Problem is that we don't build the damn things anymore, so each one is bespoke and expensive. Ideally we'd keep building them and develop the expertise and make it a more repeatable scalable process.

I worry instead that the lesson taken from this will be "nuclear is too expensive and ineffective".

MIT found that reusing a design made plants more expensive to build, not less, because of costly on-site last minute design changes.

Taking your point more charitably, it is indeed the lack of a sustainable nuclear energy industry that routinely builds plants that causes costs to skyrocket. There is a chicken and egg situation: nuclear projects don’t get funded because they’re too expensive, so there is no chance to develop expertise in how to build them cheaply, which causes the few that get greenlit to be built by rookie teams that make rookie mistakes that cause costs to skyrocket.

The MIT study into the causes of cost overruns: https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118

How many hundreds of billions in subsidies would be required to once again, for the nth time since the 1950s prove that nuclear is truly dead outside of luxury niche applications like submarines?

Today renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels which in turn are cheaper than than nuclear. Through pure economic terms the world is steaming towards a new cheaper energy equilibrium based on renewable energy.

We are currently in the chaotic transitioning phase but that will of course shake out. Sprinkling some luxury nuclear in top will have miniscule effect.

Its pretty clear whats going to happen. Energy companies will provide the absolute minimum redundancies and will make formidable profits most years. Every 10-15 years there will be some catastrophic blackout due to unlikely weather events and everybody will scream murder. The energy companies will swear to do better and maybe some toothless regulations will be legislated. The politicians will be happy to be bought off by those companies since the next event will be most likely after they have left office, so its free money.

Rince repeat.

In countries with private energy generation perhaps. Energy production is at least partially nationalised (or at least heavily regulated) in a lot of the world, which puts those places in a much stronger position to plan for such events.

The nice thing about nationalized companies is that they're happy to spend your money on things you don't want! Given the choice, folks would rather pay $0.18/kWh for energy production (the average US rate) with 99.9% uptime than $0.30-0.40/kWh (the average Western European rate), even if that came with 99.99% uptime.

Nationalized industries are great for like 5-10 years, after which it becomes clear they have no ability to make effective plans or react to a changing market.

The Goverment power company here (bc Canada) is one of the best run in the world, with some of the cheapest rates (10c cad) and has been a public utility for over 60 years despite a previous conservative Goverment saddling it with 16 billion of extra costs due to grift

Norway also does great with its nationalized O&G

Nationalize industries can be fantastic with the public benefiting directly rather then a few select individuals.

Fix your public institutions instead of privatization

Pointing to the best run government power company says nothing about the average government run power company. And I don't know why you think cheap rates for a government power company are particularly special. The rates are subsidized by your taxes. What's the real cost? I bet its hard to even find out.

> a previous conservative Goverment saddling it with 16 billion of extra costs due to grift

Oh really? A government run monopoly being involved in grift? How surprising. Guess what? That's what happens with government run companies. You can't simply wish away the opposing party. And I bet the party you like best also does awful crap you conveniently ignore.

For every great nationalized business you can point out, I could point out 100 that are awful wastes of money.

lol no. BC Hydro is profitable and is not subsidized by taxes, usually turning a profit for the province. it did this for decades until the previous government decided to privatize power production and surprise surprise that saddled the crown corp with a ton of extra costs where if it had built out the capacity itself and not funnelled money to private companies who were doners.

in canada every province with private electricity company is being reamed with high energy prices. every province with a government run power company is not. the same seems to apply in the EU/UK.

nationalized companies run from amazing too crap but every time infrastructure or natural monopolies is privatized the consumer/citizen looses out. EVERY TIME. from parking in Chicago to PG&E in cali to the 409 in ontario - privatization never works out and to prevent abuse regulation is always imposed.

turns out when you grant a for profit company a monoply they take advantage. every time without fail.

so we have on one hand nationalized companies ranging from bad to great for society to private companies always being bad doing everything possible to extract money.

> turns out when you grant a for profit company a monoply they take advantage. every time without fail.

Yes. Granting anyone a monopoly (a corporation or a government) is always a terrible idea. Let's stop doing that.

Turns out somethings will always be a monopoly - you eont get to have multiple roads or power lines to your home. Somethings are natural monopolies and turns out in those cases it’s better to have a Goverment provider a service with the objective or serving community/people then a company who’s only goal is maximizing profit.

Also turns out that competition doesn’t always lead to the best outcomes for a society see healthcare in America vs the rest of the world or that we are speed running the world into a climate disaster

No it doesn't "turn out" that way. It is a self fullfilling prophesy where a government either grants a monopoly to a private company or to itself. There is almost nothing that would actually be a monopoly without government protection.

> you eont get to have multiple roads or power lines to your home

Why the fuck not? You are asserting things that you clearly haven't thought much about. But I don't have time to try and change your mind. Your biases are clearly too ingrained.

It’s funny you talking about “bias” when you simply refuse to acknowledge natural monopolies which are a real thing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly and just presume they have to be “granted by the Goverment”

You're an idiot, goodbye.

>Every 10-15 years there will be some catastrophic blackout due to unlikely weather events

We seem to get by fairly well without those in most places. There are various solutions.

I think it's more likely the current exponential improvements in renewables increase such that we have to come up with new uses for the excess power.

> costly on-site last minute design changes

I clicked through to the actual study ( https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30458-X?_r... ) and I couldn't find a single sentence mentioning on-site last-minute design changes. I searched for "change" and tabbed through all of the results. The closest thing was mention of Westinghouse changing construction standards halfway through an ongoing project, which required many changes to the project design. But, that's one project.

So my question is: Is it possible that the MIT News Office can't understand MIT journal articles?

"Our results point to a gap between expected and realized costs stemming from low resilience to time- and site-dependent construction conditions."

Couldn't that be paraphrased to "last minute changes"?

From the article's own summary: Our results point to a gap between expected and realized costs stemming from low resilience to time- and site-dependent construction conditions.

Guess that's where they took it from.

Skimming the paper it seems a large part of the issue is that it's difficult to mass produce something which needs to be integrated into a variable environment, and attempting to do so is detrimental compared to custom solutions.

This seems to mirror what I've found in the software world, where a custom integration is often much cheaper and easier to maintain than trying to manhandle some generic library/software to do what's needed.

There's got to be some middle ground between every reactor in the country being absolutely bespoke and on the other hand trying to build them in a factory like modular housing.

IIRC one of the big differences/problems is that every one of them have completely different control rooms and control systems. To the point that you cannot train on one reactor and walk into another and operate it. If we at least standardized that side of things, the cost of operations would surely come down

I also question (and happy to be enlightened about) how much the local project needs some massive change. That a pipe might need to be a few hundred yards longer to reach the river surely isn't so consequential that you can't reuse designs

These things are built on huge sites that could be completely leveled and turned into identical square clean pieces of dirt with massive empty land around them How much variation can there possibly be that can't be handled outside of the critical reactor design area

Yeah, I can't shake the feeling it should be possible to mass produce most of the difficult bits, and then have a per-site specific foundation of sorts.

Then again, perhaps it is one of those things where you actually need to make a few of 'em to gain experience.

Nuclear projects don't get funded because of regulatory risk, not because they're "too expensive".

Let's hear what the then-President of Exelon, at the time one of the largest nuclear operators in the US, had to say about that.

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4088

“The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.

I'm not sure why you think that Exelon didn't consider regulatory risk as one of the things that made it not make sense for them. It was certainly a large factor.

The idea that existing nuclear power plants are losing money because they aren't operationally competitive with oil and gas does not square with the facts. The total cost of running a nuclear plant is 30% less than oil and gas per kilowatt-hour. And if all our nuclear plants weren't 50 years old and saddled with massive overregulation, the operation and maintenance of a nuclear plant would probably be equivalent to running a fossil fueled power plant, which would cut ANOTHER 30% off the cost of nuclear because fuel costs of fossil fueled power plants are 4 times the cost of nuclear fuel per kwh.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_04.html

And as for construction costs, you can see that the massive increase in construction costs in the early 60s and 70s was because regulation required enormous increases in staffing, which ballooned labor costs.

https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs/

And even so a nuclear plant should be expected to be profitable as long as you can manage to operate it for long enough without the government shutting you down (one of the major regulatory risks I mentioned).

Nuclear power plants in the past generally took 7 years to build and pay off in 16-24 years. While a natural gas plant can be built in 2 years and pay off in 8 years. Nuclear power plants are so cost effective tho, that if you can manage to run it for 17 years, you'll make more money than running a natural gas plant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC_BCz0pzMw

> I'm not sure why you think that Exelon didn't consider regulatory risk as one of the things that made it not make sense for them. It was certainly a large factor.

Who cares? That putative issue would be beating a dead horse. If it didn't make sense economically anyway, why worry about that?

> The idea that existing nuclear power plants are losing money because they aren't operationally competitive with oil and gas does not square with the facts.

Oil isn't in the picture (it's not used for any baseload power generation in the US, and precious little peaking). But gas is certainly an issue. There have been existing plants (not all of them, of course) that shut down because they could not make even an operating profit. TMI's other reactor was cash flow negative for six years before it was shut down, for example.

In any environment where existing plants are troubled, building new NPPs is obviously completely off the table economically. V. C. Summer was so out of the running it was better to write off the $9B spent so far on it than to complete it.

Sounds like you're ignoring my whole post. I guess this conversation is over then.

