[vablings]

Nuclear is insane levels of expensive likely due to overregulation.

It is important for base load power and overnight power and should always be the backing of the grid frequency. Total loss of grid frequency is much more difficult to recover from with synthetic inertia.

A healthy grid should have all of the following - Nuclear base load that keeps the grid stable and pick up from low solar

- Gas plants for surge power and base load when nuclear/solar/wind cannot take up the slack

- Battery storage for surge/storage during off peak

- Solar for very low-cost cheap energy during peak usage hours

- Wind for other power source ie when the sun isnt shining as much

source: https://grid.iamkate.com/

[bayindirh]

> overregulation.

Americans love to remove regulation to make things cheaper (and to enable capitalistic monopolies, but that's a different matter), then cry when people die (or worse).

Some things needs to be regulated, esp. if mistakes are costly to the planet and/or people on the said planet.

So yes, nuclear should be regulated, and even overregulated to keep it safe. We have seen what Boeing has become when it's effectively unregulated.

[vablings]

> We have seen what Boeing has become when it's effectively unregulated.

I think this is vastly overstated by the media. Boeing is still heavily regulated and has a pretty good safety record compared 20 or 30 years prior. The biggest disaster of recent times (MCAS) was because of the tight regulations around type certification and trying to avoid costs to carriers

> Some things need to be regulated, esp. if mistakes are costly to the planet and/or people on the said planet.

I absolutely agree. I am not for the removing ALL regulations from nuclear energy but there is a whole political servitude cycle that has taken place for a number of years to make nuclear "safer" when in actuality it has little to no influence on the technology and just adds burden and overhead especially in the new construction of a nuclear power plant

Nuclear is this big scary monster because its invisible death machine. Despite us being regularly exposed various levels of radiation in our lives most people are completely unaware of. Some people are terrified of dental x-rays but will happily jump on an intercontinental flight without any second guess.

I think arguing in the opposite of "you can never be too safe" is kind of like the whole double your bet every time you lose at the casino yes, its technically true but you need an infinite pool of chips for it to work.

[piva00]

> The biggest disaster of recent times (MCAS) was because of the tight regulations around type certification and trying to avoid costs to carriers

Meaning they tried to skirt around the regulations, including regulatory capture by pushing self-certification because competition caught up to them while they spent money on buybacks instead of investing in R&D, perhaps even investing in absorbing some costs of certification of pilots into a new type they could develop into the future instead of relying on a design from 60 years ago.

Mismanagement is what created Boeing's issues, not regulation.

[vablings]

> Meaning they tried to skirt around the regulations, including regulatory capture by pushing self-certification because competition caught up to them while they spent money on buybacks instead of investing in R&D, perhaps even investing in absorbing some costs of certification of pilots into a new type they could develop into the future instead of relying on a design from 60 years ago.

No, this is literally the opposite of what happened. They did not want all the operators to go through lengthy and expensive recertification processes as required by the FAA so they make the system as close as possible which likely cost them millions of dollars.

The issue was that pilots were not aware, they received very little training and knowledge on the subject when they should have had more (just not a new type cert)

[mlinhares]

Its also bullshit to say the EU has less regulation on developing planes than the US. Boing was just incompetent and mismanaged because of decades of government handouts keeping the business going and MBA wielding idiots cutting costs at every corner.

It became a private equity managed business without ever being bought by private equity.

[Forgeties79]

> Boing was just incompetent and mismanaged because of decades of government handouts keeping the business going and MBA wielding idiots cutting costs at every corner.

>cutting costs at every corner

Costs like those incurred when adhering to safety standards set by regulations?

[janc_]

Arguing the EU has less regulation than the USA on anything is 99.9999% always wrong.

[ChocolateGod]

Is the 0.0001% kinder eggs?

[seg_lol]

> The biggest disaster of recent times (MCAS) was because of the tight regulations around type certification and trying to avoid costs to carriers

Lost me right here, MCAS may have been motivated by losing type certification (as it should), but everything they did was not a result of regulations. Including upcharging to make the system actually redundant. Had they actually engineered the MCAS properly, they would have never gotten caught in the first place.

[dctoedt]

> Nuclear is this big scary monster because its invisible death machine.

Yup: It really is big, it really is scary.

