[Vanclief]

Where did you get the data that there has never been a profitable one? Not calling you out, but curious of where you are getting this data.

I would expect that there have been multiple nuclear power plants that provide a net positive return, specially on countries like France where 70% of their energy is nuclear.

[Retric]

France lost an incredible amount of money on nuclear through capacity factor issues. The numbers are so bad they don’t want to admit what they are.

However a reasonable argument can be made the public benefited from externalities like lower pollution and subsidized electricity prices even if it was a money pit and much of the benefit was exported to other countries via cheap off peak prices while France was forced to import at peak rates.

[amenhotep]

Regulatory burdens on fission account for negative externalities to an arguably overzealous degree, whereas fossil fuel energy has been until recently allowed to completely ignore them. Doesn't seem like a fair comparison.

[Retric]

Regulatory burdens on fission result from the inherent risks and negative externalities. You’re never going to see huge long term exclusion zones with coal, but nuclear has two of them right now (Ed: Overkill though the current size may be) which also have massive government funded cleanup efforts.

So while regulations may be overkill it’s not arbitrary only hydro is really comparable but hydro also stores water and reduces flood risks most years. Fusion sill had real risks, but there’s no concern around $500+ Billion cleanup efforts.

[pfdietz]

I wonder how bad the property value damage would be from widespread tritium contamination of ground water.

[Retric]

Depends on if anyone uses wells in the area. Probably not that much outside of some sci-fi movie extreme as piping water from in contaminated regions wouldn’t be particularly expensive, but the question is assuming something I’m not sure is possible.

How exactly would you get meaningful widespread tritium contamination of groundwater? IE not just the trace amounts you see from existing nuclear reactors.

Groundwater doesn’t flow quickly from a point source and tritium has a fairly short half-life. 60 years later you might be looking at a larger though still small area, but 97% of the stuff will have decayed and what remains is now diluted and doesn’t bioaccumulate.

It’s not going to concentrate around some site after entering the atmosphere the way heavier than air particulate pollution would.

[pfdietz]

The flow of tritium through a DT reactor is five orders of magnitude higher than tritium production in a fission reactor of the same thermal output. To put a number on it: the tritium produced and consumed in one year by a 1 GW(e) DT power plant would, if released as tritium oxide, contaminate two months of the average flow of the Mississippi River above the legal limit for drinking water.

[jmyeet]

Not a single one of the ~700 nuclear power plants has been built without significant government subsidies [1][2].

Additionally, the industry as a whole is shielded from the liability that would otherwise have bankrupted it multiple times. Notably, the clean up from Fukushima will likely take over 100 years, requires tech not yet invented and will likely cost as much as a trillion dollars [3]. In the US, there is a self-insurance fund paid into by the industry, which would've been exhausted 10-20 times over from a Fukushima level disaster. Plus, Congress severely limits liability from nuclear accidents, both on a per-plant and total basis ie the Price-Anderson Act [4].

Next, it seems like it's the taxpayer who is paying to process and store spent nuclear waste, a problem that will persist for centuries.

Even with all this the levellized-cost-of-energy ("LCOE") of fission power is incredibly expensive and seemingly going up [5].

Some want to reduce costs by using more off-the-shelf tech and replicating it for scale, most notably with small modular reactors ("SMRs") but this actually makes no sense because larger fission reactors are simply more efficient.

[1]: https://theecologist.org/2016/jan/04/after-60-years-nuclear-...

[2]: https://www.ucs.org/resources/nuclear-power-still-not-viable...

[3]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...

[4]: https://www.yuccamountain.org/price_anderson.htm

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

[bpfrh]

Not really in the sense that the owning company has managed to survive without the state stepping in and give them money.

Most reactors are old and in need of repair, most of these earlier than planned afaik.

There is also the bigger issue that some reactors are shut down in the summer because cooling water would leave the reactor so hot that it would be a danger to the animals living in the river.