Why does nuclear power plant construction cost so much? | Hacker News Reader

Why does nuclear power plant construction cost so much?

progress.institute

259 pointsscythe409 comments

Listening to Jigar Shah, head of the DOE loans program, indicated part of the reason it's so expensive to build NPPs is that each nuclear power plant is a bespoke operation and requires a ton of custom work, planning and certification, etc. The suggestion he made was to create a basic design that you can just copy-paste where suitable, allowing you to leverage economics of scale. This would seem at least at first glance to align with the recommendations in the article.

[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/dk/podcast/jigar-shah-on-the-does...

The way to build standardized nuclear plants is for the reactor maker to build merchant plants, operate them, and sell the output into competitive power markets. It's like SpaceX building and operating their own vehicles, and how many renewable and natural gas power plants work.

It's just that no such merchant nuclear plant has ever been built anywhere. There's a serious lack of dog food here.

Of all of the things to entrust to the invisible hand of the private sector, I would put nuclear power generation dead fucking last on the list.

If you thought Bhopal and Exxon Valdez were bad, wait until some CEO decides to juice The Atomic Corporation's Q4 earnings by skipping a few safety inspections and half the Eastern seaboard no longer needs streetlights because everyone's tumors glow in the dark.

Oh, I don't mean these merchant plants would be unregulated. It's just that if they were such great ideas, why aren't the power plant builders just going ahead and doing it themselves? According to the nuclear proponents, there's so much potential profit just going uncollected.

> why aren't the power plant builders just going ahead and doing it themselves?

Because they would still have to build the plants somewhere, and the legal environment in the US is such that anywhere you build your project will be snowed under by NIMBY Lawsuits and your investment will never pay back anything. So nobody wants to try.

Except that's not true. NIMBY lawsuits are not what has affected recent nuclear builds. There are strict limits on what such lawsuits can do.

> NIMBY lawsuits are not what has affected recent nuclear builds.

Can you give some examples?

> There are strict limits on what such lawsuits can do.

On paper that might be true. But the actual law rarely matches the law on paper.

Here's a timeline for what happened at Vogtle. No NIMBY lawsuits in there; plenty of screw ups and back and forth lawsuits among the participants though.

https://www.powermag.com/how-the-vogtle-nuclear-expansions-c...

This looks like adding reactors to an already existing site. That kind of project won't have the same exposure to NIMBY lawsuits because the site is already there. The kind of project I had in mind was standing up a new site that had not previously had any reactors located there.

That said, I did not mean to imply that such lawsuits are the only issue that drives up costs for nuclear plants. From the article you reference it seems like various forms of government meddling in the process is a major factor, not to mention corporations being more interested in jockeying for position than getting a job done.

> No NIMBY lawsuits in there; plenty of screw ups and back and forth lawsuits among the participants though.

This is also true for the French project (Flamanville-3, an EPR). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36258182

The answer is that companies have limited cash reserves and need external capital to do anything. Particularly when you are looking to build something hugely expensive that cannot generate revenue for years. The real "plant builder" is not the organisation with the technical expertise. It is the one that can pursuade banks and investors to take the risk.

I don't think you are disagreeing with parent. As you are explaining, "the market" thinks nuclear power plants to be too risky and too expensive compared to other power sources, which is exactly the reason why they shouldn't be build by public agencies anymore either.

> If you thought Bhopal and Exxon Valdez were bad

...then you have learned a valuable lesson, not about failures of the private sector, but about failures of government regulation. Of all the things to entrust to government regulation, I would put critical infrastructure of any sort last on the list. The reason our infrastructure is such a mess is that governments insist on regulating it up one side and down the other, and regulatory capture is a thing. It's much easier for nefarious private companies to buy government regulations that allow them to cut corners, than it would be if they had to actually sell their wares in a true competitive free market with actual liability for any damage done.

Uh, why? Why is “buying government regulations” that allow you to cut corners easier than just cutting corners where no regulations exist. Like, if there’s a true competitive free market, are consumers of petroleum products going to choose to pay a premium for ethically sourced petroleum? No, right? Otherwise they’d be doing that now. So how would it be better with fewer regulations? There’s no logic or analysis presented in your comment, just a series of assertions. I’d love it if you could unpack your argument a little bit about how deregulating (eg: the oil and gas sector) might make disasters like Exxon Valdez less likely.

> Why is “buying government regulations” that allow you to cut corners easier than just cutting corners where no regulations exist.

Because of competition. If you have regulatory capture you avoid competition that then allows the cutting of corners. Without that regulatory capture you have, in your straw man example, no regulations, and hence zero barrier to entry which actually should prevent at least some cutting of corners. Though I'd go for regulation that doesn't prevent competition, but that's just me.

> Unregulated, privately built and owned nuclear power plant fails catastrophically, killing thousands and making large swaths of land uninhabitable for generations.

"Good thing the free market will step in to build another one!"

I'm pretty sure I mentioned straw men.

I guess the bit I don’t understand is why zero barrier to entry should prevent some cutting of corners. I’m not really sure I understand the logical link there, and I haven’t really noticed that effect in industries where barriers to entry have been removed (eg: media with the internet).

I also didn’t mean to strawman you about zero regulation. It sounds like you want some regulations, but just ones that don’t prevent competition. Is there a specific aspect you think should be regulated? Because the position “we should have good regulations and not bad ones” wouldn’t be controversial, even in government circles.

> I also didn’t mean to strawman you about zero regulation.

Fair enough, mainly because I'm not the person you were originally discussing with :)

Going backwards, “we should have good regulations and not bad ones” is a very general, to the point of meaningless opinion (as you point out) but the actual opinion is "regulations tend to increase their ill effects as their limits on competition increase" i.e. lack of competition correlates with things like bad corner cutting, to the point that I would posit that it's a cause.

So, if we take that and steel man that case - zero regulation means you and I can both start touting our nuclear power station designs, and that would be bad. On the other hand, no one is going to employ either of us because there is competition that is clearly better. Still, I'm sure there are some health/work/environmental regulations that would/should be introduced that would also limit competition and kick us out of the market *but* wouldn't limit it to a monopoly or an effective cartel.

Contrasting that with regulatory capture that does produce a monopoly or an effective cartel (or more likely, is the result of regulations, shall we say… encouraged by incumbents to protect or produce a monopoly or cartel), we end up with say 2 or 3 giant companies that no one can compete with because of their size and the regulations protecting them, then they can do what they want and the kind of good regulations that you and I might both agree on are actually cut or ignored.

Banking, might be a good example. They do something wrong, who bails them out? Why not let them die? Why is it so hard to even enter the market? Why do we see so many financial giants engage in wrongdoing and yet so few receive punishment?

We can't turn to anyone else, that's why. 1 doctor on a ship who's a murderer, lock them in their cabin, but what do you do when someone needs surgery? You let them out. 100 doctors on a ship and 1 is a murderer… you lock them up and then pick the best doctor.

> if there’s a true competitive free market, are consumers of petroleum products going to choose to pay a premium for ethically sourced petroleum?

If there's a true competitive free market, first, consumers won't even buy petroleum products unless those are the most cost effective for what they're doing. And in a true competitive free market, the huge infrastructure we have that gives a huge advantage to petroleum-based fuels might not even exist, certainly not in the form it currently exists, which is a product of constant government intervention and subsidies.

Second, in a true competitive free market, an oil company that contaminates thousands of miles of beaches with a spill can't get shielded from meaningful liability by courts that interpret the law to favor corporations, on the grounds that, after all, they were following the regulations, so it couldn't have been wilful mismanagement or intentional cutting of corners with disregard for safety, it must have been just an unlucky accident. (For example, look at the various lawsuits against Exxon after the Valdez spill and the rulings and long term outcome of those.) In our current regulatory environment, paying some fines now and then or having to defend a few lawsuits is just the cost of doing business. In a true competitive free market, such companies would be out of business, because they would have to literally make whole every person harmed by a spill, just like an ordinary person does when they commit a tort.

> If there's a true competitive free market ....

That brings to mind the Assume a Can Opener fallacy [0] and its companion, the Spherical Cow [1] — not to mention the South Park underpants gnomes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assume_a_can_opener

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

Thanks for spelling it out, I appreciate it. For what it’s worth, I agree that more accountability (maybe even to the point of piercing the corporate veil) is critical. But I’m not sure how to get that done without more regulation. Lawyers and accountants are so creative, and in a multinational environment have so many options, it’s hard for me to see how this sort of enforcement can happen without strong government intervention. But anyway, I appreciate you taking the time to share your perspective, thank you

> with actual liability for any damage done.

Where does that liability come from if not regulation?

> If you thought Bhopal and Exxon Valdez were bad, wait until some CEO decides to juice The Atomic Corporation's Q4 earnings by skipping a few safety inspections

Perhaps things are different now, but when I was going through the Navy's cram course for the [chief] engineer exam after two years of pretty-intensive sea duty, we worked through some what-if scenarios that they hadn't exposed us to in the year-long basic nuclear-propulsion course. That experience was a real eye-opener — especially coupled with having seen shipyard workers in "action" during my ship's in-port maintenance periods.

I still remember the exact moment in the cram course — sitting in a conference room at a Navy base on a gorgeous San Diego day — when I thought, oh, s__t, civilian workers shouldn't be running nuclear-power plants that are located anywhere near civilization. This was about a year before Three Mile Island and about eight years before Chernobyl.

To be clear, I was comfortable with the Navy's operating practices, which — thanks to the Rickover culture — were ferociously focused on safety and on second-checking everything in sight.

Supposedly there are inherently-safer civilian reactor designs out there now that are less vulnerable to human f*-ups; I haven't kept up and wouldn't be competent to judge.

Three Mile Island however was probably in part caused by the operations team on duty at the time being former Navy nukes: their instincts for what they needed to prevent going wrong were completely mismatched to the difference of design and scale - a 50MW navy reactor has basically no decay heat, whereas a 1GW electricity station is still putting out about that much in thermal energy even after its "shutdown" - which is proposed as an explanation for why they were so willing to keep overriding various automatic reactor cooling systems, since they just didn't internalize how much heat was actually still being produced.

> a 50MW navy reactor has basically no decay heat

Not necessarily: It depends on the power level the reactor was run at, and for what period of time. [0]

> they just didn't internalize how much heat was actually still being produced

It's not apparent that this was actually the case. I found this explanation, which makes sense to me (although I stress I have no particular knowledge of the incident): "... the [TMI] plant crew’s response was guided by wisdom received from another domain [i.e., Navy submarine plants]. ... They were under strict guidelines to never let the pressurizer go solid [which can be catastrophic in a submarine], and yet it was. The internal stress to meet this guideline was so severe, they left the rails and violated another guideline (shutting down the ECCS)." [1]

This actually reinforces my basic point above about the undesirability of putting pressurized-water reactors near civilian population centers: Human error is inevitable, and it's undesirable to have a system where such errors would be catastrophic if compounded — and human error can indeed come in multiples, with each error compounding the effects of earlier ones.

Here's a follow-up piece from the same author, about the effect confirmation bias at TMI and Fukushima (quoting another person): "Every reading that was true and really bad, they thought of as erroneous. Every reading that was erroneous but really good, they relied upon. That’s a trend that I always see in emergency response. Operators want to believe the instruments that lead them to the conclusion they want to get to." [2]

[0] https://www.quora.com/How-much-time-does-it-take-for-a-nucle...

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2016...

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2016...

> a 50MW navy reactor has basically no decay heat

> Not necessarily: It depends on the power level the reactor was run at, and for what period of time. [0]

Yes it does - but the TMI plant was producing about 6% of its output power when it was put into shutdown, which is about 50MW - i.e. the full power of a much smaller Navy reactor.

> the TMI plant was producing about 6% of its output power when it was put into shutdown, which is about 50MW - i.e. the full power of a much smaller Navy reactor.

Are you taking heat density into account? An analogy comes to mind from summer outdoor-grilling season: A tiny chunk of glowing-hot charcoal doesn't produce nearly as much heat as does a bonfire, but the chunk of charcoal will still burn your hand pretty catastrophically.

> thanks to the Rickover culture — were ferociously focused on safety and on second-checking everything in sight.

So true. This also explains why France never had any major mishap degenerating into a severe accident.

There is an old joke: "1 worker opens some valve, 10 workers check that the valve is indeed open, 30 engineers study causes, consequences and ways to cope with this process".

However nothing is perfect, and a major accident may also be triggered by some terrorist/desperate mind/military/... action.

There are other parameters: hot waste, geo-strategic challenges tied to uranium, lowering ore grades inducing more and more polluting extraction processes...

Moreover we don't know how to build reactors anymore upon a decent schedule and budget: 9 out 10 of those built since the 2000's are late and overbudget, and most other ones are opaque projects.

obvious solution: let the navy run the power grid

Bhopal failures were at least as much Indian politics (e.g. restrictions on safety automation out of fear it’d reduce constituent/patronage jobs) as it was the evil hands of capitalism.

It already is in private hands; Government leases from, or contracts out to corporations after all; Which means the nuclear arsenal is in private hands. Technically.

Of all things to trust to the invisible hand of government, I would put nuclear power generation dead fucking last on that list.

Who do you think runs the Navy's fleet of floating and submersible nuclear reactors?

it's already happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_River_Nuclear_Plant?us...

