But in the end, just the price will kill them on any larger scale.
All solved issues - nuclear energy is a matter of political will at this point.
As it is, even with that subsidy financing plants is basically impossible without more subsidies. Bill Gates' new reactor startup required taxpayers to fund 50% of it to even exist.
In terms of priorities it doesn't make any sense at all to me though. It's hard to get the global population to care and act about what the GLOBAL state of the planet will be by the end of the century. So I really could not care less if by accident a few people dug a hole in tens of thousand of years at the wrong place and it created an issue. It's not like the whole human population would meet at this same spot and quickly dig a hole deep enough together so that they all get radiated...
Also, if you do decide to leave a message anyway, you'll just have to make it interpretable to a human, not to any possible "creature". 10 000 years is nothing on evolutionary time scales, so it will still just be us humans around, (or nobody at all, if we happen to go extinct first).
Yes, solar and wind will need to be accompanied by lets call them "on-demand" power sources, like gas, water, in the future large-scale storage and of course power2gas for entirely renewal gas production.
By the way, the "base load" was artificially increased in the past to accommodate the mainly slow power plants. This is no longer a requirement, future loads will be more dynamic and more adjusted to the market offers.
So you always have to have some means of power generation available for demand raises at any point and you have to be able to throttle down power generation in case of a demand drop, because otherwise the grid goes down equally as if you had not enough power capacity.
The good news is: renewables can be throttled down quickly, better than most other sources, the bad news is, you can only know about 3 days in advance what the maximum output of your renewables will be and there are days with very low total production. A future grid concept would have to come up with a solution for that. Gas would have been the easy way and probably will be the future when based on gas created via power2gas.
This is an incredible misunderstanding! Honestly, it's like saying that planet Earth is flat.
Did you meant something like "time zones are a social construct"? This true but quite a different claim that the one you made (which is not surprising since what you said is just nonsense).
Conclusion: we need nuclear (and most certainly we don’t need gas).
And before the inevitable comment follows, yes, that may change with future technology. Just like everything else.
In your scenario where we use renewables + gas, water, and storage which of these would be ensuring that we at least have enough to satisfy the loads on the grid that never turn off or vary? Everything on that list except gas is subject to forces we cannot directly control so I assume you would need a certain number of gas power plants to always be in production or idling to satisfy that demand.
Thirdly, why the preference for gas over nuclear?
The big problem with nuclear from the grid side is, that they are the slowest power plants available. Consequently, (and because of cost efficiency) they are run at high power output levels 24/7, the rest of the grid has to adjust by being throttled or fast plants which can be ramped up and down.
Gas is the fastest type of classical power plants (together with water, but that usually has limited amounts). And as the fuel always was on the expensive side, there is quite an incentive of not running gas power plants too much. They would be a good company to renewables, as they can switch between 0 and 100% and back very quickly. And in a grid dominated by renewables, you would only rarely run them at high loads for longer times. And while they emit more CO2 than nuclear plants, they do distinctively less than coal powered plans.
In the long run, you can run gas plants on e.g. hydrogen produced from solar - the recent plans for extending gas power plants in Germany all included the requirement to be usable with hydrogen too.
> [...]
> According to National Grid plc chief executive officer Steve Holliday and others, baseload is "outdated".[7][6]
Great, so what do we do when the sun isn't shining, the wind isn't blowing and the dams are empty? Just have a second grid worth of gas plants which we turn on once every two weeks for shits and giggles?
In fact this isn't going to happen and there needs to be enough fungible capacity both internally and in the European grid. Right now, France is highly dependent on the grid, as 50% of the nuclear plants are down.
What if it just requires keeping the existing plants around, and turning them on for 6 hours every 8 weeks, for example?
Yes, that's not 100% renewable, but it gets electricity production to 99% renewable, and that other 1% you can mitigate by doing power-to-gas / direct-air-capture.
Australia is right now fairly close to finishing a 350GWh battery for about $6 billion.
By contrast, Hinkley Point C will take about 20 years to finish, and pump out 3.2GW at a cost of about $20 billion.
