Comment by AnthonyMouse
3 hours ago
> 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 plutonium, 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.
The difference between nuclear and coal is that when nuclear has a horrible accident, it kills as many people right here and makes as much land uninhabitable right here as coal does in our enemy countries within 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.
The costs of cleaning up Fukushima, including the wider effects on the Japanese economy, are estimated to exceed US$200 billion. That makes it a pretty EPIC disaster in economic terms alone.
Even Chernobyl was not really that bad in terms of lives lost. Even taking the worst estimates of long-term deaths from radiation exposure, it killed a tiny fraction of the numbers of people who have died from hydroelectric disasters or from exposure to coal power plant pollution. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a catastrophic disaster for the regional (and wider Soviet) economy.
Fukushima was partly an issue of flawed risk assessment. The tsunami that took down the plant was believed to be an incredibly rare even, expected to happen once every ten thousand years.
However, that was a result of faulty assumptions made when the plant was initially planned. With better data and methods, the event would have seemed a lot more likely.
It was perfectly fine because the operators stole the batteries from all the cars in the parking lot to run the control room. Not something I'd like the continued existence of New York City to rely upon.
> 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.