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Comment by Georgelemental | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR rising labor costs and regulation

Note that the regulatory costs are only responsible for much of the increases of the 60s and 70s. They're the boogey man, but the increases of the last forty years can't be blamed on them.

It's a general problem: HSR and subway stations have seen similar increases.

may be the increases of the last forty years have'nt been studied as thoses of the 60s to 70s, but regulatory costs are still a reality, the french EPR for exemple got a 20billion increase in cost during the construction for changes in security standards.

That’s also due to regulatory costs. Regulations now require “citizen voice” for large projects, whether infrastructure or just an apartment building. So NIMBYism is able to slow construction (which translates directly to increased costs), require additional measures or features. And NIMBY lawsuits after regulatory approval is given can further increase costs and schedule, even if the court rules in favor of the project. And then because of all these regulatory costs, the experience isn’t gained, so learning doesn’t occur, and if it does, it occurs only for a few firms. Additionally, large state sponsored projects often are treated as jobs programs, etc.

Another issue is that the difficulty of complying with the regulations is intentional. The paperwork is difficult as an intentional sort of time-tax on building anything new. We could actually automate and streamline everything to be approved immediately (while following the letter) without large paperwork costs, but that’s not actually what those who push for the regulations actually want. They WANT it to be hard.

It’s not just a boogeyman. It’s the real reason. Regulations are responsible for most of the cost of nuclear power.

You're not wrong, but I'm not sure what's a better alternative.

Think of it in a different scope: government contracts are also expensive because the have to be open to competition. A lot of the red tape could be reduced with no-bid contracts, but people understand the corruption risk tradeoff is generally not worth it.

In your example, it seems like the NIMBYism is the root cause, not the process by which NIMBYism is wielded.

I don't think it's useful to conflate construction code style regulation and NIMBYism.

There can be excess of the former, but ultimately rules-based regulation isn't the worst. NIMBYism and other discretionary review adds more much delays and uncertainty and that is the Achilles heel.

Ultimately we need build out the literal and metaphorical supply chains, i.e. do the same thing over and over and over again. Economies of scale are real, and so are diseconomies of discale, and the latter is the NIMBY's greatest weapon for collective action.

Are Stadtbahns the SMRs of transit?

It’s not just a boogeyman. It’s the real reason. Regulations are responsible for most of the cost of nuclear power.

In a counterfactual world with fewer regulations, I can believe that construction would be cheaper. But regulations don't explain why new projects have drastic cost and schedule overruns. The United States started building new AP1000 reactors in Georgia and South Carolina in 2013 [1] [2]. There were no regulatory changes/increases after 2013. But the projects went drastically over the budget and schedule numbers that they had in 2013.

The South Carolina project was ultimately canceled and the SCANA CEO ended up in federal prison: https://www.powermag.com/former-scana-ceo-will-land-in-priso...

Following the project's demise, an “exhaustive and multi-year joint investigation” was conducted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the South Carolina Attorney General’s Office, and the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division. Marsh’s sentencing is the result of that investigation.

“Kevin Marsh deceived regulators and customers to financially benefit SCANA,” Susan Ferensic, special agent in charge of the FBI Columbia Field Office, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, Marsh’s and other executive’s actions resulted in South Carolinians bearing the financial brunt of the failed Summer Nuclear Station.”

“Due to this fraud, an $11 billion nuclear ghost town, paid for by SCANA investors and customers, now sits vacant in Jenkinsville, S.C.,” DeHart said.

The Georgia project is still in progress.

https://apnews.com/article/business-environment-united-state...

"Georgia nuclear plant’s cost now forecast to top $30 billion"

A nuclear power plant being built in Georgia is now projected to cost its owners more than $30 billion.

A financial report from one of the owners on Friday clearly pushed the cost of Plant Vogtle near Augusta past that milestone, bringing its total cost to $30.34 billion.

...

When approved in 2012, the third and fourth reactors were estimated to cost $14 billion, with the first electricity being generated in 2016. Now the third reactor is set to begin operation in March 2023, and the fourth reactor is set to begin operation in December 2023.

It's reasonable to say that a pacemaker costs more to develop than an MP3 player because medical devices are heavily regulated by the FDA. But it's not reasonable to say that a project to develop a new pacemaker is 100% over budget and 7 years late because of FDA regulations if the FDA regulations didn't change in the mean while. In this case, the regulations didn't change. So earlier estimates were due to fraud or incompetence (either execution-incompetence or planning-incompetence). I tend to blame incompetence -- after all, many megaprojects end up horribly late and over budget, not just nuclear ones -- but in the case of South Carolina's VC Summer there was outright fraud too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil_C._Summer_Nuclear_Gener...

Is this due to "citizen voice" or is it just that all of the land is now someone's back yard? A century ago most of the land around cities was forest, plains, or sometimes farm. Building out rail, transmission lines, or pipelines was relatively easy because barely anybody lived near where you were building.

Today there are people scattered all around and they will absolutely complain when you start building something near the property they bought specifically to be away from other people.

Since 50s we've got so many improvements in construction tech that I would expect costs to plummet, instead they are higher than ever. Countries use immigrant labor (sometimes illegal) and have all tech available and the price only goes up. I wonder why.

Each build is unique and requires way too much overhead. The new generation of preapproved factory assembled SMR's are the future.

I have high hopes for prefab modular systems. The same design approval covers 1000+ units, most designs fit on a flat-bed for transport, and instillations can scale up as needed.

Having talked to a nuclear engineer about this: SMRs are being politically pushed because of their political and financing convenience, more than engineering reasons. Power output scales really well with reactor size, so it makes much more sense to build the one big expensive power plant than a multitude of smaller ones. SMRs do make sense for off-grid or on-site power, but not for grid electricity.

The ideal case is that SMRs are not the end goal, but a way to rebuild the supply chain. As soon as we have SMRs in prod, rather than building more of them, we should attempt to increase the size of deployments with minimal falling back on in-situ construction.

SMRs take the supply chain metaphor a bit too literally: we do need practice but assembling prefabbed parts at a larger scale is fine too. There is a spectrum of options and we just need to avoid "special snowflake boondoggles".

Given the US's fucked NIMBY culture, it well may be that SMRs are the best route despite these inefficiencies. Just don't expect the "solar model" where we just shit out lots of lousy product and that's it.

From a thermal physics and material science perspective, yes, bigger is definitely better. But there's a lot to be said of the value of being able to mass-produce a product in a factory and ship it in nearly ready-to-use state to its destination.

There would also be a lot of value in turning off the ability of folks to NIMBY everything from new power plants to housing.

Alvin Weinberg begs to differ, at least concerning PWRs and BWRs. The bigger plants are more efficient but less safe.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iW8yuyk3Ugw

One can scale the size by using several reactors, which is exactly what NuScale and others aim to do. One also doesn't have an unavailability problem having to shut down a large reactor in order to refuel it.

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