Nuclear does not seem to be on the mass production curve that solar and batteries are.

Even if you could design a reactor that itself can be mass produced at that scale, you still need to do the same with selecting and getting environmental and public safety approval for installation sites and production, transportation, and disposal of the fuel and waste.

I'm not against nuclear from a technological perspective, but I just don't see it being economically competitive with effectively printable devices like solar and batteries given the current direction of the cost curves on each.

Nuclear might not be able to compete in the U.S. and Europe, but that’s largely because of a ridiculous regulatory regime and has very little to do with the actual tech.

People love to say it, but is there evidence? I've never seen it - which doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but that this claim needs it.

Nuclear was much cheaper in the 1970s and early 80s: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Overnight-Construction-C...

This wasn't just due to regulatory influence, it was also due to economies of scale. But the two are related, more regulation results in fewer builds. Fewer builds reduces economies of scale and thus increases costs. Which results in even fewer nuclear builds, and so on.

In other words, nuke cost has only ever increased, however much was built.

On a per-MW basis nuclear power dropped in cost during the 1950s. See the small blue dots round the late 1950s and early 60s? Compare that with the cluster of red dots.

Early, low-hanging fruit?

That, and larger plants. Things like concrete containment vessels have costs relative to the surface area of a hemisphere, while power output scales with the volume. But the big driver was economies of scale. Building multiple copies of the same or similar design means you can have longer production runs of steam generators, pressure vessels, turbines, etc.

I.e., cost has risen monotonically since the 1950s.

Incorrect, it fell from the 1950s through the 1960s.

I.e., cost has risen monotonically since the '60s. Costs were all over the map in the 50s.

In the early days, vendors didn't know how much NPPs would cost, so they priced them to sell, so they could gain that data. Later prices reflected that experience.

One can view the increase over time of nuclear costs as the replacement of wishful thinking with actual experience.

Thanks for the paper. Quick summary (of a quick read): Most research has studied US and France; this paper adds other countries. Costs have greatly increased in US and France, but not always in other countries. They've decreased recently in South Korea.

> (economies of scale)

Why do you blame economies of scale? The paper doesn't say that, afaict.

Also they say, "increased environmental and safety regulation ... may have led to cost increases", which does not sound conclusive.

Also, I think we really need to be talking about lifetime cost, including construction, operation, and decommissioning. In many things, spending more up front reduces later costs.

We can thank the hippies of the 60s and 70s for all their anti-nuclear silliness for making the nuclear industry heavily over regulated.

There was also the Soviet nuclear fireworks project in the 80s that didn’t help much.

And then it took until the 90s to have an actual imopact on policy. It always puzzles how people get even the most basic timelines wrong.

You have to to be honest. They were able to push for stronger regulations not because politics mainly listens to hippies. Stronger regulations were prudent considering the safety levels of the earlier reactor design. Without those regulations, many more cheap, but less safe reactors might have been built. Of which more had gone bad over years.

So yes, if you will, thank the hippies for preventing several nuclear incidents.

China has installed more renewable energy than the rest of the world put together last year. I'm pretty sure we can rule out any "ridiculous regulatory regime" issues there.

They’re also building a lot of nuclear: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1129876/china-nuclear-po...

China is barely building nuclear anymore. China added more wind and solar the past nine months than all of its nuclear reactors under construction will provide. Yes, that includes capacity factor. https://twitter.com/yo_ean/status/1718633487454904718

A moderate civilian nuclear supply chain and skills base helps keep a lid on the maintenance and construction of nuclear submarines, carriers and nuclear bombs.

If you’re going to try to determine how China is approaching nuclear power, it’s probably more useful to look at data related to that [0], instead of drawing conclusions from tangential data.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

The point I was making is that China isn't inclined to do things just to appease some regulatory requirement. They are also building an incredible amount of Coal power.

Ah, I think there’s a misunderstanding of the parent comment. They aren’t necessarily saying that the problem is pro-renewable regulation, just that there are heavy (safety) barriers for nuclear.

Yeah, the safety standards for nuclear reactors exaggerate the dangers compared to the alternatives that are suitable for base load generation

The Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act exists precisely because sophisticated private insurers run a mile from fully insuring against these dangers.

Until the subsidy is repealed and taxpayers stops insuring it, the industry's frequent claims of its own safety ring kind of hollow.

It's particularly galling to see them cynically demand that safety regulations be watered down to bring down costs while the act still exists. Imagine if we made taxpayers responsible for cleaning up oil spills.

> Imagine if we made taxpayers responsible for cleaning up oil spills.

We are. Then we try to go after the companies but it all depends on their corporate structure and in what legislature.

- For a ship not exceeding 5,000 gross tonnage, liability is limited to 4.51 million SDR (US$5.78 million)

- For a ship 5,000 to 140,000 gross tonnage: liability is limited to 4.51 million SDR plus 631 SDR for each additional gross tonne over 5,000

- For a ship over 140,000 gross tonnage: liability is limited to 89.77 million SDR (US$119.39 million)

https://www.imo.org/en/About/Conventions/Pages/International...

In the past we have accepted this socialized cost as a requirement for a world fueled by fossil fuels, which of course will change as we transition away.

How do costs compare? What's the site approval process like in China vs the US?

Compare this graph with more than nuclear, and notice how lagging nuclear is compared to any other renewable.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-energy-consumption

Slave labor is always cheap. https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ILAB/images/storyboar...

Batteries are nowhere near able to meet any energy storage demands of the grid.

