Comment by Retric
5 hours ago
> Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.
It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop. You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond. Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions. Decommissioning could be a little cheaper with laxer standards, but it’s never going to be cheap. Etc etc.
Worse, all those capital costs mean you’re selling most of your output 24/7 at generally low wholesale spot prices unlike hydro, natural gas, or battery backed solar which can benefit from peak pricing.
That’s not regulations that’s just inherent requirements for the underlying technology. People talk about small modular reactors, but small modular reactors are only making heat they don’t actually drive costs down meaningfully. Similarly the vast majority of regulations come from lessons learned so yea they spend a lot of effort avoiding foreign materials falling into the spent fuel pool, but failing to do so can mean months of downtime and tens of millions in costs so there isn’t some opportunity to save money by avoiding that regulation.
> Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies.
It's true that a pound of nuclear fuel costs more than a pound of coal. But it also has a million times more energy content, which is why fuel is only 15-20% of the operating costs compared to >60% for coal. And that's for legacy nuclear plants designed to use moderately high enrichment rates, not newer designs that can do without that.
> Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop.
You're describing a heat exchanger and some pipes. If this is the thing that costs a billion dollars, you're making the argument that this is a regulatory cost problem.
> You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond.
Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive.
Equipment to move things is something you need at refueling intervals, i.e. more than a year apart. If this is both expensive and rarely used then why does each plant need its own instead of being something that comes on the truck with the new fuel and then goes back to be used at the next plant?
> Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions.
This is the regulatory asymmetry again. When a hydroelectric dam messes up bad enough, the dam breaks and it can wipe out an entire city. When oil companies mess up, Deep Water Horizon and Exxon Valdez. When coal companies just operate in their ordinary manner as if this is fine, they leave behind a sea of environmental disaster sites that the government spends many billions of dollars in superfund money to clean up. That stuff costs as much in real life as nuclear disasters do in theory. And that's before we even consider climate change.
But then one of them is required to carry that amount of insurance when the others aren't. It should either be both or neither, right?
> which is why fuel is only 15-20% of the operating costs compared to >60% for coal
Nuclear has much higher operating costs than coal. It’s not 20% of 3 = 60% of 1, but it’s unpleasantly close for anyone looking for cheap nuclear power. Especially when you include interest + storage as nuclear reactors start with multiple years worth of fuel when built and can’t quite hit zero at decommissioning so interest payments on fuel matter.
> You're describing a heat exchanger and some pipes. If this is the thing that costs a billion dollars, you're making the argument that this is a regulatory cost problem.
It’s a lot more than that, and far from the only cost mentioned. It’s pumps, control systems, safety systems, loss of thermal efficiency, slower startup times, loss of more energy on shutdown, etc.
> Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive.
Highways don’t use expensive materials yet they end up costing quite a lot to build. Scale matters.
> Equipment to move things is something you need at refueling intervals, i.e. more than a year apart. If this is both expensive and rarely used then why does each plant need its own instead of being something that comes on the truck with the new fuel and then goes back to be used at the next plant?
Contamination with newly spent nuclear fuel = not something you want to move on a highway. It’s also impractical for a bunch of other reasons.
> But then one of them is required to carry that amount of insurance when the others aren't. It should either be both or neither, right?
No nuclear power plants has ever actually been required to carry a policy with that kind of a payout. Taxpayers are stuck with the bill, but that bill doesn’t go away it’s just an implied subsidy.
However, the lesser risk of losing the reactor is still quite substantial. You could hypothetically spend 5 billion building a cheap power plant rather than 20+ billion seen in some boondoggles but then get stuck with cleanup costs after a week.
> Nuclear has much higher operating costs than coal. It’s not 20% of 3 = 60% of 1, but it’s unpleasantly close for anyone looking for cheap nuclear power.
But that's the point, isn't it? You have two types of thermal power plant, one of them has a somewhat lower fuel cost so why does that one have a higher operating cost? Something is wrong there and needs to be addressed.
> It’s a lot more than that, and far from the only cost mentioned. It’s pumps, control systems, safety systems
These things should all costs thousands of dollars, not billions of dollars.
> loss of thermal efficiency, slower startup times, loss of more energy on shutdown, etc.
These are operating costs rather than construction costs and are already accounted for in the comparison of fuel costs.
> Highways don’t use expensive materials yet they end up costing quite a lot to build. Scale matters.
5 miles of highway has around the same amount of concrete in it as a nuclear power plant. We both know which one costs more -- and highways themselves cost more than they should because the government overpays for everything.
