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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

> the modularity of modern reactor design failed to deliver

So? Just because one particular approach failed doesn't mean it's impossible.

My father was a nuclear engineer so this is something I happen to know something about. I can tell you from speaking to my father back when he was working (from the 1970s to the 1990s), the nuclear industry was lousy with politics, and there were many, many innovative ideas (his own included) that never saw the light of day because the political pressure against doing anything new with nuclear power was insurmountable.

The anti-nuclear lobby in the U.S. successfully killed nuclear power by 1) stopping all research and development and then 2) saying, "See? We told you it couldn't be done." Well, yeah, but the reason it couldn't be done was you, you idiots. And now we have climate change to deal with as a result, so thanks for that.

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> the nuclear industry was lousy with politics...

It's that way because nuclear power plants are prestige projects. They are now so un competitive with the price of renewables that you can't blame over regulation. Without the politics no nuclear projects would get started because they're not investable.

It wasn't last week that renewables became vastly cheaper than nuclear. It's been this way for at least a couple of decades, and power customers in Georgia are taking it in the pants for having supported nuclear power. You can't blame climate change on a lack of nuclear power, and lead times are so long that nuclear stands no chance of making a dent in climate change.

Small modular reactors are also wishful thinking. We know what size reactor is the most economical and it isn't economical enough.

> you can't blame over regulation

I absolutely can. If nuclear power had not been over-regulated for 50 years the technology might be much more advanced now than it is. We will never know. It's kind of like pointing to the failure of public transportation in the U.S. and saying that this was inevitable, without taking into consideration the fact that there was a well-developed system of local rail before a criminal conspiracy of car, oil, and rubber companies dismantled it, making the poor quality of public transit into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The reason we don't have good public transit in the U.S. is not because it can't work but because we chose to force it not to work so that car, oil, and tire companies could make more money. It's the same with nuclear energy.

That's a lot of would've could've should've, nevertheless we can test that idea that nuclear power would be more advanced: it wasn't over regulated in the Soviet Union, and that got us the RBMK 1000, a design with inherent flaws that make the remaining reactors in operation a high risk. Nuclear power isn't over regulated in China and their reactor designs are adapted from existing mainstream reactor designs.

You need to search for "Why China can't build jet engines." Just because China hasn't been able to do it doesn't mean it's not possible.

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