So instead of new, safe, carbon neutral nuclear power (like thorium reactors, passive cooling, etc), we're are continuing to running literal old-timer nuclear plants (Diablo Canyon was built in 1981).
Most folks would not drive a car from 80s, but somehow we're cool with running powerplants that old.
IMHO The best for our carbon footprint with safety would be new nuclear plants.
What stopped these new nuclear builds, and doomed future new nuclear builds, was fraud on the part of management, unconstructable designs, incompetence in EPC, etc. these are the challenges with nuclear.
If somebody could build cost effective nuclear that didn't bankrupt those building it, there are roughly 100 reactors in the US nearing their end of life that local populations would love to keep running.
Nuclear didn't die because of public outcry in the US, it died because of cost overruns and bankrupting utilities. No buyer wants to take on that risk.
Combine that with the complete rewrite of regulation and the whole governmental structure in regards to nuclear, making them much tougher to build, killing much of the research, limited political support from either side and so on and so on.
They had to essentially rebuild plants according to newer standards stopping all new construction. While some of those changes were worthy, its also objectively true that coal plants were not subjected to nearly as much additional regulation despite them being much less save both for the workers and for the population around.
So if you have one standard of safety applied to one thing, and a completely different standard to another thing, then of course nuclear can't win in a market situation.
Large scale nuclear is successful if you can do it at scale. But that needs a top down approach or at least government approval and support.
Had nuclear received the kind of support wind/solar had in the last 20 years, the US would have transition to nuclear at a rate comparable to the adoption of oil.
The government has used many mechanism to push those things, not sure how that's questionable. Including to force Utilities to adopt renewable energy (even those that already had carbon free nuclear). Other laws that prevent pricing on intermittence. Support and tax-breaks for rooftop solar. And lots of other policies.
The difference is for renewables the cost savings panned out, while nuclear has only gotten more expensive.
Renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels, that is why we see mass adoption. Stop crying over spilled milk because nuclear never materialized, embrace the technology that are forcing true change.
At the same time cheap coal was discovered and changed the economics and utilities had little intensive to adopt nuclear.
In France where a top down nuclear approach was adopted, it has been an absolutely amazing deal. Far, far cheaper green energy then German 30+ year journey adopting renewables (and they aren't close).
> embrace the technology that are forcing true change.
Nuclear actually made true chance 40 years ago. It just some countries that took advantage of it and some countries that burned a lot of coal that cost them much, much, much more.
That just false.
> any durable price declines at all.
If we stopped building wind turbines for decades the price declines wouldn't be durable either.
The simply reality is that when nuclear was built at scale, even with current PWR the prices are pretty damn good. India cost in their heavy water reactors are really good. South Koreas reactor prices in UEA are incredibly reasonable.
I actually did a bunch of calculations on this. Starting in around 2000, what if Germany had gone nuclear instead of solar/wind/storage and so on. I took very pessimistic price assumptions for the nuclear plants based on the South Korean reactors in UAE. And I assumed a scaling rate far lower then what France did in the 70/80s.
And even then the price for a complete transition of the whole grid to 95%+ nuclear was both cheaper and faster then what Germany actually achieved. And that would have come at a cost that amounts to about 4-5% of extra debt per GDP with resulting low electricity prices.
Germany as society is paying, far, far more then that. Just their recent emergency measures to subsidize prices are about as much as a whole nuclear fleet. Germany had decades of high energy prices that one had to account for and then they had a huge investment in wind and solar. Plus costly deals with Russia both politically and in cost terms.
Frankly, there is simply no evidence that Germany did better by Solar/Wind/Coal/Gas route then if they had done nuclear. And that is before we are even considering that without storage the system Germany building is very brittle and its not at all clear when they will actually achieve consistent 95%+ green energy.
It would be more efficient at moving demand to match price.
In the end, power at night might cost more rather than less and power during the day would stabilize or drop.
But although some things are used all the time, other things like charging your electric car or heating a tank water heater can be moved around, and people don't mind doing it if they save money.
"Regulations" are the excuse of people that didn't do their homework or prepare for the serious work of large construction projects. All of which have huge overruns in the US, regulations or not.
In truth, it's a labor and productivity problem. Advanced economies have far more productive uses for workers than sitting around construction sites, waiting for something to arrive so that they can finally do a small amount of work before waiting some more.
Yes, and the gigantism of the projects does not help. Here's an example [1]. Last week they mounted the reactor dome at Hinkley. Here's a quote:
> Using one of the world's largest cranes, known as Big Carl, the dome - with a diameter of almost 47 metres, height of 14 metres and weighing 245 tonnes - was lifted and then slowly lowered onto the 44-metre-high reactor building.
You are absolutely right, this has nothing to do with the NRC. They have a job to do, and in a world where Fukushima can happen, you can't be too careful.
But can SMRs reduce construction costs? The anti-nuclear crowd is dancing in the streets for the failure of NuScale to keep the Utah project alive. But NuScale is a player with zero experience. There are numerous other players [3] that actually build reactors. For example one is BWXT, a company that makes nuclear reactors for the US Navy.
[1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Hinkley-Point-C-...
[2] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
> The Forgotten History of Small Nuclear Reactors
> Economics killed small nuclear power plants in the past—and probably will keep doing so
https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/the-forgotten-history-of-small...
Of course, the article was published in 2015, so it could not predict that China would build and put in operation two fourth generation SMRs in 2023[1]. And that they would state they intend to build 6 more that would drive a single 650 MW turbine.
[1] https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newschinas-htr-pm-demonstra...
That does not match reality on land.
