
The Nuclear Option - akakievich
https://www.city-journal.org/atomic-power
======
niftich
Some of nuclear energy's challenges get a good amount of coverage: politicians
unwilling to support it, citizen opposition, and cost overruns and delays at
plant currently under construction. Others, less so. And if we discount
politics for a moment, the day-to-day economics of new nuclear barely pencil
out. Nuclear needs immense capital expenditure vs. other types of generation.
Solar gets generous subsidies and doesn't need a lot of opex, wind is similar.
And in the US, natural gas is cheap and plentiful, and pairs well with
intermittent renewables, and load-following gas turbines are blurring the
distinction between baseload generation and peakers.

Despite the wishes of many, pollution externalities are not priced in, and
while that is the case and fracking continues to bring up cheap gas, the rule
of natgas will continue.

But nuclear's immense capex is a problem nonetheless. While reactor designs
purport to be off-the-shelf, the each plant itself is a one-off. There's no
institutional memory and hardly any re-use of expertise, there's no economies
of scale -- just all the hallmarks of difficult megaprojects. Sound familiar?

This is why research into 'small modular reactors' is promising. Plenty of
political barriers remain, but removing some institutional barriers and easing
some of the economic ones would improve nuclear energy's prospects.

~~~
jabl
Existing nuclear plants got as big as they are because of economies of scale.
Turns out that a plant twice as big costs less than twice as much as two
smaller ones.

But, due to nuclear expansion faltering we build too few of these plants, and
thus all of them become essentially first-of-a-kind, which tends to mean a lot
of (very expensive!) delays.

I also think SMR's are very promising, trying to break the cycle of ever-
increasing costs of big plants through mass production (and passive safety)
rather than just making them as big as possible. Think airliner factory rather
than one-off megaprojects.

~~~
pfdietz
They also got big because of economies of scale of operation. Making a reactor
smaller doesn't proportionally scale down the staff you need to operate it.
This is relevant when as many as a third of reactors in the US are not even
making an operating profit.

SMRs will require changes to operational regulation if they are to compete.

~~~
acidburnNSA
Indeed. Many microreactors of the past like the PM3A in Antarctica were just
too expensive to operate and maintain so they got replaced with oil. SMRs are
great for lower capital cost but they won't just automatically be cheap to
operate. The nuclear industry has to focus heavily on getting maintenance and
operation costs way down. Some of that is regulatory, but lots of it is
inherent.

------
SCAQTony
...Less radioactive material than coal ash as well. Very excited for he NRG
Thorium reactor test going on in the Netherlands.

Coal Ash more radioactive: [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-
ash-is-more-...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-
radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/)

NRG Thorium Reactor tests: [https://www.technologyreview.com/the-
download/608712/a-thori...](https://www.technologyreview.com/the-
download/608712/a-thorium-salt-reactor-has-fired-up-for-the-first-time-in-
four-decades/)

------
trimbo
Sigh.

I've been arguing this for so long, and gave up about 5 years ago. I can't
think of a more scalable way than fission to combat carbon, yet it won't
happen for so many reasons.

* There are too many solar and wind success stories to point to. "Why can't NYC be like Scotland with wind power?!" You start to list the reasons and the response is "we can accomplish it if we put our minds to it!". It's an endless cycle of optimistic non-problem-solving.

* No politician will back nuclear. If there's an accident, they'll be run out of town. Not worth the risk.

* Along the same lines, there is zero interest in technology research/investment. This became obvious when they shut down reprocessing in the 70s and IFR was shut down in the 90s. And the reprocessing ban was by a President who happened to be a nuclear engineer! If he won't do it, who will?

* The scare-mongering in the media over accidents is impossible to overcome. There's no way to have a rational discussion when all someone has to do is point to the endless exclusion zone documentaries to win their argument.

* And then much of the blame needs to be shared by the nuclear engineers. They had decades to make nuclear safer before TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima (1942 -> 1970s, 80s, 2010s). And yet, here we are, with the same light water reactors that Rickover speced out in the 50s! Yes, I get that has something to do with building restrictions since TMI... so how about before that?