I'm ignoring your fantasizing, your wishful woulda-coulda-shoulda, and instead paying attention to what things actually cost. So, yes, the conversation is over.

Because the regulatory environment is different in different countries, and can be changed with political will? The US is particularly expensive: https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/infrastructure-costs-nuclear-e... but it doesn't have to remain that way.

> Problem is that we don't build the damn things anymore, so each one is bespoke and expensive.

When we built them more often, weren't they bespoke and expensive?

No, they were much cheaper in the 70s and 80s!

That's not what I understand, but I don't have numbers. Do you happen to know where we can find some?

From another thread:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Overnight-Construction-C...

"The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing" (2010, A. Grubler): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

Right, nuke costs have only ever increased. For reasons.

Solar and wind costs have only ever decreased. For reasons.

You're not saying what you think you're saying with those facts.

The value proposition for renewables left nukes far behind a long time ago. Nukes have no prospect of narrowing the gap even if they could be built and operated more cheaply, of which in any case no plausible signs are evident.

Nuclear works 24/7/365. Renewables don't. That's the value proposition. (And nuclear does operate more cheaply in China and South Korea)

I.e., with massive government subsidy, hidden behind opaque accounting.

China has constructed more solar and wind generating capacity in the past year than its entire fleet of nukes will produce after they have finished building them. China is less interested in power production from their nukes than strategic isotopes.

Are you blind? The only reason we have so much solar and wind is because of massive subsidies.

Solar and wind are now much cheaper than alternatives, even without subsidies. E.g. it is cheaper to build a new solar farm and switch over to it than to continue using an existing coal plant.

The only reason massive subsidies for renewables continue is to accelerate build-out to address the looming climate catastrophe. We need to ramp up to building out a TW of new renewable capacity every year.

Solar and wind are subsidized by everything else that puts electricity into the grid when the sky is dark or calm.

They are a supplement to, not a straight replacement for, nuclear or gas or anything else.

Factor in the cost of filling in the gaps, and solar and wind don't come out ahead.

I'd like you to concede that your snarky comment about subsidies implies things that are incorrect. Nuclear is not subsidized and has never been widely subsidized. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...

In France this is false: nuclear always obtained heavily (albeit indirectly) subsidies: the R&D was public, it was built by a public monopoly using public money and money borrowed thanks to the state vouching for it...

Financial effect of renewables in Europe: https://www.iea.org/reports/renewable-energy-market-update-j...

No one was talking about France. angiosperm snarkily implied that Nuclear only works if its subsidized. He's clearly wrong. The fact that France does subsidize it isn't relevant. Nuclear in the US is not subsidized and yet is massively more cost effective than fossil fuel power plants.

The larger debate is way less clear-cut than your assertion, check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_debate#Subsidies and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...

The civilian nuclear industry stemmed from massive military investments, which were a way to subsidize it. "In the United States, the federal government has paid US$145 billion for energy subsidies to support R&D for nuclear power ($85 billion) and fossil fuels ($60 billion) from 1950 to 2016" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies_in_the_United...)

The very PWR reactor exists thanks to the US Army desire of nuclear subs, which paid all associated R&D (Westinghouse then adapted it to the civilian on-shore market). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressurized_water_reactor#Hist...

Nowadays the sole direct federal energy support "peaked in FY 2021 at over $500 million" ( https://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/pdf/subsidy.pd... )

There is no secret here: https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/nuclear-power-still-not-via... https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/2019-09/nuclear_s... Nuclear enjoys massive tax reduction

Cost effectiveness will be established after the last hot waste of the last decommissioned plant will be cold. In the meantime any serious accident or waste particle wandering around may induce costs.

Was the basic research funded by governments? Yes. Is subsidization necessary or even done for nuclear powerplants to be built and profitably run given that basic research as an already-existing stepping stone? No.

> Is subsidization necessary or even done

As already answered: https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/nuclear-power-still-not-via...

Thanks for the info. I did some more research and found out that Nuclear Power was indeed not subsidized from 1985 to 2000, but after 2000 some nuclear subsidies seem to have been created. However, while over 20% of the electricity in the US is produced by nuclear plants, only 1% of energy subsidies goes to nuclear, which looks like is approximately on par with subsidies for fossil fuel power.

I don't think we should be subsidizing power (or most things) but it seems disingenuous for an article to claim that nuclear power isn't viable because it gets subsidies, even tho fossil fuel gets at least as much subsidies per mwh as nuclear.

Nuclear power is not viable for a reason other than than it depends on subsidies. It is not viable because it costs overwhelmingly more both to build and to operate than the competition, with or without considering subsidies on either side, and has always produced exactly zero watts for many years after a project started.

Coal and oil still get huge subsidies, yet even with are not viable against solar and wind without.

I'd be very surprised if you could convince me that solar or wind could eliminate the need for the majority of our electricity to be generated by base-load systems like hydro, coal, oil, or nuclear. Do you know what the cost of solar power is if you factor in storage needs?

> Nuclear works 24/7/365. Renewables don't.

Wait, what? Other than solar (for obvious reasons), renewables can run 24/7/365, and that's extremely common; as an example, the Itaipu power plant has run continuously since 1984, and it only powered down once in 2009, when several of the transmission lines taking power from it failed at nearly the same time due to lightning.

Solar doesn't. Wind doesn't. Hydro does (usually). You know he was talking about solar and wind. Why are you being a turd? Hydro is tapped, we can't build significantly more hydro in this world.

Because from the end of WW2 up to at least the 90s civilian nuclear was supported, often indirectly, by military programs (nuclear weapons). In France the Court of audit could not even assess it.

I heard or read somewhere that in China they had the same issue - like in every mega project, there are deadlines and ... well it doesn't really fare well. So the issue is real.

They've always been bespoke and expensive. Where have you been?

Studying history. The cost of nuclear was low until we stopped building 50 years ago.

https://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-u...

It's a pity -- if we had kept up the pace, we'd already have completely decarbonized our grid, but instead we are barely starting. Ah well. At least solar and wind finally became economical. Any path forward is a good path, even if it's 50 years late.

At the moment, coal and probably gas is more expensive than solar, purely due to the turbines and generators.

Nuclear relies on the same subsystems, and it’s unlikely they’ll get significantly cheaper any time soon.

Having said that, I think nuclear could be made cost-competitive with coal and natural gas, at least in theory. Also, it’s unclear that we’ll be able to build a reliable, net carbon negative power grid without a large number of nuclear plants.

Solar cannot provide reliable power. It's cheaper because it doesn't solve a massive part of the problem.

Do the actual math on what it takes to get a reliable solar kWh onto the grid and suddenly it's a lot more expensive.

Perhaps they were in France, where the plants are neither bespoke nor expensive.

They reuse blueprints, and make use of interchangeable parts, unlike the US nuclear. As a bonus, they can train people once, then transfer them between identical nuclear plants. Also, if there is a near miss at one plant, they apply the safety upgrades to the whole fleet.

I had a professor in an facilities course mention the improved level of industrialization of nuclear plant construction as a big reason why France managed to be successful with nuclear energy in a way that other countries have not. If so, is this one of those dreaded examples of the free market failing our actual best interests?

?? How does that show a failure of the free market??

The French government, through the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives, played a key role in standardization of civilian nuclear plants and, to my knowledge, the United States had no true parallel and instead relied on private companies to figure that amongst themselves. We all know how that tends to turn out.

I'm sorry but if you think the US had a "free market" for nuclear power, you're an idiot.

I actually thought nothing and was curious enough to ask for clarity, as clearly demonstrated. But if you're the type to read into the question what you want just so you can call me an "idiot", that makes you a pretty special type of asshole there buddy.

Your question was full of self righteous snark and your response to my question was as well. Trying to tell me you were just "curious" and "asking for clarity" is 100% bullshit and you know it. If you want to actually engage in a conversation, drop the snark and I'll be happy to have a pleasant conversation with you. Otherwise, I guess we'll both have to be assholes.

Or you could ask if my use of the word "dreaded" was sarcastic, because it wasn't.

I believe it was Mill who insisted that one should be able to argue the other side of a topic as well as the one they prefer :)

I still don't see you making any constructive comment. If you're going to, make it your next one please. If you want an answer to your original rhetorical-looking question. The answer is no.

How much did they cost in France? How much do they cost?

> They reuse blueprints, and make use of interchangeable parts, unlike the US nuclear. As a bonus, they can train people once, then transfer them between identical nuclear plants. Also, if there is a near miss at one plant, they apply the safety upgrades to the whole fleet.

That all sounds good as a first impression, but I've learned to ask: Are those the primary bottlenecks and costs?

EPR has been a total disaster, to the point where the state took over Areva.

France is past tense so, they have one reactor under conszruction and 6 proposed and not even planned...

I sometimes imagine how cool it would be if some of the worlds biggest billionaires got together and just did some crazy mega project and didn't care about profits.

This nuclear plant cost ~$34 billion USD. What if Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, and a few others just got together and built 10 or so nuclear power plants? I wonder if that could actually bring down the price to build them.

Money, at that scale at least, is pretty good at calculating business cases. And the money is on renewables, especially solar. And the solar Wp cost for modules is, with some special cause exceptions, following Moores law. Nuclear not so much, all those plants have is delays and cost over-runs.

The Money can see where renewables and storage are likely to be when any nuclear plant that could start to be built today would become available.

