Comment by Maursault | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Maursault | Hacker News Reader

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Except, it was never the regulations.

A nuclear power plant costs between $6B - $9B to build, before it generates any electricity, that is just the construction cost these days for a 1100MW plant

Regulatory costs for a nuclear power plant will range between $7M - $15M annually.

Do the math: it is definitely not the regulations. Any time someone complains about regulations, you know there is a Republican agenda. We need regulations, because they are the only thing preventing Big Business from enslaving you and me and worse. Regulations are good. Unless you make more than $400K/yr, stop doing the 1%er's jobs for them making sure most of the wealth is controlled by just a few by... removing regulations which really only bothers them because it means they make slightly less of the fortune they'd make without it.

The money is what is important. Your money should be important to you, so please make sure you only support agendas that work for your personal economic interests rather than the interests of the richest of the rich. If everyone always voted in their personal economic interests, we'd see a boom economy. The problem is, 99% of the Republican Party is literally voting adversely to their economic interests. They are voting to keep themselves economically stagnant and also to make sure the rich stay rich, for that day that will never come when they are rich, or maybe it is the absolute distractions that do not affect economy, like abortion or 2nd A. issues. If everyone only voted in their personal economic interests, and ignored all other concerns, there could not be a Republican Party. Well, there would be, but it would only have about 20 members, all listed among the top 25 richest Amercans. Most people aren't rich, and could benefit from better opportunity, which will never come so long as a minority party somehow has and has had control of the Senate for 18 of the last 20 years. If you care about your money, you should be on board with making DC and Puerto Rico legitimate US States, tax them and let them vote, and let's progress as a nation, rather than stagnating.

This is disingenuous.

A nuclear power plant is "just" a steel cylinder in a concrete building, attached to a very ordinary steam turbine hall and a set of transformers.

The expensive part is not the building! That steel is not some unobtanium, and while the concrete is the highest grade, it's not $billions expensive. The fuel pellets are surprisingly cheap also. That's... kind-of the point! You're not burning thousands of tonnes of coal in these things. The low fuel costs are a selling point.

The reason for the expense is because every single nut, screw, and bolt needs to have a mile high pile of paperwork. Because every pipe, pump, and filter needs to be certified. Every sensor needs to be purpose-built and documented by expensive PhD-wielding scientists, not just obtained at the local engineers shop. And so on, and so forth.

The Westinghouse design paperwork specified the type of paint used for the dividing lines between the parking lot divisions.

Not to mention the lawsuits by NIMBYs, which means you often can't even start construction for 6-15 years. No other business in the world is held up in red tape for as long, or as intensely.

PS: This is why China can slap down AP1000 reactors down half a dozen at a time, like they're playing Sim City. Over there, with an authoritarian government, they simply don't have these red-tape / certification problems. Some high-up politicians simply make the decision, and that's... it. Time to start pouring the foundations.

PPS: It seems that on further research, China is having troubles with the high base cost of the plants, even with the reduced overheads due to mandates at the highest levels: https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/12/12/138271/chinas-lo...

... so the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Nuclear is expensive, but too expensive in western countries. Realistically, they're probably not worthwhile long term unless subsidised by the nuclear weapons industry...

In China nuclear's progress is in fact quite slow: 2 to 6 new reactors/year. Nuclear now produces 6% of the electricity, and the plan is to reach 7.7% by 2035 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China#1964%E2...

Electricity generation by renewables: 27.3% in 2020, growing at an astounding pace. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China

> A nuclear power plant is "just" a steel cylinder in a concrete building, attached to a very ordinary steam turbine hall and a set of transformers.

If you save the quite expensive steel cylinder and concrete casing, that quite ordinary steam turbine and set of transformers can run on coal just by themselves. And guess what, this is already too expensive to compete with the alternatives nowadays.

(And no, there is nothing ordinary about that steel cylinder.)

> A nuclear power plant costs between $6B - $9B to build

Why? Why not $20M or at the absolute worse $200M?

> Regulatory costs for a nuclear power plant will range between $7M - $15M annually.

This is disenginous number. Every single supplier, compliance, proposal, EVERYTHING about nuclear is regulated.

Behind this $7M-$15M on paper costs, lies the true cost of regulations: $6B-$9B.

> The money is what is important. Your money should be important to you, so please make sure you only support agendas that work for your personal economic interests rather than the interests of the richest of the rich.

Strange thing to say.

So you're saying that if we removed the regulation and built cheap reactors each reactor might cost -1 billion dollars to construct? Sign me up!

I would even question why construction costs so much in US vs. say China. It is all entirely full of regulations. Not labor. Material costs are probably minscule % if you scoure the entire supply chain for regulations.

The discussion whether certain regulations (OSHA) are needed or not is an entirely different conversation, but having worked on large government/military contracts ($1B+); I have seen the shitshow with my own eyes and mind.

Gross incompetence of Gov (and its contractors) x Regulatory Capture x Lack of Innovation = Current dysfunction.

I am not saying China is the role model for safety regulations, but we need to take a deep look at what's necessary and what's not.

SpaceX will make reusable rockets a few orders of magnitude cheaper than anything NASA has produced. And current NASA administration has been forthcoming in working with private industry (SpaceX, BO, Rocketlab, Firefly, etc.). Good.

> I would even question why construction costs so much in US vs. say China.

The difference is in manufacturing and labor costs. If you want to build cheap, you can do so in Mexico at half the manufacturing and labor costs of China, which is about 1/7th that of good ol' fashioned USofA manufacturing and labor.

You should have already known this. Nothing to see here.

Why? Why not $20M or at the absolute worse $200M?

I feel like if you need to ask a question like "Why can't this thing be built for $20m, or 0.03% of the cited $6bn cost?" then you don't understand the problem well enough.

This is defeatism. Someone asked that question and is building 100x cheaper rockets. Soon to be 1000x cheaper.

Literally everything needs to be questioned. We can do that with humbleness and without arrogance.

Last I checked, we are on a tech forum known for starting companies.

Someone asked that question and is building 100x cheaper rockets. Soon to be 1000x cheaper.

They got there by solving some hard problems over multiple decades by understanding the domain and the difficulties in it. They didn't start by saying "Why aren't rockets 1000* cheaper?" They started by saying "What happens if we solve these problems?" and ended up with cheaper rockets. In another domain they might have had a different outcome, or failed to solve the problems.

I can agree with that but also SpaceX absolutely started with the question "Why aren't rockets cheaper". Thus followed resuability with an question "Why are we building single use Rockets?". Either way, we should question all of this. The entire house of Nuclear industry is probably filled with bureacratic termites.

Probably the same reason that SpaceX was able to build human rated orbital rockets with a marginal cost that’s a fraction of what came before.

The incumbents are corrupt, the regulations are overbearing and bloated, the government has no interest in solving the problem. Fortunately, it doesn’t really matter what we think, the Chinese will continue to advance and deploy the nuclear state-of-the-art and become an energy superpower, while the US and Europe debate the issue until we’re made irrelevant.

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