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Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

    building a fission reactor takes one or two decades 
    and its kWh is costlier than alternatives

It didn't and doesn't need to be that way. Obviously we need strong regulatory oversight over nuclear power, but a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations imposed by politicians who are (a) pandering to public fear (b) heavily influence by the fossil fuel industry.

Also, talking about kWh cost in the short term is... missing a large portion of the point. Burning fossil fuels is only "cheap" if all the long term damage is ignored. Let's talk about how cheap it is once we start truly paying the price for climate change to the tune of billions of lives and many quadrillions of dollars.

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> > building a fission reactor takes one or two decades and its kWh is costlier than alternatives

> It didn't and doesn't need to be that way [..] a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations [..]

(Alleged over-)regulation is only part of the story.

"analysis, done by a team of researchers at MIT, is remarkably comprehensive. For many nuclear plants, they have detailed construction records, broken out by which building different materials and labor went to, and how much each of them cost. There's also a detailed record of safety regulations and when they were instituted relative to construction. Finally, they've also brought in the patent applications filed by the companies who designed the reactors. The documents describe the motivations for design changes and the problems those changes were intended to solve."[0]

"while safety regulations added to the costs, they were far from the primary factor. And deciding whether they were worthwhile costs would require a detailed analysis of every regulatory change in light of accidents like Three Mile Island and Fukushima"

[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...

So how are other countries e.g. South Korea building them faster than the US, yet not suffering nuclear accidents?

I presume the problem is not a lack of engineering talent in America.

> a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations imposed by politicians who are (a) pandering to public fear (b) heavily influence by the fossil fuel industry

People keep on parroting this, but could you list what these "incredibly hostile regulations" entail?

The only "new" thing I know of is the requirement in certain places (like in Sweden) to have ICSS, Independent Core Cooling System, to prevent a Fukushima situation, plus to prevent a meltdown caused by what happened at Forsmark Nuclear Plant in Sweden 2006[1]

ICSS isn't that expensive BTW. Vattenfall cited the cost of adding ICSS to their 5 reactors to about 3 billion SEK in 2020. That's about 300 million US dollars with today's exchange rate.[2]

[1]: https://analys.se/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/forsmark-incide...

[2]: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Swedish-reactors...

>ICSS isn't that expensive BTW. Vattenfall cited the cost of adding ICSS to their 5 reactors to about 3 billion SEK in 2020. That's about 300 million US dollars with today's exchange rate.

$300m seems pretty expensive to me as a cost to add to what is already the safest energy source in the world by terawatt-hour produced[0]. One-fifth the death rate of rooftop solar. 0.025% as dangerous as oil. Every terawatt-hour of energy a coal power plant produces results in as many deaths as one hundred Fukushima "situations."

[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

Rubbish.

Considering a single reactor costs €11-19 billion[1][2] to build in Western Europe currently (Olkiluoto 3, Flamanville (we haven't seen the final bill for that one yet)), an additional 300 million dollars is a drop in the bucket and not the thing that will make the project go from viable to nonviable.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#... (final)

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan... (projected, not final)

Step 1: Nuclear reactors are so expensive already, additional costs to increase safety barely matter in their overall price! This additional regulation isn't enough to make a viable plant nonviable.

Step 2: Nuclear reactors are so expensive it makes no sense to provision new ones when renewables are just around the corner! Just keep the current coal power plants running while we take another decade to increase solar grid capacity by a few terawatts.

Step 3: Go to step 1.

See also; heap fallacy. Seriously, coal power generation is so bad that if we had to reduce safety regulations to the point that we were having a Chernobyl-level meltdown every month to replace all coal with nuclear plants, we would be significantly better off for it. It's not even close. We could literally completely deregulate safety of nuclear power plants and be safer overall.

(Per the stats I shared earlier, coal power kills 100,000 people per thousand terawatt-hours produced. The world produces roughly 44,000 tWh of coal energy, resulting in 4.4 million deaths per year. Casualty estimates of Chernobyl vary wildly, but even the most pessimistic estimate produced by Greenpeace, avowed anti-nuclear activists that they are, only totals 200,000. Coal power is almost twice as bad as having a Chernobyl every month)

I think you underestimate how much lobbying the nuclear industry does.

Here's the former head of the US Nuclear regulator talking about how he worked to reduce safety regulations to make it easier to build nuclear plants. Now he thinks no new nuclear power should ever be built: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/i-oversaw-the-us-nucl...

It stands to reason that the nuclear lobby is out for its bottom line, but let’s not lose perspective on just how devastatingly deadly fossil fuel combustion is by comparison, killing an estimated 8.7 million people per year [1]. That’s 1 in 5 of all deaths globally.

Our perceptions of risk are massively skewed by the (literally) explosive nature of nuclear disasters compared to this silent holocaust to which we’re shockingly normalized.

From Our World in Data [2]:

> Nuclear energy, for example, results in 99.9% fewer deaths than brown coal; 99.8% fewer than coal; 99.7% fewer than oil; and 97.6% fewer than gas. Wind and solar are just as safe.

That’s per unit of energy generated.

Curiously, while most can likely name Chernobyl and Fukushima (perhaps fewer Windscale and Three Mile Island), what of the Banqiao Dam disaster, which killed an estimated 171,000 people the 1970s?

All that said, extrapolating the lethality of nuclear generation to a world with many more nuclear plants is fraught, precisely because there are so few data points.

There’s no escaping the fact that these are incredibly complex and expensive machines, which can fail in unexpected ways, no matter how scrupulously they’re designed to be passively safe — especially when compared to a solar PV park.

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00139...

[2]: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

> building a fission reactor takes one or two decades

> and its kWh is costlier than alternatives

> It didn't and doesn't need to be that way. Obviously we need strong regulatory oversight over nuclear power, but a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations imposed by politicians who are (a) pandering to public fear (b) heavily influence by the fossil fuel industry.

That is not true, there was an HN submission which broke down the cost of nuclear construction (am on mobile and can't easily find it right now) and cost is largely dominated by construction cost, which to a large degree (>50%) are the same as a regular thermal power plant. Regarding regulations, the nuclear lobby is actually very strong, they even managed to reduce regulations for the steam-generating cycle compared to other power plants (I think this was in the US).

> Also, talking about kWh cost in the short term is... missing a large portion of the point. Burning fossil fuels is only "cheap" if all the long term damage is ignored. Let's talk about how cheap it is once we start truly paying the price for climate change to the tune of billions of lives and many quadrillions of dollars.

But the comparison is not to fossil fuels, the comparison is to renewables. If renewables are cheaper and faster (which is the case) they will enable us to move of fossil sources faster than nuclear, so the overall emitted CO2 is less.

Fuel diversification is important too. That's something Germany seems to have forgotten when they went all in on natural gas.

Not only are the costs comparable to a carbon thermal plant, the generating equipment is identical, and the cooling needs are also identical.

Solution: build nuclear cores as close to existing coal plants as possible, shut the coal plant down, and move everything from the steam boiler to the wires to the nuclear plant.

Repeat until no coal.

The cooling needs on a LWR are actually a bit higher, per unit of electrical power output, because the steam temperature is lower than that of a coal plant. The discrepancy is much larger for combined cycle plants.

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