Hmm, my understanding was that when you dig into why nuclear is expensive, it can be roughly broken into two parts. One part is the intrinsic costs of building a functional power plant. The other part is making things safe, and that's where we've pushed our regulation far past "safe enough" (compared to other sources of power) and into the realm of absurdity, because we're looking at absolute safety and not relative safety. I found the post where I originally read about this (https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop) -- basically, nuclear power is required to be "as safe as possible", implying that if you have money left in your budget and you could have spent it on improving safety, you've failed, even if it's already far, far safer than any other thing humans build. Which, according to the author of the article, means that you can never try to build a more cost-efficient nuclear plant, you always have to blow all your money on safety, and that's why costs keep rising. I found it pretty convincing.

That said, it's likely we can't fix our regulation AND build new plants in time to fix climate change, so I agree with you there. I don't have any agenda about what tech we use to solve this problem -- I'm perfectly happy with solar, wind, or flower power if that's what it takes :)

The cost of doing something safely isn't distinct from "intrinsic costs". If you kill everyone in the county, maybe that's an acceptable risk and statistically, you are right. But you are also dead, and the reactor isn't running (or: is running decentralized, in the cloud).

The idea that some safety costs are entirely frivolous, obviously so, with no serious argument against that notion, just doesn't strike me as believable. Yes, government projects (and private industry projects) tend to run over budgets. The saying is "work expands to meet the budget provided", but that's intended to be cynical snark, not descriptive of reality. There are plenty of governments that care less for safety than the nations of the global north, yet they haven't found this holy sweet spot of safe efficiency, as far as I can tell.

Ok sure, I know what you mean, you can't separate out costs. But imagine we could say -- how much would it cost to produce nuclear power that killed as many people yearly as natural gas plants do, per unit of energy produced? Everything on top of that is extra safety. But really, it wouldn't even be expensive to be much safer than that. When you look at the deaths per unit of energy produced, nuclear is right down there with wind and solar: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

The reason we still have to run coal and natural gas plants is to cover the times that wind and solar aren't producing. Nuclear is a substitute for coal and natural gas, not wind and solar. Because we're shutting down old nuclear plants and not building new ones, coal plants are still going up in many parts of the world. Even if nuclear was ten times as dangerous, it would still be a net win on safety compared to natural gas and especially coal.

But also, my understanding is that a whole bunch of these deaths were at Chernobyl. From the article I linked:

The deaths from Chernobyl, 35 years ago, were due to unforgivably bad reactor design that we‘ve advanced far beyond now. There were zero deaths from radiation at Three Mile Island or at Fukushima. (The only deaths from the Fukushima disaster were caused by the unnecessary evacuation of 160,000 people, including seniors in nursing homes.)

Did you check out the article from my original comment? It does explain things much better than I can. And about your last point of the sweet spot of safe efficiency -- Jack Devaney, the author of the book that the article is about, is currently partnering with the government of Indonesia to produce nuclear power that's cheaper than coal: https://thorconpower.com/ The website is pretty generous with info, and doesn't set off my bullshit/vaporware detector. Maybe it's already happening.

>Really the whole debate is mostly scientism: nuclear power didn't lose because it was too dangerous. It lost because it is too expensive. These days, it's still too expensive, but now it also just takes too long for it to be useful for the climate emergency.

It's expensive because Chernobyl caused the whole world to develop cold feet. Innovation stopped and funding for nuclear dried up after 2-3 accidents. Solar and wind were super expensive (vis-a-vis coal or gas) in 2010 and before compared to 2022 and people were railing against solar for that reason alone. But only a decade later, the cost has fallen by an order of a magnitude, making it far more practical and a valuable source of energy because society invested money and resources to bring the cost down.

Imagine having 3 children and lavishing all your attention and resources on two of them, leaving one to fend for itself and then turning around and saying that the aloof one has no talent, skills and is basically a burden on the society.

Nuclear is not a panacea but railing against the technology because humans goofed up, then refused to pay more attention and do things correctly in the future is an irrational stance.

You're off by a decade, three-mile island, Chernobyl, Fukushima and all other accidents which "would never happen if you had actually been smart" only added dead weight to an already completely uncompetitive business.

There hasn't ever been a nuclear plant built which was not subsidized. Wind and solar needed a kick-start, now they bid to even get permission to build off-shore wind power.

