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Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

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Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#171

Post by WheatM »

pdonis wrote: post #157
EarthMephit wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the points that the article brings up is that a nuclear power plant takes around ten years to build, and that's ignoring the political red tape that you mentioned which would add on another 5+ years, plus the huge upfront capex costs. With the energy industry changing so rapidly at the moment, that's a huge risk for anyone wanting to invest. In that ten years for construction its likely that battery, solar, an…

> the only future for nuclear is going to be small, cheaper reactors that are quick to construct But even those will be nonstarters unless the regulatory environment is fixed. Nuclear has always been held to much, much stricter standards than any other energy source, for no good reason.

No post body was provided.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#172

Post by maccam94 »

kyrra wrote: post #138
JoeyBananas wrote: post #122

It has nothing to do with economics, nuclear energy is stagnant because the industry is a regulatory hell. From eia.gov: Of the 104 operating nuclear power reactors in the United States: The last construction permit for a nuclear power plant was issued in 1978 for Progress Energy Inc.'s Shearon Harris plant, near Raleigh, North Carolina. The last operating license for a nuclear power plant was issued in 1996 to the T…

Not an expert here, but from a commentary piece from 2021: https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-regulatory-council-nrc-... > In 1957 the internationally recommended limit for radiation exposure was about 15 times the natural background radiation that people absorb from rocks and cosmic rays. Without evidence of harm from exposures within the 1957 limits, the U.S. had by 1991 ratcheted its public limits down to less t…

I think the root cause here is that people are afraid to live near nuclear plants, and would get mad at their political representatives if they got built in their area. Making these limits more stringent makes it look like the politicians are forcing the plants to be safer, when really they are just blocking the plants from being built in their districts at all.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#173

Post by jhgb »

JoeyBananas wrote: post #122

It has nothing to do with economics, nuclear energy is stagnant because the industry is a regulatory hell. From eia.gov: Of the 104 operating nuclear power reactors in the United States: The last construction permit for a nuclear power plant was issued in 1978 for Progress Energy Inc.'s Shearon Harris plant, near Raleigh, North Carolina. The last operating license for a nuclear power plant was issued in 1996 to the T…

> because the industry is a regulatory hell

That's weird, since many believe that the US nuclear industry is a fine example of regulatory capture.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#174

Post by Maursault »

systemvoltage wrote: post #170
Maursault wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has nothing to do with economics Nuclear power is not profitable. It has nothing to do with regulation and everything to do with economics. If nuclear power were profitable, you could not stop it. If nuclear power were profitable, the regulations would change with a quickness, because motivated investors remove any and all roadblocks to their money. If it wasn't for the absurdly bad economics, bad track record p…

You're mixing up the matters and has gotten it backwards. The industry has been regulated to teeth after scare mongering by environmentalists post Chernobyl/3-mile-island. It has wiped out any hopes for private industry to build and hope to bring down costs by economies of scale. Too much regulation leads to death of economies of scale. If software was regulated like nuclear power, say because of hypothetical AI risk…

Except, it was never the regulations.

A nuclear power plant costs between $6B - $9B to build, before it generates any electricity, that is just the construction cost these days for a 1100MW plant

Regulatory costs for a nuclear power plant will range between $7M - $15M annually.

Do the math: it is definitely not the regulations. Any time someone complains about regulations, you know there is a Republican agenda. We need regulations, because they are the only thing preventing Big Business from enslaving you and me and worse. Regulations are good. Unless you make more than $400K/yr, stop doing the 1%er's jobs for them making sure most of the wealth is controlled by just a few by... removing regulations which really only bothers them because it means they make slightly less of the fortune they'd make without it.

The money is what is important. Your money should be important to you, so please make sure you only support agendas that work for your personal economic interests rather than the interests of the richest of the rich. If everyone always voted in their personal economic interests, we'd see a boom economy. The problem is, 99% of the Republican Party is literally voting adversely to their economic interests. They are voting to keep themselves economically stagnant and also to make sure the rich stay rich, for that day that will never come when they are rich, or maybe it is the absolute distractions that do not affect economy, like abortion or 2nd A. issues. If everyone only voted in their personal economic interests, and ignored all other concerns, there could not be a Republican Party. Well, there would be, but it would only have about 20 members, all listed among the top 25 richest Amercans. Most people aren't rich, and could benefit from better opportunity, which will never come so long as a minority party somehow has and has had control of the Senate for 18 of the last 20 years. If you care about your money, you should be on board with making DC and Puerto Rico legitimate US States, tax them and let them vote, and let's progress as a nation, rather than stagnating.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#175

Post by epistasis »

replygirl wrote: post #169
jeffbee wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These statements do not seem factual. Didn't the NRC issue a construction license for Virgil C. Summer units 2 and 3 in 2012? Which subsequently failed to be built despite spending 9 billion dollars, because companies like Westinghouse are structured solely for the purpose of robbing the American public blind.