I'm sure I read an article about this plant/procedure and they were looking to save 30 million dollars on a billion dollar plant.

> CR-3 went offline in September 2009 for RFO-16. While the reactor was down, the old steam generators were to be replaced. There are 426 steel tendons within the concrete walls of the reactor containment dome which reinforce the dome. Plan developer Sargent & Lundy specified that 97 tendons be loosened. Progress rejected that number as excessive. The next proposal was to loosen 74 tendons, which was typical of other nuclear plants doing the procedure. According to a Progress employee, "de-tensioning the tendons is a very expensive and time-consuming effort", so the number was further reduced to 65. Progress engaged Bechtel to provide a 3rd party review, which agreed that 65 was appropriate. However, when the work was performed, only 27 tendons were loosened, and a foreman and supervisor sent emails questioning the way the tendons were loosened.

Awful and yet totally unsurprising.

Yet there will be people still calling for private profit-motivated companies to run everything and this will be dismissed as a one-off, never-happen-again sort of event.

edit: I think it's worth including this quote too:

Gregory Jaczko, former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, stated, "That's a multi-billion dollar asset that had to be shut down because of improper work planning, improper understanding of how to properly do this containment retrofit".

Many civilian plants in the US are ran by the private sector today. The safety record still speaks for itself, its a very safe form of energy.

Most renewable, utility scale, operations are not run by the equipment OEMs, same as airlines aren't run by Boeing or Airbus. X-as-a-service works fine for software, but stops scaling well, or working at all, with hardware. Especially when capital isn't free anymore.

I think industry likes it bespoke because the money is practically unlimited.

Selling a basic design or a micro reactor means the industry would have to compete for the first time.

Or perhaps the cost overruns are not accidents, but are the whole point. Nuclear power plants are a way to monetize the quirks of regulated monopolies. Get the plant approved and then shovel on the "oh gosh, who could have predicted this" cost increases. I mean, it's not like the people involved don't realize what's going to happen when they start building something that isn't even fully designed yet. As long the state regulators keep going along, each increase in capital cost is an increase in the earnings of the regulated utility. The perverse incentive is to balloon the costs as much as the regulators can bear. That the reactors are first of a kind is a feature, not a bug, since it lets that first foot-in-the-door lowballed estimate get approved.

France has sort of done this - they have 56 reactors in operation all based on the same 3 basic designs[1]. It's pretty incredible how quickly the plants were designed, tested, and built. Over a span of 15 years they brought 56 reactors online[2] - in the US we'd be lucky to build and commission a single reactor in that time span.

[1] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/frances-efficiency-in-t... [2] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/read...

Lets add Flamanville 3 to the "experience" graph in the article. The only reason it gets pushed through is for France to have an industrial base enabling nuclear submarines, carriers and weapons.

https://imgur.com/6G2RBa0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

> Lets add Flamanville 3 to the "experience" graph in the article. The only reason it gets pushed through is for France to have an industrial base enabling nuclear submarines, carriers and weapons.

That's garbage.

- The reason Flamanville 3 takes so much time is precisely because it is a prototype on a new design that never have been produces in series, nor even tested. That supports 100% what is said here: If you want to reduce cost, mass produce.

- Submarines and carrier nuclear reactors are completely different beast that have nothing to do with either Flammanville 3 or the existing nuclear park.

> Flamanville 3 takes so much time is precisely because it is a prototype on a new design

No, this reactor type (EPR) is a mere evolution. Proof: https://www.irsn.fr/savoir-comprendre/surete/presentation-hi...

From the link it looks like it had many changes implemented to improve safety: The EPR is a so-called “evolutionary” reactor, that is to say that its design is based on that of existing reactors, the French N4 type nuclear reactors and the German Konvoi . It thus benefits from proven technologies and operating feedback from its predecessors. It is a powerful reactor with a production capacity of 1,600 megawatts (MWe) compared to 1,450 MWe for the latest reactors built in France (type N4). It is designed for a service life of 60 years . Significant changes have however been introduced compared to existing reactors

Perhaps more importantly, there's a pretty long engineering history of assuming that "similar" means "don't need to test as much" not working out. Any time you make a change, you can and should be testing the parts as though they were a new design. I mean the most recent example of that was the Boeing MCAS.

Also Ariane 5 maiden launch failure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_flight_V88

I wouldn't call Ariane 5 an evolution of Ariane IV.

Code and digital system re-use in aerospace systems is not uncommon. After all, the fly-by-wire computer system on board the Space Shuttle was derived from the original Apollo flight computer, and they are two very different space vehicles..

Right but the point is it doesn't let you make assumptions that tests aren't needed, just that you expect them to be likely to pass. The design still has to be tested as though its a new system, it's just the re-use hopefully saved some development time and the testing hopefully finds fewer issues.

The MCAS was not thoroughly tested by design.

A new system requiring extensive testing would have alerted the FAA that something was off, and possibly led to a more costly re-certification they were trying to avoid.

That aircraft should never have been allowed to fly.

It doesn't matter if it's an evolution or a revolution - a change of any sort means new tooling to produce the components, new procedures to assemble them, new analysis to certify that they will all work together, and new training for everyone involved to do all the above.

All this was known before starting the building process, and the builder planned to deliver the reactor in 2012. It is late (right now: not delivered) mainly because project management and quality insurance were abysmal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

> Submarines and carrier nuclear reactors are completely different beast that have nothing to do with either Flammanville 3 or the existing nuclear park.

To be completely fair, the french nuclear industry is a small world. DCNS (now called Naval Group) did design and manufacture thermal exchanger for civilian nuclear reactors. On the other hand, if I remember correctly, they do work with Areva (now Orano) for some part of the nuclear submarine. Company that can produce parts (even things like tubing or screws) for nuclear reactors are very few, so they often end up working for civilian and military application.

All of this to say that the civilian and military nuclear industry are very much intertwined, feed each other and in many ways, keep each other alive.

The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

That article neglects that the plants built by the end of the program were not the same as the plants built in the beginning. Within each "pallier", a speedup can clearly be observed. Likewise, costs can hardly be compared if you don't look at the same models.

[1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrale_nucl%C3%A9aire_en_Fra...

I have no idea how a speedup appears to you. On the graph it is quite clear that, with time (and therefore experience), the average amount of time needed to build one is raising.

Not sure how you read that in the graph.

What I read:

    model : first reactor -> last reactor
    CP0 : 65 months -> 60 months
    CP1 : 73 months -> 64 months
    CP2: 56 months -> 79 months
    P4: 82 months -> 74 months
    P'4: 85 months -> 89 months
    N4: 151 months -> 104 months

That's 2-3rds of the builds showing a speedup. The results are even more striking if you calculate the correlation between start date and build time for any 2 reactors of the same model.

Sorry, I didn't expose it clearly.

Yes, I considered the long-term experience gain (columns, not lines: from 65 to 151 and from 60 to 104).

The first nuclear plants were theoretically the most difficult to build as the local industry was less adjusted to building such things, especially specific components.

As those reactor 'models' were very similar (there is no quantum leap) pertinent experience (processes, tooling...) accumulated.

However there was no reduction of 'intensity' (investments, amount of simultaneous building projects, foreseeable projects...) as all this was encompassed by a huge national programme (the 'Plan Messmer').

Therefore it seems that both min and max time to completion should diminish with time.

> Yes, I considered the long-term experience gain (columns, not lines: from 65 to 151 and from 60 to 104). [...] As those reactor 'models' were very similar [...]

They're not the same buildings. A N4 is much larger than a CP0, uses different technologies, has more safety features, produces much more power, etc.

To compare with another tech topic, that's like expecting SpaceX to design or build their spaceship faster or cheaper than they designed their falcon. That's unlikely, even though falcon knowledge definitely benefited the design of their new craft.

> They're not the same buildings

Not exactly the same but same generation, architecture and design (Westinghouse), slightly (not fundamentally) enhanced. Stating that new features add such a large amount of work (relatively to the total amount) that it compensates for the knowledge gained thanks to previous projects is debatable.

Between the oldest (CP0) and newest (N4) aren't the key differences limited to a same machine and command room shared (CP0) or not (N4) between reactors, scale (CP0's nominal power being lower), and details related to fuel rods and pipes? In which way are they dissimilar to the point of absorbing the effect of gained knowledge and adding such delays?

Even the shiny new EPR is a mere enhancement of the core design dating back ~1970.

Sorry, I don't know enough about SpaceX to have an opinion.

> Even the shiny new EPR is a mere enhancement of the core design dating back ~1970.

If you push this logic to its end, even a tesla car is a mere enhancement of the electric cars produced in 1900. There is no breaking change like wings, the ability to teleport or supersonic speed.

If you look in details what changed between CP0's and N4's though, there's quite some change [1]: N4's have a double containment enclosure while CPO's have a single one, the vessel contains 400m3 vs. 270m3 and weights almost 50% more, sustains 15 mor bars and 15 more °Cs, and it produces almost 60% more power.

Enough progress for Westinghouse to value Framatome's experience to the point that they became a partner, stopped paying license fees and earned the right to export their design[2].

[1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrale_nucl%C3%A9aire_en_Fra... [2]: https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1981/01/24/framatome...

Before the N4 there is no question, read page 12 (first paragraph) and 13 (first paragraph): https://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/index2.php?url=http%3A%2F%...

The N4 double containment is a mainly quantitative change, as are all the other changes you mentioned: the very architecture remains the same, as do the associated exploitation processes.

Those modifications were big enough to justify seeing the N4 as a "new design" because the French worked hard to master this design, and since 1981 (Nuclear Technical Cooperation Agreement, NTCA) Westinghouse & the French formally exchanged know-how. Moreover Westinghouse didn't work on the N4 and it escaped the Westinghouse license (which expired in 1992). However the very design isn't disruptive. As for this approach efficiency the note #17 seems pertinent.

The newest design ('EPR') also is a mere evolution, as officially stated: https://www.irsn.fr/savoir-comprendre/surete/presentation-hi...

Negative learning by doing is very easy to explain: as you go, you realise many perils and dangers of this thing that you were not aware of in the beginning, and those result in a lot of safety precautions added in subsequent projects, increasing the costs.

I can't imagine how TCO will not be much lower for subsequent ones, though.

Redundancy generally costs more to maintain not less.

Aka design 1 has 500 pumps, design 2 has 600 and is safer but now there’s more equipment to main and more complex plumbing etc.

I begin to understand the logic behind the US derailings.

The idea here is that maintenance is much, much cheaper than rescue operations. If 100 more pumps let you run for years without a scram, go along and order them.

That assumes it’s actually a benefit.

The point here is the “100 pumps” raise costs and complexity for zero benefit.

Genuine question. What is the stopping the US from paying every experienced French Nuclear Engineer x 2 x Usual US cost Adjustment --> and letting them build here in the US ? France and US are allies, and likely aligned on climate goals. France has similar climate as many of the planned regions and has fairly high building standards.

I don't think this is an issue of engineer competency. If you gave it to a French company, even they would be bogged down by the US regulatory agency and simply fail.

> would be bogged down by the US regulatory agency

Oooooh buddy, you mustn't be familiar with some layers French bureaucracy.

Imagine a unionized DMV.

I am a Czech, so no dog in this particular fight barks for me.

But the French train company SNCF abandoned the Californian high-speed rail project, citing local political dysfunctionality and comparing it unfavorably to ... Morocco.

https://www.businessinsider.com/french-california-high-speed...

The California high speed rail project never made any sense, even before political dysfunction.

Made perfect sense. Uncomfortable length to drive, and end to end trip time would be shorter (and more comfy) on a highspeed train than on a plane (getting to the airport early, security, baggage collection, taxi to the city, etc).

It made no economic sense at all.

Like any transportation projects it won't make economic sense if you ignore wider societal impacts. Highway expansion or airport expansion would neither ever make any economic sense at all if you'd apply the same narrow model. Now if you include climate impacts and the true cost of the climate catastrophe HSR is really the only transit project on this corridor that does make sense.

I'm sure if you looked at the cost per unit of CO2 emission avoided the CA HSR project was still completely ridiculous.

Ridiculous compared to what? Freeway expansion? Airport expansion? Do nothing?

Freeway expansion is not that much cheaper, and if you factor in the cost of 6 hour drives (or 8 hour bus) over the entire users, I’m not sure freeway expansion comes out in favor.

Airport expansion is also ridiculously expensive. The airspace between San Fransisco and Los Angeles is already super congested. You will probably need to build whole new airports to offer the same capacity as high speed rail. Airport expansion also fails to service the Central Valley, which leads to further economic depression of the millions of people who live there, making this option even more economically ridiculous.

This leave us with do nothing. Sure people can take the 9 hour bus or the 12 hour train and save the carbon footprint, or they can ignore the climate crisis and drive the 6 hours or navigate the dozens of airport combinations. This is by far the cheapest option, but only if you ignore the economic impacts of people choosing not to travel between between population centers in California. Given the cost of travel in California, both in time and carbon emissions, than keeping the travel options as is, is also a ridiculous option.

Perhaps high speed rail is economically ridiculous, but given the options we have, it is still the most sane option.

> Ridiculous compared to what? Freeway expansion? Airport expansion? Do nothing?

All the other ways of eliminating CO2 emission, including direct air capture.

Be sure to use realistic estimates of how many people will use this boondoggle.