~~~
gotocake
The overall incredible ignorance around nuclear is staggering. If you ask the
average person how many people have died as a result of the Chernobyl
incident, they’re usually going to estimate high by orders of magnitude. In
general what people don’t understand about radiation is effectively everything
about it, and worse, they don’t want to know. Meanwhile trying to explain how
many million die _each and every year_ from burning hydrocarbons rolls right
off them. It’s pathetic and infuriating and I’ve also given up completely.

 _And then much of the blame needs to be shared by the nuclear engineers. They
had decades to make nuclear safer before TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima (1942 -
> 1970s, 80s, 2010s). And yet, here we are, with the same light water reactors
that Rickover speced out in the 50s! Yes, I get that has something to do with
building restrictions since TMI... so how about before that?_

It has to do with fuck all investment, a dead regulatory environment, and
inability to test new designs at scale. For all the other reasons you
mentioned the investment isn’t there. I’d add that the waste issue is seen by
most of the public as technically insurmountable, whereas in fact it’s
technically simple, but politically insurmountable. At this point you’d need
it to be _the_ platform issue for a popular president, along with a truly huge
education initiative and a lot of arm-twisting in the senate. It would cost a
fortune, but less than the inevitable disaster were hurtling toward without
nuclear.

Unfortunately even on a site like HN, optimism about renewables and new tech
combines with ignorance of nuclear power; how can we expect better from the
average American?

~~~
MapleWalnut
Nuclear power is cost prohibitive. Additionally, it's hard to predict and
account for that one-in-a-million catastrophe that creates a nuclear
wasteland. The sample size is too small.

~~~
gotocake
_Nuclear power is cost prohibitive._

Really, because it’s widely employed around the world. If you have some
evidence that it’s “cost prohibitive” though I’d love to see it. Evidence mind
you, not flat declarations devoid of substance.

 _Additionally, it 's hard to predict and account for that one-in-a-million
catastrophe that creates a nuclear wasteland. The sample size is too small._

Many decades and thousands of reactors on land and naval applications with
only a few notable disasters beg to differ. I’m also curious where this
“wasteland” comment is coming from. The worst nuclear disaster, one singular
in its extremity, has led to something far from a wasteland, although quite a
few people had to be relocated.

Either way, trading in the known mass casualtiesin the millions per annum, and
environmental catastrophe of burning hydrocarbons, for scaremongering “what
if’s” so profoundly out of touch with reality as yours is the falsest of
dilemmas. The total death toll from everything nuclear, including weapons
can’t match a year of deaths and illness from burning coal. Never mind mining
coal, drilling for oil and transporting it and the associated sociopolitical
disaster of the Middle East, the environmental harm of fracking, and the sheer
stupidity of not addressing climate change _now_.

~~~
gmac
_Nuclear power is cost prohibitive._

How about:
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36160368](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36160368)?

For the cost to be prohibitive, it only really needs to be dearer than an
alternative that's at least as good. That alternative is now wind:
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41220948](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41220948).

~~~
mcjiggerlog
Wind is not a like-for-like replacement for nuclear. The amount of land wind
would need to replace just one nuclear reactor is many orders of magnitude
greater.

Renewables must be supported by a reliable base-load supply, which effectively
means you need to choose between either nuclear or fossil fuels.

~~~
gmac
1\. The amount of land _or sea_ , which latter makes for a dearer installation
but is much easier to find in densely populated countries like the UK.

2\. My understanding is that, sure, you can't have a grid that runs purely on
wind, but you can go a lot higher than we currently do without much trouble.
The issue with massive new nuclear is that outages can take a sizeable
percentage of your generation off-grid unexpectedly at a moment's notice
(Hinkley will I believe represent 7% of UK grid capacity), which in a sense is
a worse intermittency problem than you get with renewables (which tend to ramp
up and down more smoothly and broadly in line with weather forecasts). Also,
battery storage can help.

------
skybrian
Given the construction costs, the case for keeping existing, already paid-for
nuclear plants open seems a lot stronger than building new plants that won't
pay for themselves for decades. Who knows what the electricity market will
look like then?

Solar and wind infrastructure is now mass-produced and competition is driving
costs down. It's unclear what forms of energy storage will win, but I would
expect it to be competitive as well.

~~~
Johnny555
Except that's why we have so many power plants based 1950's era designs
instead of safer, more modern plants.

~~~
toomuchtodo
“Safer, modern” plants in the US, the UK, and China are being scrapped because
they’re not affordable.

Solar, wind, and storage are already cheaper than nuclear. So why build
nuclear?

