why cant we have a bit of both? renewable seems very good long term and nuclear is also nice for transition. but I wouldnt want to live next to one of those crappy leaky french reactors.
We tried four reactors back then, using a new regulatory process that was supposed to speed construction and reduce costs. Instead, costs and timelines ballooned 3x. Two of the four reactors were abandoned half-way through construction, resulting in rate payers holding the bag for billions of dollars and no Wh delivered to the grid. Executives are being criminally prosecuted for fraud.
The other two reactors are supposed to complete late this year, but I don't think any honest person should rely on such timelines when they inevitably slip every single time.
Nuclear is not something we can realiably build. We are bad at big construction jobs to begin with. But when you add in training up massive new workforces for extremely specialized welding or concrete pour skills, it's hugely inefficient because we don't know how to utilize this labor effectively. People sit idle for months, waiting for their chance to work. Just a gigantic clusterfuck of logistical (mis)management.
And construction productivity has stagnated since the 70s, while manufacturing productivity has gone through the roof. We should use our limited construction capacity to build factories to manufacture things, not spend it on nuclear reactors. $15B spent on solar or battery production facilities will churn out many many GW year after year of additional capacity, whereas it only buys a single GW of nuclear. And that's in the best case scenario where we actually finish the damn reactor...
These were the Westinghouse AP1000 units to be installed in Georgia and South Carolina, contract beginning in 2008. It's worth noting that four other AP1000 units also from Westinghouse were built and installed in China, beginning construction in 2009 and entering into operation in 2018. The total cost of both systems was slightly more than half the cost of the failed project in South Carolina.
>And construction productivity has stagnated since the 70s, while manufacturing productivity has gone through the roof.
You seem to be arguing that we shouldn't bother building major projects, but I think this implies the opposite: we need to find ways to fix the construction industry. The US is currently facing a situation where cities can't grow like they used to; growing cities quickly become unaffordable, where by contrast Chicago sustained rapid growth for decades before the Great Depression.
The time to transition is now, and making that transition with the ample tools we have right now is a good thing. It's not an argument that we shouldnt improve construction. It's an argument that we should at a minimum do what we know how to do.
If you have ideas on how to improve construction efficiency in the US, it's an absolutely massive addressable market that gets too little attention, and should definitely be addressed. I would love to go work for somebody that is fixing construction, if I had the right skills. I would love even more to do it myself, but I have zero experience or ideas.
The French, Americans, Russians, and Japanese have all had periods of time where they built them quickly and cost effectively too. But then various institutional rot sets in. We're going to have to keep building big things anyways so it's not like having that capability is wasted.
Look, for example, at the challenges that are being experienced as we try to build chip fabs in the US.
Instintutional knowledge and capability are real things. And I definitely think that construction capability is an important thing to build.
But let's improve our construction capability on building real things that get built and improve our capabilities, such as battery factories or solar panel factories or transmission lines or other things that get build closer to on-time, and then use those contractors that succeed to try more ambitious projects.
Let's not piss away billions of dollars with no sustained knowledge growth or construction capacity improvement. Trying to build even, say, 10GW of new nuclear right now would be posing away 90% of the capital. We don't even know who we would really hire for this!
Until we have a track record that's strong enough to attract investment, I don't see the rush to burn money on nuclear builds. It won't help the climate, and it doesn't even help the nuclear industry.
If you don't want to do that, you can do what the UAE did and hire the Koreans to teach you how to build plants. They went from no nuclear program to 5.4 GW of clean energy in 10 ish years.
What utility would do this? It is financial suicide. There's no allocator of capital whos going to look at Vogue and think "yes this is worth another shot". None. What investor?
There's two half-built reactors in South Carolina. Who would be foolish to even try to complete them now?
There is literally no one with the expertise to execute on more reactors that thinks we should order more AP1000, because now in 2023 we know much more than we did in 2008 and we know that nobody in the US can build them competitively.
The first reactor is always the slowest and most expensive because you're going to make mistakes. Building just one is always a mistake. We've paid the deposit, so now we should reap the benefits of having the experience. We know what not to do now. With your attitude, we'd never build anything big.
