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Comment by derriz | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how you are measuring complexity.

The plant and equipment required to maintain a stable nuclear reaction and extract its heat is far more complex than that required to control a coal or natural gas firebox.

This is reflected in the fact that to run 1GW of nuclear generation, on average (in the US) requires about 700 FTE to operate. The average for coal generation is about a third of that number. And the average for a combined cycle gas plant is about 60 FTE.

And nuclear fission produces low-grade heat - around 320°C - compared to coal (around 550°C) or natural gas (over 1300°C). Thus are less thermally efficient and require huge cooling towers and much larger turbines to extract the thermal energy. Which, of course, are more expensive and complex to build and maintain.

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Kind of my fault, I specifically thought only about the powerplant + fuel part.

Of course nuclear is much more complex as a whole, because it comes with at least two, sometimes three different business sections attached by default: Production and sale of rare isotopes, on-site laboratories and research and recycling of spent fuel.

It's hard to beat gas. The small double digit MW plant in my town literally has only one on-site full-time employee. My guess the only reason the FTE hits even 60 (didn't check) is because there are so many small installations.

Coal has a lot of fuel processing on-site just for its own demand, the mostly very sensible environmental regulations add a lot of complexity to processing the flue gasses and this adds A LOT of moving parts.

Nuclear can be built simple enough that people are literally thinking about dropping it down a mile deep hole, barely the width of a US-standard human. On the "hands off" scale it can't beat gas, barely anything but solar, geothermal and nuclear thermal electric can, but it could beat coal and hydro and possibly even wind via scale. Just how often should one have to send a report to some oversight body on the number of functional overhead lights and whether the change in microclimate didn't displace any rare insect species before one can say: "You didn't read the last 20, you're not getting another one."

> Of course nuclear is much more complex as a whole, because it comes with at least two, sometimes three different business sections attached by default: Production and sale of rare isotopes, on-site laboratories and research and recycling of spent fuel.

That misses my point. Managing fuel and waste is more complex for nuclear. Producing heat using a nuclear reactor is more complex than producing it with coal and gas. And extracting useful energy from the heat is also more complex (given the low-grade heat that reactors provide).

At every step of the way you have more complexity in engineering and operations.

These engineering realities are independent of the regulatory environment or other activities occurring around the plant.

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