[epistasis]

While this is a compelling tale of culture war in the US, I think that the culture war aspect has little to do with nuclear's failure, if anything at all. I am continually offended as I encounter people with Ehrlich's 1970s Malthusianism, but these are not the folks stopping nuclear.

Look to France, which has a huge nuclear fleet. Look at what's happened at Flamanville, with a supportive population. What sort of culture war or regulatory arguments could be made to explain France's failures with the EPR design, that so closely mirror the US's failure with the AP1000 design in the past decade?

By focusing on culture war, we miss a bigger story: perhaps nuclear construction is not compatible with modern economies? And perhaps it never was a great fit, according to this quote from the article?

> At first, nuclear energy was too expensive and so less attractive to utilities. But once General Electric and Westinghouse spurred the indus­try onward by becoming loss leaders (they collectively lost around $1 billion building plants) the race was on.18 A herd mentality soon devel­oped as utilities lined up to take advantage of government benefits to build new reactors. So many orders came in that “[w]ith only two companies building plants, a rapid increase in orders escalated costs for major components and strained the limited supply of qualified labor.”19

[SECProto]

> What sort of culture war or regulatory arguments could be made to explain France's failures with the EPR design, that so closely mirror the US's failure with the AP1000 design in the past decade?

Nuclear plants are massive, complex, tightly regulated capital projects. These require strong project management capacity. Most Western democracies have spent decades systematically outsourcing project management to various consultants (who are great for reducing cost on small projects with short timelines, but not good for major projects with a lot of schedule and budget uncertainty). Couple that with the fact that the US and France haven't built a nuclear plant in decades (France started two in the 1984-2007 gap), causing the loss of most institutional knowledge. I think these are the root cause of price and schedule escalations.

Same problems have caused cost and schedule escalations in the Site C dam and the Lower Churchill hydro project in Canada. High speed rail in California has similar issues. Similar causes have affected the Berlin airport, and the Stuttgart railway station reconstruction.

[nor-and-or-not]

> Stuttgart railway station reconstruction

I lived there for some time so I know a lot of details about this; and I have to disagree with your statement.

This wasn't a lack of knowledge - quite the contrary. "Stuttgart 21" (the core in Stuttgart itself, not the smaller sub-projects in the surroundings) is nothing more than a prestige project and most of the local politicians and a lot of the business folks wanted it, e.g. to have some new area for buildings and to have something special in Stuttgart to attract people, tourists, plus more advertising for the city.

But they ignored _all_ warnings about the unsuitable rock layers for an underground rail station, the shortcomings of the rescue system in the tunnels itself, the too steep slope of the platforms, the decreased amount of trains, the accessibility problems, the water problems, and so on - which all became clear in very early discussions, as some folks (including railway enthusiasts, as well as scientists such as structural engineers and geologists) formed a small club against the project and also did a lot of lectures to inform the public. This all was years before it even was announced widely.

Later all of these warnings came to be true, hence the multiple cost explosions.

[epistasis]

I agree, and think that this is one of the primary causes of nuclear failing.

Advanced economies have higher labor costs, but far lower manufacturing costs. Nuclear construction requires massive amounts of highly skilled labor, not only because of the miles upon miles of piping that require super-high precision welding that will last in extreme conditions for decades but even down to things like concrete pours.

My hypothesis on nuclear is that it only makes sense for a very very narrow window of economic advancement, where labor costs are still low, but there is still enough technological capacity to design and build a hugely complex beast of a project. But I don't have any numbers to back my hunch yet...

[jwie]

The US Navy has been training 20 year old kids to operate the things for almost 70 years. I was one of them. Westinghouse and GE build and refuel, and decommission the existing nuclear reactors in the fleet today.

It’s hard work, but we have the knowledge and workers to run these things and build them today. We still build nuclear reactors in the states, they’re just on submarines and aircraft carriers.

There’s a lack of political will to devote MIC dollars to power production, but it’s not like nobody knows how to do it.

[epistasis]

Military reactors are different from civilian reactors in at least two ways: 1) military fuel would not be allowed in civilian hands, and 2) military reactors have essentially an infinite budget, and have few economic constraints.

