that
| incorporate many lessons learned, along with a very well
| structured program for implementation, saw some of the best
| results.
| virissimo wrote:
| Our nations were far less wealthy when the existing stock of
| nuclear power plants were built, the technology available for
| building them have improved since then, and the raw resources
| needed as their inputs aren't a constraint, so why have costs
| risen so much relative to what we are willing to spend on it?
|
| Environmental and safety regulations are supposed to be
| explanations for this rise in cost, not rival explanations to
| "cost is the issue" (since they take that as given).
| crote wrote:
| - Nuclear power plants are rare enough that each project is
| basically unique.
|
| - Nuclear power plants are very complex. They are more
| "engineered" than "constructed", with hundreds of kilometers
| of tubes and wires. Pouring the concrete is the easy part.
|
| - Nuclear power plants deal with an incredibly dangerous
| environment: high pressures, high temperatures,
| radioactivity, hazardous chemicals. Everything has to be
| tested, re-tested, and certified. Many parts will be near
| impossible to replace once it enters production, and the
| plant is supposed to be operational for decades.
|
| - Nuclear power plants are safety-critical. Contrary to many
| other structures of similar complexity, things can get _way_
| worse than a big explosion. They have the potential to
| contaminate the site (or even the surrounding country) for
| decades or centuries. Failure is simply not acceptable.
|
| - Safety regulations have been getting stricter over the
| years, because supposedly "100% safe" plants keep having
| accidents and the population is not very happy about that.
|
| The existing stock of nuclear power plants is an offshoot of
| several military programs. The most common design is pretty
| much a submarine power plant on steroids, which turned out to
| be less than ideal. Things like "safety" and "profit" were
| almost seen as a suggestion more so than a requirement.
|
| Newly-built power plants are required to incorporate over 50
| years of innovation, but it turns out almost nobody has the
| skills to actually _build_ them. They have simply gotten too
| complex to construct!
| nine_k wrote:
| * Technology makes machines cheaper, and makes human work
| more expensive in comparison. Nuclear projects involve a lot
| of highly qualified human work.
|
| * Technology makes repetitive operations cheaper. You build a
| factory for hundred million dollars, make a billion gadgets
| on it, and every gadget cists you ten cents to make. Nuclear
| projects lack the economy of scale: even the Navy is going to
| order reactors by a dozen, and civil power plant reactors may
| see even fewer installations per model. Thus the huge costs
| of the R&D and the factory are amortized over but a few
| reactors, making each of them very expensive.
|
| * Due to small production scale, various custom materials
| needed for nuclear reactors, like special steels, are much
| more expensive than more widely used materials.
|
| Nuclear is now in a position similar to solar cells 15 years
| agi: a promising technology which is too expensive due to
| small scale and bespoke nature of their production. It took a
| decade of betting on them, pouring money into them, and
| giving various discounts to the customers to get where we are
| now, with solar panels which are efficient, affordable, and
| available. I suppose nuclear tech would need the same to
| become cost-efficient. France did / does something along
| these lines; the US does not.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| They built them only for non economic reasons. Either because
| they wanted material for bombs, or as national vanity
| projects or because they convinced themselves it would be
| cheap.
|
| If you want those reasons, go for it. Iran for instance is
| pursuing at least one of these goals when it works towards
| nuclear "power". Just don't expect affordable electricity at
| the end...
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| >the technology available for building them have improved
| since then
|
| Broadly, construction is the singular industry where
| productivity hasn't improved with modern technology.
|
| https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/sketch-of-a-
| theor...
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| In fact, the opposite, there's been a noticeable
| productivity decline in the US in most of the construction
| industry.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| Concrete infrastructure projects in particular seem to have
| gotten more expensive and time consuming.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I am stunned by the "Navy has operated 5,000 years of reactors".
|
| But, I come back to my basic thesis on nuclear power. It's the A+
| game or bust Yes the _US fricking Navy_ can do it well, but the
| minute the Soviet 's ran out of cash they just let it all rust.
| If we lean on nuclear in the carbon energy transition then when
| we run out of money, can we afford to let them rust.
| Spivak wrote:
| So why don't we have the US fricking navy actually run and
| manage the reactors? It's not as if they only exist at sea. And
| if the reactors are actually wholly military operated we might
| get the added benefit of being able to use the Navy's 20ish
| year lead on civilian nuclear. Amazing what you can learn when
| you have a navy nuclear engineer a few beers in and trying to
| impress you.