[Forgeties79]

> and trying to avoid costs to carriers

Isn’t that just code for trying to violate regulations without getting caught?

[vablings]

Yes but no. They wanted as many pilots to fly the new aircraft as possible without having to get them re-type certified which is pretty expensive. The issue is that pilots were completely unaware of the MCAS and when it malfunctioned there was not correct training in place because the system was "a hidden abstraction"

Clearly the system worked as intended because nobody had to be re-certified to fly the aircraft but being completely unaware of an additional control layer is dangerous and should have been known about by pilots, but Boeing kept it hidden.

[Forgeties79]

So cutting costs in a way that is explicitly unsafe. Seems a little bit like splitting hairs but I get what you’re saying

[ericmay]

There is room between under-regulation and over-regulation.

Given that we are experiencing high costs and other barriers to construction, we can do at least two things: reduce red tape where it makes sense or where the risk is acceptable to help lower costs, or the US government can, through a variety of mechanisms ranging from basic research funding to direct subsidies, spend taxpayer money to try and alleviate costs.

Given that we supposedly (and I agree) need to build nuclear reactors to help power our country and given that we aren’t building them, we can optionally use both levers to encourage construction. There seems to be this mind virus that has infected many people on the internet that seem to think that regulations are a moral good, and so having more of them must be more good.

This is not accurate.

Regulations are simply a tool we can wield to achieve desired outcomes within various risk and need-based calculations. More regulations can be good, for example we should ban highway billboards- that would be a good regulation. Or we can eliminate regulations - allow businesses to build more housing using pre-approved designs that meet existing zoning code. Neither is good or bad, except in that it helps to achieve some aim that society has.

The regulation or lack there of, of nuclear energy in the United States has absolutely nothing to do with Boeing airlines screwing up some plane designs. Drawing a conclusion that nuclear energy must be regulated (it is) or over-regulated (it probably is or else we would build more), because of a belief that Boeing airliners weren’t regulated enough is, to put it lightly, nonsense, and you are mistakenly using the application of some regulation or lack of causing some bad things to happen, to imply that more regulation in another area would mean good things happen through this framework of regulation == good.

And further, if you’re going to suggest that Boeing is effectively unregulated, which is untrue in practice and in principal, then I’d argue that was for the best given that it is a hugely successful company that employs tens of thousands of people and hundreds of millions have flown and continue to fly on their airlines every single day safely and without incident.

[ImPostingOnHN]

> There seems to be this mind virus that has infected many people on the internet that seem to think that regulations are a moral good

The people who don't agree with you are largely reasonable, as you likely are, and are no more infectees of a "mind virus" for holding their opinions than you are for holding yours. There's no need to denigrate them, or misrepresent their views to try to make your point. Indeed, many of them arrived at their opinion after seeing what happens when people push for not-enough regulation: Once bitten, twice shy.

[Forgeties79]

With something as serious as a nuclear reactor, I am OK with over regulation.

[dzhiurgis]

But why not same scrutiny for coal?

[ben_w]

Correct operation of a coal plant has global impact, and therefore coal should be phased out entirely.

Absent that, when a coal plant goes badly wrong, the damage is small enough and localised enough to be affordable.

When a nuclear plant goes wrong, the upper bound for error includes both Chrenobyl and also "unknown parties stole the radioisotopes" followed by terrorists repeating the Goiânia accident somewhere.

Making all the failure modes not happen is expensive.

[dzhiurgis]

But one is enforced (nuclear security) and coal is not.

p.s. ICE cars are literally spewing cancer fumes right into kids faces. 0 fucks given. If anything people try to frame EVs as actual devil.

[nandomrumber]

In the entire history of civil nuclear power "unknown parties stole the radioisotopes" has never happened.

The Goiânia accident caused four deaths.

The Chrenobyl reactors weren’t even housed in containment buildings, they were housed in what’s best described as a shed.

Got any real complaints?

[Forgeties79]

Why do you think I am more generous towards the coal industry? We are talking about nuclear power. If you would like my opinion on coal, I will gladly give it to you. You never asked.

For starters: I think clean coal is absolute nonsense (I’ve cited the White House’s outrageous stance on this several times on HN) and people brush away the environmental, social, and general health impacts of coal to their own peril. We know the harmful impacts. We know the body count. We have alternatives and it’s time to move on.