That is a bit ironic now isn't it. Now that Morocco has high speed rail, but California doesn't.

Ask yourself where does the word “bureaucracy” come from.

Who would vote for it?

If you mean the public, I'd expect a lot of people, if it were presented right, considering how often the cost of energy comes up in political discussion

If you mean congress, I think the more important questions are - who would lobby for it? - who would lobby against it?

Hard to say. The public is divided. Even environmentalists are divided. Some follow the old misinformed guard led by ms. Fonda and you have some more new throwback environmentalists behind nuclear.

It really sticks is my craw that a misinformed but activist actress can torpedo an industry for half a century.

The industry and governments of the time torpedoed itself by insisting on secrecy and, especially in the case of the UK, doing stupid things like building the reactors on SSSIs (sites of special scientific interest, for instance Torness) instead of building them near where the power was needed.

As someone else said in this discussion: presented properly many people would vote for nuclear power. However, you need to have some substance to the presentation too.

GreenPeace has a lot of content on their website[0] with questionable anti-nuclear power content. They have been a force for decades for anti-nuclear content, when renewables were in a hilariously worse state than they are today.

[0] https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/challenges/nuclear-power

Greenpeace had the unmitigated gall to be correct. For this, some people can never forgive them.

Amory Lovins is another example of this phenomenon.

They had no idea if they were correct, and if more nuclear power had been built then we would be in a much better place globally than we are in now.

Only France, being the archetype of the unmitigated Gaul, actually pushed ahead despite all this Greenpeace pressure and established a great example of lowering CO2 emissions without burning a load of gas. Which to me implies that they weren't correct.

And no one is forgiving them or not. I'm just stating another large force that has been a nuclear power trip hazard for the last 50 years and prevented the economies of scale for nuclear that all forms of power generation need to lower their costs. The question was "who would lobby against?" which I was answering.

Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore not only admits that he was wrong about nuclear power, he is now actively pro-nuclear.

https://www.politico.com/story/2008/03/why-a-greenpeace-co-f...

That's a story from 2008. The case for nuclear had not so completely fallen apart at that point. But since then PV has become an order of magnitude less expensive, and the "nuclear renaissance" has so spectacularly flamed out in the US.

Moore's claim that replacement of fossil fuels would require nuclear is at this point objectively wrong. I mean, it was unproven then and disproven now.

It would be good to hear some evidence of why you think it's disproven.

And the topic of this thread is what lobbying has prevented said nuclear renaissance. You can't use the result of lobbying to prove that the assumptions behind the lobbying were correct.

Renewables and storage are cheap enough that a 100% renewably powered world economy is possible. And they would be cheaper than nuclear in most places.

The objections to this now are mostly "but it hasn't been done yet", which is the last ditch stand of the passive-aggressive denialist (and hypocrite, if that person says nuclear could do it.)

> Renewables and storage are cheap enough that a 100% renewably powered world economy is possible. And they would be cheaper than nuclear in most places.

How do you know this? Other than for new designs, nuclear/coal/gas costs and performance are well understood in because we've done them for 50+ years.

> The objections to this now are mostly "but it hasn't been done yet", which is the last ditch stand of the passive-aggressive denialist (and hypocrite, if that person says nuclear could do it.)

This just seems to be ad hominem stuff. Claiming something that hasn't been done as fact is an obvious problem. Attacking the people who say it rather than what's said is, well. Ad hominem, as I say.

The US has no lack of relevant engineers, after all, it does maintain a large fleet of nuclear powered vessels. As is usual with most of America's problems, there's just a lack of sufficiently concentrated political will to get things done.

That, and the influence of the fossil fuel companies.

That's probably the biggest single contributor to the lack of political will. Not just the company bosses, though - a lot of the employees will have similar interests. Say there's an "oil town" or a "coal town", that's a lot of voters.

I'd resist policies that threaten my job too.

Indeed. Worth keeping in mind though that the fossil fuel people successfully displaced whalers and candlestick makers.

Makes sense, considering the survival of humanity generally comes (if ever) after immediate personal survival is secured

Certainly. It's an odd dynamic because the same people who want to eliminate fossils also hate nuclear. The trending political position is energy austerity, while at the same time electrifying everything. But that's just not going to happen. (Well, I guess it does in California with the rolling blackouts.)

Yes, after all, the reason that Texas is currently working on laws to block renewable power generation in favor of fossil fuel power is because their power grid is _too_ reliable.

Not sure what point you're trying to make. I think it'd be a great idea to build nuclear in Texas.

If a political will is needed to do X, we need to look again at whether we really need it. Normally stuff that's needed, happens by itself as market forces push it.

Nah, market forces are usually short term, whereas political forces should handle long term needs.

> Normally stuff that's needed, happens by itself as market forces push it.

...As we can see in our efforts to avoid climate change.

Which is why healthcare, housing and education is super affordable, big tech companies are respecting people's privacy and freedom and climate change has been averted.

Exactly! They all lack some of the properties that make markets efficient, or form a market at all.

- Healthcare cannot be an efficient free market, where those who can pay most receive the best, and those who cannot pay get nothing. The reasons are pretty obvious. It sort-of-works as an insurance scheme, but currently in the US it's more like a payment scheme (and prices blow up), and in most of the EU is like a redistribution scheme (and amount of care is highly minimized until your condition is really serious).

- Housing in desired areas is heavily influenced administratively by zoning and other stifling norms (hello, SF), and also lack of land in desirable areas (hello, Manhattan). If you agree to live far from bustling megacities or posh suburbs, houses are relatively affordable. (But how are you going to earn the money then?)

- Privacy is not something you want to sell on the market; the whole point is to prevent it. So market forces can't solve it directly. You can buy e.g. an iPhone that gives you more privacy, or use a paid search engine and, a paid email provider, a VPN, etc if you agree to pay more for preserving your privacy; here the markets work well.

- Climate change is again not about trading and competition, because its downsides were not priced into any goods, and mostly are not yet still. Make carbon emission expensive, and the market forces will do their job. E.g. a lot of datacenters are carbon-neutral and powered by solar / wind / hydro just because otherwise the electricity ends up being pretty expensive.

Making carbon emission expensive you say? Lobbyists have historically stopped that one, so we're back to an issue of political will.

What's your market solution for that one? Making lobbying even more expensive? I guess that's the fixed point of this function

I suppose if lobbyists run things we need someone to lobby the lobbyists.

> Lobbyists have historically stopped that one

Lobbyists don't stop this. Government chooses to listen to lobbyists. I don't understand why people don't blame the government for government failings.

Giving them free money from taxes and expecting them to not be bribed is not too much to ask.

Sure, it's a government failing. Or looking wider, perhaps a system failing that the only governments who succeed in getting in are the ones that are cozy with lobbyists who either make big donations to their campaigns, or wield influence with the electorate in other ways.

I don't know how to fix that, but I imagine it's going to require political will from somewhere.

> I don't understand why people don't blame the government for government failings.

In the end we get the politicians we deserve. If we're too lazy to find the uncorruptable ones, or even run ourselves if all are corrupt, we get corrupt politicians.

> Making carbon emission expensive you say? Lobbyists have historically stopped that one, so we're back to an issue of political will.

EU is doing it, with CBAM. Basically internally trading emissions and taxing carbon at the border.

I wonder whether this time round the price will be high enough to actually change anything.

Most of those things are being caused by political will.

Healthcare is paralysed by over-regulation. There are lots of easy ways to bring down costs in healthcare that the average entreprenure would love to fix. They don't fix the problems because most of those ways have been made illegal because regulators who adopt a do-no-harm approach that ironically causes more harm than good. In every country I can read the laws of, a doctor and a patient trying to make decisions about healthcare are going to discover that the regulator is in the room 2nd guessing them.

Housing and education, assuming we are talking the US, have been flooded with credit by the government. That happens to be why costs are so high. There is no way the levels of money there are the market-optimal amounts. Every so often the housing market tries to shed debt and force people to buy the things they enjoy and the regulators step in with money printing. I'm pretty sure the US even has such a thing as a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage which is insane. I see figures as high as trillions [0] in the things.

Big tech the reason we need privacy is because sooner or later there will be authoritarians in charge with a lot of political will, using that data. There is a conversation to be had there; the Europeans have crippled their tech sector and privacy legislation was a part of that. Maybe the upside is worth the costs.

Climate change I give you the market would ignore. For the same reason it is ignored politically - nearly nobody thinks it is worth spending real money on to try and fix it.

[0] https://www.bankrate.com/mortgages/mortgage-statistics/

The biggest problem with healthcare is that doctors are sued if they don't provide state of the art care. So there's an incentive to produce more and more expensive drugs and technologies, and no (or at least insufficient) ability to trade off cost vs. effectiveness.

Flooding the housing market with credit is only an issue because there isn't enough housing so prices are demand driven rather than supply driven.

But that is caused by nothing but zoning! That's the only reason. Sure, in a token few places like NYC, probably prices would be sky high even without the zoning, but in the absolute majority of places, not at all. Zoning is a politically pushed limitation of construction for the benefit of incumbents - local property owners who want their housing values to go sky high, and they achieve it. It's example of conseqences of government action.

Permissive zoning doesn't make cheap/affordable housing more profitable than mcmansions.

It's easier and more profitable for a developer to work with a single rich individual to sell them a big overpriced house instead of working hard to make a lot of housing with a small margin (because the purchasers CANNOT AFFORD a high margin).

You know what finally got builders to put up new, affordable housing in my area? Rent control (well, "stabilization"). It means they can only "capture" the cash looking for property in the area by building new property, because otherwise they are limited in the price they can charge. It has caused many area landlords to start huge housing projects because the alternative is a 5% max increase in rent income every year.

I would have imagined an apartment block would be by far the most valuable thing a developer could put on a property if permitted and in the right area.

At worst, usually you'll do better with 4-6 units on a single block than a single high-value dwelling. People value having anywhere at all to live quite highly, and further amenties than that significantly less (ie. a 4bd house with 2x the space is not worth 2x a single house with half the space)

Absolutely so. Zoning rules prohibit construction of more units per plot exactly because this is what customers want to buy and developers want to build and what makes the most money to everyone - everyone except the incumbents who own other places because that would increase housing supply in their area and lower valuations of their existing properties. If developers wanted to build a smaller number of bigger houses and customers wanted to buy those, zoning rules won't exist, they won't be necessary.

I'm not talking total income, I'm talking profit per effort. Does a developer really want to take the big risk of hoping they can find a property management client to take the large apartment building off their hands for a probably minimal profit since they are also a business with strong connections looking to earn maximum profit off minimum work?

It's so much easier for the average development group or individual to just build a single mcmansion, where the profit margin can be easily raised with stupid water fixtures or other pointless things, and with clients that are not at all price sensitive. A single moderately expensive mcmansion is probably also easier to get financing for than a competitively priced apartment building where you basically have to hope you keep a good market position for 15 years to start actually making money.

I did consider that a little after posting - my conclusion was that people who don't have access to credit will be pushed out of the market and forced to rent.

> Climate change I give you the market would ignore. For the same reason it is ignored politically - nearly nobody thinks it is worth spending real money on to try and fix it.

Some of us feel that you can literally wipe the US off the map and it wouldn’t make a single degree’s worth of difference to climate. Some of us also feel that the climate movement is not about climate but about resource redistribution and thus suspect in its real intent.

While market forces may be pushing for it, administrative forces may be pushing in an opposite direction.

In my experience, admin will go out of there way and to multitudes more work in order to not get anything done

Administer is the opposite of complete.

To do work is what they are paid for.

To solve the problem which an organization was created to solve means to show that the organization is no longer needed. But this means no more work to be paid for!

We really need a lot of things yet nothing is being done about it

> there's just a lack of sufficiently concentrated political will to get things done.

Ideally it shouldn't be the case that something like building a power plant to produce electricity shouldn't require political will; just willing investors and operators who desire to make a profit.

The lack of willing investors might indicate that they are doubtful about the profitability.

Absolutely true, but the profitability is likely affected precisely by government policy.

By policy, over the next 80 years.

Well, surely the government can’t allow anyone to just build a nuclear power plant, so some policies are required. I can’t judge how reasonable or unreasonable the current ones are. But I can imagine for reasonable policies to be unprofitable without government subsidies, and that would require political will.

The same reason that France is utterly failing at building flamaville 3 - it's not a technical problem but of regulation, government and public support.

And yet, EDF successfully built Taishan 1 and Taishan 2 in China, pretty much in time and in budget. There were a couple of teething issues (as expected given these were the first two EPRs to enter service), but they are now running great.

According to Yves Bréchet [1], former head of the French Atomic Energy Commission, the main difference is not regulation, government or public support. It's something that should speak a lot to the engineers on HN, but is almost always absent in public debates: the lack of technical expertise. Think expert welders, pipe-fitters, boiler makers, etc. The expertise required when making a nuclear power plant is very high, including and especially when it comes to welding, quality of steel, etc.

Costly mistakes were made while welding critical parts of Flamanville 3 for instance, requiring expansive and expensive rework. I don't think Hinkley Point C is faring much better. On the other side of the world China has been building nuclear power plants relentlessly: they have all the expertise needed. If you allow me a slight exaggeration, given France and UK massive de-industrialization over the last few decades, we are now amateurs compared to China.

