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Google to back three new nuclear projects

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Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#321
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to advocate for some holier than thou perfect path rather than the messy reality that is a transition of the entire energy system to a new cheaper source while upholding our modern society. Let’s look at the area under the curve? You know, we need to decarbonize agriculture, construction, transportation etc. as well. Let look at what the UK has done: - Coal has gone from 150 TWh to zero. - Fossil gas from 17…

If we want to talk messy reality, then the only realistic way to prevent critical point in global warming is to build everything that is non-fossil fuel, that being renewables, nuclear, experimental storage and so on, while at the same time utilizing market forces and use risk-benefit analysis for each government intervention in order to spend government subsidies as cost effective as possible. Everything is needed i…

You still haven’t been able to answer why we should waste money on new built nuclear power.

It costs 5-10x as much, does not integrate well with renewables due to the capital structure and takes 15-20 years to build from political decision to operational plant.

We need to decarbonize now. Not extend the life of fossil assets for decades waiting for nuclear power to come online. With this nuclear power producing a fraction of the TWh compared to if the same money went into renewables and storage.

Wasting money on enormous handouts to the nuclear industry is not ”doing as much as possible to reduce emissions”. It is a dogwhistle from climate change deniers to extend the life of fossil assets to stymie their disruption by renewables.

I don’t think you’ve kept up with the renewable industry. The absolute explosion we are seeing is because renewables and storage today are cheaper than fossil fuels.

It started as feelgood moonshot decades ago. Today companies and countries are at a competitive advantage if they can retool their fossil dependent processes and systems to renewables.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#322
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20 years ago nuclear was the fastest, cheapest and best method for carbon free electricity, so the fossil industry pushed solar & wind as a distraction. Today solar & wind are the fastest, cheapest and best method for carbon free electricity, so the fossil industry pushes nuclear as a distraction.

Nuclear energy was never cheap, it was always heavily subsidized. Just ask Joe Kaeser the former CEO of Siemens. He said no nuclear power plant was ever profitable

Profit is tied to the subsidies, so that statement by the CEO is meaningless.

When you say nuclear was never cheap, what are you comparing it to? The impossible to compete with subsidization of coal plants? How can you compete with plants that are allowed to dump toxic radioactive waste into the atmosphere that kills hundreds of thousands annually, but your plants have to go through regulatory hell to prove they're 99.99999999% safe before even being approved?

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is actually backwards. The reactors are build big to get economies of scale. Building 4 small ones, each of which will also go over budget, only to produce a more expensive product out of each (electricity) puts your economics backwards.

It's about the amount of capital at risk, not the per kWh unit economics. The risk is of complete failure of build and getting $0.

I don’t know of that many plants that failed to finishing building after construction started.

Unit economics are important. Managing to build doesn’t mean much if you can’t turn a profit.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#324
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re skeptical of nuclear, a proven technology with excellent safety record, the only power generation that has a completely closed fuel life cycle, and believe in a technology we don’t have. If we (the West) had built out nuclear to satisfy our electricity needs, implementing new nuclear power tech as it improved, we could have electricity subscriptions like we have mobile / home internet planes. You’d just pay fo…

> a proven technology with excellent safety record Excellent safety, if you ignore Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, the Tokaimura accidents, the Church Rock spill, the beaches near Dounreay, and dozens more. Nuclear power rarely kills anyone, but when (not if) things go wrong, it tends to create a massive mess which costs billions to clean up - if a cleanup is even possible at all. It is the only power source…

> Excellent safety, if you ignore Chernobyl, Fukushima, [...]

Nope, it's all included, how could it not be?

> Nuclear power rarely kills anyone, but when (not if) things go wrong, it tends to create a massive mess which costs billions to clean up

Yep, yet it's still the safest, which means your argument has to be wrong.

Just to show you the magnitude of your error, the Fukushima accident was directly caused by a tsunami which killed 20,000 people. But your main concern from that event is the cost of cleanup of radioactive material.

More people die from falling off roofs while installing solar panels than from nuclear accidents.

> but if you want to convince people of its safety you probably shouldn't be mentioning its historical record.

Well you're not technically wrong. As you've inadvertently demonstrated with your irrational arguments, since people didn't use reason to arrive at their conclusions, they would not be likely to be persuaded by it.

> Only if you completely ignore the huge amount of pollution and waste generated by mining, reprocessing, and disposal.

Do you mean to say the waste is significantly worse than for solar panels, wind turbines, etc.?

> Again, I personally don't believe this has to be a dealbreaker, but the waste generated by the nuclear industry is still an unsolved problem.

Inert solid waste sitting in a barrel somewhere is not a problem that is worth talking about.

Again, the magnitude of your error is outstanding. We've been simply releasing all the, radioactive mind you, products of burning coal into the atmosphere for the past few hundreds of years but you're concerned about a tiny amount of solid waste.

