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Comment by ok_dad | Hacker News Reader

My rebuttal is this: where’s the nuclear plants then?

It’s not economically viable. No amount of (ugh) Jordan Peterson whining will change that.

Same reason why Germany closed it's nuclear plants ahead of time or switched to burning gas in "green" propane gas-burning powerplants. Regulations.

You add tariffs and you make steel production profitable in US. China subsidizes it's electric cars industry and they can sell EVs in Europe for half the price of European cars, literally killing the market.

You subsidize renewables heavily and you get windfarms that are unprofitable once subsidizing ends.

I'm sure that in a free market situation, your comment would make lot of sense. But this is not the case and you should read up a little.

I believe that one should aim to, in spite of their political views, try to see the big picture. Like why there's so little nuclear vs sun or wind.

Germany had a badly designed prototype reactor with 80 incidents in 4 years of operation and one particular incident on the 4th of May 1986 - a week after Chernobyl accident, where reactor operator was lying about it. No wonder they have those regulations and general public distrust in anything nuclear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300

Which specific regulations are halting nuclear construction?

Let me know, specifically, which of the safety measures you think we can skip, with your extensive knowledge.

Requirement 73 of the IAEA's Safety of Nuclear Power Plants would be a start. That rule is so stringent that it requires bag in/bag out procedures for changing HEPA filters at nuclear power plants.

Bag in/bag out was developed for labs handling infectious micro-organisms. It involves a complicated bagging system, which, if done properly, isolates a contaminated filter from the environment during filter change outs.

But for nuclear the bag only protects from alpha particles and electrons. It has zero impact on photon dose. If workers are wearing bunny suits and respirators they are already protected from alphas and electrons. The extra change out time required by Bag In/Bag Out increased the worker photon dose.

This regulation actually increases workers’ exposure to radiation.

OK so how does that reduce the cost of nuclear effectively? That has to be a savings of a few tens or maybe a hundred grand over a year, it's peanuts. I'm asking for big examples, ones that would convince someone that regulations truly are stifling nuclear.

They're all in France, whose construction began under a military dictatorship to ensure energy security whenever the US starts a war in a place supplying it with energy.

This strategy was proven decisively correct in 2022, and also applies to solar and wind when the US (and by proxy, the whole West) inevitably gets into it with China and suddenly your degrading solar panels and growing need for energy become major problems (and thus forces you to build out nuclear anyway).

Cost isn't the only factor here, and it would be short-sighted to take the cheaper short-term option by buying Chinese rather than paying our own people to regain and retain that engineering and construction experience we foolishly squandered 30 years ago.

Yes, cost was only 1 of 4 factors I noted.

Did you read what he wrote? They’ve been made uneconomical due to excessive regulation and that’s why nobody bothers building them.

"Excessive regulation" is always the excuse but I have literally never seen someone show how that is the case. They'll show you one or two low-hanging fruits and then extrapolate that into saving billions of dollars on construction or something. It's ludicrous that anyone even repeats this argument without even knowing what they are talking about.

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