Why does nuclear power plant construction cost so much?
progress.institute
progress.institute
[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/dk/podcast/jigar-shah-on-the-does...
[1] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/frances-efficiency-in-t... [2] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/read...
Also that doesn't include design. French design was done in the 60's, and resulted in UNGG prototypes which were abandoned in favor of buying a Westinghouse PWR license. All french reactors are based on that license.
Still an amazing feat, considering it's what provides power to France to this day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
That's garbage.
- The reason Flamanville 3 takes so much time is precisely because it is a prototype on a new design that never have been produces in series, nor even tested. That supports 100% what is said here: If you want to reduce cost, mass produce.
- Submarines and carrier nuclear reactors are completely different beast that have nothing to do with either Flammanville 3 or the existing nuclear park.
To be completely fair, the french nuclear industry is a small world. DCNS (now called Naval Group) did design and manufacture thermal exchanger for civilian nuclear reactors. On the other hand, if I remember correctly, they do work with Areva (now Orano) for some part of the nuclear submarine. Company that can produce parts (even things like tubing or screws) for nuclear reactors are very few, so they often end up working for civilian and military application.
All of this to say that the civilian and military nuclear industry are very much intertwined, feed each other and in many ways, keep each other alive.
No, this reactor type (EPR) is a mere evolution. Proof: https://www.irsn.fr/savoir-comprendre/surete/presentation-hi...
[1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrale_nucl%C3%A9aire_en_Fra...
What I read:
model : first reactor -> last reactor
CP0 : 65 months -> 60 months
CP1 : 73 months -> 64 months
CP2: 56 months -> 79 months
P4: 82 months -> 74 months
P'4: 85 months -> 89 months
N4: 151 months -> 104 months
Aka design 1 has 500 pumps, design 2 has 600 and is safer but now there’s more equipment to main and more complex plumbing etc.
Ideally it shouldn't be the case that something like building a power plant to produce electricity shouldn't require political will; just willing investors and operators who desire to make a profit.
...As we can see in our efforts to avoid climate change.
> France and US are allies
Probably not after such an event.
According to Yves Bréchet [1], former head of the French Atomic Energy Commission, the main difference is not regulation, government or public support. It's something that should speak a lot to the engineers on HN, but is almost always absent in public debates: the lack of technical expertise. Think expert welders, pipe-fitters, boiler makers, etc. The expertise required when making a nuclear power plant is very high, including and especially when it comes to welding, quality of steel, etc.
Costly mistakes were made while welding critical parts of Flamanville 3 for instance, requiring expansive and expensive rework. I don't think Hinkley Point C is faring much better. On the other side of the world China has been building nuclear power plants relentlessly: they have all the expertise needed. If you allow me a slight exaggeration, given France and UK massive de-industrialization over the last few decades, we are now amateurs compared to China.
Again, it's not an issue of regulation. It's just that when you don't build things the know-how gets lost very very quickly. Something that should get hammered in the head of all CEOs/managers/decision maker...
[1] https://www.thinkerview.com/france-la-strategie-du-canard-sa...
"It was estimated that the plant’s investment cost would rise to between 22 and 23 yuan per watt from an originally budgeted 14 yuan"
So about 60% cost overrun.
You don't even need to oay the engineers more, not only because you have engineers, but because EDF for example can be given attractive enough terms to build and operate overseas, as it has in the UK.
A nuclear power plant is:
- a 10 year investment delay (with no return until completed)
- could be cancelled at any moment (high risk)
- with a very uncertain price target (solar/wind + grid storage will probably be half the cost or less of what it is today)
- can't be expanded
- very likely to balloon in cost and be a total financial quagmire
Solar/wind can be scalably purchased, installed, and expanded as needed. The costs will drop continuously, replacement and maintenance is easy, there's no nuclear waste to get rid of, and can very reliably be specced in terms of cost for generation.
Solar and wind is excellent investment for those wanting to compete when supply in the grid is high and prices are low. Nuclear, hydro, storage and fossil fuels are there to compete with supply is low and prices high.
It's not just that NPPs are expensive to build, and unpredictably priced in ways that make the price of power generated uncompetitive. They are also a large and hard to predict liability after they stop generating power and the income from selling that power.
There is no example of "this is how to do it." New designs have to emerge and be proven before it is possible to build new NPPs with as much cost certainty as other kinds of power generation.
Oooooh buddy, you mustn't be familiar with some layers French bureaucracy.
Imagine a unionized DMV.
But the French train company SNCF abandoned the Californian high-speed rail project, citing local political dysfunctionality and comparing it unfavorably to ... Morocco.
https://www.businessinsider.com/french-california-high-speed...
It's not that the knowledge is inaccessible, the problem is that the not-invented-here syndrome compounded by administrative red-tape, powerful counter lobbies and greedy actors make those projects prohibitively expensive.
If you mean congress, I think the more important questions are - who would lobby for it? - who would lobby against it?
It really sticks is my craw that a misinformed but activist actress can torpedo an industry for half a century.
We did 6 batches of 6-to-20 reactors.
Either way, US carriers are probably one of the safest places for nuclear, as they’re mission critical for the life of the carrier and most likely to receive the utmost care… Plus the US has a long history of rubber stamping virtually unlimited funds to solve any military problem, whether the people approve or not. The handling of the waste is still a major concern, but what about the consequences of a torpedo compromising the reactor in warfare?
Most countries, including the US and France, did a build out in the 70's/80's and then basically stopped. France a bit later than the US, but both essentially did the same thing. Checking the wiki list[0] and sorting by operation year you can see 4 things. 1) the vast majority of reactors were built in the 70's, 2) the newest reactor was built in the 90's (operational 2001), 3) the most recent reactors took longer to go into operation (including a few at 16 years, where the 70's build out was typically 6-7 years), 4) almost all 70s/80's reactors are of the same type and same power level (CP1, CP2, P4 REP 1300). We actually see the exact same story in the US (see Watts Bar, ouch).
On the other hand, South Korea didn't do their build out till the mid 80's and continued into the 90's. Then we see the wall hit in the 2000's with the APR 1400. Japan did a bit better and strangely looks like the big success story, especially considering how many reactors such a small country built. Interestingly only Mitsubishi reactors are still operational... Canada is also a good success story but also hasn't built anything since the late 80's (but last reactor was still <10yrs).
