Certainly nuclear tech was subsidized originally by the Manhattan project, but very soon after, bomb making and nuclear power went their separate ways.
You could much more strongly argue that the nuclear reactor development made to power submarines helped develop the commercial nuclear power industry. This checks out much more cleanly, as Shippingport was led by Rickover himself.
Simply too expensive for civilian use and they never had a dual use that benefited generating material for nuclear bombs. Commercial reactors today are based on minor variations of nuclear fission that was also strategically relevant for getting plutonium. Different reactors but same mineral supply chains and a lot of overlap in R&D. As soon as the cold war ran to an end, funding for all that fell off a cliff. Including building new nuclear power plants. Coal and gas plants were vastly cheaper to build. And they still are. And back then, nobody cared about pollution.
Only now that people are interested in small reactors are these decades old fission reactors getting more attention.
Conversely the graphite moderated Hanford reactors that made plutonium never led to commercial reactors. Closest you got was Hanford N but that was kind of a one-off.
If it matters, I'm a professional nuclear engineer with a lifelong interest and expertise in reactor history.
Graphite reactors have a history for power production: see [1] and [2]. They might even have a future [3] but the German experience makes me think the prismatic type core makes more sense [4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_gas-cooled_reactor
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK
[3] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Chinese-HTR-PM-D...
The submarine reactor uses highly enriched uranium and, I believe, burns like a cigarette, which makes it easy to start and stop the reactor without worrying about [2]. It doesn't produce a lot of Plutonium because it doesn't have much U238 in it. I believe the fuel elements are horizontally oriented. It's built tough because it might get knocked around in a war.
The commercial reactor has vertically oriented fuel elements and tries to burn the fuel uniformly along the axis because this minimizes cost, because minimizing cost is a matter of maximizing power for a certain sized reactor core, and maximizing power is a matter of maximizing heat transfer out of the interior of the fuel rod and to the coolant, so you want to be producing and removing heat from the whole volume of the core. Temporal uniformity helps with spatial uniformity so the reactor is not so good at starting and stopping, but it can follow loads [3]
Notably the west (where natural gas is available) quit building coal burning power plants at the same time it quit building nuclear power plants, partially because of pollution [4], partially because a 100% steam turbine powerset as used in coal and nuclear plants can't compete with a gas-fired combined cycle powerplant which combines a very-low capital cost gas turbine with a steam turbine that is about half the size (and cost)
The small LWR is a pipe dream because LWR economics improve as the reactor gets bigger. One reason why we can't build reactors on an N-th of a kind basis is that every time we build one we decide the economics weren't that good and they might get better if we scale the design up. Had NuScale ever built a plant they probably would have tried scaling it up too.
It is claimed small reactors could be easier to build but until somebody actually builds one, this claim is hard to take seriously.
One path that makes sense is to pick an optimized design for a large reactor and "get good" at building it, it could be an advanced Western design like the AP1000 or something like the Chinese Hualong One which is an improved version of the reactors that France built in the glory days. The Russians are really good at building the VVER, their version of the PWR.
The other path is to build a reactor that works at much higher temperatures such as the fast breeder reactor, high temperature gas cooled reactor, or molten salt reactor and couple it to a gas turbine powerset or use the heat to produce hydrogen directly. [5] This is still decades away.
[1] Pressurized Water Reactor, there is also a Boiling Water Reactor in which the water boils in the core but it's not a vast difference: these are both called LWRs (Light Water Reactor)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon-135
[3] https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain (SO2 from coal burning plants, ironically, masked the warming effects of CO2 until we cleaned up coal plants)
Your response amounts to "the government was mistakenly subsidizing civilian nuclear power". Which might be true, but doesn't refute the fact that they were.
The government spent money researching it early on, such as for the space program. Then the government has outright subsidized solar installations on roofs, etc. Part of the solar miracle of the last 15 years have been huge demand-side subsidies by China because they want to corner the market.
That said, recognize that there's an important difference here. Virtually all solar subsidies are on the demand side of the equation. They pay homeowners to buy solar, and act to increase the size of the market. They don't make solar cheaper to produce (except via second order effects due to the resulting scale).
Nuclear wasn't like that in the 60's and 70's. The government was handing the checks to the reactor builders, not the consumers.
Solar doesn't have that property. Solar is in most areas reasonably competitive already, and the subsidies work towards increasing the size of its market.
The hope, then, was to quickly obtain an industrial breeder reactor in order to considerably reduce (or even suppress any) dependency towards uranium providers (there is no known similar trick for oil/methane).
It failed, and it may be a major cause of the current nuclear demise.
"identified uranium reserves recoverable at US$130/kg ((...)) At the rate of consumption in 2017, these reserves are sufficient for slightly over 130 years of supply" Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Peak_uranium
In other words the already precarious and degrading case of nuclear as a sound investment further degrades with each and every new reactor, up to the catastrophic "no more uranium for a reactor not yet amortized".
Nuclear now produces, worldwide, about 10% of electricity which is less than 25% of final energy: nuclear produces about 2.5% if final energy.
Build reactors to have it reach about 7% and there is not enough guaranteed uranium for all reactors to produce 100% of their theoretical output for about 40 years => from an investor's viewpoint it is moot.
