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I'd be interested in hearing which "newer designs" exactly you think got postponed for stupid political reasons. As far as I know, nuclear power did evolve over the last decades as far as it could and if it's "still basically the same", then just nobody came up with something really new in the field. Basically, uranium alloy fueled, pressurized light water reactor is what you can get. Fusion? Was said to be ready in 20 years - 40 years ago, and today? Still 20 years to go...

> As far as I know, nuclear power did evolve over the last decades as far as it could and if it's "still basically the same", then just nobody came up with something really new in the field.

The nation that should have been the primary driver of nuclear technologies (the US) saw an explosion in the cost of development. This was not seen in other countries, which is evidence that it's because of cultural/institutional problems rather than fundamental technical ones.

http://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-us...

> Fusion? Was said to be ready in 20 years - 40 years ago, and today? Still 20 years to go...

This is a common misconception. In fact, the authoratative government body on energy research made it very clear 40 years ago what it would cost to develop fusion power. Fusion power never got the required funding so it never materialized -- as predicted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8311566

>Nuclear construction costs in the US did spiral out of control, especially after the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979. But this wasn't universal. Countries like ... Japan kept costs fairly stable during this period

So if we keep costs down like Japan did we can experience the same cost savings they did?

Where do I sign up?

Compared to the radiation deaths caused by coal power plants, Fukushima was a little inconsequential blip, so even if we assume that it represented what you get if you follow Japanese regulations, it'd still be a plus.

Except we're easily at a point now where both coal and nuclear plants can be phased out as they reach the end of their natural lives and replaced with solar + wind farms at a reasonable cost, as Germany and Denmark are currently demonstrating.

The variability problem turned out to be smaller than nuclear+coal industry led us to believe and relatively easily managed with market based solutions (e.g. ramping up/down power usage by aluminum smelters and simply building in extra capacity) rather than by building massive batteries (an idiotic idea).

Massive batteries is an idiotic idea, as you said. Which is why the constant and large and instantaneous fluctuations from solar and wind are smoothed largely by natural gas. Recommend checking out the video of RFK, Jr saying a solar or wind plant is a gas plant.

Pebble bed reactors and Thorium reactors are two types that are just now being taken seriously, and largely because of work outside of the US. E.g. China's HTR-10 and coming HTR-PM [1] is based on decades old designs that were originally largely shelved because their advantages were not advantages then (the waste from traditional reactors was a plus when you want to produce lots of nuclear weapons, so why design reactors that produce different waste?). HTR-PM modules are designed to be "mass produced" once the first reactor is operational.

This [2] article covers both China's pebble bed and Thorium ambitions, as well as an evolutionary design based on a Westinghouse design that they are hoping to export.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTR-10

[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-02-21/china-wants-...

Monstrously capital intensive industries are conservative for obvious reasons. Computers were never as capital intensive as a large power plant, and transistors and ICs made them exponentially less. When a project that costs twenty billion dollars fails companies go bankrupt and politicians lose their careers. Lots of pressure to stick with what you know will work.

Also everyone blames the hippies for nuclear stagnation but nobody looks at the fossil fuel industry. The latter has far more money and political influence and is more than happy for nukes to get stuck in the 50s.

There isn't much else that is more capital intensive than a modern chip factory, the costs are - roughly - comparable to a nuclear power plant.

But this haven't been true in the 60's or early 70's.

They're just as conservative too. They'll go to .22nm from .32nm but they're not going to invest billions up front in a fab to produce a completely untested chip technology based on graphene and optics or something. Not unless someone (like the government) coughs up the money risk-free. Same with nukes.

Gradual evolution of the overgrown 50s submarine reactor is the AP1000. To really make fission work and scale would require something like the liquid thorium cycle or accelerator driven reactors or pebble beds... something not an evolution of 50s tech.

Indeed. So, now with Moore's law coming to an end there will be an incentive to try 'strange' and off-the-beaten-path technology, it will in a way be the most interesting time for semiconductors in many decades. There is just a chance that we'll hit on something that would not even be considered only 10 years ago that will actually make a huge difference. Before that all you could pretty much set the clock by was a predictable speed increase, now we're going to either get stuck or there will be something revolutionary in computing to move us to the next level.

Some of the options:

- 3D (heat issues, but biology got that one solved to some extent by using massive parallel low power, extremely slow and clockless architectures)

- Quantum Computing

- biological computing

- exotic semiconductors (for instance: GaAs)

- optical computing

- Totally new software architectures to take advantage of existing hardware in an un-foreseen way

- non Von-Neumann machinery (for instance, computing memory)

And a whole raft of even lesser known and researched tech. I'm really very curious what the next decade will bring.

Why? If end user devices are just thin clients for the cloud and we can always just make data centers bigger, where is the trillion dollar incentive necessary to make the leap?

The constraint on tech is usually more about what is economically justifiable rather than what is physically possible. It's 2016 and passenger flight is still subsonic for example.

That depends on the amount of computing capacity required for those data centers and if the last years have been any indication the amount of data center capacity is not even close to where we will end up. Even the 'thin clients' will acquire features and more capacity as time goes on, that's just the eternal terminal->personal computer pendulum on one end of it's swing at the moment.

Cutting edge chip production is still highly dependant on possessing the required experience within your institution. You may be able to build a FAB from parts, but that doesn't mean you can immediately start mass producing the latest CPU's or memory. And there are other comparably complex project's with similar issues (like designing rocket engines).

I think the same applies to reactor building where only a few companies know how to do a particular thing (like build a reactor vessel). Cutting edge development is unavoidably going to be limited to a small group of people who have limited capacity. Merely maintaining that capacity is tricky.

We're stuck with massively large nuclear plants in part because the only way of making a new plant cost effective given the regulatory regime is to make them big.

While running nuclear power plants might be manageable, reliably storing the nuclear waste for the next 1,000,000 is almost impossible. No other industry has a similar problem.

The long-term waste is transuranics, like plutonium. Fission products are much shorter-lived.

Some advanced reactor types, including fast reactors and molten salt reactors, produce very little transuranic waste, and can use our existing transuranic wastes as fuel, converting them to fission products. These reactors produce a much lower volume of waste, which goes back to the radioactivity of the original ore within three centuries.

Russia has two large fast reactors connected to their electric grid, one since the 1980s. The U.S. nearly completed its Integral Fast Reactor before the program was shut down by the Clinton administration. Half a dozen startups around the world are working on molten salt reactors, and China has a billion-dollar R&D program for them.