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Comment by jjoonathan | Hacker News Reader

> no nuclear plant that has submitted an application since the formation of the NRC in 1975 has yet commenced operation.

Wait, what? I knew that reactor construction stopped around then. I hear it alluded to often enough, e.g. "US grid could have been 100% low-CO2 power by now if we had just kept up the pace of deploying nuclear instead of stopping in the 80s." Still, I thought the story was a messy mix of regulations hitting at the same time as city growth was topping off and interest rates were skyrocketing.

If the NRC just says "no" to everything, that's a big deal. Is there more to the story?

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The NRC said "yes" to 4 new AP1000 reactors in Georgia and South Carolina more than 10 years ago. They were all supposed to be completed years ago. The South Carolina project was abandoned after cost and schedule blowouts. The Georgia project continues to chug forward despite similar cost and schedule blowouts. Here's a brief synopsis of the Georgia project:

On August 26, 2009, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued an Early Site Permit and a Limited Work Authorization. Limited construction at the new reactor sites began, with Unit 3 then expected to be operational in 2016, followed by Unit 4 in 2017, pending final issuance of the Combined Construction and Operating License by the NRC. These dates have since slipped to 2022 and 2023 for Units 3 and 4, respectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...

Thanks for the context!

Yeah, that syncs up better with my intuition: disasters plus bad economic timing killed the industry in the 80s and it hasn't gotten back on its feet because big projects are hard enough with momentum and the industry has to start over from zero.

Here's hoping they can get back on their feet!

Westinghouse Electric Company (the reactor manufacturer) took over construction management in 2015 after the first constructor botched schedules and costs. Westinghouse subcontracted to Fluor. In 2016, adding Bechtel.

In 2017, Westinghouse declares Chapter 11 bankruptcy from construction losses, and the final owner Southern Company reselects Bechtel as the construction manager.

Current operational date looks like 3Q 2022, and on track.

tl;dr - Don't allow megaproject management experience to atrophy. The US military learned this (see: how the Navy builds carriers and nuclear subs). Have a prime and a secondary. Rotate. And, for god's sake keep the pipeline full. Skills atrophy and knowledge is forgotten.

The South Carolina reactors were abandoned. Vogtle looks on track to spin up this year. Vogtle was held up a long time because the index reactor of the type in China was held up while the factories were taking a while to figure out how to make the parts.

In so far as a water reactor could be practical (awful economics of the steam turbine and steam generators) the AP1000 looks pretty good.

Right, but one interpreation of this fact is that they set the bar for compliance too high, so it's almost impossible to finish a reactor in a financially feasible way.

Unfortunately, there seems to be no way for our society to overcome the apparent moral high ground that nuclear skpetics hold. Nuclear disastors are too good at capturing the imagination and all a skeptic has to say is "you can never be too safe."

Meanwhile, we claim that our reliance on fossil fuels is a disastor, but if it's not enough of a disastor to compel us to make nuclear regulatorily viable, how much of a disaster can it really be?

It not being financially feasible to finish a reactor and comply with the regulations doesn’t mean they’re set too high. Maybe it just means you can’t have safe AND financially feasible nuclear right now.

It actually does since other countries are actually building nuclear plants. I bet if you traced through the NRC membership you would find government malaise and industry connections stopping new reactor designs from making their way through.

How is it that four AP1000 reactors are built and running in China, that the companies building nuclear reactors have a long and apparently successful history of providing reactors to the US Navy, and yet trying to build two in the US bankrupts the company?

There used to be four under construction in the US. Those in South Carolina were left partially built instead of spending even more money trying to complete them after the project went off the rails. Regional newspapers have gone into great depth explaining what went wrong. Here's a recent article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about problems building the Georgia reactors:

"How Georgia nuclear project’s big finish went so wrong"

https://www.ajc.com/news/business/how-georgia-nuclear-projec...

There were even worse problems in South Carolina that actually led to federal criminal convictions:

"Former Westinghouse Executive Charged with Conspiracy, Fraud in Connection with V.C. Summer Nuclear Project"

Former Westinghouse Electric Co. Senior Vice President Jeffrey A. Benjamin was charged with 16 felony counts, including conspiracy, wire fraud, securities fraud, and causing a publicly traded company to keep a false record, for his part in failing to truthfully report information regarding construction of new nuclear units at the V.C. Summer nuclear plant in South Carolina.

Benjamin is the fourth individual to be charged in the ongoing federal investigation. Former SCANA CEO Kevin Marsh, former SCANA Executive Vice President Stephen Byrne, and former Westinghouse Vice President Carl Churchman have all pleaded guilty to federal felony charges for their roles in the matter.

https://www.powermag.com/former-westinghouse-executive-charg...

Here's a big investigative series that the Charleston Post and Courier did about the problems with the VC Summer expansion in South Carolina:

https://www.postandcourier.com/business/vc_summer_nuclear_pr...

If I had to guess, neither China nor the US Navy care about generating a profit from the reactors.

