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.