Nuclear Power Won’t Survive Without A Government Handout | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear Power Won’t Survive Without A Government Handout

fivethirtyeight.com

22 pointsonychomys17 comments

Since competition from natural gas seems like the main hindrance toward big capital investments in nuclear, nuclear could probably survive without handouts if we had a proper carbon tax. Which we should: natural gas might be better than coal, but it's still a CO2-generating energy source and should have its externalities priced in accordingly.

yes, capitalism can't work properly if incentives are distorted. nuclear lumbers under a strict regulatory environment while fossil fuels enjoy a lax one, at the cost of shortened human lives.

let's focus on fairness in the market as opposed to the partisan bickering over whether the rules are too tight or lax (à la the goldilocks principle).

yeah it’s unfortunate that the “price of gas” is so often referred to as a proxy of how good the economy is for the average person. If that weren’t so it would be more politically feasible to have a higher carbon tax.

A carbon tax would hit the poorest the hardest. I’d rather spend money on making more nuclear power plants and shutting down existing coal plants.

The carbon tax (that didn't pass) in washington state had a system to rebate costs for poor people, ie giving them money. it's a hard problem, figuring out how to incentivize safer environmental behavior.

Not really certain of the top line numbers here but you have to consider the fact that a nuclear plant always has to run at a certain baseload even when the utilities purchasing power from it are somewhere else in their dispatch stacks.

I'm a technical guy, and not a cost accountant, but even I realize that SOMEONE has to pay for that. And it would probably end up being those utilities. Which MIGHT impact the position of that nuclear resource in the dispatch stacks of those utilities? (I'm not sure how close all of these sources would be to one another in terms of price when operational costs like that are factored in.)

In any case, nuclear would still only make sense in certain places. For instance, if there is a giant hydroelectric resource nearby, you probably don't want to invest in a long term nuclear resource in that area. So the number of places that could potentially take advantage of nuclear is going down too.

Well we do already need storage solutions for balancing renewable power, I don't see why we couldn't add a little more so the nuclear plants can offload power in down times. If we use for example water storage up on a mountain or hill.

Plus cheap power is like THE factor in bringing material refinement industries to the area. Aluminum, iron, fertilizer, clean water, and all sorts of other chemical reagents require massive amounts of power, which is why they are done in foreign countries without pollution laws because they have cheap power. If we started overproducing nuclear power I would expect local growth of many other industries.

Every energy source should pull its own weight, including the costs of its negative externalities.

We should not be subsidizing electric cars or solar or nuclear. The success of a solution should not depend on convincing 51% of the legislature of its benefits.

Plenty of people disagree about the dangers of carbon dioxide, but we tax many things that are beneficial. Can't we tax something that might be very dangerous instead of something we KNOW is beneficial?

Like hard work. Why do we tax people at a higher rate if they work 10 hours in a day instead of 6? I'd rather tax CO2 more and hard work a little bit less.

But that is just one positive thing we could tax less to balance any tax on CO2. One possible tradeoff.

Couldn't such a tradeoff help sell this to people who object to taxing CO2? Or is taxing hard work as much as possible MORE important than reducing this risk to Earth?

We need to separate the idea of taxing CO2 from the idea of making nuclear viable.

There are many, many good reasons to tax CO2. It's just that even if you do, it's likely that nuclear will still not fare very well in the overall generation picture. If you consider China, which kneecaps CO2 generating technologies in fairly draconian fashion, those technologies still dominate China's generation sources. Nuclear comes in way behind sources like hydroelectric and wind. (And that's even with the Chinese government propping it up.)

Nuclear is simply a very costly technology to implement compared to throwing up some windmills in Texas and Oklahoma or something. It's just much cheaper. And the infrastructure is already in place for a lot of the CO2 generating sources, so investments don't have to be as large. I suspect you would need a fairly huge tax to make nuclear beat natural gas for instance. And even if it did, what about all the other sources? Wind/pumped storage hydro? Solar where appropriate? Geothermal or hydroelectric? It's just not as easy a thing as it seems.

But taxing CO2 has numerous other benefits, even if saving nuclear is not one of them.

We incentivize a lot of things (like, billions for farmers, to keep the price of food lower and availability stable; we incentivize hedge fund billionaires by the carried interest deduction). Doing this for new industries that have promise and benefit, for a limited time, seems like a good idea to me. The incentives are reduced over time. For example, Tesla will soon reach 200k cars in the us and then their ev reduction will be cut in half and then go away after that.

I'm not aware we tax by the hour, can you explain? We tax by income.

Some are shutting down. New ones aren’t being built. And the ones still operational can’t compete with other sources of power on price.

Capitalism at work then?

Not quite: the main thing hurting nuclear isn't wind/solar, it's natural gas. Which is unfairly cheap (and thus effectively subsidized) because the externality costs of CO2 aren't being priced in. If we had a carbon tax and thus a level playing field, nuclear could beat natural gas.

I disagree with this thesis. Renewables are killing nuclear because renewables have no marginal fuel cost. Natural gas can always spin down dictated by grid demand, nuclear must always maintain a certain level of output; If its generation is crowded out by renewables, it must sell electricity at a loss.

Nuclear could survive even without a carbon tax on natural gas if you could find large power consumers who would sign direct PPA agreements with commercial nuclear generators (as power consumers have done with wind and solar plants), perhaps utility scale battery operators.

Not really. One of the things prohibiting the market is the Price-Anderson Act, which stipulates, irrespective of the sort of reactor (and since there have been newer and cheaper reactor designs) a level of insurrance that nuclear plants need. Effectively, this has made it impossible to enter the market with reactor designs that are smaller and safer and do not require the insurance proscribed by the act. I don’t personally know operational costs for these other sorts of reactors, but suffice it to say there are artificial limitations in place that skew this market.

It doesn't skew the market, it just prevents externalizing of costs.

How does it not (potentially) skew the market? If one such alternative plant had a higher operating efficiency and therefore lower cost, wouldn't the fact that there is a law preventing the lower cost from being reached skew the market? Am I missing something?

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