Wikipedia succinctly puts what happened last time "scale" was tried.

> 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.[46] [...] Eventually, more than 120 reactor orders were cancelled,[50] and the construction of new reactors ground to a halt.

> 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.[53]

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

The Forbes article cited there is criticizing the American model of building nuclear but praising the French model. The difference being standardization. One could also point to South Korea as a good model. By building new plants and tinkering with both the designs and regulation the US has maximized cost, albeit while pushing the tech forward. Basically the US built almost every reactor as an R&D project over that period. We could have and still could stamp out standard designs, and then the difficulty would be in construction management. That's by no means simple stuff but it's a reasonable path forward.

So you need to cheat on the safety side of things to be a good model? Their once grandiose plan of being a nuclear power house exporting reactors stopped at exactly the 4 reactors to UAE which was signed before the scandal. Of course to an authoritarian country.

> In November 2012 it was discovered that over 5,000 small components used in five reactors at Yeonggwang Nuclear Power Plant had not been properly certified; eight suppliers had faked 60 warranties for the parts. Two reactors were shut down for component replacement, which was likely to cause power shortages in South Korea during the winter.[24] Reuters reported this as South Korea's worst nuclear crisis, highlighting a lack of transparency on nuclear safety and the dual roles of South Korea's nuclear regulators on supervision and promotion.[25] This incident followed the prosecution of five senior engineers for the coverup of a serious loss of power and cooling incident at Kori Nuclear Power Plant, which was subsequently graded at INES level 2.[24][26]

> In 2013, there was a scandal involving the use of counterfeit parts in nuclear plants and faked quality assurance certificates. In June 2013 Kori 2 and Shin Wolsong 1 were shut down, and Kori 1 and Shin Wolsong 2 ordered to remain offline, until safety-related control cabling with forged safety certificates is replaced.[27] Control cabling in the first APR-1400s under construction had to be replaced delaying construction by up to a year.[28] In October 2013 about 100 people were indicted for falsifying safety documents, including a former chief executive of Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power and a vice-president of Korea Electric Power Corporation.[29]

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

No-- but there is a middle ground between institutional paralysis requiring safety-at-any-cost... and laissez-faire, safety-be-damned!

Ever since local NY authorities prevented a distant completed reactor from ever being operated by refusing to write a regulation-mandated evacuation plan, it's been mostly impossible to build nuclear in the US. Why put lots of capital at risk when rules might change and it can be decided "ehhhh, nevermind, you can't operate!" at the end of the process years later.

You’re arguing against a straw man. I’m not advocating sacrificing safety. Nuclear in the US is regulated to a level of safety far more stringent than any other industry and out of line with the actual danger. Moreover the regulations change frequently and safety reviews of new designs get rejected without comment or feedback. Many of these regulations were written and devised by people specifically trying to tank the industry. We could take an approach that is more neutral to nuclear and base regulations on probabilistic models of risk and it would be much cheaper and just as safe.

indeed, everyone misses the fact that, for any solution to be cost-effective you need an experienced team that have built thay before, that means:

1 - all powerplants should be identical, so you can work out problems on reactor 1 and have no probpems by the time you are building reactor 55. The US model of private companies building random shit doesnt fit well. Thats how wind and solar work - they build thousands of identical solar panels and wind turbines

2 - you cant start and stop construction - if you stopped building for 10 years, your engineers have left, retired or died. Now you build a new reactor, and you are goong to have inexperienced people making the same mistakes. you have to have an institution that is building non-stop for 20 years, like china does.

thats also why wind and solar works - the same teams of people were installing and servicing turbined for decades

3 - factory made - manufacturing of wind and solar is automated to a large degree. Automation in construction is ~0%. Whether you are building a house or a reactor, they are expensive manual labour. Some of this might be solved with prefab buildings, some might be solved with Small Moduper reactors, but approached require large investment and long-term commitment

I’m not sure they all have to be the same, but settling on a few standard designs would help a lot. SMRs might be good in some cases whereas in other situations a larger plant would make sense. I think privately constructed and run plants would be fine if the regulations were clear and didn’t change so frequently.