$10 billion for a gigawatt of the cleanest, safest, most energy-dense, most thermally efficient, and most reliable power you can find vs $4 billion for a gigawatt wind farm that takes up 100-1000x the land, always has a few % of its installed capacity down for maintenance, and doesn't provide predictable output unless you mine about half a million pounds of lithium

These points are either inaccurate or irrelevant

We can not build nuclear at $10/GW, that's a fantasy.

The use of the land is quite different too. When a wind farm "uses" 100x-1000x the land (and I am not accepting those numbers, just quoting you), that land is still available for other uses. The fraction of "used" land is so neglible as to not matter at all. So to discuss it in the same terms as a reactor doesn't make sense at all.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#176

Post by gregwebs »

uranium wrote: post #66

"Recently, places as diverse as Texas, California, Oklahoma/Iowa/Kansas/Nebraska (SPP), the UK, and Germany have rapidly decarbonized without nuclear." Uh...Germany's actually recarbonized by shutting down their nuclear [increasing coal and imported electricity to pick up the slack]. "The nuclear electricity production lost in Germany's phase-out was primarily replaced with coal electricity production and electricity…

The article on the site about solar is equally bad. Both are full of lots of good information but then have some key misunderstandings. The solar article doesn't acknowledge that installing a solar requires installing a gas peaker plant on the grid as well. [1] Although solar certainly reduces carbon emissions (the gas peaker plants only runs some of the time), the result is that the cost to the grid, rather than being the lowest, could be one of the highest depending on how the math actually works out. Battery can be installed instead of peaker plants, but the prices of raw materials for batteries have increased dramatically recently and it isn't possible for the mining of battery materials to keep up with the future demand. Tesla's car prices are shooting up- even though they are building huge battery factories to drive down price- it's not enough- they are now exploring mining Lithium, having already bought mining rights for it in Nevada.

[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w22454/w224... Does anyone have a more up to date citation?

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#178

Post by systemvoltage »

Maursault wrote: post #174
systemvoltage wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're mixing up the matters and has gotten it backwards. The industry has been regulated to teeth after scare mongering by environmentalists post Chernobyl/3-mile-island. It has wiped out any hopes for private industry to build and hope to bring down costs by economies of scale. Too much regulation leads to death of economies of scale. If software was regulated like nuclear power, say because of hypothetical AI risk…

Except, it was never the regulations. A nuclear power plant costs between $6B - $9B to build, before it generates any electricity, that is just the construction cost these days for a 1100MW plant Regulatory costs for a nuclear power plant will range between $7M - $15M annually. Do the math: it is definitely not the regulations. Any time someone complains about regulations, you know there is a Republican agenda. We ne…

> A nuclear power plant costs between $6B - $9B to build

Why? Why not $20M or at the absolute worse $200M?

> Regulatory costs for a nuclear power plant will range between $7M - $15M annually.

This is disenginous number. Every single supplier, compliance, proposal, EVERYTHING about nuclear is regulated.

Behind this $7M-$15M on paper costs, lies the true cost of regulations: $6B-$9B.

> The money is what is important. Your money should be important to you, so please make sure you only support agendas that work for your personal economic interests rather than the interests of the richest of the rich.

Strange thing to say.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#179

Post by epistasis »

SemanticStrengh wrote: post #68
jmyeet wrote: post #41

This is a solid write-up. I particularly like this part: > Most fusion concepts are just a more complicated way to heat water. It's kind of wild that our means of power production do ultimately mostly boil down (pun intended) to turning a turbine with steam and, as the article notes, this is an inherent cost problem whereas solar is a direct form of energy. I hadn't really thought about it in those terms but it's tru…

> Nuclear power plants take too long to plan, build and bring online. IIRC it's at least 11 years It's crazy what people come to believe. To generalize the pathetic bureaucratic failures like the EPR to all model couldn't be farther from reality. Russian commercialized VVER 1200 models take 57 month to build. Their successor, the VVER-TOI take 40 month, so 3.5 year to build. It output 1300MWe Besides the russian comp…

> It's crazy what people come to believe.

It's not crazy to believe the reality of what is actually happening in the US and Europe

Assuming that the US and Europe can build the way that Russia or China can might be crazy though.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#180

Post by bbu »

Has anyone built a facility to store the waste for 1 million years yet? I think Finland is the only country in earth who started for real. It is mind boggling to me that people even consider building more waste before having the slightest idea what to do with nuclear waste. And the talking about how clean it is. Lol.
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