Poland might need to use expensive nuclear, but it's not the case in the continental US. Poland is not the US, has far cheaper labor, and I don't know the status of their construction industry or their funding sources, but they are different from the US's.
Again, if you think that this is a good idea for the US, how are you going to convince a utility to do this? And if it's an investor operated power gen facility, what investor would risk this?
If it's a government-funded and owned facility, then that would solve thee funding source. It's another question if it's a wise use of capital, and yet another of who does the EPC. Perhaps Bechtel? Definitely the most likely to succeed.
My attitude is not to avoid big projects. I think we need to build massive big projects. HVDC. High speed rail. Subways in all major cities. Massive factories, mines, etc. Advanced geothermal. New hydro in select locations. All of these projects will have better pay off, less risk, and increase the construction capacity of the US. Nuclear is not a wise choice for any of this. If we can increase our productivity on large projects, then it's time to try projects with less payoff, like nuclear.
> It's most definitely not the case that successive reactors are cheaper or faster, that's a myth that gets told but the data says otherwise both in the US and France and many other countries (but not all).
Maybe, but Votgle is a massive outlier and successive plants of the same design are all but guaranteed to be faster and cheaper. You don't make those kinds of mistakes twice.
For the long term trend, like you said it depends on the country. You can see in this figure: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Overnight-Construction-C...
The giant explosion in costs for the US starts right when the disastrous ALARA regulation is adopted in 1971. Entirely self-inflicted wound. France and South Korea largely don't experience a cost increase in the time periods shown.
You're going to have trouble convincing me that we can't pull off a Messmer plan because it has literally been done before. Yes, the government should be in charge of and finance it. That's the only realistic option and that is what has worked before. Hire the Koreans if we have to. Build us 3 or 4 Barakahs. It's been done. It's being done. It can be done again.
Look at all the Us construction projects from the 70's, before Three Mile Island.
2-4x the budget and 2-4x the timeline should be the expectation.
Just because something was done in a particular time and place doesn't mean that the same thing can be achieved again, or even that we would want it. We have different people in different positions of power, completely different technological capabilities, completely different regulations. I haven't heard anyone suggest that we should get rid of ALARA that works in the field. And I certainly don't know anybody who works in the field who would ever want to build the same designs from the past.
We have new and better tech, different costs of labor, everything is different. We need to operate on our best knowledge and tech today, not that from 50-60 years ago. You'll never convince me that's a sane way to make massive capital allocations.
It is for countries that only build a few reactors. Again, China and Korea don't have this problem because they build lots of reactors. They aren't aliens. China doesn't even have cheap labor these days. The South Koreans are an advanced economy like us. They got good at it by doing it. There is no reason why we couldn't do that. We just don't want to and then we say it's not possible because we aren't good at it. It's circular logic. We've been saying it takes too long for decades when that is plenty of time to rebuild those skills and then build reactors quickly. We could've been done by now.
> Look at all the Us construction projects from the 70's, before Three Mile Island.
The chart in my last comment shows those reactors were built economically. If you look at the reactor build times at PRIS you can see the build times are quite impressive too: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
> I haven't heard anyone suggest that we should get rid of ALARA that works in the field
Why is that surprising? They are trained and educated that this is the correct and lawful standard to which they must operate. It's baked in to the institutions.
> You'll never convince me that's a sane way to make massive capital allocations.
The alternative will be even more capital intensive and it's completely unproven. You need to build out thousands of miles of high voltage transmission and TWhs of battery/hydrogen/hydro storage. It's unproven. No nation has a majority wind/solar grid without fossil fuel backup. Some places are blessed with enough hydro resources but that won't work in the US. We already know you can mostly decarbonize a grid with nuclear because France did it 40 years ago.
Because they're economically incompatible.
Nuclear is very expensive to build, and wants to run 24/7 to offset costs. They also want to run continuously.
The problem is that renewables are cheap, but intermittent.
