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Comment by readyman | Hacker News Reader

This needs to be recognized as an indictment of our society. An inability to accomplish anything in a collective and intentional manner is only one of the many disasterous outcomes of the wretched individualism promoted by the neoliberal agenda. And make no mistake; this is not a result of a so-called "free market". It is the result of top-down privatization. The US government, for example, has a much larger budget than ever before, accounting for inflation and so on. It's just being delivered to private firms for profit instead of on building big things or maintaining the big things we used to build. This lack of cooperation across society is also the primary source of cultural breakdown and the sense of "division" felt by all of us, both rich and poor.

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When the market is telling you something over and over, it's best to listen.

The so-called "market" isn't telling anybody anything here. The financiers are the only ones speaking and all they're saying is they can't turn as much profit in their own individual lifetimes. It is a total disregard for society as a whole, which is why we're in this mess.

> “The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.

https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/71/12/26/904707/US...

What is your point? Cost is not a problem when near-term profit is high, and nuclear energy has an unbeatable track record with long-term ROI. Saying "it's expensive" is meaningless nonsense. There is absolutely no excuse besides the time to ROI.

Every one of your statements there is obviously false.

Source? France's investments in nuclear energy are very well known as being incomparably successful, both in terms of return on capital investment and emissions. There is literally nothing to compare it to because nothing comes close. The only downside is literally upfront cost. Even the US has had great ROI in long term nuclear investments, especially if you discount the losses of all the prematurely decommissioned plants.

There is no market in the regular sense when it comes to large-scale enterprises, especially one that is so government-entangled as the energy and infrastructure sectors.

There are plenty of markets in the electrical power sector. In addition to the market for energy sources, selling generating assets to utilities, there are markets in the power itself in many places, for example ERCOT in Texas.

No one has ever built a nuclear plant to sell into a competitive power market. One can trace the downfall of nuclear in the US to the time when markets were opened to competition, with PURPA.

Nonsense. PURPA was just more regulation, regardless of how it was sold. It had nothing to do with "markets being opened to competition".

One can trace the downfall of nuclear in the US to the end of the New Deal coalition and the divestment of public infrastructure, which meant short-term planning only. It has nothing to do with "markets". Markets in energy don't exist now and did not exist then.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/009634021348594...

> The Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 (PURPA) triggered a restructuring of the previously monolithic utility sector, stipulating in particular that electricity produced by independent power producers must be purchased by utilities at "avoided cost." The new power from independent producers, combined with lack of demand for electricity, further eroded utilities' need for new nuclear plants. In large part owing to the provisions of PURPA, nonutility generation rose steadily from 71 billion kilowatt-hours per year in 1979 to almost 400 billion kilowatt-hours per year by 1995 -- this new, nonutility generation was the equivalent of adding more than 50 typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear plants (Energy Information Administration, 1996). As Peter Bradford (2011), a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, argued in the Wall Street Journal:

> "Nuclear-plant construction in this country came to a halt because a law passed in 1978 [PURPA] created competitive markets for power. These markets required investors rather than utility customers to assume the risk of cost overruns, plant cancellations, and poor operation. Today, private investors still shun the risks of building new reactors in all nations that employ power markets."

Collective intention requires some amount of collective agreement. Many people are unfortunately scared of nuclear power and politicians know this.

The idea that nuclear is struggling because people are "scared" is a form of denial from nuclear advocates. Nuclear is struggling because it's much too expensive, not because people are "scared".

It's expensive because people are scared, and to alleviate that fear, regulation is put in place.

Some of those fears are founded, but some are not. But overall, the regulation required is what drives the cost up.

That is simply not true and repeating it all the time does not make it more true. There have been several analysis posted here on HN which showed that compliance with regulations is not a major cost factor for nuclear power. In fact nuclear power operators have often lobbied to be exempt from regulations that apply to other power generation schemes. Solar and wind often have significantly higher compliance costs as percentage of their budget than nuclear.

Could you post a link to one or two of the sumissions where these analyses have been presented please?

It’s expensive because environmentalists put in too many barriers to building nuclear power plants because they’re scared (in addition to being innumerate). If we had started building out nuclear power in the 1960s the same as the French, we would have much more runway today to address climate change.

It's failing pretty much everywhere (even in China it's struggling, falling far short of plans). Your explanation presents environmentalists as so globally omnipotent it would be senseless to fight them. Unfortunately, environmentalists are not this powerful.

It worked great in France, which had a majority renewable grid back in the early 1990s. If the rest of the developed world had invested in nuclear power during that same time frame we would have much more developed nuclear technology today. More importantly, we would’ve started emissions reductions decades ago instead of waiting for solar to become viable. We are still waiting for fundamental breakthroughs in grid-scale battery technology that will likely come too late to avoid 4C warming.

