Nuclear power is not profitable. It has nothing to do with regulation and everything to do with economics. If nuclear power were profitable, you could not stop it. If nuclear power were profitable, the regulations would change with a quickness, because motivated investors remove any and all roadblocks to their money. If it wasn't for the absurdly bad economics, bad track record proven bad for 7 decades bad, you could not stop investors from building a nuclear power plant in every county in the US.
I promise you that you can have all the nuclear power plants you want, but all you need to do is make it make money. Make nuclear power profitable, and the world is your oyster. Because we need it, and the pronuke crowd is stuck in the mud moaning about regulations and doing nothing but being annoying. It isn't the regulations. Even if the nuclear industry were entirely unregulated, it still couldn't generate profit. There is a huge problem, and it isn't the regulations. Every new plant design is more expensive than the last. Make cheaper nuclear plants. It is that simple. Scale it down or scale it up, I don't know, but do something other than allow it to be unprofitable and keep bitching about regulations... rather than design a plant that has a sane build and operating cost, draw in investors, let them deal with the regulations, and retire with a fortune. But no, instead we get blaming and finger pointing. It is the money, and that is all it is. Make it make money, please, make it make money.
> There is a huge problem, and it isn't the regulations. Every new plant design is more expensive than the last. Make cheaper nuclear plants. It is that simple. Scale it down or scale it up, I don't know, but do something other than allow it to be unprofitable and keep bitching about regulations... rather than design a plant that has a sane build and operating cost,
Part of the problem here is encapsulated in "every new plant design". What you aren't saying is that practically every new plant is a new design.
There are multiple reasons for this. One is a bit of a chicken and egg issue: because starting up new nuclear power projects is rare, it has probably been quite a few years since the last time someone started one. So the last plans you used probably need a serious update. Another is NIMBYism that takes the firm of objections thrown up arbitrarily that require changes to be made.
You're mixing up the matters and has gotten it backwards. The industry has been regulated to teeth after scare mongering by environmentalists post Chernobyl/3-mile-island. It has wiped out any hopes for private industry to build and hope to bring down costs by economies of scale.
Too much regulation leads to death of economies of scale.
If software was regulated like nuclear power, say because of hypothetical AI risks; then we'd never have anything. Software would have been written by large corporations who have the funds to penetrate the regulations.
Let's not take one iota of blame away from regulations. It needs to be brought naked to people to see why environmentalists have gotten themselves into a chinese finger trap (want to save the world but without nuclear).
Seriously did nobody read the article?! Is this reddit or Slashdot?! The article goes through the calculations, it shows that even with deregulation LWRs would not be competitive. It says that other designs might be, if they ever get off the ground.
And let's not discuss the fact that regulation affects many markets which work perfectly fine and when lifes depend on it they should be. I'd rather not that the CRT gives me a deadline dose of radiation because the programmer was playing fast and loose with his unit conversions.
> And let's not discuss the fact that regulation affects many markets which work perfectly fine and when lifes depend on it they should be.
I'm unconvinced a sane person could look at the other most heavily regulated market, healthcare, and say it works "perfectly fine".
> The article goes through the calculations, it shows that even with deregulation LWRs would not be competitive.
The numbers given in the article of $53/MWh are currently less than half the current UK wholesale electricity price and renewables impose increasing costs as they become a larger share of your electricity mix (renewables are not even remotely competitive if you also had to pay for even a single day of electricity storage, which would cost at least $4000/kw[1]).
Deregulated nuclear would be much cheaper than wind&solar+storage.
In that case, the problem wasn't conversion units, but race conditions. Anyway, three people died because the radiation therapy unit burnt them with lethal doses of radiation, because of a software error.
A nuclear power plant costs between $6B - $9B to build, before it generates any electricity, that is just the construction cost these days for a 1100MW plant
Regulatory costs for a nuclear power plant will range between $7M - $15M annually.
Do the math: it is definitely not the regulations. Any time someone complains about regulations, you know there is a Republican agenda. We need regulations, because they are the only thing preventing Big Business from enslaving you and me and worse. Regulations are good. Unless you make more than $400K/yr, stop doing the 1%er's jobs for them making sure most of the wealth is controlled by just a few by... removing regulations which really only bothers them because it means they make slightly less of the fortune they'd make without it.
The money is what is important. Your money should be important to you, so please make sure you only support agendas that work for your personal economic interests rather than the interests of the richest of the rich. If everyone always voted in their personal economic interests, we'd see a boom economy. The problem is, 99% of the Republican Party is literally voting adversely to their economic interests. They are voting to keep themselves economically stagnant and also to make sure the rich stay rich, for that day that will never come when they are rich, or maybe it is the absolute distractions that do not affect economy, like abortion or 2nd A. issues. If everyone only voted in their personal economic interests, and ignored all other concerns, there could not be a Republican Party. Well, there would be, but it would only have about 20 members, all listed among the top 25 richest Amercans. Most people aren't rich, and could benefit from better opportunity, which will never come so long as a minority party somehow has and has had control of the Senate for 18 of the last 20 years. If you care about your money, you should be on board with making DC and Puerto Rico legitimate US States, tax them and let them vote, and let's progress as a nation, rather than stagnating.
