Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
austinvernon.site
Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
1–10 of 672 posts
Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#2It's too expensive to build anything nuclear. Especially these days. Also NIMBYism and fossil fuel interests and antinuclear activists.
Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#3Storing nuclear waste for 10,000+ years is also unpopular and no-one wants it stored in their backyard and further does it add up to put aside proper funds to steward waste for 10,000 years.
Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#4It's too expensive to build anything nuclear. Especially these days. Also NIMBYism and fossil fuel interests and antinuclear activists.
By the time anything could be finished, much cheaper renewables will render any such plant redundant. Spending $billions on a plant that will be cancelled partway is unappealing. None of the money is ever given back.
Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#5Probably for the same reason we don't see massively expanding horse carriage industry. Nuclear is on the way out despite enormous government subsidies. Just fundamentally too burdensome, expensive, and outcompeted by modern tech.
Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#6I don't think it's stagnant. I continue to see stuff like small modular reactors making progress. The obvious reason why it doesn't get more play is because it doesn't serve anybody's political goals. Renewables and carbon taxes or other measures to try and reduce quality of life (or opposition to those) get attention because they have good political value. Actually spending money and generating sustainable power, not much you can do with that, it doesn't match an ideology. Same with carbon capture and storage. There are good technical motivations to climate change, they just don't have a political champion.
Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#7Storing nuclear waste for 10,000+ years is also unpopular and no-one wants it stored in their backyard and further does it add up to put aside proper funds to steward waste for 10,000 years.
All nuclear waste ever produced in the US could be stored in an area the size of a football field
Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#8investment cost and payoff. a gas turbine plant can deliver returns in as little as six years and requires minimal oversight. a nuclear plant may take as long as 30 years before it returns a profit, and it lives under a government regulatory and security magnifying glass.
personal opinion but the modern american investor has no patience for anything but instant profits. nuclear could be great but the executives you have to convince are all well familiar with and scarred by their 60 year old reactors.
Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#9no one ever mentions nuclear proliferation risk associated with the production of plutonium.
Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
#10Storing nuclear waste for 10,000+ years is also unpopular and no-one wants it stored in their backyard and further does it add up to put aside proper funds to steward waste for 10,000 years.
All nuclear waste ever produced in the US could be stored in an area the size of a football field
While true, this does not make it popular or lead to NIMBYs changing their mind. How important this is varies by nation, but it’s not nothing in most places.