I am absolutely 100% critical of the coal industry/power - far more than I am of nuclear. It doesn’t even compare.

So to answer your question:

> But why not same scrutiny for coal?

I’ll give you the same answer I give every person who gives me this tired refrain without ever even trying to suss out what I think about coal: I am. You are misinformed. And it has no impact on my desire to demand the highest safety standards for nuclear power.

[UltraSane]

Over regulation of nuclear energy in the US made it so expensive we didn't replace all fossil fuels with it.

[array_key_first]

I don't think this is true at all.

It's a heavy capex business with very small marginal returns, that takes planning on the order of decades.

AKA, a US company's worst nightmare. Investors don't like that shit, they like half-baked software that code monkeys can pump out.

[UltraSane]

A fully paid off nuclear reactor is extremely profitable because of little fuel cost.

[ViewTrick1002]

Nuclear power in a the US was collapsing due to cost and schedule overruns already before TMI.

Blaming regulations seems like trying to find a scapegoat rather than admitting reality.

[ToucanLoucan]

> Americans love to remove regulation to make things cheaper

Americans have no broad idea how anything works. Decades of attacks on our education system have left us civically illiterate (and for a lot of people, actually illiterate too.).

[hammock]

> Americans love to remove regulation to make things cheaper (and to enable capitalistic monopolies, but that's a different matter), then cry when people die (or worse).

Different people

[psunavy03]

This entire comment is conflating "overregulation" with "no regulation" when these are not at all the same things.

Oh, and with an extra seasoning of Murica Bad on the side.

[mlinhares]

There's also the surprise factor that it just never gets cheaper, the newly formed monopolies quickly take over and push prices up beyond what they were before and milk the cow they were given until all customers are bled dry.

People that missed the solar bandwagon during the Biden admin are going to regret dearly not having installed it at the price and interest it was back then, we'll never see that again.

[stuffn]

Regulation, I’d argue, is a far more efficient route to monopoly than “unchecked capitalism”. If you have enough money you can gain regulatory capture.

If you pay close attention the majority of “evil capitalists” the far left bitches and whines about so much are masters at this. Last mile service, car manufactures, medicine, law, construction, power, water, technology, banking, housing, etc. Most of the world’s billionaires got their money through fucking over the average person with regulatory capture. This must present the leftist with a conundrum they simple ignore because it doesn’t fit their paradigm. More government leads to more control of wealth by fewer people.

This isn’t to say all regulation is bad. However, the line between over-regulating and under-regulating is so thin it’s often better to err on the looser side. Otherwise, in many places, small business is immediately crushed and “late stage capitalism” is the result.

[whoknowsidont]

>I’d argue

You could, but it's without any basis or evidence.

[root_axis]

Regulatory capture is not an argument against regulation, it's an unavoidable externality that has to be managed.

[CamperBob2]

So yes, nuclear should be regulated, and even overregulated to keep it safe.

Here's what overregulation of nuclear power has done for us over the past several decades: "We can't risk releasing radioactive pollution in an accident, so we'll build coal plants that spew it into the air during normal operation instead."

[whoknowsidont]

Sounds like the other systems are under regulated.

[janc_]

Many countries shut down all their coal plants over a decade ago. Why didn't yours?

[CamperBob2]

Because Greenpeace and other powerful lobby groups convinced Americans that nuclear power was more dangerous than fossil fuels.

I'm not one of those tinfoil hatters who rants about how the anti-nuclear movement was seeded and sponsored by the Soviets... but I will say that if they didn't do that, they overlooked some of the most useful idiots at their disposal.

[epistasis]

Nuclear is expensive because of the large amount of high-skill labor, including welding, that's required. For less economically advanced countries, that labor is cheap. For more economically advanced countries, that labor becomes more expensive. Regulation is a red-herring being pushed as an excuse, mostly by startups that are desperate to get the next round of funding, because it plays very well to the investor class, but it's not based in reality. I ask about this all the time and even if there are some half-baked critiques of things like ALARA, nobody has a path to actually making the Nth build of a reactor cheaper from changing regulations.