The challenges of using military reactors in other settings go far beyond questions of "political will"

[tomatotomato37]

I've also heard anecdotal accounts that military reactors are still maintenance nightmares, and their lack of public nuclear accidents is less due to doctrine and more to the fact that these reactors spend their life in a classified military environment floating in international water; AKA easy to cover up

[jwie]

The lack of accidents is due to a lack of accidents. Part of it is training, part of it safety interlocks. There are near misses but nothing that would really scare anyone who knew how these things work.

The Russian reactors on the other hand… let’s just say a lot of those guys die of cancer.

They aren’t maintenance nightmares for technical reasons. More for regulatory reasons. Still, they always manage to get underway on time.

[jwie]

The unlimited budget and the fuel comes from political will so I don’t understand your point.

[epistasis]

The economic concerns and weapons concerns may have political aspects, but the bigger part are the material differences.

Usually when people say "political will" it's about making a choice without serious other constraints. There are incredible constraints on pricing and danger that go beyond politics when it comes to military style reactors.

[alerighi]

Nuclear energy may seem expensive, because it has a big initial cost to get started, and we tend not to factor the long term effects of what we do. What is the cost of using fossil fuels? What is the cost and the damage done by climate change? An amount of money that we can't even quantify. So sure, burning coal/oil/gas may be cheap now, but it has an enormous long term cost that we just now are starting to pay.

[epistasis]

Fossil fuels are not on the table, IMHO, so there's no point in comparing to them at all.

Sure, nuclear is CapEx heavy, with low OpEx. But storage and wind and solar have lower CapEx and OpEx. And they also scale much better, and are falling in cost, so when they need to be replaced, they will be replaced at even lower costs than their initial builds. And investing in the technology now only drives down future costs even more.

We have ~100 nuclear reactors in the US, and they are reaching their end of life. If we could start building 10 replacement reactors tomorrow, and we can't, because we don't have a design or the labor force or the supply chains or the EPC capability, we could maybe hold on to about 2% of future electricity in the US as nuclear. And those 10 reactors would take 10-15 years to complete, even if we had the proper economic requisites.

None of the advocates for nuclear seem to ever run the numbers on what it would take to actually build nuclear. They don't model the needs of the grid, they don't look at where nuclear has failed during construction and do a root cause analysis, they don't try to change specific regulations, they don't try to figure out what could actually make nuclear work in the US. Instead we get vague wishes and hand waving, and we are missing any of the hustle that would be required to actually make positive change in the world.

And I have a feeling that the reason for this lack of practical attention to detail, and this lack of this entrepreneurial hustle, if because when you start paying attention to details and the maze of action needed to get nuclear built, nuclear is not compelling compared to the alternatives.

[alerighi]

> Fossil fuels are not on the table, IMHO, so there's no point in comparing to them at all.

There is the point: fossil fuels are the only alternative to nuclear.

Renewable energy has their problem, and the problem is that not all country are like the US, i.e. a lot of space that is unused and can be used to put solar panels, wind turbines, or make dams, without anyone complaining. If you look at the European territory, it's mostly used, there is not a square centimeter of land unused. This is a problem.

Another problem of renewable energy is storage. How do you store all that amount of power to use it when the renewable energy production (that is depended on the weather that you can't control) is not available? It's a big deal. And you will likely always need fossil fuel power station ready to operate in case of necessity.

> We have ~100 nuclear reactors in the US, and they are reaching their end of life. If we could start building 10 replacement reactors tomorrow, and we can't, because we don't have a design or the labor force or the supply chains or the EPC capability, we could maybe hold on to about 2% of future electricity in the US as nuclear. And those 10 reactors would take 10-15 years to complete, even if we had the proper economic requisites.

I don't know if you are up to date, but we have also a semiconductor shortage. Guess what solar panel are made of? Semiconductors. How do you even imagine getting the material to produce all that panels in a short time? Not only that, but solar panel alone don't do anything, since they produce DC power: you also need inverters, that are other piece of electronics. Again an enormous quantity of electronic that this day is not available. And do you talk about storage, do you think that getting lithium is much simpler? And in the context of a probable (if not already in progress) commercial war with China, where do you produce them? How many years do you take to open up a plant to make semiconductors in the US or Europe? And where do you even get the raw material?

