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Comment by jaysonelliot | Hacker News Reader

"Too cheap to meter" was a common assumption about the future of nuclear power when it first began. If you only look at the amount of power available based on the raw materials, it's a reasonable prediction.

They simply didn't take into account all of the associated costs and complexities that would be involved with the actual nuclear power plants, not to mention the political and social complications.

That doesn't mean such a future can never happen, it's theoretically possible. We're simply in a place right now where it's hard to imagine with our current level of technology and our current energy economy.

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They didn’t expect that government regulation would kill innovation in the nuclear industry. If nuclear plants had not been regulated so highly decades ago, we’d have abundant, clean power today. We may have had hundreds of thousands more dead from nuclear accidents, but that would pale in comparison to the tens of millions saved by phasing out coal earlier and pushing off climate change.

> They didn’t expect that government regulation would kill innovation in the nuclear industry. If nuclear plants had not been regulated so highly decades ago, we’d have abundant, clean power today.

The regulation is basically a liability shield and subsidy, the industry wants more, not less, of it to build plants.

That doesn’t mean that regulation doesn’t impede innovation, e.g. by eliminating the incentive to adopt safer cycles. Moreover, the onerous review of reactor designs means there is a high incentive to stick with older designs that have already been reviewed by the government. (Thats a double whammy, because it makes newer, safer designs harder to deploy while reducing the incentive to deploy them.)

> If nuclear plants had not been regulated so highly decades ago, we’d have abundant, clean power today. We may have had hundreds of thousands more dead from nuclear accidents, but that would pale in comparison to the tens of millions saved by phasing out coal earlier and pushing off climate change.

And if wishes were horses .... It's hard to imagine how any democratic society could have gotten past the salience bias to make that happen. (Also, there's the better-the-devil-you-know familiarity bias working in coal's favor, to say nothing of the political influence of voters depending directly or indirectly on coal for their livelihoods.)

EDIT: This also brought to mind the trolley problem [0], with the added wrinkle that it's not possible to predict with any confidence which specific persons would actually be injured or killed.

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

If nuclear plants had not been regulated so highly decades ago, we’d have abundant, clean power today.

Are African and Latin American countries with less effective governments and less regulation are leading the world in innovation, cheap nuclear power, genetic engineering and so on?

A casual disregard for the living and a "happily ever after" fairy tale correlates pretty well with a lot of cult and religious behaviours, and associated human tragedies, but not very well with actual happily ever after, I think.

Low regulation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for innovation. You also need the predicate technologies, precision manufacturing capabilities, etc. But within the US, where we have those things, loosely regulated industries (like the Internet) have consistently evolved faster than heavily regulated ones.

Low regulation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for innovation.

Restating it isn't convincing. Innovation didn't stop when slavery was banned, innovation didn't stop when Romans mandated that bread sellers sold a fair amount of bread, or when weights and measures were standardised in commercial transactions, or when mains electrical devices had to be earthed/grounded/double-insulated.

"You can't pollute groundwater with careless discharge of nuclear waste" - innovate within that constraint.

It's not just about regulation . The eco-liberals of the 80s and 90s actively influenced the political landscape to stop nuclear power, which also caused companies to halt investments.

We shouldn't be rewriting history now that we see that nuclear power could have actually prevented global climate change.

Yeah, let's build nuclear plants with wild abandon, and let the industry innovate and regulate itself. That has worked wonderfully elsewhere...

> We're simply in a place right now where it's hard to imagine with our current level of technology and our current energy economy.

...and the fact we have about 4bn more people here than we did in 1960.

We have far fewer people than growth rate at the time suggested; IIRC, around that time growth was viewed as exponential with a doubling period of ~35 years, had it continued the population would be 10.74 bn now, nearly 1.5× what it.

So, no, population (at least high population) isn't something that was unforeseen.

Yea, that is of my understanding too. There was no need for any great advance in that matter at the time. Now however, the situation is different, and yet, not as pressing as the global conflict back then to fund another "Los Alamos".

I wonder if they had the 'capacity paradox' in mind, where the more you can have, you more you will use. In the 50s energy usage were quite minuscule compared to today I think.

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