No nuke anywhere was ever fully commercial. In every case they depend on heavy public subsidy.
Anyway let's address the comment:
> all currently available nuclear reactor models are way more expensive to build than renewables
Okay you use all, a universal quantifier which is epistemologically very weak. For starters the economical costs are accidental bureaucratic contingencies. The interest rate is a self-fullifling prophethy and most of nuclear reactors have been created pre-bureaucratic era, are still in use and are actually much less deadly than C02 air pollution so let's admit the talking point is ad-hoc mediocrity. Secondly even if you take into account the economics of nuclear reactors from countries that have abandoned nuclear.. you have to realize how absurd the comparison is:
1) renewable is increasing the cost of nuclear operation (underusage of maximal throughput) for nor reason
2) solar panel have a short lifespan (20-30 years) with diminishing returns of efficiency, compare that with the lifepsan of 80-90 years that nuclear often attain and you see that the cost that people usually refer for solar panel must be doubled.
3) Essentially it's time to try to avoid making absurd statements. Solar and wind economics are absurd, inexistant once you necessitate a storage grid (e.g. no light at night or with mild weather) and this which is barely doable (still no single real world deployment of a smart grid fully renewable (without cheats like hydro) exists) and has absurd economics (not even talking about the immense stress that would have on lithium resources which are seriously needed for the future of mankind). 3) just show how strong the level of virtue signaling/hypocrisy going on.
4) actually if your country hasn't become crazy you can have nuclear that are more economical even without considering 3), which is likely the case of China but most evidently is the case of Russia, which like it or not is the world leader by far, the new VVER-TOI are disruptive, both in economics and time to build (3.5 years), while simultaneously improving upon safety.
> where to get and reprocess fuel rods
this is not an issue
> What about operational safety
well if you're not retarded enough to build a plant in a major seismic/tsunami region the operational safety is much superior to all other classses of energies. Renewable induce more deaths than nuclear.
> where to dump the radiactive waste
You are talking about a fiction, in france nuclear generate a few kilos of waste per habitant, per year. The majority of nuclear wastes do not come from the nuclear industry and are a non issue since we have many depositories in place and the vast majority become negligibly radioactive after a few years. About the long term part while its very easy to isolate like many kinds of equally or more toxic industrial wastes, it can be reprocessed as MOX fuel however it is slighly less economical but only of a few percents.
In the end, once renewable reach a major percentage of energy and heat production, the use of gaz and fuel as pilotable energies will skyrocket making the point moot. If nuclear become the needed pilotable energy it makes renewable economics moot. Hence obviously renewable use will be very limited. Also I foresee that the russian nuclear export monopoly will massively grow although china might take a slice and so could Korea and France iff France new EPR pragmatic design is not a shitshow.
One thing I am wary about is what the lifespan of any newly build plant would be that uses modern technology.
If you take a random 8bit home computer from 1983, all the non-mechanical parts on it likely still work today.
If you take a random computer from 1993, well most bits probably work.
If you take a random computer from 2003, if you are lucky some things work.
2013? Odds are it won't work.
The differences in manufacturing between everyday consumer electronics and high reliability electronics has grown larger and larger, for two reasons.
One is progress of Moore's law, smaller feature sizes have made electronics more susceptible to many different types of failure[1][2].
The second is RoHS[3], removing lead from solder has basically given all consumer electronics a 10 year life span.
Now of course you can get non-RoHS components, but they are not the norm, and to make things reliable you need to ensure everything is not RoHS.
Want a reliable storage medium? That is going to cost an insane multiple. Want a reliable computer? Another insane multiple, you are going to need to have something built on an ancient manufacturing process, and because you aren't getting the benefits of economies of scale you are paying more, and you are basically getting a bespoke machine so you now need to test it to heck and back to ensure reliability.
One problem with how we have chosen to advance our electronics industry is that the types of goods that are made en-masse have steadily separated from what types of goods need to be made for long term engineering projects.