Nuclear plants have only ever been built where the customers can be forced to buy the power. No merchant nuclear plant, selling into a competitive market, has ever been built anywhere.

We don't really build anything anymore. The "expertise" has transferred to Asia. Anything we build we'll build worse, slower and more expensive.

Except for airplanes that's one of the few things we still do better.

To be specific it's airplane engines, 5th gen turbofan engines. China started building COMAC airplanes too, probably with questionable maintenance and serviceability story, that they can push with govt airlines. They are still having trouble with modern turbofan engines though.

One airplane isn't a full story. The US and Europe still lead the way here.

I believe engines are from Rolls Royce which is European.

According to my sources, Hong Kong has an engineer shortage. They still want the je ne-sais quoi quality of North American trained engineers.

I would say Hong Kong doesn't illustrate the overall story.

"Machinery" (not including airplanes) is still one of the largest exports of the US. The list [1] of exports by size is:

Mineral fuels including oil: US$378.6 billion

Machinery including computers: $229.6 billion

Electrical machinery, equipment: $197.7 billion

Vehicles: $134.9 billion

Aircraft, spacecraft: $102.8 billion

Optical, technical, medical apparatus: $99.1 billion

Gems, precious metals: $92.5 billion

Pharmaceuticals: $83.5 billion

So the top 3 "non-aircraft" machinery categories are still exported at 5x the amount of aerospace. It seems like people [2] are still interested in the stuff the US manufactures.

[1] https://www.worldstopexports.com/united-states-top-10-export...

[2] https://www.usitc.gov/research_and_analysis/tradeshifts/2020...

Yes but Asia dominates the "building" category overall by a massive margin.

It's just true.

Pharmaceuticals, medical and gems are off topic.

I'm sure there's other small niches the US dominates in. But overall what I said is the objective truth no matter how much you desire it to be not true.

If Asia doesn't dominate a niche yet they are aggressively on track to dominate in the near future.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "building"? It's a nebulous term. If you mean building infrastructure, that's true, but also partly because the US invested heavily in the same type of infrastructure a generation or two prior. I would disagree with the pharmaceuticals because that is a manufacturing-intensive industry.

Throwing out gems (because that probably isn't a good case, like you said), it still amounts to over $1.2 trillion in exports. I'm sure other countries would love that kind of "niche" business.

Gems isn't good also because it's mostly aesthetic. No intrinsic utility other then being rare and pretty. You won't actually "improve" society with gems. It's hard to distill this in technical terms but I hope you're able to understand without the need to get pedantic.

Gemstones therefore are more of a reflection of countries with the ability to purchase the gemstones as an import and less of a reflection of the country actually exporting the gemstones. Right? If a country exports a huge amount of gemstones it means a lot of external countries have an abundance of economic output such that they can purchase frivolous goods that ultimately don't contribute much to the economy. North Korea doesn't purchase gemstones but maybe a rich country would. And the place where diamonds are mined are mostly from some poor countries in Africa.

>Can you elaborate on what you mean by "building"? It's a nebulous term.

Manufacturing and infrastructure I believe are the two words that cover it best off the top of my head but it's unnecessary to specify this to the level of pedantic detail you're going for here. I think those two terms are clear enough.

I think we both know, in general the direction China/Asia is going and where they're completely dominating the US. It's at a general tipping point now. Where one can say they're better than the US overall in the general area of infrastructure/manufacturing. Manufacturing is pretty broad and general and that's the right word to use because broadly and generally Asia is just ahead of the US in this matter.

The problem with these things is that even though it's obvious people still like to debate pedantic details in some vain attempt to use the pedantic details to obscure the obvious truth or even shift the advantage in the favor of the US. Why else would you bring up gemstones and pharmaceuticals?

I don't think I need to elaborate as you requested. You know what I'm talking about and deep down you most likely agree. The trouble here is less about getting at the most accurate truth and more about the inability to accept the truth.

I know what you mean but it's not that clear cut. Rockets? USA. Phones? Assembled in Asia but running iOS or Android. Electric cars? Tesla's still ahead. A lot of the move to China was a choice to have them do the work because they quoted cheaper, which is not irreversible.

It is clear. First of all you brought up Elon. That guy is an anomaly. If it wasn't for him both industries he's responsible for pushing forward would have been viciously surpassed ages ago.

Additionally byd will be surpassing Tesla soon. It's projected to in less than a year.

As for phones, the entire stack is owned by Asia. Software is the only thing we have left and most of it is open source.

Pretty clear cut from your examples. But also clear cut from common sense.

I suggest you find other examples to help detract from the obvious generality. Look into Tiny niches like precision and highly advanced bespoke manufacturing where the US still holds a shakey lead. These areas may help you construct an argument that looks effective but obviously isn't.

It's a little strange that you dug your heels in on the gemstones because I was trying to be gracious and steelmanning your point by conceding that portion. But since you brought it up again, I'll explain why I think it's wrong. Gems are not just "mostly aesthetic". 80% or so of diamonds are used in industrial purposes, ie manufacturing. So if you concede that manufacturing is a good measure, by extension so are gems. The same holds for many other gems. E.g., rubies are used in lasers, continuous measuring machines (which are heavily used in aerospace) etc. Even if that wasn't the case, your take is overly utilitarian IMO. Under your logic, any type of art (movies, music, visual art) are worthless as exports because they are more aesthetic than functional. I don't think I want to live in a society that de-prioritizes art to that degree.

The rest of your post seems like a deflection because you can't seem to adequately illuminate your point. Asking for clarification is not being pedantic any more than hiding behind ambiguous terms makes for a convincing argument. I'm not, for one, saying the US manufactures more than Asia. But I'm also not in agreement that it's languishing, save for a single industry like aerospace. If you look at the actual data, there is still a fairly robust manufacturing base in America, especially for a service-oriented economy. You wrote a lot of words but didn't contribute much to the argument other than another vague diatribe when asked for a finer point, and that's often indicative of not having a thorough understanding.

>It's a little strange that you dug your heels in on the gemstones because I was trying to be gracious and steelmanning your point by conceding that portion.

It's False gracious-ism lol. You obviously believe you can win the argument without that so you gave it up. It was a deceptive gesture. Anyway. I'm not in this to win. I'm in it because I, in totality believe I'm right. So what does it matter if I use gemstones given that you already conceded that point? And like I said it was a false concession. You pretended to concede that point and I correctly responded as if you didn't concede.

>The rest of your post seems like a deflection because you can't seem to adequately illuminate your point.

I can't adequately illuminate my point. I concede to that. The statement "Asia is superior to the US in manufacturing and infrastructure" is a statement with so many fuzzy words I can't satisfy your pedantry. What is "manufacturing"? What is "superiority"? What is "Asia"? Am I referring to North Korea?

There is no study, no science on the face of this earth that can prove either side of this debate correct.

The most we can do is throw a bunch of random facts and tidbits at each other and never ultimately agree. Take your side foray into gemstones... Does diamonds represent all of gemstones? Also what about the proportional value of artificial diamonds vs. Mined diamonds? What about the amount of value involved in beauty vs. Manufacturing? You failed to acknowledge here that diamonds used in manufacturing are mostly manufactured themselves. How much of manufacturing does gemstones represent? We could dive deep into this useless pedantic branch of the debate and ultimately go nowhere.

But despite all of this, we both know what gemstones usually refers to a mined rock for beauty purposes. That was the industry referred to through the colloquial usage of the term gemstones. But there's an underlying strategy here where you can subtly switch definitions and use the pedantic definition without the other party realizing it. Anyway let's move off of gemstones like you originally conceded.

I value the human ability to know things and communicate vague and general concepts and things without fuzzy boundaries without the need to reference data or research. If you don't have the intellectual ability to do this then the only logical conclusion for you is to not even engage in this debate or any debate for that matter because no definitive conclusion is possible for most things of this nature.

I also concede that despite all of this fuzziness you are smart enough to know what I'm talking about and deep down you know I'm right.

Call it diatribe or whatever you want. The outcome of this conversation had a predictable end of going to a pedantic nowhere. I just took it to a different end here.

>If you look at the actual data, there is still a fairly robust manufacturing base in America, especially for a service-oriented economy.

So? You can make this statement and the following can still be true: Asia is far superior to the US when it comes to manufacturing and infrastructure.

Additionally the following statement can still be true: the past several decades American manufacturing and infrastructure has been in decline.

And this as well: America does not have the will or the manufacturing capability to replace it's energy infrastructure with nuclear.

Do we need to get into a overly detailed debate about this or is it just self evident that these statements are true? I think it's self evident. Again it's not really matter of truth, but more about accepting the truth.

China is a paper tiger. It is amazing the credit the media gives them, but no surprise given the medias purpose is to create narratives rather than put light on truth. If China were as dominant as the media alleges Taiwan would have been invaded decades ago. The reality is big mighty China has one aircraft carrier that entered service just 5 years ago, and another one that is a renovated old soviet carrier. The vast bulk of their air force is a half century behind ours. Most other industries are similarly toothless when you dig into how they are actually comprised beyond their raw numbers.

I'm not talking about China alone. I'm talking about Asia. Which is China + Taiwan + Korea + Japan + Singapore, plus every major asian country.

Additionally the rivalry between the US and China is off topic I'm not talking about that.