Even France, which is known for having far lower construction costs than the US on big projects, and for being very good at building out their nuclear fleet in the past, is at ~$12/W with their newest round of 6 reactors. And that's before they have even started construction:

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/frances-edf-estimate...

This is roughly the cost of the latest US nuclear reactor at Vogtle, which is viewed as unrealistically expensive energy.

And even the most optimistic plans for reducing the cost of nuclear from the Liftoff report in 2023 from DOE doesn't place regulations as having much of a role in lowering costs:

https://gain.inl.gov/content/uploads/4/2024/11/DOE-Advanced-...

There's significant political interest in having regulation be the reason that nuclear is expensive, but I find almost zero people in the nuclear industry that are able to articulate where regulations increase the cost of builds or whether there's anything that could or should be changed about the regulations.

[Retric]

Nuclear is inherently expensive even with zero regulations you have the full costs of a coal power plant + more expensive lifetime costs for fuel + extra costs associated with nuclear such as more and more highly educated workers.

Meanwhile coal is dead because it’s already more expensive than the market is willing to accept.

The only hope for nuclear is massive subsidies, deregulation on its own isn’t going to work.

[jeltz]

How come Sweden as cheap nuclear power? The main reason electricity is kinda expensive in Sweden is because the EU forces is to export our cheap nuclear energy to Denmark and Germany.

[ViewTrick1002]

Paid off nuclear plants produce quite cheap electricity. The problem is that it takes 10-15 years of building and then 40 years of paying $180-220/MWh to get a paid off nuclear plant as per modern western construction costs.

[Retric]

In terms of pure operating costs ignoring everything else it can look good vs other sources that include all costs.

However, ‘Paid off nuclear’ in terms of construction costs still needs to worry about decommissioning, and their maintenance costs keep increasing every year.

Several power plants have looked at going offline for potentially years and spending billions at around year 40 to get to year ~60 as not being worth the investment. That’s the issue with projecting those long lifespans, the buildings/containment structure/cooling tower may be fine but that doesn’t mean the pipes, pumps, turbines, and control systems etc are still fine.

[janc_]

And don't forget the cost of storing nuclear waste for the next 10000 years, which is never included in the "cost of nuclear".

[nandomrumber]

What nuclear waste? Where is it?

Somebody must be able to point to the nuclear waste by now. There it is, waving frantically in panic, the nuclear waste! It’s coming right for us!

Something is either highly radioactive for a short amount of time, or not very radioactive for a long amount of time.

But never both highly radioactive and for a long time.

In reality, there is so little nuclear waste that most of it has mostly been stored on site where it was generated, taking up less space than any grid scale solar or wind.

[Retric]

Subsides, the cost to produce electricity and the cost charged for that energy end up very different.

[stephen_g]

Grid forming inverters for providing virtual inertia are only going to get better and better, there's no reason that as those control systems improve why synthetic inertia won't be able to be basically identical to real spinning mass. In the meantime while that technology matures, synchronous condensers can provide grid inertia without needing nuclear or coal, we already have about four in Australia supporting our grid and will probably have another dozen or so built over the next decade or two.

[sdenton4]

Or maybe it's expensive because it doesn't scale. The per-unit cost of nuclear power plants is extremely high, making it hard to get economies of scale in building more of them. And if we /do/ hit economies of scale, uranium availability is likely to become a problem...

[vablings]

> The per-unit cost of nuclear power plants is extremely high, making it hard to get economies of scale in building more of them.

I disagree. building big infrastructure projects always scales well. As stated by the project managers at Hinkley Point C (the most expensive nuclear reactor ever) they estimate that build times and cost will be significantly reduced for the second reactor due to the knowledge and expertise baked into the workforce. Frances nuclear revolution during the 1972 oil crisis also shows the same thing with construction cost getting lower the more reactors built.

There are other reactor designs that do not use uranium that have been tested and hypothesized.

[jandrewrogers]

> per-unit cost of nuclear power plants is extremely high

Unless you are the US Navy. It probably helps that they churn out dozens of the same few cookie-cutter designs without needing permission from NIMBYs.

[epistasis]

Those reactors were also very expensive, though, weren't they? I've heard lots of people look to them as a reason that SMRs might work, but not because the naval reactors were cheap. Plus they use uranium enriched to levels that we typically don't allow in civilian reactors...