An example of this in action: when Tesla first came out they realized existing automotive infotainment systems basically sucked and that they couldn't provide a good UX with anything available off the shelf at the time, so they instead plopped new consumer non-automotive gear. A touch screen that didn't suck! But it also melted. Everyone yelled at them "should have known better!" but their choices were "unreliable consumer" or "crappy behind the scenes".
Another example, RoHS doesn't have exclusions for home appliances. RoHS is also why the control board on washing machines gives out after ~10 years, necessitating purchasing a new washing machine even though the mechanics may have another decade left in them! (RoHS needs a crap ton more exclusions for long lived appliances...)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_(semiconductor)#Fa... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Subst...
It's just a function of cost, do you want to engineer your device/machine to last or not, and are more features more important to you than reliability.
YouTube recently recommended me some tear down videos of washing machines, for whatever reason. The video compared 1990s to modern machines.
The insides are remarkably similar, the main failure point is the electronics, flat out.
And in my experience (n=1), what fails on modern appliances is the electronics! Not the pumps or motors, sure sometimes those go out, but most often it is the control board.
Look at every car built since 2010. Sure you have some models with known manufacturing defects on a given part, but replace that one part and mechanically most cars are reliable. But how many cars have you come across that run just fine, but the check engine light is stuck on and the mechanic is like "well I could fix it but it will cost a lot"?
We have hundreds of years of knowledge about making reliable machines in massive quantities, and then cost reducing them (ok maybe 200 years tops), as a species we haven't even bothered trying to cost reduce reliable electronics! We just accept that they will fail.
People absolutely can build reliable electronics these days, but it will be slightly more expensive than not quite so reliable electronics. Higher profit margin has a higher priority than making sure the product survives long after the warranty period has ended. Especially if the consumer only looks at the initial price without taking into consideration how long it will last. Which is also hard to do without reviewers tearing the machine to bits. Being expensive does not mean it is actually any good and will last a long time.
I guess that's because you are missing part of the picture.
> For starters the economical costs are accidental bureaucratic contingencies.
Yes, everything says that it's possible to create safer nuclear reactors. But our current ones aren't. Safe reactors are on the same level of "nobody does this because of market and bureaucratic constraints" as cheap open-storage fuel cells. Except that the constraints are harder to change for the reactors.
We should be trying very hard to change both. But until we do, the reality will be that both nuclear reactors and batteries are expensive. And our current reactors are only safe because of the safeguards put on them, remove the safeguards, and they won't be safe anymore.
> renewable is increasing the cost of nuclear operation (underusage of maximal throughput) for nor reason
That's a pretty bad way to frame it. The problem here is that all non-dipatchable (on the economical sense, not the technical one) sources compete to get full utilization. That's not a problem when most of the power is dispatchable, but none of the options you are considering (renewables - except for buifuels - or nuclear) are. Adding nuclear capacity will increase the nuclear operational cost even more than renewables (because they have the same generation profile).
The only solution here is storage.
> solar panel have a short lifespan (20-30 years) with diminishing returns of efficiency ... the cost that people usually refer for solar panel must be doubled.
You noticed that you took the manufacturer guarantee and cited it as expected lifetime, right? AFAIK, we don't have a good number for how long our current tech of solar panels will last, because after just a few decades on the field, nobody catalogued enough failures to measure it. But we know it's way longer than that.
Anyway, doubling the cost of solar panels is both the wrong way to go (interest rates exist), and changes about nothing when comparing with the current costs of nuclear. (It would make them lose to coal, but then, both solar and coal are normally built by private business with proper accounting in practice to compare their costs.)
> Solar and wind economics are absurd
Well, you clearly didn't dig into those. Storage seems to be viable even with current tech (not using batteries). But it will of course always lose to natural gas generation.
Anyway, natural gas generation at night is a pretty good stop-gap.
> not even talking about the immense stress that would have on lithium resources which are seriously needed for the future of mankind
I don't expect grid storage to use lithium at all, but the fact that you have gone over lithium¹ reserves and are ignoring uranium reserves shows a very biased research. TLDR, none will be a problem soon (or probably ever for lithium).
