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Comment by tuatoru | Hacker News Reader

> There's so many complaints about cost overruns, etc.

This is ironic. I recommend you read How Big Things Get Done[1], by Bent Flyvbjerg, the world's foremost expert on megaprojects. The book discusses an analysis of about 10,000 projects of over a billion dollars each.

Which projects were most likely to come in on time and on budget, and deliver the promised returns? PV solar.

Which projects were third most likely to overrun by 100% or more, be 100% late or more, and deliver only a fraction of the promised returns? Nuclear power plants.

Edit: The book's ratings are based on construction phase only, after all the permitting and other planning work has been completed.

(Third worst? What could be worse? Answer: nuclear waste storage sites, and Olympic Games hosting.)

1. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/672118/how-big-thin...

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Who'd have thought that the targets of perhaps the world's largest anti-anything campaign can slow them down so much? In the 1991 the anti-nuclear industry published its strategy to use everything in their power to slow down nuclear plants and especially nuclear waste sites. It's in black and white. [1]

[1] https://atomicinsights.com/anti-nuclear-movement-strategy-ci...

How does that work in China and Russia?

China and Russia regularly deliver nuclear plants (VVERs, Hualong One) roughly on time and budget.

But not at a rate that can keep up with the growth in demand, especially in China. Demand in China has grown more than 20-fold over the 21st Century but nuclear installs have not come close to keeping up with that.

In contrast solar PV and wind have now grown to the point where they are overtaking the growth in demand, meaning that fossil plants can soon start to be be retired.

Anti-pollution activists share a lot with anti-nuclear activists.

In China and Russia they don't have as much clout, so they use lots of coal, if it's cheaper.

According to https://www.worldometers.info/coal/coal-consumption-by-count... Russia's coal consumption is notably lower than that of the US per capita.

China and Russia funded the antinuclear sentiment in other countries, not in their own.

So how to anti nuclear activists cause massive cost overruns? The nuclear industry is a multibillion dollar industry with extremely close ties to government (probably one of the closest after the military industry). But somehow a movement, that still gets largely dismissed by politicians as environmental nutters managed to get them to overrun costs?

I mean the myth of the supposedly all powerful anti-nuclear lobby is actually hilarious. I mean took fukushima to get Germany (arguably on of the most nuclear sceptical countries) to decide on stopping nuclear (despite the majority of the population being against nuclear power for years prior) and under quite favourable conditions for the nuclear industry.

If you think about it, what is the argument for why nuclear is to plan? Nuclear is impossible to plan because ... pixies steal the computers the planners are using? Note that whatever factors you identify, the people estimating the plant build process are aware of that.

The planners know exactly how long it takes to build a nuclear plant, and they learn just as quickly as everyone watching from the sidelines. Their assumptions are being thrown by something - almost certainly anti-nuclear campaigners in government or regulatory forces warping incentives. Those are the only things that can consistently diver overruns. Otherwise it is hard for overruns of a nuclear plant to be different from any other project.

Are you joking? This is a blog post by some guy from a venture which invests into nuclear outlining a conspiracy theory where the Nuclear Information Resource Service (NIRS), the Safe Energy Communication Council (SECC), and Greenpeace slowed down nuclear around the world? What?

The blog post simply links to a scanned 1991 document from the major anti-nuclear players laying out their strategy. It includes folks like Ralph Nader.

ICYMI: https://atomicinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/Antinuclear-st...

Given the absolutely massive popularity of the antinuclear movement, the fringe belief is actually to think the legal intervenors that came out of it had negligible impact.

Germany for example had a 100% complete fast breeder reactor called SNR-300, designed to provide sustainable low carbon 24/7 energy for decades. Before it could turn on for the first time, protestors rioted. They never turned it on. Today it's an amusement park. Now that is impact.

Neither you nor the blog post "just" do something.

You both imply a conspiracy resulting from this document. You have no proof for any connection to anything relevant going from that.

The SNR-300 story is also completely unrelated. You just stacked it upon the conspiracy theory.

Not to double-spiderman you or anything, but from my perspective, your claims that the anti-nuclear movement was not a significant cause of nuclear power cost escalations worldwide appear to be baseless. Not sure how old you are, but the scale of the movement worldwide is pretty flabbergasting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement

My claim is that the conspiracy theory that you shared here and which is based upon that scanned document is just that. A conspiracy theory.

I never said there were no anti-nuclear movement.

There are many and in every country they have their own reasons and are more or less influential. For example: there hasn't been a anti-nuclear movement as influential as it was in Germany. This is why Germany was able to replace nuclear with renewables and push it's development for the whole planet. However, no German politician participated in your conspiracy.

Your pitiful attempt at derailing only say something about yourself.

This is a misguided response. Nuclear power plants have all been essentially custom, one-off projects built by inexperienced crews. It’s little surprise the cost overruns. It’s a very different proposition with identical, smaller modular plants that are being proposed that will be built in the tens to hundreds. Costs will drop dramatically while safety will increase, both by the design of the plants and the economies of scale.

You are correct - one offs incur huge "unknowns" which bloat budgets.

You are correct that the obvious solution is standard production of modular designs are the solution to that.