Again, it's not an issue of regulation. It's just that when you don't build things the know-how gets lost very very quickly. Something that should get hammered in the head of all CEOs/managers/decision maker...

[1] https://www.thinkerview.com/france-la-strategie-du-canard-sa...

So public support wasn't an issue in China?!

I'm not sure whether this is a troll post or but China is not a democracy. So public support isn't needed.

Yves Bréchet point in the linked video is that it’s first and foremost technical expertise, rather than political/regulatory landscape that explains why Taishan has fared better than the other EPR projects.

It’s not something we (I’m European) want to hear.

It doesn’t mean that public support doesn’t impact projects in Europe (or democracies in general), but it should not be used as an excuse to refuse to look further.

For instance Flamanville got a massive delay because of welding issues. That’s not a regulatory or public opinion issue. That’s an issue with the (lack of) expertise of French welders.

I don’t remember if it is for this one, or for repairs in other French nuclear power plants, but Canadian welders were called to the rescue…

I think it was for other nuclear plants that had been operating. Foreign welders were needed because there was only so much welding one worker could do before they reached their radiation exposure limit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taishan_Nuclear_Power_Plant

"It was estimated that the plant’s investment cost would rise to between 22 and 23 yuan per watt from an originally budgeted 14 yuan"

So about 60% cost overrun.

Compared to Hinkley Point, Flamanville or Olkiluoto, that’s actually pretty good…

Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, the play was pretty good, wasn't it?

US compliance & regulation, which would take three committees and five years to approve each metric BOM item or certified acceptable substitute?.

You don't even need to oay the engineers more, not only because you have engineers, but because EDF for example can be given attractive enough terms to build and operate overseas, as it has in the UK.

Probably the biggest bureaucracy in the world. Wonder how it compares per capita with China

Hard to be sure because of the population difference, but India's got to be well up there. US border control is a paramilitary operation; India's is a bureaucratic one.

This may come as a surprise to you, but many french people have no interest living in the US, even for more money.

> France and US are allies

Probably not after such an event.

Weapons manufacturers would not benefit from this.

But not the ones who underestimated decommissioning costs by a factor of 4 vs. Germany's estimates, and about a factor of 10 vs. UK. France is not the paragon of nuclear efficiency it is commonly portrayed as being.

It's not just that NPPs are expensive to build, and unpredictably priced in ways that make the price of power generated uncompetitive. They are also a large and hard to predict liability after they stop generating power and the income from selling that power.

There is no example of "this is how to do it." New designs have to emerge and be proven before it is possible to build new NPPs with as much cost certainty as other kinds of power generation.

Probably the same problems that are making (rail) infrastructure building 10x more expensive in the US than in Europe.

It's not that the knowledge is inaccessible, the problem is that the not-invented-here syndrome compounded by administrative red-tape, powerful counter lobbies and greedy actors make those projects prohibitively expensive.

Well... They only know metric, would be a recipe for disaster!

France still hasn't built a reactor in several decades. Latest started in 91 and finished in 02. The problem is that the parent missed some parts of the story.

Look, the elephant in the room is that if a power company wants to invest a billion dollars in power generation, they are going to do it with solar/wind. The project scales out, the cost is dropping constantly, and they get power generation early in the project.

A nuclear power plant is:

- a 10 year investment delay (with no return until completed)

- could be cancelled at any moment (high risk)

- with a very uncertain price target (solar/wind + grid storage will probably be half the cost or less of what it is today)

- can't be expanded

- very likely to balloon in cost and be a total financial quagmire

Solar/wind can be scalably purchased, installed, and expanded as needed. The costs will drop continuously, replacement and maintenance is easy, there's no nuclear waste to get rid of, and can very reliably be specced in terms of cost for generation.

Power companies that wants to invest a billion dollars in power generation will also invest into fossil fueled power delivery. Solar and wind produce a lot of cheap energy when the weather is optimal, but when the weather change and demand exceeds supply, the market price of energy goes to the roof. Last winter in Europe we saw prices spikes well over 100x of what the average market cost, which primarily went pay for fossil fueled power generation. Fossil fueled power delivery also get a lot of subsidizes in order to provide reserve energy, so they get the advantage of being paid twice.

Solar and wind is excellent investment for those wanting to compete when supply in the grid is high and prices are low. Nuclear, hydro, storage and fossil fuels are there to compete with supply is low and prices high.

It was more like 30 years. '70-'85 was only the CP0-1-2 part, which was about 34 reactors. P and N models were built from '78 to 2000.

Also that doesn't include design. French design was done in the 60's, and resulted in UNGG prototypes which were abandoned in favor of buying a Westinghouse PWR license. All french reactors are based on that license.

Still an amazing feat, considering it's what provides power to France to this day.

Chronological scale of the construction dates of French reactors: https://fr.quora.com/En-combien-de-temps-construit-t-on-une-...

We did 6 batches of 6-to-20 reactors.

Friendly reminder that the US does have such a program (the Navy's nuclear propulsion program), and several reactors are commissioned every year.

One of the core problems with nuclear is the size and scale of risk posed by cost cutting and neglect over its lifetime, especially the waste. People neither trust for-profit enterprises or present/future governments with that sort of responsibility (and with empirically justifiable reasons). I’m aware newer models are stated to be significantly safer, but assurances mean little when these institutions have repeatedly lied and failed in the past.

Either way, US carriers are probably one of the safest places for nuclear, as they’re mission critical for the life of the carrier and most likely to receive the utmost care… Plus the US has a long history of rubber stamping virtually unlimited funds to solve any military problem, whether the people approve or not. The handling of the waste is still a major concern, but what about the consequences of a torpedo compromising the reactor in warfare?

Many claim that France’s 1974 Messmer plan resulted in the building of its 58 reactors in 15 years. This is not true. The planning for several of these nuclear reactors began long before. For example, the Fessenheim reactor obtained its construction permit in 1967 and was planned starting years before. In addition, 10 of the reactors were completed between 1991-2000. As such, the whole planning-to-operation time for these reactors was at least 32 years, not 15. That of any individual reactor was 10 to 19 years.

> in the US we'd be lucky to build and commission a single reactor in that time span

Most countries, including the US and France, did a build out in the 70's/80's and then basically stopped. France a bit later than the US, but both essentially did the same thing. Checking the wiki list[0] and sorting by operation year you can see 4 things. 1) the vast majority of reactors were built in the 70's, 2) the newest reactor was built in the 90's (operational 2001), 3) the most recent reactors took longer to go into operation (including a few at 16 years, where the 70's build out was typically 6-7 years), 4) almost all 70s/80's reactors are of the same type and same power level (CP1, CP2, P4 REP 1300). We actually see the exact same story in the US (see Watts Bar, ouch).

On the other hand, South Korea didn't do their build out till the mid 80's and continued into the 90's. Then we see the wall hit in the 2000's with the APR 1400. Japan did a bit better and strangely looks like the big success story, especially considering how many reactors such a small country built. Interestingly only Mitsubishi reactors are still operational... Canada is also a good success story but also hasn't built anything since the late 80's (but last reactor was still <10yrs).

Countries like Sweden, started their build out but then there was a hard stop. Sweden had nothing past '85. Germany isn't too far off, but it is also a different story. Ditto for UK.

I intentionally left out China and Russia because different economic structures and because the stories are a bit different even though might appear similar to what I'm discussing at face value (note that my comments are vastly oversimplified, with some things only being alluded to), but it is worth paying attention to the above patterns and think about how the economic structure might reinforce some of those aspects, then think about the western countries different styles during their build out phases (how it actually worked).

The nuclear story is long and complicated. Even this wall of text is oversimplified. This is part of the problem: we like our simple talking points but as speakers are often unwilling to admit that these are only part of the stories or as listeners rebut the speaker as if they are only considering a single factor. It makes real conversation almost impossible and both play a role and build over time. Which is not too dissimilar to a few problems that happened in the nuclear industry.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...

I have to imagine that someone has had the idea to create a standard design prior to 2023.

In fact, there are a lot of standard designs. There's just not A standard design.

The issue is we build 1 or 2 plants at a time with a given design and by the time those plants are finished (10+ years) new regulations and new standards are in practice (see Gen II vs Gen III vs Gen III+ vs Gen IV reactors).

The good news is that Gen IV reactors, if approved, are much cheaper to build than Gen III/III+. The bad news is nobody wants to build them.

Generation III reactors were also promoted as more affordable than Gen II before they had actually been built. Anyone can build a great reactor on paper. I would evaluate Gen IV cost and schedule numbers after they start generating power.

In 2014 Westinghouse still touted high confidence in affordable, predictable construction for its Generation III AP1000 design:

https://web.archive.org/web/20141225195417/http://westinghou...

From the outset, the AP1000 PWR was designed to reduce capital costs and to be economically competitive with contemporary fossil-fueled plants. This requires lower overnight construction costs and higher confidence in the construction schedule.

The AP1000 plant reduces the amount of safety-grade equipment required by using passive safety systems. Consequently, less Seismic Category I building volume is required to house the safety equipment (approximately 45 percent less than a typical reactor). The AP1000 plant’s modular construction design further reduces the construction schedule and the construction risks, with work shifted to factories with their better quality and cost control as well as labor costs that are less than those at the construction site.

This also allows more work to be done in parallel. The use of heavy lift cranes enables an “open top” construction approach, which is effective in reducing construction time.

With new computer-modeling capabilities, Westinghouse is able to optimize and choreograph the construction plan of an AP1000 unit in advance by simulation. The result is a very high confidence in the construction schedule.

In actuality, AP1000 construction went so far over budget and behind schedule that it bankrupted Westinghouse 3 years later:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westinghouse_Electric_Company#...

Have there ever been project that has not been marketed to be affordable and to arrive on budget and on time?

Utility scale PV projects are typically within a few percent of their promised cost.

So if we scaled up nuclear builds to same number of sites and same building standards we could reach them being in few percent of promises?

My point was that no one has ever promised to go over budget and be late.

No. How could you even think there is any logic in such a question?

Nuclear plants are vastly different from PV plants. PV involves a large number of loosely coupled modules with very large amounts of redundancy. Malfunctions in individual components do not affect the system as a whole. Contrast this to a nuclear plant, where redundancy when it exists is on a much smaller scale. The parts in a nuclear plant must be constructed with much higher reliability in order for the plant to operate. The consequences of failure are much higher.

The difference is a solar farm consists of 4 million identical modules and a quarter billion identical cells. If a cell is faulty, it decreases output of that module by 2%. If a module is faulty it either decreases the string output by 5% or costs $80 and 15 minutes to replace. If many modules are found to have a long term fault later, repowering comes at a cost penalty of about 1c/kWh. Building terawatts of solar involves trillions of identical cells, and trillions of trials to practise making them cheaply with zero penalty for iteration.

A nuclear reactor consists of many thousands of bespoke parts. If one is faulty, at the very least the whole thing is shut down while millions are spent replacing it, or possibly it kills a lot of people. Building terawatts of nuclear involves making each part thousands of times, and the penalty for iteration is thousands of man hours for validation as well as potentially shutting down every power plant with that part. If there is a major systematic flaw you are out 5-20c/kWh and years of output.

Yeah, that's what TFA is about. People thought about it, but it turns out it doesn't matter, because regulatory requirements were a moving target and were applied retroactively to any project not yet finished.

This quote sums it up nicely:

> It doesn’t matter how standardized your design is if you end up needing to change it on every project to meet new requirements.

Yeah, but how can that happen in a changing regulatory environment? From the article it seems to me that even if you had built a plant and loved the design, it probably wouldn't be legal to build another one just like it a few years down the road. The author says that part of the reason for cost overruns is that the rules change even after construction has begun.

If DoE provided the regulations then they could update the template design as they update the regulations - if the build of the plant needed to change because of a change in regulations then they could account for that in the design.

But DOE doesn’t write the regs, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission does.

I worked in commercial nuclear operations for 23 years. It was a two unit site with unit one built first. It was designed as two identical units. By the time unit 2 was finished the regulations had changed so much that final reactor required operators to get a seperate license for each unit.

The idea that this hasn't been tried repeatedly is a myth.

That accounts for part of it, but there's a lot of litigation and environmental redtape that slows these things down. Before you can build a nuclear plant, you have to do an environmental impact report. Then somebody can complain, or sue, to stop over something in that environmental impact report. The ability of interest groups to halt nuclear, even green energy, is a bit ridiculous.

that may account for a small part of it, but the article goes into detail on what actually accounts for it

Getting the design certified and using that again is certainly a way of saving cost. Any regulator worth their salt would however still have to do the on the ground checks (e.g. if the right materials are used etc).

I think every HN user who programs knows that the process of copy-pasting comes with it's own danger. You are not automatically getting a working thing if the context you are pasting into differs ever so slightly.

If one plans to build a lot of nuclear plants that context might be something you can control. One of the things I would worry about is water and how to cool it.

Last summer most of France's nuclear power plants were switched off because the rivers they use for cooling were dried out. And the presidictions on the climate catastrophe have gotten worse.

The regulatory ratchet, headline fear and a complete refusal to consider having a $/QALY number is the reason for the insane costs. Nuclear power is the most over regulated industry in the world, with many safety measures giving returns of less than a single quality adjusted life year per billion dollars! (You can get this number simply by comparing the accident rate and QALY costs of 1970s reactors to modern ones)

All while the government still subsidizes the accident insurance. Lets remove that as well!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

Compare the $15 billion funded by the industry with Fukushima looking to cost at least $150 billion to clean up.