Countries like Sweden, started their build out but then there was a hard stop. Sweden had nothing past '85. Germany isn't too far off, but it is also a different story. Ditto for UK.
I intentionally left out China and Russia because different economic structures and because the stories are a bit different even though might appear similar to what I'm discussing at face value (note that my comments are vastly oversimplified, with some things only being alluded to), but it is worth paying attention to the above patterns and think about how the economic structure might reinforce some of those aspects, then think about the western countries different styles during their build out phases (how it actually worked).
The nuclear story is long and complicated. Even this wall of text is oversimplified. This is part of the problem: we like our simple talking points but as speakers are often unwilling to admit that these are only part of the stories or as listeners rebut the speaker as if they are only considering a single factor. It makes real conversation almost impossible and both play a role and build over time. Which is not too dissimilar to a few problems that happened in the nuclear industry.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
Compare the $15 billion funded by the industry with Fukushima looking to cost at least $150 billion to clean up.
Unfortunately your misconception is very popular, and I think a large part of why a lot of people don't support nuclear.
Renewables + storage can provide "synthetic baseload" at a cost that will likely be lower than nuclear in most places, especially for a new nuclear plant whose construction has not started yet (it will compete with renewables + storage of the future, since they are installed much faster and don't have to start now to be done at the same time.)
An important reminder is to not use just batteries for storage. Many bogus attempts to show renewables can't do it assume batteries are used for long term storage. This is a technological strawman argument. Use e-fuels instead. With renewables and electrolysers crashing in price, green hydrogen will become remarkably cheap.
> Indian developer secures 300 MW renewables project with $0.050/kWh bid
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/05/19/indian-developer-secu...
Nuclear costs $0.12 - $0.20/kWh in comparison.
https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...
You'd be way better off spending that money on nuclear (including accident cleanup) and healthcare.
This is one of those areas where an technology neutral law should be applied. Rather than have the government pay for insurance, move that to a tax on the consumer based on how much energy is consumed and the cost of accidents and environmental impact. For energy produced by fossil fuels that would be any costs associated with global warming (including any accidents and extreme weather), for hydro it would be flooding, and for nuclear it would be nuclear accidents. Base the insurance cost on the historical accident rate and the predicted rate in the future.
That would make renewable energy even cheaper in optimal weather, energy produced from fossil fuel a few order of magnitudes more expensive for every watt consumed, and nuclear and hydro would increase by a modest sum.
This quote sums it up nicely:
> It doesn’t matter how standardized your design is if you end up needing to change it on every project to meet new requirements.
It's just that no such merchant nuclear plant has ever been built anywhere. There's a serious lack of dog food here.
If you thought Bhopal and Exxon Valdez were bad, wait until some CEO decides to juice The Atomic Corporation's Q4 earnings by skipping a few safety inspections and half the Eastern seaboard no longer needs streetlights because everyone's tumors glow in the dark.
Perhaps things are different now, but when I was going through the Navy's cram course for the [chief] engineer exam after two years of pretty-intensive sea duty, we worked through some what-if scenarios that they hadn't exposed us to in the year-long basic nuclear-propulsion course. That experience was a real eye-opener — especially coupled with having seen shipyard workers in "action" during my ship's in-port maintenance periods.
I still remember the exact moment in the cram course — sitting in a conference room at a Navy base on a gorgeous San Diego day — when I thought, oh, s__t, civilian workers shouldn't be running nuclear-power plants that are located anywhere near civilization. This was about a year before Three Mile Island and about eight years before Chernobyl.
To be clear, I was comfortable with the Navy's operating practices, which — thanks to the Rickover culture — were ferociously focused on safety and on second-checking everything in sight.
Supposedly there are inherently-safer civilian reactor designs out there now that are less vulnerable to human f*-ups; I haven't kept up and wouldn't be competent to judge.
So true. This also explains why France never had any major mishap degenerating into a severe accident.
There is an old joke: "1 worker opens some valve, 10 workers check that the valve is indeed open, 30 engineers study causes, consequences and ways to cope with this process".
However nothing is perfect, and a major accident may also be triggered by some terrorist/desperate mind/military/... action.
There are other parameters: hot waste, geo-strategic challenges tied to uranium, lowering ore grades inducing more and more polluting extraction processes...
Moreover we don't know how to build reactors anymore upon a decent schedule and budget: 9 out 10 of those built since the 2000's are late and overbudget, and most other ones are opaque projects.
Not necessarily: It depends on the power level the reactor was run at, and for what period of time. [0]
> they just didn't internalize how much heat was actually still being produced
It's not apparent that this was actually the case. I found this explanation, which makes sense to me (although I stress I have no particular knowledge of the incident): "... the [TMI] plant crew’s response was guided by wisdom received from another domain [i.e., Navy submarine plants]. ... They were under strict guidelines to never let the pressurizer go solid [which can be catastrophic in a submarine], and yet it was. The internal stress to meet this guideline was so severe, they left the rails and violated another guideline (shutting down the ECCS)." [1]
This actually reinforces my basic point above about the undesirability of putting pressurized-water reactors near civilian population centers: Human error is inevitable, and it's undesirable to have a system where such errors would be catastrophic if compounded — and human error can indeed come in multiples, with each error compounding the effects of earlier ones.
Here's a follow-up piece from the same author, about the effect confirmation bias at TMI and Fukushima (quoting another person): "Every reading that was true and really bad, they thought of as erroneous. Every reading that was erroneous but really good, they relied upon. That’s a trend that I always see in emergency response. Operators want to believe the instruments that lead them to the conclusion they want to get to." [2]
[0] https://www.quora.com/How-much-time-does-it-take-for-a-nucle...
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2016...
[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2016...
Because they would still have to build the plants somewhere, and the legal environment in the US is such that anywhere you build your project will be snowed under by NIMBY Lawsuits and your investment will never pay back anything. So nobody wants to try.
Can you give some examples?
> There are strict limits on what such lawsuits can do.
On paper that might be true. But the actual law rarely matches the law on paper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_River_Nuclear_Plant?us...
