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Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

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Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#211

Post by andromeduck »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #209
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…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany Actually, Germany did not have a long term increase in coal/gas due to the nuclear shut down but a decrease. Coal has been in a slow but steady decline in Germany (mainly due to cost); which is on track to decline all the way to 0 as Germany is committing to getting rid of coal based production completely by 2035 or so. Gas production did grow but mainly to offset decli…

It only cost 40k lives and millions of livelihoods. No big deal.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#212

Post by systemvoltage »

onion2k wrote: post #205
systemvoltage wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Y…

Why? Why not $20M or at the absolute worse $200M? I feel like if you need to ask a question like "Why can't this thing be built for $20m, or 0.03% of the cited $6bn cost?" then you don't understand the problem well enough.

This is defeatism. Someone asked that question and is building 100x cheaper rockets. Soon to be 1000x cheaper.

Literally everything needs to be questioned. We can do that with humbleness and without arrogance.

Last I checked, we are on a tech forum known for starting companies.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#213

Post by _djo_ »

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…

Those regulations are designed with the knowledge that 100% compliance is impossible, so a safety buffer is designed in that ensures people are kept as safe as possible even within an imperfect regulatory compliance regime. Those limits are a target, and plants will likely exceed them slightly from time to time. That might not be caught for months, and keeping them at such low levels means the plants can have reasonable time to return to compliance without shutting everything down.

That's over and above the possibility of catastrophic disasters, which are covered through other regulations.

Some regulations are bad, sure, but there's generally a ton of thinking and precedence behind those related to safety.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#214

Post by mdp2021 »

bamboozled wrote: post #196
maccam94 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would you like to live near one ?

Sorry - why not? I can think of definitely devastating infrastructure - I have experienced wind turbines, for example -, and I am not aware of issues related to living near a nuclear power plant (apart from the very rare critical accidents).

Do nuclear power plants cause pollution in the surrounding territory?

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#215

Post by DigitallyFidget »

bamboozled wrote: post #196
maccam94 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would you like to live near one ?

I've lived near one, and I'd rather live near one again instead of near a coal plant.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#216

Post by jillesvangurp »

varajelle wrote: post #199
stkdump wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany is still a net exporter of electricity. France benefits from that, because in recent years they had to shut down their nuclear plants during heatwaves, when the rivers they use to cool them got too warm. I guess that will only get more frequent in the future.

This is a funny argument against nuclear. Some nuclear reactor have to shut down for a few days to avoid heating the rivers is a big problem. But the solar panel being down more than half the time (night or clouds) and the wind turbine also being down depending on the wind in uncontrollable ways is Ok.

Shutting down and restarting nuclear plants is super expensive and that actually adds to their cost problem. Predictable intermittencies of solar and wind are a given and mainly a challenge for other energy sources on the grid. For example, a lot of gas plants originally intended for base load are now pushed into the role of peaker plants. When there is cheap solar and wind power available, it's cheaper to shut down gas production. Of course that vastly reduces overall profitability of these gas plants. Any time they don't produce, they still cost money. Nuclear peaker plants are not a thing. It's just not practical.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#217

Post by RealityVoid »

pmoriarty wrote: post #146
DennisP wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, NRC services are not free. They charge several hundred dollars per hour. All the reactor people were asking for was to pay in several stages, instead of all at the end after a very expensive reactor design process.

It seems strange to me that they'd want that rather than finding out up-front before they spent a much greater amount of money actually building something which might be rejected.

They do want that. The guys didn't want blid acceptance, just doing this in stages so that they can focus on the things that might need improvement.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#218

Post by jillesvangurp »

runarberg wrote: post #202
neilwilson wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Uh...Germany's actually recarbonized by shutting down their nuclear" Germany outsourced their nuclear to France. Remember that Germany and France are no longer countries, but states in the Eurozone within the wider European Union. It's the same effect as, say, New Mexico exporting nuclear power to California and California then calling itself 'nuclear free'.

No, the math doesn’t add up. The most recent reactor to open in France was in 2002. In the last 30 years France has opened a total of 5 new reactors with 7.300 MW of nuclear energy capacity (not subtracting the ~3.500 MW it decommissioned in the same period). In the same period Germany has closed 17 reactors with total capacity of around 18.000 MW (assuming I tallied correctly). So unless France has significantly cha…

There is also the notion that the energy market overall has grown quite a bit and continues to grow. Nuclear has been declining for a long time. Both in absolute and relative terms.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#219

Post by onion2k »

systemvoltage wrote: post #212
onion2k wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Why not $20M or at the absolute worse $200M? I feel like if you need to ask a question like "Why can't this thing be built for $20m, or 0.03% of the cited $6bn cost?" then you don't understand the problem well enough.

This is defeatism. Someone asked that question and is building 100x cheaper rockets. Soon to be 1000x cheaper. Literally everything needs to be questioned. We can do that with humbleness and without arrogance. Last I checked, we are on a tech forum known for starting companies.

Someone asked that question and is building 100x cheaper rockets. Soon to be 1000x cheaper.

They got there by solving some hard problems over multiple decades by understanding the domain and the difficulties in it. They didn't start by saying "Why aren't rockets 1000* cheaper?" They started by saying "What happens if we solve these problems?" and ended up with cheaper rockets. In another domain they might have had a different outcome, or failed to solve the problems.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#220

Post by mdp2021 »

jhgb wrote: post #204
replygirl wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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

> that takes up 100-1000x the land Practically irrelevant unless you're Singapore or the like. > always has a few % of its installed capacity down for maintenance That's true for a nuclear power plant fleet as well. There's always some downtime for maintenance and/or refueling (although usually you prefer to do both at the same time, sometimes unplanned outages are still a thing). > and doesn't provide predictable ou…

> Practically irrelevant unless you're Singapore or the like

No. Very many Countries have very dense territories, and not much land naturally destinable to that kind of degradation.

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