And how much of that is utterly unnecessary? The evacuation was also costly -- and unnecessary...

Yes but was that known beforehand?

If you can't insure something, that's a pretty strong market signal.

Judging by the radiation maps? Over 90% is cost ineffective.

The clean up was absolutely over the top and not guided by objective measures. The government effectively already absorbs all costs involving the externalities of coal, oil and other dirty sources of energy, which add up to way more than 150 billion.

Great that the alternative in 2023 in renewables then! You're arguing a strawman comparing nuclear to fossil fuels.

Last I checked switching to pure renewables would triple electricity costs due to storage needs.

You'd be way better off spending that money on nuclear (including accident cleanup) and healthcare.

Given that nuclear on marginal price markets would require 5-8x the costs from renewables that is a win? Stop living in the 70s.

Actually model it. Go look at gridwatch and use the graphs to calculate total storage needs if using a wind-solar mix, then check out the US department of energy 2019 report on energy storage solution characteristics.

Calculated total cost when I did it would have tripled UK electricity prices.

Pure French nuclear, on the other hand, resulted in a mere 30% increase in electricity prices.

French existing nuclear paid for completely opaquely to support the military nuclear program.

Now input Flamanville 3 costs for your buildout.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

Yes, over regulation leads to massively spiraling costs as delays lead to financing issues (both interest and uncertainty), knowledge loss, project management timing issues, etc etc

And yet even with that you're getting 400 billion kWh over its 40 year lifespan for €13 billion construction costs (multiply by 1.5 for lifetime costs), for electricity production price of €0.05 per kWh. Which is honestly decent.

Btw: did you actually do the calculation before posting?

Hahahahaha. Yeah, a 20 year project + 40 year lifespan and you get a "decent" number. You are guessing about 2083.

Do you even listen to yourself?

Your reply seems to just be empty mockery unworthy of you. Do you dispute the figures I gave? Do you think the price given makes nuclear nonviable?

Renewables are great but they don't provide a good base capacity capability. That means you still need hydro, geothermal (both limited), coal, gas, oil or nuclear in your grid, with enough capacity to provide energy in case it's not sunny or windy. Large scale storage using batteries is simply not feasible at this point, which is why nuclear is still a good bridge technology until we figure that out.

Unfortunately your misconception is very popular, and I think a large part of why a lot of people don't support nuclear.

Of course they do.

> Indian developer secures 300 MW renewables project with $0.050/kWh bid

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/05/19/indian-developer-secu...

Nuclear costs $0.12 - $0.20/kWh in comparison.

https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...

Sorry but your source is bad - no details whatsoever about which storage solution they are aiming for. Regardless, we know for a fact that not a single country has storage capabilities for even 1% of their energy needs. Lots of initiatives want to change that, such as the one you posted, but there is absolutely no large scale solution for this issue at all. Once you accept that fact, you realize renewables are not a replacement for nuclear at this point.

I greatly appreciate your second link and will have a look at it later. I'm very curious how they got such a high figure for the nuclear cost given a look at even more expensive modern nuclear reactors costs gives a number of around $0.07/kWh.

The manufacturers say they are cheap, well 0.07/kWh is super expensive, but in your reality yes, cheap, before starting to build. Then reality hits.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-dream-of-mini-nuclear-plants...

The $0.07/kWh is for recently completed plants. The industry estimates they publish for new plants are more like $0.03/kWh.

You appear to be employing rhetoric a lot more than hard numbers. If you want a productive discussion I recommend sticking to the latter.

$0.07/kWh is not even close to reality in the west. $0.12 - 0.2/kWh is the reality. This is whole sale prices, so you can not compare it to your power bill.

https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...

Like Hinkley Point C clocking in at a fair $0.16/kWh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

I think you is the one blinded by the industries promises rather than the reality it produces.

Take IEA and their special report on Nuclear power. They generally are super conservative and in favor of traditional methods.

> As an established large-scale low emissions energy source, nuclear is well placed to help decarbonise electricity supply. In the IEA’s Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario (NZE), energy sector emissions fall by about 40% from 2020 to 2030, and then decline to zero on a net basis by 2050. While renewable sources dominate and rise to nearly 90% of electricity supply in the NZE, nuclear energy plays a significant role. This narrow but achievable pathway requires rigorous and immediate policy action by governments around the world to reshape energy systems on many fronts.

> Nuclear has to up its game in order to play its part

> The industry has to deliver projects on time and on budget to fulfil its role. This means completing nuclear projects in advanced economies at around USD 5 000/kW by 2030, compared with the reported capital costs of around USD 9 000/kW (excluding financing costs) for first-of-a kind projects. There are some proven methods to reduce costs including finalising designs before starting construction, sticking with the same design for subsequent units, and building multiple units at the same site. Stable regulatory frameworks throughout construction would also help avoid delays.

Essentially - Nuclear as it exists today is dead, if it can get it costs down to less than half it may play a tiny role.

https://www.iea.org/reports/nuclear-power-and-secure-energy-...

It looks like you've been posting overwhelmingly on one topic. Single-purpose accounts are not allowed here, regardless of their purpose or topic, because they go against the spirit of intellectual curiosity that we're trying to optimize for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). We therefore ban this sort of account.

I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please stop doing this on HN, we'd appreciate it.

p.s. please also follow the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) when responding to other commenters. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36345123 broke the rules badly. Fortunately it doesn't look like you've been making a habit of that!

Actually, no, you're the one stuck on a misconception.

Renewables + storage can provide "synthetic baseload" at a cost that will likely be lower than nuclear in most places, especially for a new nuclear plant whose construction has not started yet (it will compete with renewables + storage of the future, since they are installed much faster and don't have to start now to be done at the same time.)

An important reminder is to not use just batteries for storage. Many bogus attempts to show renewables can't do it assume batteries are used for long term storage. This is a technological strawman argument. Use e-fuels instead. With renewables and electrolysers crashing in price, green hydrogen will become remarkably cheap.

Can you point me to a country that can store even 1% of their energy needs currently? If not, you're talking about unproven technologies that may or may not fix this problem. I hope they do, but until then we are in a world where closing a nuclear plant means opening up a carbon-intensive one. Renewables are not currently a replacement for nuclear, and this is not a misconception, it is a fact.

Pretty much all of them? That's because they burn fossil fuels, and fossil fuels are also storage. There's no sense making a synthetic fuel for storage when you're still burning a natural fuel.

Care to show me a country with a breeder-based nuclear cycle? Oh gosh, by your logic nuclear cannot use breeders, since it hasn't been done yet. I guess nuclear is ruled out so we're totally doomed. Fortunately, your logic is entirely specious.

There is no easy way to economically produce a synthetic fuel at scale as you suggest. It is irrelevant whether breeder reactors work or not, I can point to dozens of countries with a significant impact of nuclear in their mix, but you cannot provide a single country that uses synthetic fuels or any other type of storage at scale (>0.1% would probably still be challenging).

My logic is that we are currently shutting down or creating regulatory hurdles for the cleanest base load technology, which is proven safe and reliable, in favor of pipe dreams such as that renewables plus storage is all we need.

Hydrogen can be produced and stored on a massive scale. Electrolysers are now below $300/kW.

"Economically"? Compared to current hydrogen from methane, sure that would be hard. But compared to electrical power from nuclear? Much easier. Exelon stated in 2005 that nuclear could be competitive if natural gas (with a $25/ton CO2 tax) were around $14/MMBtu (note that natural gas at the Henry Hub is a bit over $2/MMBtu right now). That's about $.05/kWh(thermal). Electrolysis could pretty easily make hydrogen at that cost, given today's cheap renewable energy. Given that those 2005 nuclear cost estimates were optimistic, I doubt existing nuclear could compete with combined cycle plants burning green hydrogen. Of course, on a renewable grid, a great deal of the energy will go directly from the renewable sources to the grid, not through hydrogen, so nuclear will do even more poorly.

Why don't you answer my question? Can you point to a country that uses electrolysis and hydrogen at scale currently? Because if we are going by estimates and projections, I can also talk about fusion and other pipe dreams on the nuclear side. Not to mention a lot of electrolysis is currently done with fossil fuels.

Hydrogen projects are sprouting up like crazy. It's pretty much a repeat of the early days of wind and solar.

Indeed. And yet, there's the stubborn idea that the prices of electrolysers will not continue to decline along an experience curve. The same blindness occurred with critics of solar and wind.

Agreed. Hydrogen is going to be nearly free in terms of production cost. It will just follow the curve of wind and solar.

I don't answer obviously bad faith questions. It doesn't matter whether hydrogen is being done at scale right now. What matters is whether it could be done at scale when fossil fuels are out of the picture. And the answer to that is clearly that it can.

> Renewables + storage can provide "synthetic baseload" at a cost that will likely be lower than nuclear in most places,

Try actually calculating this. Last I did I got around $100 billion per year needed for storage+renewable for the UK, which was triple the wholesale electricity annual revenue.

Got the numbers for hydrogen (energy conversion loss, storage costs per kwh, drain, cycle numbers, costs per kw)? The 2019 US department of energy storage costs paper I used didn't include it and I suspect this was because the numbers are atrocious. Compressed air storage seems like the best for day+ energy storage with batteries for hourly storage.

What do you mean by "storage"? Short term storage only, like batteries? This would lead to an overly large renewable installation to power the country in the winter.

The round trip efficiency of hydrogen is indeed bad, but for long term storage that's is overwhelmed by the much lower cost of hydrogen storage capacity, vs. batteries.

The round-trip efficiency isn't actually that bad once you realize that we're dealing with large installations here. For instance, heat can be used to make hydrogen, which is why you sometimes hear about nuclear power making hydrogen. Large installations can recapture heat, either as co-generation or use it to drive a gas turbine.

Yes, by "storage" I mean storing the hydrogen for those rainy days.

Can I take this to mean you don't know where to find reliable numbers on this?

You can look at the assumptions under https://model.energy/ which were based on cost data in Europe (I believe there's a link to the source).

Per-kW cost of electrolysers is already 1/2 of the total per-kW cost given there in the 2030 assumptions (but that may include other equipment).

Cost of storage caverns is well known from natural gas, as little as $1/kWh of capacity. Cost of combined cycle plants to convert the hydrogen back to power is also well known, as these will be nearly identical to natural gas fired CC plants (just the details of the combustors will change.)

The government subsidizes all major accident insurance across all industries. Nuclear should not be different.

Why do it when the alternative, renewables, barely have any risks for third parties?

Go ahead as long you don't use hydro or fossil fuels to fill in demand when renewables are not producing.

This is one of those areas where an technology neutral law should be applied. Rather than have the government pay for insurance, move that to a tax on the consumer based on how much energy is consumed and the cost of accidents and environmental impact. For energy produced by fossil fuels that would be any costs associated with global warming (including any accidents and extreme weather), for hydro it would be flooding, and for nuclear it would be nuclear accidents. Base the insurance cost on the historical accident rate and the predicted rate in the future.

That would make renewable energy even cheaper in optimal weather, energy produced from fossil fuel a few order of magnitudes more expensive for every watt consumed, and nuclear and hydro would increase by a modest sum.

I have no problem with this personally. But I fear that nuclear fearmongers would capitalize on this as a possible "worst-case scenario" if we tried to deploy such a plan. Is this thought misguided?

You mean maybe like a shipping container sized reactor that is simply stacked (and replaced / defueled for maintenance)?

Like one that can have its liquid fuel removed by just piping?

That's very development was done using a closet-sized reactor that could be easily powered up and powered down so it CAN scale with demand?

Whose design is inherently meltdown-proof?

Which uses almost all its fuel so there's no nuclear waste to transport?

That can breed its fuel from Thorium?

The time to invest in this was 20 years ago. Certainly the viability of nuclear missed the boat 10 years ago.

Nuclear will have to wait for solar/wind/battery and other grid levelling alternatives (home solar + storage, EVs-as-grid-batteries) to mature and develop before they have a stable economic target.

Then nuclear needs to figure out how to make that target. I think it is a LFTR, but who knows. I don't think solid fuel rods are the way. Too much waste, too much danger inherent to the fuel packaging.

And seriously, "the institute for progress"? The nuclear industry is so out of touch their marketing and lobbying is 30 years out of date.

My mother worked for a company that made small cooling fans used in fighter jets and space craft.

She would bring one of the fans home and say “Look! I just sold 10 of these for $1,000,000”

The fans themselves were cheap to manufacture. But they were SO incredibly important that they could NOT fail under any circumstance. (They were mostly fans meant to cool electronic systems, and if they failed, would cause the plane or space craft to explode, literally)

The fans were so expensive because they had to go through so many quality checks to ensure they would sustain every environment imaginable, compounded with the fact that there’s no scale in demand (no one other than Boeing, NASA, etc is going to buy a tiny $100k fan)

Tiny production volume + huge quality requirements/standards = very expensive product.

I assume a similar dynamic applies to many components in a nuclear power plant. Volume is very low and the quality/reliability requirements are very high.

not sure if you care but they track comments like this on https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights

There has to be a way to build a safe system from several not as safe parts. At least for a system which doesn't need to fly.