[jandrewrogers]

Even at military contracting prices, estimates put them at $100-200M each IIRC. That's not terrible.

The highly enriched fuel is used because it simplifies the design and maintenance. It eliminates all the machinery you'd need to support things like operational refueling of the reactor. Old designs still needed to be rebuilt every 25 years but the new ones are sealed systems that are never supposed to be cracked open over their design life.

I think the main reason we don't use HEU in civilian reactors is non-proliferation concerns, valid or not. Ideally you'd want maximally simple, sealed reactors for the same reason the US Navy does.

[epistasis]

I'm not finding much support costs being that low... best collection of info I have seen is here:

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...

At 1.5-1.7x the cost of diesel ship, and the "well-managed" Virginia class costing $3.6B, we are at over $1B for 60MW of power, 200MW thermal, which is far worse than larger civilian reactors per watt.

The reason we use nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers are their far superior operational characteristics when compared to hydrocarbon fuels. That benefit is massive and well worth it. For terrestrial grid electricity those benefits don't really exist.

[vablings]

Honestly not a terrible idea. Just have your reactor on a huge barge and if it goes meltdown just drag it out into international waters and let the fish deal with it /s

[larkost]

An actual meltdown at sea would have the now-molten uranium come in contact with seawater, which would instantly flash to high-pressure steam, throwing the uranium into a cancer-causing cloud that the world has never yet seen.

This is absolutely a terrible idea about how to deal with a meltdown.

[cbm-vic-20]

Doing the math, it looks like the amount of uranium in pre-disaster Chernobyl is 200 metric tons. Apparently, that can bring 333ML (133 Olympic sized swimming pools) of room temperature water to a boil.

[sheikhnbake]

I suspect geothermal is going to quickly replace Nuclear as the most viable option for base load stabilization. Tech has come a long way towards letting us access it away from hot zones and it uses a lot of the same infrastructure and expertise that the oil industry has already developed.

[cperciva]

Nuclear is insane levels of expensive likely due to overregulation.

It's not just a matter of "overregulation". ALARA, aka As Expensive As Reasonably Achievable is an explicit goal of nuclear regulation.

[m0llusk]

Or possibly under regulated. Where exactly is all the radioactive waste going to go? Especially the spent fuel rods pose major disposal challenges. The one site that was looking hopeful appears to have been discarded. It is a bit late in the game to be pending basic stuff that is piling up. Most nuclear power plants are not well sited for long term disposal, though that is what is happening.

[xp84]

You sound like you know a lot, I’m curious if there’s a case to be made that instead of batteries that take a ton of minerals and need to be replaced, instead using the excess energy to store energy by e.g. pumping water to higher altitudes and letting it generate electricity on the way down later when needed.

[immibis]

Is there a comparison of how much nuclear costs versus the number of cities destroyed per year? Say, if we allow 1 meltdown per year does it become comparable to solar or does it require 10 meltdowns per year?

[nandomrumber]

How many cities per year does solar destroy?

What?

[immibis]

Allegedly the reason nuclear is expensive is that it's expensive to prevent Chernobyl. So I'm asking for a curve relating energy costs to Chernobyls per year. I'd like to read off the curve how many Chernobyls per year would be required to make nuclear energy as cheap as solar.

[nandomrumber]

I see, thanks for clearing that up.

[lawlessone]

>Nuclear is insane levels of expensive likely due to overregulation.

Would to prefer underregulating it?

How would you find the exact amount of correct regulation?

[AlexandrB]

Changes to bring regulation in line with actual risk would be a good start: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gzdLdNRaPKc

[vablings]

> Would to prefer underregulating it?

No

> How would you find the exact amount of correct regulation?

Difficult problem. The issue right now is that nobody wants to be seen to remove a regulation from a nuclear. One of the biggest things is that ALARA/LNT needs to go away. It is not useful, and it is not based on good modern science

Creating new assessments based on modern research would be good and there is already a ton of evidence around that could be foundational for making real science based changes

[wahnfrieden]

nuclear also has a very limited lifespan if we go all-in on it. we will run out.

[TheTaytay]

Run out of what? The fuel? Given its energy density, and uranium availability, that seems unlikely, but I haven’t done math on it.