> Contamination with newly spent nuclear fuel = not something you want to move on a highway.
Is this actually a problem? It's not a truck full of gamma emitters, it's a machine which is slightly radioactive because it was in the presence of a radiation source. Isn't this solvable with a lead-lined box?
> Taxpayers are stuck with the bill, but that bill doesn’t go away it’s just an implied subsidy.
Have taxpayers actually paid anything here at all? The power plants have paid more in premiums than they've ever filed in claims, haven't they?
> You could hypothetically spend 5 billion building a cheap power plant rather than 20+ billion seen in some boondoggles but then get stuck with cleanup costs after a week.
You could hypothetically build a hydroelectric dam that wipes out a city on the first day. You could hypothetically build a single wind turbine that shorts out and starts a massive wildfire.
The problem with nuclear mistakes is they aren't a few decades. They can be measured in centuries.
So yeah. Regulation.
Don't build a damn LWR on a fault line (Fukushima) 3mile Island - don't have so many damn errors printing out that everything is ignore Chernobyl - we all know I think. It's still being worked on to contain it fully. Goiânia accident (brazil) - caesium-137 - Time magazine has identified the accident as one of the world's "worst nuclear disasters" and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) called it "one of the world's worst radiological incidents". (and this was just a radiation source, not a nuclear plant)
So yeah. Oil has bad disasters. Nuclear has EPIC disasters.
I think what is missing in your argument is not that these pieces are difficult. It's that combining all of them adds to a significant amount of complexity.
It's not JUST a heat exchanger. It's a heat exchanger that has to go through shielding. And it has to operate at much higher pressures than another type of power production facility would use. Which adds more complexity. And even greater need of safety.
I'm not arguing against Nuclear; I think it's incredibly worthwhile especially in the current age of AI eating up so much power in a constant use situation. But I do think it needs to be extremely regulated due to the risks of things going south.
And then there's coal. The difference between nuclear and coal is that when nuclear has a horrible accident, it kills fewer people than coal kills as part of its normal expected operation.
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I agree Chernobyl was an epic disaster, but Fukushima ? Last I heard the radiation level are basically normal even close to the reactor, and overall radiation wide there hasn't been much damage if at all.
So it seems that fukushima is an example of something that should have been an EPIC accident, but actually was perfectly fine in the end. I may be wrong, but thats what I remembered from the wikipedia page.
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> Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive.
Well, anything is expensive in enough quantity. But there is a bit of a tell not covered where of regulatory problems because nuclear plant projects keep going way over budget. Even stupid planners can notice trends of that magnitude and account for them, there is something hitting plant builds that isn't a technical factor and it is driving up costs.
It really is. Nuclear is 100-1000x safer than coal. By insisting on such an aggressive safety target, we force prices up and actually incur much higher levels of mortality - just delivered in the boring old ways of pollution and climate-driven harms.
See https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy for detailed stats.
I think we should target “risk parity with Gas” until climate change is under control.
When the nuclear industry feels confident enough to not need its own special law to protect it from liability in case of accidents, I’ll feel a little more confident in their safety rhetoric.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
This exists because of a cognitive bias: we tend to focus on direct, attributable harm while overlooking larger, diffuse, and indirect harm.
A nuclear plant could operate safely for 50 years, causing no harm, but if it explodes once and kills 10,000 people, there's gonna be a trial. A coal plant could run for the same 50 years without any dramatic accident, yet contribute to 2,000 premature deaths every single year through air pollution—adding up to 100,000 deaths. Nobody notices, nobody is sued, business as usual. It's legally safer today to be "1% responsible for 1000 death" than to be "100% responsible for a single one". Fix this and that law goes away.
The trouble with liability is that if your nuclear plant has an accident and the cancer rate in the area doesn't detectably change, everybody in the area who gets cancer will sue you anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Childhood_Vaccine_Inj...
The problem with nuclear is not the ultra-low probability of incidents, but the potential size of the incidents.
And then you have bad faith actors.
No one would ever put graphite tips in the control rods to save some money, wouldn't they?
No one would station troops during war in a nuclear power plant, wouldn't they?
No one would use a nuclear power plant to breed material for nuclear bombs, wouldn't they?
Finally, no CxO would cheapen out in maintenance for short term gains then jump ship leaving a mess behind, right?
None of that has never ever happened, right?
> The problem with nuclear is not the ultra-low probability of incidents, but the potential size of the incidents.
This is also not as bad as people think. Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible.
Even if we had ten times as many nuclear disasters - hell, even fifty times more - it would still be a cleaner source of energy than fossil fuels.
