Is that because every country fails to adequately charge oil/coal/etc for its externalities? Are we essentially subsidizing oil, bringing the costs artificially low such that nuclear can't compete?
Nuclear isn't similar to the things that grow cheaper as the operators gain experience.
1) It was inherently unstable because when the fuel temperature increased, it made the reaction speed up. Modern reactors do the opposite.
2) It didn't have a containment dome.
(Chernobyl also happened because of paranoia but that was largely the Soviet's obsession with saving face to the point of hiding a design flaw from the operators).
Though, I will push back on the idea that this is exclusively why it's so expensive: Nuclear has plenty of other issues with cost beyond excessive safety targets.
This is a convenient opinion, not a true fact. Not different than saying, "I broke my leg after running from a tiger, so not running from a tiger would had been safer".
People try to convert that opinion on truth by the procedure of repeating it again and again, but we are still waiting to see the facts and the logical thinking that sustain this claim.
The radiation could have done a lot of harm, and nobody in march 2011 knew if the plant could be stabilized. They toke the 120% correct choice with the available data. And would be still the option taken in 2026 under similar circumstances. Everything else is reckless negligence.
To those that repeat in 2026, "but the plants never exploded". remember that they didn't had the luxury of knowing this at the time. Also that the inconvenient facts (like cancer ratio increasing, or newborns with troubles) were hidden under the rug and ignored for as much time as they could, so any comparison is biased from the start.
The explosion at Chernobyl wasn't actually a nuclear reaction. It was that the reactor got hot enough to separate the cooling water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then you can get a hydrogen explosion.
If the primary coolant is water. And the reactor is designed in such a way that that can happen.
Meanwhile you can use other primary coolants or other designs where that isn't a thing. There are designs that don't explode even if you lose power entirely. At which point the cost of an evacuation that the design doesn't require you to do, isn't a cost that you have to pay.
We are being promised about how much safe will be this new plants in a normal context while we do that, this context is vanishing. New possibilities opened and now we must deal with the possibility of a nuclear plant versus 1000 drones that want to destroy it, or that will keep coming for months until destroying it. Each energy plant is now a target, guided by AI.
Too much people in power are plutonium grade unstable, and is just a question of time that at some moment new "smart robot soldiers" will be asked to do unstable things also
So... how can you convince us, and guarantee that this is not just planting bombs under our own bedrooms?
What are they?
The biggest radiation dose to the population was not from breathing air filled with radio-nuclides, but from drinking locally produced milk and eating milk products and leafy vegetables. In the first days after explosion Iodine-131, with half-life 8 days, is the biggest source of radiation dose.
Had the Soviets informed the population not to eat local milk, leafy vegetables for 3 months, the health impact would be much smaller (also distribution of Potassium Iodide would help). In case of Fukushima accident, health protection was implemented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine-131
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission_product#Iodine
The reason that constant inspections are need is because radiation weakens everything. Since nothing is immune, everything can break prematurely and so everything must be inspected.
Is this really true? We seem to have a pretty large disaster perhaps every 15-20 years (3 mile island, Chernobyl, Fukushima), which makes me think that it is either correctly- or under- regulated. Of course coal and oil are worse, but that’s not exactly a high bar…
It is what we want to replace with nuclear power, so that's exactly the bar we should jump over. So let's say it: all of these disasters did not cause even 1/1000 as many deaths as coal power plants.
And anyways this isn’t the claim I was disagreeing with — the parent claim is that nuclear is regulated “beyond what's necessary to ensure safety”. I just don’t think that’s the case. As dramatic as it sounds, we regularly have nuclear disasters.
> ... Despite this, there were no deaths caused by acute radiation syndrome. Given the uncertain health effects of low-dose radiation, cancer deaths cannot be ruled out. ...Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged in the academic literature from none to hundreds.
> ...For evacuation, the estimated number of deaths during and immediately after transit ranges from 34 to "greater than 50". The victims include hospital inpatients and elderly people at nursing facilities who died from causes such as hypothermia, deterioration of underlying medical problems, and dehydration. The old people and already sick, were more likely to be injured because of being relocated than damaged by radiation.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cas...
Evacuation wasn't necessary, govt enforced it deliberately. If ppl weren't evacuated in such a rush(or not at all), they would have been fine
The low dosage claim is shady considering we have parts of the world with higher natural background radiation and in some cases cancer rates are lower there
Still, even by wildest estimations nr is fairly low
So nuclear radiation impact from Fukushima is minimal in the total loss of life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...
Fukushima prefecture itself counts a total of ~2100 disaster related deaths of which ~1350 are "nuclear plant related". This is somewhat of an upper bound with lots of indirect deaths mainly as a result of having to evacuate an entire city, but the nuclear meltdown was a major component of making the tsunami disaster significantly worse (locally).
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cas...
The deaths are due to the evacuation, and the evacuation is due to some combination of [poor judgement] and [reactor meltdown]. If we attribute all the deaths to poor judgement, then we’re asserting we could confidently predict a reactor meltdown would pose no danger. Some people might claim that, but it seems implausible to me.
In 2011 4,612 died in Japan from motor vehicles. And a similar number every year since.
In reality we see it time and time again, the larger a project (and that applies to pretty much all infrastructure) the easier it is for the operator to get regulations loosened, because of the large amount of money involved, they tend to have much more leverage over politicians.
Isn't this the thing where you require something in one case but not the others?
If every oil drilling operation had to carry enough insurance to cover Deepwater Horizon and every hydroelectric dam had to carry a policy large enough for Banqiao and every solar panel factory had to insure against leaving Superfund sites that leak into the groundwater in some of the most expensive real estate in Silicon Valley then they'd be in trouble too.
> the kind of inspection+maintenance regime that's necessary for safety isn't amenable to cost reductions.
People often say things like this and then if you actually have someone go through the existing process you find out that more than half of the labor is going to inspect things that aren't actually safety-related, or some corruption is involved which is quadrupling the cost because the contractor bribed a politician to make use of their services required by law or create artificial scarcity for something which is actually important but shouldn't cost as much as it does.
Nuclear gets cheaper if you have several units built in same place and if you increase CF with various methods, incl higher enriched fuel
I'd argue at least half of it basically functions as a petroleum subsidy.
And the other thing that people just simply do not understand is it's solar and wind are now cheaper than anything else, even if the subsidies are applied to them, and would be even more so if the trump tarrifs were eliminated.
The only justification in nuclear right now it's deglobalization and energy independence. But I would argue all the money you throw into nuclear for that, it's much better served simply building out solar and wind
> so if the trump tarrifs were eliminated
That sounds very very questionable. We have like tens of countries in Europe that are trying to implement solar and wind energy throughout the decades, and are undoubtful lieders and visioners in that areas. And what is the practical results? Energy costs like 10 times more than if that energy was generated through burning fissile fuel alone.
But, the same is true for solar and wind which starts off much cheaper than fossil fuels in the first place.
Most new build energy is renewables, that's what nuclear needs to compete with.
Is the customer 10, 50 or 500 km from the power plant?
Do I need to build a second backup power plant for each installed primary power plant, 100% backup capacity? Or 40%, or 20% backup capacity?
Costs of pumped hydro/battery energy storage.
What are the costs of CO2 emission? Europe 80 Euro per tCO₂, China/India 8, US zero.
But, the public has made it clear they are unwilling to give up the implied subsidy the unaccounted externally provides.