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Comment by schnitzelstoat | Hacker News Reader

I like the engineering of nuclear power plants, but I'm not particularly biased towards them over renewables.

But we need to greatly improve energy storage if renewables are going to work.

Places like Scotland have generated equivalent to around 97% of their entire electricity consumption from renewables - yet still consume around 13% of their energy from fossil fuels as they export the renewable energy at peak production.[1]

I also just really don't like the misinformation that surrounds nuclear energy. I majored in Physics and it's just irritating to see people so confident in their ignorance. I recommend the book "Atomic Accidents"[2] as an excellent book on the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear power plant engineering in general.

[1] https://fullfact.org/environment/scotland-renewable-energy/

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Accidents-Meltdowns-Disasters-...

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Yeah. We need a better transmission grid before we can go to 100% renewables (balancing out Scottish wind with Spanish solar). But a better transmission grid is miles cheaper than nuclear, so it's still a no brainer.

Citation? In particular, small modular reactors are estimated to produce energy at a cost which rivals natural gas (but we can’t know for sure because anti-nuclear folks have prevented us from seriously testing it) which is almost certainly less than the cost of solar/wind and tens of thousands of km of massive copper cables.

> small modular reactors are estimated to produce energy at a cost which rivals natural gas

You'd be foolish to believe those projections from salesmen. NuScale's attempt at new reactors has already doubled in cost.

So let’s get our thumb off the scales and allow them to build their technology so we can find out it’s true price? It’s equally foolish to assume that the prices won’t fall over time as we optimize.

So we have high operational costs but a lower capital cost for SMRs since we lose the size advantage of regular reactors. We then hope that these higher operational costs are offset due to the scale advantages of building many reactors. That's gonna require some huge cost savings?

You're making a lot of assumptions, including that the only difference between SMRs and older generation reactors is size. SMRs are also much simpler, with the express purpose of reducing operational costs. Maybe the operational costs would be higher, but we aren't going to know that without more robust analysis or--heaven forbid--trying out SMRs.

They will be a bigger part of the costs compared to current reactors. Which is normal because employment costs are high. It's a popular choice now because all the latest reactors in the west have huge budget overruns.

What do you mean by "thumb off the scales"? Elimination of nuclear regulation? I'm sure that would be politically sane. /s

If you were here in good faith, you would know that regulation isn't an all-or-nothing proposition.

I guess we just need omniscient philosopher-kings to tell us ahead of times which safety regulations were actually necessary. Is there R&D into crystal balls?

If you can't make good faith arguments, maybe your position isn't very strong?

I am asking you how one determines which regulations are actually necessary. Those of you making this "too much regulation" argument never seem to go into detail on that. Judging by every other industry that has ever existed, this is not a tractable problem -- one determines what regulations are necessary by failing and learning from the experience. With nuclear, how many meltdowns are you willing to tolerate to get this experience?

Thank you, this comment seems constructive.

> I am asking you how one determines which regulations are actually necessary.

This is something that experts need to work out.

> Those of you making this "too much regulation" argument never seem to go into detail on that.

Our arguments don't require us to specify specific regulation to eliminate, it suffices to note that we tolerate tens of thousands of annual deaths due to fossil fuels and we tolerate virtually zero deaths due to nuclear. We can be sure that there are regulations which are onerous for relatively little safety gains, but to your point most of us aren't experts here and can't speak to specific regulations or how they work.

> Judging by every other industry that has ever existed, this is not a tractable problem -- one determines what regulations are necessary by failing and learning from the experience.

Not at all. The number of deaths we're willing to tolerate is a choice, largely one driven by lobbyists. For example, we tolerate tens of thousands of annual fossil fuel deaths, transportation deaths, etc. The only reason we tolerate so few nuclear deaths is because of FUD campaigns.

> With nuclear, how many meltdowns are you willing to tolerate to get this experience?

Well, we could look to our own past experience or the experience of other countries which had extensive nuclear experience and virtually zero meltdowns despite far less regulation.

> This is something that experts need to work out.

Experts put these regulations into place. To cancel regulations, we will need somebody who is opposite to experts.

No, regulators (bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry and other special interests) put the regulations into place.

This is for America, I don't have anything to hand for Europe

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/study-transmiss...

