These cost overruns are largely caused by the excessive regulations imposed by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Even very minor changes to the design have to go through an extremely costly and time-consuming amendment process. In contrast, the NRC can decide whenever they want to change their mind about an already approved design, even after millions of dollars and years of time invested. That's why, until now, no nuclear reactor had ever gone from initial design to starting operations, all under the authority of the NRC (since 1974 when it was established).
South Korea also had a scandal with faked documents. If that is what is needed to build profitable nuclear then we might as well let the nuclear industry continue its self inflicted slow death.
> In November 2012 it was discovered that over 5,000 small components used in five reactors at Yeonggwang Nuclear Power Plant had not been properly certified; eight suppliers had faked 60 warranties for the parts. Two reactors were shut down for component replacement, which was likely to cause power shortages in South Korea during the winter.[25] Reuters reported this as South Korea's worst nuclear crisis, highlighting a lack of transparency on nuclear safety and the dual roles of South Korea's nuclear regulators on supervision and promotion.[26] This incident followed the prosecution of five senior engineers for the coverup of a serious loss of power and cooling incident at Kori Nuclear Power Plant, which was subsequently graded at INES level 2.[25][27]
> In 2013, there was a scandal involving the use of counterfeit parts in nuclear plants and faked quality assurance certificates. In June 2013 Kori 2 and Shin Wolsong 1 were shut down, and Kori 1 and Shin Wolsong 2 ordered to remain offline, until safety-related control cabling with forged safety certificates is replaced.[28] Control cabling in the first APR-1400s under construction had to be replaced delaying construction by up to a year.[29] In October 2013 about 100 people were indicted for falsifying safety documents, including a former chief executive of Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power and a vice-president of Korea Electric Power Corporation.[30]
It truly is amazing that the entire world is in cahoots in a conspiracy against the nuclear industry. At the same time huge on-shore, off-shore and solar PV projects gets built on budget to little fanfare displacing existing fossil and nuclear production.
So ... WHY are there so many regulations and safety procedures? Is this political fluff? Pure overhead? I don't think so. It is inherent to the nature of a solid fuel rod reactor, the incidence (and fear) of meltdowns, and the fear of nuclear waste.
What is a nuclear meltdown. In solid fuel reactors a nuclear chain reaction is induced, so an atom of nuclear fuel splits from an incoming neutron, and in the process releases more-than-one neutron which then can trigger more fission events in nearby atoms. Of course you don't want all the fuel chain reacting in a geometrically expanding rate. That's a runaway reaction.
If intended, it can be a bomb. In a power reactor, a runaway reaction heats the solid fuel to such a degree that it melts anything around it, and gravity pulls it downward and it melts its way through ... anything. Eventually you hope the solid fuel expends enough of the fuel that it stops doing this, but by then the reactor is ruined and the national news cycle has hit.
So how does a solid fuel reactor stop runaway chain reactors? Moderator rods/systems and cooling. Perhaps you've seen some cartoon anime of an overloading reactor where the operators desperately inject rods into something. That is a moderator rod, trying to absorb and reduce the number of neutrons flying around and slow down the reaction. And there is good old cooling too.
But, like Fukushima showed, control systems are vulnerable to failure. Think you've designed enough failsafes? Nature will hit you with a bigger tsunami or a bigger hurricane or a bigger earthquake. Or.... humans over time will get lazy.
Solid fuel produces waste. As solid fuel is used, and the atoms either split in fission reactions, or absorb neutrons transmuting to other elements (some with bad half-lifes, more aggressive gamma emissions, etc). YOU CAN'T REMOVE THIS WASTE while the fuel is being used. So once enough of the solid fuel rod is used, it won't sustain a fission reaction anymore, it is then full of a ton of waste and crap.
So you have to transport it either to Yucca for long term storage, or maybe you truck it to someplace that will "reprocess it".
So solid fuel, NO MATTER WHAT, will involve active control systems and waste transport.
This is what the public is afraid of, and what nuclear meltdowns have shown can happen.
Thus every design needs to be carefully reviewed, approved, reapproved, and since there are so many actively managed safety systems with the threat of horrid meltdown, procedures and inspections and the like.
Well, what if there was a nuclear reactor design that:
1) CANNOT MELT DOWN (no disasterous runaway scenarios)
2) uses all its fuel (no waste)
So no transport of evil radioactive waste or dirty bomb material through your neighborhoods. No explosions (Chernobyl) or permanently hot cordoned off slag heaps of steel and concrete (Fukushima). No Yucca mountain.
Here's more advantages:
- scalable to small sizes, so no massive behemoth concrete towers and the like.
- doesn't even use uranium (and a rare isotope of uranium at that), it can breed fuel from thorium which is much more stable and non-radioactive.
- proliferation resistance aka can't make bombs from it (allegedly)
- possibly can "burn" nuclear waste from solid fuel reactors
It is a Molten Salt Reactor, or Liquid Fluorine Thorium Reactor. The fuel is liquid. There is a lot of stuff on the internet about it from enthusiasts. You can actively reprocess the fuel as the reactor is generating power (because you pipe it out). Because it is a breeder reactor, you can breed transuranic waste with neutrons into usable isotopes. You can extract "fission products" (the non-fissile elements resulting from atom splits or radioactive decay) from the liquid using chemical processing. In the process of "online processing" the liquid fuel, you constantly pipe the usable part back to the reactor. So the reactor uses ALL the fuel.
The liquid nature of the fuel expands and contracts with the heat of the liquid, reducing criticality. IF you get overheated, a "plug" melts that drains the liquid fuel into a cooling pan that separates the liquid into a state where it is non-critical (won't sustain a chain reaction). IF the containment reactor "sprang a leak",well, the liquid would spill into a shape that was non-critical. It can't melt down. Even if every safety system fails, it can't melt down.
