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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure if nuclear has always been a field where charlatans proliferate, but it's certainly true of the past few decades. The Summer plant in South Carolina was completely fraudulent, sending the power executives to jail for their fraud. Billions spent and nothing to show except a hole in the ground. Vogtle was slightly better in that they powered through to construction completion so that nobody cared about the deception and grift that resulted in a cost 3x that of estimates.

The startups have been bad too, with some disingenuously starting regulatory processes and then not even responding to questions or attempting to follow through.

South Koreas is the most developed nation that has had success building, and even they send people to jail for construction fraud.

There are undoubtedly many honest and earnest people trying to build new nuclear. But it's hard to tell who until after billions have been sunk and misallocated.

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It's likely because the NRC is the most insanely regulatory body of the US government. Ostensibly, this is a good thing, nuclear power, meltdowns, radioactive waste, etc.

But really I cannot emphasize enough how strict and overbearing they are.

"Oh that 12V backup battery pack needs to be replaced? Better get the same one from the same manufacturer"

"They aren't in business anymore but we have this 12V battery the fits perfectly, same specs"

"Nope, not certified with that system. You can start recertification that will cost ~$40M if you like"

"...."

There is so much ass covering and not wanting to take responsibility that the market is basically in paralysis.

I don't think that's an accurate depiction of NRC for builds like at Georgia's Vogtle. Even in California, entire reactors have been installed backwards and the regulatory problems were not the big problem.

Given that France's builds in both Finland and France itself have been similarly disastrous as the US builds, I don't think the NRC seems to be the likely cause. And France is much better at building big things than the US is, their infrastructure costs are a fraction of US costs. IMHO there's something deeper to the lack of success of nuclear as a technology. It's a mainframe trying to compete in the cloud era.

There is an official report detailing why the project in France (the Flamanville-3 EPR) failed, published at (French ahead!) https://www.economie.gouv.fr/rapport-epr-flamanville , and regulations aren't a major cause (translating the summary offers a good overview).

Do you have a source?

I work for a company that provides electronics that end up in nuclear reactors. We don't do batteries, the story is just an example of the kind of headache it is.

Maybe it's true for the actual reactor control system I dunno. Our industrial phones ended up at a nuclear plant once (that we know of) and we only learned about it because the engineer called us for firmware reset procedure. The product doesn't have any nuclear energy certifications (although it is tested for rail and maritime use).

> I'm not sure if nuclear has always been a field where charlatans proliferate, but it's certainly true of the past few decades.

I think it's less an issue of anything to do with nuclear in particular, and more that we're just living in an absolute golden age of charlatans. It's like the 1980's all over again except instead of fraud being doable because of a lack of information, fraud is doable because everyone for whatever reason you'd like to describe is thoroughly committed to pretending it's the 1980's.

The Ohio nuclear bribery scandal is another case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal

Yes, even in South Korea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal

It's not necessarily malice, it's very easy to underestimate the difficulty building and running a real nuclear reactor. The 1953 'Paper Reactor' memo still applies fully today: https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html

> South Koreas is the most developed nation that has had success building, and even they send people to jail for construction fraud.

That's why :)

Russia is also fairly successful at building reactors. Although, somehow their orders pipeline has been getting shorter and shorter (wonder why...).

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