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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

Before we even get to the safety, and the disposal of the nuclear waste, we have huge difficulties with the basic economics and construction of nuclear in the US.

The two plants under construction, Summer and Vogtle, have been plagued by construction difficulties and cost overruns. The Summer plant was just finally cancelled today. It seems that the Vogtle plant is going to follow the same route.

The management competence and institutional knowledge needed to build these large, insanely expensive projects seems to have disappeared. The time for nuclear in the US is done. Other options are cheaper, faster, and more responsive. And that's ignoring the political aspect of it all.

http://www.utilitydive.com/news/breaking-santee-cooper-scana...

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> The management competence and institutional knowledge needed to build these large, insanely expensive projects seems to have disappeared.

And whose fault is that? Not the fault of nuclear-power supporters and advocates! Nuclear didn't die, it was killed.

Hold on, there's more than enough blame to go around.

Westinghouse Electric Company's bankruptcy and lies to Toshiba [1] weren't caused by nuclear's opponents. That's all on the heads of Westinghouse's management. And if management was competent, perhaps Summer would have been closer to being on budget.

It's not as though the AP1000 is impossible to build, other countries are doing it just fine. It's just impossible for US contractors to pull through, apparently. That's not the fault of nuclear's detractors.

[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/westinghouse...

I'm not surprised that Westinghouse behaved idiotically; they've always struck me as the Ford of washing machines, and I can only imagine what they're like at utility scale...

It sounds like the best course of action is to bring in foreign firms to construct reactors in the US; but that'll probably have to wait for the 2020 election... if it happens at all, that is.

Westinghouse built something like 25% of all nuclear reactors worldwide. That they are failing for just 4 more reactors is a bit shocking to me, honestly, and I would not have expected it.

If it takes 10 years to plan and build a new reactor, I simply can't see the point of trying it in 2020. Sizing our solar and wind resources to cover our needs during seasonal lows, building HVDC, and adding storage at 2030 prices seems like a far smarter move economically.

Unless there are improvements that halve the cost of nuclear, and make it so that it's only a $1B gamble instead of a $10B gamble, I simply can't see why anybody would put up capital. There are lots of government backed loans on these things, but even then it's going to be a hard sell to investors. Everybody has been burned by these projects.

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