> By the mid-1970s it became clear that nuclear power would not grow nearly as quickly as once believed. Cost overruns were sometimes a factor of ten above original industry estimates, and became a major problem. For the 75 nuclear power reactors built from 1966 to 1977, cost overruns averaged 207 percent. Opposition and problems were galvanized by the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.[48]

> Over-commitment to nuclear power brought about the financial collapse of the Washington Public Power Supply System, a public agency which undertook to build five large nuclear power plants in the 1970s. By 1983, cost overruns and delays, along with a slowing of electricity demand growth, led to cancellation of two WPPSS plants and a construction halt on two others. Moreover, WPPSS defaulted on $2.25 billion of municipal bonds, which is one of the largest municipal bond defaults in U.S. history. The court case that followed took nearly a decade to resolve.[49][50][51]

> A cover story in the February 11, 1985, issue of Forbes magazine commented on the overall management of the nuclear power program in the United States:

> "The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale … only the blind, or the biased, can now think that the money has been well spent. It is a defeat for the U.S. consumer and for the competitiveness of U.S. industry, for the utilities that undertook the program and for the private enterprise system that made it possible.[55]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...

It's not clear to me why we should care whether nuclear is "subsidized", given that all of our dominant fossil-fuel infrastructure is also massively subsidized, in addition to it doing a great job of rapidly killing the entire planet.

Similarly, I'm not sure that for decisions in 2022-2050, we should be relying on lessons learned half a century ago in the 1970s about tech which was designed and deployed even earlier than that, during the absolute infancy of nuclear power tech.

Given the state of Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer, Flamanville, Olkilouto today and so on the lessons learned in the 1970s were the nice rosy days. Productionizing the research from the 50s and 60s.

Renewables are here and vastly cheaper. Steam based plants like nuclear and coal lost their competitiveness with the advent of the CCGT plants in the 80s. Both are dead simply due to their shared thermodynamic cycle. Renewables are pushing CCGT plants more and more towards only existing as peakers.

>There hasn't ever been a nuclear plant built which as not subsidized. Wind and solar needed a kick-start, now they bid to even get permission to build off-shore wind power.

I am not sure why nuclear needs to be perfectly competitive to be a valuable option. Govts worldwide subsidize infrastructure programs to varying degrees. Roads are subsidized. Water treatment plants are subsidized. Hell, agriculture and farming cannot survive a free market without government subsidies in most of the planet. Companies like Apple and Tesla won't build manufacturing plants without tax breaks (effectively a subsidy.) Amazon won't build an office without asking for a tax break from the cities.

The expectations of nuclear are irrationally high.

And your quotes all point to policy issues which can be fixed with proper governance. Just because it "became" non-competitive 5 decades ago is no reason to not pursue it going forward given that any help against the climate emergency is welcome. Even IPCC in a report some time back accepted that meeting the climate target is not possible without the help of nuclear and in a good policy environment nuclear can be cost competitive.

Why not put it into long-term storage for emergencies based on hydrogen instead? Why this fixation on nuclear as the one true savior?

Today you can use solar to produce hydrogen which you then burn and still economically come out ahead of nuclear. Not that it would be sane to do which is why it haven't been adopted.

> Nuclear is not a panacea but railing against the technology because humans goofed up, then refused to pay more attention and do things correctly in the future is an irrational stance.

But we didn't even become more careful with existing reactors. The companies running them kept being textbook capitalists and cut costs wherever possible. Outsource maintenance to questionable Eastern European workers. Inspections reveal unexplainable micro fractures near the reactor core? Just declare it safe and carry on. Workers on-site monitoring the operations are retrained electricians, because well, both things have something to do with electricity right?

I'm not afraid the technology is inherently unsafe. I'm worried because it's run by companies maximizing profit, and regulated (indirectly) by politicians caring about getting re-elected, and maybe about their hometown/electoral district.

The Davis-Beisse reactor in Ohio was found in 2002 to have a boric acid leak that ate through 6 inches of steeling cladding, leaving only 3/8ths inch of steel holding in the high-pressure coolant.

A few months earlier, the company had claimed that "oh yeah, we checked that, everything's fine!" and employees were later convicted for providing false information to and hiding evidence of the leak from government inspectors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis%E2%80%93Besse_Nuclear_Po...

Fair point but I am not sure how it is any different from other risky industries. Aviation became safer (current Boeing fiascos not withstanding) over the past 2-3 decades where today an airliner crash makes global news.

Humans being terrible at something, at some time in the past, is not a sole reason to write off the technology. The response should be to rather focus on improving the process and policy rather than shrugging off nuclear which IPCC has admitted is necessary to meet our climate goals.

Most American's are very worried about dying from terrorism while most are actually being killed by heart attacks.

At a certain point it is a matter of what people want to believe and what is actually happening on the ground.