Meanwhile the amount of overregulation is extreme and often absurd. It's not a coincidence that most operational nuclear plants were built decades ago.
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Agreed that lumpiness is an issue and so in practice you wouldn’t want to argue for coal levels of death-per-MWh.
This concern is, I believe, the crux of why folks are overly-conservative - the few well-known disasters are terrifying and therefore salient.
Plus it’s hard to campaign for “more risk please”. But we should bite the bullet; yeah, more of the stuff you list would happen. And, the tradeoff is worth it.
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Climate change is planet wide. No nuclear incident has ever had such a widespread effect.
None of what I said really relates to safety. 3 mile island was a complete non issue when it comes to safety, but one day the nuclear reactor went from a useful tool to an expensive cleanup.
Agreed, you are talking about non-safety factors. I don’t think they necessitate the price levels we see; for example, look at how cheaply China can build reactors.
I think it’s quite clear that we pay a high safety / regulatory premium in the west for Nuclear.
My point about safety is that we are over-indexing on regulation. We should reduce (not remove!) regulations on nuclear projects, this would make them more affordable.
I don’t think this is a controversial point, if you look into post-mortems on why US projects overrun by billions you always see issues with last-minute adaptations requiring expensive re-certification of designs, ie purely regulatory (safety-motivated) friction.
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You are making a common mistake, your source does only considers things that have happened, not things that could happen. But we know what could happen, which is why the security standards have to be high for nuclear power.
The challenge though is how to hit safety levels with a high level of accuracy. And we keep rediscovering how tough that can be. The space shuttle and 737 max are examples of that.
True, but we have multiple OOMs to play with. How about we try to go from 0.03 to 0.3 deaths per TWh and see how much cheaper we can make it? As long as we stay lower than 30 we didn’t actually make a mistake.
Climate has never stopped changing since the day the earth was formed, that's why we are here. Keep it "under control" is a wild target.
"All wooden boats always leak a little, so stopping people from drilling holes through the hull is a wild target."
It's a strawman to pretend that 10,000 year slow changes are qualitatively the same as what's been going on in the last hundred.
This statistic is very relevant here, and surprising to many! Deaths per kWh produced for all energy sources.
Solar and nuclear both really stand out immensely as the safer alternatives.
People tend to think of nuclear as dangerous, but that's just propaganda. There has been a lot of anti-nuclear propaganda over the years. But the numbers speak truth:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
> "It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate."
Not just to operate, but to clean up and decommission at their end of life. In the UK, for example, early reactors were built cheaply without much consideration/provision for eventual decommissioning. This has left an enormous burden on future taxpayers, estimated to exceed £260 billion, much of it related to the handling and cleanup of vast quantities of nuclear waste [1].
Thankfully new reactors are being financed with eventual decommissioning costs "priced in", but this is another reason why they've become so expensive.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/23/uk-nucle...
> cleanup of vast quantities of nuclear waste
The total high level, dangerous nuclear waste of the entire world since we started playing with nuclear power 70 years ago fits in an American football stadium with plenty of room to spare. "Vast quantities" is a serious exaggeration.
The UK alone had the following inventory of nuclear waste as of 2022:
~1,470 m³ "high level" waste totalling ~14,000,000 TBq at year 2100. "High level" waste is that which generates enough heat to require specially designed storage facilitates to prevent spontaneous fires etc.
~496,000 m³ intermediate level waste totalling ~1,000,000 TBq at 2100
~1,340,000 m³ low level waste totalling ~130 TBq at 2100
~2,750,000 m³ very low level waste totalling ~12 TBq at 2100. VLLW is considered safe enough to be disposed at landfill sites subject to certain special considerations. But not until the radioactivity drops below a certain threshold, of course - it still has to be stored at special facilities for many decades until then.
It's a pretty vast and costly problem even if you don't consider this a "vast quantity".
Source for these figures: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-radioactive-wa...
>> Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.
>It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days
Maybe it can't be as cheap as coal, but at the very least it shouldn't be absurdly expensive compared to what South Korea and China can do.
https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20250906_WBC...
That’s fair, but everything else is outcompeting coal these days.
So even if we can drop prices down to what China pays, nuclear still loses in China.
> It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop. You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond. Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions. Etc etc.
Without the fear of dual use, we could just enrich the fuel to higher levels and refuel once per 30 years.
Regulation still plays a role in the final cost. Sure it has to be safe. But we need to draw the line. Nuclear is arguably way too safe currently (zero death for a long time). Some regulations could be relaxed to speed up the construction, and make the operations cheaper.
