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Comment by ifdefdebug | Hacker News Reader

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...

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> 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-...

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