I beg your pardon? Excessive safety guidelines? Do you have any idea what a large scale nuclear disaster could cause in a densely populated Europe? How close Japan brush with disaster as the Fukushima fallout could have hit the Tokyo region?

> Do you have any idea what a large scale nuclear disaster could cause in a densely populated Europe?

Yes. My idea is that it would be much less harm (to human health and the environment) than is caused by burning brown coal in properly functioning coal-burning power plants.

And much less harm than results from using diesel as a transport fuel. That produces very high levels of carcinogens and other harmful products.

Yet, Europe does both.

Edit: note that these harms are caused every day by equipment working as designed. They are not due to extreme unforeseen circumstances but are accepted as normal.

Have you seen the amount of pointless paperwork that has nothing to do with actual safety/better outcomes that the nuclear industry generates? It’s mind boggling.

Fukushima is a good example of this, because the massive amount of paperwork made it hard to see that they could just spend 1/10th the amount of time, energy, and money and better protect their cooling generators and/or ask for help in time from the navy that was sitting just offshore and willing to help

> Do you have any idea what a large scale nuclear disaster could cause in a densely populated Europe?

Depends, what type of plant?

Plenty of nuclear plant designs that just drop the rods into a water bath and halt all activity.

Do you realize what types of health impacts gas leaks are having on densely populated regions right now?

Or how about fracking destroying drinking water? Higher cancer and birth defect rates for surrounding communities.

> How close Japan brush with disaster as the Fukushima fallout could have hit the Tokyo region?

The amount of fallout from Fukushima was obscenely minuscule. The worst case estimates, by the most pessimistic naysayers, 130 extra deaths will result from the accident. The most commonly agreed upon estimates, 0 additional deaths.

Meanwhile, 13k people dead minimum from coal in America each year. No one even tracks the impact from the literal thousands of natural gas leaks that are ongoing. [1] is a nice visualization of natural gas incidents from 2010 to 2017.

Fukushima was a worst case scenario with massive mismanagement on multiple levels, and the sum environmental impact was less than any of the multiple of oil tanker spills that happen, quite literally, multiple times a year. [2]

[1] https://public.tableau.com/views/NaturalGasTransmissionIncid... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills

Yes, they are excessive. You can dump a lot of the expensive guidelines and nuclear would still be extremely safe.

I always love the nuclear arguments of "It's SAFE!" immediately followed by, "We just need to remove those pesky safety regulations to make it economical."

I can’t speak for European regulatory bodies, but in the USA the relevant authority is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which was founded in 1974 and approved zero new reactor designs between 1974 and 2020. Conservative doesn’t even begin to describe the stance of regulatory agencies, despite newer designs being much safer from decades of design improvements, nobody wants to be the person responsible for signing off and issuing a safety certification.

The NRC was cheap at the price.

It is a shame it was unable to prevent green-lighting Vogtle and the other disaster next door.

Factoring in the nuclear waste storage cost over it's whole lifetime (instead of socializing it) will eat those savings easily.

Also: Germans love their safety regulations, this is never going to happen.

Probably not, if using casks and storing on site which costs nearly nothing?

Reactors don’t generate a lot of waste by volume, and it gets less of a problem over time by it’s very nature.

The required storage time for nuclear waste in Germany is 1 million years. Storing anything safely for one million years in one of the most densly populated continents is a huge challenge and certainly not as easy as "just dump it somewhere in the desert".

Also: uranium is a finite resource. After it will have run out, it humanity will have to maintain and check these storage sites for that amount of time. Who is expected to pay this? People who don't profit from the power anymore? In my eyes the only solution is either transmutation into less harmful wastes (very costly) or paying the future storage cost for that timeframe upfront (very, very costly).

Which points out the absurd safety requirements and paperwork. That regulation (if true, I haven’t seen it) is just trying to make it impossible to do anything, not actually protecting anyone in any real way.