I'm sure I read an article about this plant/procedure and they were looking to save 30 million dollars on a billion dollar plant.
Yet there will be people still calling for private profit-motivated companies to run everything and this will be dismissed as a one-off, never-happen-again sort of event.
edit: I think it's worth including this quote too:
Gregory Jaczko, former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, stated, "That's a multi-billion dollar asset that had to be shut down because of improper work planning, improper understanding of how to properly do this containment retrofit".
...then you have learned a valuable lesson, not about failures of the private sector, but about failures of government regulation. Of all the things to entrust to government regulation, I would put critical infrastructure of any sort last on the list. The reason our infrastructure is such a mess is that governments insist on regulating it up one side and down the other, and regulatory capture is a thing. It's much easier for nefarious private companies to buy government regulations that allow them to cut corners, than it would be if they had to actually sell their wares in a true competitive free market with actual liability for any damage done.
Because of competition. If you have regulatory capture you avoid competition that then allows the cutting of corners. Without that regulatory capture you have, in your straw man example, no regulations, and hence zero barrier to entry which actually should prevent at least some cutting of corners. Though I'd go for regulation that doesn't prevent competition, but that's just me.
If there's a true competitive free market, first, consumers won't even buy petroleum products unless those are the most cost effective for what they're doing. And in a true competitive free market, the huge infrastructure we have that gives a huge advantage to petroleum-based fuels might not even exist, certainly not in the form it currently exists, which is a product of constant government intervention and subsidies.
Second, in a true competitive free market, an oil company that contaminates thousands of miles of beaches with a spill can't get shielded from meaningful liability by courts that interpret the law to favor corporations, on the grounds that, after all, they were following the regulations, so it couldn't have been wilful mismanagement or intentional cutting of corners with disregard for safety, it must have been just an unlucky accident. (For example, look at the various lawsuits against Exxon after the Valdez spill and the rulings and long term outcome of those.) In our current regulatory environment, paying some fines now and then or having to defend a few lawsuits is just the cost of doing business. In a true competitive free market, such companies would be out of business, because they would have to literally make whole every person harmed by a spill, just like an ordinary person does when they commit a tort.
Where does that liability come from if not regulation?
I think every HN user who programs knows that the process of copy-pasting comes with it's own danger. You are not automatically getting a working thing if the context you are pasting into differs ever so slightly.
If one plans to build a lot of nuclear plants that context might be something you can control. One of the things I would worry about is water and how to cool it.
Last summer most of France's nuclear power plants were switched off because the rivers they use for cooling were dried out. And the presidictions on the climate catastrophe have gotten worse.
The issue is we build 1 or 2 plants at a time with a given design and by the time those plants are finished (10+ years) new regulations and new standards are in practice (see Gen II vs Gen III vs Gen III+ vs Gen IV reactors).
The good news is that Gen IV reactors, if approved, are much cheaper to build than Gen III/III+. The bad news is nobody wants to build them.
In 2014 Westinghouse still touted high confidence in affordable, predictable construction for its Generation III AP1000 design:
https://web.archive.org/web/20141225195417/http://westinghou...
From the outset, the AP1000 PWR was designed to reduce capital costs and to be economically competitive with contemporary fossil-fueled plants. This requires lower overnight construction costs and higher confidence in the construction schedule.
The AP1000 plant reduces the amount of safety-grade equipment required by using passive safety systems. Consequently, less Seismic Category I building volume is required to house the safety equipment (approximately 45 percent less than a typical reactor). The AP1000 plant’s modular construction design further reduces the construction schedule and the construction risks, with work shifted to factories with their better quality and cost control as well as labor costs that are less than those at the construction site.
This also allows more work to be done in parallel. The use of heavy lift cranes enables an “open top” construction approach, which is effective in reducing construction time.
With new computer-modeling capabilities, Westinghouse is able to optimize and choreograph the construction plan of an AP1000 unit in advance by simulation. The result is a very high confidence in the construction schedule.
In actuality, AP1000 construction went so far over budget and behind schedule that it bankrupted Westinghouse 3 years later:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westinghouse_Electric_Company#...
My point was that no one has ever promised to go over budget and be late.
Like one that can have its liquid fuel removed by just piping?
That's very development was done using a closet-sized reactor that could be easily powered up and powered down so it CAN scale with demand?
Whose design is inherently meltdown-proof?
Which uses almost all its fuel so there's no nuclear waste to transport?
That can breed its fuel from Thorium?
The time to invest in this was 20 years ago. Certainly the viability of nuclear missed the boat 10 years ago.
Nuclear will have to wait for solar/wind/battery and other grid levelling alternatives (home solar + storage, EVs-as-grid-batteries) to mature and develop before they have a stable economic target.
Then nuclear needs to figure out how to make that target. I think it is a LFTR, but who knows. I don't think solid fuel rods are the way. Too much waste, too much danger inherent to the fuel packaging.
And seriously, "the institute for progress"? The nuclear industry is so out of touch their marketing and lobbying is 30 years out of date.
Selling a basic design or a micro reactor means the industry would have to compete for the first time.
She would bring one of the fans home and say “Look! I just sold 10 of these for $1,000,000”
The fans themselves were cheap to manufacture. But they were SO incredibly important that they could NOT fail under any circumstance. (They were mostly fans meant to cool electronic systems, and if they failed, would cause the plane or space craft to explode, literally)
The fans were so expensive because they had to go through so many quality checks to ensure they would sustain every environment imaginable, compounded with the fact that there’s no scale in demand (no one other than Boeing, NASA, etc is going to buy a tiny $100k fan)
Tiny production volume + huge quality requirements/standards = very expensive product.
I assume a similar dynamic applies to many components in a nuclear power plant. Volume is very low and the quality/reliability requirements are very high.
1) Everything had to be manufactured in the US with all the requisite paperwork
2) Every non-destructive test under the sun was required for every distinct part, including an encyclopedia's-worth of paperwork per test per part
In this case, it's not the parts, or even the design that breaks the bank. It's the validation.
See also "certified" versus "experimental" general aviation aircraft.
Say you have 10 independent critical components each with a 0.99 probability of not failing. Well the probability of nothing failing in the system is 0.99^10 ≈ 0.9. So your collection of parts each with a 1% chance of failure has a 10% chance of some critical component failing overall.
