Sure, the NRC is not approving new reactor designs, and this is a real problem. One of the quoted articles cites the cost decline in South Korean nuclear as the example that regulations matter. Missing is the context that nuclear power in SK has been moving in the opposite direction in cost in the past 15 years - quickly. Nuclear projects all around the world are over budget and behind schedule; the subsidies required to get them built keep increasing. Even China hasn't started construction of a new commercial reactor since 2016. The costs of GenIII+ designs just seem uncontrollable. I certainly do hope that GenIV designs can address these costs and trends - and an awful regulatory environment certainly makes this tough - but I have a hard time seeing how the costs can come down enough to make nuclear economically feasible beyond particular niches.
its only been the last decade that anyone seriously started working on new fission reactor designs in the united states. as far as i know there is only one company that has submitted an application and its a SMR (small modular reactor) which is somewhat different paradigm than current fission reactors.
There's also been hardly any nuclear investment initiated because of anti-nuclear sentiment, poor economic viability and booms in other energy areas. Therefore the baseline to compare to is probably only a few applications, not the boom of reactors from projects initiated in the 50s and 60s.
This tweet makes no sense. Licenses have been approved, recently they approved the NuScale SMR design for example. They didn't approve Oklo's SMR design a couple of weeks ago and the CEO of that company then brought up the statistic. The tweet this one is citing is better. "No license initially submitted to the NRC has yet begun operations." The designs just don't seem to make it to production for some reason. The reason or reasons can't be deduced from this statistic.
I can't prove it (not an accountant), but commercial nuclear has never made money anywhere, in any country. It's always subsidised by the government (to support military nuclear).
When you dig into it they get loan guarantees, favoritism, and using accounting tricks like wishing away decommissioning costs by claiming reactors will be working for 60 or even 100 years.
The US DOE basically supports the US nuclear power industry, budget wise.
Advocates always point out the very low death rate from nuclear accidents (true) but fall silent on the cost of making 150 square km of Japan uninhabitable.
TL:DR; Nuclear has many benefits over over the carbon club but being cheaper is not one of them.
The same outcome would befall wind and solar energy if you applied the same regulatory structure and burden to them. Cost would balloon and innovation would stop.
Try making wind farms abide the same siesmic requirements and end of life plans that we hold nuclear to. They would become wildly expensive and uneconomical.
Swap regulatory structures between wind and nuclear, wait two decades and you’ll see a bunch of NYT articles talking about how toxic it is for workers and the environment to be sawing fiberglass wind turbine blades into pieces to dump in a landfill when they are no longer economically viable due to asinine regulations.
But that is the case already, solar/ wind farms have to have decommission plans, environmental impact plans etc. In fact building a wind farm faces large amount of regulations. I'd argue considering the difference in consequences of failure it's the amount of regulations faced by wind and solar compared to solar is quite unfair.
I also find the arguement that we should put the same regulations on solar wind as on nuclear weird. The consequences of a failure is many orders of magnitude different, the considerations when decommissioning are vastly different etc..
The same outcome would befall wind and solar energy if you applied the same regulatory structure and burden to them..
Incorrect. The Russians, Chinese, French, Koreans et. al. have wildly different regulatory burdens and they can't do it either. The PRC bought some Westinghouse AP1000s, stole the design, tried to copy, ended up way late and way over budget.
> If we churned these things out like iPhones, they'd be damn cheap.
If an iphone had the potential to render a city/country/continent uninhabitable for decades, I'm willing to bet the FCC would have a bit more stringent approval process.
These figure are also only true if you don't count QALYS injuries to the 600,000 liquidators involved in the cleanup, or believe that radiation exposure to those living in the area was harmless and resulted in no deaths.
I’m not going to minimize the dangers of nuclear but doing good faith comparisons would mean that we should consider the full human and ecological costs of the status quo as well which is much more catastrophic than even a Chernobyl level incident every decade. If solely comparing radiation fossil fuel production is much worse than nuclear of all things as well even counting accidents like Fukushima, Three Mile, and Chernobyl.
