[eru]

Well, if you want to answer that question, you probably also need to figure out the hypothetical cost of the other power sources minus environmental regulations.

Nuclear would be (and used to be) massively cheaper, before regulations went wild against it.

I'm deliberately saying 'went wild', because the earlier nuclear power generation that was built to saner standards also has turned out to be incredibly safe already.

(Basically, anyone who avoided insane Soviet bullshit had safe nuclear power, as measured in eg fatalities per Joule of electricity generated.)

[bryanlarsen]

The regulatory costs of nuclear are mostly occurred in the design phase. Those costs are sunk and mostly irrelevant for new builds of old designs.

The fact that old designs like the AP1000 are crazy expensive to build has a lot more to do with the fact that the US sucks at building mega projects than anything else.

[fragmede]

Interestingly, one of the reasons the design phase for nuclear is so onerous is the sheer amount of red tape involved due to compliance and other regulatory reasons. You wanna know something funny? You know what's really good at generating piles of convincing sounding bullshit that it's possible no one even actually reads, and looks like it's totally going to insert fuel rods into the nuclear power industry?

LLMs!

[herewulf]

This will definitely make the nuclear industry perceptibly safer. How soon can we start?! /s

[eru]

Nuclear power is arguably way too safe.

[dalyons]

It’s not just the US that sucks at mega projects. It’s everywhere that’s not china.

[bryanlarsen]

Other countries are better at building particular types of mega projects. Some are better at transit, others are better at building tunnels, others are better at building massive ships, et cetera. But in regards to nuclear, I believe you're right.

[pfdietz]

I'm getting the impression the problem isn't any particular regulation, but rather than because regulations exist, the design is fixed.

Getting a design approved means a specific design is approved. So, the power plant must be built as designed, no changes. And apparently ensuring you built exactly what the design specifies is really expensive.

What's needed to reduce this cost is having some way to get a whole cloud of closely related designs approved, so that reasonable deviations from the design are also approved. This is equivalent to saying only the most critical part of the design would need to be built as designed, everything else would be allowed some slop. With something like this, one might (for example) be able to build the confinement building with less tight control on the configuration of the reinforcing steel.

I'm don't know how one would get such a cloud of designs approved. Maybe this is a problem that could be solved by massive computation? Run billions of mutant designs through a simulation gauntlet to see how sensitive it is to various perturbations? Or maybe add more defense in depth, like devices that scrub radioactive elements from steam (such things exist) so the tolerable chance of meltdown can be allowed to increase while keeping expected damage in check?

[ericd]

Sounds kind of like hyperparameter search - you're searching the design space for the bounds of the different parameters. I don't know if parametric design is possible on reactors, but would be neat if possible.

[ericd]

I'm mostly curious if there's any world in which coal beats at-scale solar production, or if it's totally moot. To be clear, I'm not rooting for that so much as looking for an ironclad case against.

Nuclear is a whole can of worms because of its PR problems.

[ViewTrick1002]

The American nuclear industry was collapsing due to spiraling costs before TMI happened.

This ”before regulations” time period seems to be made up on feelings about a rosy picture of the past rather than actual data.

[pfdietz]

It wasn't just spiraling costs, but also the collapse in the steady 7%/year growth in electrical energy demand. Without transparency on demand growth, very long term investments become risky (a risk reflected in the bankruptcy of WPPSS). The passage of PURPA in 1978 also didn't help with this as it allowed a flood of non-utility generation onto the grid, helping soak up what demand growth there was.

[eru]

Yes, regulations started tightening before TMI.

> This ”before regulations” time period seems to be made up on feelings about a rosy picture of the past rather than actual data.

No, we have data about costs in those earlier times, and we know what regulations came in when.

[ViewTrick1002]

Given the cleanup costs of the early nuclear program maybe they learned a thing or two preventing the externalization of costs?

DOE report: Cost to finish cleaning up Hanford site could exceed $589 billion

https://www.ans.org/news/2025-04-17/article-6942/doe-report-...

Sellafield cleanup cost rises to £136bn amid tensions with Treasury

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/23/sellafield-...

[juliankauai]

Except of course, Fukushima. Or any nuclear plant that gets hit by tsunami, earthquake, terrorism,or other natural disaster.

[LarsAlereon]

It looks like the top-end estimate is that the Fukushima disaster may have caused up to 500 additional total lifetime deaths from cancer. Roughly 23,000 people per year died of diseases attributed to coal power plants in the United States alone from 1999-2020.

Edit: Changed "linked to" to "attributed to", because this is the estimated count of people who would not have died of disease if coal power plants were not running.

[pfdietz]

500 deaths at $12M per life is $6B. This is a small fraction of the total cost of Fukushima.

People say LNT overestimates deaths, but what they don't realize is that even if you take LNT at face value the cost of deaths from a nuclear accident isn't really that high. A regulatory regime where reactor operators that have accidents are charged the inferred cost of the expected deaths could work.

[yobbo]

Were there any deaths from the Fukushima nuclear disaster?

A large area was evacuated and "human costs" were great. But as I recall, no deaths from radiation.

[Gibbon1]

People whose metabolic reserve is low often die when you stress them.

I saw a study claiming 440 excess deaths from the Los Angeles fires. I'll make an assumption that permanently moving old and health impaired people from the Fukushima exclusion zone had a similar increase in mortality. And then a bit of looking leads me to this.

"The evacuation itself also was not without severe consequences. The accident was in the winter, and the evacuation of 840 patients or elderly people in nursing homes and health-care facilities apparently resulted in 60 immediate deaths due to hypothermia, dehydration, trauma and deterioration of serious medical conditions (Tanigawa et al 2012) and upwards of 100 deaths in subsequent month"

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0952-4746/33/3/49...

Like the Grapes of Wrath where the family starts out for California and the grandparents both die on the way.

[chairmansteve]

Yes, If there were 20x nuclear power stations, there would probably have been 20x Fukushima scale incidents.

Murphy's law is real...

[eru]

Fatalities per Joule of generated electricity is extremely low for nuclear power, even if you add not just Fukushima but also Chernobyl.

So if you'd scale up, and keep that level of safety, it would be fine. Even less safety would be fine. After all, we accept much less safety in eg natural gas or even solar power. (Solar power is extremely safe once running, but if you look at casualties over the lifecycle, you get a few people falling off roofs when installing residential solar power. It's a very small number, but nuclear is so safe, that the roof-fall incidents of solar are a big number by comparison.)