Yes, a nuclear reactor take a lot of materials to build, but with a few reactors you can make all the energy that you need. That is overall the materials that you need to produce the same amount of power are order of magnitude lower. Also, a nuclear reactor has a greater life expectancy than other renewable sources (except hydroelectric).

[epistasis]

> There is the point: fossil fuels are the only alternative to nuclear.

According to whom? I don't know if any carbon free grid models that say nuclear is absolutely necessary. There are some models that show that it may be cheaper to have 10%-20% nuclear generation along with other renewable generation, but I'm not sure if they have updated their models for a word where we don't have any constructible nuclear designs in the US, or accounted for current nuclear costs.

As far as shortages: 1) the current semiconductor shortage is a chip fab shortage, the semiconductor process for solar only shares the input of silicon.

That's not to say that there aren't supply chains issues, but the solar PV market is orders of magnitude larger than nuclear production capacity, and growing exponentially. The cure for high commodity prices is high commodity prices, and the solar PV history is a history of overcoming shortages and using ever less materials to relentlessly reduce costs.

And as far as "materials" that's only part of the cost of any product, there's also labor, and also different materials have vastly different costs.

So instead of being concerned about "materials" we should be concerned with costs. And that's where nuclear has not shown any ability to compete, any ability to learn and reduce costs, or really any ability to behave like a proper and good technology. Nuclear gets more expensive the more advanced an economy we have, which is not a tech that we want to continue to use.

[qqqwerty]

This isn't about nuclear vs coal. It is about nuclear vs renewables. And what it really comes down to is that nuclear is really expensive and takes way too long to build. For every nuclear plant you build, we can build the exact same generation capabilities for about half the cost and it can be built in a quarter of the time[1]. That means that the renewable solution will have already mostly paid for itself before the nuclear plant delivers its first electron.

I am 100% in support of nuclear where it make sense. But there has been this weird strain of FUD being spread around painting renewable advocates as some sort of crazed anti-nuclear zealots. Some of this is coming from pro oil and gas groups looking to spread uncertainty and doubt to disrupt decarbonization efforts. But it is also getting picked up by a certain subset of "contrarians" that think they know better than everybody else, but are clearly not doing their research.

[1]https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/08/05/youve-got-30-billion-...

[eric-hu]

From the article you quoted:

> In order to replace the two nuclear plants while the sun is down, the batteries would need to replicate two 1.117 GW power sources for 16 hours. The total energy storage capacity would be 39.3 GWh, after we add an extra 10% for safe measure.

Sorry, but no. This is a brittle system proposed. A 16 hour battery backup doesn't account for bad weather events like hurricanes, let alone more severe ones like the Texas power crisis.

Take a look at this diagram of power production during said Texas power crisis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis#/media...

Compare the area of the solar curve at the start and end of this 11 day window to what it is in the middle. There's a huge difference between how much solar was produced between good days and bad.

Now look at the nuclear production for this same time and tell me these two can be used equally well for base load power production.

[epistasis]

A major cause of Texas's power outage was nuclear tripping off.

Meanwhile, massive amounts of batteries are far less brittle than the single point of failure like a nuclear reactor. Same with solar. It's the difference between building one massive mainframe and having a data center. In the data center you plan for failure, plan for individual nodes to go down, and the whole system becomes incredibly reliable because of the elimination of SPOF.

Solar and batteries distributed over a wide geographic area work fantastically, and this is a primary way that Texans will plan for their own energy security in the future, when they don't want to use fossil fuel based generators.

[eric-hu]

I request a citation that it was a major cause of Texas' power outage, because looking at this graph, there is a step-down in nuclear generation on Feb 15th from 5 to 4 gw, but that's smaller than the step-downs in natural gas (-15 gw), coal (-5 gw) and wind (-5 gw).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis#/media...