> they consider those technologies to be girly, and therefore still bring up big hairy nuclear reactors whenever anyone fails at avoiding them at parties.

I don't think this is really a thing, and I suspect this appeal to ridicule is being made in bad faith.

My impression is that there's currently an active and honest debate going on right now on whether nuclear is necessary or not.

https://www.factcheck.org/2019/11/what-does-science-say-abou...

Every argument I've heard about nuclear was about getting to carbon neutral or negative fast enough to avert climate disaster, and providing a stable base load in light of generation fluctuation of solar and wind, and current lack of sufficient storage to smooth load - generation curves.

To counteract fluctuating loads, you do not need a "stable base load". You need generation power that happily fluctuates at just about the same rate as the renewables do, but on command. That is not nuclear power, it is (currently) natural gas.

> Actual scientists and competent tech people have driven the costs of solar and wind power, as well as storage, down by several orders of magnitude

Yet have been incapable of offering a way to power my oven on a cold windless night without burning something.

Virtually all solar and wind installation are accompanied by a thermal power plant (usually gas) that's supposed to takeover when renewable can't be trusted. Yet the eco crowd refuses to factor in the cost of these - otherwise completely useless - backup power plants in the cost of their magical solution. They also conveniently refuse to look at the CO2 produced when using those.

In short, renewables are cheap (if you forget that you also have to create a full backup system) and produce no CO2 (if you forget to measure what's produced by the backup system). Selective memory at it's finest.

Yes, I know, batteries are coming. There is a new breakthrough that will made this practical every 5 year. We have been hearing that same song for the past 4 decades. In reality, energy storage is quite close to optimal. There are some improvements made here and there, but nothing that will be a game changer: if it does not work now (it doesn't), it probably won't in a near future.

1. the natural gas backup system already exists; it is our current infrastructure

2. batteries are already here. The US built 3.1 GW of grid-scale batteries in 2021, and utilities have filed with the EIA that they are building 10 GW of batteries in 2022-2023.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=51518

3. the market for grid-scale batteries scarcely existed before the explosive build-out of solar in the past 3 years. Before recently, the only economic use of grid-scale energy storage was to store excess electricity produced overnight by nuclear power plants at places like the Bath County Pumped Hydro plant, or the "store nuclear-produced energy and release it during commercial breaks of EastEnders" pumped hydro plants in the UK.

This means that there is suddenly a huge market incentive to develop new energy storage tech, and the market incentive simply didn't exist 10 years ago. I expect that to produce dividends.

Batteries were $2,152 per KWh as of 2015, and now go for $137 KWh. That's a 15x improvement in 7 years.

>...the CO2 produced when using those.

Isn't that still a net win? If you're burning N tons of CO2 now, you're burning N-Y during the hours when you don't have to be running the fossil plant. Bonus points if your new backup plant is cleaner (say, NG vs coal)

It's absolutely a net gain when compared to running gas/coal only. But unfair to say that this produces 0 CO2, like it's often claimed. And this backup CO2 production is very far from negligible.

Similarly, the cost of running gas only should be computed as: cost of gas power plant + cost of gas. And the cost of the renewable option should be computed as : cost of renewable power plan + cost of backup gas power plant + cost of backup gas. You can't magically exclude the backup from the calculation. And suddenly the renewable option sounds way more expensive.

That is why green hydrogen derivatives are so important.

Nuclear has the same problem though. It takes on the order of days to change the power output of a nuclear plant. You can't just run it at night or when the wind dies down like you can with a fossil fuel plant.

“Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope, up to 140 MW/minute.[7] Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode and so participate in the primary and secondary frequency control. Some units follow a variable load program with one or two large power changes per day. Some designs allow for rapid changes of power level around rated power, a capability that is usable for frequency regulation.[8] A more efficient solution is to maintain the primary circuit at full power and to use the excess power for cogeneration.[9]”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant#Nuc...

And now your nuclear plant which is a net loss running at 100% became an even larger liability.

This is the best comment in the thread and it's somehow being downvoted.

Physics grad student here and I agree with this comment whole-heartedly. I love the idea of nuclear power but I also understand that it requires enormous CapEx and that the time to get a reactor up, running, and carbon neutral is much too long to address the climate crisis. We absolutely shouldn't be shutting down nuclear plants but any money spent on new plants is money that could otherwise be spent generating lower cost Wind/Solar in a shorter period of time.

