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.
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.
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.
Is there a study that pinpoints which nuclear regulations are unnecessary and how much they add to the LCoE of a nuke plant?
I'm thinking more of the cycles of community approval that can drag on and delay the project rather than individual ongoing regulations.
Why are these rounds of community consultation allowed? Surely legislatures ought to be able to pre-empt them.
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?
I mean concrete is also just really expensive. A lot of the cost is labor, yes, but still.
And the price was escalating even before TMI and Chernobyl.
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
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
> ... 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.