What is preventing new nuclear power plants from being built? Is it just fear/local opposition, or is there some regulatory or financial reason that new plants aren't being proposed?
http://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/annual...
If it's regulatory, I'm surprised that more climate focused candidates don't campaign on streamlining regulations to make it possible for more plants to get built. It's essentially zero cost in comparison to other climate efforts that will cost billions / trillions in re-investment.
I don't know a lot about renewables or energy production, but my understanding is that solar and wind are not good for base load unless there's a big improvement in storage technology (either batteries or some physical setup like the pair of lakes in West Virginia where they pump water around). So, nuclear is something we can do now that we know works. And since all these plants are at the end of their life, we can get a much more realistic picture of the total cost of ownership, instead of projections about what the produced power would cost.
The map shows three currently under construction in the United States, which is more than any other country with under a billion people.
Whatever did go wrong at Fukushima wasn't deregulation. That sort of mistake can creep through in even an extremely well regulated environment.
Also, the cost of the cleanup from the Tohoku earthquake that was linked to the tsunami was something like 300 billon; so maybe the fact that they had a design flaw in their nuclear plant maybe doubled the cleanup depending on what the figures on Wikipedia already factor the Fukushima clean up costs in.
Doubling the cost of something is significant, but for an event of that rarity not really a deregulation concern. If you told me that there was a risk of a city being leveled by a tsunami and there was a chance my taxes rising by, say, an unnecessary 10% for 12 months I might (depending on which city) squint at you in confusion about why the 10% was a problem. I've payed 1% disaster levies in my lifetime.
A slight chance of a moderate-in-context one off cost due to a series of unlikely coincidences just doesn't really rate as a major regulatory risk to me. I'd trust the regulators to deal with it for next time as part of their normal process. We have literally had to scour the globe for a decade to find an example where it matters.
Other plots that I have seen show new additions slowing long before TMI.
Each pre-TMI project was managed with a different level of skill, or with better rolls of the dice on timing, and those that completed quickly were profitable, and the those that had long delays had huge cost overruns due to massive capital outlays and interest payments without any revenue to back it.
And another reason that I don't think we can blame regulation: look at Vogtle and Summer. You have to dig really really really far into backwaters of blogs before you can even find somebody saying "this regulatory process caused us to be delayed," and even those complaints are vague.
It's not regulation, it's the industry.
We can look elsewhere in different regulatory environments too: UK, France, Poland, all have the same huge difficulties we do when constructing nuclear. The places that seem to have fewer difficulties still have difficulties. China has long delays, that would still cause investors to lose money in the US. South Korea had been on a tear of seemingly good construction, but it turns out that the contracting process was rife with corruption and now there are worries that unqualified parts are stuck deep in reactors that are supposed to run for 60 years.
If there is a regulatory delay on these projects, I'm not sure that there's any sort of appropriate regulatory structure that would make them work. And you can tell because the industry insiders that complain about regulation don't have any fixes in mind.
One thing no one ever talks about is environmental lead exposure. Just like it appears to have caused a huge crime spike, by impairing executive function, I think it may have impaired society's ability to manage complex projects.
See “Public Reaction” in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Castle_Project
Plus, many of the plants that are currently operating in the states are losing money because their electricity is too costly. We have had a series of nuclear plant bailouts in the past few years. If you can't make money after the construction costs have already be amortized, how can you make money on a new plant?
It's just a very poor financial investment to build a large reactor in the states (unless something changes).
Without subsidies it’s a money losing proposition even if you can sell all power produced at a good rate. However, with renewables regularly pushing down the value of electricity for much of the day things have gotten even worse.
Nuclear is an order or two more efficient (you need a fraction of the mines, and a fraction of the work to keep the whole technology stack running). In practice this seems to mean that nuclear power doesn't have much of a lobby in favor of it even if it is established as an industry.
In Australia the coal lobby is a pretty noticeable force in two states and arguably influenced the last election. If we were 100% nuclear instead there wouldn't be enough people in the industry to make a political difference.
It's incredibly expensive and takes a decade to start collecting revenue. In that time, renewables could emerge as a winner.
Of the ones that are being built have caused an epic cascade of business failures from construction companies to Westinghouse (who was the leading reactor core design company in the US, not even a construction company).
As I understand it the USA has had a glut of skilled construction labor, all the expert laborers from the 70's never really had a chance to pass down their trade during the nuclear glut of the 80's - 00's
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612940/the-new-safer-nucl...
The problem is we can’t build them cost effectively. Toshiba had to sell it’s 18 billion memory chip business to cover the losses of its nuclear division.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-toshiba-accounting-westin... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-toshiba-accounting-westin...