Of course it’s more complicated because in real life nothing is really independent, and failure of one component will be coupled to failure in another. This makes simple solutions like redundancy not necessarily helpful (and sometimes even detrimental).
A friend of mine builds a component for a satellite system and the FDIR mechanisms need to be chosen very carefully, as adding more fail-safes can actually make the system overall more error prone.
There's an interesting blog post on from AWS about that topic [0]. Turns out adding more fallbacks and fail-safes is actually discouraged there.
[0] https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/avoiding-fallback-in...
My theory might be speculative and totally off the mark. But when you compare deaths per TWh of energy produced, coal is responsible for almost 3 orders of magnitude more deaths than nuclear. So maybe the real question is "how has coal power stayed so cheap?" or "if we tried to make coal power as safe as nuclear, what would it cost?"
[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...
It's very simple: the only way to 100% prevent an incident is the absence of production at all. If your incentive is to avoid incidents at all cost, you are incentivized to prevent production entirely.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_the_Earth
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/28...
It is well documented
The search to find the capsule cost four million dollars and there were global news stories warning people to avoid the highway the (very, very long) highway the truck had driven down.
In other countries (e.g. Soviet ones) where precautions like that haven't been taken, those capsules have been found after dozens of people caught cancer due to regular exposure to a capsule that just happened to end up near them. Presumably there are more that haven't been found, and those countries just accept a higher rate of cancer than the rest of the world.
Avoiding those scenarios is what costs so much.
> The capsule, part of a gauge used to measure the density of iron ore...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/1/31/australian-nuclear-...
More info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Australian_radioactive...
Terrifying Wikipedia rabbit hole:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...
Also medical radiation machines around the time that
Those millions of dollars could have saved a dozen lives, while odds are very high that capsule would have not been found by a civilian until after decaying to a harmless level. In the very unlikely event of being found it would likely have killed only one or two people.
I'm stating that money IS lives. If you spend $100 million to save one person when you could spend $100 million to save 10 people you're wasting 9 lives.
Even purely commercial monetary gains can be inefficiently converted into lives via government taxes that then get spent on road safety, pollution regulation or healthcare.
I'm also cynically skeptical that the money would go to road safety or healthcare or some other noble cause if it wasn't spent here. It seems more likely that the money would have stayed with whatever branch of government spent it, and instead it would've been used to buy a new tank or patrol cars or some such. Or in true Catch-22 fashion, they'd spend $3.5 million on a report on how to spend the remaining $500k but the report runs over budget and costs the full $4 million.
You would expect that if risk of radiation source loss underlies cost then they would be much more expensive.
Also, I wonder if the US has accumulated know-how to lower the cost of nuclear power plant construction. Korea has continued to build nuclear power plants, and it is clear that it has the know-how to cut costs.
> In November 2012 it was discovered that over 5,000 small components used in five reactors at Yeonggwang Nuclear Power Plant had not been properly certified; eight suppliers had faked 60 warranties for the parts. Two reactors were shut down for component replacement, which was likely to cause power shortages in South Korea during the winter.[25] Reuters reported this as South Korea's worst nuclear crisis, highlighting a lack of transparency on nuclear safety and the dual roles of South Korea's nuclear regulators on supervision and promotion.[26] This incident followed the prosecution of five senior engineers for the coverup of a serious loss of power and cooling incident at Kori Nuclear Power Plant, which was subsequently graded at INES level 2.[25][27]
> In 2013, there was a scandal involving the use of counterfeit parts in nuclear plants and faked quality assurance certificates. In June 2013 Kori 2 and Shin Wolsong 1 were shut down, and Kori 1 and Shin Wolsong 2 ordered to remain offline, until safety-related control cabling with forged safety certificates is replaced.[28] Control cabling in the first APR-1400s under construction had to be replaced delaying construction by up to a year.[29] In October 2013 about 100 people were indicted for falsifying safety documents, including a former chief executive of Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power and a vice-president of Korea Electric Power Corporation.[30]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_South_Korea#H...
https://ieefa.org/articles/european-pressurized-reactors-nuc....
The cost overrun is a global problem.
The five European Pressurized Reactors (EPRs) designed by French utility EDF have all suffered unanticipated issues that have led to costly delays and soaring price
Findings of a 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysis that found successive iterations of a new nuclear design generally cost more than the original project
Although a pair of Chinese EPRs have been completed and are generating power, one unit was shut down for more than a year because of faulty fuel rods.
Costs and delays have also plagued EPRs in France, the United Kingdom, and Finland, where the completion of the Olkiluoto 3 reactor has been delayed 17 years
This largely explain the complexity of the design: it would probably have been easier to make either an evolution of the Framatome N4 reactor, or the latest Siemens reactor. Combining both and trying to please all industrial partners (industrial work-share...) added a lot of complexity.
Hence the simpler EPR 2 design that is being worked on, presumably without Siemens Konvoi involvement in the design (although probably still as a subcontractor).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)
EDIT: clarity
When talking about nuclear power it seems like always someone else is the bogeyman.
And frankly, I don’t care. I look for flaws in processes, rather than trying to assign blame. Especially trying to assign blame to a country…
So my claim is that the design complexity is due to forcing Framatome (then Areva) and Siemens into designing something together. An alliance willed by politicians, in the name of Europe, or maybe French-German cooperation, but certainly not something wanted by the industrial players.
There lies the original flaw. The rest is just consequences.
I’m sure Framatome would have preferred to iterate on its own design (itself an iteration on a design of Westing House, Fr-am-atome stands for French-American-Atome). Same for Siemens.
12 years ago, when Germany decided to get out of nuclear power altogether, the EPR was already designed. Contracts were signed. Constructions ongoing.
Do you really think the design complexity would suddenly go away 12 years ago? France, UK, Finland and China signed for that overly complex EPR design, and that’s what they are getting.
Much faster in China, because they actually know how to build things, while in (at least some parts of) Europe we seem to have dropped the ball quite a bit… but that’s another subject.
> [...] the energy transition,” said Frank Bass, an IEEFA editor and author of the study. “Unfortunately, [...]
