Comment by crote | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crote | Hacker News Reader

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- Nuclear power plants are rare enough that each project is basically unique.

- Nuclear power plants are very complex. They are more "engineered" than "constructed", with hundreds of kilometers of tubes and wires. Pouring the concrete is the easy part.

- Nuclear power plants deal with an incredibly dangerous environment: high pressures, high temperatures, radioactivity, hazardous chemicals. Everything has to be tested, re-tested, and certified. Many parts will be near impossible to replace once it enters production, and the plant is supposed to be operational for decades.

- Nuclear power plants are safety-critical. Contrary to many other structures of similar complexity, things can get way worse than a big explosion. They have the potential to contaminate the site (or even the surrounding country) for decades or centuries. Failure is simply not acceptable.

- Safety regulations have been getting stricter over the years, because supposedly "100% safe" plants keep having accidents and the population is not very happy about that.

The existing stock of nuclear power plants is an offshoot of several military programs. The most common design is pretty much a submarine power plant on steroids, which turned out to be less than ideal. Things like "safety" and "profit" were almost seen as a suggestion more so than a requirement.

Newly-built power plants are required to incorporate over 50 years of innovation, but it turns out almost nobody has the skills to actually build them. They have simply gotten too complex to construct!

All of the above is true enough, but it is not the full story on why US nukes cost like they do.

The ones attempted recently in South Carolina and Georgia cost so much because people in a position to block building them want it that way. Once a nuke project starts, a torrent of money starts flowing. Everybody with a stake expects a share, and none want it ever to end. Finishing a plant would plug that flow. If it looks like the flow will dry up regardless, they might deliver something at the end.

We see the same process with urban tunnels and big military procurements. It is all perfectly legal. It is probably not fixable.

Thus far, wind and solar projects have mostly avoided it, maybe in part because their legitimate costs are easy to estimate.

Existing nukes also cost more than renewables to operate, because they actually have operating costs. Big steam turbines, in particular, need regular overhauls. So, it is hard for anything with a steam turbine to compete with something that has none. Reactors need also operation, inspections, refueling, security, compliance monitoring... the list goes on.

Solar panels might need to be dusted off, or replaced. The worst that can happen to a wind turbine is to catch fire.

Wind turbines also need regular maintenance, but a lot less than big turbines.

>We see the same process with urban tunnels and big military procurements. It is all perfectly legal. It is probably not fixable.

Not being a lawyer and all that, would some of this holding of the hands-out not qualify as some sort of grift or worse? Are there not laws already in place for this stuff? Is it a case of it being too hard to prove so no prosecutions are brought?

>Not being a lawyer and all that, would some of this holding of the hands-out not qualify as some sort of grift or worse? Are there not laws already in place for this stuff? Is it a case of it being too hard to prove so no prosecutions are brought?

Practically speaking sure, but all one needs to do is hide the grift behind a veneer of altruism and people[0] lap it up. Also half the time it is the lawmakers behind the grift. Do the phrases: “Think of the children“, “we need an environmental impact report“, or “This is a building of historical significance“ ring a bell? Behind each of them is an entity(ies) looking to advance their interest, which is often, but not always, profit from the increased diligence required or profit from the obstruction and the induced scarcity.

[0]The voting electorate, anyway.

Extortion is the metaphor I use.

Francis Fukuyama uses the term "vetocracy" for our government. So many layers, so many checks and balances. Some of them were even a good idea at the time (eg in response to abusers like Robert Caro).

Every petty tyrant or crank has to be bought off, rolled over, or buried under. That takes time, resources, lawyers, political capital, stamina, tenacity.

I'm not even so sure vetocracy is a wholly bad thing, in principle. Of course people impacted by projects should be considered, heard, and hopefully accommodated. But, as others have already stated, vetocracy has been weaponized to thwart all progress, regardless of how much popular support is behind them.

For instance, we need expand our power grid, roughly 3x bigger. The challenge is our current patchwork of veto points (local, county, state, regional, national). So someone(s) will have to expend huge political capital to overhaul the regulatory and permitting system. Or we simply won't reach our goal for net zero carbon emissions.

>Extortion is the metaphor I use.