My statement is, Asia is superior to the US in terms of Manufacturing/infrastructure. I can add more to that as well. In terms of ICs, Asia also dominates. The US is behind Asia on all three of these fronts. As a general statement this is still true. You didn't invalidate anything with your off topic comment here.

That being said, the united states is the dominant spender in terms of defense. They are number one on this front and in terms of technology. I don't think the world has ever seen a military industrial complex as massive and as advanced as the one the US has built. What you say here is true and it's major. It's not included in "manufacturing" but it's intimately connected and thus worth mentioning.

Why do you compare an entire continent to one country and also not count one of that country’s largest manufacturing cost centers as part of its manufacturing? Seems like cherry-picking.

Because at one point in time the US played the dominant role here, with output comparable to entire continents. Now with globalization that dominance has shifted to Asia.

So in essence if there is a place that will convert to majority nuclear power it's most likely going to be Asia that still has the capability to do this. I don't think it's likely for the US.

US still has the capability for sure. Look at this environment in this country. Most every consumer good produced imported here without having to bear the externalities of local manufacturing or resource extraction like localized pollution and diminished health outcomes. Most money is kept or invested here. Most of the world is trying to immigrate here. Realistically if push came to shove this is exactly where you’d expect a massive buildout to occur. Supply of materials is solved with massive globalized trade networks oriented towards ports in NY and CA. Supply of money is solved from both private investors and also the strings the federal reserve can uniquely pull. Supply of labor is also solved considering how much low skilled labor is available in central and south America that is able to be drawn upon in probably a years time or much less if such job opportunities present themselves. There is also a lot of low skilled labor in this country already kept idle, working service jobs like cashiers in towns that have little other work but such service jobs, in effect the town exists and demands labor yet produces nothing, and these sorts of places were ripe for building out defense industries in record time in the 1940s. We import skilled labor and knowledge workers from most other countries who struggle to offer them lifelong work locally.

Both Ukraine and the Red Sea collapsing has produced ads for uranium mining in Saskatchewan, Canada. These kinds of ads don't run without government support; since public opinion is often extremely uninformed, I expect the pivot to nuclear to happen with or without pundits vocalizing their views.

The French never stopped building them all over the world and they still are over budget and overdue.

Somehow all the articles criticizing Vogtle keep mentioning the cost overruns, the additional cost to consumers, but don't mention that in Georgia people pay less than the national average price per kWh (11 cents vs 12.7) while sunny California, for example pays about twice the average (24.3 cents per kWh). In my state, NY, where 2 reactors were decommissioned in 2020 and 2021, the average price is 22 cents per kWh.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

This cost premium has always existed. https://ballotpedia.org/Historical_state_electricity_prices

Good point. Could it be that Georgia already generates a lot of power from its existing nuclear reactors, and has been doing that for a few decades?

Georgia has some of the largest coal plants in the country. The power company (Georgia Power, part of Southern Company) was allowed to pre-bill customers for the costs of the new plant well over a decade in advance. If you lived in Georgia before the new units came online, you paid to have them built but received no benefit from them. Investors in Southern Company received unwarranted protection from the consequences of poor project implementation and cost overruns on the back of the utility's customers.

I mean, all that data is also from when California and New York both had operational reactors.

In 2013, CA generated 17 out of 200 GW from nuclear. GA generated 32/120 GW. NY generated 44/136GW. So at least in the case of New York, it generated more power from nuclear as a percentage than GA, and had higher electricity prices, so there doesn't seem to be a correlation. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/state/

It probably has more to do with the fact that electricity is deregulated in CA and NY, where implementations were infamously botched: https://truenergy.com/deregulated-energy-states/

This is how your link describes deregulation in California:

"very limited and is conducted by a lottery system called DirectAcccess"

There was a semi-deregulation in 1996, but it was largely rolled back in 2001. So any price data post data 2001 should be bucketed in regulated.

What’s interesting about those numbers is that Georgia generates much more power per person than California or New York. Georgia has a population of 10 million. California is at 40 Million and New York 20 million.

Ok, you are right.

But the thing still remains: the supposed Vogtle 3/4 boondoggle of gazzilions of dollars of cost overruns did not result in consumers paying more for electricity. Sure, historically they used to pay less than the national average, but they continue to pay less than the national average, and by about the same amount. The cause could be regulation or deregulation, or better geographic position, or whatever. But the consumers are not paying more, after Vogtle 3, am I right?

It resulted in the consumers there paying more than they would have had Vogtle 3/4 not been built.

Being a counterfactual, your statement is by definition opinion, not fact.

One can look at the cost of the alternatives and see I'm speaking the truth. Also, demand didn't increase as much as the (likely fraudulent) projections used to justify Vogtle 3/4.

All the "nuclear renaissance" nuclear builds aside from Vogtle 3/4 were cancelled because the utilities realized the alternatives were much better economically. V. C. Summer was cancelled after dropping $9B on it. Even with that sunk cost, it still wasn't worth completing.

What happened between back then and now is two (well, three) things: fracking crashed the price of natural gas, demand didn't increase as much as utilities said it would, and then (later, after fracking) renewables also became much MUCH cheaper. One can excuse the nuclear industry for not seeing this would happen (or perhaps for not wanting to see that it would happen), but that doesn't change the fact that it did happen, and that the nuclear builds turned out to be economically unjustifiable.

Things got so bad for nuclear we were seeing already completed NPPs being shut down because they couldn't even make an operating profit! The other reactor at TMI had been cash flow negative for the last six years it was in operation, for example. In that sort of environment, building a new NPP (which would also have to amortized construction and financing costs) would be totally out of the question economically.

Ok, so let's talk facts.

Fact 1. People in Georgia pay about 1.7 cent per kwh less than the national average ($0.110 vs $0.127 [1])

Fact 2. People in Georgia paid about 1 cent per kwh less than the national average 20 years ago ($0.077 vs $0.087, [2])

Are you disputing these facts?

[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

[2] https://ballotpedia.org/Historical_state_electricity_prices

Comparing to the national average is clearly dishonest on your part, since those rates can differ for other reasons. What matters is the difference between what Georgia rate payers would pay with or without Vogtle 3/4.

Your same source has information on the relative proportion of generation [1]. Nuclear is at about 26.5%, while coal is about half that

[1] https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=GA

Surely much of the crippling cost is due to hostile lawfare and regulation.

This is the case for all public works projects. The red-tape overhead is crazy. Regulation is necessary but the bureaucratic maze that has to be negotiated is a huge problem. I worked on a public rail system and the down-time waiting for permission on everything was draining.

Damn, if only we didn't have to build them safely we could make them so cheaply.

Safety and bureaucracy are orthogonal. Bureaucracy is a slowing force, which is sold as being correlated with safety. The more layers of abstraction needlessly added, the more likely there will be systems engineering failures.

>more layers of abstraction needlessly added

I think you're betraying your bias here with the added term "needlessly". There is some (maybe even most) bureaucracy that is inefficiently applied, for sure. But it is meant to address some risk. Maybe it's a risk that you (personally) don't care about, or aren't even cognizant of, and that's when it becomes easy to declare it "needless." We should be looking to streamline our risk mitigation and align it with risks that the public cares about, not throw it out altogether.

You're betraying your bias by insinuating I suggested throwing out risk mitigation. I advocated for streamlined risk mitigation by highlighting the risk of unnecessary complexity.

Maybe you can point me to where you advocated for risk mitigation. Because you seemed to imply bureaucracy is sold as risk-mitigation under the mistaken assumption that it correlates with safety. Did I read it incorrectly and you are actually saying there is a truly positive correlation between safety and bureaucracy? Or maybe you have an opinion on what we should replace the current version with?

Now you only need to get expert consensus on which parts of the complexity are unnecessary.

That sounds an awful lot like industry standards and codes, which are often eschewed as the very bureaucracy the OP was railing against.

A true expert can streamline their industry every time. Simply because most people who make decisions on process are not experts in the relevant field, but expert administrators who often lazily apply existing policies to new concepts that they never got the training to understand or put into context.

Just look at any institutional review board: the breadth their expertise is always smaller than the relevant topics they will have to rule upon at the institution, and often that leads to a certain level of consternation, misplaced understanding of risk, and overall higher levels of inefficiency.

I have worked in a highly regulated industry before. I found the regulations that concerned me (safety critical software) to be quite good and rather too lax than too strict. I would be surprised if you could streamline nuclear power plant regulations by a lot without using losing safety.

OK, so then we just need to figure out how to identify a true expert and we're off to the races.

They are subject to a regulatory ratchet that almost guarantees that you won't make a profit. I.e. if a new safety measure becomes "economically feasible" because you increased cost efficiency somewhere else then regulators would adjust their calculations in the future and make additional requirements because they would now be feasible. This can even lead to requirements changing during the construction time of a plant and require expensive retrofits.

https://freopp.org/rethinking-u-s-nuclear-energy-regulation-...

We build planes safely, but those same parts are 3x the cost. Safety isn’t the reason why it’s more expensive.

Renewables kill orders of magnitude more people (just look at how many die from falling when installing wind turbines, it's not pretty) and render orders of magnitude more land uninhabitable. We have ludicrous double standards when it comes to safety.

I think these are baldfaced lies, especially the first claim. Justify, please.

First google result: https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... . (Most renewable production is still hydro, so yes, it really is over 10x more deaths from renewables).

You explicitly said wind turbines, which your own reference shows are not "orders of magnitude" more dangerous. Thanks for destroying your own claim.

