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Comment by fuzzy2 | Hacker News Reader

I mean, certainly. Well, maybe not the answer, but whatever.

However, are we actually capable of building new reactors and managing their operation in the private sector? I’m not talking about possibly maybe here. Are we actually ready, today, to build a new reactor within reasonable time at reasonable cost? I don’t know, but my gut feeling says no. We cannot even build roads like that.

Furthermore, is operating these reactors economical? Current reactors are not. They externalize lots of cost factors.

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China can. Russia as well. It appears that the secret ingredient is totalitarianism.

Chernobyl happened largely because plant admins wanted to please (or were afraid of) their higher-ups. Russia has had numerous secretive incidents in their southern military nuclear production sites, and more recently? Mysterious things like "high winds"...

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/russia-suspected...

In China? Taishan has been plagued with problems.

No, China can not build nuclear economically. That's why they're drastically reducing their nuclear goal while they continue to scale up coal and solar.

PRC is currently building indigenous nuclear relatively economically which appear to be performing around expectations. What happened / what PRC can't seem to do, like the west, is build _western_ nuclear tech economically. Rollout past decade has been delayed largely due Fukushima reassessement and drama over western nuclear tech (French EPR / US AP1000 technical and political issues & US sanctions / Westinghouse bankruptcy) forcing PRC to switch to domestic tech. Current 14th 5-year plan still aiming for ~180-200 GWe by 2035 with ~150 reactors, which is in line with mid 2010s assessments. What is also happening is PRC scaling up coal and solar, due to geopolitics of rushing energy security and lower renewable costs, but not at the expense of nuclear rollout.

Actually the secret ingredient might be more "central planning". Mostly used in socialist/communist countries, but US/UK know how to do it, when the stake is high enough (e.g. war). One could argue that climate change is sort of a war, threatening the national security.

Current renewables also externalise a lot of factors. Any production at scale externalises a lot of factors.

Unfortunately, the discussion is so emotionally and politically charged, that I'm afraid no one is actually properly calculating all the costs, and risks etc.

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