So take an economically rational marketplace. I can either buy the same amount of power for $1, or for $2, what do you think I'd choose? $1 of course. Power is power, I don't want to pay more than I must.
So any time I can buy renewables for $1, nuclear makes no revenue. This pushes off its payoff into the future. This isn't a good situation to be in. Time goes by, components get older, people get impatient, more renewables keep getting built.
Now you're a bank considering a loan for nuclear you think might be paid off in 20 years. Or if renewables keep growing, maybe in 40. Or if they really take off, maybe never. Risking billions that way doesn't sound enticing, now does it?
If nuclear made money we wouldn't be seeing these blog posts show up over and over. Money solves many problems and greases many palms. If nuclear was profitable, every other problem would be solvable. Not enough safety? Money can buy that. Too close to people? Money can put a plant further away. Legal problems? Money pays for lawyers.
The logical end state of all this seems to be that renewables kill off the profitability of nuclear badly enough that nobody builds it (relatively speaking). Eventually the grid destabilizes and this forces urgent measures to shore things up. The final state I imagine is a very renewable-heavy grid, after a period of chaos in the middle.
I can't believe that modern nuclear plants wouldn't be dramatically more profitable.
Even if they weren't, it would be worth government incentives to prevent grid destabilization as wind and solar take over as the main sources.
Fast-responding natural gas plants are used for rapid response to changing load. Hydro (storage or regular) as well. More recently, energy storage systems like the huge system Tesla deployed in Australia.
If I had a dollar for every HN commenter that doesn't understand the basics of grids and generation but considers themselves an expert in how awesome nuclear is...
I can.
First, nuclear doesn't always get cheaper. Chernobyl happened, how do we fix that? Containment building. That costs money. Fukushima happened, how do we fix that? Better backup plans. That costs money. Renewables skip this completely.
Second, renewables also benefit from progress, but a lot more. Solar and wind are mass industry production. Each iteration is cheap. Experimentation is cheap and safe and done all over the world. Production is highly amenable towards automation. Nuclear isn't.
So we have factories pumping out millions of solar cells, but we don't have factories pumping out millions of nuclear vessels, because nuclear plants are rare, one off projects that don't justify mass production, and are too rare to have a robust industry and lots of competition.
> Even if they weren't, it would be worth government incentives to prevent grid destabilization as wind and solar take over as the main sources.
Yeah, but there are other options that can be used. Eg, yeah, we can spend decades building nuclear and waiting until it starts to work, or we can do things like improving the grid transmission which works out to simple tasks that are doable much faster and amenable to mass production.
Same goes for say, pumped hydro and battery storage. Those things can already be done, and you can start doing it much faster than you'll get nuclear built.
Western nuclear power plants always had containment buildings, so no, this isn't a factor.
> Fukushima happened, how do we fix that? Better backup plans.
Most places aren't subject to magnitude 9.1 earthquakes, so no such plans are needed.
Nuclear power benefits from economies of scale. Building a nuclear power plant involves constructing things like pressure vessels and steam generators that have no market outside of nuclear power construction. The price history of nuclear plants demonstrates this: The plants built during the nuclear boom during the late 60s and early 70s were some of the cheapest forms of decarbonized energy production [1]. Producing a run of 40 steam generators [2] is a lot cheaper than a run of 4 steam generators. Same with pressure vessels, and other costly components. Serialized production of the same design yields cost savings.
> Same goes for say, pumped hydro and battery storage. Those things can already be done, and you can start doing it much faster than you'll get nuclear built.
No, we can't. This is just hand-waving away the biggest obstacle to widespread deployment of intermittent sources. Hydro storage is geographically dependent: you essentially need to be able to create an artificial alpine lake, and it needs to be close to an existing lake or river in order to fill it.
Battery storage remains prohibitively expensive. The actual cost of battery storage is much higher than the raw cost of lithium batteries [3]. Labor, installation, and DC to AC conversion equipment leads to net costs of ~$500/KWh.
This is why plans for a grid primarily powered intermittent sources assume that some other battery chemistry or hydrogen storage will make energy storage essentially free.
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_power...
3. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-co...
The point is that nuclear is safe because we've been making it safer over time, and that rarely makes it cheaper. The specific ways in which that's done isn't the point.
Mass production in general is made cheaper by simplifying and cutting corners. Nuclear isn't terribly friendly towards this, you can't just go "How about we use 30% less concrete?"
> Nuclear power benefits from economies of scale.
Everything does, but nuclear benefits less. Precisely because of what you said, they have no other market use. You'll need to convince industries that it's worth scaling up for that, and that it won't backfire. That will be tricky.
> No, we can't.
You're missing the point. Here's what I envision:
1. Renewables continue to eat nuclear's lunch 2. Nuclear keeps not getting built 3. Eventually grid destabilizes 4. People want solutions, right now
At point 4, nobody is going to sit there and wait 5-10 years for nuclear to be built. Yeah, batteries are expensive, but remember Tesla's battery in Australia that got done in 100 days?
So that's how I see things going. Once the shit hits the fan, urgent solutions will be needed. And pretty much everything is much faster than nuclear.
I'm not envisioning some utopic future, but one where problems will be ignored until something goes quite wrong, that's going to suck for a while, then things get hurriedly rectified in a huge rush and at great expense, but that will still favor non-nuclear solutions.
Er, no it is the point. We've always been using the safety mechanisms you specified, so it's not going to affect costs because those safety features have always been there.
> Everything does, but nuclear benefits less. Precisely because of what you said, they have no other market use. You'll need to convince industries that it's worth scaling up for that, and that it won't backfire. That will be tricky.
Quite the contrary, it makes it benefit vastly more from economies of scale. For example, one of the central components in a wind turbine is an alternator or dynamo. We make alternators for all kinds of products, so doubling the production of wind turbines doesn't remotely double the market for alternators because wind turbines are only a small segment of the market for alternators.
By comparison, nuclear pressure vessels are only used for nuclear power plants. Thus doubling the production of nuclear pressure vessels doubles the market for pressure vessels. Serialized production of nuclear power at scale would easily expand the market for nuclear power components by an order of magnitude. The same cannot be said of wind turbines and alternators.
You're missing the context that renewables are currently being used to supplement a primarily fossil fuel grid. This means we don't actually have to accommodate the intermittent nature of renewable production. Once renewables saturate the energy market during peak production, things become a lot harder for renewables. You're comparing apples to oranges when you compare an intermittent source to a non-intermittent source.
People want solutions right now, and intermittent sources are not a solution until cheap and scalable energy storage is invented. Which it hasn't. We have geographically-limited options like hydro which are good for the regions that have access to it. But for everywhere else, it's either continue to use fossil fuels or nuclear power.
> Yeah, batteries are expensive, but remember Tesla's battery in Australia that got done in 100 days?
How much does it store? Media reports this as "2,000 megawatt seconds" [1]. In other words, 0.55 megawatt hours. This is less electricity than a small nuclear plant produces every minute. To put this in perspective the US alone consumes about 12 TWh (or 12,000,000 MWh) of electricity every day. We'd need tens of millions of these battery facilities.
Again, there's a reason why plans for a primary renewable grid assume hydrogen storage, or some new battery chemistry will be a silver bullet for storage.
1. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/27/tesla-big-battery-beg...
Again, the point is a generic one. When we find a problem with nuclear, we add extra safety systems. Those cost money. This is something much rarer with say, solar or wind because there's less that can go wrong, less backups needed, and breakage is much more acceptable.
> We make alternators for all kinds of products, so doubling the production of wind turbines doesn't remotely double the market for alternators because wind turbines are only a small segment of the market for alternators.
But it does mean there's factories already pumping them out, plentiful production capacity, competition, and cheap prices.
> People want solutions right now, and intermittent sources are not a solution until cheap and scalable energy storage is invented.
I don't think you're still quite getting what I'm getting at.
Consideration on the level you speak of doesn't exist. Nobody is in charge of the whole system, so a full functional system doesn't matter.
People will build intermittent sources because they're cheap to build, and because intermittency isn't the provider's problem.