I said "Renewables kill orders of magnitude more people" and I was right. My post is right there, lol, ironic that you wanted to talk about "baldfaced lies".

Regulation is actually not a large driver for nuclear project cost overruns according to this MIT study: https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118

if that were the case, the prc, the us navy, and the russian navy would be mostly or completely nuclear-powered

Maybe if they can continue the momentum and learn from this project, the next reactors will be cheaper?

Yes it will, but experience from South Korea says it won't be cheap enough to matter. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30380897.

And also:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sc/pr/top-westinghouse-nuclear-... ("Top Westinghouse Nuclear Executive Charged with Conspiracy, Fraud in 16-Count Federal Indictment")

That's the failed project OP blithely elided over as:

- "Two other Westinghouse AP1000 reactors were planned for a nuclear power plant in South Carolina, but construction was halted in 2017."

I'm really, really strongly in favor of nuclear fission power; but the American attempts this decade, and this company in particular, have been a grotesque failure. We really seem to have forgotten how to build things.

Elon to the rescue ?

Sure, let his companies blow up a few to learn how to build them. /s

Rockets and cars are one thing. But that risk equation doesn’t work for nuclear.

He has shook up and revitalized two industries and proven his ability to execute and get people motivated to do significant work with physics and manufacturing and project management that are complex. It doesn’t seem that far fetched to me and aligns with his sustainable energy focus but downvoters seem to disagree!

Based on everything he has said to date, he would just cover a few square km with solar. In that one talk he said building enough solar to power the entire world is similar in effort to all the cars that have ever been built. So we can certainly do it.

Also doesn’t he already own a solar company? Tesla is already a battery company. They do sell industrial cells. But I hear they have a bad track record of not delivering to spec.

He paid other people to shake up and revitalize two industries with his dad's minecraft money and probably told them "why don't you do it this way" a few times

A good start!

If we’re worried about cost overruns, then perhaps cancel the California high speed rail boondoggle. That project could buy several nuclear reactors.

The difference is that there are many cheaper viable alternatives to the firm power that nuclear provides, including renewables+batteries ($60/MWh and dropping) and enhanced geothermal ($80/MWh and dropping). Heck, even natural gas combined-cycle + carbon capture/storage is cheaper on an LCOE basis (~$60/MWh) than nuclear ($180/MWh and rising) [1]. It would be great if nuclear could be cost competitive for equivalently firm power, but its costs are increasing, not decreasing.

In contrast, the only real alternative to air travel for high speed transportation between Northern and Southern CA is high speed rail. The "Hyperloop" has been exposed (charitably) as a failed concept, and personal vehicle travel (even electrified) is not an equivalent to HSR in a state as big as CA.

None of that is to say that the CA HSR project has been well planned/executed or that the costs have been well estimated. But that doesn't obviate the need for high speed ground transport in the state.

1. https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april... (pages 2 and 31)

Oh good grief, not that Lazard "study" again.

They took the cost to build Vogtle, which is one of the most or even the most expensive outlier in terms of time/cost overruns of all time, and decided to make that the baseline for "the cost of nuclear power".

When the average time to build a nuclear reactor in the world has consistently been around 7.5 years. For the last 50 years, and also for the ones that came online in 2022, lest you think these were just the bygone good old days.

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...

Which new nuclear would you suggest instead? Hinkley C will cost about $160/MWh, right in the range given by Lazard.

I would suggest we look at overall stats instead of isolated examples.

Time to construct a nuclear plant takes on average 7.5 years, a number that hasn't really budged in the last 50 years.

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...

And since financing (i.e. interest) is the primary cost of nuclear (~50%), time is money.

Hinkley and Flamanville are examples of the EPR, a brand new reactor type that is both at the start of its learning curve, always problematic, and also apparently a design that is particularly difficult to build. And both Europe and the US haven't really built any nuclear plants for quite a long time, so the know-how to build them is just not there. Oh, and the regulators sometimes change regulations after parts of the plants have been built so they have to tear down what they have built and start again.

These are obviously all solvable problems, and mostly solvable by just building more. The problem is that we didn't build enough. Just build more.

Construction time is misleading. It takes a few days to a couple of weeks to build a wind turbine, but at least in Germany a wind turbine construction project takes more than five years.

So what better estimate would you suggest? What nuclear power plants where built in the last decade or so, for how much do they sell their power? How big will their decomissioning costs be per MWh?

> Construction time is misleading.

Please support your claim.

We were talking about cost, and cost is directly proportional to construction time because financing (interest) is the primary cost of nuclear power plant construction.

It’sa lot harder to find investors for a project that takes 20+ years from planning to first income than for a project that takes seven and a half years.

I’m still waiting for better cost estimates than what Lazard gives.

Simple:

Take the Vogtle-3 time, divide by average time to construct a nuclear reactor.

Apply factor to Lazard "estimate".

If it is so simple, can you do that math for us?

Even going by that ridiculously oversimplified calculation, and taking best-case numbers 0.75*$141 (10 years from first concrete poured to grid connection vs your 7.5 years average) is still barely competitive with worst-case Wind+Storage and more expensive than solar as Lazard estimates. And those are proven numbers from real projects not some pie in the sky guesstimates.

Your numbers don't add up.

Vogtle was only delayed by 25%, 2.5 years? I thought it was such a disaster and this proved nuclear doesn't work?

Now it's all good?

This says the delay was 7 years:

https://apnews.com/article/georgia-nuclear-power-plant-vogtl...

Oh, and the plant will still be cost effective, apparently, even with those delays.

Oh, and the solar numbers include sufficient batter storage? I saw something about 4h for half the capacity on some of the graphs. Most didn't explain at all.

As I said above, where you didn't believe me, construction times are misleading. First concrete poured was 2013. If you don't like the numbers, please suggest a better cost estimate. As it is, nuclear seems to be expensive.

"LCOE of less than $30/MWhre for 40-60 years"

https://web.mit.edu/kshirvan/www/research/ANP193%20TR%20CANE...

Mean project cost over-runs: Nuclear power 120% Oil and gas 34% Mining 27% Fossil thermal power 16% Wind 13% Energy transmission 8% Solar 1%

https://www.enr.com/articles/55774-oxford-professors-latest-...

Probably best to diversify infrastructure investment across... multiple projects.

I have a very strong impression that the perpetual money pits of California (rail, the amount spent on homelessness without progress, etc.) aren’t bugs but features… for someone. That money is going into someone’s pocket.

Our electeds simply don't care what anything costs, and as a result we have (probably) the worst cost disease on the planet.

> electeds simply don't care what anything costs

California has a referendum system. That so few referendums focus on cutting costs says something about its voters’ priorities.

Sure does! That's why I used "electeds" rather than "representatives", to make really clear the connection.

On the other hand, the state is losing population on an absolute basis (and relatively even more so against a backdrop of national growth). So some folks are voting with their feet. I'm eagerly awaiting the day when I'm free enough to do the same.

> why I used "electeds" rather than "representatives", to make really clear the connection

I’m arguing the opposite. The voters have the tools to oppose the state government’s size. That they don’t use them signals support in broad terms.

I’d agree with you with the caveat that such public support is mediated by regulatory capture on all sides and from all quarters: outside the government by industry and lobbyists, within the government by elected officials, and adjacent to/despite the government by a public apathetic to such issues and/or voting against its own shared/collective interests in favor of individual interests. Participation in local and state politics even in California is not common beyond voting, which is a low bar to clear. Much of media messaging in the area of referendums is focused on niche issues and special interests, and serves to highlight and promote those issues to convert NIMBYs to YIMBYs or vice-versa on those specific narrow issues. Agreement in broad terms like you mention is hard to achieve due to the difficulty in drafting referendum legislation texts such that they will withstand a challenge by the state attorney general as well as state Supreme Court, as well as having the resulting referendum achieve enough signatures to make it on the ballot and have enough recognition and support by voters to actually pass and become law.

One key difference that I do like about the CA referendum process is that laws passed by referendum in California are equal to the state constitution and require 2/3 supermajority in state congress to modify or change, just like the state constitution itself. This avoids many attempts by legislature to foil or spoil the will of the voters’ referendums, in contrast to other state referendum processes which are only considered a law passed by other means and are usually able to be modified by simple majority.

As usual it's some from Column A and B. Hard to tell sometimes what is graft and what is incompetence.

A little of A, B, and C.

A) Idealistic voters with little interest in detail or executions.

B) Hard working state employees executing in an ineffective way because they are working on over constrained problems with conflicting and sometime impossible goals.

C) A number of opportunists that take advantage of poor rulemaking and bureaucratic disorganization.

For what it is worth, I dont think corruption is a major driver of problems, but bad policy detached from the practical considerations.

One simple example is SF parks maintenance:

The city wants to keep invasive species out, so it has staff to remove them. The city also believes in livable wages, so the workers make >100K. Residents dont like pesticides, so the workers must hand weed. Hand weeding doesnt work, so the City periodically pays outside consultants to come in and take care of the invasives (with pesticides and low paid workers).

>The city wants to keep invasive species out...

These small examples are extremely frustrating as a tax payer. What is the solution to these examples, or does one just try to ignore it as a price of living in that society?

Frustrating indeed. I don't think there is a quick fix to create a political culture among voters and representatives that cares about fiscal responsibility.

One consideration is having a broader tax base so that voters have more skin in the game.