We should have a discussion and review all the regulations surrounding nuclear.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250908384960/en/Dee...
I think if you regulated coal on a linear no threshold risk model, you'd find the costs to be somewhat closer.
Coal is already losing, and things are only getting worse for steady state production.
Grid solar drives wholesale rates for most of the day really low long before new nuclear gets decommissioned. If nighttime rates rise above daytime rates a great deal of demand is going to shift to the day. Which then forces nuclear to try and survive on peak pricing, but batteries cap peak pricing over that same timescale.
Nuclear thus really needs to drop significantly below current coal prices or find some way to do cheap energy storage. I’m somewhat hopeful on heat storage, but now you need to have a lot of turbines and cooling that’s only useful for a fraction of the day. On top of that heat storage means a lower working temperature costing you thermodynamic efficiency.
> Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it.
You have to take scale into account. This is 20 years of spent fuel.
https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/cca0b8d/21474836...
That's it. 20 years. Just that, for a constant, quiet output of just about a gigawatt. And that's an old, decommissioned reactor.
You're right about nuclear fuel refinement, packaging, and so on being non-trivial, but the amount of it that you need is so miniscule that if you don't talk about volume you paint a misleading picture.
> small modular reactors are only making heat they don’t actually drive costs down meaningfully.
Mass production makes anything cheaper. Ask the French about their efficient reactor program.
If anyone is interested, here's a picture of decades worth of it[0]. I used to have a video of Russia's, but it seems to have gone down. If somehow you can way back it, here's the link[1].
For more comparison, France produces about 2kg of radioactive waste per year, which delivers 70% of the country's electricity. If you removed all nuclear power reactors you'd still be generating 0.8kg of radioactive waste[2]. It'll work it's way out to on the order of (i.e. approximately) a soda can per person per year.
I think people grossly underestimate the scale of waste in many things. Coal produces train loads a day (including radioactive and heavy metals), while nuclear produces like a Costco's worth over decades. The current paradigm of "we'll store it on sight and figure it out later" isn't insane when we're talking about something smaller than a water tower and having about 300 years to figure out a better solution.
On the flip side, people underestimate the waste of many other things. There are things much worse than nuclear waste too. We spend a lot of time talking about nuclear waste yet almost none when it comes to heavy metals and long lived plastics. Metals like lead stay toxic forever and do not become safer through typical reactions. We should definitely be concerned with nuclear waste, but when these heavy metal wastes are several orders of magnitude greater, it seems silly. When it comes to heavy metals (lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, etc) we're talking about millions of tonnage. These things are exceptionally long lived, have shown to enter both our water supply and atmosphere (thanks leaded gasoline!), and are extremely toxic. It's such a weird comparison of scale. Please take nuclear waste seriously, but I don't believe anyone if they claim to be concerned with nuclear waste but is unconcerned with other long lived hazardous wastes that are produced in billions of times greater quantities and with magnitudes lower safety margins.
[0] https://x.com/Orano_usa/status/1182662569619795968
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uN0bZBOic&t=105s
[2] https://www.orano.group/en/unpacking-nuclear/all-about-radio...
Reminds me of:
https://xkcd.com/1162/
True, but you also get large amounts of electricity in return.
You're over simplifying and cherry-picking. Is it a big deal if it costs 10x more if it produces 20x more power? What about 10x the cost, 10x the power (so equal $/MWhr) but 0.1x the land? What about 10x cost, 10x power, 1x land, but 10x more power stability? As in fewer outages. How much will you pay for 99.999 than 99.99?
The problem with the vast majority of these energy conversions is that people act like all these costs are captured in the monetary metric. I'm sorry, the real world is complex and a spreadsheet only takes you so far. There's no one size fits all power source. The best one to use depends on many factors, including location. If you ignore everything and hyper focus on one metric you're not making an informed decision that's "good enough" you're arrogantly making an uninformed conjecture.
I'm surprised how often this needs to be said (even to pro nuclear folks), but nuclear physics is complicated. Can we just stop this bullshit of pretentiousness masquerading as arrogance?
> It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it.
This is based on reactors with poor efficiencies that leave a lot of unburned Uranium in their waste. Fast reactors and thorium reactors burn 90% of fissile material, so mining costs are significantly lower for the same power output.
> Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions.
Total death count from nuclear is lower than the death count of wind and solar. Falling off roofs happens a lot more frequently than nuclear accidents. This is a nothingburger, particularly given new reactor designs are meltdown proof.
Regarding fuel:
https://xkcd.com/1162/