China is barely building nuclear anymore. China added more wind and solar the past nine months than all of its nuclear reactors under construction will provide. Yes, that includes capacity factor.
https://twitter.com/yo_ean/status/1718633487454904718
You also do the common misstake of always talking about future nuclear plans. They will be the savior, as long as the costs are marketing material and not real. Because we can't look at the existing batch of botched nuclear construction the past 20 years in the west, that would spoil the rosy image.
Better trust our future to Powerpoint reactors. Rather than competitors delivering day in and day out.
Nuclear and coal is the plan for baseload because solar/wind doesn’t cut it for that use (coal I believe is intended to be a mechanism of last resort intended to never be run as long as other alternatives are available although I suspect reality will not be so kind).
That's a funny way to look at things. China built 40 GW worth of nuclear power plants in the last decade [1], which matches the best decade of France, and almost matches the best decade of the US. In 2022 they started work on 5 reactors (GW-sized), 2 more than the rest of the world combined.
[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
[2] https://world-nuclear.org/getmedia/0156a8d7-01c6-42d9-97be-3...
Congress is, in fact, very price sensitive about military procurement, and there are significantly greater engineering challenges in ship construction than in terrestrial construction. The difference is that the scale and regulatory environment around building naval ships is not completely dysfunctional.
Worse, these are coupled. The result is often that people say x -> y! And stop there. But it's not an acrylic graph so narrow views don't work and simply trap us in this circular argument we've had for 40 years now (not unique to nuclear either). Truth is public outcry influences regulation which influences cost which influences outcry and so on and on. There is no root to point to as the start and there are arguments you can make about any of these being the start because influence doesn't mean sole contributing factor. As an example, you can argue cost is related to regulation and even that lack of innovation have been "caused" by public outcry (or claim regulatory costs/lack of innovation are confounders). Certainly it is a causal variable, but multiple causal variables can contribute to something. Truth is there are unique costs to nuclear independent of regulatory concerns. There's a reason you'll find far more physicists actively managing a nuclear power plant than a wind farm. There's also different dangers and uniquely there are proliferation concerns which do impose unique regulation. Can all this be better optimized? Certainly! But we can never do that if we are just going to endlessly have these circular arguments.
I know the weeds and details often don't matter for many subject matters (actually I think this is naive) but can we at least admit that nuclear power is at least a little bit complicated? And that there's a unique history? And that any opinion that is not formed through years of schooling and experience in the field is de facto naive? No matter how many youtube videos or articles you read from science communicators and even if you have a degree in physics because there's more to the problem that simply nuclear physics?
Most importantly, can we also admit that it's perfectly okay to have naive opinions? Literally nothing wrong with them unless high confidence is placed in those opinions. We're all smart people here, right?[0] So we recognize that the modern world is built via specialization and no person can really be an expert in all things, and realistically only in a few? Fuck man, I think one of the great filters is when a species gets to the point where approximate/naive solutions are no longer effective and they just fucking kill themselves because evolutionary pressure makes these solutions incredibly effective in the beginning but makes those same species ill equipped once a certain level of complexity is reached. I just wonder if we're intelligent enough to overcome these limitations in more than narrow settings (sure, you're smart in x, but are you okay being dumb at y?). Certainly the capacity exists.
[0] If we all know what you're (ambiguous) going to comment in response to this line, are you proving you're "better" or demonstrating your lack of intelligence? Please, just don't. Respond to something more substantial.
What I don't like is that Diablo Canyon is built on the shoreline, which is ripe for another Fukushima-like disaster in the event of a tsunami that hits California.
Even if that cliff edge is high it may destabilize with a high enough wave.
What is the connection between car longevity and nuclear power plant longevity?
More relevantly, if you're talking about the age of the design, construction started in 1968.
Not that I am opposed to new nuclear construction but its a completely wrong to suggest these old plants are to old.
Renewables are simply much easier to build. They mostly affect people that can see them and especially solar can be built in a lot of places, that don't really bother people, unless they don't like how they look (like a roof or to shade parking spots). Wind is a bit more difficult, but apart from the shadow and in closer distances the noise, the look isn't actually that bad. Kids tend to get about as excited about them as when they see a fire or dump truck. It is mostly that we prefer to look at peoples cars and streets than a spinning wheel on a wind turbine.
That's probably the big benefit renewables have. They have relatively few downsides to people and failure modes are mostly predictable as well (electrical faults or falling over would probably be the worst case and feel much easier to run away from, when you try to imagine them). So there shouldn't be as much resistance against them, apart from people living directly next to them even when people are unreasonable.
If a 100% electrical grid with renewables is possible (and I think it is), I think it is simply the better option, because it really shouldn't bother anyone (and probably also is cheaper and quicker to build). But maybe I am overestimating how much people care about looks or the coolness factor of nuclear.
I think it's perfectly fine (and smart) to keep Diablo Canyon running longer. $6B over five years doesn't seem crazy at all for a plant rated for 2.2GW. And shutting it down when our generation mix still heavily relies on burning natural gas would be a step backward.
But renewables are here now, today, and are cost-effective, much more so than building new nuclear plants, which are huge capital undertakings, that take many years to build, and the disposal of nuclear waste is still fraught with political and NIMBY issues.
I think you are incorrect to suggest that building new nuclear plants (even the new safest, cleanest designs) is the best bet for our carbon footprint. It seems pretty clear to me -- at least in a place like California -- that solar is miles ahead the better choice.
> Most folks would not drive a car from 80s, but somehow we're cool with running powerplants that old.
C'mon, that's just disingenuous. You can't just throw out a random machine and try to compare it apples-to-apples with a nuclear power plant.
Then your healthy dose of reality had to bring me down