For example, taxes in Houston are less progressive than SF, but SF city budget per resident is more than 500% that of Huston.

How do we get to a more decisive government that doesn't try to make everything a priority (especially things that are at odds with each other)? Is it to reduce direct participation and rely on representation (remove public hearings)?

The $1.7M public toilet was a painful example showing how far off the rails we are. Should auditors and controllers have some teeth? What would they be?

This is always the case when you build large one-off projects.

If you continue to build reactors non-stop you'll learn how to make the process more efficient and be able to make better estimates.

Surely we software developers should appreciate how hard making accurate estimates is? And this isn't a 2 week sprint we're talking about, but a gigantic engineering project.

These were not one-off reactors, it's just that the first ones went so poorly that everything else was cancelled. There were four that were started at roughly the same time. There were many other sites getting order ready.

Westinghouse used a new regulatory process that had been created specifically at the request of industry to speed the design and build of AP1000s. Despite this, Westinghouse did not deliver constructible designs, and the contractor soldiered on with on site modifications. Westinghouse screwed up so bad that they nearly bankrupted Toshiba, their owner.

So we have two failed holes in the ground at Summer in South Carolina, something like a $10B monument to corruption, with utility execs going to jail for their fraudulent reports.

All the other sites that were eyeing AP1000s to replace aging reactors have now backed out. The disaster was too big. What exec wants to go to jail for a nuclear reactor? What exec wants to lose their job for greenlighting what has a not-insignificant chance of bankrupting the entire utility.

Nuclear is too risky, but public perception is off, it's not running reactors that have the risk, it's the financial risk to anybody who wants to build one.

So you're saying that instead of learning from a single project we made the same mistakes four times at once?

We learned that the economics were so poor that all future projects stopped their plans.

There were supposed to be advantages to building four at once, in that there would be some economy of scale. The AP1000 were also supppsed to be somewhat "modular" to avoid on site custom builds. None of this worked out as planned.

If we wanted nuclear to be a part of the energy transition, we didn't need two new reactors every decade or even four, we needed something like 5-20 per year. However, the experience of building the AP1000 has soured the market.

If we are going to build more nuclear, now is the time because we have the most knowledable workforce right now, but the benefit of building nuclear looks so small in comparison to the cost and the risks that it seems unlikely.

Major major support from the government is needed (and it's there from DoE's Loan Programs Office, run by a huge nuclear fan), but you also need utilities who want to place orders. And that second part is hard to create.

But are we going to build reactors non-stop? Is there either private-sector funding for this, or government subsidies to make it happen?

Yes, of course.

Power demand increases. Technology improves. Installed capacity ages out.

There will always be a need to build new plants, might as well lean into it and be proactive.

I found this list which shows "under construction", "planned" and "proposed". It does not look like the US is planning to build a lot of reactors. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...

The US is one of the 22 signatories of the COP28 pledge to triple nuclear capacity by 2050.

With the failure of Germany's Energiewende, countries have drastically re-evaluated their nuclear stances.

France just did an about-face and cancelled their plans to drastically reduce nuclear capacity or even get out of nuclear entirely. Instead they are now investing into a nuclear renaissance.

Poland is getting into nuclear power big time, they are buying reactors from South Korea (and possibly also the US).

The Finnish Green Party has recently come out to endorse nuclear power.

Japan, who was also getting out of nuclear power after Fukushima has also made an about face and is now going to reactivate more plants and even build new ones.

etc.

It’s hard to see how these non-binding pledges mean anything. France, in particular, already generates ~75% of their electricity with nuclear. They’re really going to triple that and generate 225% of their current generation? The US is going to go from a small handful of planned reactors to hundreds? Where is the money for this coming from?

Most of these countries are implementing policies.

France had a law to slowly phase out nuclear and switch to renewables. They've rescinded that law and instead passed legislation to build more nuclear plants, and make building those plants easier, putting into action Macron's call for a "nuclear renaissance". Also extending the life of existing plants.

Japan, site of the second worst nuclear accident, had all, then most of its reactors shuttered (after political pressure). They are now reactivating more and more of them, have rescinded the policy to get out of nuclear and instead are planning to build more plants.

Poland is getting into nuclear power in big way. They currently don't have any and have just approved building 24 small reactors at six sites. I think they're also in talks with the US's Westinghouse to build more.

Ukraine, site of the worst accident in history, continues to operate its plants, and is talking with Rolls-Royce to convert some of their coal plants to nuclear. Rolls-Royce wants to build these reactors in a factory (economies of scale!) and ship them to sites. There are a lot of coal power plants that either already are decommissioned or soon will be. So quite the market for mass-produced reactors.

The US just approved the first new kind of nuclear reactor in 50 years, a molten fluoride salt-cooled reactor. China just gave an operation license for their first molten salt reactor (completed ahead of time), and their pebble bed reactor started delivering electricity to the grid this year.

etc.

France has a fleet of 56 reactors, about 14 of which are scheduled to be decommissioned in the 2030s or before. They currently plan to build 6 more reactors and “possibly” another 8 by 2050, which seems more like maintenance than expansion. By contrast, France constructed all of its current 56 reactors over a 15-year period, and the current plans do not look remotely comparable to that effort.

Japan generated 30% of its electricity from nuclear before 2011, and is now aspirationally hoping to generate 20% by 2030 when considering decommissioned reactors and restarts.

Poland has two planned reactors with construction targeted to begin in 2026 and a couple of additional proposed reactors. There are some plans to deploy SMRs in Poland, but the reactors aren’t even in the design stage yet and I can’t determine how many GW these small reactors will actually produce in total. I also can’t figure out where Rolls Royce is in the product cycle, except that they’re still somewhere in the design stage. Any deployments in Ukraine seem likely to be decades out.

The Hermes molten salt reactor looks pretty great, but it won’t generate electricity and the Hermes 2 project will also be a 28MW test reactor. I’m very bullish on this sort of research, including the SMR stuff, since — unlike the 1970s-era plants being built, it at least has the potential to take off. But it’s all very much at the research and design stage: actual commercial production may be decades out. Who knows where battery storage tech will be in two decades.

As part of the very recent switch back to nuclear, the lifetime of France's existing reactors will be extended.

> Poland has two planned reactors

Incorrect.

"Poland has given the green light for the construction of 24 new small modular reactor (SMR) units across six sites"

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/poland...

Anyway, nobody claimed that this was in advanced stages, how could it be?

Just two years ago, pretty much everybody was getting out of nuclear, some more quickly, some more slowly, but the direction had been consistent for the last two decades or so. Then Ukraine happened, and the house of card that was the German Energiewende, built on a solid foundation of cheap Russian gas, collapsed.

Not sure how quickly you expect turnarounds in energy policy to happen, but let's just sat that the Energiewende was made officially announced in the 1990s. And look how far we've gotten.

I personally find the development in the last year, year and a half remarkable quick.

Lifetime extensions do not result in additional capacity.

Regarding the Energiewende, the initial plan from the SPD-Green government was decent. It was then revised, before being rushed in again by a CDU/CSU-FDP government after Fukushima. By the way, no new reactors were planned during that time anyway.

And please, do everyone a favour, look up the numbers of reactors under construction, reactors planned and proposed, the number of planned shut downs, the corresponding capacities and then compare those to the nameplate capacity of other sources going online.

And yes, I know the load factor for solar and wind is lower. But what these numbers tell you is, that the money does not go nuclear, not even close.

And all that is before we talk actual costs, construction times and delays.

"out 14 of which are scheduled to be decommissioned in the 2030s or before. "

That was the start of the post I replied to.

How long are these lifetime extensions? A solid 20 year extension still has them closing by ~2050s which is about how far the construction plans I listed go.

Lets put it in a formula:

- comparison of net additional capacities: total name plate capacity of new NPPs being build + total nameplate capacity of new NPPs planned and proposed - nameplate capacity going offline vs. new solar + wind capacity being installed, do that on a yearly basis intil, say, 2035

Run the math, provide sources for the numbers, come back and share the result and your interpretation of it. Takes about max. an hour if you don't where to look for input data yet, much less if you do already.

Why should I do that?

The policy shift was announced was announced December 2nd of this year. So 26 days ago.

And your counter is "so where are all the new nuclear plants, I don't see them".

Seriously?

Glad we agree that so far there was no nuclear build out, anywhere!

Edit: COP28 agreed on triplong renewable capacity to 11 TW by 2030. If we consider pledges for future NPPs, I think it is just fair to do the same when it comes to renewables, right?

Also incorrect.

There was quite a bit of nuclear built. For example France nuclearized its electricity grid.

In the last 20 years, policy shifted away from nuclear and there was very little built.

This hasn’t been in dispute in the least bit.

Just now we have witnessed a policy shift by most countries where nuclear is or was relevant back towards nuclear.

To argue that this policy shift hasn’t happened because we didn’t see its effects in the last 20 years seems weird, unless there was some important time travel news I missed.

To argue that the policy shift hasn’t happened because we haven’t seen new nuclear plants pop up since the few weeks or months since the shifts happened and were announced is also…odd.

And you seem to be under this impression that for nuclear to be built up, renewables must somehow be reduced.

This is simply not the case.

There was no real build out since the, what, 80s? And no projection I have found hinted at one in the future. If those policy changes are supossed to any effect by 2035, those new NPPs would have to be at least in planning stage by now, which they are not.