The problem is a commercial design doesn't exist. At some point in the early 1970s the development was axed by the Nixon Administration (and political backstabbing if you listen to the proponents) in favor of solid fuel rod reactors.
The ENTIRE nuclear power industry is built around solid fuel. Its all they can conceive of. But as I described, solid fuel is fatally flawed from a political perspective. Large scale solid fuel reactors will never be on time and under budget in the USA.
China is actively working on LFTR/MSR/liquid fuel reactors. Coincidentally (not) there are several research reactors appearing in some US research universities and national labs. And LFTR/MSR has some real challenges in materials engineering (molten salts are hard), and of course the liquid fuel reprocessing is complicated, not as hand-wavy as I may have made it seem.
But IMO the fundamental advantages of the approach are the only known viable path to a nuclear reactor that is economical and politically palatable in the USA. A fundamentally safe practically waste-free reactor.
The you wouldn't need so many white gloves, inspectors, etc. Scalability means you can build them in a factory, and if one of 20-100 reactors fail (can't melt down, remember), well, you drain the (liquid, remember) fuel and cart it away and replace it with a new one and pipe the fuel back into the new one.
Now to emphasize THERE ISN'T A VIABLE COMMERCIAL DESIGN YET. Maybe it's impossible. And the vast majority of the nuclear industry (solid rod reprocessing, waste transport, reactor vendors) doesn't even want a liquid reactor, because they can't profit off of it. They have no interest in its development because it is a massive risk, they are desperately trying to eke a profit out of current nuclear plants, which are fundamentally noncompetitive on LCOE economics. Really, the government has to do it.
There has been more near misses in the nuclear industry than tsunamis. After Fukushima about all plants in the west had to install independent core cooling because the regulators realized the risk was systemic, even though the cause was special in the case of Fukushima.
A nuclear reactor in Sweden had a severe incident in 2006 when many of the "defense in depth" layers had been accidentally removed through freak occurrences and upgrades.
Do you think blaming "organizational incompetence" as a one-off is going to relieve constant review and regulation?
*You're arguing against the wrong point.*
Organizational incompetence is an every GREATER inevitability than a tsunami, earthquake, meteor strike, tornado, hurricane, or terrorist attack.
The point is that solid fuel reactors are currently completely fucked from an economic standpoint. They are fundamentally economically noncompetitive. They will hang on until grid storage, geothermal, or (god help us) natural gas turbine + CO2 capture replaces them as grid levelers. No, I don't think pebble bed or other approaches will work.
I love nuclear, it is so cool. I WANT a viable nuclear reactor option, that's competitive and useful. Does it HAVE to be LFTR? No, it's just the only design I see that really addresses all the semi-rational political concerns.
The nuclear lobby does itself no favors, just like you did with your immediate retort. "Death rates are low". "Nobody died from Fukushima". Those are fundamentally losing arguments politically, it will get the nuclear industry nowhere.
Now, as I said, the entire "nuclear lobby" is the "solid fuel legacy nuclear design lobby". They are riding out a loser's hand as long as they can. A switch to a radical new design might as well be the same thing as shutting down every existing nuclear plant. It's the same economic armageddon to them, so they don't care about "nuclear the idea" just "nuclear the profits".
But the dangerous thing is that all the practical nuclear engineering/knowledge that might allow a radical reactor design to succeed won't be around if the nuclear industry just clings to a slowly sinking ship. Everyone will die or retire in a generation, and then nuclear power, the IDEA, has a longer road to viability. Or it may be permanently disabled.
I don't want that. I want the nuclear industry, nuclear lobby, and American research infrastructure to WAKE UP and start really working on economically viable reactors. NOW. I mean, China isn't asleep at the switch.
But I don't see it. I see bullshit astroturfing stories like clockwork here. Which just saddens me.
"Organizational incompetence is an every GREATER inevitability than a tsunami, earthquake, meteor strike, tornado, hurricane, or terrorist attack."
No, that isn't necessarily true. Look at the FAA, which has led to ever greater increases in airline safety, to the point where airline travel in the U.S. is safer than driving a car. Absent the 737 MAX debacle, airline deaths per mile had declined by multiple orders of magnitude since 1980.
SMR technology is being proven a safe and and cost-effective nuclear technology.
Also, the number of deaths from Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukishima are orders of magnitude less than current coal or oil fired electrical generation. I don't see what pint you are seeking to make.
> The point is that solid fuel reactors are currently completely fucked from an economic standpoint. They are fundamentally economically noncompetitive.
If all of this is so "fundamental", then why does South Korea manage to build plants for cheap? And why has France managed to have its entire grid be nuclear-based for many decades? Please explain.
> I want the nuclear industry, nuclear lobby, and American research infrastructure to WAKE UP and start really working on economically viable reactors.
Then we must fix the regulatory incentives. That's how capitalism works: corporations chase profit. So if you want them to innovate, you make innovation the profitable option, instead of adding a mountain of regulation to block anything new.
> It is inherent to the nature of a solid fuel rod reactor, the incidence (and fear) of meltdowns, and the fear of nuclear waste.
So why do these factors not apply to South Korea? Last time I checked, the laws of physics are identical there and here.
> They have no interest in its development because it is a massive risk, they are desperately trying to eke a profit out of current nuclear plants
Everything nuclear is already a massive risk, that the NRC will decide tommorow that they are feeling grumpy so your billion-dollar years-long project is canceled. Of course companies won't assume additional risk on top of that! The only way to survive is to play it as safe as possible.
It ain't carbon-free to build the plants nor to mine and refine the uranium.