Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

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Power companies where I have lived can charge a percentage over costs. Basically, they can build nuclear all they want; amortize it and charge 10% above cost to customers.

Further, I can imagine an insurance broker (similar to the FDIC) collaborating across areas of nuclear was an option.

Laws are what’s stopping nuclear, not finances or economics. I’ve mentioned it here before, my family was in the industry building nuclear plants. They’d have 3+ people for every weld, fit; etc.

example of real situation: contractor is supposed to weld frame, the union guy is supposed to weld pipes, there are different inspectors for each. Pipe inspector comes Wednesday, frame inspector comes Thursday. Frame must be inspected before pipe is in.

Contractor welds pipe and frame Tuesday because union guy is out sick. Pipe inspector approves on Wednesday. Pipe welder returns Thursday, frame inspector comes and pipe welder complains, take it out.

Next week, the pipe welder drinks all week. Frame welder welds frame, inspection complete and passes.

Following week pipe welder completes weld for pipe. But inspector was out sick. Further sections must be put on hold until inspected.

Following week pipe inspector inspects and approve.

At this point the project is 1 month behind where it could have been due to union rules (enforced by law) & legal requirements of inspection.

What really put the nail in the coffin, was (I believe it was GE) was caught faking photos of pipes. There was then a requirement to remove and replace all the piping for a project(s) - at cost. Which was a hell of a lot of money and regulations were then dramatically increased. Haven’t built since.

> Power companies where I have lived can charge a percentage over costs. Basically, they can build nuclear all they want; amortize it and charge 10% above cost to customers.

This doesn't solve the economics, if the cost is too high it doesn't matter that you can charge the consumers extra. You have to weigh it against other energy investments you can do instead.

> Power companies where I have lived can charge a percentage over costs. Basically, they can build nuclear all they want; amortize it and charge 10% above cost to customers.

Okay, and if people are selling wind or solar at 30% of the price, why would anyone pay to the nuclear plant?

> Laws are what’s stopping nuclear, not finances or economics. I’ve mentioned it here before, my family was in the industry building nuclear plants. They’d have 3+ people for every weld, fit; etc.

Well, tough shit, that's how things work when you're dealing with dangerous stuff. I fully believe nuclear can be a safe technology. But it's only safe when everything is done by the rules, and there are inspectors for everything.

If modern renewables are so affordable as investments, provide quick returns, and produce electrictiy that's 30% the cost of nuclear, then why isn't it everywhere and electric power very cheap?

They are pretty much everywhere nowadays, because they're such good investments. The fact that they're intermittent is a big problem for nuclear and other "constant" power sources, resulting in their gradual disappearance. More renewables will make this happen even faster. The problem is that this is not necessarily good for the grid as a whole if there are no power sources that can fill in when renewables aren't producing as much, while they at the same time have priced the stable sources out of the market.

> The problem is that this is not necessarily good for the grid as a whole

I agree. Average electricity prices seem to be higher the more renewables are available in a given area.

It seems to me that this, in part, is due to the pricing mechanisms available. Let's say a nuclear based energy company could sell power to its customers at a fixed price, where the customer would commit to buying this even when the spot price went lower.

Now, let's also assume that the customer would only pay for the grid capacity needed to transfer this power from the local power plant. If companies selling wind power needed a grid capable of transmitting the power from the other side of the continent, that extra cost would be slapped on top of the wind power, NOT other power sources.

In sum, this should make it possible to sell the nuclear power to consumers at prices moderatly above the production cost (plus taxes, local grid costs and reasonable profits).

For old nuclear plants (or those built at the prices available in Korea or China), this would make the price to the consumer quite competitive, if not outright cheaper than energy mixes based on renewables and natural gas.

Also, there is nothing technical that prevents us from building nuclear plants at the safety standards of those plants, with designs from about 1970 not only at the same price (inflation adjusted) as back then, but even much cheaper, due to technological developments. If so, I would expect production costs below $20/MWh. This would still cause less total harm per TWh than any other stable power mix available today.

What prevents this seems to be regulations at every level, where nuclear is burdened with all sorts of extra costs, ranging from insane security requirements and other red tape, limits on pricing in many markets, having to pay for the extra grid capacity required by renewable sources, excessive taxes or deposits for externalities that is not required for other energy sources.

Now let's say all power sources were held to the same standards when it comes to externalities such as safety/harm caused.

This would mean that wind would have to deposit enough funds to ensure proper recycling of blades at end-of-life (or at the very least, safe storage). Ditto for solar. Hydrocarbons have the same allowances for toxic substances as nuclear, in terms lives lost and diseases caused. The harm from greenhouse gases could also be priced in this way. Grid costs would be allocated proportionally to grid capacity requirements.