A nuclear power plant is "just" a steel cylinder in a concrete building, attached to a very ordinary steam turbine hall and a set of transformers.
The expensive part is not the building! That steel is not some unobtanium, and while the concrete is the highest grade, it's not $billions expensive. The fuel pellets are surprisingly cheap also. That's... kind-of the point! You're not burning thousands of tonnes of coal in these things. The low fuel costs are a selling point.
The reason for the expense is because every single nut, screw, and bolt needs to have a mile high pile of paperwork. Because every pipe, pump, and filter needs to be certified. Every sensor needs to be purpose-built and documented by expensive PhD-wielding scientists, not just obtained at the local engineers shop. And so on, and so forth.
The Westinghouse design paperwork specified the type of paint used for the dividing lines between the parking lot divisions.
Not to mention the lawsuits by NIMBYs, which means you often can't even start construction for 6-15 years. No other business in the world is held up in red tape for as long, or as intensely.
PS: This is why China can slap down AP1000 reactors down half a dozen at a time, like they're playing Sim City. Over there, with an authoritarian government, they simply don't have these red-tape / certification problems. Some high-up politicians simply make the decision, and that's... it. Time to start pouring the foundations.
... so the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Nuclear is expensive, but too expensive in western countries. Realistically, they're probably not worthwhile long term unless subsidised by the nuclear weapons industry...
> A nuclear power plant is "just" a steel cylinder in a concrete building, attached to a very ordinary steam turbine hall and a set of transformers.
If you save the quite expensive steel cylinder and concrete casing, that quite ordinary steam turbine and set of transformers can run on coal just by themselves. And guess what, this is already too expensive to compete with the alternatives nowadays.
(And no, there is nothing ordinary about that steel cylinder.)
> A nuclear power plant costs between $6B - $9B to build
Why? Why not $20M or at the absolute worse $200M?
> Regulatory costs for a nuclear power plant will range between $7M - $15M annually.
This is disenginous number. Every single supplier, compliance, proposal, EVERYTHING about nuclear is regulated.
Behind this $7M-$15M on paper costs, lies the true cost of regulations: $6B-$9B.
> The money is what is important. Your money should be important to you, so please make sure you only support agendas that work for your personal economic interests rather than the interests of the richest of the rich.
I feel like if you need to ask a question like "Why can't this thing be built for $20m, or 0.03% of the cited $6bn cost?" then you don't understand the problem well enough.
Probably the same reason that SpaceX was able to build human rated orbital rockets with a marginal cost that’s a fraction of what came before.
The incumbents are corrupt, the regulations are overbearing and bloated, the government has no interest in solving the problem. Fortunately, it doesn’t really matter what we think, the Chinese will continue to advance and deploy the nuclear state-of-the-art and become an energy superpower, while the US and Europe debate the issue until we’re made irrelevant.
Someone asked that question and is building 100x cheaper rockets. Soon to be 1000x cheaper.
They got there by solving some hard problems over multiple decades by understanding the domain and the difficulties in it. They didn't start by saying "Why aren't rockets 1000* cheaper?" They started by saying "What happens if we solve these problems?" and ended up with cheaper rockets. In another domain they might have had a different outcome, or failed to solve the problems.
I can agree with that but also SpaceX absolutely started with the question "Why aren't rockets cheaper". Thus followed resuability with an question "Why are we building single use Rockets?". Either way, we should question all of this. The entire house of Nuclear industry is probably filled with bureacratic termites.
I would even question why construction costs so much in US vs. say China. It is all entirely full of regulations. Not labor. Material costs are probably minscule % if you scoure the entire supply chain for regulations.
The discussion whether certain regulations (OSHA) are needed or not is an entirely different conversation, but having worked on large government/military contracts ($1B+); I have seen the shitshow with my own eyes and mind.
Gross incompetence of Gov (and its contractors) x Regulatory Capture x Lack of Innovation = Current dysfunction.
I am not saying China is the role model for safety regulations, but we need to take a deep look at what's necessary and what's not.
SpaceX will make reusable rockets a few orders of magnitude cheaper than anything NASA has produced. And current NASA administration has been forthcoming in working with private industry (SpaceX, BO, Rocketlab, Firefly, etc.). Good.
> I would even question why construction costs so much in US vs. say China.
The difference is in manufacturing and labor costs. If you want to build cheap, you can do so in Mexico at half the manufacturing and labor costs of China, which is about 1/7th that of good ol' fashioned USofA manufacturing and labor.
You should have already known this. Nothing to see here.
I think they're suggesting that industry motivated by profits will out-lobby environmentalists and anyone else. I've seen it suggested that the anti-nuclear message was propped up by the coal industry who saw it as a direct threat.
Environmentalists have made minimal headway against Murdoch media here in Australia, struggled to make progress against coal/mining, etc. Industrial lobbyists have far more money and power.