I’m not presenting environmentalists as powerful. I’m presenting them as innumerate feelers. Unfortunately that’s contagious.

Did it work great in France? The financing was so opaque it cannot be audited.

What we do know is that France can no longer do what they once maybe did. Their recent attempts to build nuclear plants have been disastrous. They've also given up on fast reactors, which is a clear tell they do not expect the world to go nuclear anytime soon (if the world did, it would quickly need breeders).

The "environmentalists did it" argument is not a good one. It falls apart when examined closely. If they were so powerful as to suppress nuclear worldwide, why can't they (for example) stop oil pipelines? Or coal combustion? The argument has all the signs of something cooked up to save a tenuous position, not because the evidence actually supports it.

Because the big coal & big oil lobbies are massively more powerful than the very meagre lobbying efforts of the nuclear industry. And yes, the greens are of course going for choking off the nuclear opponent, instead of Big Oily, not forgetting that part of the green movement does receive money from the hydrocarbon industry; the Sierra Club in the US has been funded by Cheasapeake Energy from which it receives 25 million bucks between 2007 and 2010.

For example, Greenpeace has recently successfully lobbied the Phillipne government to ban golden rice despite its obvious advantages:

https://phys.org/news/2024-04-philippine-court-blocks-gmo-go...

So please don't present the environmental lobby as being selectively powerless.

Only the massive onesare absurdly expensive, we build plenty of cheap small safe ones for the military to power aircraft carriers and submarines. why dont we build the same thing for power.

Naval reactors are so economical that it's cheaper to burn expensive liquid fuels instead. Most naval ships are not nuclear, you know. Yeah, that's a ringing endorsement. /s

most navel vessels dont need a nuclear reactor it would be overkill.

The observation isn't that ships don't need nuclear reactors, it's that it's usually cheaper to use liquid hydrocarbons instead. Or do you think the USN is deliberately wasting money by constructing all these ships with conventional power plants?

What makes you think anything about military construction is cheap?

their cheap compared to the cost of a civilian nuclear power plant. A whole aircraft carrier which has two reactors costs $4.5 billion of which about 1 billion goes to each reactor, a civilian nuclear power station cost on the other hand cost on the low end around 5.4 billion minimum. civilian reactors are cost over 5x as much.

That's false. The manufactured nulear scare is a leftover from the Cold War where communists in the West did everything to equate nuclear energy with nuclear weapons and/or ticking time bombs that they advocated the abolition of (at the same time as most East-bloc nations had operating nuclear power plants). The cold war ended but the seeds of angst had been sown and to this day is the bedrock of the "green" anti-nuclear policies in pretty much every "green" movement on the planet, with a notable exception of the Finnish Greens. The Green parties, fx. In Germany have actively used hyper-regulation of the nuclear power sector as tripwires to make nuclear energy operation in the West extremely expensive to do.

I'm not sure that nuclear is that expensive per unit of energy delivered, compared to rooftop solar for instance. In Europe (UK and Germany) one might get 1000 kWh/year from 1kW of panels. Last year I helped a family member install 6.4kW of solar for around £7000 (VAT free), so £1.2 per kWh/year = 1.4 USD/kWh/year. Vogtle 3 & 4 cost around 30bn USD but has a 90% capacity factor on 2 x 1117MW = 17612856000 kWh/year = 1.7 USD/kWh/year. I believe the AP1000 reactors have a 60 year design life. In addition the reactor design (lacking at the start of the project, and cause of many delays) plus underlying skill-base now exists to construct more. In addition nuclear power now attracts the Inflation Reduction Act Investment Tax Credits for up to a 50% rebate once a reactor comes online. Which puts nuclear at 0.85 USD/kWh/year before we account for reduced construction cost and time now that the AP1000 is Nth of a kind.

You need to include interest rates, not just divide the cost over 60 years.

One way to subsidize nuclear is to artificially reduce the interest rate on its financing, but market rates for nuclear financing would make a 60 year lifespan almost irrelevant. The NPV of the out year revenue would be very low.

Put another way: for nuclear to pay out over 60 years, it also has to compete with the cheaper energy sources that will be discovered and improved over those generations. This obsolescence risk cannot be ignored, and gets reflected in interest rates charged. Now that wind/solar are becoming dominant, their inherent rapid evolution has pulled in the time horizons for all other energy sources. I sometimes think this has kept natural gas going longer than it otherwise might have, since the uncertainty adds incentive for sources with more operating cost and lower investment cost, as these have less obsolescence risk.

Expecting AP1000 to show NOAK improvements is optimistic.

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