Then things break, and people will seek solutions. There will be a rush and various patchwork solutions being implemented in a panic.
You're thinking like a sane person, trying to transition to a different stable system and ensuring it will work properly from the start. I think that won't be the case. We will keep pushing until things break, everyone will blame everyone else, and we'll need to fix things in a hurry.
And again, we already added that safety system. There is no "extra safety systems" because it's already there.
> But it does mean there's factories already pumping them out, plentiful production capacity, competition, and cheap prices.
Exactly: production is already at scale so making a large order for a bunch of alternators for wind turbines isn't going to lead to further saving because it's a drop in the total market for alternators. As a contrast to nuclear power components - where nuclear plants are the only market - so a tenfold increase in the production of nuclear plants leads to a tenfold increase in the production of pressure vessels.
> People will build intermittent sources because they're cheap to build, and because intermittency isn't the provider's problem. Then things break, and people will seek solutions. There will be a rush and various patchwork solutions being implemented in a panic.
Correct, and the solution to intermittency that we've found is to burn fossil fuels. The battery storage facilities being provisioned are nowhere near large enough to be significant. Hydroelectric storage requires specific geographic features, and isn't widely available. You're right: when we have shortages of electricity people will implement solutions. And the solution grid operators have found to the intermittency problem is to continue burning fossil fuels.
No. Every time we have an accident we think of what could have prevented it, and invent more safety systems.
Eg, Fukushima wasn't just "account for tsunamis", which is a local problem. One resulting requirement is "Ensure that the required parts to keep the reactor said can be made available and brought in by helicopter within 24 hours even if the terrain is impassable".
So that added a nigh universal requirement to store various replacement parts and to ensure some way to deliver water, as well as the availability of helicopters to bring that in. That increases the price of every nuclear plant out there. Maybe not by a huge amount, but it does.
And renewables escape that because nobody cares if something knocks down a wind turbine, so long it doesn't fall on somebody's head.
> As a contrast to nuclear power components - where nuclear plants are the only market - so a tenfold increase in the production of nuclear plants leads to a tenfold increase in the production of pressure vessels.
10X of approximately nothing might still not be enough to bother automating anything, and you'd have to convince those companies that demand is going to stay and make the investment worthwhile. Meanwhile we're not about to stop needing gearboxes and generators.
> Correct, and the solution to intermittency that we've found is to burn fossil fuels.
Fair, but again backs up my view that nuclear isn't going to happen.
And for the third time, the safety systems that would have prevented Chernobyl are already present in western reactors:
* Western reactors have secondary containment
* Western reactors also use dedicated control and moderator rods
We don't need to spend the money to invent more safety systems if we already have them.
> 10X of approximately nothing might still not be enough to bother automating anything, and you'd have to convince those companies that demand is going to stay and make the investment worthwhile. Meanwhile we're not about to stop needing gearboxes and generators.
It's not a question of automation, it's more of a factor of institutional knowledge and overhead cost of design. When building something unique like a steam generator a new manufacturer typically builds a broken first model and has to iterate a couple times before nailing down the manufacturing process. That overhead cost can be amortized over a larger production run.
You're stuck on Chernobyl. I repeat, it was an example of a trend. The specific example wasn't intended to be of any particular importance. The trend of accident -> extra security is.
So yeah, Chernobyl was a bad example, but that does nothing to change that when something on a nuclear plant goes wrong, we look at how to stop future accidents, and add extra tech for monitoring/backups/etc, making nuclear more expensive, which is one of the reasons why price hasn't gone down over time. Because we've added extra stuff on top to patch up both big and smaller problems that cropped up.
Though I think that without Chernobyl it's well possible somebody would have eventually suggested maybe a containment building isn't quite necessary. Because it sure isn't free.
Meanwhile, if a wind turbine falls apart somewhere, for the most part we just ignore it. It's a problem for the operator. We're not trying to ensure no wind turbine anywhere doesn't fall apart ever.
This is painfully wrong. Go shopping for pretty much any industrial part, and you'll pay through the nose for a few. Order a few dozen, and you get massive discounts in price for identical products.