Independent reviews (of course I wouldn’t trust USSR orgs) of the Chernobyl fallout I’ve read (including out into EU where wind currents would theoretically have created higher cancer rates) show nothing really conclusive. Similar for follow-ups from Fukushima (yes, I’m aware of the radiation levels in the water).
These nuclear v renewable distractions seem to do nothing to get us off the clear and present danger of fossil fuels, which is my big frustration.
I agree that fossil fuels cost a huge number of lives and constitute an ongoing disaster.
It seems the general public are very sensitive to tail risks. There are times that can be irrational (terrorism) but there is also some wisdom in that.
Diffuse risks (say, particulate) are usually more acceptable than acute risks (need to evacuate a huge area, mount a months or years long cleanup, maybe your city becomes uninhabitable). Familiar risks (auto accidents, low-level air pollution) are usually more acceptable than mysterious or unpredictable risks (radiation). I suppose this could be fixed if radiation hazards were more generally familiar.
I think what a naive analysis of the risks of nuclear power misses is variance of outcome and also the confidence of the public.
You need a lot of trust in your fellow man and government (to not be corrupt, to put safety ahead of profit, to be technically proficient) for nuclear to make sense. That seems in short supply these days.
It's also not clear to me that building nuclear plants will actually reduce fossil fuel consumption worldwide. It seems to me that if fossil fuels are not consumed in one place, it is likely they will be consumed somewhere else. Put another way, it's not clear to me that fossil fuel consumption is dictated by anything but price or political mandate. (EDIT: This is a pretty whataboutish objection and could apply to any technical solution, which we definitely need some of, so I admit it's not that great of an argument).
The climate crisis is a complex socio-technical mess, and I remain skeptical that nuclear is a panacea. Asking people to be rational and just accept the plants ignores the squishy bits (humans) which are a big component of the problem.
I was just trying to apply the same standards to Chernobyl as you apply to other accidents.
(Obviously, if you talk about QALYS injuries, most polluting industries, especially in this era, could be associated with arbitrarily high numbers of deaths, even if you don't look at events like the Bhopal catastrophe, or Minamata syndrome, etc. I actually think it's fair and worthwhile to highlight this, but I don't think it's fair and worthwhile to only do so in the case of Chernobyl, and not in any other industrial accidents or operations).
If modern reactors would be safe, we would have plenty of them. Building safe reactors is extremely expensive, and the poison they produce is still not manageable long-term.
The better stat would be how many applications rejected they are a regulator their job is to stop those that don't meet the standards. I think many western kids of today complaining about goverment regulations should go and live a few years in a few 3rd world/Devolping countries. This is the main reason though I am pro nuclear I don't believe it can be source of electricity for the world in the near future. Not because of the tech but that it will be run by humans. Enough Humans are self serving greedy assholes that put nuclear tech in hands of everyone is impossible.
maybe there really wasn't anything to approve because nuclear is already dead and it's time to say it.
In a setting with a very high share of renewable energy, the need for sluggish power plants such as nuclear power plants declines while the need for grid scale energy storage systems increases
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 77.2 ms ] threadAlso, how many of whatever license type that stat is about have been submitted?
China has 14 commercial reactors under construction, 11 of which started construction after 2016.
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
its only been the last decade that anyone seriously started working on new fission reactor designs in the united states. as far as i know there is only one company that has submitted an application and its a SMR (small modular reactor) which is somewhat different paradigm than current fission reactors.
When you dig into it they get loan guarantees, favoritism, and using accounting tricks like wishing away decommissioning costs by claiming reactors will be working for 60 or even 100 years.
The US DOE basically supports the US nuclear power industry, budget wise.
Advocates always point out the very low death rate from nuclear accidents (true) but fall silent on the cost of making 150 square km of Japan uninhabitable.
TL:DR; Nuclear has many benefits over over the carbon club but being cheaper is not one of them.
Try making wind farms abide the same siesmic requirements and end of life plans that we hold nuclear to. They would become wildly expensive and uneconomical.
Swap regulatory structures between wind and nuclear, wait two decades and you’ll see a bunch of NYT articles talking about how toxic it is for workers and the environment to be sawing fiberglass wind turbine blades into pieces to dump in a landfill when they are no longer economically viable due to asinine regulations.