> In the end, once renewable reach a major percentage of energy and heat production, the use of gaz and fuel as pilotable energies will skyrocket making the point moot.
Well, eventually we will need storage. That's true for nuclear too.
But anyway, renewables don't increase the consumption of fossil fuel based sources in any way, so the only way they can push the prices higher is by reducing economies of scale, what is actually the goal.
1 - Of any element you could choose, you decided to go with lithium, one of the most available ones on the Earth's surface? But well, once in a while somebody pops up talking about iron or silicon shortages, so you could have done worse.
1) extraordinary claim 2) completely miss the point that the 10000 bureaucratic safety rules could be trimed by half while actually improving security and reducing costs. 3) completely miss the point that current models from Russia and China are cost effective and comply with aforementioned unoptimized rules.
> remove the safeguards, and they won't be safe anymore
most of the reactors from the 70s and 80s are still in use. they have much less safeguards and are still safe enough as in you'd better invest the saved money in saving lifes/medecine research than in those hypothethical safety gains that only drive marketing and hypocrisy.
> Adding nuclear capacity will increase the nuclear operational cost even more than renewables (because they have the same generation profile).
completely miss the point that not developing renewable and going for 100% nuclear increase overall economics. completely miss the point that nuclear plants can contrary to renewable decrease their output in a very fine grained way. Why is that interesting? The plant cost almost the same, but does not add a significant cost by overproducing electricity. When renewable overproduce electricity (which happens all the time given enough share) the excess electricity will break the electric grid and cause a nationwide shutdown. To prevent that, the Grid operator has to sell electricity at a loss (AKA pay people to consume the electricity). Given some level this startegy won't even work and will need a special costly infrastructure optimized for burning (throwing away) excess electricity.
> But we know it's way longer than that
who is we? Where is the evidence? Also newer reactors have a lifespan extendable to 100 years hence you need to triple or quadruple the price. And wind, which is generally much more prevalent than solar last in most cases 20 years. In 2016 they have started (in germany) installing twice as big turbines which are likely to have shorter lifespans.
> The only solution here is storage. > Well, eventually we will need storage. That's true for nuclear too.
nuclear doesn't need energy storage.
> Storage seems to be viable even with current tech (not using batteries)
please source, enligthen me, I am unable to find reliable information supporting this.
> Anyway, natural gas generation at night is a pretty good stop-gap
Please let's not be a joke, the discussion is about a long term fossil-free future. Not a thesis that only works until it doesn't.
> grid storage to use lithium at all
wtf, energy storage without batteries is niche. What are you refering to? Water, hydrogen? The majority should be with electric batteries AKA lithium. This should be obvious.
> renewables don't increase the consumption of fossil fuel based sources in any way
Renewable needs pilotable energies. Solar in january and december is almost non existent. How much is an empirical and country dependent question but bewteen 20-30% average share of fossil energy needed seems probable. Meanwhile 100% nuclear is perfectly doable. 70% renewable 30% nuclear is also doable but would be economically inefficient.
> both solar and coal are normally built by private business with proper accounting in practice to compare their costs
Wrong assumption, solar and wind in germany are extensively subsidized.
Anyway the most salient point about this discussion is the storage energy cost and feasability, of which you provide zero data.
regarding lithium availability: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceDiscussion/comments/q78xv... Enough to build 8 billions cars and then zero cars for the next generation LOL. Now add that in addition of one car per habitant we need a similar or even bigger battery for his regular electricity uses, including house heating.