| epistasis wrote:
| Is our ultimate goal to get nuclear at any cost? Then sure.
|
| But nuclear at any cost is not a reasonable goal. The only
| reason we want nuclear is for its carbon-free energy. At
| which point it must be evaluated on its merits, not as an end
| goal of its own
| dickholesalad wrote:
| I'm an ex navy nuke (I did the whole thing, school through
| startups, sea trials, refuel, operations, maintenance, was
| nuke mechanic). I think some of the main impediments to
| adoption of navy-style training, operations, and maintenance
| in the civilian world are that the work is challenging and
| high stress. The school is very mentally and spiritually
| challenging to most people. When you get to the fleet the
| work is very challenging both mentally and physically. You
| are taking weekly technical short answer tests, operating the
| thing in 100F degrees doing legit physical work, responding
| to emergency stuff at 2 am before a 6 am shift. It's nuts.
| The navy selects smart people through asvab test
| requirements. Most students are still challenged by the
| coursework. When you stay in by reenlisting it gets a little
| easier because you have less physical work to do but you
| still have to maintain excellence and train the junior people
| to the required competency level. Combine this with the fact
| that the pay is shitty compared to other jobs in industry
| available and the incentives just aren't there. Where do we
| find these highly motivated, fit, young, intelligent people
| to work like dogs? They don't exist in sufficient quantity to
| do this. The navy doesn't have superior technology; most of
| the ships are old and maintained. The secret sauce is the
| personnel and their desperation. You aren't going to contract
| people in the civillian world to do this stuff. I really
| don't think it's feasible.
| dqpb wrote:
| > Combine this with the fact that the pay is shitty
| compared to other jobs in industry available and the
| incentives just aren't there.
|
| > Where do we find these highly motivated, fit, young,
| intelligent people to work like dogs?
|
| We increase the pay. It's that simple.
| nradov wrote:
| Thus killing the economics of nuclear power relative to
| competing sources. The Navy uses nuclear power on a few
| dozen carriers and submarines because that's the only
| practical way to accomplish the mission. But after
| building a handful of nuclear powered surface combatants
| they abandoned that approach, and returned to
| conventional engines largely for cost reasons. Civilian
| power plants have to find a way to operate at a profit.
| landemva wrote:
| Personnel are a key ingredient for success. In civilian
| world for construction the regulatory environment is wildly
| different. Calls for Navy to run civilian nukes would
| likely not work with the civilian regulator.
| ok_dad wrote:
| That only solves part of the problem, the civilian reactors
| are still too expensive to build. Nuclear is great, I went
| through the Naval Nuclear Power Program several decades ago
| myself, but it's _not financially viable_.
|
| Let me say that again to those engineers who weren't
| listening:
|
| _Nuclear (fission) power is not, and will never be,
| financially viable for civilian powerplants._
|
| I'll eat a roll of toilet paper covered in hot sauce if
| someday nuclear fission is financially viable enough to
| produce power for civilians at a decent scale.
| kinghajj wrote:
| Even assuming that's the case, isn't the counterargument
| "Fine, then governments need to subsidize investment into
| nuclear power plants, just as we do with other green
| technologies."
| epistasis wrote:
| The amount of subsidy required for nuclear is at least an
| order of magnitude larger than renewables.
|
| Switching to renewable energy with massive amounts of
| storage is a world of cheaper energy than today. There
| has been zero learning curve for oil, and coal, and
| nuclear. If anything nuclear gets more expensive rather
| than less.
|
| In contrast, renewables and storage are technologies that
| behave like semiconductors, or hard disks. There's a
| fairly predictable improvement in costs over time,
| resulting in massive changes in capabilities over the
| course of decades.
|
| So not only is switching to renewables and storage
| cheaper than our current every sources, the faster we
| perform the change, the more money we save, the more of
| our resources we can devote to improving the quality of
| human lives, instead of devoting all that effort to make-
| work of welding pipes and pouring concrete.
| dale_glass wrote:
| I think not really. It depends on why you think
| subsidizing is a good thing.
|
| My personal take is that we should subsidize tech to take
| it from an early stage to a production stage as soon as
| possible. We need better power sources yesterday, not
| next century. So we can't sit around waiting for some
| sort of Elon Musk to get really passionate and dump heaps
| of cash into it.