~~~
rurounijones
As far as I know scalable storage for base-load is not a solved problem. Has
that changed?

Personally I find it hard to believe that we can live on renewabls until a
european country goes 1 year completely on renewables (I guess Germany is
probably the best candidate for that since they are going all-in).

~~~
toomuchtodo
If batteries and renewables are cheaper than nuclear, how is it not a solved
problem? You still need to build the new renewables and the batteries, but
it’s cost effective and can be done.

~~~
zanny
Because renewables are regional. They make exceedingly good sense in places
like the US midwest or most of Europe where you can build solar / wind and
have substantial availability. Solar, by contrast, is much less performant if
you live somewhere with less sunlight due to any number of reasons - weather,
smog, latitude, etc. Same with wind - it only makes sense to build wind where
you get the most wind.

And the trick with those is that its not a zero sum. Even if solar would be
viable somewhere less optimal panels are still going to go where solar is
cheapest first. And then you are looking at the costs of transporting that
power gradually towards areas of reduced renewables efficiency and/or storing
it.

To put it even more generally, if the state of Maine were willing to build a
fission plant but not buy solar, wind, hydro, etc LET THEM BUILD IT. You can
manufacture all the solar panels and windmills you can while also building
nuclear plants. The priority has to be shutting down all oil and gas plants as
soon as possible by any means available.

~~~
toomuchtodo
No one is stopping anyone from building modern nuclear reactors except debt
markets and utilities. The problem is that no one wants them (compared to
other generation technologies).

Timoth3y in another thread explains it extensively:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19168057](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19168057)

~~~
kortilla
That’s wrong. Debt markets are reflecting the risks of the plants being
stopped by orgs like the NRC, etc. The debt markets don’t favor it precisely
because so many different parties can block new builds.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I disagree with your assertion. It's simply time value of money. As an
investor, you don't want to wait decades for a higher risk low return that may
never materialize, or the bond defaults entirely because your nuclear plant is
shuttered for safety or political reasons. Could government insure the bond?
Yes! But then they're subsidizing nuclear when that money could go into
renewables and storage.

~~~
kortilla
You didn’t disagree, you just affirmed it. The debt markets treat it as high
risk precisely because so many parties can easily stop it.

Nobody refuses to invest in nuclear because of the negligible meltdown risk.

------
dv_dt
Just about every builder and operator of large nuclear fleets of reactors have
all outright said or implied by their actions that nuclear is uneconomical vs
renewable power options. The massive bulge of capital and scheduling needed
points to humans not being able to build a next generation of nuclear plants
in time to head off the worst climate change, and renewable energy sources
being both faster and cheaper to build.

France: 44 Billion would be saved by investing in rewables instead of nuclear

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-10/french-
po...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-10/french-power-costs-
will-rise-if-renewables-are-sidestepped)

Private operators in the US have said new plants are unlikely due to the
economics of nuclear:

[https://www.usnews.com/news/national-
news/articles/2018-04-1...](https://www.usnews.com/news/national-
news/articles/2018-04-16/exelon-official-no-new-nuclear-plants-to-be-built-in-
the-us)

The last few completed plants in the US (that didn't get canceled) were 20-30
years in the making - and typically over budget and schedule by more than 2x.
With some of the cancelled projects over budget by 3-4x.

Even China, which embarked on building it's own fleet of nuclear plants, and
has all sorts of regulatory advantages found that construction was slow and
overbudget:

[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-
its-...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-taste-
for-nuclear-power-thats-bad-news/)

~~~
rurounijones
I can get the "We cannot build them in time" part but the whole "It is not
economical to build them" strikes me as a pretty crazy position to take.

Uneconomical compared to the massive disruption that climate change will bring
to our civilization? Are we fighting to save our future or not?

Discarding a proven technology that will massively reduce our carbon emission
for an unproven "We still have problems to solve around wide-scale baseload"
seems to be ass-backwards to me and pinning more on hope than common sense.

~~~
rtpg
It's not that nuclear is unproven, it's that _renewables at this point are
proven_.

You can build huge (or tiny! it's super scalable) fleets of renewable energy
sources pretty economically, with a ~0% chance of making surrounding areas
uninhabitable for 20 years if there's a failure.

Yeah sure a truckload of uranium goes a long way but building the plants is
really hard even when you look past the regulatory issues.