The site also seems to be a content farm, with the article rehashing the MIT study already posted here.
This whole system of retroactively requiring changes made is absurdly costly and it's why we're stuck in terms of building out new capacity. This is not de-regulation, just changing how we regulate this from something that is actively antagonistic to something that is not.
My favorite example of this is that during the golden era of cheap nuclear power mentioned in articles like this, it was the norm to run all the redundant control and monitoring wiring through the same narrow duct in a wall meant to stop fire spreading, fill it with highly flammable foam, and test the foam for air leaks using a bare candle flame. The way we learned this was a bad idea was because workers at Brown's Ferry Nuclear Power Plant actually managed to start a fire and take out a bunch of supposedly redundant monitoring and control systems whilst flooding the control room with smoke. This bad design made both the redundancy and the firestops that were meant to be there ineffective, and the stricter fire regulations required to prevent issues like this are a major cost.
You can't just assume that because something hasn't caused a major catastrophe yet that it's safe to continue doing either. This is such bad engineering practice and has played a role in so many major disasters across multiple industries there's even a specific name for it: the normalization of deviance. It's dangerous because it invalidates all the engineering and safety calculations that were meant to prevent disaster, replacing them with a gamble where no-one really knows the odds.
This is a false dichotomy. Even if you ignore renewables, there is still gas and combined cycle plants.
Tsunamis do not happen everywhere, but the regulators found the risk to be systemic. As an example: A nuclear reactor in Sweden had a severe incident in 2006 when many of the "defense in depth" layers had been accidentally removed through freak occurrences and upgrades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J...
When your "safety" regulation is costing a billion dollars per QALY then by imposing it you are killing thousands of people, because that money could have instead been spend on other things like cancer screening that would let you save a thousand times as many lives per dollar.
The vast majority of that cleanup is incredibly QALY inefficient, spending millions removing tiny bits of radiation from soil that would cause a hundredth of a cancer case. This is because the rules are that they need to return the area to the same radiation levels it used to have, not merely to a safe enough level that further action would be QALY inefficient.
Even in 2012 the natural reduction in radiation meant you have only a few square kilometers[1] with exposure levels over 20uSv/h, the level at which we can actually detect a cancer increase. An area that seems to have had less than a thousand people judging by satellite photos. There is no way to justify spending $150 billion cleaning up something that would kill only a couple of people (particularly when you can just pay them the old value of the land/housing and then let them decide whether they want to accept the increased cancer risk) when even in Japan you can save a thousand lives with that money.
[1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/uploadedImages/wnn/Images...
Enough that no one is building one of the latter (not France, not China, not South Korea), and everyone is building one of the former (including France, China and South Korea)
Why there is a large contingent of people who think nuclear doesn't need storage is a genuine mystery to me. There's been more storage built for nuclear than for any other power source.
Leaving aside Soviet-era propaganda and that contribution, this would lead to regular Chernobyl-style events if there was no requirement to implement reactively discovered safety processes.
I am reminded of my summer internship installing a computer system in a sewage plant. One of my jobs was testing the connection of the computer system to sensors. I needed a guide to show me where the sensors were located, and then I needed to attach a multimeter to the wires while someone on the computer end sent a signal. So two people needed.
However, there were six of us: The guide. The guy who could open the sensor cover. The guy who could attach the clips to the wires. The guy who read the meter. The guy who made sure each person only did his part of the job. And me. 300% of the required labor, so 300% of the costs.
This makes communication chains much shorter which usually leads into better end result. Also when things go wrong finding who is at fault is easier and it is more likely to be some big company that actually has money/proper insurance to be able to take care of it instead of some 2 or 3 person company that caused a multimillion fuckup and thus they would just go bankrupt instead of paying.
This creates a chain where the main contractor goes out to find labor, they find someone who promises fifty engineers for a good price. This company doesn’t either have fifty engineers sitting idle. Maybe they have ten. So they go out to find forty engineers. Rinse and repeat until the price that’s offered is too low for anyone to accept, or they’ve found their allocation of engineers.
The only way to prevent this is for the original contracting company to hire all of the necessary staff themselves onto their staff, but this is slow and only works if the project is long enough so that you can entice people to switch jobs. All experienced engineers are already employed somewhere else.
https://www.amazon.com/How-Big-Things-Get-Done-ebook/dp/B0B3...
It might well be that nuclear plants are even worse than other types of projects, but I'd like to see the proof.
It turns out he has, and they're in the quadrant of "dumb scale-up."
On the other hand, he does have some association with Oxford, which is selling a "course" on how to apply his methods of project estimation.
I wouldn't waste my money on the course, but I think the method of "look at similar projects, and take the average" is a much better algorithm than the bottom-up Gantt chart that everyone does. Shit happens, no one thinks it'll happen to them but it does, and the historical data includes all the Black Swan events that no one saw coming.
- Monocrystaline turbine blades have become required due to their ability to operate at higher temperatures than the melting points of the metals that compose their alloys. The requirement is their efficiency in power production. These are also used in aerospace, but are complex and difficult to produce.
- Common water reactors must contain insanely high pressures, enough to force water to remain liquid at 300°C or higher. This is not inexpensive.
- Molten salt reactors, where deployed, must be composed of alloys resistant to molten (negative) chloride ions and (positive) sodium ions, assuming the fluid chemically disassociates. Alloys that can withstand these conditions are also not inexpensive.
-Current nuclear reactors aren’t nearly hot enough to need single crystal turbine blisks. We’re talking on the order of 300°C.
-Coal power plant routinely hit much higher temperatures in supercritical and ultra-supercritical (yes, that’s a real term) steam generators. We don’t have quite as bad a problem building coal power plants.
-We’re not currently building molten salt reactors for power generation.
You didn’t say anything that was wrong. I’m just don’t think this is the reason building reactors is so expensive.
A simple cycle combustion turbine power plant might have 5% of the capital cost per watt of a nuclear power plant.
I'd ask my metalurgist friend, but I don't want to look like an idiot.
But there are other cases where an alloy has higher melting point. Ti(88)Al(12), for example.
1) in 2050, the world will get its energy almost exclusively from renewable sources, with a combination of batteries, hydrogen, biogas, hydropower (conventional and pumped), and demand management used to cope with variability.
