Doing both, removing subsidies from dirty energy and moving them to nuclear, would be the best case.
We have two recent build sites in the US, one failed entirely, and the other is hobbling along. I've read lots of analyses and postmortems, and the only regulation-related criticisms I've found are that the NRC doesn't regulate enough. By only looking for safety of the design, Westinghouse was able to submit designs that were safe, but not particularly buildable. If the regulators had checked the work of Westinghouse to include basic build ability in addition to safety, tens of billions of dollars might have been saved, and we might have been building more nuclear reactors.
But I would like to hear more specific complaints about how regulations could change, if it has the chance to improve nuclear.
Because the commission is biased towards safety above all else. They need to be more realistic and not cave in to fearmongering. The design needs to be safe, but against a realistic threat model.
The designs also need to be assembly line and not so highly customized. French style reactor designs are good for this reason. Part that holds the reactor? Fine, evaluate for weather and calamity resistance and build per location. The reactor? Hope you like black.
Also with new concepts like micro reactors or reviving long abandoned technology like liquid thorium reactors that would burn what we stupidly label “waste” and if the active systems are interrupted coast to a stop on their own instead of running away like our fast breeder water based designs a lot of the existing regulations and requirements are suddenly moot.
Most importantly Nuclear is the only “clean” technology that is predictable and controllable. Until you have a way to reliably meet base load requirements, fossil fuel generation is going to continue.
So if you really do think that climate change represents impending doom, resisting nuclear power is pretty dumb. It’s not perfect - but there isn’t any technology that is perfect or without some risk. Pretending nuclear is the only energy technology with serious issues is also dumb. 50 years of people painting nuclear as the boogie man hasn’t helped either. If you strongest arguments are emotionally based those aren’t very good arguments at all.
Is nuclear really safer than solar?
This[1] has some data and estimations for death rates measured based on deaths from accidents and air pollution per terawatt-hour (TWh), which suggests nuclear has 0.07 deaths per TWh, which is marginally higher than wind (0.04), hydro (0.02), and solar (0.02).
So, it's very close!
The larger deployment of utility-scale solar does seem to have reduced it's death rate. (Many of the solar deaths are from falling off the roof during installation or maintenance. Utility-scale solar is normally on the ground and with better safety measures.)
I think this is fair. /All/ deaths from nuclear and renewable power are due to accidents and bad decisions. Accidents and bad decisions aren't going to go away. It takes a monumentally boneheaded decision to make a nuclear power plant dangerous, but apparently the rate of monumentally boneheaded decisions is one per thirty years at our current level of nuclear power usage.
That rate is very likely to increase as time goes on and reactors become older and thus more prone to failure/some freak low probability incident happening.
The NRC uses a value of $9M for the value of a statistical life. That is, it is worth spending $9M if that will save one expected life.
Nuclear, solar and wind have deaths/energy somewhere in the ballpark of 1 life per 10^10 kWh. So, at $9M/life this cost is roughly $0.001/kWh. This is very small, which says that even minor differences in the cost of energy from various sources will be more important than the direct number of lives lost.
(This would not be true of fossil fuels, though.)
TLDR: it's more important to reduce the cost of energy from these non-fossil sources, and to choose the sources with lowest cost, than it is to make them safer. For nuclear, inherent safety could be useful if it would enable cost to be reduced, but not because nuclear needs to be safer.
All of the problems with nuclear reactors have happened to plants which were designed and constructed in the 1950->1970s. As it turns out, we've learned a ton about safely operating nuclear plants. The problem is upgrading these old plants rarely happens and getting newer plants to replace them is equally daunting.
There are 3 examples of major nuclear plant problems. That doesn't seem like too many.
In contrast, there are hundreds of operating plants. The newer ones are particularly safe because they require positive input to keep the nuclear reaction going. Any sort of earthquake, tsunami, mudslide, etc that causes the plant systems to fail will cause the nuclear reaction to be halted.
Chernobyl, 3 mile island, and fukushima are all impossible in plants built in the last 25 years. (Gen III or newer)
I support research and trials of the SMRs, but you might want to consider the possibility that it really is hard at the full-system level. The human mind does not readily understand invisible, exponential process like radiation.
A statistic that only works because epidemiological studies into the long term effects of radiation exposure are extremely difficult, complex and time consuming.
Something made even more difficult by the fact that we blasted uranium fallout in the atmosphere that's hanging around to this day, so getting a non-affected control group has become pretty much impossible.
Ain't helping that any research attempting to investigate the problem will very quickly be labeled as highly controversial by pro-nuclear lobbies [0]
By comparison, atmospheric nuclear tests added 0.11 mSv at their peak in 1963, declining to 0.005 mSv/year today. Chernobyl added 0.04 mSv in 1986, declining to 0.002 today. The nuclear fuel cycle adds 0.0002 to the global average, and is required to be less than 1 mSv for all members of the public.
The highest natural background radiation is in Ramsar, Iran, with 6.0 mSv/year. Studies are ongoing but the evidence so far shows no negative health effects.
