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points by rtkwe 3 days ago | 0 comments
Nuclear /could/ have solved this years ago but the spectacular and scary nature of failures like TMI or Chernobyl [0] really sunk any chance of that happening. Plus you had all the traditional nonrenewable energy providers intensely interested in stoking fears of that and the question of nuclear fuel storage.

[0] Yes pollution from normal everyday fossil fuel power generation causes more damage and deaths in the aggregate but it's a diffuse hard to attribute kind of damage which makes it far less, for lack of a better way to say it, real to people. eg: Did living downwind of that unupgraded coal plant really kill them or is their death because of something else.

[–] rootusrootus 3 days ago
Price probably played a pretty big role, too. The up front cost of a new nuclear plant is eye watering. Hard to compete against solar & battery these days which can be spun up in months and cost comparatively pennies.
[–] rtkwe 3 days ago
That's also true, partially driven by a lot of hurdles and time spent fighting for approval due to the anti-nuclear push due to the things I mentioned, but it is also just expensive to build in the US because our labor and land is pretty expensive too.
[–] triceratops 3 days ago
Is there a study that pinpoints which nuclear regulations are unnecessary and how much they add to the LCoE of a nuke plant?
[–] rtkwe 3 days ago
I'm thinking more of the cycles of community approval that can drag on and delay the project rather than individual ongoing regulations.
[–] triceratops 3 days ago
Why are these rounds of community consultation allowed? Surely legislatures ought to be able to pre-empt them.
[–] no-name-here 3 days ago
Disallow community input just for building nuclear in a community, or also disallow community input for all public and private zoning, and infrastructure proposals, transit proposals, etc?
[–] cucumber3732842 2 days ago
Disallow community input for anything not meeting some emissions (noise, smell, light, whatever) at the property line criteria.

For industrial sites (including nuclear) there should have to be some sort of containment requirements or insurance/bonds for cleanup but if those can be met I don't see why it should matter any more than a soda bottling plant.

[–] dalyons 2 days ago
Nukes are ruinously expensive all over the world. This isn’t a US thing, or a “darn regulations slowing us down” thing. Nukes are just too expensive, regardless of regulatory regime.
[–] BobaFloutist 3 days ago
I mean concrete is also just really expensive. A lot of the cost is labor, yes, but still.
[–] pfdietz 3 days ago
And the price was escalating even before TMI and Chernobyl.
[–] jmyeet 3 days ago
Nuclear has to be the most cultish topic on HN, I swear. Anything less than full-throated support for nuclear gets downvoted into oblivion and it simply doesn't matter how well-reasoned those views are.

To borrow the meme about LISP [1], if nuclear was so good, it would've caught on at any point in the last 80 years. And it hasn't for some good reasons:

- It's too expensive. As an example, Hinkley Point-C in the UK has a super high negotiated rate that only lasts 35 years for a plant that still needs a lifetime of 60 to justify the investment so who knows how expensive the power will be for those last 25 years;

- It takes too long to build, typically ~20 years;

- Fuel processing (to create the fuel rods) creates a lot of harmful waste (eg UF6) and it is not a solved problem;

- Processing of spent fuel is not a solved problem. There's this idea that you just stick it in a barrel and leave it for a thousand years doesn't match the reality. It typically needs active cooling for possibly decades, for a start;

- Failure modes for a single plant dwarf any other alternative. The standard counterpoint is global warming from fossil fuels but that's for the entire fossil fuel ecosystem. The clean up for Fukushima, for example, will likely take over a century and cost over $1 trillion;

- The taxpayer bears the burden for these failures because, in the US for example, the industry self-insurance fund is a couple of orders magnitude too small to cover it;

- Nuclear requires liability limits well below any such failure mode to make it remotely economical (eg the Price-Anderson Act liability limits);

- The ecosystem of building, maintaining, repairing, servicing, monitoring and regulating nuclear power plants as well as all the supply chains (eg transporting and storing fuel) takes a long time to scale up.

I really wish I understood why nuclear has this cult-like following. It's completely irrational.

[1]: https://paulgraham.com/iflisp.html

[–] MisterMower 3 days ago
It did catch on, and then it was regulated beyond the point of profitability, and nuclear plants stopped being built. The points you make are only true because of the unique regulatory regime that nuclear plants exist under.

We tolerate all kinds of externalities from fossil fuel energy production and environmental degradation due to rare earth mining required to produce solar panels and wind turbines.

Nuclear energy is the only industry required to mitigate all possible externalities, and for that reason it is very expensive.

