Earlier quoted context omitted.
Construction costs are only part of the picture and utility operators are well aware that they need to look at lifecycle costs. This includes everything from costs of fuel rods (look at the historically volatile uranium market), availability of large volumes of cooling water (see more frequent droughts), maintenance costs (maintenance being a major factor in the retirement of California's nuclear power plants), secur…
Can’t you just dump radioactive uranium into the bottom of the ocean? Can’t imagine it would do much damage with all of the water around it.
Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?
391–400 of 512 posts
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
Construction costs are only part of the picture and utility operators are well aware that they need to look at lifecycle costs. This includes everything from costs of fuel rods (look at the historically volatile uranium market), availability of large volumes of cooling water (see more frequent droughts), maintenance costs (maintenance being a major factor in the retirement of California's nuclear power plants), secur…
Also the insurance costs are so high as to make operating the plant unprofitable... which is where the taxpayer comes in, to foot the bill.
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
Construction costs are only part of the picture and utility operators are well aware that they need to look at lifecycle costs. This includes everything from costs of fuel rods (look at the historically volatile uranium market), availability of large volumes of cooling water (see more frequent droughts), maintenance costs (maintenance being a major factor in the retirement of California's nuclear power plants), secur…
> the cost of storing fuel rods onsite for decades This environmental remediation cost is generally missing in comparisons with all other energy sources.
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
> micro and modular reactors Umm, are these the ones that - relatively speaking - produce significantly more radioactive waste than traditional designs? "The next generation of small nuclear reactors will be big on producing radioactive waste"[0] "Small nuclear reactors produce '35x more waste' than big plants"[1] Sorry for the scepticism, but the nuclear lobby were the ones that brought us the phrase "too cheap to m…
35x of a small problem is not necessarily a big problem. You need to quantify that objection. Nuclear waste can be reprocessed (see Fast Breeder reactors); the concern raised here is usually proliferation risk. Given a binary choice, I'd rather have to deal with some nuclear waste than climate change, and I don't even think that climate change is an existential risk for humanity (just likely to cause large and uneven…
Doubt so, as after decades of often huge projects in many nations there is not a single industrial fast breeder reactor working satisfactorily. Can you name one?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Development_an...
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...waste disposal are so expensive. Until there are higher costs for CO2 emissions... Perhaps we should also examine the requirements and costs associated with storing waste from coal-fired power plants. Oft overlooked in favor of the fuel rod boogeyman. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/coal-... If we treated such waste with the care and security it deserved, the cost equation may balance out…
Yes. The problem with nuclear is basically twofold: first, the approval and regulatory process is deliberately cumbersome and in obvious need of reform. Treating every plant as a one-off design rather than standardizing has enormously inflated costs. And generally much higher scrutiny requirements for new designs have strangled the ability to roll out better/safer designs. It's very similar to what happens in the FAA…
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
35x of a small problem is not necessarily a big problem. You need to quantify that objection. Nuclear waste can be reprocessed (see Fast Breeder reactors); the concern raised here is usually proliferation risk. Given a binary choice, I'd rather have to deal with some nuclear waste than climate change, and I don't even think that climate change is an existential risk for humanity (just likely to cause large and uneven…
> Nuclear waste can be reprocessed Arguing that we should adopt smr reactors because their proportionally larger amount of waste can be burned by a much larger/more expensive reactor that we'd _also_ have to fund/build? One that would likely cost >10b and take 20 years to construct? That doesn't seem like a good response to the waste issues with SMRs.
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
"selling this idea to the private-sector energy industry was an uphill battle" Could you elaborate on the why? I would asume, because of risk. A solar plant, you can more or less just put anywhere, but a nuclear power plant, even a small one, needs state permission, has to meet extensive regulation, etc. It would need some convincing for me, too, that a nuclear reactor can be just a drop in replacement for coal. I wo…
Sounds like a good time to get into the energy sector. Time for an HN Wind, water, solar, and nuclear company start-up. Who’s in?