Exploration is a bet: the uranium bubble (2007) triggered an impressive exploration raise, which had very insufficient results (reserves: + ~15%).
To reduce greenhouse gas emissions we have to electrify numerous applications and therefore will need at least 2x more electricity: those ~7% (of current electricity demand) will then be ~3%.
Tripling the nuclear output this way means maintaining the (already old) fleet of reactors and building approx 600 more. Before 2050?!
In the event of a nuclear 'renaissance', those limited uranium deposits will be subjugated by superpowers. In the event of a serious accident all hope to amortize may be instantaneously lost.
No industrial breeder => game over.
You seem to think nuclear failed because we didn't go with breeder reactors. But the reality is the opposite: we didn't get breeder reactors because nuclear failed. The justification for breeder development was that uranium was going to run out real soon (with everyone building cheap-as-dirt nuclear power plants), and breeders would then have a big market as uranium prices rose.
But nuclear was too expensive, so the build out was aborted. Uranium has remained at a price level at which breeder reactors (or even reprocessing to make MOX fuel for burner reactors) cannot be justified. In the time scale of operation of any existing reactor, or any reactor we could build today, uranium is projected to remain cheap enough for this still to hold.
That even France has mothballed its breeder program, saying publicly there would be no market for such reactors before the second half of this century, should be evidence breeders weren't some sort of panacea for the problems of nuclear. They were a solution to a hypothetical problem that failed to arise.
And other disasters like Three Miles Island very insignificant.
Do you have a source for that? I'd be very interested in a study that quantifies the damage of coal plants in terms of famous nuclear disasters.
If it's not the important issue justifying nuclear over coal, why bring it up?
Nuclear was the only viable green option back then. It failed because of mass psychosis and because it was more expensive than coal and gas.
Of course it’s too late now. But had nuclear plant construction continued to grow at the same pace as in the 60s and 70s CO2 emissions from power generation would have be been solved by the 2000s.
> adding pollution control to coal plants
Even if it was 100% effective that would do nothing to slow down climate change.
But the mass psychosis after Three Mile Island and then Chernobyl made nuclear expansion very expensive politically and financially (of course not saying that all of the additional safety regulations which inflated costs were not necessary). It would be rather silly to claim that it didn’t tip the scales at all.
You're spinning a comforting story to allow you to evade unpleasant realities. I would have thought "everyone is crazy but me" would have set off red flags for you, but apparently not.
I repeated that cost (of course only if externalities, that hardly anyone was fully aware of back in the 80s, are excluded) was the primary reason why nuclear failed. Do you really think that public opinion had no impact and did not accelerate it, though?
> "everyone is crazy but me"
Is that how you feel? Must be interesting..
We see plans for nuclear go up and down based on economic conditions. Public opinion doesn't seem to have any effect on that. The nuclear renaissance was going great when natural gas seemed like it was running out. It collapsed when fracking made gas cheap again. Today there's concern for AI power demand and nuclear seems to be getting traction. Public opinion isn't driving any of that.
There was a period when being a pro nuclear liberal/central-left politician was politically suicidal.
> connected the dots and shown that had any tangible effect.
It’s not my job to put in significant amount of effort to try and change your opinion (which is worth exactly as much as mine is).
> The nuclear renaissance was going great
That’s an exaggeration. Even back then nuclear was hardly seen as cost effective without a lot of squinting. The number of new reactors was hardly significant.
> Public opinion isn't driving any of that
You mean currently? Perhaps. Don’t see how is that an argument when talking about the 80s.
> Public opinion doesn't seem to have any effect on that
That obviously not true. Unless you ignore how, when and by whom the decisions to close the remaining nuclear reactors in e.g. Germany were made. Especially considering that then (before cheap renewables were available) we already knew that nuclear was cost competitive if negative externalities are accounted for (which was only partially the case back in the 80s).
You cannot show any good evidence for it, though. You can merely assert correlation (if a bad one, given that nuclear was in trouble long before TMI or Chernobyl).
It's clear what's going on here: the actual situation, that nuclear has failed economically, is completely unacceptable to you, so you are confabulating a fantasy that something else caused nuclear's troubles. It's wishful denial of reality to preserve the illusion that your energy waifu has any chance.
Surely you must be trolling? Or you just can’t read? How many times did I repeat that?
> It's wishful denial of reality
I mean you are literally looking and what I wrote and seeing words that are not there.
e.g. NIH estimates 460k excess deaths (just in the US alone) between 1999 and 2020 were caused by emission from coal plants. And that’s the period when coal became relatively “clean”.
So it must have been much worse back in the 70s and 80s.
The highest estimate for Chernobyl is 60,000. But 16,000 is probably more realistic.
Nope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...
It may. I don’t think that’s the consensus view though and again something being well-known doesn’t make it the consensus.
I’m not saying that WHO’s and IAEA‘s figures are perfect and flawless but they aren’t widely challenged either.
Of course “environmentalists” and most others back in those days preferred cheaper coal and gas.
Transport fuel and combustion-based heavy industry are the hard nuts to crack, and reactors don't help there.