Doing policies that last for just the current generation and not the next centuries is madness. Yes we've all heard there are HUGE reserves in the oceans. Which pointless to say. There are a looot of gold in the oceans too. The density and extractability of it is the key question. The fact this is not currently used means it cost more than current methods. How much more? x10 ? x100? x10000? Who knows? Sharing technical evidence about this issues would improve the depth of the discussion but until then we are manipulating a huge existential risk.
about uranium reserves: right, the current estimate of reserves is of a 230 year supply at current consumption. The needed consumption for 100% would be at least a x10 so let's say we ran out of uranium in 23 years if massively adopted. 1) A major point is that contrary to lithium, the mining industry of uranium is much smaller and therefore if it received mass funding, the reserves might significantly increase. 2) like lithium there are huge oceanic reserves and like lithium, this is not a solution until proven otherwise. 3) reactors that reuse MOX fuel (like e.g. France does) can significantly (how much ?) reduce uranium consumption. Note that lithium can be recycled too but setting a global systematic recycling industry is yet to be done. 4) Indeed thorium reactors (not uranium) are the ideal solution since we have thorium for the next millenium. Thoriums reactors are not just a theoretical concepts, some have been made so it is feasable. It has not been developed because the energy efficiency/economics are inferior (how much ?) although since most of the cost is on the time to build the plant anyway, this should still be a viable solution although not necessarily as cost effective as renewable here (but with an expensive energy storage grid and pragmatic designs (like russian/chinese ones) and taking into account lifespan, and renewable need for fossil fuels/gaz, it very well could be) As for the ocean argument it seems easier to solve for uranium though which is needed in much less quantity (because of its ernergy density) and hence needs less regional density. Note however that water filtration methods for lithium are often similar to existing desalinisation plants. Which ironically are a great specialization for nuclear power plants.
So... The claim safeguards created after major accidents happened are necessary for safety is extraordinary?
They can probably be improved, but then, you keep comparing with Russia and China as if those two countries cared about the safety of their population.
(Anyway, there was a recent paper here on HN that looked into the issue and discovered the costs are more of a consequence of the small size of the industry than the safety constraints. That kind of problem is hard to fix, but if you want to try, it's a worthy cause.)
> completely miss the point that not developing renewable and going for 100% nuclear increase overall economics.
You seem willfully ignorant of how power generation economics work. Or are you talking about the opportunity costs of choosing the cheapest option?
>> But we know it's way longer than that
>who is we? Where is the evidence?
Hum... The first Google result I get seems to be using this data:
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/51664.pdf
TLDR, the worst kind of panel they measured lost less than 2% of it's capacity per year, so about half of its capacity in 50 years. Some slightly more expensive ones lost less than 1% per year.
> > Storage seems to be viable even with current tech (not using batteries)
> please source
Oh, there's a comment on this thread about how hydro-storage can hold about 10 times the requirements for the world. There was one recently about how hydrogen is perfectly sufficiently, as flawed as it is. And of curse, there is always some weird design appearing once in a while, that nobody invests in, of course, because nobody has ever invested on energy storage.
> The majority should be with electric batteries AKA lithium.
What a lack of principled thinking, this equating batteries with lithium. Lithium isn't that great for stationary storage in any way other than the batteries factories already existing.
> Renewable needs pilotable energies.
Not more of them than we are using now. Anyway, no, 100% nuclear doesn't work well either, it would be incredibly expensive. None work without storage. (By the way, you seem to have an incorrect model of why renewables don't decrease their production when they overproduce. Most of them can do it perfectly well if the overproduction becomes too severe, it just brings costs.)
> regarding lithium availability
And then we go into the "what is the meaning of that "reserves" word" treadmill... You may want to look into it in detail, as both lithium and uranium have a problem with that word. None has a problem of availability.
Anyway, about sea extraction, people have done it economically for lithium, but for uranium it's many orders of magnitude harder.
Also, about this:
> reactors that reuse MOX fuel (like e.g. France does) can significantly (how much ?) reduce uranium consumption.
In theory, recycling can reduce consumption around 1000 times (varies with every detail on the lifecycle). Breeding can do much more (that's why thorium is interesting).
Overall, breeding reactors are currently way too expensive. They are interesting on the long term, once those solvable problems get solved. I do agree they have no place at all in a discussion about current energy crisis or global warming.
Fukushima is a good example of this, because the massive amount of paperwork made it hard to see that they could just spend 1/10th the amount of time, energy, and money and better protect their cooling generators and/or ask for help in time from the navy that was sitting just offshore and willing to help
Yes. My idea is that it would be much less harm (to human health and the environment) than is caused by burning brown coal in properly functioning coal-burning power plants.
