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Ok, but France exists.
EDF has recently been re-nationalized, and has always been under strong government influence. It's not a good example of a civilian/free market nuclear power plant operator.
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>I'll eat a roll of toilet paper covered in hot sauce if someday nuclear fission is financially viable enough to produce power for civilians at a decent scale. So all the world’s nuclear power plants operate at a loss? That’s a pretty strong proposition…
The problem is that people want to talk about fully-loaded life-cycle costs; and depending on who is doing the talking you get wildly different numbers.
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That only solves part of the problem, the civilian reactors are still too expensive to build. Nuclear is great, I went through the Naval Nuclear Power Program several decades ago myself, but it's not financially viable . Let me say that again to those engineers who weren't listening: Nuclear (fission) power is not, and will never be, financially viable for civilian powerplants. I'll eat a roll of toilet paper covered…
Counterpoint: France gets over 70% of its total energy from nuclear power (and exports some to other EU countries).
Have you bothered to look at Flamanville or Olkiluoto? What happened when in the past when France built subsequent copies of a reactor design, and won't we expect similar costs rises with these already unviable reactors?
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That only solves part of the problem, the civilian reactors are still too expensive to build. Nuclear is great, I went through the Naval Nuclear Power Program several decades ago myself, but it's not financially viable . Let me say that again to those engineers who weren't listening: Nuclear (fission) power is not, and will never be, financially viable for civilian powerplants. I'll eat a roll of toilet paper covered…
Counterpoint: France gets over 70% of its total energy from nuclear power (and exports some to other EU countries).
It’s hard to work out exact figures but around 60% of the grid’s electricity used in France came from nuclear reactors. To illiterate the difficulty, recently most of France’s nuclear power plant where undergoing maintenance however due to low seasonal demand other power plants where able to make up the difference.
PS: To be really pedantic, total electricity production would include car alternators, home PV panels, diesel electric locomotive etc, but that’s yet another calculation.
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Even assuming that's the case, isn't the counterargument "Fine, then governments need to subsidize investment into nuclear power plants, just as we do with other green technologies."
Right. It's fascinating how this is the one area where so-called environmentalists suddenly become very concerned about fiscal responsibility.
In the US, Georgia and South Carolina started building with nary a peep. France started building again without any environmental objections.
Yet these builds are all catastrophic failures, to the point that any other financial backer is scared away from even touching nuclear. The decision makers are those with the dollars to invest, not the environmentalists.
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So why don’t we have the US fricking navy actually run and manage the reactors? It’s not as if they only exist at sea. And if the reactors are actually wholly military operated we might get the added benefit of being able to use the Navy’s 20ish year lead on civilian nuclear. Amazing what you can learn when you have a navy nuclear engineer a few beers in and trying to impress you.
I’m an ex navy nuke (I did the whole thing, school through startups, sea trials, refuel, operations, maintenance, was nuke mechanic). I think some of the main impediments to adoption of navy-style training, operations, and maintenance in the civilian world are that the work is challenging and high stress. The school is very mentally and spiritually challenging to most people. When you get to the fleet the work is ver…
> Where do we find these highly motivated, fit, young, intelligent people to work like dogs?
We increase the pay. It's that simple.
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Even assuming that's the case, isn't the counterargument "Fine, then governments need to subsidize investment into nuclear power plants, just as we do with other green technologies."
I think not really. It depends on why you think subsidizing is a good thing. My personal take is that we should subsidize tech to take it from an early stage to a production stage as soon as possible. We need better power sources yesterday, not next century. So we can't sit around waiting for some sort of Elon Musk to get really passionate and dump heaps of cash into it. But the assumption there is that once the tech…
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EDF has recently been re-nationalized, and has always been under strong government influence. It's not a good example of a civilian/free market nuclear power plant operator.
Electricity generation in the US isn't "under strong government influence"?
I am stunned by the "Navy has operated 5,000 years of reactors". But, I come back to my basic thesis on nuclear power. It's the A+ game or bust Yes the US fricking Navy can do it well, but the minute the Soviet's ran out of cash they just let it all rust. If we lean on nuclear in the carbon energy transition then when we run out of money, can we afford to let them rust.
Human nature is inherently a bit of a crapshoot and progress on that front is slippery, but "make a reactor robust to neglect and abuse" is an engineering problem and progress on that front is sticky. We've gotten much better at this particular engineering problem. For instance, Fukushima was designed in 1967, but if it had been designed in 1972 it would not have had its fatal flaw.
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Right. It's fascinating how this is the one area where so-called environmentalists suddenly become very concerned about fiscal responsibility.
Environmentalists have pretty much zero impact on the ability of nuclear plants to be started and demonstrate feasibility. In the US, Georgia and South Carolina started building with nary a peep. France started building again without any environmental objections. Yet these builds are all catastrophic failures, to the point that any other financial backer is scared away from even touching nuclear. The decision makers…
don't underestimate the negative influence of "environmentalists"