The problem with nuclear is that is not really improved by market forces. The failure mode is pretty catastrophic so insurance is underwritten by the state.
No company can simply try a different operational regime and go under if they do it badly. Thua any nuclear project is by default a government project. I am much more hopeful for fusion in this regard. Letting a fusion company fail doesn’t seem very dangerous so if the basic science can be tamed, gradual economic improvement could actually acrue by market forces.
Contrast that to nuclear where each new plant is getting more expensive per GWH delivered.
Nuclear plants are uninsurable. No insurance company will touch them. Fusion is an impossible dream and completely pointless.
The dirty secret of the industry is that we need nuclear plants in order to make nuclear bombs. It's where we get the enriched plutonium to blow things up. They never mention that, do they? The entire industry is an offshoot of Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" mandate. The world was so horrified by Hiroshima that we had to make up peacetime uses of radioactivity in order to keep rational people from stopping the entire experiment. Fusion is just the latest of these.
The most persuasive argument against nuclear power today is the economic one, and I find it odd that this article doesn't even mention it.
While the global energy industry is moving towards distributed, flexible generation, nuclear power represents centralized generation that requires the accurate projection of energy use 40 years in the future.
Furthermore, the total levelized cost of nuclear is already higher than that of utility-scale wind and solar. Recent nuclear plant construction has been plagued by 100%+ cost overruns, and those costs always seem to be rate-based meaning the consumers, rather than the utility companies, pay for the overruns.
You can argue both sides of the safety issue, but its pretty hard to make an economic case for building new nuclear power plants.
I’ve always thought the best argument against nuclear is a political one. It takes a well-coordinated state to maintain and regulate nuclear power. You need regulators completely divorced from the profit side. I mean, we assume that we’ll be stable in 40 years time, but will we be?
I don’t know too much about this particular aspect, but I imagine that even the risk management part of paying for insurance gets tricky once you’re projecting out 10+ years.
All this being said, it’s the best argument in my view, but still not prohibitive. I still find myself believing in nuclear power, especially more research into advanced tech.
Indeed. He does allude to the cost problem but buries it. Another post on HN a few days ago claimed that no new nuke plants will ever be built (after Sumpter) in the US because the economics make no sense. Let's hope he's right.
Of course, the elephant in the room is that costs are out of control because of the safety issue. When nuke plants are broken, as they all are, Very Bad Stuff happens. It's the attempts to mitigate this that send costs through the roof.
See what I mean? Someone down voted this post which is entirely factual.
Every plant has leaks and safety violations. They're all publicly documented. The uneconomic nature of the industry stems from the attempts to make something safe which is inherently unsafe. Why would someone downvote those facts unless they were trolling?
I'm sure I'll get down voted for contradicting this post, but here goes.
First, a correction. Three Mile Island did indeed experience a core meltdown which the power company suppressed. Don't ask my sources; just look it up yourself.
The biggest problem with nuclear is that all of its problems are unfixable. Cost is out of control, as the OP says. Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island can never be cleaned up. Never. And those are only the household name accidents. The history of nuclear power is littered (literally) with accidents, screw ups, and permanently contaminated sites -- one of which is where the latest PG&E wildfire started. Again, don't ask me how I know this. I spent years doing my homework. But even a cursory review of nuclear power's history will show that it's full of plants gone wrong. Poke around.
The most common unfixable problem of nuclear power is the waste. No one has ever figured out how to deal with plutonium's 200,000 year half life of fatal radiation output. It's a problem at a scale that humans simply cannot address. And don't lecture me about breeder reactors or what they do with waste in France. Do more research and you'll find that I'm correct. There is no working storage or recycling solution anywhere in the world and we're 60 years into the problem.
The OP says it's not so bad because "nobody died," but that's not true either. Again, a little more digging will show that nuclear mining, waste, leaks, and even normal operations affect cancer numbers everywhere they're found.
Who's afraid of nuclear power? The people who sell it. They're afraid the world has figured out their massively subsidized boondoggle and is backing away, which indeed many countries are doing.
A terrific resource if you want more than Facebook-level facts is Helen Caldicott's book, Nuclear Power is Not the Answer. That's a good place to start.
As Einstein said, "It's one hell of a way to boil water!"
I'm writing a book about nuclear power bit this isn't it. I'm tired of HN folks whining "Where is that from?" A modicum of Google will bear out everything I've said.
You're right. Also, there are industry trolls who do stuff like derail online conversations and downvote logical arguments.
My book is a scathing exposé about the entire con job of nukes, from the promise of "power too cheap to meter" (that was a good one, huh?) to "radiation might be safe" and other nonsense.
One reason I get so pissed off at these trolls is that I've accumulated over 250,000 pages of documents, some of them from my own Freedom of Information Act requests. It's taken an enormous amount of work to be sure that I had original souce materials for everything I write, and I don't mean a Wikipedia article. One unique facet of the book is that every single claim I make is backed up by full and original quotes with sources, many of them from the industry itself.
Have you ever noticed that a post like mine will immediately be slammed with "show me sources!" but the original poster's outrageous claims like "nobody died" are met with blanket acceptance? How can the person who wrote that article say there was no meltdown at Three Mile Island? Jesus, even Wikipedia has that right. Yet no one questions them. This is trolling at it's finest.
And I did give a good starter reference for those who care. Most people want everything reduced to a tweet. You can't do that with this issue and I'm not going to try.
No company can simply try a different operational regime and go under if they do it badly. Thua any nuclear project is by default a government project. I am much more hopeful for fusion in this regard. Letting a fusion company fail doesn’t seem very dangerous so if the basic science can be tamed, gradual economic improvement could actually acrue by market forces.
Contrast that to nuclear where each new plant is getting more expensive per GWH delivered.