[epistasis]

I believe those numbers are correct. Perhaps "major" is a subjective position, but an unexpected drop of 20% is quite major, IMHO.

Whereas wind was expected to drop in output, because wind is intermittent, and any primarily renewables based grid will have large overages of generation capacity to account for that. (Just as we currently have large overages in capacity for traditional generators).

[qqqwerty]

As expected, the pro-nuclear comment is cherry-picking the details of the argument to make a poor attempt at a rebuttal. Did you miss the part where the proposed system was almost half the cost of the nuclear plant? That leaves quite a bit of money left over to address the long tail risks. A few nat gas peaker plants that rarely if ever get run could be more than sufficient. Maybe include a carbon capture system if you are so inclined. I am more than happy to entertain counter arguments, but please make a more comprehensive evaluation of the original argument before responding.

Nuclear is crazy expensive. Our current renewable technologies, at current prices are capable of providing solutions that in aggregate largely deliver the generation profile of what nuclear can provide at a cheaper cost. This is true for most regions of the world with the exception of the extreme latitudes. And renewables for the most part are continuing to get cheaper, whereas nuclear for the most part has only gotten more expensive. Also, the renewable solution, by incorporating multiple technologies will have greater reliability than the single point of failure that is the nuclear solution. And the renewable solutions can be built out in a few years, very likely paying for themselves before the nuclear solution is even producing its first electron. This is an issue that the pro-nuclear likes to ignore entirely because it is so damning. If you were a free market energy investor, would you rather invest in a capital project that pays for itself in 7-8 years, or a project that doesn't even start making revenue until 10+ years down the road, and has enormous amounts of uncertainty around ongoing maintenance costs to the point where it is not even certain the project would produce enough revenue to offset those? There is a reason renewable projects are getting built left and right, and nuclear projects are few and far between. It is because investors and project developers are running the numbers, and they know which technologies will make them money and which ones won't.

These are all essentially facts. They should be your starting point when attempting to make a pro-nuclear argument. If you fail to address these facts in your counter argument, you will not be taken seriously.

The main problem right now, is that when an energy developer goes to build a project, they are not seeking to build a robust renewable solution that mimics the generation profile of a nuclear plant, they are incentivized to build for the thinnest slice of the generation market as possible to keep costs down. There is some movement in the direction of these more robust renewable projects, we are starting to see more and more solar and wind projects with on-site storage for example. But what we really need is utilities and their regulators to step up and start shaping the energy market to incentivize these more robust renewable packages. Until then we will continue to see incidents like the Texas outage. And FWIW, nuclear will need a fairly large helping hand from those same regulators as well if it is to every be viable, so the need for regulatory changes isn't unique to renewables.

[thayne]

But part of the point of the article is that nuclear is unnecessarily expensive. And I would guess if we had put as many resources into R&D for nuclear fission as we had into wind and solar, nuclear would be a lot more economical today.

[happymellon]

Nuclear has had many decades of research.

[thayne]

> But there has been this weird strain of FUD being spread around painting renewable advocates as some sort of crazed anti-nuclear zealots

It's certainly not true of all renewable advocates, but such anti-nuclear zealots do exist, and cause resistance to nuclear. Although I don't think environmentalists and renewables advocares are the only source of resistance, and cold war fear of all things nuclear/atomic/radioactive also shares some blame.

[alerighi]

> And what it really comes down to is that nuclear is really expensive and takes way too long to build.

Also other form of renewable are expensive. Unfortunately we are not so good at doing calculation on large scale. Just because installing a few solar panels is cheap, it doesn't mean that if we start installing a lot of them will maintain the same price.

Especially these days there is a shortage (they said due to COVID, but it's obvious that we are in a commercial war with China) of electronic components and semiconductors, guess what solar panels are made of? Where do you produce them, of course you can't rely on importing them from China, because China in a couple of years will not sell you anything, but if you start producing them in the US good luck making them cheap. And where do you even get the raw materials to start with?

Sure, a nuclear reactor does use a lot of materials, but are mostly steel and concrete, something that is produced in every industrialized country.

