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After 70 years of trying we haven't built an economic traditional nuclear reactor. Even less a breeder. It is like saying we have infinite fossil fuels because

After 70 years of trying we haven't built an economic traditional nuclear reactor. Even less a breeder. It is like saying we have infinite fossil fuels because we can use renewables to create it from water and air. The interesting part of the conversation is the efficient allocation of money and people. In that conversation nuclear power never materialized.

throwaway1777 3y ago
Did you forget about externalities and politics? Because nuclear would be way cheaper with practice building reactors, economies of scale, without billions in red tape, etc. not to mention it’s the best source of base load without creating massive amounts of air pollution or battery waste
- ben_w 3y ago
  Sadly we don't get to ignore politics inconveniently making fission more expensive. If you do ignore politics and just look at costs alone, then we can make a global HVDC power grid for less than the cost of the other local upgrades we want regardless within each national power grid. People demand a safety standard from fission which is expensive, and keep demanding ever more safety from them, and when it can't do that will replace it with fossil fuels even despite nuclear being much much safer than fossil fuels.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    The reason people demand higher standards is history. An example: stacks that scrub radioisotopes out of steam from confinement during serious accidents when the steam has to be released to prevent overpressurization of the confinement system. These were added to most European reactors after Chernobyl. The US and Japanese didn't add these, saying the cost wasn't worth it. Then Fukushima happened. Had the reactors there had these systems, the radioactive release would have been reduced by a factor of 100.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Given how few people got cancer from Fukushima, this doesn't really help make the fears seem rational. One death from cancer, 2313 from relocating: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-chernobyl-and-fukushima https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...
      - pfdietz 3y ago
        One person identified as having gotten cancer from Fukushima. Most of the cancers would be in a larger population and could not be distinguished from the large background of cancers. That doesn't mean they didn't (or won't) happen, or that regulation must assume they didn't/won't happen. Regulation is not like criminal law; radiation is not presumed innocent until proven guilty.
        ben_w 3y ago
        That's kinda my point — in the court of public opinion, nuclear is unable to win. This does actually matter despite the deaths from coal etc. being massively higher by the same measures.
        pfdietz 3y ago
        I agree that fossil fuel use should be aggressively reduced. In the past, that would have meant more nuclear. It does not mean more nuclear now. Reducing fossil fuel use has ceased to be an argument for nuclear construction.
        ben_w 3y ago
        Yup, I think we're on the same page on this point. (Almost a pity we never got to see atomic cruise liners and cargo ships, but nobody wanted them in the ports, so…)
- Joeri 3y ago
  China and Russia do not build and run nuclear power plants at dramatically lower costs, despite having none of those handicaps. Edit: Hmm, actually, I find wildly diverging LCOE numbers in different locations online. Some indicate they build at half the cost from France, while others say at a similar cost. So, if anyone knows which LCOE numbers are reliable please indicate.
  - chrisco255 3y ago
    Russia's economy is currently heavily dependent on oil exports, so there may at least be some incentive there to suppress it. China on the other hand, had quadrupled its nuclear power generation in the past 10 years (1). (1) https://www.forbes.com/sites/thebakersinstitute/2023/05/17/how-long-will-it-take-for-chinas-nuclear-power-to-replace-coal/?sh=4a492aaf3b1b https://www.forbes.com/sites/thebakersinstitute/2023/05/17/h...
    - bell-cot 3y ago