~~~
rurounijones
Someone said roughly the same thing in another thread
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19167849](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19167849)

But as far as I know there is no proven large-scale storage system, which is a
criticla part of renewables. The other commenter mentioned building batteries
and then it is just a matter of scale which seems like an over-simplification
to me but I cannot find much useful info on it.

Personally I would love a 100% renewable setup but I would not bet the future
of our civilization on it when nuclear is another option.

~~~
darkmarmot
We do have a very simple large-scale storage system that's already in use
across the world: pumping water uphill. It's just not as economical as rain
when you factor in the efficiency losses from generating and transferring
power twice.

~~~
rurounijones
And pumping water uphill is a regional solution that requires specific
regional geography, to me that does not class as "scalable".

I should be more specific in that to me "scalable" is a solution that can be
deployed anywhere without require specific regional properties. Maybe you
think this is unneeded and that a lot of region specific solutions can cover
the storage requirements.

However another posted did point out that 1 mile by 1 mile of batteries is
apparently enough to store US energy requirements.

~~~
ShorsHammer
Unless there is big improvements in battery tech I don't see it as a solution.
Lithium batteries have their own environmental problems and die after 10
years.

Pumped hydro requires the geography, building new capacity tends to flood
large areas and release huge amounts of greenhouse gases initially.

Simply lifting weights on cranes or rail tracks is looking more efficient and
can be adapted anywhere. It will probably win out in many cases.

~~~
usrusr
> Simply lifting weights on cranes or rail tracks is looking more efficient
> and can be adapted anywhere.

The energy density of that kind of scheme is a joke. Thought experiment: a
fully charged Tesla, how often could it climb a hill the size of that crane if
it skips recuperation on the downhill leg? That's how much lower the energy
density of a crane storage would be. Pumped storage works (where the geography
allows it) because water is by far the cheapest and the most easily
transported ballast and geographic height differences dwarf almost every human
made structure.

If you want something that scales everywhere, look no further than compressed
air. It's usually ignored because of the big thermal losses, but if you have a
direct application for coolant they are not that bad and even without, it
serves as an almost trivial lower bound to the storage problem. We can
calculate how much intermittent energy production we would need with
compressed air to serve a power demand profile and everything else is just a
possible improvement.

~~~
ShorsHammer
Since when was energy density ever been a problem for grid storage? Even in
the most crowded cities on earth it's not a constraint.

Unless you are talking about portable applications it's all about round trip
efficiency and cost, I'm not sure if you are getting confused about terms here
or talking about an entirely different subject.

Compressed air efficiency isn't great. Using it for cooling lowers the
efficiency even more.

Crane and rail gravity storage are pushing 80-90% round trip efficiency.

Previous HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17789456](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17789456)

------
exabrial
What stinks about nuclear is it got too big too fast. There was a massive
buildout of these 1950s-1960s reactor designs, before we had time to fully
realize the full cost lifecycle of said designs, and their failure modes. I
guess it didn't help at the time we were facing nuclear obliteration between
two super powers :/

Still I really wish people could differentiate the risks behind a PWR, BWR,
Liquid Metal cooled, the AP-2000 design, and a thorium cycle. They're all kind
of lumped together unfortunately.

------
JackPoach
There's just no way nuclear is making a come back until the economic issues
are resolved. Almost all nuclear projects are over budget and over time by 2x
or 3x, except for plants built in/by Russia, India, China

~~~
philipkglass
As I mentioned in another comment, China and Russia don't build reactors all
that quickly. Their newest commercially operating reactors Hayiang-2 and
Leningrad 2-1 took 8 and 9 years respectively.

India is slower yet. Their newest reactor Kudankulum-2 took 14 years to build:

[https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails....](https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails.aspx?current=853)

Could the US build a reactor in 14 years like India does? I think so, even
with my currently-low opinion of the industry's ability to plan. But I also
don't see how to guarantee institutional support that lasts 14 years. Neither
utilities nor politicians have the tools or incentives to support something
that takes that long to gestate.