I mean, I would like to say that "people have made them profitable" "but then they blew up"
But I would be being too hyperbolic, as I would not say per se that the rmbk reactors where all that profitable at the time, tho they were certainly cheap tho
But yeah, issue with nuclear is a cursed triad of
Having nuclear reactors be cheap
Having nuclear reactors be on schedule
Having nuclear reactors be safe
Choose 2 from above
Even the AP1400 fail the test above, as more than a couple of them at least in China have been build over/close by seismic faults and in shores with tsunami risk
The fact that Toshiba nearly went bankrupt trying to build ap1000 nuclear reactors ought say it all
If by "nuclear" you mean pressurized solid fuel reactors, well yeah I agree.
But EVERY nuclear idea out there? Come on, the orders of magnitude of power density, availability of thorium an others for fuel, there has to be SOME design that is safe and economical.
But "economics" is a moving target with Solar/Wind cost improvements year on year.
That will eventually stabilize. Then there's a fixed target.
I hope that:
1) this target puts all the PWR people and their entrenched regulatory influence and reprocessing and lobbying to death. That does exist, and it is a major blocker. Too many people are making money as old nuclear circles the drain.
When that gets permanently put to bed, then ...
2) Then some LFTR/pebblebed/whatever design starts getting actually researched and invested in. The LFTR people claim that it's illegal to do liquid reactor research, which is why the pebble bed is being researched. I don't know the regs to know if they are telling the truth, but it does show lots of "chilling effects".
Then you target an actual number. Probably would require an iterable and scalable design.
Space may be the other good pusher.
But it's going to be a couple decades before nuclear should think about pushing anything to market, and the old nuclear should be shut down when battery storage gets good enough to replace it.
A couple decades is a generation, and it will clear the table of the old guard.
> Even if the nuclear industry were entirely unregulated, it still couldn't generate profit.
I recommend doing some simple arithmetic here. This is simply false:
As the article points out, reactors used to be under $2000/kw (this is with some regulation, just not onerous amounts). The UK electricity wholesale price is currently at £100/MWh, so at current prices your new plant in the deregulated world (which will take 5 years to make) will make back its construction costs (ignoring operating costs for now as nuclear is dominated by capital costs) in two years of operation.
That's a damn good rate of return compared to most businesses.
Regulations aren't some random worthless bullshit imposed by bureaucrats. They are the consequence of nuclear accidents. Dreaming of a world without regulations in the nuclear sector is just as stupid as a world without regulations in the airline industry. It just won't happen and pretending that there some kind of environmentalist plot behind the regulations won't make these regulations less necessary.
There is no way you can recover the investment costs of a modern nuclear plan in two years. It takes a very long time to recover the money (decades), and this is the main reason why investors are just not interested in nuclear plants. They have to lend money long term, and in that time lots of things can happen - from renewable technology being discovered, to changes in prices of nuclear fuel and geopolitics. You essentially can't predict the profit of a nuclear plant in the far future, and that means you can't predict how fast the investment is going to get repaid. It's just not an attractive investment, which is why some modern nuclear plants can't go ahead without some kind of government support.
These regulations are only cost effective if you have a value of human life at a billion dollars!
Looks at the actual accident rate and how bad they were in the 70s when nuclear power was reasonably priced. It is very much not worth increasing the price of nuclear by 5x, can just keep the regulations as they were and invest that money in healthcare to save 1000x as many people.
> It takes a very long time to recover the money (decades
In the overegulated world where nuclear power is 5x more expensive than it once was, yes. We aren't talking about that world though.
> These regulations are only cost effective if you have a value of human life at a billion dollars!
If other energy souces were regulated to the same degree of safety, I would expect nuclear to become the cheapest one again.
The main reason nuclear is expensive, is because people consider it to be worse if a person dies from radiation than from air polution, construction accidents, etc.
Nuclear power is not profitable. It has nothing to do with regulation and everything to do with economics. If nuclear power were profitable, you could not stop it. If nuclear power were profitable, the regulations would change with a quickness, because motivated investors remove any and all roadblocks to their money. If it wasn't for the absurdly bad economics, bad track record proven bad for 7 decades bad, you could not stop investors from building a nuclear power plant in every county in the US.
I promise you that you can have all the nuclear power plants you want, but all you need to do is make it make money. Make nuclear power profitable, and the world is your oyster. Because we need it, and the pronuke crowd is stuck in the mud moaning about regulations and doing nothing but being annoying. It isn't the regulations. Even if the nuclear industry were entirely unregulated, it still couldn't generate profit. There is a huge problem, and it isn't the regulations. Every new plant design is more expensive than the last. Make cheaper nuclear plants. It is that simple. Scale it down or scale it up, I don't know, but do something other than allow it to be unprofitable and keep bitching about regulations... rather than design a plant that has a sane build and operating cost, draw in investors, let them deal with the regulations, and retire with a fortune. But no, instead we get blaming and finger pointing. It is the money, and that is all it is. Make it make money, please, make it make money.