> > If we (the West) had built out nuclear to satisfy our electricity needs

>

> We did. France hit 80% nuclear, for example.

You cherry-picked the single country with the biggest share of nuclear by far.

> > implementing new nuclear power tech as it improved

>

> We did. It made the plants too expensive to be commercially viable.

Ironically, that's because the standards for nuclear plant safety are determined by the sort of irrational thinking you're presenting here.

> Taking all costs into account, nuclear is currently the most expensive form of generating electricity.

And that's where the issue is buried, I don't believe you're taking all costs into account.

Is coal really cheaper when you include the health and environmental damage it creates? It literally can't be, the costs of human created climate change will be eye-watering.

Are renewables really cheaper once you consider the end goal of a 90%+ renewable grid? The costs of accounting for the inherent intermittency of solar and wind go up exponentially as you increase the share of renewables in the grid.

Adding the first 10% of renewables is trivial, you need no extra storage since the grid itself will simply absorb the difference.

Adding the last 10% is horribly expensive and I don't believe you're accounting for that at all.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fukushima - meltdown, too-small containment vessel, large disaster. Probably overselling the "large" there... at least on the scale of global power production.

You wouldn’t call Fukushima a large disaster? The financial cost is at $180 billion US. That seems large.

Nobody knows for sure, but the sole nuclear accident cleanup operations may cost $470 to $660 billion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cle...

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#326

Here's a better article: https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/07/google_signs_another_... > "Elementl didn't respond to questions by press time. Its public materials offer little clarity on its actual operations—aside from broad claims about providing "turn-key project development, financing and ownership solutions customized to meet our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit." > "The nuclear d…

I'm not sure if nuclear has always been a field where charlatans proliferate, but it's certainly true of the past few decades. The Summer plant in South Carolina was completely fraudulent, sending the power executives to jail for their fraud. Billions spent and nothing to show except a hole in the ground. Vogtle was slightly better in that they powered through to construction completion so that nobody cared about the…

The Ohio nuclear bribery scandal is another case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal

Yes, even in South Korea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's likely because the NRC is the most insanely regulatory body of the US government. Ostensibly, this is a good thing, nuclear power, meltdowns, radioactive waste, etc. But really I cannot emphasize enough how strict and overbearing they are. "Oh that 12V backup battery pack needs to be replaced? Better get the same one from the same manufacturer" "They aren't in business anymore but we have this 12V battery the fi…

I don't think that's an accurate depiction of NRC for builds like at Georgia's Vogtle. Even in California, entire reactors have been installed backwards and the regulatory problems were not the big problem. Given that France's builds in both Finland and France itself have been similarly disastrous as the US builds, I don't think the NRC seems to be the likely cause. And France is much better at building big things th…

There is an official report detailing why the project in France (the Flamanville-3 EPR) failed, published at (French ahead!) https://www.economie.gouv.fr/rapport-epr-flamanville , and regulations aren't a major cause (translating the summary offers a good overview).

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even without I think wind will become too expensive eventually to make it worth while. Especially when solar gets more efficient and cheaper. Wind has down sides like moving parts and requiring giant concrete poors. Birds strikes, noise as well as ground vibration are also issues.

You can add (no) recycling of huge composite balades.

Recyclable blades are gaining traction: RecyclableBlade, ZEBRA, PECAN...

There even are efforts to recycle existing ones: https://www.offshorewind.biz/2023/02/08/newly-discovered-che...

In most advanced nations landfilling them is prohibited, and many are now burnt in cement kilns.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets face it deploying nuclear around the world will add other mayor headaches like nuclear profileration.

What nuclear proliferation? How many nuclear electricity states are there? 30 How many nuclear weapons states are there? 9 What headaches are those nine nuclear capable states providing, exactly? How has the world been made worse by having nine nuclear capable states? Practically, not just hypothetical anxieties about an unrealised future.

Because, for now, those non-nuclear-capable states weren't interested in becoming nuclear-capable. On a standard PWR (the most common type of civilian industrial reactor) cooking military-grade plutonium is easy: charge it, let it start ('diverge') and then run, all as usual, then shut it down early.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#330
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be revisionist history trying to position nuclear power as some underdog?!?!? We threw absolutely massive handouts at the nuclear industry 20 years ago. Only look to Vogtle, Virgin C. Summer, Olkiluoto 3, Flamanville 3 and all other projects. Moorside, Oldbury, Wylfa and countless in the US. Had new built nuclear power delivered on budget and on time nuclear power would definitely have been part of the…

Remember that time France went from 7% to 70% nuclear energy? https://youtu.be/1WNjyxeBsWc?si=kVa2qf0uBeFrAyYB

Nuclear ELECTRICITY, not 'energy'!

In France about 60% of final energy is produced thanks to fossil fuel.

Moreover the cost of this 'nuclearization' was huge (France debt is abyssal, and taxes are very high)

Details: https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/messmer-pl...

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