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Comment by andyxor | Hacker News Reader

The author is a geologist at University of Vermont with no apparent connection to energy space except for his environmental activism.

on a separate note, NASA had a recent breakthrough after decades of "paper reactors", building and testing the safest and smallest reactor so far based on a new solid core design https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/kilopower/

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environmental activism.

My physics teacher in high school was a retired naval nuclear engineer/tech/something. He blamed Jane Fonda (the actress) for a huge portion of the anti-nuclear activism that basically entrenched the power of oil companies and cartels. It's funny/sad how badly the save-the-forest and anti-nuke activism of the 1970s is coming back to bite us so hard now, with wildfires and global warming.

Makes me wonder which activist movements today will turn out to have been net negative in another 40-50 years.

It’s cold hard economic issues that held back nuclear power rather than any environmental concerns. The US is actually close to the ideal nuclear mix from a cost basis.

At best operating at full capacity with moderate subsides it’s roughly competitive with coal operating 24/7, but the grid has wildly fluctuating demand and nuclear’s price per kWh is roughly 3x as expensive at 30% power output as at 100%.

France was able to export a lot of nuclear power while importing significant electricity to meet demand and they still had capacity factors fall below 70%.

The most surprising issue with nuclear is actually fuel costs. Yes, it’s cheap to mine and enrichment isn’t that expensive, but refueling ends up being quite expensive in part because it’s slow. 3+ weeks of downtime every 1.5-2 years is effectively a 1.5+% fuel cost even if everything else was free. Dropping that to 1 week on it’s own wouldn’t really change the economics much but there are many such issues.

Economic issues were caused in part by political opposition. An extreme degree of reviews and legal objections can't help the economics.

And research into new designs that might improve on economics and safety isn't going to be as profitable or as common if there is always going to be a virtually insurmountable hurdle of objections on spurious environmental grounds, so the economic pressure that has caused coal plants to become more efficient can't be applied.

Plus, that coal vs nuclear economic calculation doesn't account for the costs of warming, nor for the intended electrification that abundant nuclear power was supposed to enable.

It all has its roots in disproportionate opposition and silly old movies that portrayed nuclear plants as potentially exploding with ten megaton blasts.

> And research into new designs that might improve on economics and safety isn't going to be as profitable or as common if there is always going to be a virtually insurmountable hurdle of objections on spurious environmental grounds, so the economic pressure that has caused coal plants to become more efficient can't be applied.

The core economic issues aren’t based on the physical design of the reactors. Better designs might have dropped net costs by 20%, but that doesn’t allow you to follow the demand curve. It doesn’t allow you to operate without vast quantities of water. It doesn’t reduce fuel costs, or allow efficient operation in extreme temperatures. Let alone figure out reasonable regulations in a small corrupt country that’s just going to build one.

Worse, the industry can’t afford to invest it’s own money in these kind of improvements. We aren’t talking 100’s of millions or low billions, were talking 10’s of billions that might possibly payoff decades in the future. People see Nuclear already reviving billions in research funding and it hasn’t really paid off yet. That’s what makes such investments difficult.

It's clear these challenges don't nessesarially make Nuclear expensive when you look at France. They have the highest mix of Nuclear by some margin and the cheapest power in Western Europe.

The problem seems to be that 'we' don't know how to build nuclear reactors anymore. France has to replace their aging nuclear powerplants in the next few decades. But building a new one proves to be very difficult.

It is not clear to me what changed. There have been a few accidents. But Chernobyl is mostly unrelated to current reactors. Fukushima is of course more annoying but it doesn't explain why so many current projects that try build a nuclear powerplant are failing.

I suspect nuclear did as well as it did, in the past, because it was viewed as a thing that the best people should work on. Now, it's viewed as a backwater, or even a dead end. This won't attract the same kind of people.

The problem is more that we can't imagine decentralised open power.

France doesn't have the cheapest power in Europe. Even for non-households, they are beaten by a large margin by the likes of Denmark - where wind is the biggest source of generation. And household consumers pay pretty much the average European price for electricity. [1]

If you want to look at France, google the most recent French attempt to add nuclear capacity - Flamanville 3. It's 15 years late and nearly 6 times over budget and still not operational.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Indeed. This 'success story' led to a state law (2015-992, from 2015, the "loi relative à la transition énergétique pour la croissance verte") stating that the part of nuke-produced electricity must fall to less than 50% in 2025, from 72% then, and that renewables must replace it.

In France nuke-power is backed by gas (which produced 10.3% of gridpower in 2017).