Taking the view for a moment of somebody who thinks we won't have a solution until we have plenty of nuclear power,

> the time to get a reactor up, running, and carbon neutral is much too long to address the climate crisis

In that particular sense, it's not a crisis: if you think N megadeaths will occur in time T as a result of climate change (making no comment on that because I don't know much about N as a function of T), there are still (10000 - N) million humans around at time T to suffer from lack of a solution. In that situation, it doesn't make sense to say "it's a crisis, so a solution that helps after time T can't possibly help"?

So for people who think that we won't have a solution until we build a lot of nuclear power, the slogan "climate crisis" seems likely to badly damage those 10000-N million humans because it gives us an excuse to never solve the problem. People could reasonably disagree with the antecedent ("won't have a solution until we build nuclear"), but I hope you see a bit how the other side sees it?

Greetings from an ex-Physics grad student on the other side by the way! Other side both of this debate and of being a grad student I suppose. Have a nice day over there :wave:

have you noticed how the mythical future where the bulk of energy is supplied by wind and solar is always at an indeterminate point in the future? There is currently no gigawatt scale power grid anywhere in the world that supplies more than 20-30% of annual energy from variable energy sources like wind and solar.

Meanwhile, France enjoys a low carbon grid together with low energy prices as do many parts of Canada, parts of eastern europe and so on.

It is wrong to frame the argument as wind/solar versus everything else. The argument should be carbon versus no carbon. Period.

Look no further than South Australia with a 65.7% renewable utilization for the 2021. Sure you can shift the goal posts to include total energy usage instead of simply electricity, but that also makes it easier since now you have a whole load of possible smart consumers in for example the transportation industry.

https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/record-year-rene...

South Australia does not scale. It is a region with a tiny population, almost 75% of which lives in a limited area.

South Australia is also incredibly sunny and has the advantage of being an arid desert. Again, that does not scale well.

With the exponential lowering of the costs of wind power, solar and storage that band should increase every year right?

South Australia sits at 25 to 37 degrees south. The longest HVDC line (in China) is 3300 km, that is 30 degrees.

Based on existing HVDC lines and South Australian circumstances we can say that we should reliably be able to supply somewhere up to 55 to 67 degrees from the equator, in general. Do you know what is at 66 degrees north? The arctic circle. That is how far north we end up.

This is not even considering that closer to the poles the wind resources are much better, especially in winter time.

The 4 million people living north of the Arctic circle might have a harder time. But it would seem that it is a trivially easy to solve edge case when the rest of the world has a solution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Circle#Human_habitation

This of course discounts any geopolitical concerns, which makes it harder. But on a US or EU continental scale we easily have the technology today.

South Australia gets rather more sunshine than the regions of the world where people actually live.

With the exponential lowering of the costs of wind power, solar and storage that band should increase every year right?

South Australia is 25 to 37 degrees south. The longest HVDC line (in China) is 3300 km, that is 30 degrees.

So now based on existing HVDC lines and South Australian circumstances we can say that we should reliably be able to supply somewhere up to 55 to 67 degrees from the equator, in general. Do you know what is at 66 degrees north? The arctic circle. That is how far north we end up.

This is not even considering that closer to the poles have much better wind resources, especially in winter time.

So, the 4 million people living north of the Arctic circle might have a harder time. But it would seem that it is a trivially easy to solve edge case when the rest of the world has a solution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Circle#Human_habitation

This of course discounts any geopolitical concerns, which makes it harder. But on a US or EU continental we easily have the technology today.

Ireland is gigawatt-scale, over 36% wind energy, and growing rapidly. Well beyond your stated 20-30% figure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Ireland

>. Well beyond

Is it? This adds nothing to the discussion. If it were actually 50% and i claimed 30%, that would be a distinction worth pointing out.

Since we are being pedantic, you should really look up the figures for energy share from wind in 2021 in Ireland. It fell to 29% which completely negates your claim of it growing rapidly.

> It is wrong to frame the argument as wind/solar versus everything else. The argument should be carbon versus no carbon. Period.

I am framing it as carbon vs no carbon. A new nuclear plant's timeline to carbon-neutrality compared to the counterfactual where an equal capital investment is made in solar/wind is well over a decade. Given the time crunch we are on to lower emissions, I simply do not think we have the time to waste building new plants. That said, we should not be decommissioning plants that are still operable.

How much massive grid batteries could built within 10 years?

I realize that you won't be impressed, but 20% of electricity in Texas came from wind in 2019 (plus 1% solar) [1].

Texas has been building wind and solar like crazy since then, such electricity in Texas in 2021 was 24% wind + 4% solar [2].