------
tomohawk
This highlights the foolishness of relying on magical government solutions.
Nuclear power has plenty of promise, if the waste is magically taken care of
by an as yet to be implemented solution from the government. Since this
solution never arrived, the waste gets stored at each nuclear plant, where it
needs to be actively cooled for some period of time.

~~~
666lumberjack
There's nothing in principle preventing private companies from reprocessing
spent nuclear fuel and storing what remains in long-term underground storage.
It's just illegal for them to do the reprocessing and too politically
unpopular for any local government to consent to having a storage facility
built on land it manages.

It's misleading to refer to a 'magic government solution' as though the
nuclear industry is expecting the government to invent a magic wand that will
disappear spent fuel with a flourish of the hand.

~~~
pfdietz
It's not illegal to reprocess. Carter's ban was rescinded by Reagan. What it
is is stupid. Reprocessing is a net economic loss.

------
heyjudy
Worked in nuclear industry in the late 90's. Most *WR designs are inherently
not fail-safe, complex, require dedicated teams, are nearly impossible to
insure and require a massive capex investment. This isn't necessary. Modern
MSR/LFTR designs tend to get around most of these problems by being smaller,
simpler and most robus, similar to what some startups, Taylor Wilson proposed
and partially what ANP/ASTR/MSRE/DMSR proved. Downsides to many small reactors
include more, smaller sites needing physical/SCADA security and more
geographically-diffuse waste handling. Upsides include no exploding
containment vessels and consumption of HEU down-blended.

~~~
DennisP
There's nothing to keep us from putting lots of small reactors at the same
site, if that's what we want. We'd still get the economy of scale from
factory-built reactors.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
We need nuclear. Not only is a reliable carbon-free source of nuclear energy,
even if wind and solar continue to develop where they provide all the power
for day to day use, we can use the excess energy generated to drive CO2
removal from the atmosphere. It is seeming less likely that we able to change
course in time such that just stopping carbon emissions prevents disaster. We
will likely also need to actively remove carbon from the atmosphere. All such
processes are energy intensive, and having excess nuclear power will be
helpful.

~~~
tjpnz
It's our best chance going forward (short of Fusion) but how do you go about
calming people who are quite rightfully scared by it? I live in Japan which
has a long history with nuclear but after Fukushima people take to the streets
whenever a nuclear plant comes (or is announced to come) back online. If a
country like Japan can still screw nuclear up so monumentally I don't hold out
much hope for the rest of the world.

~~~
intopieces
They are not "rightfully scared." Even if you take the highest number of death
estimates -- all the way from the initial incident through the people who died
in evacuation all the way those who will die of cancer in 20 years -- the
death toll is staggeringly low compared to carbon emissions. It just so
happens that radiation is scary and deaths happen all at once.

~~~
victorp13
Don't just count deaths: Nuclear fallout has profound long-term negative
effects that coal accidents do not. At Fukushima, nearly 80.000 people are
still displaced, almost eight years later. Source:
[http://www.reconstruction.go.jp/english/](http://www.reconstruction.go.jp/english/)

~~~
jabl
That's true, but OTOH those people are displaced due to fear of radiation (and
due to large areas being trashed by the tsunami), not due to the actual
effects of radiation.

And FFS, something like 15000 people were killed by the Tsunami, while 0 have
died due to radiation released by the plant. Yet we continue to obsess about
the nuclear accident. WTF?

------
Animats
China now has four AP1000 plants in operation. The US still has two under
construction. We'll have to see how the AP1000 works out.

------
lsfanwetew233
As far as I can tell every top level comment in this thread claiming that
Nuclear is more expensive than wind/solar is simply wrong.

\-- First of all, complaints about the capex of nuclear make little sense if
you are trying to argue for wind/solar; as the only reason you could plausibly
make a case that solar/wind enjoy a comparable marginal levelized cost as
fossil fuels is assuming that the cost of capital is insanely low thus making
the large upfront capital expenditures on solar/wind infrastructure look like
a better tradeoff than the cheaper upfront cost of fossil fuel and higher
ongoing maintenance/fuel to run a fossil fuel plant.

If you are making that assumption for wind/solar it stands to reason you can
make the same assumptions for nuclear as well. Of course, in the "real world"
only super rich countries can afford to make those tradeoffs in the first
place and given that nuclear usually requires access to cheap capital (i.e.
government loans) it stands to reason wind/solar have the same problems; and
to use an example I will return to later Germany has considerable subsidies
for wind/solar compared to fossil fuels as expected.

\-- Secondly, no utility uses the marginal cost of producing electricity for a
power source that is inherently variable. The economic costs of failing to
produce enough power for a regional or national utility outweigh any
hypothetical marginal advantage for wind/solar. Essentially every wind/solar
power source has to have a reliable backup source that can step in to ensure
the utility can meet the demand for electricity. In most cases this just means
you build cheap combined cycle gas plants. If you are a rich country like
germany you can afford to overbuild your power generation capacity.

Countries like germany also have the advantage of being able to purchase
energy from neighboring countries to make up shortfalls in demand. The german
energy program relies on the availability of french nuclear power for
precisely this reason. Of course, some days you can trumpet that some gigantic
% of total production is supplied by wind/solar but this is mostly irrelevant
from the financial perspective of the utility.

\-- Finally, energy storage for wind/solar simply doesn't make sense with
current technology. To take one example, Hydropower can already be expensive;
now add in the cost of producing enough renewable energy to power all the
original power produced by hydro cycle AND the cost of machinery to somehow
replicate the operation of gravity. Basically you are looking at 2.5 to 3x the
cost of your original investment to make your variable energy source reliable.
Current lithium battery technology is totally unworkable at scale as another
alternative.

To top it off I think the levelized cost figures often trumpted on this site
for wind/solar are off anyway. Basically, unless you get a bunch of subsidies
from the government it almost never makes sense unfortunately.