      > Russia's economy is currently heavily dependent on oil exports... All the more reason for them to build nuclear plants. Every barrel of oil that their own economy doesn't need (because they have plenty of nuclear plants) is another barrel they can make money exporting. And if or when using oil becomes unfashionable, or their oil reserved start running low...then being recognized experts on how to build & run lots of safe, economical nuclear plants sounds pretty good, eh?
      - zdragnar 3y ago
        Nuclear competes with natural gas and coal, not oil. Beyond powering the grid, there are myriad uses for oil that nuclear cannot substitute directly for- asphalt, plastic, nylon, even Aspirin (synthesized from benzene).
        chrisco255 3y ago
        And yet the biggest use of petroleum by far is for transportation. Worldwide demand for petroleum would plunge 90+% if all cars were electric and nuclear was fully deployed.
- pyrale 3y ago
  > without billions in red tape I would prefer to keep the red tape, thank you very much. Sure, nuclear is an expensive industry, but it's also a very safe industry, and I believe we should keep this part of it.
  - fsflover 3y ago
    The parent didn't say "without reasonable safety measures". See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-risk_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-risk_bias and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36751041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36751041
monkaiju 3y ago
People also dont like to mention that even the current, far from 'green', extraction is because we currently only mine the easiest to access deposits of uranium. There are not many of these and we would shortly need to start accessing much more challenging (read: dirty) deposits were we to scale nuclear. Also of the handful of breeder reactors we have (i think the only 2 running are in Russia) they are incredibly far from economical and have a really annoying tendency to catch fire...
hedora 3y ago
The French managed to. I guess they have super-human engineering prowess. The trick is that they keep building the same obsolete US-based design instead of re-inventing the entire thing from scratch for each plant. Imagine how much more accessible computers would be if you could just copy the operating system from one "printed" circuit board to another, instead of hand-wiring all the transistors, then hand coding process scheduling and I/O. The French did this totally unprecedented novel thing where they manufacture more than one identical part at a time in a line of assembly stations, and the parts of the plants are interchangeable. I doubt such things transfer to other countries or industries though.
- Zigurd 3y ago
  The French have discovered that they vastly underestimated end-of-life costs. And the power having been sold and used at a price that did not fund those costs, they are well and truly screwed.
  - pyrale 3y ago
    > And the power having been sold and used at a price that did not fund those costs, they are well and truly screwed. I don't know where you read that, but that's nowhere in actual reasonable sources. Actual serious sources [1] report funding is being set aside for dismantling, which may be significantly eased by the fact that these reactor are actually going to serve for longer than expected. [1], in french: https://www.ccomptes.fr/system/files/2020-03/20200304-rapport-arret-demantelement-installations-nucleaires-2_0.pdf https://www.ccomptes.fr/system/files/2020-03/20200304-rappor...
    - Zigurd 3y ago
      https://energypost.eu/how-much-will-it-really-cost-to-decommission-the-aging-french-nuclear-fleet/ https://energypost.eu/how-much-will-it-really-cost-to-decomm... Whereas Germany has set aside €38 billion to decommission 17 nuclear reactors, and the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority estimates that clean-up of UK’s 17 nuclear sites will cost between €109‒250 billion over the next 120 years, France has set aside only €23 billion to decommissioning its 58 reactors. That's about 6X less than Germany, per reactor. When is the last time that kind of project came in under budget?
greatfilter250 3y ago
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throwaway1777 3y ago