There exist green energy companies, and their biggest barrier to growth is government policy. For example, when Green Mountain energy wanted to sell to customers in AZ in 2021, SRP, one of the states largest utilities, pushed the state to repeal the competition laws it had on the books for 24 years. HB2101 was introduced in January to do this and it was signed by governor Doug Ducey in April. This gutted the states policy to have a competitive energy market and stopped the expansion of Green Mountain into the state.
You need friendly environments to operate in. Existing players like their monopolies, and they have the political connections to use the force of law to shut down your energy startup. You may have to plan to spend most of your investors money on Lobbyists and Lawyers.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/...
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
What remediation costs do solar or wind have?
Wind turbine blades are next to impossible to recycle or (at the scale we're talking about) re-purpose. 'What What happens to all the old wind turbines?' (bbc.co.uk) [2020] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22265321
Wind turbine waste is almost nothing compared to that. Still worth fixing, but perspective is important.
1. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-10/coal-ash-has-become-o...
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?
#399The cost of nuclear energy seems seriously understated. Nuclear waste storage costs the US $6B per year and we still don’t have a long-term storage plan. We’ll incur this cost for hundreds or thousands of years. https://earth.stanford.edu/news/steep-costs-nuclear-waste-us... There’s also a cost to secure the nuclear infrastructure. https://medium.com/the-future-is-electric/nuclear-generation... Can anyone find a cost…
Nuclear waste is only a problem if you don’t allow breeder reactors. Otherwise it is a fuel resource and an asset, not a liability.
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Environmental review has become a tool of environmental extremist militants to derail and progress in energy. Hmm... I wonder why they are so bent on blocking the only viable solution to climate change? Almost as if they are being used a pawns to shift over the control of energy to the government... after all, if I wanted to nationalize every industry, I would start with the industry upon which all other industries…
> they are being used a pawns to shift over the control of energy to the government ...by pushing for domestic solar panels? And improved isolation, heat pumps, passive houses? Sounds like the very opposite of centralizing energy production. So maybe we need a bit more evidence for your conspiracy theory.
The reasonably accessible domestic solar panels that do come out will most likely be IoT devices. It will be energy as a service. They will gather information in a way you might not be happy about, and have an off-switch listening for a signal from a remote, centralized hub. The solar panel's use will be governed by a TOS about what you use the electricity for. An automated system will sometimes cause random power outages for any kind of citizen, but it will also get disproportionately used against political enemies, as requested (perhaps sometimes with plausible deniability) by admins that we will never get to see, and never get to reach. It will be a corporate system, ergo the noble platitude of "electricity as a human right" will be sidestepped or shouted down, along with other things. To "manage carbon", alternative generators will be kept out of the hands of the people. Victims will either need to steal electricity or covertly depend on jury-rigged, borderline medieval sources of power to get by.
It will be an exacerbation of the status quo where service access is hydraulic state/corporate despotism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_empire
As far as I can tell, the despots hate us because they know we desperately want this system to not get further created and we speak as able against the segments of it that exist. These people as a political unit behave sort of like Roko's Basilisk that way - a hyper powerful technological system that punishes you for trying to prevent its creation.
To gain the trust of people like us and help work together on this energy crisis, I recommend you and others campaign as hard as you can against a political system that allows this kind of abuse in energy policy management - and indeed in any place you can agree it is wrong. An alternative is to decide we are so stupid, paranoid and useless that a system like this should be created and should lock us out, because we are a doomed strain of ideological mutants holding the human team back, and our co-operation on energy would be a net detriment anyways. The final, safest, most comfortable alternative is to flatly deny such a system will exist, when stuff like it already happens in other parts of our lives and the means and motive are clearly present. The alternatives will keep dragging humanity into a sterile, upside-down world that feels less and less worth living in, no matter how many gigawatts of whatever kind of power we seem to benefit from.