~~~
marcosdumay
> First of all, complaints about the capex of nuclear make little sense if you
> are trying to argue for wind/solar;

I'm having a hard time making sense of this claim. You compare the costs of
wind/solar to nuclear basically by capex only, why does the cost of capital
even matters? Why what relation do fossil fuels beating them on under
developed countries change how one compares to the other?

~~~
pfdietz
His claim is absurd. The easily checked facts on the ground show new nuclear
being several times more expensive than renewables in the US, on a levelized
basis.

The president of Exelon, a US corporation that operates 23 nuclear
powerplants, has stated that effective CO2 taxes would have to be $300/ton or
higher for new nuclear powerplants to compete with natural gas in the US. And
yet, wind and solar are increasingly competing with and winning against gas
here.

------
PavlikPaja
I'm going to attack nuclear from an entirely new point of view: What if
thorium or uranium have other, yet unknown uses? We could be burning
potentially invaluable resources for relatively unimportant amounts of energy.

~~~
666lumberjack
This argument could be applied to literally every depletable resource in
existence. If utilized efficiently with reprocessing and breeder reactors the
world's proven Thorium + Uranium reserves would last thousands of years, even
powering 80-90% of world energy use. By that point we should be using either
fusion energy or beamed power from panels in solar orbit, depending on how
optimistic you are - and if uranium does turn out to have a miraculous
alternative use we'll have a sufficiently developed space program to mine it
from somewhere other than Earth.

I disagree with the notion that we'd be producing 'relatively unimportant
amounts of energy' when we're talking about the only geography-independent
near-zero-carbon energy source with the proven capability to provide base load
power for an advanced economy, unless you think anthropogenic climate
disruption is no big deal.

~~~
PavlikPaja
There are no other resources depletable in the same sense - even if you burn
coal or oil, equivalent resources can be synthesized. The rest is usualy not
depleted in the literal sense, only put into use and may need to be recycled
to be used elsewhere. But the elements used in nuclear fuel are completely
destroyed in the process and there may be no easy way to recreate them.