Note that Sieverts are normalized to the health effects on the human body. Any concerns about different types of radioactivity are already accounted for in this measurement.
Chernobyl and Fukushima of course caused larger exposures to nearby inhabitants, and these exposures are accounted for in the statistics I mentioned.
This one is particularly interesting considering Fukushima wasn't the first time something like that happened. On the other side of Japan is the Kahiwazaki-Kariwa plant [0], the largest of its kind on the planet.
In 2007 that plant was already hit by an earthquake, shaking the plant beyond design basis, it was shut down for 21 months after that.
And even tho it wasn't affected by the 2011 earthquake that blew Fukushima up, it still was shut down to implement safety improvements, it remains shut down to this day with no date for resuming operations.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashiwazaki-Kariwa_Nuclear_Pow...
https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop is a review of "Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop" by Jack Devanney.
Based on the review, the short version is that the regulators use the wrong threat model for radiation (LNT), and a regulatory model which effectively requires nuclear to be unprofitable (ALARA).
The review describes briefly what needs to be changed.
Setting a firm limit on radiation release ahead of time, rather than one based on economics like ALARA just seems like it would be far safer. The other examples also seem like they are bad regulations that don't help safety or construction either. Would be great to see if they could result in more efficient construction.
When regulations prevent deploying something 10x safer than the currently deployed alternatives, they're not making us safer.
LNT stands for Linear No Threshold: cancer risk is directly proportional to dose, that doses are cumulative over time (rate doesn‘t matter), and that there is no threshold or safe dose. This contradicts studies that we have about people who received enough CUMULATIVE doses of radiation that they would be dead if it was at the same time.
ALARA: Radiation should be As Low As Reasonably Achievable. In practice this means that any cost reduction simply means freed money that you're now required to spend on safety.
Nuclear fans like to complain about the LNT, but I don't think they're really thinking this through.
In a nuclear accident, most of the population exposure will be a minor increase spread across a vast population. At those doses, we basically cannot check whether LNT is true or not -- the small cancer incidence it predicts is statistically invisible against all the other causes of cancer.
So foes of LNT want to say "we can't show LNT is correct", which is fine, but then they say "so we must assume the actual effect is smaller, perhaps zero", which is not fine. The evidence doesn't support that second step, and this is not a court of criminal law where radiation must be presumed innocent unless found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. One might very well argue that one should take a precautionary approach, which is to assume that low level radiation has the worst effect it could have that is not ruled out by evidence. This would imply even larger threat than under LNT.
This would suggest that the risk should be linear with radiation dose. But cells have DNA repair mechanisms. If a person receives a very large dose in a short amount of time, it makes sense that the repair systems might be too overwhelmed to fix all the damage that has occurred. Of course, the repair system isn't perfect, and some small fraction of damage will be permanent. This suggests that LNT should be true for small doses, but the harmfulness of radiation per particle should increase at larger doses.
A few consequences if that's true:
Depending on how the constant coefficient is determined, a fully linear health risk model will tend to overestimate risk at low dose rates, but underestimate at high dose rates.
This also suggests that radiation concentrated in a particular spot on the body is particularly dangerous. The cells in that location will be bearing the brunt of the radiation dose, so their repair systems are more likely to fail. So inhaling a bit of plutonium dust means you're in for a worse time than absorbing an equivalent dose spread out over your body.
Of course, whatever health risk model we choose, it should also be applied to the regulation of coal plants, since they put radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere as a part of their regular operation.
Isn't it true that the proportionality coefficient for LNT was calculated using cancer rates for atomic bomb survivors? The dose for them would be very rapid, and there would be little time for enzymes to be produced. This would explain why such a valley didn't show up in that particular set of data.
A few years ago I got to sit in a meeting between reps from a bunch of GenIV reactor startups, and a former head of the NRC. The reactor people had one complaint: that the NRC required near-complete blueprints before they would even look at a design. It cost several hundred million dollars to get to that point, then the NRC would give a flat yes or no. If no then you were out of business, and if yes then you still just had a paper reactor.
That's a really difficult environment for investors. They said it would be a huge help just to have a multi-stage process. The NRC person was unsympathetic, said it wasn't the NRC's job to help develop nuclear technology, and brushed off climate change arguments.
Fortunately Congress has gotten involved since then and things seem to be improving a bit.
What's to prevent cutting massive corners after the original half plan was approved?
If we started mass producing plants, there would be stronger push for uniformity in design and that would translate into significant cost savings. But no one is going to start mass producing plants because it's so difficult to get just one plant online.
To the more general question though: subsidies are to incentivize people (or companies) to do a thing (or do more of a thing). In the case of nuclear power, the timelines involved in building a power plant are so long, and given the uncertainty of having the same tax credits staying in place for long enough to impact financial plans, it seems unlikely that it would actually have the effect we'd want on nuclear power production.
Nuclear is the cheapest energy when state-owned, but struggle to compete against coal/gaz otherwise.