It’s disingenuous to claim nuclear power is a failure because it’s expensive to build without examining the reasons why that might be.

For proof it can work and is both safe and economical, witness the Chinese currently building 40 new nuclear plants. We could do that here, but choose not to. The only missing ingredient is political will, and resistance from ill-informed people such as yourself.

[–] jmyeet 3 days ago
> ... regulated beyond the point of profitability

I love this argument because it's never qualified. What regulations exactly make nuclear unaffordable? How many of them are safety related? Is safety not necessary?

It's just a hand-wavy argument for nebulous deregulation when all the evidence suggests that no industry is capable of self-regulation.

> ... rare earth mining required to produce solar panels ...

Solar panels don't require rare earths.

> Nuclear energy is the only industry required to mitigate all possible externalities

This is just objectively false. Fuel processing, spent fuel processing and storage and failure modes are absolutely not completely mitigated or even solved problems.

> For proof it can work and is both safe and economical, witness the Chinese currently building 40 new nuclear plants.

Well if 40 power plants are being built, you can't really say that their operational record is that they're "safe and economical" because they have no operational record, right? Now China has other nuclear power plants but you're not arguing with those.

China has several advantages no Western country has:

1. A standardized design so economies of scales with components;

2. State subsidies such as ultra-cheap finance; and

3. If people who manage and oversee such plants skimp on such maintenance they'll likely be executed.

[–] dpkirchner 2 days ago
> China has several advantages no Western country has:

Plus, 4. The ability to do long-term planning.

5. An engineering culture instead of a lawfare culture.

There's upsides and downsides to both of these facts, of course.

[–] MisterMower 2 days ago
> What regulations exactly make nuclear unaffordable?

Suppose you tell a football player, your overriding priority is not getting hurt. If you get hurt or do anything that might get you hurt, you are out of football for life. Now go out there and win this game.

Those, in a nutshell, are the incentives the nuclear industry in the US faces. Whatever you do, you must never have even the tiniest release of radiation. Safety is the overriding priority. Cost doesn't matter. If there is any wiggle room in your cost structure, you must spend it on making the possibility of a release even smaller.

Meanwhile, we accept major amounts of smog and carbon dioxide emissions from gas power plants, we accept significant environmental degradation due to mining minerals for wind and solar plants, and we tolerate radioactive fly ash from coal power plants beyond the levels we would allow emitted from nuclear power plants.

> Fuel processing, spent fuel processing and storage and failure modes are absolutely not completely mitigated or even solved problems.

The French did solve this problem using a large breeder reactor where they reprocessed nuclear fuel, and the US was on track to build something similar in the 1970's until the Carter administration banned breeder reactors in 1977.

Choosing to not use a breeder reactor means spent nuclear fuel has to just sit there and be guarded while we also have to go and mine and process more nuclear fuel from scratch to run our existing reactors. It's hard to imagine a more idiotic regulatory regime.

> Well if 40 power plants are being built, you can't really say that their operational record is that they're "safe and economical" because they have no operational record

China has 60 existing nuclear power plants that have operated safely and efficiently, and there is no reason to think that these would operate any less effectively. They will likely be even more safe and efficient.

China has a single advantage over the US when it comes to nuclear: they can ignore people like yourself who don't understand how nuclear power works and just build it. The US would be wise to emulate that approach, especially given we do already do this when it comes to flock cameras or AI data centers.

[–] krior 3 days ago
> Nuclear energy is the only industry required to mitigate all possible externalities, and for that reason it is very expensive.

Is there a plant where the enviromental costs of building and decomissioning a plant and of extracting and enriching the fuel are completely mitigated?

[–] dpkirchner 3 days ago
> I really wish I understood why nuclear has this cult-like following. It's completely irrational.

I believe it is largely because it is so unviable. If you can shut down any power supply argument with "but muh nuclear" then you can ensure that we keep burning coal and gas forever. And as a bonus, you get to pretend you're the smartest person in the room for having come up with the only good solution.

[–] kortilla 3 days ago
> I really wish I understood why nuclear has this cult-like following. It's completely irrational.

Because “cost” is not an argument against something that hasn’t been scaled. Nuclear was snuffed in the crib before any repeatable plants could be brought online.

If you looked at the cost of solar in 1995, using it to power anything like a house was a complete joke. It had to fall over an order of magnitude and leave behind a trail of solar company corpses to get to a point where you can break even after 10 years putting them on a house.

Solar and wind need storage to make a complete solution, so when it comes to climate change discussions, you just end up with two “irrational” groups arguing about the optimistic potential things that don’t actually exist at an affordable cost.