~~~
666lumberjack
Uranium and Thorium could be produced by nuclear transmutation in the event we
discover some miraculous property they have ten thousand years from now. This
is non-trivial, but it's essentially the process used to produce plutonium for
nuclear weapons and we managed to get pretty good at that.

~~~
PavlikPaja
I suppose recreating those would be much harder, because of the gap between
them and the other elements.

------
philipkglass
I agree that nuclear power is safe and that reactors in good condition should
not be retired before fossil generators on the same grid. Subsidies are
justified to prevent premature nuclear retirements. But anyone who thinks that
all new nuclear projects need is the tax subsidies currently going to
renewables is willfully blind to recent history.

 _“Subsidies to wind and solar are backfiring, both economically and
environmentally,” says Michael Shellenberger, head of the pro-nuclear advocacy
group Environmental Progress. “That money should be shifted to nuclear.”_

The most generous renewable subsidy offered across the USA [1] is the wind
Production Tax Credit, which offers wind projects $23 in tax credits per
megawatt-hour that they generate over the first 10 years of operation [2].
There is only 1 American reactor new enough that it would qualify if the same
terms were offered to nuclear projects: Watts Bar II, which was completed in
2016 after a 30 year construction hiatus.

There are 4 partially completed AP1000 reactors that would also now qualify
for wind-like tax incentives if they had met their planned construction
schedules. Unfortunately, all 4 are horrendously behind schedule and over
budget. Two have been canceled. These project failures drove the bankruptcy of
Westinghouse in 2017.

New nuclear power has had its own federal production tax credit since 2005,
though on terms less generous than those offered to wind:

[https://www.nei.org/advocacy/build-new-reactors/nuclear-
prod...](https://www.nei.org/advocacy/build-new-reactors/nuclear-production-
tax-credit)

I would guess that it's less generous because in 2005 nuclear power was
considered to be relatively mature, affordable technology already; wind was
riskier and needed more incentives to develop to maturity. 14 years later,
wind projects look like the predictable option for investors and nuclear
projects are the crazy gamble. So I wouldn't be _opposed_ to offering reactor
builders the same incentives offered to builders of wind and solar farms, but
I don't think that will move the needle much. The problem isn't that new
reactors need more revenue per MWh. It's that they have trouble delivering any
MWh. You can offer $50 per MWh and it doesn't help if the project can't
deliver a single megawatt and is years delayed, billions over budget.

Why are all the AP1000s late and over budget? Why did schedules slip so badly?
They were originally supposed to be built within 5 years in the US. In fact,
they are taking 8 years or more. Even the AP1000s built in China ended up
taking nearly 9 years. It wasn't obstructionist tactics from anti-nuclear
activists or lawyers. It wasn't shifting regulatory requirements. _It was the
nuclear industry itself._

Here are the Post and Courier stories tagged “Westinghouse.” These are all
about the failed VC Summer AP1000 project in South Carolina.

[https://www.postandcourier.com/search/?k=%22westinghouse%22#...](https://www.postandcourier.com/search/?k=%22westinghouse%22#tncms-
source=keyword)

Some damning headlines:

 _S.C. utilities knew of big problems 6 months into nuclear project but didn’t
tell customers_

 _Insight that would’ve alerted problems with nuclear project scrubbed from
audit two years ago_

 _Whistleblower says he was demoted after finding problems in S.C. nuclear
project, report says_

 _Confidential Westinghouse report details early faults with nuclear projects_

 _Letter shows S.C. utilities knew Westinghouse’s reactor designs would lead
to increased costs and schedule delays_

The American nuclear industry is going to take a decade to recover from these
self-inflicted wounds, if it ever does. Maybe (I hope) small modular reactors
can avoid the runaway schedule and cost problems that plagued the AP1000 and
the EPR.

I've been reading calls to prioritize building reactors over renewable
projects for at least 15 years now. They even made a lot of sense back then.
The pitch: if we can just get the irrationally fearful public out of the way,
nuclear projects can displace fossils faster and cheaper than renewables.
These American AP1000s were supposed to convince fence-sitting
environmentalists and ratepayers alike that it was time for an American
nuclear renaissance. Reactors would be as all-seasons reliable as coal and
generate a MWh cheaper than any solar farm. Instead they've been complete
fiscal disasters that to date have generated less electricity than a single
rooftop solar system.

People who are still pitching the "cheaper and more predictable than
renewables" line about nuclear projects should be dismissed as chat-bots stuck
in a loop. They're not integrating new information and reconsidering past
stances.

[1] I don't know details of all 50 states' renewable incentive policies, and
some of them are structured in ways that make it difficult to assign a
straightforward dollars-per-MWh value.

[2] [https://www.energy.gov/savings/renewable-electricity-
product...](https://www.energy.gov/savings/renewable-electricity-production-
tax-credit-ptc)

~~~
jessaustin
The fact that yours is the only post here to _mention_ South Carolina makes me
really wonder how practical the typical nuclear advocate could be. $25B would
buy a lot of solar panels.

------
roenxi
My issue with trying to calm people down on the subject of nuclear is as far
as I can tell they are scared of risks that don't exist. That can't be
controlled with engineering solutions; so making nuclear energy safer won't do
anything.