I also find the arguement that we should put the same regulations on solar wind as on nuclear weird. The consequences of a failure is many orders of magnitude different, the considerations when decommissioning are vastly different etc..
Incorrect. The Russians, Chinese, French, Koreans et. al. have wildly different regulatory burdens and they can't do it either. The PRC bought some Westinghouse AP1000s, stole the design, tried to copy, ended up way late and way over budget.
If an iphone had the potential to render a city/country/continent uninhabitable for decades, I'm willing to bet the FCC would have a bit more stringent approval process.
Modern reactors are safe.
Even the old (inherently unsafe) reactors like the Soviet Chernobyl style design aren’t some sort of apocalyptical danger.
Less than 40 people died in one of the most serious accidents ever (Chernobyl).
That’s a fraction of the number of people killed every year because of windmills and fossil fuels.
Far from “rendering cities uninhabitable for decades” there is no reason why Chernobyl couldn’t be repopulated today.
Heck, they have tourists visit the site every day these days.
Presumably a lot more people would have died if it wasn't for a really expensive and heroic cleanup / disaster management effort.
Independent reviews (of course I wouldn’t trust USSR orgs) of the Chernobyl fallout I’ve read (including out into EU where wind currents would theoretically have created higher cancer rates) show nothing really conclusive. Similar for follow-ups from Fukushima (yes, I’m aware of the radiation levels in the water).
These nuclear v renewable distractions seem to do nothing to get us off the clear and present danger of fossil fuels, which is my big frustration.
It seems the general public are very sensitive to tail risks. There are times that can be irrational (terrorism) but there is also some wisdom in that.
Diffuse risks (say, particulate) are usually more acceptable than acute risks (need to evacuate a huge area, mount a months or years long cleanup, maybe your city becomes uninhabitable). Familiar risks (auto accidents, low-level air pollution) are usually more acceptable than mysterious or unpredictable risks (radiation). I suppose this could be fixed if radiation hazards were more generally familiar.
I think what a naive analysis of the risks of nuclear power misses is variance of outcome and also the confidence of the public.
You need a lot of trust in your fellow man and government (to not be corrupt, to put safety ahead of profit, to be technically proficient) for nuclear to make sense. That seems in short supply these days.
It's also not clear to me that building nuclear plants will actually reduce fossil fuel consumption worldwide. It seems to me that if fossil fuels are not consumed in one place, it is likely they will be consumed somewhere else. Put another way, it's not clear to me that fossil fuel consumption is dictated by anything but price or political mandate. (EDIT: This is a pretty whataboutish objection and could apply to any technical solution, which we definitely need some of, so I admit it's not that great of an argument).
The climate crisis is a complex socio-technical mess, and I remain skeptical that nuclear is a panacea. Asking people to be rational and just accept the plants ignores the squishy bits (humans) which are a big component of the problem.
(Obviously, if you talk about QALYS injuries, most polluting industries, especially in this era, could be associated with arbitrarily high numbers of deaths, even if you don't look at events like the Bhopal catastrophe, or Minamata syndrome, etc. I actually think it's fair and worthwhile to highlight this, but I don't think it's fair and worthwhile to only do so in the case of Chernobyl, and not in any other industrial accidents or operations).
Against instinct, we should find unacceptable even an absurdly minuscule chance of (for instance) irradiating the European peninsula for 10,000 years.
An argument for safety with an attached “even Chernobyl was [mostly safe]” corollary should be suspected of unsupportable optimism.
If modern reactors would be safe, we would have plenty of them. Building safe reactors is extremely expensive, and the poison they produce is still not manageable long-term.
Most usually, if construction starts, they cost billions of dollars before they are cancelled. They never give back any of the money afterward.
A growing number of countries in the Middle East, Asia and Africa are looking to nuclear power as a clean and cheap source of energy.
But they’re going for Russian, Japanese or Korean designs where they once might have used an American designed reactor.
Like not slightly inefficient...or even significantly inefficient...but outrageously unbelievably inefficient.
In a setting with a very high share of renewable energy, the need for sluggish power plants such as nuclear power plants declines while the need for grid scale energy storage systems increases