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Comment by throwaway1777 | Hacker News Reader

Did you forget about externalities and politics? Because nuclear would be way cheaper with practice building reactors, economies of scale, without billions in red tape, etc. not to mention it’s the best source of base load without creating massive amounts of air pollution or battery waste

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> without billions in red tape

I would prefer to keep the red tape, thank you very much.

Sure, nuclear is an expensive industry, but it's also a very safe industry, and I believe we should keep this part of it.

The parent didn't say "without reasonable safety measures". See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-risk_bias

and

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36751041

China and Russia do not build and run nuclear power plants at dramatically lower costs, despite having none of those handicaps.

Edit: Hmm, actually, I find wildly diverging LCOE numbers in different locations online. Some indicate they build at half the cost from France, while others say at a similar cost. So, if anyone knows which LCOE numbers are reliable please indicate.

Russia's economy is currently heavily dependent on oil exports, so there may at least be some incentive there to suppress it. China on the other hand, had quadrupled its nuclear power generation in the past 10 years (1).

(1) https://www.forbes.com/sites/thebakersinstitute/2023/05/17/h...

> Russia's economy is currently heavily dependent on oil exports...

All the more reason for them to build nuclear plants. Every barrel of oil that their own economy doesn't need (because they have plenty of nuclear plants) is another barrel they can make money exporting. And if or when using oil becomes unfashionable, or their oil reserved start running low...then being recognized experts on how to build & run lots of safe, economical nuclear plants sounds pretty good, eh?

Nuclear competes with natural gas and coal, not oil.

Beyond powering the grid, there are myriad uses for oil that nuclear cannot substitute directly for- asphalt, plastic, nylon, even Aspirin (synthesized from benzene).

And yet the biggest use of petroleum by far is for transportation. Worldwide demand for petroleum would plunge 90+% if all cars were electric and nuclear was fully deployed.

Uh, no. Only two thirds of petroleum used in America is used for transportation, and that includes all transportation. You cannot possibly get a 90+% reduction in petroleum use by electrifying all cars.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...

So by that chart, a barrel of oil is basically 89% used to generate gasoline, distillate fuel oil (diesel), hydrocarbon gas, and jet fuel. That is to say, 89% is used for energy and 11% or less is used for plastic, asphault, and materials. That 27% industrial figure on the right chart includes things like propane production, which is mainly used as a heat source (nuclear could absolutely replace this).

Either way, if your economy is dependent on oil exports, whether you were to lose 2/3 of that or 9/10 of that business, you're going to be hurting, and you might not rush to refactor your economy around nuclear.

You've got an interesting way of reading charts... are you classifying trains, trucks and boats all as cars? And classifying all process heat used in industry as "energy" is certainly true but you're abstracting away way too many details if you just suppose all of that can be replaced with electrical heating. A lot of process heat could be provided by very small nuclear reactors on site, but honestly that seems like a pipe dream.

From what I understand, Lazard's LCOE, which are quoted everywhere, mainly rely on US numbers. That means they probably are reliable for US situations.

Sadly we don't get to ignore politics inconveniently making fission more expensive. If you do ignore politics and just look at costs alone, then we can make a global HVDC power grid for less than the cost of the other local upgrades we want regardless within each national power grid.

People demand a safety standard from fission which is expensive, and keep demanding ever more safety from them, and when it can't do that will replace it with fossil fuels even despite nuclear being much much safer than fossil fuels.

The reason people demand higher standards is history.

An example: stacks that scrub radioisotopes out of steam from confinement during serious accidents when the steam has to be released to prevent overpressurization of the confinement system. These were added to most European reactors after Chernobyl. The US and Japanese didn't add these, saying the cost wasn't worth it.

Then Fukushima happened. Had the reactors there had these systems, the radioactive release would have been reduced by a factor of 100.

Given how few people got cancer from Fukushima, this doesn't really help make the fears seem rational.

One death from cancer, 2313 from relocating: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...

One person identified as having gotten cancer from Fukushima. Most of the cancers would be in a larger population and could not be distinguished from the large background of cancers. That doesn't mean they didn't (or won't) happen, or that regulation must assume they didn't/won't happen. Regulation is not like criminal law; radiation is not presumed innocent until proven guilty.

That's kinda my point — in the court of public opinion, nuclear is unable to win.

This does actually matter despite the deaths from coal etc. being massively higher by the same measures.

I agree that fossil fuel use should be aggressively reduced. In the past, that would have meant more nuclear. It does not mean more nuclear now. Reducing fossil fuel use has ceased to be an argument for nuclear construction.

Yup, I think we're on the same page on this point.

(Almost a pity we never got to see atomic cruise liners and cargo ships, but nobody wanted them in the ports, so…)

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