Texas is building 6.1 GW of solar in 2022 and 3.8 GW of wind [3]. So that indeterminate point in the future where ERCOT is more than 30% wind+solar is probably 2023 or 2024. It might even be 2022.

[1] https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/fiscal-notes/2020/augu... [2] https://www.ercot.com/gridinfo/generation [3] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50818

> Really the whole debate is mostly scientism: nuclear power didn't lose because it was too dangerous. It lost because it is too expensive.

If I understand correctly, in saying that this is scientism, you're saying something like that people on the other side of this debate think science and technology are the only relevant things going on here? Another possibility is that they do think other things are relevant (cost, political considerations, ...) but that they think that the expense is not intrinsic to the technology.

While I'm sure you've heard the "but it's expensive because of the anti-nuke people!" claim many times and have your own well-considered reasons to think that mistaken in some sense -- if I'm wrong and it turns out that it being expensive has nothing very much to do with anti-nuke protests, does that really make me a scientist? "Scientist", the way you're using it, is a statement about somebody's epistemelogical beliefs, I think?

> It's funny how your forward-looking worldview can turn all retro on you within just a few decades.

This could be seen as ad hominem and could usefully have been omitted I think

Exponential growth is the true problem and most of the technologies we are currently looking towards will only be temporary solutions. Even Fusion could only solve the problems exponential growth will throw at us in both population increases and energy usage increases.

Population isn't growing exponentially and is expected to peak around 9.7 billion in the 2060s and declined by about 0.9 billion in the subsequent 40 years.

Just because the growth rate isn't constant, does not make it not exponential. I do acknowledge that there are smart people forecasting the end of exponential growth, but who is to say a cultural or technological phenomena will not change this path?

It is currently exponential, anything else is a lie, and I don't even know what the intentions would be of someone perpetuating such nonsense. Now there will easily be at least a whole generational period in which we don't really know for sure if we have leveled off, that is just the nature of human reproduction, seems safer to wait at least 1 generation before we have declared victory on our biggest enemy.

> Just because the growth rate isn't constant, does not make it not exponential.

That's literally what makes it not exponential (I.e. when it falls low enough that it is no longer proportional to the derivative). Sigmoid functions, catenary functions (hyperbolic trig), even the complex exponential (regular trig), and the like all have exponential terms. We don't use the term "exponential growth" in any of these cases unless there is growth without bounds - aka the real coefficients are positive.

To argue anything other than its exponential is to zoom into an area of the curve that is meaningless.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_...

I found the actual population estimate he seems to be referencing are from the Lancelet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow... There are enough referenced facts on that wiki page to know that is not a certainty.

Human population is obviously not strictly exponential, as there have been worldwide phenomena that lower it globally, and these will happen again in the future, but if the net growth rate is even 0.1% it is not linear, it is exponential. Only when the growth rate equals the replacement rate (deaths) will it suddenly be static, but if it increases even a hair over that its exponential at that moment (because new humans produce more new humans).

Also as we know from microbiology human population with finite resources can't be exponential in the long run as resources will limit it, so sure its not an exponential function because it obviously is a logarithmic function (likely with a whole other side to the graph once it reaches its peak). Sure maybe we are smarter than this, but it does seem like a leap to get there. So yes technically you are 100% right human population is not and cannot be exponential, it just has been for the past few centuries, and there isn't a good reason to expect it not to be in the future.

The current population growth rate globally is 1%[1], which is definitionally not exponential. World population has doubled since 1970, but the rate has been declining since.

[1]https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/population-g...

It would be exponential if the net growth rate was 0.1%. If your savings account produces 0.1% interest that is still exponential growth. According to the rule of 70 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_72) it would double in 700 years. That is exponential!

The growth rate is trending down and will probably go negative, it's unlikely to ever double again over any time horizon we can reasonably project.

I think this would be a good thing, but if it were reality, I think many countries would encourage births before we got even close to net 0. This part we cannot really know.

Singapore is just one example that has been discouraging population increase then switching to encouraging population increase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_planning_in_Singapo... Yet there is still a net increase during all this time. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/SGP/singapore/populati...

I think asking the world to agree on something this potentially controversial, when you and I can't even agree on the nature of the increase, is asking too much.

This argument sounds rational but isn't. It ignores some huge problems - fossil fuels have been subsidised for decades. They will obviously appear to be cheaper than nuclear which is one of the few industries that designs for the worst case scenario.

Wind and solar are also subsidised - by electricity consumers. Their volatility has a price that is currently absorbed by the grid and is ultimately paid for by you and I.

It was made too expensive due to people who don't understand of it and are scared of it.