|
| But the assumption there is that once the tech is
| developed and mature, it'll be good enough to stand on
| its own. Because if it'll never not be expensive, we're
| just artifically choosing a power source that's
| permanently more expensive than the alternatives, and
| that's an unstable situation. Eventually people will get
| tired of dumping money into it, or there will be some
| other urgent matter to throw money at, and then we have a
| bunch of expensive tech that's falling out of use, and
| underdeveloped alternatives.
|
| Subsidizing nuclear forever also doesn't make any sense
| economically. Money is fungible. There's no real
| difference between say, paying $200/month to your power
| company, or paying $100/month to your power company, and
| $100 in taxes that ends up going to the power company.
| The amount you have to spend at the end of the month is
| the same either way. Now paying $200/month for 5 years so
| that then your power bill drops to $50/month afterwards,
| that's a different proposition.
|
| So, I support subsidizing solar, wind and storage because
| I believe that in their perfected, mass produced versions
| they're cheap and competitive. They just need a push
| _now_. I don 't support subsidizing nuclear because I
| believe it'll always be expensive because it's a
| fundamentally complex technology that's not amenable to
| mass production and will always lose to brute force mass
| applications of simpler technologies.
| stormbrew wrote:
| The US government makes a steady stream of trillions of
| dollars appear in order to, among other things, build
| single use missiles for millions of dollars each and jets
| that have never seen real combat for billions each. The
| idea that any durable public work is somehow "too
| expensive" in the face of that is comically absurd.
| epistasis wrote:
| Putting aside the wisdom of such massive defense
| spending, the question is what is the alternate good that
| could perform the job?
|
| If we spend $12B on a 1GW reactor, we have far far better
| alternatives. A 1GW nuclear reactor has a 90% capacity
| factor of undispatchable, hard to throttle electricity.
| At today's prices, thay $12B could instead buy 6GW of
| solar at 20% capacity factor, and 24GWh of batteries.
| This combined solar plus storage is more flexible, more
| responsive, and delivers 30% more overall energy. And
| this is with a stupid design of splitting the cash to
| half storage half solar. A smarter design more tailored
| to the actual demand curve would remove some flexibility
| but become far cheaper.
|
| There's zero reason to build nuclear unless you want to
| line Bechtel's pockets.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| Some questions jump out there:
|
| What does that amount of solar and storage look like in
| terms of material used for its construction as well as
| area occupied once it's deployed?
|
| What current examples do we have of projects at this
| scale?
|
| What is the lifespan of the solar arrays and batteries?
|
| What are the operating costs? How many personnel are
| required for maintenance and day to day operation?
|
| What other infrastructure is necessary to support such a
| deployment? Transmission lines, buildings, monitoring
| facilities, security, roads, office space, etc.
|
| What is the construction timeline for such a project?
| epistasis wrote:
| I don't have exact numbers for any of these questions.
| However, we know that regardless of the inputs in
| materials or land, the ultimate dollar cost, all in, is
| cheaper than nuclear. Take the levelized cost of solar
| for the MWh coinciding with daylight hours, and the
| levelized cost of storage during the other hours, and
| nuclear is blown out of the water:
|
| https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-
| energy-...
|
| Also, the scale doesn't matter, we have built far more
| than 6GW of solar, deployed more than 24GWh of storage,
| but it doesn't have to be at one location for these
| resources. Solar and batteries scale far better than
| nuclear, because they can be deployed on smaller
| installations without nearly as much hassle as nuclear.
| Or they can be sited at one location.
| orangecat wrote:
| Right. It's fascinating how this is the one area where
| so-called environmentalists suddenly become very
| concerned about fiscal responsibility.
| epistasis wrote:
| Environmentalists have pretty much zero impact on the
| ability of nuclear plants to be started and demonstrate
| feasibility.
|
| In the US, Georgia and South Carolina started building
| with nary a peep. France started building again without
| any environmental objections.
|
| Yet these builds are all catastrophic failures, to the
| point that any other financial backer is scared away from
| even touching nuclear. The decision makers are those with
| the dollars to invest, not the environmentalists.