2) Energy, even taking into account transmission and firming costs, will be cheaper than it ever was.
3) Message boards will still be full of arguments over nuclear energy.
Predictions:
1) in 2050 NIMBY will be just as bad for renewables as it used to be for nuclear.
2) New standardized nuclear pp designs will bring the cost of nuclear down to be much cheaper than almost all renewables, but in localized areas where it actually makes sense renewables will dominate
3) Message boards will still be full of people claiming we should run exclusively on solar even in places like Norway and Canada
In 2019, fossil fuels still generated 79% of our power worldwide with a projection to very slowly lose market share [1]
[1] https://earth.org/data_visualization/eo-indexes-global-energ...
Only if you ignore the cost and conversion efficiency of generating the electricity.
There aren't any electricity wells out there where it comes out of the ground for the cost of pumping it.
That is the alternative, not burning fossil fuels somewhere else.
Solar:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm
The Topaz Solar Farm in the US has a capacity of 550MW and a construction cost of $2.5b US billion.
That puts it at a cost of $4.5 million per MW capacity (550MW / 2.5b) (adjusted for inflation that's $3.2b USD or $5.8m per MW). It is used at 26% of its capacity which I assume is due to the non dispatchable nature of solar (would likely change if batteries were added - increasing cost).
Assuming a 10 year loan at 3% adds $500m bringing it to $6.7m per MW capacity
Nuclear:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...
The Palo Verde nuclear plant has a capacity of 3937MW and a construction cost of $12.6b USD adjusted for inflation. That puts it at a cost of $3.2m per MW capacity and it was used at 82% of its capacity over its lifetime.
Interest at 3% over 10 years adds 2b to the figure making it $3.7m per MW capacity
Limitations:
This doesn't consider running costs, maintenance or factor how usage capacity affects cost.
Maybe I am missing something, perhaps the running costs of nuclear eclipse the total cost of solar + batteries over 50 years? Maybe the loans granted for nuclear are at a much higher interest rate than those granted for other power projects? Is insurance a factor?
https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/how-does-utility-scale-sol...
See figure 9 in particular:
https://www.solarreviews.com/content/images/blog/SMI-2021-Q2...
Utility scale fixed tilt PV installations like Topaz were down to $0.77 per watt ($0.77 million per megawatt) by 2021.
Looking at some more modern projects and it is actually looking pretty good. I don't know how to account for unused capacity as it seems most PV util setups use about 30% of their capacity (do you just multiply the cost by 1.7?)
Case 1:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karap%C4%B1nar_solar_power_pla...
2023 Turkey - 1300MW capacity and a construction cost of 1.3b USD puts it at ~ $1m/MW capacity which is incredible.
Case 2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Signal_Solar
2018 USA - construction cost of $1.1b (maybe) and a capacity of 615MW so ~1.8m per MW
Case 3 (China nuclear)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fangjiashan_Nuclear_Power_Plan... is ~ 1.8m USD per MW capacity if we can trust their numbers.
Assuming a utilization of 80% (like other nuclear plants) this seems at worst cost competitive?
So a 100MW plant in the US quoted at $110 million including the cost of finance, profit margin, regulatory compliance, insurance and transmission with a capacity factor of 27% has 130MW DC of modules. Some other countries will quote DC so there may be a discrepancy. You can find harmonized comparions in things like the IRENA generation costs report, the ITRPV or the frauenhofer photovoltaics report. The US is also almost all single axis tracking where other countries may have fixed tilt as dominant.
New fixed tilt utility solar in 2023 is about 50-60c/Wdc or 80c/Wac. Single axis is about 70c/Wdc or $1/Wac.
The chinese nuclear project doesn't include inflation since 2008 (40%), cost of finance/escalation, chinese-government-accounting, or insurance. The (admitted) costs per watt of the chinese nuclear program have also increased substantially since 2008. Even with these, the claimed capex per MWh is comparable to solar in the west, but the O&M would make it much more expensive. Solar in china is 20-50% cheaper than the west.
Similarly costs for older nuclear plants in the US tend to exclude the cost of finance/escalation, as well as costs that were paid after they were "finished" due to upgrades needed for reliability (early capacity factors were <50%) and safety due to lessons learnt in incidents like browns ferry.
In the west O&M is about $30/MWh, which overlaps with the all-in cost of solar.
Also note that the cost of the Turkey facility you mentioned includes a factory which will produce many times more modules.
https://www.irena.org/Publications/2022/Jul/Renewable-Power-...
https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost...
Unfortunately, people looking for comparison tend to search for the biggest solar installation, and Topaz pops out on that list. However, because solar is so modular, new installations tend to be small and quick.
Example: The Black Bear solar project in Alabama came online in Feb 2023, just 15 months after it secured $100 million in financing in Dec 2021. The project provides 100 MW (AC) of power. That's $1m / 1 MW of solar generating capacity.
The CEO of the Alabama Municipal Electric Authority is quoted as saying that, had Black Bear solar come online in Jan 2022, they would have saved $10 million in fuel costs (since natural gas prices jumped after the start of Putin's war).
https://lightsourcebp.com/us/project/black-bear-solar/
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/12/20/130-mw-alabama-solar-...
https://www.greenvilleadvocate.com/2022/11/29/black-bear-sol...
But having cross-industry standards that are known to work for particular application is usually very helpful. If a government could help that by making large enough contracts, and pushing these standards across connected industries in order to fulfill these contracts, that might be good.
There will always be a window for quality, and nuclear will always be at the top along with other high budget projects.
I don't think it's the industry what pushes for even higher standards.
OTOH some cost-cutting in very mundane things can end up in a disaster. The whole Fukishima catastrophe won't happen if the height of the tsunami-protection wall was not reduced. So when a once-in-a-century earthquake with a once-in-a-century tsunami hit, it proved to be inadequate. But building a concrete wall does no require any special nuclear-reactor-grade materials or skills, it's civil engineering 101.
> Coal produces much more radiatoin-induced diseases
You can't compare nominal operation of coal with nuclear. Nuclear is very safe when operating nominally but once in a while there is a leak or something, which sometimes even go unnoticed. And it could affect the surrounding for years.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident...
