[Nifty3929]

I haven't seen any data that backs that up based on general principals. Most of the cost is in artificially-imposed operational requirements - however well founded.

Also, remember that nuclear, unlike solar, has a lot of room for improvement still, both in how it's done, and how it's regulated. Solar has already been tremendously optimized, while nuclear has not.

The cost argument seems to be advances by the same people who impose or support the additional operational requirements, and who also just have a philosophical aversion to nuclear power.

There are hundreds of nuclear power plants already in operation, many decades old. There have been only a very small number of minor accidents (3 come to mind: Chernobyl, Three mile island and Fukushima), in which only a few dozen people were killed. Nuclear, even using old technology, has proven to be far safer and better for the environment than any scalable alternative, including solar. New designs are even safer.

[peer2pay]

Calling Chernobyl a minor accident is insane. We are lucky it wasn’t worse but even then most of Europes forests are still polluted from the fallout. People directly killed during the incident is not a great indicator of incident severity when we're talking about environmental pollutants.

Nobody died from installing asbestos insulation yet here we are.

[rsynnott]

> Most of the cost is in artificially-imposed operational requirements

Indeed. Once there was a wonderfully efficient, economical nuclear reactor design, better thermal efficiency than PWRs, could be refueled during operation, considerably cheaper to build… However, nobody is THAT keen to build more Chernobyls.

(The RBMK design really was quite impressive, provided you weren’t too concerned about, well, safety.)

The economics of nuclear energy are difficult, today. So much of the cost is upfront that getting the investment is problematic; unless you have a guaranteed price per kWh, it really is a huge gamble.

[Certhas]

All I see is people with an aversion to solar and wind, that champion nuclear for purely ideological reasons. The aversion seems to be mostly driven by the fact that solar and wind were first championed by eco hippies, and some people seem to find it hard to bear that the eco hippies were right in this case.

Nuclear has had tremendously more cumulative R+D spend than solar and wind. The notion that it's less optimized is absurd. And this is where your bias shows: we have empirically proven persistent scaling laws for solar and batteries. We also have seen nuclear become ever more expensive over time. Yet you claim that these trends will come to an end, and in the case of Nuclear will suddenly completely reverse themselves without any evidence.

To also bemoan the burdensome operational requirements while championing it's safety record is internally inconsistent.

And in the end no one has so far actually built a place where you could store the nuclear waste long term, and the costs of long term storage are not even fully factored into the costs of today's nuclear power plants.

[Nifty3929]

"All I see is people with..." - Maybe some do, but not me. I think solar is great, and wind too. I have solar panels on my roof that cover most of my family's usage. Geo would be awesome, and hydro can be great.

I'm all for doing more, and improving our lot incrementally over time. Let's focus on doing more wherever we can.

Why is nuclear getting more expensive over time? Are we forgetting how to produce it or something? Actually we've been finding more efficient and safer ways to produce nuclear for decades, but we impose - as I said - artificial burdens that make it more expensive, or simply don't allow it at all. At least in the US.

The operational requirements DON'T make it more safe though, they just add cost. Storing nuclear waste is also safe, easy and cheap - if we allow it to be so.

[Certhas]

Seriously, that's good to hear. I really often encounter arguments that seem heavily ideology driven.

Do you have some sources for operational requirements not making things safer? And as far as I know there are plenty of fusion concepts in the lab, but very few that have actually been explored at the full reactor scale. If you have any pointers on recent developments in that direction I would also be curious to take a look.

But then I also have to ask why nuclear? Why not methanation (or hydrogen if storage becomes feasible) and gas power plants or some more sophisticated version of that? That has much better complementarity to solar. And it typically is preferred to nuclear by energy system models wherever seasonality is strong.

Also I haven't really seen any proposals discussing long term waste storage. Again do you have any sources that discuss this?

[AtlasBarfed]

Nuclear has had a century almost to hone its craft.

I'm a lftr fanboy, but nuclear had its time to optimize.

I can't believe you're calling Chernobyl "minor". Go take a vacation there if you disagree.

Anyway, nuclear is not cost competitive in the real world, imo it never will be with solid fuel, nor will it be safe. Certainly not with standards like yours.