The problem is that any system that's built around cheap redundant parts will gradually degrade to it's minimum viable state because the humans who maintain it will eventually be lazy| greedy| stupid enough. So it also has to fail early by design before reaching that state.

That’s not a given

It’s the opposite really - even if you have really safe parts, the overall system will be more likely to fail than any particular part.

Say you have 10 independent critical components each with a 0.99 probability of not failing. Well the probability of nothing failing in the system is 0.99^10 ≈ 0.9. So your collection of parts each with a 1% chance of failure has a 10% chance of some critical component failing overall.

Of course it’s more complicated because in real life nothing is really independent, and failure of one component will be coupled to failure in another. This makes simple solutions like redundancy not necessarily helpful (and sometimes even detrimental).

There is in software, but in hardware it's a chain with links and the weakest part will be the one to cause the chain to fail. Hence the focus on individual parts reliability and quality.

I think the only way to do that is redundancy.

Redundancy also adds a lot of complexity, as fail-over mechanisms aren't simple either. That added complexity then turns into additional possible error sources.

A friend of mine builds a component for a satellite system and the FDIR mechanisms need to be chosen very carefully, as adding more fail-safes can actually make the system overall more error prone.

There's an interesting blog post on from AWS about that topic [0]. Turns out adding more fallbacks and fail-safes is actually discouraged there.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/avoiding-fallback-in...

You make me think about how nuclear weapons tests are currently done. they are detonated underground, the soil above the device collapses on top, containing the majority of the fallout. it's a reliable and simple system and poses the question, could a nuclear power station be built in that way, because it wouldn't require the development of new technology.

Burying a structure under tons of earth when it contains a number of human beings tends to be politically unviable.

Many years ago it was my job to design and procure control systems for natural gas power plants - this included mostly valves and instrumentation. Of course, once you're dealing with superheated steam (whether fired by natural gas, coal, angry isotopes, etc) it's all the same valves and thermocouples. So I got to know the product lines of the handful of suppliers very well. A few had nuclear product lines (USA only) which were identical in spec to everything else...with two major differences:

1) Everything had to be manufactured in the US with all the requisite paperwork

2) Every non-destructive test under the sun was required for every distinct part, including an encyclopedia's-worth of paperwork per test per part

In this case, it's not the parts, or even the design that breaks the bank. It's the validation.

> In this case, it's not the parts, or even the design that breaks the bank. It's the validation.

See also "certified" versus "experimental" general aviation aircraft.

It is like the RAD750 radiation hardened processor. It is a PowerPC 750 but costs about $100K because under those harsh conditions - it can not fail!

Could you use it to cool a Pentium 4 processor?

I have a tinfoil hat theory that all of this environmental and safety regulation was amplified heavily by lobbying and/or propaganda efforts from the coal companies. On one hand, you can make the argument that nuclear fuel was the new silent invisible killer on the block (as opposed to coal mining and emissions which were known, but accepted since it had been around for decades) But when I read stuff like this, it seems as if regulation was heavily disproportionately applied to nuclear energy even despite it being a new and unfamiliar danger. Or maybe the coal industry simply was more successful at curbing regulation. After all, it was was a more mature industry financially and politically.

My theory might be speculative and totally off the mark. But when you compare deaths per TWh of energy produced, coal is responsible for almost 3 orders of magnitude more deaths than nuclear. So maybe the real question is "how has coal power stayed so cheap?" or "if we tried to make coal power as safe as nuclear, what would it cost?"

I mean, with the history[0] of petro companies funding anti nuclear groups, it's not a very out there conspiracy theory.

[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...

A couple more links:

https://www.ans.org/news/article-1392/robert-anderson-antinu...

https://thebreakthrough.org/blog/the-true-face-of-the-anti-n...

Greenpeace was started with the standard oil money...

Not sure if you’re being entirely serious but is there any truth in that? Just curious.

"Save the trees" used to mean "use more plastic"

I couldn't find anything for Greenpeace, but I did find Friends of the Earth (which like Greenpeace, also split from Sierra Club), was split off "because of the [Sierra Club's] positive approach to nuclear energy. The founding donation of $500,000 (in 2019 USD) was provided by Robert Orville Anderson, the owner of Atlantic Richfield oil company." [1, 2, 3]

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

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/28...

[3] https://atomicinsights.com/smoking-gun-robert-anderson/

And then supported by Russia

Links?

Working with QA analysts has shown me that quality people are totally autonomous in adding disproportionate hurdles to the way of production without needing the help of any external lobbying.

It's very simple: the only way to 100% prevent an incident is the absence of production at all. If your incentive is to avoid incidents at all cost, you are incentivized to prevent production entirely.

Russian influence operations as well.

It is well documented

Last year a tiny radioactive capsule the size of a fingernail went missing in Australia, when a "safe" storage container the size of a small car failed and allowed it to fall out.

The search to find the capsule cost four million dollars and there were global news stories warning people to avoid the highway the (very, very long) highway the truck had driven down.

In other countries (e.g. Soviet ones) where precautions like that haven't been taken, those capsules have been found after dozens of people caught cancer due to regular exposure to a capsule that just happened to end up near them. Presumably there are more that haven't been found, and those countries just accept a higher rate of cancer than the rest of the world.

Avoiding those scenarios is what costs so much.

That doesn’t check out, though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident Was horrific and teletherapy machines are quite cheap.

You would expect that if risk of radiation source loss underlies cost then they would be much more expensive.

The accidents you described didn't come from nuclear power plants. The Western Australian incident was mining equipment. The Goiânia accident happened in Brazil and was medical equipment. The Kramatorsk radiological accident was also mining equipment.

I was imaginging insane nuclear laser drills, but...

> The capsule, part of a gauge used to measure the density of iron ore...

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/1/31/australian-nuclear-...

More info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Australian_radioactive...

Terrifying Wikipedia rabbit hole:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...

There's an interesting YouTube channel called Plainly Difficult that goes over industrial accidents, many of them nuclear/radiation in nature. (https://youtube.com/@PlainlyDifficult)

Also medical radiation machines around the time that

I love his radiation incident videos and it's sad he seems to have run out of them. The structural failure and trainwreck videos just don't scratch the same itch for me.

I find it actually quite relieving that he doesn't have any new nuclear incidents to document.

Fun fact: one of the few industrial applications of nuclear fusion reactors today is as pulsed neutron generators for excitation gamma ray spectroscopy in oil exploration. https://www.slb.com/-/media/files/drilling/brochure/neoscope...

The Australia case is a clear example of misspent money because headlines rule the world.

Those millions of dollars could have saved a dozen lives, while odds are very high that capsule would have not been found by a civilian until after decaying to a harmless level. In the very unlikely event of being found it would likely have killed only one or two people.

Meanwhile air quality is killing millions per year.

I find the attitude of valueing money more than human lifes worrisome, to say the least. And I have been called a cynic more than once.

Read what I wrote again.

I'm stating that money IS lives. If you spend $100 million to save one person when you could spend $100 million to save 10 people you're wasting 9 lives.

Even purely commercial monetary gains can be inefficiently converted into lives via government taxes that then get spent on road safety, pollution regulation or healthcare.

A lot of these "cost" reports include money that couldn't be shifted around. E.g. they often include the salaries of people who worked on the project, and you can't just not pay them and re-allocate those funds elsewhere.

I'm also cynically skeptical that the money would go to road safety or healthcare or some other noble cause if it wasn't spent here. It seems more likely that the money would have stayed with whatever branch of government spent it, and instead it would've been used to buy a new tank or patrol cars or some such. Or in true Catch-22 fashion, they'd spend $3.5 million on a report on how to spend the remaining $500k but the report runs over budget and costs the full $4 million.

If that money was genuinely doing nothing useful then I guess spending it pointlessly searching for a tiny nuclear capsule is harmless enough...

Why couldnt it be you though, so we wouldnt have to read such stupid comments.

Although this article is about nuclear power, in fact it may be an issue that applies to all US infrastructure. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29489616

Also, I wonder if the US has accumulated know-how to lower the cost of nuclear power plant construction. Korea has continued to build nuclear power plants, and it is clear that it has the know-how to cut costs.

Or just falsified certificates and used opaque accounting methods, all while the regulator sat on double chairs.

> 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.[25] 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.[26] 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.[25][27]

> 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.[28] Control cabling in the first APR-1400s under construction had to be replaced delaying construction by up to a year.[29] 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.[30]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_South_Korea#H...

Same thing happened to a certain extent with French nuclear. This article talks vaguely about new requirements whilst large components were manufactured, but one of the big problems with Flamanville 3 was that one of the largest and most critical components - the main pressure vessel that formed the primary containment for radioactive materials - didn't meet the existing material specifications and was at increased risk of failing, and the manufacturer had basically faked the testing and certification on it. After discovering this, the regulators went back and looked at the reactor pressure vessels built by the same supplier during the golden era of French nuclear, and a bunch of them turned out to be defective in the same way.

Here's shorter article.

https://ieefa.org/articles/european-pressurized-reactors-nuc....

The cost overrun is a global problem.

The five European Pressurized Reactors (EPRs) designed by French utility EDF have all suffered unanticipated issues that have led to costly delays and soaring price

Findings of a 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysis that found successive iterations of a new nuclear design generally cost more than the original project

Although a pair of Chinese EPRs have been completed and are generating power, one unit was shut down for more than a year because of faulty fuel rods.

Costs and delays have also plagued EPRs in France, the United Kingdom, and Finland, where the completion of the Olkiluoto 3 reactor has been delayed 17 years

For more context: EPRs are all developed by EDF and Framatome. So this could be another factor explaining that they all have issues, rather than their sheer complexity.

You are missing half of it: Siemens. The EPR design is French-German, as an "evolutionary descendant of the Framatome N4 and Siemens Power Generation Division Konvoi reactors". [1]

This largely explain the complexity of the design: it would probably have been easier to make either an evolution of the Framatome N4 reactor, or the latest Siemens reactor. Combining both and trying to please all industrial partners (industrial work-share...) added a lot of complexity.

Hence the simpler EPR 2 design that is being worked on, presumably without Siemens Konvoi involvement in the design (although probably still as a subcontractor).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)

EDIT: clarity

Siemens sold their nuclear business in 2011. The last 12 years are completely on the French.

When talking about nuclear power it seems like always someone else is the bogeyman.

I disagree. But note that I never said it was Siemens fault. Or Framatome. I have no clue on that, so won’t make any claim on the subject.

And frankly, I don’t care. I look for flaws in processes, rather than trying to assign blame. Especially trying to assign blame to a country…

So my claim is that the design complexity is due to forcing Framatome (then Areva) and Siemens into designing something together. An alliance willed by politicians, in the name of Europe, or maybe French-German cooperation, but certainly not something wanted by the industrial players.

There lies the original flaw. The rest is just consequences.

I’m sure Framatome would have preferred to iterate on its own design (itself an iteration on a design of Westing House, Fr-am-atome stands for French-American-Atome). Same for Siemens.

12 years ago, when Germany decided to get out of nuclear power altogether, the EPR was already designed. Contracts were signed. Constructions ongoing.

Do you really think the design complexity would suddenly go away 12 years ago? France, UK, Finland and China signed for that overly complex EPR design, and that’s what they are getting.

Much faster in China, because they actually know how to build things, while in (at least some parts of) Europe we seem to have dropped the ball quite a bit… but that’s another subject.

The EPR was designed and sales contracts signed well before 2011. The bad decisions and designs didn't evaporate, it has taken all these years to complete the inherited projects. Olkiluoto 3 was supposed to be complete by 2010! You can read about everything that went wrong here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...

Simpler and also smaller, if EPR1200 becomes their main product: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#EPR1200_...

I found it a bit ridiculous that the author of the article interviews himself in the third person, depicting himself as:

> [...] the energy transition,” said Frank Bass, an IEEFA editor and author of the study. “Unfortunately, [...]

The site also seems to be a content farm, with the article rehashing the MIT study already posted here.

It sounds like we could fix basically all of this by having new plant approvals be "sticky", ie, once a project is approved, you can build and operate it with no additional regulatory-imposed changes.

This whole system of retroactively requiring changes made is absurdly costly and it's why we're stuck in terms of building out new capacity. This is not de-regulation, just changing how we regulate this from something that is actively antagonistic to something that is not.

When we find a systemic risk across the industry, like the requirement for independent core cooling after Fukushima, we should just roll with it and accept it?

Tsunamis do not happen everywhere, but the regulators found the risk to be systemic. As an example: 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...

> we should just roll with it and accept it?

When your "safety" regulation is costing a billion dollars per QALY then by imposing it you are killing thousands of people, because that money could have instead been spend on other things like cancer screening that would let you save a thousand times as many lives per dollar.

The other side is, how many QALYs do you get from the at least $150 billion we are spending to clean up Fukushima?

Or, even if you assume no disasters, how many QALYs can you buy with the cost difference between a renewables based grid and a nuclear based grid.

Enough that no one is building one of the latter (not France, not China, not South Korea), and everyone is building one of the former (including France, China and South Korea)

A purely renewable grid is sadly more expensive due to storage costs. Even CAES isn't enough to get below nuclear.

A commonly repeated (was going to say 'believed' but I'm not sure that's actually true) misconception.

Why there is a large contingent of people who think nuclear doesn't need storage is a genuine mystery to me. There's been more storage built for nuclear than for any other power source.