If we do this, I'm convinced Nuclear would come out as the cheaper than renewables combined with enough hydrocarbon plants (or batteries) to even out the variability of the production capacity. If all power source were punished the same as nuclear for any risks, they would be impossibly expensive. If the demands on nuclear were reduced to the same levels as other sources, it would become dirt cheap.

All of these changes would favour solar + battery to a rather ridiculous degree. Especially given recycling PV is already mandatory in civilised countries and costs very little (and will likely be revenue positive as supply chains mature). Nuclear waste management funds would also have to increase, the industry would have to pay its fair share for security and liability limits (ie. Free public insurance) would have to go away to be fair as well. The nuclear industry would also have to actually remediate the uranium mines which it has historically never done. Wind also has to pay for decomissioning in many cases, and it doesn't really alter the costs because dealing with 10kg/kW of fiberglass is insignificant and recycling the other materials is revenue positive. You'd also be double charging many renewable projects (especially offshore wind) because the frequently include the costs of transmission. And every time your nuclear plant at one end of the state went offline for two months for refuelling and maintenance you'd be paying more than the wind turbines for transmission.

If your impossible to solve for or fairly charge market came about, the net result is no-one would build anything other than parking lot and commercial rooftop solar + battery storage or at-site renewables for industrial until around 60-90% of demand was met. Then nuclear still wouldn't be remotely viable, but it would be harder to build wind and pumped hydro.

And your fantasy about 70s reactors is based on them getting free money, a workforce with free training, free design work, using completely different accounting methods and resulting in designs that were only online half the time. During entire period before TMI construction costs were rising >20% yoy.

The incoherence of the claims about APRs being cheaper than big heavy reactors, then bigger heavier reactors being cheaper, then SMRs being cheaper all for opposite reasons would be kind of amusing if public officials didn't keep falling for them.

> What prevents this seems to be regulations at every level, where nuclear is burdened with all sorts of extra costs, ranging from insane security requirements and other red tape, limits on pricing in many markets, having to pay for the extra grid capacity required by renewable sources, excessive taxes or deposits for externalities that is not required for other energy sources.

These 'ridiculous' regulations constantly prove themselves necessary for preventing multi-trillion dollar damages to the public. Barely a year goes by where there isn't an operator or builder caught doing at least one and often two of the five simultaneous colossally stupid things that have to happen simultaneously to cause a proper meltdown. The strict rules are the only reason there's yet to be an actually bad plant failure or mishandling of Pu239 or waste. Even with regulations preventing a major failure, ukraine and japan are spending enough on cleanup and economic damage to use up over half of your $20/MWh for every joule ever produced by a nuclear reactor anywhere on the planet.

They take time to build, solar is intermittent, and just like with nuclear there are NIMBY issues. Installed solar capacity is rapidly going up.

Solar in particular is a big potential issue for nuclear, because so long the sun is shining, why would you buy any nuclear power? Solar is far cheaper to provide, so any rational person would buy solar first. And the more solar the less nuclear has to do during the day, which means that all those billions take longer and longer to pay off.

And you better hope storage doesn't kick off before that.

So renewables are not cheap, easy, and quick?

They're very cheap compared to building nuclear, very easy to build compared to nuclear, and go up in weeks or months rather than years, so also quick.

Capacity is being rapidly added, but there's not enough of them yet.

So it's easy to throw up some wind turbines and solar panels, but difficult, expensive, and requires cutting-edge technology to make them useful as power sources to the national grid?

No, we just need to build more of them.

Renewables started being competitive fairly recently and you can't just magic solar panels and turbines out of thin air, they need to be built. And we're rapidly building them.

Which by the way, the very reason why we're having this conversation. If nuclear was such a great proposition, people would go and build it. We wouldn't be having silly arguments about its worth on websites that affect nothing. People with billions of money to spend and who expect juicy profits don't need Hacker News' validation.

We (well, at least in the UK) have plenty of them. It's all that tricky, expensive, and financially unrewarding infrastructure that's holding things back.

We pay Scottish windfarms about £200million per year to curtail their output, just because we can't get the power from source to sink.

Because customers want electricity 24 hours/day, 7 days/week and 52 weeks/year. Conversely renewables are intermittent. So the basic solutions are to massively overbuild renewables, to massively increase the capacity of the electric grid--so you can move huge amounts of electricity all around the country, have massive amounts of very expensive electricity storage and/or to have a massive fossil fuel backup system.