Take a recent article [0]. Now, they talk about getting "one chest X-ray every
week", and apparently a chest Xray is about as radiation as 10 days of
background radiation [1]. We're talking about a bit more than doubling a
completely safe background rate to a figure that we have no evidence is of
practically different, and that the experts claim is safe. I'm not going to
look in to it, but I bet that the 'international limit' they talk about wasn't
even derived scientifically, they probably just multiplied average background
rate by some constant.

This is almost literally the same as taking the anti-vaccination crowd
seriously. People who seem to be anti-chest-xray are being treated like
credible sources of information! How can we expect sane policy in that sort of
environment.

[0]
[https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2018/03/fukushima-...](https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2018/03/fukushima-
radiation-levels-100-times-higher-than-normal-greenpeace-report-warns/)

[1] [https://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info.cfm?pg=safety-
xray](https://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info.cfm?pg=safety-xray)

------
sasavilic
One thing we always keep forgetting: spent nuclear fuel, which is highly
radioactive. It has to be kept safe for years and somehow I don't this is
really calculated into price of nuclear electricity. But if we had a reactor
that wouldn't have issue with highly radioactive waste, then it would be a
different story.

~~~
kijin
Keeping radioactive waste far away from anyone who might be harmed by it, even
for thousands of years, is a solved problem. We know how to bury stuff deep
underground in a geologically stable region. Or if you prefer, throw it in a
subduction zone.

As with most things nuclear-related, the real problem is NIMBY. If a country
as large and sparsely populated as the U.S. can't agree on a place to bury
nuclear waste, there doesn't seem to be much hope for others like France and
Japan.

~~~
sasavilic
I am not convinced that it is a solved problem. How old are Egyptian pyramids?
Yet there is a lot of stuff that we don't know about them. We are confident,
that after 20 000 years, people will still know about nuclear waste storage
facilities? Think about it: records could be lost, our language will be
different. Why are we so sure that somebody will not dig it up?

~~~
jabl
The radioactivity of spent fuel decays exponentially. After a few hundred
years, most of it is gone, although there is of course the danger due to the
chemical toxicity, just like any other heavy metal deposit. Obsessing over
what could happen if somebody digs it up after 10000 years is not anchored in
reality.

~~~
sasavilic
> The radioactivity of spent fuel decays exponentially

True, but it is still question of the half-life (i.e. plutonium)

> Obsessing over what could happen if somebody digs it up after 10000 years is
> not anchored in reality.

It is a reasonable concern, because we have never before in our history
produced such toxic waste that lives so long. I don't know about you, but I do
hope that Homo sapiens will survive next 10k years.

~~~
jabl
> > The radioactivity of spent fuel decays exponentially

> True, but it is still question of the half-life (i.e. plutonium)

To expand my statement, yes, spent fuel is a mix of different isotopes, some
stable, and others unstable with different half-lives. The point being, if
something is super-radioactive, then by definition it has a short half-life.
And conversely, if something has a long half-live, it's per definition not as
radioactive has something with a short half-life.

Thus, after 10k years, what is left is not that radioactive (to be more
specific, after 10k years with a once-through cycle, spent fuel will have a
radio-toxicity about 20 times that of natural uranium ore. Now, I'm not
suggesting you should grind it into dust and sprinkle on your cheerios in the
morning. But it's not any kind of civilization-ending toxicity either.

The idea that a future civilization will have the know-how to mine stuff 1 km
underground, but somehow they have no clue about chemical or radio-toxicity
just seems so absurd to me.

> It is a reasonable concern, because we have never before in our history
> produced such toxic waste that lives so long.

Citation needed. My guess would be that we have produced an unfortunately
large amount of toxic waste, but the vast vast majority of that is not
radioactive, and will thus never decay. Dig it up a million years from now,
and it will be as toxic as it is today. The incredible energy density of
nuclear fuel means that, in the end, the amount of nuclear waste is very
small.

> I don't know about you, but I do hope that Homo sapiens will survive next
> 10k years.

I hope so too. In my mind, however, climate change, biodiversity loss, topsoil
loss etc. rate far far higher as risk factors than a comparatively small
amount of nuclear waste. In fact, by not deploying nuclear due to risks
associated with nuclear waste, we significantly reduce our chances of dealing
effectively with climate change, a much higher risk.