I am unaware of any nuclear electricity storage needs. Wasting extra electricity is trivial, while last I calculated you'd triple electricity costs due to storage if you switched the UK to wind power.

So what number did you get for nuclear when you did these calculations? With no storage you've got to be talking something like 20x for nuclear, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

> The most important use for pumped storage has traditionally been to balance baseload powerplants, but may also be used to abate the fluctuating output of intermittent energy sources.

For switching entirely to current gen French nuclear (rather than the MUCH cheaper 1970s plants) it was something like a 30% increase in consumer electricity costs.

Basically, you can just have make your "baseload" the amount you want at peak time and sell the excess electricity for basically nothing to industry. This is obviously a bad idea and you'll want some storage instead, but it's much less than what you need to last through a calm but cloudy week.

I very much encourage you to look up numbers for various storage types and energy sources and make a few models. It takes a few hours but its pretty interesting (I should really take it from my hard drive at home and put it on a blog somewhere...).

1) "below nuclear" is a very flexible concept (the Levy plant in Florida cost $1 billion and they didn't even break ground) and people often confidently assume a nuclear price that is three times smaller than actual building costs. 2)"purely renewable" is a small phrase about a big assumption. 80% solar/wind is cheaper than operating what the US has right now; solving the last 20% has a number of options and we don't know which will work, but while we are quadrupling our current level of solar and wind we have some time to work on that. (Noon Energy makes some attractive claims but it's very early days.) 3) A small amount of "clean firm power" - almost anything's cheaper than nuclear- saves a large amount of storage. Maybe that's closed loop geothermal, maybe that's synthetic natural gas, maybe it's nuclear, but nuclear is REALLY expensive.

Even the ridiculous latest plants with 5x cost overruns costing £35 billion seem to have a lifetime electricity cost of around €0.05/kWh. That doesn't seem "really expensive" to me.

Old 70s style nuclear power is under €0.01/kWh.

I also think your 80% is optimistic and it'll start to become much harder to integrate in once we go over 50% total yearly electricity production. Going to need large natural gas plants just lying around idle for most of the year.

That's not really "the other side", is it? Those 150 billion are just waste/Keynesian stimulus.

Very very few indeed, it's stupidly wasteful.

The vast majority of that cleanup is incredibly QALY inefficient, spending millions removing tiny bits of radiation from soil that would cause a hundredth of a cancer case. This is because the rules are that they need to return the area to the same radiation levels it used to have, not merely to a safe enough level that further action would be QALY inefficient.

Even in 2012 the natural reduction in radiation meant you have only a few square kilometers[1] with exposure levels over 20uSv/h, the level at which we can actually detect a cancer increase. An area that seems to have had less than a thousand people judging by satellite photos. There is no way to justify spending $150 billion cleaning up something that would kill only a couple of people (particularly when you can just pay them the old value of the land/housing and then let them decide whether they want to accept the increased cancer risk) when even in Japan you can save a thousand lives with that money.

[1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/uploadedImages/wnn/Images...

Some level of retroactive regulatory changes are required because the industry keeps discovering that the previous way of doing things was substantially less safe than previously assumed.

My favorite example of this is that during the golden era of cheap nuclear power mentioned in articles like this, it was the norm to run all the redundant control and monitoring wiring through the same narrow duct in a wall meant to stop fire spreading, fill it with highly flammable foam, and test the foam for air leaks using a bare candle flame. The way we learned this was a bad idea was because workers at Brown's Ferry Nuclear Power Plant actually managed to start a fire and take out a bunch of supposedly redundant monitoring and control systems whilst flooding the control room with smoke. This bad design made both the redundancy and the firestops that were meant to be there ineffective, and the stricter fire regulations required to prevent issues like this are a major cost.

You can't just assume that because something hasn't caused a major catastrophe yet that it's safe to continue doing either. This is such bad engineering practice and has played a role in so many major disasters across multiple industries there's even a specific name for it: the normalization of deviance. It's dangerous because it invalidates all the engineering and safety calculations that were meant to prevent disaster, replacing them with a gamble where no-one really knows the odds.

Given when Brown's Ferry was built (construction started in 1966), plus just how many million American engineers, construction workers, and service members had hard-won WWII-era experience with "if you do it that way, then it may burn up / sink / explode with just one hit" design principals - one has to wonder at the management of the Brown's Ferry design process. How did they manage to keep all of the real grown-ups out of the room?

It is perhaps sometimes true that it is "less safe than previously assumed", but I'd guess that more often it's "we figured out a way to do it _even safer_", but in either one of these cases, 40+ year old nuclear tech was and is safer than coal power plants, which is the alternative. We crossed "safer than the alternatives" and "safe enough" decades ago. The safety regime in the US around nuclear is out of control and has no connection with any outside context.

> …coal power plants, which is the alternative

This is a false dichotomy. Even if you ignore renewables, there is still gas and combined cycle plants.

> It sounds like we could fix basically all of this by having new plant approvals be "sticky", ie, once a project is approved, you can build and operate it with no additional regulatory-imposed changes.

Leaving aside Soviet-era propaganda and that contribution, this would lead to regular Chernobyl-style events if there was no requirement to implement reactively discovered safety processes.

According to the article, "rising labor costs are the bulk of increased construction costs". Yet we are talking about cost increasing by hundreds of percent. The question the article does not really pose is: how much of that labor is actually necessary?

I am reminded of my summer internship installing a computer system in a sewage plant. One of my jobs was testing the connection of the computer system to sensors. I needed a guide to show me where the sensors were located, and then I needed to attach a multimeter to the wires while someone on the computer end sent a signal. So two people needed.

However, there were six of us: The guide. The guy who could open the sensor cover. The guy who could attach the clips to the wires. The guy who read the meter. The guy who made sure each person only did his part of the job. And me. 300% of the required labor, so 300% of the costs.

When I think about big projects I immediately think about the system of contractors. There is a dozen layer distance between buyer and the guy who delivers. And every layer wants the share. So having one screw installed costs a salary for one guy and profit for dozen other involved companies creating price explosion.

This is normal in any slightly larger project, the company that wins the bid rarely has hundreds of people twiddling their thumbs waiting for the next contract to be won. Instead the contracting company goes out to find sub contractors who do have free labor.

This creates a chain where the main contractor goes out to find labor, they find someone who promises fifty engineers for a good price. This company doesn’t either have fifty engineers sitting idle. Maybe they have ten. So they go out to find forty engineers. Rinse and repeat until the price that’s offered is too low for anyone to accept, or they’ve found their allocation of engineers.

The only way to prevent this is for the original contracting company to hire all of the necessary staff themselves onto their staff, but this is slow and only works if the project is long enough so that you can entice people to switch jobs. All experienced engineers are already employed somewhere else.

This is why here in Finland most large construction projects have in their contract with the main supplier/builder a limit on how many layers of sub contractors is allowed. This is 2 or 3 for most projects.

This makes communication chains much shorter which usually leads into better end result. Also when things go wrong finding who is at fault is easier and it is more likely to be some big company that actually has money/proper insurance to be able to take care of it instead of some 2 or 3 person company that caused a multimillion fuckup and thus they would just go bankrupt instead of paying.

I'm not contradicting anything about this, but I would be interested to see a comparison between nuclear power plants and OTHER very large projects (the California Bullet Train, anyone? How about the Sydney Opera House?) It seems like they are mostly all getting worse, not better. It doesn't have to be this way. Bent Flyvbjerg, a Danish professor, has a book on this:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Big-Things-Get-Done-ebook/dp/B0B3...

It might well be that nuclear plants are even worse than other types of projects, but I'd like to see the proof.

After I wrote that, I wondered if Flyvbjerg had already written on nuclear plants. He has the world's biggest database of large projects, so he must have.

It turns out he has, and they're in the quadrant of "dumb scale-up."

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.11104.pdf

I lost all faith in Flyvbjerg in the 90's when he published his doctoral thesis. It was published as two volumes, one of them being a philosophical background. That volume was 1) mostly cribbed from the Dreyfus brothers (Hubert and Stuart) and 2) contained many very dodgy quotes from Aristotle. He had used '[...]' more liberally than any other author I've ever come across. The quotes ended up being like the Homer Simpson's interview from S06E09:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqDP8SnPVA0

Hmm. The book doesn't have that, I don't think. It's pretty readable.

On the other hand, he does have some association with Oxford, which is selling a "course" on how to apply his methods of project estimation.

I wouldn't waste my money on the course, but I think the method of "look at similar projects, and take the average" is a much better algorithm than the bottom-up Gantt chart that everyone does. Shit happens, no one thinks it'll happen to them but it does, and the historical data includes all the Black Swan events that no one saw coming.

Materials science is a great expense.

- Monocrystaline turbine blades have become required due to their ability to operate at higher temperatures than the melting points of the metals that compose their alloys. The requirement is their efficiency in power production. These are also used in aerospace, but are complex and difficult to produce.

- Common water reactors must contain insanely high pressures, enough to force water to remain liquid at 300°C or higher. This is not inexpensive.

- Molten salt reactors, where deployed, must be composed of alloys resistant to molten (negative) chloride ions and (positive) sodium ions, assuming the fluid chemically disassociates. Alloys that can withstand these conditions are also not inexpensive.

Monocrystalline turbine blades reduce creep, they don't allow the blade to remain solid if its above the melting point.

But... isn't the melting point of the alloy far above the melting point of the constituent pure metals?

I'd ask my metalurgist friend, but I don't want to look like an idiot.

In a common example, the alloy of iron and carbon known as cast iron melts at a lower temperature than pure iron or pure carbon (or low-carbon steel).

But there are other cases where an alloy has higher melting point. Ti(88)Al(12), for example.

Film cooling and coatings are what allow operating temperatures above the melting temperature. That doesn’t mean the metal is above its melting temperature.

It’s definitely an expense. But this doesn’t fully explain why nuclear is expensive.

-Current nuclear reactors aren’t nearly hot enough to need single crystal turbine blisks. We’re talking on the order of 300°C.

-Coal power plant routinely hit much higher temperatures in supercritical and ultra-supercritical (yes, that’s a real term) steam generators. We don’t have quite as bad a problem building coal power plants.

-We’re not currently building molten salt reactors for power generation.

You didn’t say anything that was wrong. I’m just don’t think this is the reason building reactors is so expensive.

Yeah, the high tech blades occur in combustion turbines.

A simple cycle combustion turbine power plant might have 5% of the capital cost per watt of a nuclear power plant.

Predictions:

1) in 2050, the world will get its energy almost exclusively from renewable sources, with a combination of batteries, hydrogen, biogas, hydropower (conventional and pumped), and demand management used to cope with variability.

2) Energy, even taking into account transmission and firming costs, will be cheaper than it ever was.

3) Message boards will still be full of arguments over nuclear energy.

I’ll unilaterally bet $50 that oil + natural gas + coal will still make up >50% of the global energy mix by 2050.

In 2019, fossil fuels still generated 79% of our power worldwide with a projection to very slowly lose market share [1]

[1] https://earth.org/data_visualization/eo-indexes-global-energ...

I'll take that bet. Here's hoping both of us are around to settle it!

Separate primary energy from useful energy. An ICE car is 20-25% thermally efficient while BEVs are 90%.

> while BEVs are 90%

Only if you ignore the cost and conversion efficiency of generating the electricity.

There aren't any electricity wells out there where it comes out of the ground for the cost of pumping it.

Well, wind turbines have some trouble catching all the wind and solar PV is not 100% efficient either, but it is not like it is going to waste.

That is the alternative, not burning fossil fuels somewhere else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz%27s_law

The same predictions was probably made, but with nuclear instead of renewables back in the 60s-70s . And frankly it seems like the world could have actually been run almost exclusively by nuclear today if we had realized how bad fossils where instead of being scared of nuclear.

Predictions:

1) in 2050 NIMBY will be just as bad for renewables as it used to be for nuclear.

2) New standardized nuclear pp designs will bring the cost of nuclear down to be much cheaper than almost all renewables, but in localized areas where it actually makes sense renewables will dominate

3) Message boards will still be full of people claiming we should run exclusively on solar even in places like Norway and Canada

Doing back of napkin math (using the numbers I can find) it doesn't seem like nuclear power is expensive to construct - at least compared to solar and wind. Nothing is cost competitive with natural gas and coal - but that's the problem we are trying to solve.

Solar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm

The Topaz Solar Farm in the US has a capacity of 550MW and a construction cost of $2.5b US billion.

That puts it at a cost of $4.5 million per MW capacity (550MW / 2.5b) (adjusted for inflation that's $3.2b USD or $5.8m per MW). It is used at 26% of its capacity which I assume is due to the non dispatchable nature of solar (would likely change if batteries were added - increasing cost).

Assuming a 10 year loan at 3% adds $500m bringing it to $6.7m per MW capacity

Nuclear:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...

The Palo Verde nuclear plant has a capacity of 3937MW and a construction cost of $12.6b USD adjusted for inflation. That puts it at a cost of $3.2m per MW capacity and it was used at 82% of its capacity over its lifetime.

Interest at 3% over 10 years adds 2b to the figure making it $3.7m per MW capacity

Limitations:

This doesn't consider running costs, maintenance or factor how usage capacity affects cost.

Maybe I am missing something, perhaps the running costs of nuclear eclipse the total cost of solar + batteries over 50 years? Maybe the loans granted for nuclear are at a much higher interest rate than those granted for other power projects? Is insurance a factor?