Also, this is with technology we have right now that we know works. The problem with SMRs is they have always been 5-10 years away from being ready. We have to plan based on what we know now, not make pipe dreams based on technology we would like to have and which may never pan out.

> We have to plan based on what we know now, not make pipe dreams based on technology we would like to have and which may never pan out.

Same deal with solving for reliability with renewables. We should invest in solving both problems. Moreover, I suspect that "always 5-10 years away from being ready" has a lot more to do with regulators than feasibility.

The us navy has been building SMRs for decades. Their reactors don't need to generally be refueled either since they use higher grade fuels and burn them in place for 30+ years. So, there are differences but mostly these aren't cutting edge designs, they are 50 year old concepts that have been studied and understood to death.

Yes there are differences, but the fact that the NRC can't certify a reactor class that the navy builds (without interference from the NRC) is itself a problem.

> The us navy has been building SMRs for decades. Their reactors don't need to generally be refueled either since they use higher grade fuels and burn them in place for 30+ years. So, there are differences but mostly these aren't cutting edge designs, they are 50 year old concepts that have been studied and understood to death.

I have a hard time seeing nuclear weapons grade fissile materials spread around in every SMR in every town around the world as a feasible solution.

Plus, you lose lots in transmission over such distances.

Exactly, the price of nukes are roughly 100% regulation at this point. nuscale spent $500M+ just pushing paperwork at the NRC in the US and still haven't built one. It wouldn't surprise me if the NRC required global asteroid strike mitigations, just in case. The fact that not a single NRC approved design has successfully been built, should tell you that they exist to drive the costs so high has to be economically unfeasible.

Apparently, South Korea though has kept the costs down to 1980's levels.

A buddy of mine's joke is that the cheapest way to get new nuke plants in the US is to build a huge naval fleet and park them in ports.

I might note for readers of you book recommendation that despite the title, James A. Mahaffey the author also wrote a pro nuclear book and was a contributor to Power to Save the World[1]. He's definitely in the pro-nuclear camp, and is an expert on nuclear control systems, having introduced digital/computer controls to the industry.

[1]https://www.amazon.com/Power-Save-World-Nuclear-Energy/dp/03...

If we're choosing power sources based on the amount of lies told about them, then I'm afraid renewables win on that metric as well.

They invented a conspiracy theory that the entire planet's scientific community was trying to destroy the economy for secret marxism reasons for goodness sake.

You'd need to find someone who thinks Godzilla is a documentary to equal that level of nonsense.

No one is making those arguments here so why bring them up? Unlike nuclear, that misinformation isn’t suppressing investment.

Because the person he was responding to was using anti-nuclear bad arguments as a reason for using nuclear. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander.

Misinformation isn't suppressing nuclear investment, the all too real cost of nuclear is.

I repeat: bad arguments aren’t a problem for renewables as with nuclear.

I reject your claim that bad arguments are hurting nuclear. Nuclear is in trouble because of devastating correct economic arguments.

Nonsense. If it weren't for FUD campaigns, nuclear energy regulations could be more lax (there's a huge chasm between the safety of nuclear and fossil fuels and no one had a problem with fossil fuel deaths for most of the last half century) and investment could continue in finding more economical designs. Note that various Asian countries are able to build and operate even older nuclear plants economically.

Nonsense right back at you. Nuclear with a normal level of regulation, with the same level of up-fuckery seen in other industries, would have eventually reached a level of safety, but only after a long string of nuclear accidents (just like as air transport required large numbers of crashes to achieve today's safety.)

Would that have been politically realistic? I think clearly it wouldn't have been. So don't complain about a level of regulation that nuclear requires in order to exist at all.

I don't buy this at all. First of all, even assuming these regulations were required at one time, it doesn't suppose that they're still needed today to keep nuclear reasonably safe--we could ostensibly lift much of that unnecessary regulation now that things are safe and allow nuclear to compete fairly.

Secondly, the whole point of anti-nuclear FUD is/was to make nuclear "politically unrealistic", so it doesn't make sense to argue that "political realism"--not FUD--is responsible for the high levels of regulation.

Thirdly, lots of countries (China, South Korea, etc) have had nuclear programs with much lower levels of regulation and far better economics, which goes to show that, absent FUD, nuclear power can be safe enough to be "politically realistic".

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