Unless you assume all those future reactors are magically planned, approved, built and connected at a fraction of the time all others are. In which case, please specify how exactly that is aupposed to happen. Otherwise, all you have is claims, unfounded ones at that, and pipedreams.

The projections you read are the ones that precede the current policy shift.

> If those policy changes are supossed to any effect by 2035

They are not. 2050 is the target date for tripling.

> those new NPPs would have to be at least in planning stage by now, which they are not

A lot of the policy changes just happened this year. Some announcements were made this month. OK, no new plants were built in the last 3 weeks. You win.

Pretty much all relevant ceuntries also pleged to triple renewable capacity in 8 years, which seems mostly doable, while with the typical (western) construction timelines for nuclear they would have to pretty much start tendering the new plants now, while currently mostly only vague promises exist.

China, which the country building the most nuclear right now, is falling behind its own plans and downscaling its nuclear ambitions in favour of renewables.

I've heard rumors that you can do both at the same time.

I heard facts that people don't so.

You heard wrong.

So, all the statistics about installed capacity of NPPs, wind, solar, hydro, coal and so on are wrong? Because those numbers show everywhere renewables outpace nuclear by orders of magnitude, including China.

No. Your conclusion is wrong.

Renewables being installed does not imply nuclear not being installed.

Nuclear is getting installed for sure. Just orders of magnitude less than renewables, and it is more expebsive. And the vast majority of new NPPs replace those being shut down, meaning the new net nuclear capacity is much less than the new NPPs total capacity. This shows cleary, if you were willing to look at the numbers, in which direction the funding goes.

> Nuclear is getting installed for sure

1. To my "I've head rumors that you can do both" you replied "I heard facts that people don't so."

Glad we are now agreed that your comment was not true, and mine was true. Doing "more" of one does not imply one is not doing the other at all.

2. It's not "orders of magnitude less" once you account for capacity factors.

And once again: the nuclear under-investment of the last few decades is well known, and so that is what we are seeing in the stats now. The policy shifts just started happening at earliest a year ago, most this year. While nuclear doesn't take nearly as long as anti-nuclear advocates claim, it also doesn't happen in a few months either.

Let's see then:

PV load factor for utility scale solar was 16%. China installed 230 GW, Europe 75 GW and the US 40 GW -> 55 GW incl. load factor and excluding the rest of the world

Wind:

Let's use 40% as a load factor, which seems reasonable. Globally, around 100 GW added -> net 40 GW

NPP grid connections in 2022 (if you have 2023 numbers, please share them): 8.3 GW, with a load factor of aeound 80% for 2022 -> 6.6 GW. At the same 2.2 GW, around 1.8 GW of NPPs were shut down, resulting a net gain of 4.8 GW.

In total we have 90 GW of wind solar vs. not even 7 GW of nuclear. Excluding load factors we have 440 GW of wind and solar vs. 8.3 GW of nuclear globally. In the western world, those numbers fall even more towards wind and solar.

And looking at estimates until 2035, these numbers are looking even worse for nuclear.

So no, countries are not doing both, countries, especially in Asia, are very, very slowly adding new NPPs while overall net added nuclear capacity is negligible and barely replacing shut down reactors.

In other words, one year worth of new NPPs is added every two weeks using wind and solar.

Feel free to argue those numbers...

X > Y does not imply Y does not exist.

And you are using nameplate capacity again (after a brief nod to reality)

All my numbers above are including load factors... And I never said nuclear projects don't exist, only that their net added capacity is negligible compared to wind and solar. And that those historical numbers show us that the investment money is mainly going into wind and solar instead of nuclear, and did for years now.

You could accept these facts as reality, which would make this whole discussion a lot less frustrating... Or at least engage with the numbers, which you didn't neither...

> All my numbers above are including load factors...

Nope.

>>> Excluding load factors we have 440 GW of wind and solar vs. 8.3 GW

> I never said nuclear projects don't exist

Yes you did.

>>> I've heard rumors that you can do both at the same time.

>> I heard facts that people don't so.

> only that their net added capacity is negligible compared to wind and solar.

Nope, see above. But they are also not negligible.

> ...and did for years now.

And I've told you a number of times now that the historical under-investment in nuclear the last few decades or so is a well-known fact that in no way contradicts the fact that policy has now changed.

Linearly projecting a past trend into the future is ... unwise. Particularly if there has been a major policy shift. Which there has.

Arguing that the policy shift that just happened hasn't happened because it had no effect in the past is even less wise.

Unless the technology becomes obsolete. There are other ways to generate power.

> Technology improves

It seems like up-front monetary 'cost' is continually used to bash nuclear. And 100% from the perspective of human beings.

To put it into context, nuclear

* total human deaths due to nuclear since its inception is in the low thousands at worst, for the entire industry.

* total animal deaths due to nuclear since its inception is minimal, in fact, for example, wildlife around Chernobyl has flourished

* damage to the environment is minimal

* waste is tiny by volume, zero CO2, and can be buried deeply where no human will ever get to it.

Versus fossil fuels:

* has killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions of humans

* has killed millions if not hundreds of millions of animals through climate change, oil spillage, fires and so on

* has destroyed thousands of square miles of land for open cast mining, oil slicks, and so on

* waste dumps thousands of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every day plus other byproducts

So, what's the actual monetary cost of the usage of fossil fuels? How much money needs to be spent to mitigate climate change? Or figuring out how to de-extinct species? Or restoring habitats after cleaning up oil slicks? Or attempting to the put the land 'right' after open cast mining?

How much money are we going to spend on figuring out 'energy storage' for green power, when nuclear power is already stored in the uranium, in a tiny volume?

In fact how much money could we have saved by going long on nuclear in the 60s and 70s, had it not been for ill-educated, and ill-informed campaigns by CND and Greenpeace, for example? And how much better would the environment be right now?

The actuarial account for fossil fuels is important, but I've come across this set of summary items many times and it ignores the positive effects of CO2, which have been substantial. This is a great benefit for many ecosystems and also improves crop yields, to your monetary cost point.

The overall phenomenon is well documented, so I'll give just one highly credible account: "The greening [over the last 35 years] represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States… Results showed that carbon dioxide fertilization explains 70 percent of the greening effect" - NASA Apr 2016, https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2436/co2-is-making-earth-green...

I'm not wanting to rehash the climate debate, nor am I implying how much it offsets negatives and would grant all of your points otherwise. I do think it's wise to do whatever we can to move towards cleaner carbon burning to remove toxic and particulate emissions, and limiting CO2 emissions as well, but also within fair economic tradeoffs. I also support developing nuclear, fission and fusion.

I see you've been massively down voted, even tho none of them can manage to even disagree with your facts. Regardless, I don't think greening offsets the millions that die from air pollution every year, not including any climate change effects.

I wouldn't disagree with the high mortality from pollution toxins. I've never looked closely, but also seems common sense.

As for how much greening benefits offset costs, I was mildly frustrated by the downvoting :) and went researching on the economic effects in particular. The only study I can find on CO₂ fertilization is recent and stunning:

"we apply the CO₂ fertilization effect... backwards to 1940, and, assuming no other limiting factors, find that CO₂ was the dominant driver of [American agriculture] yield growth"

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29320/w293...

As they note, the extrapolation is from a study period of 2014-2020, but it's expected they have underestimated the prior role of CO₂ fertilization, as CO₂ response becomes saturated as levels rise and that's not represented in their model.

This is 2021 research funded by DOE & USDA, run by NBER, with PIs from Harvard and Columbia who are well cited within their field of environmental economics. Given the pedigree and that conclusion, this should be front-page news in science mags at least. I couldn't find any reporting on it except for Epoch Times (https://www.theepochtimes.com/science/nasa-satellite-data-su...), which gets an eye-roll from me, but guess they got this one :)

I read the full thing. It's great. Crosses high-resolution satellite CO₂ anomaly observations (NASA OCO-2) with crop yield records, wind modeling, sensitivity testing on non-ag land and the result is broadly repeated: +1ppm CO₂ -> +~0.5-1% yield. CO₂ levels went from ~310-410ppm in that period.

If true, it seems at odds with the normal account that gave nitrogen fertilization the lead role for increasing crop yields this past century and lifting most of the world's population out of regular food insecurity, and the growth of our population into billions. Seems more likely both were necessary.

It also makes sense, as C3 plants (e.g. soy, wheat and most plants besides hot/dry grasses) respond positively to CO₂ partial-pressures up to 800-1000ppm. C4 low-CO₂ adapted corn also fertilizes, just to a lesser extent. The authors also note the negative effects of heat stress, but this wouldn't have been as significant in the extrapolation period.

From Epoch Times: “The paper’s first author, Taylor, said: 'We reiterate that climate change will have a large negative impact on agriculture in aggregate, especially in places exposed to extreme heat. And higher CO2 may even lower food nutrition. But the countervailing fertilization effect should also be taken into account.'”

I once saw a paper arguing that one of the deleterious effects of climate change over the next hundred years was the proliferation of poison ivy. They found that greening was occurring because of increased CO2 and temperature increase, and plucked out 'oh no, there'll be more poison ivy' as their topic.

It isn't about "nuclear vs. fossil fuels" but about "nuclear and/or renewables?".

The amount of damage/victims linked to nuclear is a matter of debate, and a final count will only be possible after its very last hot waste will be cold.