Do we even talk about energy storage? How do we realize that? Batteries? Lithium ones, good luck finding them at a cheap price.

Overall nuclear power is cheap, is just that we focus on the initial price that is obviously high and don't think that all the cost of transitioning to renewable energy added up are even higher. I don't say that a private investor will ever construct a nuclear power plant, the upfront cost is too high, but it's something that a government should build.

[makeitdouble]

Nuclear energy stays a bad fit when you factor in that it needs to combine:

- sustained political will and capital

- high morale (contractors and controllers need to not collude to hide flaws/cut corners/inflate prices)

- excelent design and on par execution

- excelent risk assesment and long term vision

- stable geopolitical situation

No country currently has a combination of all the above, all the nuclear plants we build are basically a failure waiting to happen. e.g. France has a set of plants that should have been decommissioned and replaced long ago, yet it didn’t due to the first point. Japan hit the second and fourth point. We’re seeing Ukraine hit by the last. The US could be the only country that fails at less than half the point.

[bobthepanda]

It fails at less than half the points? I’ll give you geopolitcal stability, but all the other things suck too.

[pyuser583]

The US has all of those things for nuclear submarines.

[makeitdouble]

That model works because there is no question of scale or mass production, no external client, not enough civilians involved to put a strong political aspect on it, so virtually no external pressure to do anything about it.

Basically we’d need volunteer based self-sustained communities living in the middle of nowhere to replicate that in a non military setting.

[pyuser583]

The US nuclear naval fleet isn’t a set of islands. The fuel must be mined and delivered.

The nuclear reactor have to be maintained and kept in dry dock, sometimes for years on end.

Nobody is afraid of aircraft carriers, even though they are powered by nuclear reactors.

[bobthepanda]

There aren’t that many naval submarine bases, and they’re not particularly close to most of the population.

Unfortunately, nuclear reactors need transmission lines to population centers, and we can’t just concentrate reactors into less than a dozen massive stations for the entire country.

[Gwypaas]

The alternative is not fossil fuels, that's arguing a strawman, it is renewables.

[alerighi]

Good. Are you willing to renounce to your current lifestyle? Because renewable energy alone can't, even considering the most optimistic prediction, and even ignoring costs and production scale problem, substitute fossil fuels. That means that we need to reduce the amount of energy that we use, if we don't want to substitute fossil fuel with nuclear, so are you willing to do so?

I think that nuclear is the best compromise, the argument that it costs a lot of money, it doesn't make sense, I live in Europe and we are losing billions of euros each day, most of energy intensive companies have shut down, they are not producing, because energy cost is 10 times higher than usual, there are companies that got millions euros energy bill, they go bankrupt. Now how many nuclear reactors would you have built with this amount of money that is lost every day?

Now let's talk about renewable energy, the same renewable energy that in 50 years that we talk about didn't do mostly anything to reduce the dependency from Russian gas. To the point that the inevitable happened, the thing that everyone knew will someday happen but didn't want to admit that there was that possibility...

[epistasis]

A future of renewables means a future of energy abundance, of electricity far far cheaper than it is today.

A future with nuclear means extremely pricy electricity. Now, as California shows, high electricity prices don't spell doom for the economy, it means that people simply use electricity far more effectively. So if we had the logistical capability to build expensive nuclear, it wouldn't spell the end of our lifestyles, but it would be a bit harder and require that we shift around a bit how we do it.

[strawhatguy]

Something has to cover renewable’s shortfalls when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.

In Texas and Germany now, it has shown that over reliance on them have led to more instability in the grid, leading to higher fossil fuels use.

Basically you can’t really have renewables without nuclear to back it. They’re a package deal. I don’t know where this renewable purity comes from, but it’s not helpful.