The Topaz Solar Farm began construction in 2011. Solar costs dropped a lot in the following decade:

https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/how-does-utility-scale-sol...

See figure 9 in particular:

https://www.solarreviews.com/content/images/blog/SMI-2021-Q2...

Utility scale fixed tilt PV installations like Topaz were down to $0.77 per watt ($0.77 million per megawatt) by 2021.

Does $0.77m per MW describe plant capacity or realized output? Is that a national average or is that for a particular geography?

Looking at some more modern projects and it is actually looking pretty good. I don't know how to account for unused capacity as it seems most PV util setups use about 30% of their capacity (do you just multiply the cost by 1.7?)

Case 1:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karap%C4%B1nar_solar_power_pla...

2023 Turkey - 1300MW capacity and a construction cost of 1.3b USD puts it at ~ $1m/MW capacity which is incredible.

Case 2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Signal_Solar

2018 USA - construction cost of $1.1b (maybe) and a capacity of 615MW so ~1.8m per MW

Case 3 (China nuclear)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fangjiashan_Nuclear_Power_Plan... is ~ 1.8m USD per MW capacity if we can trust their numbers.

Assuming a utilization of 80% (like other nuclear plants) this seems at worst cost competitive?

The USA quotes AC capacity, costs and power.

So a 100MW plant in the US quoted at $110 million including the cost of finance, profit margin, regulatory compliance, insurance and transmission with a capacity factor of 27% has 130MW DC of modules. Some other countries will quote DC so there may be a discrepancy. You can find harmonized comparions in things like the IRENA generation costs report, the ITRPV or the frauenhofer photovoltaics report. The US is also almost all single axis tracking where other countries may have fixed tilt as dominant.

New fixed tilt utility solar in 2023 is about 50-60c/Wdc or 80c/Wac. Single axis is about 70c/Wdc or $1/Wac.

The chinese nuclear project doesn't include inflation since 2008 (40%), cost of finance/escalation, chinese-government-accounting, or insurance. The (admitted) costs per watt of the chinese nuclear program have also increased substantially since 2008. Even with these, the claimed capex per MWh is comparable to solar in the west, but the O&M would make it much more expensive. Solar in china is 20-50% cheaper than the west.

Similarly costs for older nuclear plants in the US tend to exclude the cost of finance/escalation, as well as costs that were paid after they were "finished" due to upgrades needed for reliability (early capacity factors were <50%) and safety due to lessons learnt in incidents like browns ferry.

In the west O&M is about $30/MWh, which overlaps with the all-in cost of solar.

Also note that the cost of the Turkey facility you mentioned includes a factory which will produce many times more modules.

https://www.irena.org/Publications/2022/Jul/Renewable-Power-...

https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost...

Topaz Solar Plant is my pet peeve in solar-v-nuclear cost comparisons online, because it pops up all the time and it narrowly misses the biggest story in energy: the cost of solar PV dropped by 90% in ten years! Solar went from being the most expensive way to generate energy to being the cheapest.

Unfortunately, people looking for comparison tend to search for the biggest solar installation, and Topaz pops out on that list. However, because solar is so modular, new installations tend to be small and quick.

Example: The Black Bear solar project in Alabama came online in Feb 2023, just 15 months after it secured $100 million in financing in Dec 2021. The project provides 100 MW (AC) of power. That's $1m / 1 MW of solar generating capacity.

The CEO of the Alabama Municipal Electric Authority is quoted as saying that, had Black Bear solar come online in Jan 2022, they would have saved $10 million in fuel costs (since natural gas prices jumped after the start of Putin's war).

https://lightsourcebp.com/us/project/black-bear-solar/

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/12/20/130-mw-alabama-solar-...

https://www.greenvilleadvocate.com/2022/11/29/black-bear-sol...

The real problem seems to be lack of standards in manufacturing industry to raise the quality bar across the supply chain to the nuclear levels. If all regular factories of cooling systems and valves and pipes and concretes were operating to meet interoperability and quality standards set by regulatory bodies then the cost of meeting such high quality bar would be amortized over large number of things. Also, the "indirect" costs can be significantly optimized with today's tech – especially with more AI-infused software systems. I think this pattern of the problem is seen in many industries – of lack of regulations for enforcing interoperability requirements and setting quality bar high enough to meet a large number of critical use-cases. We don't build as many big and amazing things anymore, not as much as we used to.

What’s stops the nuclear industry from then requiring even higher quality? Can you get another magnitude of safety?

There will always be a window for quality, and nuclear will always be at the top along with other high budget projects.

Nuclear power generation is already ridiculously safe. The amount of radiation allowed to leak from a power plant in a year is about as much as you receive by having a dozen trans-Atlantic flights. Number of people dying per GWh generated is lower than e.g. wind generation. Coal produces much more radiatoin-induced diseases than nuclear, because the ashes concentrate heavy metals, including some radioactive isotopes.

I don't think it's the industry what pushes for even higher standards.

OTOH some cost-cutting in very mundane things can end up in a disaster. The whole Fukishima catastrophe won't happen if the height of the tsunami-protection wall was not reduced. So when a once-in-a-century earthquake with a once-in-a-century tsunami hit, it proved to be inadequate. But building a concrete wall does no require any special nuclear-reactor-grade materials or skills, it's civil engineering 101.

Stop gaslighting please. I have heard this so many times yet it is not the truth[1]. Most of the time people are basing this on political belief.

> Coal produces much more radiatoin-induced diseases

You can't compare nominal operation of coal with nuclear. Nuclear is very safe when operating nominally but once in a while there is a leak or something, which sometimes even go unnoticed. And it could affect the surrounding for years.

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

OP isn't "gaslighting" anyone. The U.S. has been using commercial nuclear power for nearly 70 years without a single fatality to members of the general public. It has a better safety record than any other energy source, including solar and wind.

Your own Wikipedia source demonstrates that. Note how many in that long list of accidents have "0" under "Fatalities", and the few U.S. accidents that do have fatalities were either experimental military reactors (i.e., not commercial power), or the fatalities were caused by non-nuclear issues of the sort that exist (and occasionally kill people) in any power plant.

That increased cost would seep into all non-nuclear projects, too, making them more expensive, and making more of the non-viable.

But having cross-industry standards that are known to work for particular application is usually very helpful. If a government could help that by making large enough contracts, and pushing these standards across connected industries in order to fulfill these contracts, that might be good.

"72% of the cost increase was due to indirect costs, indicating a large increase in expensive professionals such as engineers and managers"

one of the first very tangible direct "Macro" effects of the rise of non-contributing b.s jobs (Consulting, Life Coaches, Influencers, Day Trading and everything else under the 4 hour week mantra).

I've always wondered what are the big picture scale effects if everyone is trying to retire early and live off real-estate income and here it is: we as a species regress in the single most indicator of progress: energy autonomy cause we can't afford it because our cultural narrative doesn't motivate enough people to specialize in it depriving us from clean energy production and literally destroying the earth we inhibit.

Nothing is really necessarily being deprived here. Society could just decide to pay for those expensive engineers and then some, take the purely economic loss, and enjoy relatively clean energy. have fun with that though

Because U.S. environmentalists were, and are, happy with the NRC making it virtually impossible to build them with a sea of totally unnecessary red tape.

Opinions differ on which part of the red tape is "totally unnecessary".

Licensing, regulation, inspections and certifications ; all good things…but also accidents, technology changing before construction is over.

insurance

Insurance is just putting a dollar value on risk.

Hugely subsidized by the federal government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

Compare the $15 billion funded by the industry with Fukushima looking to cost at least $150 billion to clean up.

Nobody insures nuclear power plants. Government is always spillover guarantee.

It also does not come into play after start of operations.

Financing would be different matter. Those percentages trump up heavily and can kill any large project with long delays.

In the US, the government charges $375 million dollars per reactor for that guarantee. This huge overhead cost incentivizes larger reactors.

Except they do but just like pretty much every other insurance it does not cover everything and the payout has a maximum.

For example here in Finland the nuclear plants are required by law to get an insurance that covers up to 732 million euros (~1.2 billion euros in Sweden) of "third party damages" (they can buy additional insurances that covers damages to the plant itself). If that is not enough then government will take care of the next 500 million after that. If that is still not enough then the company is liable for the rest which effectively means they will go bankrupt as usually the only assets they have is the nuclear power plants.

This does mean that at the very end government will have to pay for it if the accident is big enough but gets to keep all the left over assets of the company.

They buy the insurance from this company https://atompool.org/en that is a consortium of multiple insurance companies that operate in the nordics. And there is multiple of these nuclear insurance pools around the world and they all reinsure each other.

Another question related to this is why don't big dams etc need similar insurances (at least here in Finland they don't). When things go wrong the damages can be just as big if not bigger.

Just to expand on:

> If that is still not enough then the company is liable for the rest which effectively means they will go bankrupt as usually the only assets they have is the nuclear power plants.

In my experience and almost without exception large capital projects are "owned" by a single company .. that company having as major shareholders the partners or parent company that put everything together to make the project happen.

Eg. a massive copper mine project in Canada | South America | etc that appears in the Rio Tinto annual finnacial reports is owned and managed by the locally registered RTCopperCutout Company.

No suprise that this happens with nuclear capital also, but worthy of a mention for anyone not already aware.

Sometimes the parent company | shareholders can be held to further account but not always.

Yeah in Finland Fortum owns Fortum Power and Heat that owns the 2 reactors in Loviisa and ~25% of TVO.

TVO is the other nuclear company that owns the 3 reactors in Olkiluoto. The other owners of TVO is Pohjolan Voima with ~60% which is owned by the wood/paper companies UPM-Kymmene and Stora-Enso together with a bunch of smaller municipal power companies. Helen (fully owned by Helsinki city) also owns the last ~15% of TVO though its subsidiary Oy Mankala Ab.

Importantly in Finland this ownership structure also plays into how the plants operate. In the case of TVO it does not directly sell its power to end users but to its owners at cost (who are also mandated to buy it) who then use it themselves or sell it forwards.

Higher labor costs. Not investing in local extraction industries.

> We can roughly break the costs of operating any power plant into three categories: fuel costs, operation and maintenance costs, and capital costs

The article forgets to mention another cost: The cost of disposing/storing used up fuel. This is often forgotten, but a major cost too, if the spent fuel is to be stored safely and securely. And it needs to be stored like that for hundreds of thousands of years!

Switzerland is currently in the process of building a national waste storing facility, a quick Google search showed that the US currently does not have one.

It's only a major cost due to the need to manage media headlines, NIMBYism and an uninformed public. You actually could just dump it into the ocean to join the billion tons of Uranium already there...

Your comment comes of as a bit dismissive, but I'm trying to take your word here.

A quick google search shows that the there have been policies [0] to prevent ocean dumping of nuclear waste due to adverse effects on the environment. It doesn't seem like something we should do.

Also it seems like you are implying that spent fuel and raw, unenriched uranium are somehow the same, which is also not true.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...

> A quick google search shows that the there have been policies [0] to prevent ocean dumping of nuclear waste due to adverse effects on the environment.

Check the citations. The wikipedia article is conflating general oceanic waste dumping with nuclear waste dumping. Things like oil float(!), come in huge quantities and react both physically (coating) and chemically with wildlife. As best I can tell dumping solid dense nuclear waste onto the abyssal plane has no known or theoretical environmental effects.

> Also it seems like you are implying that spent fuel and raw, unenriched uranium are somehow the same, which is also not true.

You're correct here. However the moderating effects of water mean that if you did glass solid nuclear waste and dump it in the abyss you'd get no detectable increase in ocean radioactivity.

People also seem to forget that the power plants have to be removed after their lifecycle. The safe decommission of a nuclear power plant takes decades and costs billions again.

For one thing since recent history shows the actual cost was going to be about $25 Billion for the kind of plant people expect to go forward with, construction never would have been approved unless the estimate could have been artificially reduced to some more palatable number to begin with.

Plus the bigger the ticket item, the more profit for suppliers and better commission for salespeople all up and down the line of such a huge project.

The fundamental purpose is to be a gravy train not to bring affordable power to the masses unless some kind of bonanza has fully taken place beforehand.

Contractors and everyone involved know this and are prepared to take whatever bonanza they can get as long as it lasts, and it can be more lucrative than other sizable projects without even going to completion. It's the sale of a lifetime and more people than ever expect to be set for life with bonuses before construction even starts.

Plus the true need for increased safety is an issue and all industries have spiraling costs here since insurance companies are involved, even if more so during construction than operation. Not only is more safety layered on than was once acceptable, but shareholders of insurance companies wanted to experience unbroken growth in returns to beat inflation since the 1970's and 1980's too. They are traded on the same stock market as value-added companies.

One thing I never understand about the "higher safety standards increase costs" argument is that those higher safety standards are also used as a strong argument on how safe nuclear is. But then it's criticized at the same time for driving the costs up. So either we have extremely safe plants that can be built and operated safely in the thousands worldwide, or we have cheap plants that can be built quickly, but at the expense of safety. Thus far we could not have both.

This seems like a basic pros/cons kinda thing? More safety margin means less chance of your reactor blowing up (pro), but it costs more and takes longer to build (con), so you've got to weigh those up and find a sweet spot.

Learning curves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects#:~:te....