[1] https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Home/Warfare-Centers/NSWC-Crane/
Contractors have less fear than someone who can be jailed (and let’s be honest, contractors and other commercial entities are never held accountable when they cut corners for profit and pollute with wild abandon leaving us with Superfund sites).
The military doesn't have a great track record on Superfund sites i.e:
https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0...
However, I agree that at least the military has the culture that will follow orders if asked, and more importantly, it's the only government program that the US population is willing to put unchecked amounts of money towards.
As Reagan said: "trust, but verify".
Familiarize yourself with the Zumwalt and LCS procurement programs. Both are nearly total failures, with the Navy grasping at straws to find ways to make the ships that have been constructed useful. Congress bears some of the blame here, particularly in relation to Zumwalt, but it's also clear Navy leadership has been often incompetent in planning future acquisitions. Those two programs cost US tax payers about $50 billion.
Normal civilian reactors work on low enrichment uranium or even natural uranium--stuff that has no potential to go boom.
Even reprocessing isn't the danger it's made out to be. First, the plutonium from spent reactor fuel has a lot of Pu-240 in it. Bombs need Pu-239, too much Pu-240 will make them malfunction. (If you are trying to make Pu-239 you switch out the fuel rods much more frequently.) Second, the reprocessing plant has access to a lot of very hot stuff. All you actually need to do in reprocessing is strip out the waste products that poison the reaction, a fuel rod heavily "contaminated" with something like Cobalt-60 won't interfere with reactor operation, but it will ensure no thief will make off with it.
Naval reactors, however, are built to be as small as possible. That means very highly enriched uranium. Building a gun-type uranium bomb is easily within the range of what Al Qaeda can do, the limiting factor is obtaining the materials. Thus naval reactor fuel needs to be treated with extreme security.
Nuclear is characterized by very low opex compared to capex, but that ratio is even higher with renewables. If we are going to give nuclear the benefit of low capital costs, we should also give renewables that same cheap capital when comparing to nuclear.
I would say "citation needed". France typically had a documented public investment plan for nuclear energy, and is enjoying one of the cheapest and low-carbon emission electricity in Europe.
> And now we have just experienced a decade where intermittent renewables have plummeted in cost to below that of fuel-base energy
I still read this here and there, but strangely, solar/wind still need large subsidiaries to exist. How so ?
Other renewable such as hydro are fine, though, but they tend to be already at their max everywhere.
> And storage is on that trend too, with storage being added to most solar and wind projects these days
We don't have real storage solutions for now. Batteries ? Won't scale. Reversible dams ? Doable if you have the chance to have a lot of hydro.
https://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-article-...
> but strangely, solar/wind still need large subsidies to exist
Citation needed here, too! The unsubsidized costs of solar and wind are still the cheapest sources, so they don't "need" subsidies to be deployed. The existence of tax breaks subsidies for wind/solar doesn't mean that the subsidies are needed, any more than the special tax break subsidies for oil/gas/coal are needed for those sources to keep on going.
> Batteries? Won't scale
This is a very strange claim! Not only do batteries scale beautifully in theory, we already have scaled them for deployment, with GWh grid batteries that can be scaled at the same site to 5-6GWh (Moss Landing, CA). Batteries can be deployed in homes, at distribution substations, underneath utility scale solar or wind farms, at old decommissioned fossil fuel sites so that the transmission capacity can be reused, on one side of a congested transmission line to avoid massive upgrade costs... Batteries are practically defined by their beautiful scalability, a real Swiss Army knife for any grid application
Current global production capacity for the lithium ion types of batteries is 285GWh, which on a GW completely dwarfs global nuclear deployment. Projections from the battery industry are for this amount to increase 10x every five years. And though lithium ion tech is by far in the lead, there are many other chemistries perfectly suited to grid use (but perhaps not cars), if lithium ion's improvement pace ever slows to let them catch up.
We are in a new era for energy, an era that is far more like tech, and less like the staid commodity industry that energy has been for the past century. Depreciation of grid assets is very slow, far slower than the tech change of energy tech, so we need to start paying very close attention to tech change curves if we don't want to waste massive amounts of money and screw up our fight against climate change.
Hydrogen would still be hard to beat for seasonal storage, though.
But how much does a nuclear plant actually cost?
Kill two birds with one stone and all that…
Or since they are modular if significant long term loads shift geographically, you can easily move them around to where needed too.
I agree the concepts of massive plants aren’t desireable - luckily there are alternatives if we can ever get past the emotional arguments and actually discuss things rationally.
So far everyone who's pursued this small modular reactors built by factories approach has failed in the ambition. Doesn't mean it's impossible but just maybe we should be a bit more bearish than bullish on the idea of this sparking a revolution in the capital costs and time scales of nuclear power.
How do you compare the deaths from a distributed reactor network to the deaths from additional global warming?
And there are far more easily obtainable things than uranium if you want to construct a dirty bomb. Another fantastic anti-nuke red herring.