[antonvs]

According to https://www.ad.nl/economie/duur-en-gevaarlijk-elke-kerncentr... (translated with Google):

> "The leading German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) in Berlin investigated whether new nuclear power plants can indeed contribute to a clean(er) economy. The answer is negative: all 674 nuclear power plants that were built worldwide between 1951 and 2017 were built with substantial government subsidies. Without such support they would never have come about."

[MostlyStable]

Do those cost estimates include the absolutely insane over-engineering for safety that has been forced on the nuclear power industry and _only_ the nuclear power industry? I'd be shocked if a single other power generation method didn't double in price if it was forced to meet the same standards as nuclear. I guarantee you that the coal plants in Germany are killing more people every year than every single one of their Nuclear plants has combined over it's lifetime. And likely more than every single nuclear plant on the planet with the possible exception of Chernobyl

To be clear, I'm not saying there should be no regulations, and that just anyone should be able to build any kind of reactor they want anywhere they want with no concerns for safety etc. But I do _very much think_ that when you are considering a technology that increases safety and also increases cost, you have to consider what the alternatives are. Are _they_ safer than whatever the current thing is? If you force it to be more expensive and more safe, are you going to get less of it and instead get the other, cheaper, more dangerous thing?

That calculation has never been done (in the US at least) and the result is thousands to millions dead over the past 80ish years a result of continuing to burn coal instead of nuclear.

The US nuclear safety regime (which is what makes it so expensive and so impractical) has no concept of tradeoffs. It imagines a hypothetical perfect power generation that never kills anyone to which nuclear should be held. That standard is ridiculous now and was ridiculous 50 years ago when nuclear was _already safer than coal_.

[antonvs]

The comparison being discussed in the article I linked is with clean energy alternatives. In that respect, nuclear does need significantly more safety measures than wind or solar, for example.

The problem with nuclear is that it's much more difficult to regulate effectively than most other industries, because the consequences of mistakes can be so much higher. E.g. Chernobyl contaminated food throughout much of Europe for months. The natural organizational reaction in that situation is to overcompensate.

Nuclear is likely to always be expensive for that reason, because you're never going to get economy of scale as long as companies can't e.g. mass produce nuclear plants and set them up all over the place. I also generally agree with the other reply to your comment by three14.

I consider this to be a pragmatic observation, not a judgment on whether nuclear might make sense in some hypothetical perfectly rational world.

[cycomanic]

The argument that the nuclear power industry suffers from "insane" over-engineering for safety and that this is the reason for the cost is brought up again and again, except there is no real evidence for this.

In fact it's easy to see that a large proportion of a the construction cost is the same as any other (e.g. gas, coal) thermal power plant, because they all need the same steam turbine. Now nuclear power plants have additional costs, also due to safety (and I would argue that we should expect that, a nuclear power plant has more challenges to a coal plant).

Moreover if you look at the cost increases for nuclear power plant projects, they are pretty much inline with the cost increases we have seen for most large infrastructure projects. They all have become significantly more expensive (recently build coal plant also went significantly over budget). Even the world nuclear forum says (https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...): > Nuclear power plant construction is typical of large infrastructure projects around the world, whose costs and delivery challenges tend to be under-estimated.

The reality is that nuclear power is just not cost-competitive (see also this analysis somebody else (in a counter solar argument) posted https://www.lazard.com/media/typdgxmm/lazards-lcoeplus-april...). Especially considering that renewables are on an exponential curve and nuclear is not (and doesn't show any indication of how to get onto one). Because so much of the cost (and energy) is in the construction of a nuclear power plant, it is actually counter-productive to invest into nuclear power plants, because we will increase CO2 compared to an investment into renewables.

[three14]

Not to pick on you, but every time this discussion happens on HN, someone argues that the nuclear power industry is burdened by far more red tape than other industries (probably true) and that if we simply reduce the red tape, we could profitably build new nuclear plants (probably true) and they would still be safe (probably not true). This isn't an engineering problem. This is a social problem. Suppose you offer to let people build with minimal regulation - the most profitable plants are going to be the ones that cut the most corners on safety. The great engineering team that made a safe but slightly more expensive reactor than the minimum allowed by regulation will be out of the market.

And unsafe nuclear is really unsafe in a politically terrible way. You are doomed to either have Chernobyls or a lot of non-optimal regulation, or excellent regulation in the world of spherical cows and frictionless planes.

Perhaps one of the new nuclear startups can find a solution to this, but it'll have to be by finding a way to mass produce nuclear within the existing heavy red tape regime. And in the real world, that's not a bad thing.

[robertlagrant]

> And in the real world, that's not a bad thing

It is a bad thing if the increased cost / pollution kills more people either directly or indirectly.

[three14]

My argument is that is not the choice we are given. We are given only the choice between too much regulation and too little.

[fsflover]

> and they would still be safe (probably not true)

Why do you think it's not true? Just look at the existing statistics that includes old designs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_plant#/media/Fil...

[three14]

I am sure that new designs would be better on paper. I am also sure that a regulatory regime in which nuclear plants are allowed to be exactly as unsafe as fossil fuel power plants would somehow turn out in the real world of money and politics to actually be worse than fossil fuel plants.

I don't think we as humans know how to create a regulatory structure for nuclear that would keep away people who are willing to sacrifice principles for money, and at the same time allows new designs to easily be built.

[thatguy0900]

Of all the things the government can and does subsidize, cheap electricity seems like a pretty good one, especially if it's clean. I suppose that does lead to sillyness like bitcoin farms though.

[antonvs]

It's not an argument against government subsidies, it's just looking at the economic viability of nuclear power relative to other options.

[Keyframe]

Right. Does it account for positive / negative economic impact of (lack of) pollution?

[antonvs]

The goal, alluded to in the quote I provided, is to compare it to cleaner alternatives.

The article I linked ends as follows:

> "For all these reasons, nuclear energy, even though nuclear power is emission-free, is not a relevant solution for profitable, climate-friendly and sustainable energy in the future." According to the researchers, nuclear energy as a solution for climate protection is "an old narrative that is still as inaccurate as in the 1970s."

[fsflover]

> whether new nuclear power plants can indeed contribute to a clean(er) economy

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26673987

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26603464

[mattnewton]

I mean, how do you even compare that to the “subsidy” that petroleum gets from western foreign policy?

[Krasnol]

Why would you?

It's not about subsidies for nuclear vs. fossil.

It's about nuclear vs. renewables, and renewables look like a much better investment these days (and years) considering the budget explosions of recent nuclear projects.