Your own Wikipedia source demonstrates that. Note how many in that long list of accidents have "0" under "Fatalities", and the few U.S. accidents that do have fatalities were either experimental military reactors (i.e., not commercial power), or the fatalities were caused by non-nuclear issues of the sort that exist (and occasionally kill people) in any power plant.
one of the first very tangible direct "Macro" effects of the rise of non-contributing b.s jobs (Consulting, Life Coaches, Influencers, Day Trading and everything else under the 4 hour week mantra).
I've always wondered what are the big picture scale effects if everyone is trying to retire early and live off real-estate income and here it is: we as a species regress in the single most indicator of progress: energy autonomy cause we can't afford it because our cultural narrative doesn't motivate enough people to specialize in it depriving us from clean energy production and literally destroying the earth we inhibit.
It also does not come into play after start of operations.
Financing would be different matter. Those percentages trump up heavily and can kill any large project with long delays.
For example here in Finland the nuclear plants are required by law to get an insurance that covers up to 732 million euros (~1.2 billion euros in Sweden) of "third party damages" (they can buy additional insurances that covers damages to the plant itself). If that is not enough then government will take care of the next 500 million after that. If that is still not enough then the company is liable for the rest which effectively means they will go bankrupt as usually the only assets they have is the nuclear power plants.
This does mean that at the very end government will have to pay for it if the accident is big enough but gets to keep all the left over assets of the company.
They buy the insurance from this company https://atompool.org/en that is a consortium of multiple insurance companies that operate in the nordics. And there is multiple of these nuclear insurance pools around the world and they all reinsure each other.
Another question related to this is why don't big dams etc need similar insurances (at least here in Finland they don't). When things go wrong the damages can be just as big if not bigger.
> If that is still not enough then the company is liable for the rest which effectively means they will go bankrupt as usually the only assets they have is the nuclear power plants.
In my experience and almost without exception large capital projects are "owned" by a single company .. that company having as major shareholders the partners or parent company that put everything together to make the project happen.
Eg. a massive copper mine project in Canada | South America | etc that appears in the Rio Tinto annual finnacial reports is owned and managed by the locally registered RTCopperCutout Company.
No suprise that this happens with nuclear capital also, but worthy of a mention for anyone not already aware.
Sometimes the parent company | shareholders can be held to further account but not always.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
Compare the $15 billion funded by the industry with Fukushima looking to cost at least $150 billion to clean up.
The article forgets to mention another cost: The cost of disposing/storing used up fuel. This is often forgotten, but a major cost too, if the spent fuel is to be stored safely and securely. And it needs to be stored like that for hundreds of thousands of years!
Switzerland is currently in the process of building a national waste storing facility, a quick Google search showed that the US currently does not have one.
A quick google search shows that the there have been policies [0] to prevent ocean dumping of nuclear waste due to adverse effects on the environment. It doesn't seem like something we should do.
Also it seems like you are implying that spent fuel and raw, unenriched uranium are somehow the same, which is also not true.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...
Check the citations. The wikipedia article is conflating general oceanic waste dumping with nuclear waste dumping. Things like oil float(!), come in huge quantities and react both physically (coating) and chemically with wildlife. As best I can tell dumping solid dense nuclear waste onto the abyssal plane has no known or theoretical environmental effects.
> Also it seems like you are implying that spent fuel and raw, unenriched uranium are somehow the same, which is also not true.
You're correct here. However the moderating effects of water mean that if you did glass solid nuclear waste and dump it in the abyss you'd get no detectable increase in ocean radioactivity.
Plus the bigger the ticket item, the more profit for suppliers and better commission for salespeople all up and down the line of such a huge project.
The fundamental purpose is to be a gravy train not to bring affordable power to the masses unless some kind of bonanza has fully taken place beforehand.
Contractors and everyone involved know this and are prepared to take whatever bonanza they can get as long as it lasts, and it can be more lucrative than other sizable projects without even going to completion. It's the sale of a lifetime and more people than ever expect to be set for life with bonuses before construction even starts.
Plus the true need for increased safety is an issue and all industries have spiraling costs here since insurance companies are involved, even if more so during construction than operation. Not only is more safety layered on than was once acceptable, but shareholders of insurance companies wanted to experience unbroken growth in returns to beat inflation since the 1970's and 1980's too. They are traded on the same stock market as value-added companies.
Usually at most once.
It will be interesting to see if the smaller scale can avoid some of the issues mentioned in the article.
The accidents were spectacular, even though they resulted in so very few deaths. For most people nuclear is effectively witchcraft, and selling fear is effective. The HBO series were so absurd yet so loved.
2. A lot of custom stuff that has to be created from scratch, as nukes were "bad" (see point 4.) for many years so there was no chance to rise industry that would provide standard parts, etc. Imagine the cost of building every block of flat starting from the ground zero. It would be huge as well.
3. Red tape. Huge certification for everything, every piece of equipment, materials.
4. Lack of innovation for many, many years. If you wanted to work in the University on nuclear energy reactors 15 years ago you were treated by your fellow academia friends as a Holocaust denier or at least global warming denier. Green movement was very successful in making nukes look bad and now we have what we have. Germany could have been 100% CO2 neutral today if they have invested into nukes instead of renewables...
https://tiempoheadlines.com/nuscale-power-plants-in-central-...
Decommissioning is not actually needed. Plants can be run indefinitely with the correct maintenance.
Where is the decommissioning fund for the Hover Dam? Or the highway system? Or literally any other factory or power plant?
It is a cost no other industry faces.
The article talks about complexity, about delays. But it doesn't talk about how insanely inefficient the design, construction, etc is. How a lot of that complexity and waste could be eliminated if somebody in leadership actually gave a shit. But they know you're going to pay for it anyway, and they're going to get their bonus, and they certainly aren't motivated by lowering the cost to the consumer.
It's the typical capitalist story: become big enough that you have virtually no competition, so you can charge what you want, and nobody has any choice but to put up with your shit.
Do they? New construction on reactors stopped for a long time in the US. And cost is one of the primary downsides to building.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1448236.Parkinson_s_Law
Michael Liebreich recently interviewed a researcher that made some interesting points about the phenomenon of big public projects overrunning cost: https://www.cleaningup.live/ep128-prof-bent-flyvbjerg-how-bi...