And much less harm than results from using diesel as a transport fuel. That produces very high levels of carcinogens and other harmful products.
Yet, Europe does both.
Edit: note that these harms are caused every day by equipment working as designed. They are not due to extreme unforeseen circumstances but are accepted as normal.
It is a shame it was unable to prevent green-lighting Vogtle and the other disaster next door.
Depends, what type of plant?
Plenty of nuclear plant designs that just drop the rods into a water bath and halt all activity.
Do you realize what types of health impacts gas leaks are having on densely populated regions right now?
Or how about fracking destroying drinking water? Higher cancer and birth defect rates for surrounding communities.
> How close Japan brush with disaster as the Fukushima fallout could have hit the Tokyo region?
The amount of fallout from Fukushima was obscenely minuscule. The worst case estimates, by the most pessimistic naysayers, 130 extra deaths will result from the accident. The most commonly agreed upon estimates, 0 additional deaths.
Meanwhile, 13k people dead minimum from coal in America each year. No one even tracks the impact from the literal thousands of natural gas leaks that are ongoing. [1] is a nice visualization of natural gas incidents from 2010 to 2017.
Fukushima was a worst case scenario with massive mismanagement on multiple levels, and the sum environmental impact was less than any of the multiple of oil tanker spills that happen, quite literally, multiple times a year. [2]
[1] https://public.tableau.com/views/NaturalGasTransmissionIncid... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills
Also: Germans love their safety regulations, this is never going to happen.
Reactors don’t generate a lot of waste by volume, and it gets less of a problem over time by it’s very nature.
Also: uranium is a finite resource. After it will have run out, it humanity will have to maintain and check these storage sites for that amount of time. Who is expected to pay this? People who don't profit from the power anymore? In my eyes the only solution is either transmutation into less harmful wastes (very costly) or paying the future storage cost for that timeframe upfront (very, very costly).
1) In far less than a million years, the contents of the cask will be well below background radiation levels. Literally less dangerous from radiation than sitting at home.
2) It’s been less than 100 years since Germany had a raving lunatic trying to conquer the world at the helm, and less than 50 since they were split in half between two world superpowers. It’s ridiculous hubris to think anyone could predict or plan more than 100 years in advance with any certainty, let alone a million. And by setting a million year milestone, they’re saying ‘don’t even try to make something that could work now’
3) more people will die from the economic fallout of what the gov’t is doing (and the burning of Coal, wars, etc) than would die from any halfway likely outcome of a nuclear disaster here. They could have multiple Fukushima’s and still be better off.
4) as a species, anything recognizably human has been around AT MOST a single digit multiple of that number. Recorded history and civilization is a tiny fraction of that number. It’s a fun mental game, not a pragmatic limit or has any real meaning in this context.
Also, while Uranium is finite (as is everything else), we’ve got plenty to last the foreseeable future even without any fancy technology advancements. And there is plenty of avenues for that.
It’s the picture of ‘the now is unacceptable, the future is impossible.’
heck even a time scale of 10.000 is beyoned the current civilized world, do you even realize that? how stupid to talk even about millions, if the modern world didn't even exists for a few HUNDRED of years.
and it's stupid to dump shit into the earth without knowing what will happen at point x.
I’m saying ‘don’t set some impossible to achieve goal and fall into analysis paralysis while doing things with far worse known outcomes right now’. Because that is also dumb.
We know putting it in giant steel casks is pretty much foolproof, and will ensure no leaks for at least 40+ years. They’re literally bulletproof. It’s what every major reactor has been doing for 40+ years. Works surprisingly well.
It is an absolute mystery why this does not inspire utmost confidence in the future of safe nuke waste storage...
And yeah, Putin did send folks who did dig parts of it up - and play in it. They are idiots. They might die from it. However, conservatively, at least 10,000-100,000x the number of people already have, or will shortly be dead from more classical methods - artillery, gunfire, incendiaries, etc. Horrible ways to go, all. Near as I can tell, the idiots doing the digging are also likely to be the only ones seriously impacted by it, unlike the others.