One of the advantages of China's large and diverse reactor programme is that when they are building FOAK designs and something comes up that holds up the work (as it did on both their AP1000 and their EPR builds), they put their nuclear qualified workforce on buses and move them to other builds.

Compare that to Flamanville, Olkiluoto, and the US AP1000 builds where every time there was a work stoppage to review a detailed design element, a massive and expensive workforce just had some paid chill time.

See this chart:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...

Edit:

Apparently they approved NuScale's Small Modular Reactors:

NuScale spent over $500 million and more than 2 million labor hours to compile the information needed for its design certification application.

> If the NRC just says "no" to everything, that's a big deal. Is there more to the story?

The NRC doesn't say "no" to everything; AP-600/1000 designs were approved, an SMR design has been approved. The NRC is entirely willing to approve competent design efforts.

The most candid explanation of the attitude of the NRC was offered by former chairman Dale Klien and his "no bozos" baloney test; there is no room in nuclear power for hucksters and the NRC won't indulge them. This rejection is evidence that this mentality still prevails; failure to respond to NRC questions about reactor design in a timely manner is bozoery and this is the correct outcome.

The Oklo proposal isn't some generational variant on PWRs. They are proposing a fast breeder. You can't go to the NRC with a fast breeder application on anything less than a multi-billion dollar R&D operation designed to positively thrill the NRC with actually epic levels of competence and preparation and expect to be approved, and that is exactly how it should be.

What stopped the first nuclear buildout in the US was a combination of things. One is that the 7%/year growth in electricity demand suddenly moderated. This caught some utilities by surprise; if they had many NPPs in process they were in for pain (WPPSS went bankrupt). Another is the passage of PURPA in 1978, which started to open the grids to non-utility power. Cogeneration started to take off then. Any industrial activity that needed heat could now drive a combustion turbine and sell some power at low marginal cost, using the waste heat for their need. There were also some cogeneration-in-name-only non-utility plants that were mostly just to make power.

All this made large, new, expensive nuclear plants difficult to justify. TMI was just the icing on the cake.

The more recent "nuclear renaissance" died because natural gas become very cheap (and a combined cycle NG power plant costs $1/W to build; a factor of 10 cheaper than a nuclear plant) and because nuclear construction was more expensive than promised (bye, Westinghouse).

To be fair natural gas is only cheap because the cost to the environment isn't factored in. The cost of nuclear power is pennies when compared to the decimation global warming will bring to the human race.

Even so, natural gas in the US is so cheap that the CO2 charge that would be needed for new nuclear to compete would be very high, so high that very large CO2 emission reduction would occur elsewhere first.

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4088

Quote:

“The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.

Reminds me of that FDA reviewer who refused to approve any drugs on the grounds that risk couldn't be completely eliminated.

A common solution to the Trolley Problem.

got a link?

Below your quote, it says that NuScale has gotten approval. It’s not that nobody has gotten approved, it’s that nobody has commenced operation.

NuScale will, after about 15 years of engagement, receive a design certification later in 2022. After that- they will still need to apply with a combined license application like Oklo did.

Each of the words there happens to be significant.

- plant: plants that had reactors first approved earlier have since had reactors approved that will commence operation soon (Vogtle is the classic)

- commenced operation: designs exist that have been approved but haven't commenced operation

One could argue that the NRC only approves commercially unviable designs or something like that, I suppose. Or that we have just as many plants as we need and we just need more reactors. Or that the general stance of the public has shifted away from nuke.

You're misreading the claim. It's not that they have not given any approvals, it's that those reactors did not go on to reach operating status. That means these are more likely to be business problems, not regulator problems.

I don't think it makes sense to talk about the business of building nuclear reactors as something separate from regulator problems. The two are very tightly intertwined.

Four AP1000s are operating in China right now, demonstrating that under different regulatory regimes, the plants can be built.

The question then, is whether a Chinese regulatory regime (or any other sort of Chinese regime) is something the US should aspire to emulate.

I don’t see that as a useful question at all. The fact that China has working AP1000 reactors is one piece of circumstantial evidence that regulatory regime has an effect on the ability to build nuclear reactors in a timely way.

If you think that the regulatory regime plays a role, then there are three obvious questions to ask: (1) is our current regulatory regime Pareto optimal on a safety versus build time plot? I.e. are there changes that we could make which improve build time without negatively affecting safety? (2) should we consider moves along the Pareto front? I.e. should we trade some safety for some construction speed? Or vice versa? (3) are there things that we can learn from other regulatory approaches that would help us address question 1 or 2? Your proposed question fits under here, but it should be much broader than the way you posed it.

I was confused by the wording of that as well! I guess it would have helped if they put "yet" at the end of the sentence.

No worries. That’s only 47 years. Not too long in terms of new energy technologies.

Sophons at work.

Maybe the sophons should have paid more attention to Chinese literature?

Anti-nuclear lobbyists and demagogues have infiltrated the regulatory bodies in the US and Europe.

The NRC has approved several designs over the years. It's always a good idea to doublecheck what people say, even if it confirms your bias.

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