It takes time and effort to configure machines and tooling to produce something. Those are fixed costs- the more you order, the per-unit price of those fixed costs drops.
> Once the shit hits the fan
That's not gonna happen. No climate model is predicting a doomsday event. It's going to continue to be a slow, gradually worsening crisis at worst. From a political perspective, it'll never need an urgent solution, because next year isn't going to be significantly different from this year- just a little bit. Even for those people who finally realize they're going to be displaced, no urgent solution could possibly turn back the clock, short of a massive deployment of C02 removal from the atmosphere.
I'm not talking about the climate. I'm talking about the grid.
My prediction is that we'll keep on building renewables until renewables break the grid, then patch it up in a hurry, and nuclear will still not be built in the end.
Power companies don't get to just start supplying electricity to the grid at will; rather than the grid breaking, operators will simply say "no more". At that point, the only urgency will be an artificial, political one.
Nuclear fits our existing grid paradigm, and it can be built quickly if we let ourselves. Japan's median reactor build time was under 4 years. France built out their nuclear fleet in 15 to 20 years. It's literally been done before.
But of course, dams can't be built everywhere, so it's not a scalable solution.
That's the other baffling part about advocating for solar/wind grids. We're anticipating major disruptions. Why would we want to be MORE exposed to climate change?
I've seen this argument repeated a lot lately, and it's annoying, because it focuses entirely on the wrong thing. What went wrong with Fukushima was not the earthquake itself, but the flooding caused by it. A lot more places in the world are vulnerable to flooding than they are to earthquakes (I myself live in one of these: zero noticeable earthquakes, a lot of rain-caused flooding and landslides, and next to a nuclear power complex). And AFAIK, all or nearly all nuclear power plants in the world reviewed their backup power systems after Fukushima, to make sure their generators and power switches are not in an area of the plant which could be flooded.
A nuclear reactor in Sweden had a severe incident in 2006 when many of the "defense in depth" layers had been accidentally removed through freak occurrences and upgrades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
Nuclear is one of the safest form of electricity generation, even though plants built before 1980 account for most electricity production. Safety is not an issue with nuclear, when doing a good-faith comparison with other forms of energy production and the continued damage of climate change.
You can't build a building that contains a steam explosion from a runaway reactor. If you could, the reactor could be made indestructible in the first place.
Chernobyl has cost over 600 bn since 1986 and costs billions per year still, and will do so for the foreseeable future. The same goes for Fukushima.
Such costs could appear at any time, anywhere in the world that has a nuclear reactor. For example due to negligence, acts of war or terrorism. No earthquake required.
>Hydro storage is geographically dependent: you essentially need to be able to create an artificial alpine lake
True if you want to create it from scratch, but many countries already have lots of hydro that could be increased by adding pumps to existing dams. Other countries can use other methods, like store heat, for example in molten salt. Thermal solar power plants generate power even during the night. Or you can generate Hydrogen or Nitrogen. Or you can store pressurized air on the ocean floor. Or you can use batteries.
There are a number of options, and they all have the benefit of being safe enough and cheap enough that they can be made by anyone anywhere, even at small scale.
I personally think that the ease of deployment will be the killer feature for storage, as it was for solar.
Wrong: we can, and do, build concrete domes that contain a potential steam explosion. The pressure vessel has to connect to steam generators, control rods, and more whereas the secondary containment does not. Furthermore, once the pressure vessel explodes, the water boils off and is no longer being heated by the core.
> Chernobyl has cost over 600 bn since 1986 and costs billions per year still, and will do so for the foreseeable future. The same goes for Fukushima.
Got a source for these claims? Especially the "billions per year still" for Chernobyl? Even the more extreme estimates claim $200B for Fukushima, and much of that is speculative (nowhere near that much has actually been spent).
> Other countries can use other methods, like store heat, for example in molten salt. Thermal solar power plants generate power even during the night. Or you can generate Hydrogen or Nitrogen. Or you can store pressurized air on the ocean floor. Or you can use batteries.