| andbberger wrote:
| "environmentalists" in california have succesfully
| prevented at least 6GW from coming online, and were
| directly responsible for plans that shutter california's
| last operating reactor. They lobbied PG&E with a study
| they paid for that, under the insane assumption that
| california's energy use would _decrease_ in the future,
| concluded renewables would be cheaper. Meanwhile CAISO
| issued increasingly urgent press releases warning of the
| catastrophic consequences to grid stability were diablo
| canyon to close. A disaster which was narrowly avoided a
| few weeks ago by newsom.
|
| don't underestimate the negative influence of
| "environmentalists"
| epistasis wrote:
| > They lobbied PG&E with a study they paid for that,
| under the insane assumption that california's energy use
| would _decrease_ in the future, concluded renewables
| would be cheaper
|
| Usage in California has gone down, and renewables are
| cheaper, just look at the blog series in the original
| article. Calling these well-known and irrefutable facts
| "insane" does not bode well for the plethora of other
| questionable assertions in your comment. For the usage:
|
| https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-
| almanac/califo...
| andbberger wrote:
| energy austerity is incompatible with climate change
| mitigations. eg thermal industrial processes currently
| powered by fossil fuels need to be moved to grid power.
|
| their proposal was to spend $2B to lose 2GW of carbon
| free baseline power
|
| everything in my statement is true and based on documents
| in the public record
| epistasis wrote:
| I have followed the documents carefully, doing a deep
| dive on Diablo Canyon around 2020, but I do not recognize
| your framing of the situation as anywhere close to
| accurate. I'm also not sure what you mean when you are
| referring to energy austerity in your comment, of what
| $2B you are talking about.
| andbberger wrote:
| $2B is the cost to decommission diablo canyon. energy
| austerity is planning to use less energy when we know for
| a fact we're going to need more.
| IncRnd wrote:
| Environmentalists have not been, are not now, and will
| likely never be the decision makers for building nuclear
| power plants.
| manuel_w wrote:
| Aren't governments subsidizing nuclear power plants a
| whole lot more than anything else?
|
| I heard without government subsidies, nuclear power
| plants would simply not be buildable. No insurance
| company would insure them. The cost in case of a nuclear
| fallout is just too high.
| andbberger wrote:
| there's a reference I can't find discussing the financials
| of hinkley point C, a wildly expensive reactor and
| concluding that even with the extreme cost overruns, the
| levelized cost would still be superior to renewables if not
| for aggressive interest rates by financiers.
| orangecat wrote:
| Ok, but France exists.
| layer8 wrote:
| An important motivation for France to invest in nuclear
| technology is that they want to remain a nuclear weapons
| state.
| megaman821 wrote:
| I doubt Americans would be happy paying what France pays
| for electricity (both directly and government aid).
| oceanplexian wrote:
| I mean, if the choice is expensive electricity and
| rolling blackouts because the entire country relied on
| unreliable sources of energy, I'd take the former. The
| best energy source is one that's robust and dependable,
| not one that's theoretically cheaper in some ideal
| circumstances.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Also 20% of the US's electric grid for the last 30 years.
| fweimer wrote:
| EDF has recently been re-nationalized, and has always
| been under strong government influence. It's not a good
| example of a civilian/free market nuclear power plant
| operator.
| dboreham wrote:
| Electricity generation in the US isn't "under strong
| government influence"?
| fweimer wrote:
| I wasn't talking about regulation. EDF's relationship
| with the French government goes well beyond that.
| franckl wrote:
| Careful, the renationalization is due to a lot of
| factors, the main one is that the EU forced EDF to sell
| its nuclear eneegy at a loss to private energy providerd
| in order to "free the market". Look for ARENH if you
| would like to learn more (quick Google
| https://www.nusconsulting.com/energy-blog/arenh-reform-
| could...)
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Counterpoint: France gets over 70% of its total energy from
| nuclear power (and exports some to other EU countries).
| epistasis wrote:
| That doesn't counter the point above. France's fleet was
| built in the 70s, at difference costs. And what were
| those costs? Were they viable at the time, or was it a
| government program that would spend at any cost? Are
| today's costs viable now?
|
| Have you bothered to look at Flamanville or Olkiluoto?
| What happened when in the past when France built
| subsequent copies of a reactor design, and won't we
| expect similar costs rises with these already unviable
| reactors?