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> So the basic solutions are to massively overbuild renewables,

And who the fuck is doing that? Because they're not god-damned cheap if you do that!

I do not care if you can sell your product for cheap if I have to buy a much more expensive, planet-killing fossil-fuel product to make up for your SLA of "ha ha ha oh my god they think we have an SLA", which is why none of these academic ideas actually fucking include storage or SLAs! And no, cheap storage is not a fucking thing! Someone earlier on HN today was boasting of a solution that cost $800,000 per MWh, and if it exponentially decayed in cost at a rate greater than any industrial improvement ever for the next decade, it would still be more expensive than nuclear!

And yes, I'm angry, because empirically, on the very grid I use, that is exactly what has happened. We're paying, not the "extortionate" $100 or so nuclear promised, but over $500, because something needs to keep the lights on at moments not convenient for the intermittence. And I've worked with the industrial consumers of their product, conferences where literally everyone has academic AND industry experience in real engineering, and they're fucking suicidal because of the losses incurred by this shit, Europe-fucking-wide.

This is not okay. This is fraud.

> And who the fuck is doing that? Because they're not god-damned cheap if you do that!

Nobody is doing it yet because nobody is even close to having too much solar or wind at this point. But that's still likely cheaper in the end.

> And yes, I'm angry, because empirically, on the very grid I use, that is exactly what has happened. We're paying, not the "extortionate" $100 or so nuclear promised, but over $500, because something needs to keep the lights on at moments not convenient for the intermittence.

Nuclear promised power too cheap to meter. That's never materialized. Nuclear promises many things, but so far shows no signs of fulfilling them.

Eg, Hinkley Point C in the UK is infamous for that it's already economically nonsensical and can only exist because the government guaranteed a subsidy. It's already not competitive with modern renewables. That's unlikely to improve in the future.

>Nuclear promises many things, but so far shows no signs of fulfilling them.

Last time I checked, France's nuclear power stations were keeping the lights on in Europe while Germany scrambles to start up coal plants.

What does that have to do with anything?

My argument isn't that nuclear doesn't work as a technology -- it obviously produces power. My argument is that building nuclear is not competitive, and that's why nobody is building any.

If you already have a working power plant obviously it can and should be used. Somebody already footed the bill for that one, so that problem is solved for that particular plant. But that has nothing to do with whether building more is a good idea.

>building nuclear is not competitive

It clearly is, if France is selling nuclear power to the rest of Europe.

By that logic the people who bought tesla stock at $400 and are sellng it now prove that it was a good investment so long as they spent their kid's college fund on buying it in the first place.

So anything's a gamble? Gotcha.

Well no. They were both scams. It's just in the latter case you get to choose not to buy, but in the former your tax is spent on it to hide the costs.

The problem with "energy too cheap to meter" is that it has to very quickly become "energy too cheap to make a profit from". And that is the _real_ obstacle to prolific nuclear.

Nuclear's problem isn't that energy is too cheap, it's that nuclear generated electricity is too expensive in comparison to the competition.

That wasn't the original hope -- formerly, they hoped nuclear plants would be cheap and plentiful. My understanding is that "too cheap to meter" just refers to a flat rate -- why bother measuring (especially before modern times, back when that required people visiting meters in person), when you can charge a flat rate? But that clearly was extremely optimistic.

> that's how things work when you're dealing with dangerous stuff

What the OP described was looking more like an Italian strike than manufacturing sensitive construction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule

> Okay, and if people are selling wind or solar at 30% of the price, why would anyone pay to the nuclear plant?

You do both.

Energy companies can get secured loans for low rates. They can take a massive loan and do both, historically for 3-7% interest. They can immediately start charging for the loan, plus interest.

The more power they have (and if the equipment lasts long enough) they can reduce the overall cost per watt to generate, while paying off their loan.

In other words, they end up building endless capacity. Eventually prices come down and they make more money on the ride.

> You do both.

Do both what? My question is, if it's daytime, the sun is shining, and there's a solar provider selling power cheaper than nuclear, why would a rational person buy any nuclear power at all at that point in time?

> Energy companies can get secured loans for low rates.

Not for nuclear, or there'd be more of it!

Think of it, you're a bank and considering the case of a USD $9B loan that nuclear plant's owner will pay off in 20-30 years if everything goes well. And if it doesn't? 30 years is a very long time, especially with renewables now quickly being built.

If you have $9B to work with there's a lot of alternative business plans that don't involve putting all of it into a single piece of infrastructure that may not ever make a profit.

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