Did you forget about externalities and politics? Because nuclear would be way cheaper with practice building reactors, economies of scale, without billions in red tape, etc. not to mention it’s the best source of base load without creating massive amounts of air pollution or battery waste

ben_w 3y ago
Sadly we don't get to ignore politics inconveniently making fission more expensive. If you do ignore politics and just look at costs alone, then we can make a global HVDC power grid for less than the cost of the other local upgrades we want regardless within each national power grid. People demand a safety standard from fission which is expensive, and keep demanding ever more safety from them, and when it can't do that will replace it with fossil fuels even despite nuclear being much much safer than fossil fuels.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  The reason people demand higher standards is history. An example: stacks that scrub radioisotopes out of steam from confinement during serious accidents when the steam has to be released to prevent overpressurization of the confinement system. These were added to most European reactors after Chernobyl. The US and Japanese didn't add these, saying the cost wasn't worth it. Then Fukushima happened. Had the reactors there had these systems, the radioactive release would have been reduced by a factor of 100.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Given how few people got cancer from Fukushima, this doesn't really help make the fears seem rational. One death from cancer, 2313 from relocating: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-chernobyl-and-fukushima https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      One person identified as having gotten cancer from Fukushima. Most of the cancers would be in a larger population and could not be distinguished from the large background of cancers. That doesn't mean they didn't (or won't) happen, or that regulation must assume they didn't/won't happen. Regulation is not like criminal law; radiation is not presumed innocent until proven guilty.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        That's kinda my point — in the court of public opinion, nuclear is unable to win. This does actually matter despite the deaths from coal etc. being massively higher by the same measures.
        pfdietz 3y ago
        I agree that fossil fuel use should be aggressively reduced. In the past, that would have meant more nuclear. It does not mean more nuclear now. Reducing fossil fuel use has ceased to be an argument for nuclear construction.
        ben_w 3y ago
        Yup, I think we're on the same page on this point. (Almost a pity we never got to see atomic cruise liners and cargo ships, but nobody wanted them in the ports, so…)
Joeri 3y ago
China and Russia do not build and run nuclear power plants at dramatically lower costs, despite having none of those handicaps. Edit: Hmm, actually, I find wildly diverging LCOE numbers in different locations online. Some indicate they build at half the cost from France, while others say at a similar cost. So, if anyone knows which LCOE numbers are reliable please indicate.
- chrisco255 3y ago
  Russia's economy is currently heavily dependent on oil exports, so there may at least be some incentive there to suppress it. China on the other hand, had quadrupled its nuclear power generation in the past 10 years (1). (1) https://www.forbes.com/sites/thebakersinstitute/2023/05/17/how-long-will-it-take-for-chinas-nuclear-power-to-replace-coal/?sh=4a492aaf3b1b https://www.forbes.com/sites/thebakersinstitute/2023/05/17/h...
  - bell-cot 3y ago
    > Russia's economy is currently heavily dependent on oil exports... All the more reason for them to build nuclear plants. Every barrel of oil that their own economy doesn't need (because they have plenty of nuclear plants) is another barrel they can make money exporting. And if or when using oil becomes unfashionable, or their oil reserved start running low...then being recognized experts on how to build & run lots of safe, economical nuclear plants sounds pretty good, eh?
    - zdragnar 3y ago
      Nuclear competes with natural gas and coal, not oil. Beyond powering the grid, there are myriad uses for oil that nuclear cannot substitute directly for- asphalt, plastic, nylon, even Aspirin (synthesized from benzene).
      - chrisco255 3y ago
        And yet the biggest use of petroleum by far is for transportation. Worldwide demand for petroleum would plunge 90+% if all cars were electric and nuclear was fully deployed.
pyrale 3y ago
> without billions in red tape I would prefer to keep the red tape, thank you very much. Sure, nuclear is an expensive industry, but it's also a very safe industry, and I believe we should keep this part of it.
- fsflover 3y ago
  The parent didn't say "without reasonable safety measures". See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-risk_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-risk_bias and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36751041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36751041

monkaiju 3y ago

People also dont like to mention that even the current, far from 'green', extraction is because we currently only mine the easiest to access deposits of uranium. There are not many of these and we would shortly need to start accessing much more challenging (read: dirty) deposits were we to scale nuclear. Also of the handful of breeder reactors we have (i think the only 2 running are in Russia) they are incredibly far from economical and have a really annoying tendency to catch fire...

hedora 3y ago

The French managed to. I guess they have super-human engineering prowess. The trick is that they keep building the same obsolete US-based design instead of re-inventing the entire thing from scratch for each plant. Imagine how much more accessible computers would be if you could just copy the operating system from one "printed" circuit board to another, instead of hand-wiring all the transistors, then hand coding process scheduling and I/O. The French did this totally unprecedented novel thing where they manufacture more than one identical part at a time in a line of assembly stations, and the parts of the plants are interchangeable. I doubt such things transfer to other countries or industries though.

Zigurd 3y ago
The French have discovered that they vastly underestimated end-of-life costs. And the power having been sold and used at a price that did not fund those costs, they are well and truly screwed.
- pyrale 3y ago
  > And the power having been sold and used at a price that did not fund those costs, they are well and truly screwed. I don't know where you read that, but that's nowhere in actual reasonable sources. Actual serious sources [1] report funding is being set aside for dismantling, which may be significantly eased by the fact that these reactor are actually going to serve for longer than expected. [1], in french: https://www.ccomptes.fr/system/files/2020-03/20200304-rapport-arret-demantelement-installations-nucleaires-2_0.pdf https://www.ccomptes.fr/system/files/2020-03/20200304-rappor...
  - Zigurd 3y ago
    https://energypost.eu/how-much-will-it-really-cost-to-decommission-the-aging-french-nuclear-fleet/ https://energypost.eu/how-much-will-it-really-cost-to-decomm... Whereas Germany has set aside €38 billion to decommission 17 nuclear reactors, and the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority estimates that clean-up of UK’s 17 nuclear sites will cost between €109‒250 billion over the next 120 years, France has set aside only €23 billion to decommissioning its 58 reactors. That's about 6X less than Germany, per reactor. When is the last time that kind of project came in under budget?

greatfilter250 3y ago

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