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Comment by liveoneggs | Hacker News Reader

Votgle 3 has been running for almost a month. It started construction August 26, 2009 and is finishing $17B over budget so far, total about $30B. It bankrupted "Westinghouse Electric Company".

Compared to the forever/oil wars it seems like a pretty good deal, to be honest.

If we had not invaded Iraq we could have built 30 Votgles. USA has spent 2-3 votgles on Ukraine so far since the war began.

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If we had built 30 Votgles they wouldn't have cost $30B each. One of the huge problems with modern Nuclear plants is there is no economy of scale. They're all bespoke projects with fresh people re-learning the skills of the past. If they were being mass produced there would be an established industry with veterans working on most of the plants, saving enormous amounts of time and money.

This is where Wind and Solar are really winning. The industries building them are growing mature and as a result efficiency goes up and costs go down.

This was the promise of nuclear microreactors: that they could be mass produced in a factory and shipped where needed. But it seems like they're never going to get off of the ground.

Korea and China build nuclear at scale. It has not gotten cheaper for them. In china it has failed so spectacularly that they've now switched back to building more coal instead of nuclear. The reality is that politically required regulation makes nuclear completely uneconomical. The only solution is a political movement that lessens the regulatory burden.

That's simply not true. China is building more nuclear power:

https://archive.ph/W7JFd

Also note they're nowhere near as costly as Vogtle.

A lot of this is not inherent to building nuclear reactors. We've regulated nuclear power to the point where it's cost prohibitive. If we required every solar panel installer to have a phd, and only let them work 1 hr per day solar would be incredibly expensive too.

Imagine we were willing to accept the same death rate as natural gas. Reducing regulations to the point of having 100x more nuclear incidents. How much cheaper would they be to build?

The problem with nuclear accidents is the consequences can be so catosrophic that it's virtually impossible to accept failure. Irradiate a few hundred sqkm in an accident and you easily exceed every other expense of building the plant (being generous).

It's funny how usually people argue for more regulation of side effects, but as soon as nuclear gets involved it's the reverse. Nuclear must be absolutely safe, because no one but the government (and by extension, the general populace) can afford the expense of insuring it. Reducing regulation is tantamount to giving investors permission to pull as much money as they like out of the plant and leaving us with the risk.

We also know that corporations are going to be corporations. The business guys will eventually take the wheel and absent sufficient regulation they will inevitably cost-cut and corner-cut their way to disaster. It’s totally predictable.

If there is ever even a remote profit motive, everything, including safety, will eventually be thrown under the bus to maximize profit. It’s how all businesses are run.

Isn't US energy generation ~1200GW? If a Vogtle is 1.1GW - 30 of them isn't even 3% of US energy generation.

We'd still need a ton of oil...

Interesting analysis. Indeed without the need for oil and gas, Russia would not have the cash to invade Ukraine.

Or a motive to secure the resources lying beneath the east of the country.

> USA has spent 2-3 votgles on Ukraine so far since the war began.

We all know this isn't even remotely the case, right?

People might not be aware, but the bulk of the support given to Ukraine has been military surplus gear, rather than cash. The US has sent tens of billions in cash for humanitarian and some military support as well, but the bulk of what’s counted in the $100B+ of aid has been in the form of weapons and ammunition and vehicles.

Most of which we were going to decommission anyway which would have cost us money. (With the patriot missile battery being a notable exception)

Yeah, it is profitable for the US that Ukraine people keep getting slaughtered.

How?

higher or lower?

Not sure why you're framing iraq and nuclear as either/or. The US is energy independent. The Iraq war was not necessary to secure our oil needs. There's no reason to believe we would've built more nuclear had it not happened.

Because it was a pointless war based on lies that stole $1T from the american people.

  > Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

Obviously it was a pointless war. That doesn't mean that if it didn't happen we'd spend all the money that went to it on nuclear. If we spent a trillion more on renewables we'd be far further ahead than if that money went to nuclear.

But there is money in oil and gas, big money, which is why you don't get nuclear...

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