1) In far less than a million years, the contents of the cask will be well below background radiation levels. Literally less dangerous from radiation than sitting at home.

2) It’s been less than 100 years since Germany had a raving lunatic trying to conquer the world at the helm, and less than 50 since they were split in half between two world superpowers. It’s ridiculous hubris to think anyone could predict or plan more than 100 years in advance with any certainty, let alone a million. And by setting a million year milestone, they’re saying ‘don’t even try to make something that could work now’

3) more people will die from the economic fallout of what the gov’t is doing (and the burning of Coal, wars, etc) than would die from any halfway likely outcome of a nuclear disaster here. They could have multiple Fukushima’s and still be better off.

4) as a species, anything recognizably human has been around AT MOST a single digit multiple of that number. Recorded history and civilization is a tiny fraction of that number. It’s a fun mental game, not a pragmatic limit or has any real meaning in this context.

Also, while Uranium is finite (as is everything else), we’ve got plenty to last the foreseeable future even without any fancy technology advancements. And there is plenty of avenues for that.

It’s the picture of ‘the now is unacceptable, the future is impossible.’

1) In far less than a million years, the contents of the cask will be well below background radiation levels. Literally less dangerous from radiation than sitting at home.

heck even a time scale of 10.000 is beyoned the current civilized world, do you even realize that? how stupid to talk even about millions, if the modern world didn't even exists for a few HUNDRED of years.

and it's stupid to dump shit into the earth without knowing what will happen at point x.

If we never did anything until we fully understood all the ramifications forever, we’d literally have never existed. I’m not saying ‘don’t figure out what will happen next’. That’s dumb.

I’m saying ‘don’t set some impossible to achieve goal and fall into analysis paralysis while doing things with far worse known outcomes right now’. Because that is also dumb.

We know putting it in giant steel casks is pretty much foolproof, and will ensure no leaks for at least 40+ years. They’re literally bulletproof. It’s what every major reactor has been doing for 40+ years. Works surprisingly well.

> "It’s been less than 100 years since Germany had a raving lunatic trying to conquer the world at the helm, and less than 50 since they were split in half between two world superpowers."

It is an absolute mystery why this does not inspire utmost confidence in the future of safe nuke waste storage...

Chernobyl went from glowing pile of smoldering glass to ‘just don’t dig it all up and play in it, idiots’. In half the time.

And yeah, Putin did send folks who did dig parts of it up - and play in it. They are idiots. They might die from it. However, conservatively, at least 10,000-100,000x the number of people already have, or will shortly be dead from more classical methods - artillery, gunfire, incendiaries, etc. Horrible ways to go, all. Near as I can tell, the idiots doing the digging are also likely to be the only ones seriously impacted by it, unlike the others.

Nuclear waste isn’t super healthy or anything, but it’s not even on the radar of ‘nasty shit a maniacal dictator will use to kill people’. Except maybe a bond-type spy ironically.

You know the last Hitler literally had his folks invent ICBMs and setup mass death camps, right?

Even if all the nuclear waste in the world right now went back in time and got spilled in the worst places possible, the mess and ensuing death would be way less than they made.

It is not about "using to kill people". It is about sane administration.

Which matters…. Mostly if not having it will kill people, no?

If it’s entombed in glass or in giant steel casks requiring no further work to keep safe, then the only real danger would be them pulling it out and using it for evil. Which, they’ll already have plenty of evil things at their disposal, and things far easier to use and more scalable for evil too. So not likely to be all that interesting.

How is the storage costing over time? I thought you'd dig an expensive dump and that was it.

You generally need monitoring at a minimum, and maintenance to shore up degradation of any unstable containment materials (i.e. those used to prevent water leeching, etc).

Plus security. You need to keep people out- there's always going to be some idiot who wants to get too close or use it for Evil.

That said, I imagine the costs are far less than the alternatives. Rebuilding the grid to satisfy continental-wide wind will produce a lot of CO2.