Comment by planckscnst
17 hours ago
Is that because every country fails to adequately charge oil/coal/etc for its externalities? Are we essentially subsidizing oil, bringing the costs artificially low such that nuclear can't compete?
17 hours ago
Is that because every country fails to adequately charge oil/coal/etc for its externalities? Are we essentially subsidizing oil, bringing the costs artificially low such that nuclear can't compete?
Nuclear has several major cost problems if it's own. Insuring against a major accident is prohibitively expensive, the kind of inspection+maintenance regime that's necessary for safety isn't amenable to cost reductions. The list goes on. Basically:
Nuclear isn't similar to the things that grow cheaper as the operators gain experience.
Much if fhe inspections and standards aren't "necessary for safety" but the direct product of paranoia and lobbying. Nuclear is brutally overregulated, far, far beyond what's necessary to ensure safety, and that's where most costs come from.
That myth keeps persisting. In reality per $ of the project wind farms face significantly higher regulatory costs in many countries. Nuclear power operators also managed to get regulations on the turbines dropped compared to coal plants (in Germany IIRC).
In reality we see it time and time again, the larger a project (and that applies to pretty much all infrastructure) the easier it is for the operator to get regulations loosened, because of the large amount of money involved, they tend to have much more leverage over politicians.
> Nuclear is brutally overregulated, far, far beyond what's necessary to ensure safety, and that's where most costs come from.
Is this really true? We seem to have a pretty large disaster perhaps every 15-20 years (3 mile island, Chernobyl, Fukushima), which makes me think that it is either correctly- or under- regulated. Of course coal and oil are worse, but that’s not exactly a high bar…
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Then why is the insurance for every single reactor public sector based?
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No,
The reason that constant inspections are need is because radiation weakens everything. Since nothing is immune, everything can break prematurely and so everything must be inspected.
Fukushima and Chornobyl happened directly for a lack of paranoia, regulation and lobbing. I hope that we don't commit the same mistake again.
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See nuclear topic, scroll just like 2 turns to see once again someone claiming nuclear is the one technology in all of history that doesn't improve with technology.
> Insuring against a major accident is prohibitively expensive
Isn't this the thing where you require something in one case but not the others?
If every oil drilling operation had to carry enough insurance to cover Deepwater Horizon and every hydroelectric dam had to carry a policy large enough for Banqiao and every solar panel factory had to insure against leaving Superfund sites that leak into the groundwater in some of the most expensive real estate in Silicon Valley then they'd be in trouble too.
> the kind of inspection+maintenance regime that's necessary for safety isn't amenable to cost reductions.
People often say things like this and then if you actually have someone go through the existing process you find out that more than half of the labor is going to inspect things that aren't actually safety-related, or some corruption is involved which is quadrupling the cost because the contractor bribed a politician to make use of their services required by law or create artificial scarcity for something which is actually important but shouldn't cost as much as it does.
Insuring is dirt cheap. You don't insure against any nonsense but against most probable one.
Nuclear gets cheaper if you have several units built in same place and if you increase CF with various methods, incl higher enriched fuel
Yes this is true. Once you include all subsidies nuclear is cheaper than fossil fuels. Much cheaper than coal and oil and slightly cheaper or on par with gas.
But, the same is true for solar and wind which starts off much cheaper than fossil fuels in the first place.
Most new build energy is renewables, that's what nuclear needs to compete with.
You can count only the pure costs of generation of single type of power plant. But the customers are also paying the costs of distribution, costs of backup and firming.
Is the customer 10, 50 or 500 km from the power plant?
Do I need to build a second backup power plant for each installed primary power plant, 100% backup capacity? Or 40%, or 20% backup capacity?
Costs of pumped hydro/battery energy storage.
What are the costs of CO2 emission? Europe 80 Euro per tCO₂, China/India 8, US zero.
Yeah, let's not forget defence budgets that are spent to prop up oil availability too.
War would be so much harder w/o oil, yet we fight wars for oil. Hmmm.
That is clearly true, here and in other situations.
But, the public has made it clear they are unwilling to give up the implied subsidy the unaccounted externally provides.
Yes, think about the US military budget.
I'd argue at least half of it basically functions as a petroleum subsidy.
And the other thing that people just simply do not understand is it's solar and wind are now cheaper than anything else, even if the subsidies are applied to them, and would be even more so if the trump tarrifs were eliminated.
The only justification in nuclear right now it's deglobalization and energy independence. But I would argue all the money you throw into nuclear for that, it's much better served simply building out solar and wind
> And the other thing that people just simply do not understand is it's solar and wind are now cheaper than anything else, even if the subsidies are applied to them
> so if the trump tarrifs were eliminated
That sounds very very questionable. We have like tens of countries in Europe that are trying to implement solar and wind energy throughout the decades, and are undoubtful lieders and visioners in that areas. And what is the practical results? Energy costs like 10 times more than if that energy was generated through burning fissile fuel alone.