This person studied many thousands of large scale engineering projects and the pattern of these projects overrunning time and costs budgets is universal according to him. It's not a local problem specific to the US either. It happens everywhere.
A few of his observations were that renewable projects are among the best performing large scale energy projects currently and nuclear projects among the worst. The big differences between the two are:
- on site vs factory based manufacturing.
- complexity
Nuclear plants are built from scratch in the field. This has lots of risks, requires lots of ad hoc problem solving, and any emerging problems lead to costly delays. That also means that a lot of learning effects are lost because there are a lot of contractors involved that have to solve a lot of site specific issues and in between projects years/decades can pass so the next project has to re-learn a lot of things. And as each site is slightly different there are also site specific risks and uncertainty. The learning effects are negative because each project inherits the mitigations from the previous projects and then has to add completely new solutions based on any new problems.
With renewables, most of the difficult stuff happens in a factory. That factory produces lots of cheap modular units that are than shipped and assembled on site. Each unit is relatively cheap. Assembly is relatively uncomplicated. With a wind tower for example, the components are large (tower, turbine, blades, foundation) but mostly pre-assembled. So, on site assembly is relatively straightforward and does not require a lot of problem solving. With solar it's even better because the parts are more plentiful, smaller, and assembly does not require a lot of heavy equipment or site preparation. Doing this at scale means there is a large positive learning effect.
So, estimating a wind or solar project is possible with a high degree of accuracy. These projects can be scaled up or down as needed. With Nuclear it so far is the opposite.
As for modular nuclear reactors, which the article barely talks about, this is a promising but as of yet unproven way to produce reactors in factories. It's promising because it duplicates some of the advantages of renewables. It's unproven because we won't know it works until lots of these have been assembled and deployed. Which is a thing that seems to be blocked on a lot of mundane things like regulations, approvals, investor enthusiasm, etc. And there's also the notion that the nature of nuclear reactors is that so far bigger seems better in terms of efficiency and overall cost. Which goes against producing lots of small reactors that are two orders of magnitudes smaller than their traditional multi GW counterparts. Likely at least for the first few ones, cost and time budget estimates are probably not that accurate.
When managed well (i.e. Adm. Rickover's US Navy) nuclear power produces zero health-related incidents over some 14,000 reactor-years. When managed super-badly (i.e. Soviet Navy) you get multiple deadly incidents per facility per decade.
By orders of magnitude.
The worst hydroelectic catastrophe killed over 200,000.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
Coal has killed magnitudes above that.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-utility-giant...
I was struggling to find English language reporting on that topic, I'll keep it for further use. Thanks!
Nominally, but I suspect that may have been translated. "Planification"?
> This can be traced to a constantly shifting regulatory environment, which has continuously changed plant design requirements, and added more and more safety features, which often were required to be implemented on plants under construction.
> By stabilizing regulations, making them clear, and making changes to them predictable, we can prevent cost overruns associated with expensive and time-consuming on-site rework.
And one example of intrinsic issues:
> Meeting these requirements for a site-produced material is difficult. Nuclear concrete typically has multiple closely-spaced reinforcing bars that can be difficult to arrange properly (the Royal Academy of Engineer’s 30-page Guide to Nuclear Concrete mentions “congestion” 13 times). Concrete placement issues have plagued every recent nuclear project and are frequently the source of delays and cost overruns. Examples abound: a 6 month delay from incorrectly placed rebar on Vogtle 3 and 4 in Georgia, a 4 month delay on the VC Summer plants for similar reasons, and a 9-month delay from poor concrete composition at the Olkiluoto 3 in Finland.
> The difficulty of meeting requirements, combined with the lack of construction expertise due to long periods without constructing new plants, means that any new construction inevitably struggles as the builders learn how to meet the high level of stringency required. Delays at Vogtle Units 3 and 4 were partially due to a contractor unprepared for the difficulty of nuclear construction. Similar issues seem to be responsible for delays and cost overruns on Flamanville in France and Olkiluoto in Finland.
Some of the other QA/QC issues are likely due to over-regulation, but you're probably not going to find any person in a management position in overseeing these projects who would agree to reducing those regulations. Nobody wants to be the person making the call to "cut corners" which then creates an accident, and there's good money to be made in adhering to the regulations.
The author concludes that while stabilizing regulations would make construction cheaper, it still wouldn't be cheap. And to further reduce costs, we would need to find ways to apply economies of scale in the build process.
In the past few years we've had so many discussions about nuclear here on Hacker News. Mostly unproductive. I think it would be more productive if people explicitly stated their position in one camp or the other at the time they bring their arguments.
At this point, both camps are blatantly lying. That's the very nature of a polarized discussion that has lasted for decades with very few new elements.
I guess you can't blame GP for being sour about discussions he's had on that topic. But at the same time, it's kind of odd he didn't notice people from his own side peddling blatant lies.
Comparing overnight costs to final all-in prices is one way nukebros love to lie.
You're also pretending operating costs don't exist.
You're also pretending that costs for a solar project in 2015-2019 are costs today. This is another blatant lie.
Longevity is another lie. The median and mean ages of the plants that actually get completed is around 30 years, not 60. The average for nuclear plants that are paid for is even lower because so many do not open at all.
Thankyou for demonstrating.
But, can you please do me a favor and tell people around here where you stand?
Do you believe that the technology underlying nuclear reactors is simply uncompetitive and you oppose it because of that? Or you would be very unhappy for nuclear technology to succeed no matter what?
And more importantly, are you happy that humans exist on this planet? Would you prefer for us to be fewer?
What do you think of someone who has 3 children? Is this moral? Or is it a crime?
Bit odd not to notice all the lies he's telling even after they're pointed out, he doubles down on them, and then they're disproven.
If you like regulation, it got more expensive because we made them safer. If you don't like regulation, the regulations have become excessive.
Personally I'm in the camp that the regulations are excessive. Regulators are probably incentivized to keep creating new rules, without considering costs for those rules. No one notices if an extra nuclear power plant online, allowing millions to get cheap, clean electricity. But oh boy is it noticed if something goes wrong.