Hacker News Reader

Comment by mixdup | Hacker News Reader

This one may be $5 billion, but the next one will probably be (made up number) $3 billion, and the next one $1 billion

Part of the point of these projects in particular is to get the machine spinning. Once it's running you start getting some of the economies of scale

View on HN

This assumes learning rates never seen by nuclear energy. Within generations we've seen small learnings, and between generations the nuclear energy has been all negative learning by doing.

But that is literally why they want to get to assembly line levels of throughput. Dozens of identical reactors instead of dozens of bespoke reactors that can't use learnings from the last one

Also not said is the fact that going into more standardized designs you lower the operational cost because operations can be standardized. Today every single facility has different training from the next. Even at the same facility, if it's got new + old reactors, operators can't move between them without training on both

This is the biggest anticipated benefit of SMR. The US has 30+ licensed reactor designs. France has 3. Korea has 3. The economics of French and Korean reactors, built repeatably, are drastically improved over US reactors. If the NRC does its job and actually says "we know more about nuclear power than the local state energy commission and operator" then we the US can achieve those levels of repeatability and cost. We want safe reactors, we dont want infinitely customized reactors that are tailored to every state and operator's preference for how they want to polish fittings and lay out the pipes etc etc.

How many hundreds of billions or trillions should we waste to get ”learnings” when renewables and storage is already the cheapest energy source in human history?

This line of thinking seems to start with that we must have new nuclear, for some reason, and then try to rationalize it.

Hundreds of billions have already been spend on learning renewables in Germany.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321765366_How_expen...

Can't unspend that money. GP is asking whether it's worth spending additional money.

It makes quite sense to ask, how much did get Germany for the money it spend.

In term of decarbonization of electricity production and independence of imported fuel for electricity production, it got less then France for comparable amount of money.

But this is quite clear as the first and foremost goal of German Energiewende was denuclearization of German electricity production, not decarbonization of electricity production.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com