| Retric wrote:
| False, with heavy subsides ~70% of Frances electricity
| _production_ for the power grid was nuclear but they
| exported a great deal of that nuclear power in non peak
| times such as nights and weekends to maintain even a 68%
| capacity factor. Further they imported a great deal of
| non nuclear power to cover their own peak demand. By
| comparison US reactors generally have over a 90% capacity
| factor which means generating ~30% more electricity from
| the same investment or in Frances case posting a ~30%
| premium on nuclear power.
|
| It's hard to work out exact figures but around 60% of the
| grid's electricity used in France came from nuclear
| reactors. To illiterate the difficulty, recently most of
| France's nuclear power plant where undergoing maintenance
| however due to low seasonal demand other power plants
| where able to make up the difference.
|
| PS: To be really pedantic, total electricity production
| would include car alternators, home PV panels, diesel
| electric locomotive etc, but that's yet another
| calculation.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| It is more viable than any other form of energy. You need
| to count the externalized costs of fossil fuel power
| plants. The cost of climate change has already exceeded the
| cost of building many nuclear plants, and that cost will
| continue to compound at an accelerating rate. One nuc plant
| costs less than twitter, and twitter is useless. So as a
| society we have more than enough resources, just not the
| will. Let it burn.
| [deleted]
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| >I'll eat a roll of toilet paper covered in hot sauce if
| someday nuclear fission is financially viable enough to
| produce power for civilians at a decent scale.
|
| So all the world's nuclear power plants operate at a loss?
| That's a pretty strong proposition...
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| The problem is that people want to talk about fully-
| loaded life-cycle costs; and depending on who is doing
| the talking you get wildly different numbers.
| dboreham wrote:
| The life cycle cost associated with boiling the planet is
| also quite high.
| [deleted]
| remarkEon wrote:
| Can we better define what "financially viable" means?
|
| I don't know that I need a nuclear power plant to "turn a
| profit". That would be great, I suppose, but my view on
| electricity is a little more nuanced than a dogmatic
| adherence to market forces.
| SECProto wrote:
| > I am stunned by the "Navy has operated 5,000 years of
| reactors".
|
| When they've been building them for 70 years and have over 200
| nuclear powered vessels, it shouldn't be that surprising. For
| comparison, Ontario Power Generation has operated 787 years of
| nuclear reactors (343 combined at Pickering, 120 at Darlington,
| 324 at Bruce), each of which is at least 3.5 times larger than
| the biggest navy nuclear reactor. France has dramatically more
| than that.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Human nature is inherently a bit of a crapshoot and progress on
| that front is slippery, but "make a reactor robust to neglect
| and abuse" is an engineering problem and progress on that front
| is sticky.
|
| We've gotten _much_ better at this particular engineering
| problem. For instance, Fukushima was designed in 1967, but if
| it had been designed in 1972 it would not have had its fatal
| flaw.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| Fukushima was neglect. As you said we had known those types
| of tsunamis were possible since 1972, but no additional
| safety measures were put into place over the decades.
|
| There were multiple studies and suggestions ignored a decade
| before the incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_
| nuclear_disaster#200...
|
| It wasn't that there was a fundamental flaw with the design,
| just the sea walls needed to be higher.
| andbberger wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIGA
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Well originally the Manhattan Project was run by geniuses--
| endless list of geniuses, but to name a few Oppenheimer, Johnny
| von Neumann, Leo Szilard, Bohr helped, endless others (it's wrong
| to say if the list is too long you can't name a single one, if
| you say the list is long you must name some, at random but you
| must name some, or you're full of shit). So since then, and in
| particular when _The Simpsons_ got started, recruiting has gotten
| totally fucked. _The Simpsons_ meant a nuclear engineer couldn 't
| talk about his job publicly, it was a gigantic coal mining
| slander operation. And in fact everything the coal industry used
| _The Simpsons_ to accuse Mr. Burns of doing, was a confession of
| what they themselves did all the time, as coal entrepreneurs. Or
| where would they get their ideas? Confessions! Mr. Burns burns,
| burns coal!
|
| So once you screw up the recruiting, it's easy to paint an
| industry as totally incompetent. Which _The Simpsons_ are
| constantly accusing. Pretty incompetent given the slander, _The
| Simpsons_ and Matt Groening, and Fox as a channel, are directly
| materially culpable for nuclear accidents they cause through
| their slander, which impedes recruiting good people to watch
| DANGEROUS NUCLEAR SHIT. Put them in jail for any accident, before
| accusing anybody else.