When I mentioned "grift or worse", extortion is what I was thinking of but just unable to use my brain to get to extortion. So thanks for getting me there.

I think the technical term is "patronage". I am not very clear on the details. It is just, the bigger the budget, the more people you need on board pulling for it vs. every other project after the same money. Some people will support you because they agree with your priorities. Others need persuasion. You don't personally have the means for persuasion, but the project does, so it comes from that budget.

Of course, the more persuasion you need, the more it costs, and the more backing you need. So it is usually better to budget less and plan on overruns, instead. And, finishing on time would mean cutting off all those backers; thus, the schedule is overrun, too.

Thing is, most things somebody wants to spend $billions in public money on shouldn't proceed.

One reason renewables avoid it is the projects can be built in stages, with an off ramp if the contractor turns out to have lied.

Jumbojets are hugely complex with hundreds of kilometers of pipes and wires and yet a thousand of them are in the air right this second. Complexity is a nothingburger.

A jumbo jet has countless failure modes that are completely fine where something analogous happening in a nuclear plant would wipe a city off the map.

Their core backup safety feature of being roughly bird shaped requires only a few moving parts, none of which are operating at extreme temperature or require cooling.

> A jumbo jet has countless failure modes that are completely fine where something analogous happening in a nuclear plant would wipe a city off the map.

No, the first post is correct - safety is not the issue. We build keep building dams, and dam failures have killed far, far more people than nuclear. Other comments about nimby are also off the mark. People whose properties are flooded hate dams, nimby's force delays measuring decades, yet we keep building dams.

The comment you are responding contains the answer to the riddle it posed:

> a thousand of them are in the air right this second.

If the one factory could build 1000 nuclear reactors, complexity would not be an issue there either. And I'm sure after building 1000 of them, the price would not so much as drop as plummet. Which is why small nuclear reactors built in factories are such a common meme.

But the first 100 of those small nuclear reactors will be hideously expensive based on the quotes we have from people who've actually tried to do it - far more than a couple of big plants generating the same output. And the big plants already being crushed by cost overruns.

Maybe if all these people promoting nuclear put their money where their mouth is, it could happen. There seem to be an awful lot of them. That seems to be the only way it could happen, because after decades of refusals I think we can safely say the banks aren't interested in funding a technology that turns out energy 100% more expensive than current competitors.

Dam disasters don't render the entire region indefinitely uninhabitable. Nuclear accidents have only been so small and infrequent because of the constant vigilance against allowing them to gamble with millions of lives.

> Maybe if all these people promoting nuclear put their money where their mouth is, it could happen. There seem to be an awful lot of them.

The thing is none of these people actually want nuclear power. They either want to redirect resources which would make fossil fuels irrelevant or feast forever off of the public teat whilst pretending to build a power plant.

The forces stopping nuclear power have very little to do with safety or greens or nimbys. It's a combination of their cost and of the power fossil fuels have. It just so happens that the fossil fuel interests are inadverently on the side of continuing to have human habitable land by virtue of leveraging the safety issue for their own greed.

Ironically they've probably hastened their own demise because if they hadn't forced the regulation we'd probably be too busy cleaning up nuclear disasters to think about weaning off of coal.

Sounds like you have it under control. I suggest you take your business plan to YCombinator and make some serious money.

To be fair, complex is solvable compared to complicated. You just break each of the complex steps into components that are easier to solve individually. This is part and parcel for software peeps.

As stated does sound a bit pompous, but at the core, it's not inaccurate

I'm too busy working at an energy startup I think is the best path forward for energy security: something that takes a bit more effort than being an armchair quarterback.

Where? Oklo or Radiant?

>things can get way worse than a big explosion.

Total meltdown to a China Syndrome with the slag melting its way to the water table is pretty much the worst I can imagine.

Prompt supercriticality (as happened at Chernobyl) is worse. Having that happen in a fast reactor is even worse than that -- it could be a literal nuclear explosion.

Fast reactors may be necessary for a fully nuclear powered world, because the uranium runs out too quickly without breeding. And 233U or plutonium skate much closer to the edge of prompt supercriticality, since they produce about half the delayed neutrons of 235U.

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