Case in point (Chernobyl):

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/forests-around...

https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/food-environmen...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...

Energy storage: vehicles batteries are a game changer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid ). Grid backup will also use existing hydro along with turbo-alternators burning green-hydrogen ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_economy#Energy_system... ).

How many batteries do we need to store the equivalent energy in 1kg of uranium or thorium? And how much mining is required obtain those materials and how much energy is required to refine those chemicals or elements? And repeat for the millions of solar panels and wind turbines. And shipping them around the world in diesel powered boats?

It's not as much mining as you'd think -- it's not comparable to nuclear, sure, but I was surprised to learn, for example, the enormous difference between a fully decarbonized future vs. carbon present in terms of mining / extraction volume.

> How many batteries do we need to store the equivalent energy in 1kg of uranium

Energy density isn't, alone, determinant here.

The most determinant question is: after taking into account all measures aiming at reducing renewables' production 'intermittency' ('variability' is more adequate), which are: spreading a mix (wind, solar, geothermic...) of renewable sources on a continent, enhancing grid interconnections among nations for them so support each other (objective already very actively and more and more pursued in Europe), storing at continental-level renewables' over-productions (thanks to hydro, hydrogen...) and using it on a clean 'backup' compensating for renewables' 'intermittency', demand response... ... then how much energy do we need to store in order to compensate for any remaining 'intermittency'?

Given that the average electric car battery can power the average home for quite a while (days), and that other EV batteries will be online...

Moreover each year 7% to 10% of gridpower is in France (fully nuclearized) produced thanks to fossil fuel, and its electricity is low-emitting, giving a quite comfy last-resort.

> And how much mining is required obtain those materials

Those materials are recyclable and have substitutes.

Uranium isn't (in practice) recyclable and doesn't have any substitute: this is eternal mining of an ever-rarefied source.

> shipping them around the world in diesel powered boats?

This is a valid point, enforcing the need for each continent hosting cooperating nations to produce its own production units.

On the other hand uranium reserves at current conditions can provide for at best 200 years (more probably 130 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium ), therefore the conditions (price and emissions, as the raise as the ore grade lowers may quickly worsen if some 'nuclear renaissance' stems reactors building projects. Who will take the risk and invest?

> Given that the average electric car battery can power the average home for quite a while (days), and that other EV batteries will be online...

Regular houses are too small to make it possible to install enough solar to charge the car though.

That's without even considering appartment buildings.

The architecture I described does not imply that those batteries will be loaded by locally-installed solar panels. There will be a grid, as usual, carrying electricity produced by the described mix, mostly by industrial sites (in many geographical areas a large part of it will be offshore wind turbines fleets).

So electric car owners are in effect sponsoring electricity storage?

No: they are benefiting from it as they (most of the time) load their batteries when electricity is cheap, and discharge it into the grid when it is rare and therefore expensive.

On average the car autonomy already is way above the daily commute, and this margin is quickly growing.

There are more and more parking places (private and public) connected to the grid.

A bit of intelligence ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_grid ) will orchestrate.

> No: they are benefiting from it as they (most of the time) load their batteries when electricity is cheap, and discharge it into the grid when it is rare and therefore expensive.

This would only work if the added charge on night-time electricity also accounts for battery cycling cost which I doubt it would.

Very low or even negative prices, during episodes of renewables overproduction (typically when wind blows or sun shines way over demand), are more and more common.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_pricing#Electricity

Reciprocally as more and more less tolerated grid backup (greenhouse-gas emitting fossils or dangerous nuclear) disappear episodes of under-production will be more common, and during those electricity price will soar.

Renewable energy isn’t free of fatalities either. Rooftop solar, wind, and hydro all have higher fatality rates per kWh than nuclear energy: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/07/2020-fatalities-for-us...

The sole point about hydro also is highly debatable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35521090

If you don’t count fatalities that were caused by the dysfunction of communism, that also eliminates all the fatalities from Chernobyl.

Such dysfunctions of the Mega-Central-Omniscient-Organization are common to all political regimes, as shown by the Fukushima nuclear disaster: Japan isn't exactly a communist nation, and the Oganawa nuclear plant, closer to the tsunami, did not trigger a disaster thanks to a sole guy acting against the whole local Mega-Central-Omniscient-Organization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20...

No level of organization is sufficient: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J...

Then you have to count the Banqiao disaster after all.

No, because:

- there was no one really in charge of such matters during most of the pertinent decades (first leg of Mao's regime): politics were the sole concern, leading to well-known disasters such as the Great Leap Forward ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward ) and disdain (or worse) towards whistle-blowers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam#Whistle-blower )

- the (Soviet) designers had no skin in the game

A nuclear reactor built and used in such a context may trigger some bad events in way less than 23 years, as a mere few seconds are sufficient for it to do so.

>in fact, for example, wildlife around Chernobyl has flourished

This can't be serious...

Why not? Take a look at this

https://thebiologist.rsb.org.uk/biologist-features/out-of-th...

https://www.science.org/content/article/humans-are-worse-rad...

Well, I believe the factual content of what you said, I'm just surprised you'd seriously use this as an argument in favour of nuclear power, because the fact that wildlife thrived is so intimately connected with the fact that a nuclear meltdown happened.

If radiation in the exclusion zone causes less damage than human habitation, what is the argument for maintaining the exclusion zone?

Bearing in mind that coal plants have a lot of negative health effects, so there needs to be an argument that life in the exclusion zone would be detectable worse than life near a coal plant.

Is it the kind of wildlife we want to be reproducing?

Is it the kind of wildlife you want as a pet?

Is it the kind of wildlife you want to eat?

No, this is not actually a good thing.

By definition you don't want wildlife as a pet. Is there a reason you think this is the "wrong" type of wildlife?

Yes, because it is extremely sick, and their DNA is severely damaged. it would be a very bad thing to pass that on to future generations

That turns out not to be the case.

Chernobyl is an example of what Bruce Sterling calls an "involuntary wildlife preserve". He didn't claim that was a good thing, of course...

>It seems like up-front monetary 'cost' is continually used to bash nuclear.

We certainly still need to get a handle on the cost of deploying nuclear because it is not sustainable the way we do it today

In 2022 Georgia Power got 23% of its power from nuclear, 1.9 gigawatts of capacity.

Since construction started, Georgia Power customers have been paying the construction costs (about 6%) and now that construction is complete the rest of the costs are now being added to customer bills. These are surcharges in addition to the actual cost of fuel and operations at the plant, so they're going to be paying per kWh as well.

At the same time Southern Company (parent of Georgia Power) shareholders are now receiving profits from the operations of Vogtle 3 while capital costs are recovered--IE they are not paying for the asset that they will own

This 10% increase in customer bills will result in the nuclear percentage as pat of GPC's mix increasing just a few percent. It would still be lower than either Gas/Oil or Coal as of 2022's numbers (in 2023 I believe it will be higher than coal, but that is because GPC is replacing coal with gas at a rapid rate)

If you replaced all fossil fuels with nuclear at the same cost structure, power bills in Georgia would increase many fold

I'm completely on board with nuclear, but we have to absolutely and totally rethink the designs we build, how we manage the projects, who owns them (private vs. public) and more

I believe that we need a Nuclear Corps of Engineers, a publicly funded, possibly international organization like the World Bank, dedicated solely to constructing modern reactors globally. This would bring economies of scale into play, making nuclear energy more economically viable and efficient.

The feasibility of such an endeavor is clear when we compare it to military spending or the costs of road construction and maintenance. Essential infrastructure often requires substantial investment, but the long-term benefits justify the expense.

The idea of for-profit nuclear power has proven to be less effective. It leads to fragmented, inefficient projects and prioritizes short-term gains over long-term sustainability and safety. A centralized, public approach like the Nuclear Corps would streamline production, enforce uniform safety standards, and reduce overall costs.

This shift is not just an economic imperative but a step towards a sustainable, cooperative global energy future. It's time to rethink our approach to nuclear energy, prioritizing global benefit over private profit.

I've wanted to see whether thorium reactors actually work or not. I suspect the lack of interest from western governments is because it isn't very useful for making bombs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power

No, it's because thorium doesn't solve any of the actual problems that are holding back nuclear.

the fact that oil spills sometimes happen doesn't seem to be any better of an argument than the one that nuclear meltdowns sometimes happen.

Nuclear fanboys need to accept the fact that so long as nuclear always costs multiples more than literally anything else, these things won't get built, no matter how carbon-clean and healthy they are.

Nuclear only costs more because of outdated and intentionally obstructive regulations lobbied for by the oil industry (who also funded environmental groups willing to hate nuclear btw). Even with the massive over regulation of nuclear power in the US, nuclear is STILL more cost effective in the long run, and has only not been done because the risk of the government deciding to shut down their project or add untenable barriers mid construction has been too great to risk it. And don't give me "levelized cost" bs, that is skewed unrealistically against nuclear.

The Fukushima cleanup costs are estimated at damn near a half a trillion dollars!

Chernobyl was estimated at 50 billion+ adjusted.

Accidents are rare but they are costly.

And yet both Ukraine and Japan find those costs acceptable.

Both are part of the pledge to triple nuclear generation by 2050.

> It seems like up-front monetary 'cost' is continually used to bash nuclear.

How unfair of us, to use the egregious flaw of nuclear to criticize it.

Pointing at fossil fuels would have made sense in the past, but that's a useless argument against renewables.