The simple question to ask yourself is why do battery installations always get quoted in units of power - GW - and not units of energy, GWH - which is what we actually use?

(The answer is: because they're terrible for it. Batteries hold about 3x they're rated power value as energy - which means the 10 GW or whatever someone quotes is good for about 3 hours at that output. Great for grid stability, expensive and useless for long term storage).

> The simple question to ask yourself is why do battery installations always get quoted in units of power - GW - and not units of energy, GWH - which is what we actually use?

For the same reason gas power plants and hydroelectric power plants are quoted in MW units, and not on the size of their fuel tanks or reservoir volume (converted to MWh as appropriate): it's the most important number for balancing the grid. If you have 90 GW of power demand on the grid at a given moment, you need 90 GW of power generation on the grid at that same moment (simplifying a bit, since transmission constraints mean you also need some of that power generation to be at specific places).

Thus answering the challenge: they're not storage. They're grid stabilization utilities. Because no one expects to run them for more then 30 minutes to an hour while they bring dispatchable generation online.

Which means they're irrelevant to the idea of grid scale energy storage, because they don't meaningfully store anything.

Last year you said they couldn't even meet enough demand for the grid. Now it is 30 minutes to an hour. Next year it will be hours.

How does it feel when the Overton windows moves while nuclear is stuck in the past?

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

Because as we all know, the grid is supplied by exactly 1 powerplant, with one energy source, at all times. /s

The insane thing is that it is so efficient that it doesn't need to be on that mass production curve to be competitive. It is competitive even in the somewhat insane way we build it now.

However, we have a number of companies working on building reactors in factories. Rolls-Royce for example is talking to Ukraine to upgrade some of their old (not sure if already decommissioned) coal plants to nuclear with small, factory-built nuclear reactors.

For that to happen in the US, (1) we need to focus on more numerous, smaller modular reactors, (2) the NRC needs certification timeliness requirements forced on it (and more funding if there's an actual lack of resources), and (3) specific project requirements need to be frozen before construction (no more up-requiring mid-construction).

Modular reactors are the solution to not having enough capital or a long enough timeframe to launch and fund megaprojects at a pace that creates economies of scale anymore, which is exactly the US problem.

> NRC needs certification timeliness requirements forced on it

That's going to be tough: What happens if the day comes and they don't yet know? They can't just approve it, so just deny it?

The government should cover the losses of the investors.

Various agencies are constantly missing FOIA deadlines, and often the only way to get them to actually do the jobs they are legally required to do is to sue them in court, asking for both the information and to have court costs covered.

Even if you could pass that legislation, which seems very unlikely, that doesn't solve the problem. The employees of the regulators aren't personally liable, and in many respects don't individually control the schedule. The investors also cause delays - and would now have an incentive to do that - and in many cases the/an investor is the government. Also, good luck explaining to taxpayers the $10 billion payout.

Right, the employees would have to be liable to their bosses. Their bosses would have to be answering up the chain, to congress and the president.

Presumably, for a regulatory agency to be held to a deadline, they would need to outline up front (or with reasonable notice) all of the things they would need to know and the inspections they would have to make. Those time tables would have to be defined early on.

This is where the idea breaks down.

    How does a regulator devise a fixed schedule to regulate a novel technology?

    How do you hold government employees accountable without upsetting powerful interests like politicians and unions, or get staffing funded properly on demand?

    How do you even get the government to hold itself accountable on something like this when the DOD can't even *complete a clean audit*?

We'll probably just keep winging it, badly.

> We'll probably just keep winging it, badly.

I'm not sure we are 'winging it' at all, or doing badly. It may just be an irreduceable problem.

Nuclear has only ever gotten more cost inefficient. What makes you think that will change?

Nuclear was cheaper when more of it was built [1]. Economies of scale make things cheaper. A production run of 40 steam generators is a lot cheaper than 4 steam generators.

Proponents of a primarily solar + wind grid are betting on a breakthrough in energy storage. If that breakthrough does not transpire, we'll either have to give up on stopping carbon emissions or use nuclear power.

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

Converting atmospheric CO2 into fuels could contribute to this effort. But bacterial and plant-based fuel production may still be more economical and produce fewer overall emissions than even a solar array and a carbon capture plant.

Converting atmospheric CO2 into hydrocarbon fuels requires hydrogen as an input, so it'd probably be easier to just store the hydrogen directly. Right now, almost all hydrogen is produced through steam reformation [1] which emits CO2. Electrolysis is inefficient and corrosion of electrodes makes it expensive and hard to scale. Capturing atmospheric CO2 is similarly difficult. Carbon Dioxide is at very low concentrations in the atmosphere so it takes a really long time to sequester meaningful amounts of it. Similar issue with biomass: it produces energy very slowly and doesn't have the scale required.

There's a reason why plans for a primarily renewable grid assume that compressed air, synthetic ammonia, giant flywheels, or something else will provide storage for orders of magnitude cheaper than batteries: because existing storage systems aren't capable of meeting the storage demands of intermittent generation. Will one of these systems deliver a storage breakthrough? Maybe. But it's not wise to bet the future of your electrical grid on a technological breakthrough that hasn't happened yet.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming

I love the improvement implied by "continue to improve" in the face of all evidence that shows fission is a uniquely impractical source of energy that has done nothing but get more and more expensive.

So the first nuke power reactor went live in 1951.

In the 72 years since then, in what meaningful ways has "Nuclear tech" improved?

It's not cheaper to build.

It's not cheaper to operate.

It's not cheaper to dispose of the waste.

It's not cheaper to decommission.

It's not faster to build.

?