Except for solar thermal (which was never cost competitive, and still suffers from intermittency due to weather), all of these things are experimental. Like I said: in order to make intermit energy sources feasible, we need some new form of energy storage that yields order-of-magnitude improvements over existing storage systems. Maybe some of these will be our silver bullet for storage. Maybe not. Most don't want to gamble the future of civilization on the guess that some silver bullet will be found.
Sure! If you are honestly interested in the truth, it's quite easy to find information about all things nuclear. The veneer of falsehoods causing people to believe that nuclear is cheap and safe when it clearly isn't is very thin and will only affect those who don't really want to know.
Here's an estimate from 2016 for Chernobyl, the total back then was estimated to be around 700 bn USD but with some uncertainty. It's probably safe to say at least 600bn now, and it's ongoing.
https://uscglobalhealth.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/2016_che...
The yearly costs for handling Chernobyl (before the recent war) were over 5% of the national budget of Ukraine, and countries as far away as scandinavia still have ongoing costs.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/04/1037451
>Even the more extreme estimates claim $200B for Fukushima
200 bn is the actual estimate from the government. (Extreme estimates are already at 1000 bn).
82 bn was spent in the first 11 years, meaning the average is over 7 billion yearly.
https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14762193
The 200 bn estimate is very clearly extremely _optimistic_. It's frankly unreasonable to think that another 15 years will see the end of expenses related to Fukushima.
Now imagine if we could spend all this money on energy storage instead. I think it could go a long way, we just need to do it.
The costs for Fukushima are also not bearing out as you seem to claim: the bulk of that 82 billion came in the form of disaster relief (more than half), land remediation. and decommissioning the plant. Storage of the waste water from continued maintenance of the failed reactor is a slim minority less than 3%. So I'm not sure why you seem to be under the impression that there will be so much more expense, when the most expensive steps - namely resettlement and cleanup - have already been completed. 10 trillion yen out of the 12 trillion are for disaster relief payments and decontamination - both of which are already done. You have demonstrated the ability to perform division when you calculate that 82 billion over 11 years works out to about 7.5 billion per year - but you're missing the fact that this spending was heavily frontloaded during the immediate disaster response.
But even if we get to the best case scenario of small cost drops, nuclear will never compete with the tech cruces of storage and solar. It does not have the characteristics of a tech with falling costs, without a complete revolution in its operation, the likes of which I have not seen imagined by anyone. Thorium and SMRs are minor tweaks that who not reach the type of tech revolution needed to make nuclear into a tech with falling costs.
There might be a few niche locations for which nuclear is the cheapest option, such as maybe Finland who was able to finally get their new single reactor online, a year delayed from the first time they declared it online. But these are the exceptions. Unclear is it a general purpose technology, it should be viewed as useful only in special circumstances where traditional tech fails.
We collectively in the form of consumers and governments decide how expensive a thing is, and for 50 years, thanks in part to a lot of coal lobby money, decided nuclear should be more expensive than coal, so we got all the radiation /and/ all the CO2 associated with coal power plants, we can't change that history at this point.
Nuclear is a super complicated coal plant regarding how the thermal engine works. Pure steam plants have simply been obsolete the last 30 years, and renewables are making it even worse by outcompeting gas plants.
> Possibly, wind, solar, and utility-scale batteries can play some role in consistent electricity. Until that takes place coal, natural gas, and nuclear are the only sources of energy to electricity that provide this benefit for grid stabilization and human longevity.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/coal-versus-wind-rene...
YMMV, of course!
For an example in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35658964
Well both side complain about truth and disinformation, and this affirmation is far from reality.
Right now, the way we're using intermittent sources is to shut fossil fuel plants off when renewables are producing and turn them back on when they are not producing. Intermittent sources are essentially supplementing a grid based in fossil fuels.
If we use nuclear plants to fill in the gaps in intermittent sources' production curves, then we'd have already built enough nuclear capacity to run the grid without intermittent sources so we'd just run nuclear plants at full capacity and eliminate the need for intermittent sources.