|
| .
|
| Accusing without accusing, nobody can accuse them of accusing.
| When the bitchvictim media makes an accusation, nobody calls it
| an accusation. Whereas when I wrote the President of Stanford
| University telling him I was transferring out because the
| Residence Dean Arcadio Morales threatened me with rape before
| even letting me talk to him tell him what actually happened
| (basically), that was "accusatory.". That was "accusatory"
| according to a psychologist who screened for terrorism (literally
| screening for terrorism and like shootings) on campus before
| letting people back in, which supposedly is automatic. My
| accusations are accusations, bitchvictim accusations are truth.
| Doesn't depend on literally anything except that they HAVE to be
| lies. Feminist professors telling beautiful young female Stanford
| students to come to them with their incoming rape accusations, to
| foil them obviously, have a single criterion to judge whether to
| assist the accusation: is it bullshit? They make sure it's
| bullshit or they sabotage it. Totally counterfactual, men's
| rights have considered this, like are they only helping
| bitchvictims in place of worthy victims? Not possible right?
| That's exactly what's happening.
|
| They say that, there's bitchvictim feminists claiming serial rape
| accusers like themselves should be believed because "2% of rape
| accusations are false" unconditionally. Like independent events,
| in probabilistic terms. Doesn't matter if it's a virgin or a
| serial rape accuser with ten men behind bars (they only punish
| you after 11, in the only case I've read of punishment for serial
| rape accusations). Doesn't matter if she's Swedish from a culture
| of trust or a culture of abject bitchvictimhood like a stripper
| cooperating with police threatening her with taking her to the
| psych ward, like Mike Nyfong extorting Candice Mangum to make
| rape accusations for political points...votes. Doesn't matter
| when in History, except of course in the South before the Civil
| Rapes Movement, when 100% of white women accusing rape were
| liars, because literally none of those "strange fruits" deserved
| to hang. Literally, community college classes teach absolutely no
| examples of blacks with a guilty mind. Literally, categorically
| none. Whites like 120 cases of a guilty mind, no other races had
| any examples of a single case of guilty mind. Come on, a Southern
| woman and a Northern woman can't be that different, can they? All
| Southern Women are liars? But not anymore? Unless they're
| accusing a black man? What the fuck?
|
| Daniel Cussen, one of the first if not the absolute first man
| openly speaking of being accused of rape (coming forward first,
| before the bitchvictim), was accused of being accusatory because
| he accused a dean of accusing him in agreement with a secret
| accusation by the accuser. They said I was accusatory. Said,
| because it's about power, I can't say "accused", despite that
| obviously being the case. And squandered his Stanford career to
| at least become one strike against that residence dean, so he
| wouldn't trample over endless innocent men with rape extortion
| like he did until then. Actually worked, he thought twice before
| obeying manipulative bitchvictims. I was getting secretly and
| smearingly accused of rape, the whole administration is talking
| about it nonstop get their rocks off smearing me, everybody knew
| more about the accusations than I did, a literal kick me. They
| got sexual gratification from picturing me getting raped in
| prison (which they think was them alone but actually I can prove
| it happens a lot, from early childhood, rape extortion all my
| life, just like blonde women), but when I talk about it at all
| I'm the accuser. Yeah I'm the accuser. J'accuse.
| whearyou wrote:
| Until fail-safe fission technology is ready (unlike fail deadly
| technology which all current and planned systems currently are)
| nuclear power seems to me a sophisticated example of cutting off
| your nose to spite your face
| dickholesalad wrote:
| If by fail safe you mean that powering off the reactor makes it
| cool down then the Navy uses fail safe reactors. Water is used
| as the moderator to absorb radiation. When water is heated its
| density decreases (edit), thereby making it a less good
| moderator of radiation. This effect lowers reactor reactivity
| and heat output. This effect is combined with various devices
| to produce what is called an inherently safe design. Losing
| power will not make the reactor have a fuel element failure or
| melt down.
| whearyou wrote:
| Fail safe means that in a catastrophic failure of the
| reactor's regulatory systems it stops functioning rather than
| overloads. Entropy trends it to not working rather than
| working too much - for example a gas furnace will stop
| burning if the systems running the furnace stop working and
| are unable to provide more gas to the burn chamber.
|
| Is that how Navy reactors work?
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