[Gwypaas]

> B. Dealing With Variability and Stability

> Much of the resistance towards 100% RE systems in the literature seems to come from the a-priori assumption that an energy system based on solar and wind is impossible since these energy sources are variable. Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own storage. This is the key point made in some already mentioned reactions, such as those by Clack et al. [225], Trainer [226], Heard et al. [227] Jenkins et al. [228], and Caldeira et al. [275], [276]. However, while it is true that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [172], e.g. smart electric vehicles charging using delayed charging or delivering energy back to the electricity grid via vehicle-to-grid [181], [280]–[282]; storage [40]–[43], [46], [83], [140], [142], such as stationary batteries; sector coupling [16], [39], [90]–[92], [97], [132], [216], e.g. optimizing the interaction between electricity, heat, transport, and industry; power-to-X [39], [106], [134], [176], e.g. producing hydrogen at moments when there is abundant energy; et cetera. Using all these strategies effectively to mitigate variability is where much of the cutting-edge development of 100% RE scenarios takes place.

> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive. Variability, especially short term, has many mitigation options, and energy system studies are increasingly capturing these in their 100% RE scenarios.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910

[kemiller]

It’s not a straw man, it’s the whole point, and no one is saying not to push as hard as possible on renewables too. Porque no los dos? The best part of nuclear is that it slots in for coal as base load with no other changes. If we can do that until solar+wind+storage catch up we can get to net zero faster.

[pfdietz]

"Nuclear" and "faster" don't belong in the same sentence. Renewables can be brought online, and start displacing CO2 emissions, far faster than nuclear can. Any expenditure on new nuclear is a move away from the optimal path to reducing CO2 emission.

[kemiller]

Renewable sources, yes. But not storage, and it’s that base load where nuclear can help.

[pfdietz]

Storage can be brought on very quickly as well. And more importantly, we don't need storage for renewables to displace CO2 right now.

[BurningFrog]

As long as we have fossil fuel power plants, adding nuclear plants makes it possible to close them.

That makes them alternatives!

[nullc]

We need to stop looking at coal/gas, etc. as fuel. They're not. They are part of an atmosphere/carbon-sink battery.

When we get energy from carbon emitting sources we're discharging the atmosphere/carbon-sink battery. Eventually we're going to have to charge it again, and to do so it will take substantially more energy than we got from discharging it.

Beyond CO2, coal in particular produces a large amount of radioactive and particulate atmospheric pollution. We expect nuclear to capture most of its externalities but we ignore those of most other ways we obtain energy.

[Krasnol]

Yes we don't factor the long term effects because we don't know what might happen in a thousand years when some madman digs out our nuclear waste to do some madman stuff for example.

This is not about nuclear vs. fossil. Both are from the past. It is nuclear vs. fast improving and cheap technologies around renewable energy sources. It loses that battle and will keep on losing it because everything around renewables is getting better and cheaper while everything around nuclear is getting more and more expensive and takes much longer than expected.

It's time to face the future.

[conviencefee999]

You know that we can launch nuclear waste into space right? The thing that's infinitely large. As for renewables the issue is scale and renewables have limitations that investments in fusion and existing fission do not.

[Krasnol]

> You know that we can launch nuclear waste into space right?

Sure we can. That's why it's so popular eh?

> As for renewables the issue is scale and renewables have limitations

What "scale" is supposed to be the problem there? https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/wind-power-in-europe-...

And yeah...investment into fusion is limitless. The results however are quite disappointing. Meanwhile investments into renewables actually do something. They produce actual products which actually produce energy. In the real world. And they even get better. Imagine that.

[_hypx]

Fundamentally, nuclear needs to be subsidized, just like other green energy projects.

[frozencell]

> What sort of culture war or regulatory arguments could be made to explain France's failures with the EPR design, that so closely mirror the US's failure with the AP1000 design in the past decade?

There is no scientific failure but economic war by the US; on people, parties, presidents.

- https://cyprus-mail.com/2015/06/24/us-agency-spied-on-french... - The CIA files on France 1981-2010: In the secret of the presidents - https://www.amazon.com/Dans-Secret-Presidents-Dossiers-1981-... - CIA files on France 1958-1981 - https://livre.fnac.com/a2917645/Vincent-Nouzille-Les-dossier...

[thayne]

I think blaming it on a single cause is naive. The culture war is probably one of several contributing factors. And it synergized with other problems. For example resistance to nuclear results in stricter regulation, which results in higher costs.