This has all be true and obvious for several decades. Yet the realisation of this approach seems to still be far away.

It also doesn't factor in the non-technical hurdles, costs, and delays that are involved here. Environmental impacts, and local-population-resistance are significant, often terminal, factors in plant construction.

Put another way, nobody cares if I have solar panels on my roof. But if I have a tiny modular reactor in the garden the neighbours will (not surprisingly) object.

I say this as a nuclear supporter.

> Put another way, nobody cares if I have solar panels on my roof. But if I have a tiny modular reactor in the garden the neighbours will (not surprisingly) object.

Yes, though your neighbours will probably also object to you putting up one of those big wind turbines in your backyard. Or a coal fired power plant.

Im not sure they'd complain if I put up a small wind turbine. If I was in a more rural area I doubt theyd object to a big wind turbine. (The extent of their worry being noise, and danger if it self destructed in bad weather.)

Clearly a coal-fired plant would be an issue, to the degree to which they pollute the neighbours. There are diesel generators here attached to factories etc, and nobody really cares.

Objection to nuclear though is more visceral. With diesel I can hear the noise and decide if I don't like it. With coal I might notice the smell. But I don't think either would silently kill me. Nuclear leaks are invisible, and accumulative, so it can be (disproportionately) scary. Certainly those who are opposed to it will use fear to rally other people to their side. Fear is a strong motivating emotion that is easily manipulated.

> If I was in a more rural area I doubt theyd object to a big wind turbine

You'd be surprised. There was a protest in my area against putting up five new wind turbines at an industrial site as the existing buildings are take down. People object that it would ruin their view... The current buildings is part of a massive coal fired power plant which is slowly being decommissioned and there are already three existing turbines.

France, France, France, France, France. I need nuclear proponents to read about France.

A nation made a bet on "let's do all nuclear". It basically worked, but there was no magical cost decrease. They have an immense amount of institutional knowledge, huge educational system, massive amounts of resources. Their nukes are big and expensive and not really on time. There is no magic at the end of the tunnel if Greenpeace disappears.

The world isn't Sim City, power plants need water access and have location concerns, and it's not a question of just dropping a bunch of truck-sized plants across the world and magically solving everything.

Having said that, France is a success story of course. It's cool that it's all set up. But even after building it up, running these plants are expensive, there's often load issues meaning they are not fully utilized... "nuclear is free easy energy" is science fiction. That's fine, though! It's normal that we have to do stuff to power society.

EDIT: to be clear, I'm cool with nuclear, but I am not picky about where my watts come from.

France went "Negative learning by doing" [1] in their initial build out and Flamanville 3 [2] is looking like a complete boondoggle.

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Pl...

> The French nuclear case illustrates the perils of the assumption of robust learning effects resulting in lowered costs over time in the scale-up of large-scale, complex new energy supply technologies. The uncertainties in anticipated learning effects of new technologies might be much larger that often assumed, including also cases of “negative learning” in which specific costs increase rather than decrease with accumulated experience.

Oof, talk about a nasty abstract. Will need to find a way to look at this paper later.

There is a magical end that we can optimize where it is just about making nuclear fission energy more efficient.

I've heard it said that in France there are 3 types of nuclear reactor and 100 types of cheese. In America it's the other way around.

France also suffered from the same anti-nuclear sentiment as the rest of the world. To the point that they a couple of years ago they were forced to shutdown their plants for maintenance after a decade or more of neglect.

it was in fact the last winter just at the worst moment possible when electricity price was exploding. Half of them were in maintenance for various reasons

https://www.tf1info.fr/economie/crise-de-l-energie-nucleaire...

It is funny what all gets blamed on anti-nuclear sentiment or the anti-nuclear lobby. This is a new one though. The neglect was because of anti-nuclear sentiment? In France? I think France is probably one of the countries with the highest approval for nuclear (well > 50%).

The neglect was because maintenance costs money and as usual people (+governments, corporations ...) want to save money/increase earnings/profit, so upkeep gets neglected.

Of course the issue is more complex than just one cause, but anti-nuclear sentiment plays a huge role:

--- start quote ---

Following the 2011 Fukushima I nuclear accidents, an OpinionWay poll at the end of March found that 57% of the French population were opposed to nuclear energy in France.[119] A TNS-Sofres poll in the days following the accident found 55% in favour of nuclear power.[119] In 2006, BBC/GlobeScan poll found 57% of the French opposed to nuclear energy.[120]

In May 2001, an Ipsos poll found that nearly 70% of the population had a 'good opinion' of nuclear power, however 56% also preferred not to live near a nuclear plant and the same proportion thought that a 'Chernobyl-like accident' could occur in France

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Public...

--- end quote ---

It's also one of the major reasons why no new nuclear reactors appeared in France after 2000, and why the government would neglect the existing reactors.

I think you misunderstand. The comment you reply to I think acknowledges that there are problems with nuclear project management - they're saying that with that in mind, let's figure out how to do it better, to make nuclear projects less risky, more reproducible, and subsequently more commercially attractive.

Sure. To go down the Wright's Law learning curve at a rate that keeps pace with PV, we need to ramp up manufacturing to a rate of about a million reactors per year. Is that feasible? In what time frame?

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