111–120 of 277 posts
While this is a compelling tale of culture war in the US, I think that the culture war aspect has little to do with nuclear's failure, if anything at all. I am continually offended as I encounter people with Ehrlich's 1970s Malthusianism, but these are not the folks stopping nuclear. Look to France, which has a huge nuclear fleet. Look at what's happened at Flamanville, with a supportive population. What sort of cult…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it’s interesting to watch consensus switch over to pro-nuclear again. I’m not only referring to power generation by the way. In terms of global warming I’m still conflicted myself. It’s a complex topic. Going nuclear probably would be a pragmatic last minute band-aid if it had been applied 20 years ago. Now I’m not so sure anymore. Future plants will also likely meet more wars and other shocks to the system. You…
My thinking boils down to this question. What if storage, smart grids, and conservation don’t pan out? Batteries may reach some practical limits and not end up being feasible for global grid scale storage. Would we rather live in a world where we grind out building more nuclear capacity, one with rolling blackouts in the OECD, or runaway climate change?
The worst case is they end up more expensive than we'd like. There is no chance they won't work out in the sense of not working at all.
So, it's just a financial risk. If one is talking about financial risks, one must look at the chance nuclear construction will be much more expensive than promised (for example, in the estimates used to compare renewables and nuclear). This risk historically has been very real.
While this is a compelling tale of culture war in the US, I think that the culture war aspect has little to do with nuclear's failure, if anything at all. I am continually offended as I encounter people with Ehrlich's 1970s Malthusianism, but these are not the folks stopping nuclear. Look to France, which has a huge nuclear fleet. Look at what's happened at Flamanville, with a supportive population. What sort of cult…
> What sort of culture war or regulatory arguments could be made to explain France's failures with the EPR design, that so closely mirror the US's failure with the AP1000 design in the past decade? Nuclear plants are massive, complex, tightly regulated capital projects. These require strong project management capacity. Most Western democracies have spent decades systematically outsourcing project management to variou…
Advanced economies have higher labor costs, but far lower manufacturing costs. Nuclear construction requires massive amounts of highly skilled labor, not only because of the miles upon miles of piping that require super-high precision welding that will last in extreme conditions for decades but even down to things like concrete pours.
My hypothesis on nuclear is that it only makes sense for a very very narrow window of economic advancement, where labor costs are still low, but there is still enough technological capacity to design and build a hugely complex beast of a project. But I don't have any numbers to back my hunch yet...
Who Killed Nuclear Energy? The absurd cost to build this technology and the emergence of much more cost-effective and emission-free alternatives. It's as simple as that. It wasn't the tree-huggers or a big conspiracy.
Except they aren't cheaper than nuclear in any way. Nuclear power has a big cost to get started, it's a fact, but then a reactor, especially a modern one, can continue to function for nearly a century. If you factor that, the cost is risible given the benefit that nuclear power gives you. Talking about renewable, how much does it cost to remain without energy? We take it for granted, but it's not, especially these da…
Who Killed Nuclear Energy? The absurd cost to build this technology and the emergence of much more cost-effective and emission-free alternatives. It's as simple as that. It wasn't the tree-huggers or a big conspiracy.
Wind and solar aren't baseload
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Depends on perspective. I hadn't heard about this but looking it up quick and the reason it's considered too hot [1] is: > After the 2003 heatwave, France’s nuclear safety authority (ASN) set temperature and river flow limits beyond which power stations must reduce their production, to ensure the water used to cool the plants will not harm wildlife when it is released back into the rivers. And also... > Since 2000, p…
... as if the alternative energy solutions don't harm wildlife (including solar and wind). Is this again an example of expecting nuclear to mitigate its externalities while ignoring them for everything else?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on perspective. I hadn't heard about this but looking it up quick and the reason it's considered too hot [1] is: > After the 2003 heatwave, France’s nuclear safety authority (ASN) set temperature and river flow limits beyond which power stations must reduce their production, to ensure the water used to cool the plants will not harm wildlife when it is released back into the rivers. And also... > Since 2000, p…
... as if the alternative energy solutions don't harm wildlife (including solar and wind). Is this again an example of expecting nuclear to mitigate its externalities while ignoring them for everything else?
The heavy industry footprints of logistics to create the plant and equipment also are more efficient.
How many solar panels or wind turbines would you need to produce to generate a nuclear reactor’s worth of power? How expensive would that process be comparatively? These factors weigh heavily in nuclear power’s favor because it is so energy dense.
While this is a compelling tale of culture war in the US, I think that the culture war aspect has little to do with nuclear's failure, if anything at all. I am continually offended as I encounter people with Ehrlich's 1970s Malthusianism, but these are not the folks stopping nuclear. Look to France, which has a huge nuclear fleet. Look at what's happened at Flamanville, with a supportive population. What sort of cult…
Nuclear energy may seem expensive, because it has a big initial cost to get started, and we tend not to factor the long term effects of what we do. What is the cost of using fossil fuels? What is the cost and the damage done by climate change? An amount of money that we can't even quantify. So sure, burning coal/oil/gas may be cheap now, but it has an enormous long term cost that we just now are starting to pay.
- sustained political will and capital
- high morale (contractors and controllers need to not collude to hide flaws/cut corners/inflate prices)
- excelent design and on par execution
- excelent risk assesment and long term vision
- stable geopolitical situation
No country currently has a combination of all the above, all the nuclear plants we build are basically a failure waiting to happen. e.g. France has a set of plants that should have been decommissioned and replaced long ago, yet it didn’t due to the first point. Japan hit the second and fourth point. We’re seeing Ukraine hit by the last. The US could be the only country that fails at less than half the point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nuclear energy may seem expensive, because it has a big initial cost to get started, and we tend not to factor the long term effects of what we do. What is the cost of using fossil fuels? What is the cost and the damage done by climate change? An amount of money that we can't even quantify. So sure, burning coal/oil/gas may be cheap now, but it has an enormous long term cost that we just now are starting to pay.
The alternative is not fossil fuels, that's arguing a strawman, it is renewables.
That makes them alternatives!
Three Mile Island/The China Syndrome killed nuclear energy in the US. That was an interesting few weeks.
Along with things like the requirements of 1,000,000 year storage of nuclear waste. https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/11/26/the-stag... There's zero places even pretending to do this. There's one under construction that does 1/10th of that in Finland called Onkalo that's cost multiple billions and is years behind This waste procedure includes multi-decade long cooling requirements which require continuous…
That had jack shit to do with the failure of nuclear in the US. The back end of the fuel cycle is a trivial cost that had nothing to do with the financial failure of nuclear here. And it's the financial failure that stopped it.