Aging reactors more and more become a threat: https://www.liberation.fr/futurs/2016/03/03/il-faut-imaginer...

Curious. Denmark has either the 2nd highest or the 4th lowest power prices in Europe depending on whether we're talking about household or non-household users.

There must be something strange going on there beyond just having wind power, that is a huge divergence. Driven mainly by taxes I see.

edit: Sorry - I missed your last sentence on first reading - so yes it's taxes.

Danmark is a huge outlier in terms of how much it taxes household electricity consumption. Including VAT, nearly 70% of a Danish household electricity is tax. Non-households are taxed much more lightly. This is a policy decision I guess to encourage more efficient utilisation.

But the actual wholesale cost of electricity in Denmark is very low because of their use of cheap wind power.

I don't have anything more up-to-date than this[1] which is for 2019 but the second page shows a bar graph where the level of tax on household electricity is shown.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/2995521/10826603/8-0...

Heavy French nuclear subsides separate the cost of electricity from what consumers are paying. It’s not obvious what’s going on because their nuclear generation is done by the government which doesn’t need to balance the books.

This is so opaque even the Cour des Comptes wrote in an official report that their is no clear accounting of nuclear investments. https://ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/EzPublish/Rapport_th... (page 270)

Imagine how cheap that will seem if we continue at the current inflation rates in 25 years :)

>that coal vs nuclear economic calculation doesn't account for the costs of warming, nor for the intended electrification that abundant nuclear power was supposed to enable.

Even ignoring warming, coal externalizes a huge cost in the form of local pollution and its effects on health and destruction of natural resources.

> silly old movies that portrayed nuclear plants as potentially exploding with ten megaton blasts

Don’t forget the radioactive monsters/kaiju (Godzilla, et al) or fish (Simpsons). Those couldn’t have helped much either.

Simpsons showed no matter how corrupt management (Burns) and how incompetent staff (Homer), nuclear power was generally fine.

Government's ignore activists all the time. Not sure why it was apparently so effective in the case of nuclear power.

The target of the activist is not the government, it is other citizens. The goal is to increase the disapproval and outrage above the activation energy of government agencies or legislatures. Anti-nuke activism hit as the first wave of the environmental movement was peaking (think anti-pollution efforts against some really, really bad industrial practices and the anti-litter movement) and it also pulled in a large swathe of anti-war activists who were looking for their next mission after the Vietnam war wound down. Combine these with some genuine hubris on the part of the nuclear energy industry and a public that has a hard time assessing actual risk and you get a perfect storm of sorts. It was easy to pass regulations and laws that made nuclear more difficult to deploy and casually ignore the consequence that this had on making petroleum products and coal the only viable alternatives.

The US government absolutely listen to people when it comes to things like approvals because politicians need to get re-elected. Harry Reid stopped the yucca mountain complex after the govt had already agreed to it for nuclear storage.

chernobyl

And numerous more. [0x0] Plus nuclear power was never found to be cost-effective. Maybe this decade. I understand reactors will be more uniform in new designs.

[0x0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiatio...

I'm not making an argument as to whether nuclear energy is good or bad, cost effective or not. My prior on that is "it depends", but I don't know much about it, so it's a rather weakly informative prior.

I was specifically addressing parent's point. Chernobyl had a disproportionate effect on the public perception of the matter. I hadn't even heard of half the disasters in that list, for instance.

Not on that list is the Three Mile Island accident that happened almost simultaneously with the release of the movie "The China Syndrome", seven years before Chernobyl. In the US at least, I suspect that was very influential.

More consequential was the passage in 1978 of PURPA. With PURPA, the grids began to be opened to non-utility competition -- and this was cheaper than utility nuclear plants. Initially it was mostly just cogeneration, or at least things that were nominally cogeneration, but mostly run to make power to sell to the grid. But this (and the cessation of the growth in electric demand) ruined the case for new utility nuclear plants.

The safety concerns of the activists could have been quelled by developing thorium as a fuel. it appears to be very safe, too safe maybe to get funding. Instead, the technology that got developed was the one that created weapons grade material as a byproduct.

"We'll build one near you. Oh we could build a completely safe one, but instead we're going to build the mostly safe one. We're willing to put you at risk if the commies also feel more at risk."

I don't normally sympathize with nimbys, but I think that pitch deserved some pushback.

I think that falls under Myth #6 in the list of thorium reactor myths.

https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html

Why the downvote? Here is a citation [1] that molten salt reactor was killed for political reasons.

Or was I jumping to conclusions to suggest that activists knew or cared about such details?

[1] http://moltensalt.org/references/static/downloads/pdf/WhyMSR...

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