Nuclear waste isn’t super healthy or anything, but it’s not even on the radar of ‘nasty shit a maniacal dictator will use to kill people’. Except maybe a bond-type spy ironically.
You know the last Hitler literally had his folks invent ICBMs and setup mass death camps, right?
Even if all the nuclear waste in the world right now went back in time and got spilled in the worst places possible, the mess and ensuing death would be way less than they made.
If it’s entombed in glass or in giant steel casks requiring no further work to keep safe, then the only real danger would be them pulling it out and using it for evil. Which, they’ll already have plenty of evil things at their disposal, and things far easier to use and more scalable for evil too. So not likely to be all that interesting.
Plus security. You need to keep people out- there's always going to be some idiot who wants to get too close or use it for Evil.
That said, I imagine the costs are far less than the alternatives. Rebuilding the grid to satisfy continental-wide wind will produce a lot of CO2.
> By the mid-1970s it became clear that nuclear power would not grow nearly as quickly as once believed. Cost overruns were sometimes a factor of ten above original industry estimates, and became a major problem. For the 75 nuclear power reactors built from 1966 to 1977, cost overruns averaged 207 percent. Opposition and problems were galvanized by the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.[46] [...] Eventually, more than 120 reactor orders were cancelled,[50] and the construction of new reactors ground to a halt.
> The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale … only the blind, or the biased, can now think that the money has been well spent. It is a defeat for the U.S. consumer and for the competitiveness of U.S. industry, for the utilities that undertook the program and for the private enterprise system that made it possible.[53]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...
> In November 2012 it was discovered that over 5,000 small components used in five reactors at Yeonggwang Nuclear Power Plant had not been properly certified; eight suppliers had faked 60 warranties for the parts. Two reactors were shut down for component replacement, which was likely to cause power shortages in South Korea during the winter.[24] Reuters reported this as South Korea's worst nuclear crisis, highlighting a lack of transparency on nuclear safety and the dual roles of South Korea's nuclear regulators on supervision and promotion.[25] This incident followed the prosecution of five senior engineers for the coverup of a serious loss of power and cooling incident at Kori Nuclear Power Plant, which was subsequently graded at INES level 2.[24][26]
> In 2013, there was a scandal involving the use of counterfeit parts in nuclear plants and faked quality assurance certificates. In June 2013 Kori 2 and Shin Wolsong 1 were shut down, and Kori 1 and Shin Wolsong 2 ordered to remain offline, until safety-related control cabling with forged safety certificates is replaced.[27] Control cabling in the first APR-1400s under construction had to be replaced delaying construction by up to a year.[28] In October 2013 about 100 people were indicted for falsifying safety documents, including a former chief executive of Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power and a vice-president of Korea Electric Power Corporation.[29]
Ever since local NY authorities prevented a distant completed reactor from ever being operated by refusing to write a regulation-mandated evacuation plan, it's been mostly impossible to build nuclear in the US. Why put lots of capital at risk when rules might change and it can be decided "ehhhh, nevermind, you can't operate!" at the end of the process years later.
1 - all powerplants should be identical, so you can work out problems on reactor 1 and have no probpems by the time you are building reactor 55. The US model of private companies building random shit doesnt fit well. Thats how wind and solar work - they build thousands of identical solar panels and wind turbines
2 - you cant start and stop construction - if you stopped building for 10 years, your engineers have left, retired or died. Now you build a new reactor, and you are goong to have inexperienced people making the same mistakes. you have to have an institution that is building non-stop for 20 years, like china does.
thats also why wind and solar works - the same teams of people were installing and servicing turbined for decades
3 - factory made - manufacturing of wind and solar is automated to a large degree. Automation in construction is ~0%. Whether you are building a house or a reactor, they are expensive manual labour. Some of this might be solved with prefab buildings, some might be solved with Small Moduper reactors, but approached require large investment and long-term commitment