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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

I don't disagree with what you've said, but in many ways I think it's "too late" for nuclear. There was a good article I read recently that made the argument that the gargantuan cost of nuclear, coupled with long regulatory lead times and lots of local opposition make it much too slow to deploy, when we need drastic changes ASAP.

Deployment of solar and wind is just much faster and ends up being much more cost competitive. "Overbuilding" renewables, coupled with multiple storage technologies, is a better option than nuclear at this point.

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> Deployment of solar and wind is just much faster and ends up being much more cost competitive.

There's literally nothing stopping us from building _both_ solar+wind and nuclear. There's no shortage of construction workers or materials. And it avoids the need to build large, expensive, and relatively short-lived (and resource-intensive) battery installations that are needed to displace fossil fuel-based energy generation. Solar and wind have an 80/20 problem, and nuclear easily slots in as a great solution for that 20%.

> There's no shortage of construction workers or materials.

In many countries there is a shortage, actually. Especially for construction workers.

And a big limiting factor is the lack of money: money isn't unlimited and you can only spend each dollar once. You have to choose, so better spend it on the option with the biggest impact.

While true, there's a question of why would you bother if you can build nuclear? 60-70% of my states' electricity use is 24/7 constant. Outside of that number, the downward slope between maxium and minimums is very long, and very slow and mostly at night. Nuclear plants are easily variable in fuel burn over these sorts of rates.

The problem with solar and wind is that they can trip offline from the grid very quickly, so the entire question is whether you can plausibly backstop the grid for long enough without the need to spin up an extra powerplant.

With a frontloaded capex asset like nuclear, once you are building it there's a big question as to how much value you get from not using it - i.e. the main benefit of solar and wind is if with storage they stop you needing to build a new nuclear plant.

I would contend that the storage answer is very inadequate: it's not nearly good enough to have a grid which is only running with 1 day worth of banked power when you could have much longer periods of underproduction (which is the way most solar/wind storage solutions are presented). To safely have a distributed grid, you need months worth of stored power to average out the fluctuations. Storage just isn't cheap enough at that scale compared to nuclear reactors.

We have finite resources, and that is the main argument against nuclear. If cost was no object, if we could pay lackadaisical EPC to waste billions and throw timelines off track, if we could bankrupt more design firms like Westinghouse due to complete incompetence in delivery of design, sure, why not just fritter our finite labor pool and resources away.

But if want to be effective as possible at fighting climate change, we need to Marshall our resources as if we were at war, and put all the effort into the most effective routes.

This doesn't make sense. I suppose it depends what your goals are? It might be "too late" if your goal is to stay below N degrees, but that doesn't mean you should give up on it. It could still be the way to prevent N + 1 degrees.

China builds almost one nuclear reactor a year.

This is because we over-regulate and have let all the nuclear talent die, while they have done the opposite.

It’s possible we just in the West don’t want to imagine it is.

We build more than that, actually, it’s just that they’re inside of submarines and aircraft carriers.

Average construction time for a nuclear reaction is 6-8 years [1]

[1] https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years. The second best time is now.

So to with nuclear power and other long term projects. Just because we needed these things built yesterday should not stop us from building them now.

> There was a good article I read recently that made the argument that the gargantuan cost of nuclear, coupled with long regulatory lead times and lots of local opposition make it much too slow to deploy, when we need drastic changes ASAP.

Fixing the regulations and committing to a large scale construction of at least 1,000 nuclear power plants in the United States could solve these problems pretty easily.

Nobody has a single proposal on what regulation to fix, or even the more basic problem of what regulations are unnecessary.

However, if you look into detail at what happened at Vogtle, you find absolutely incompetent management that thought they could just ignore all the basic quality requirements and get away with it. Leading to massive delays, etc. etc. etc.

Regulations are a red herring, IMHO. Idiotic construction companies are however a huge problem, as are absolutely idiotic design companies like Westinghouse, which many times delivered "unconstructable" plans!

Ironically if there was more regulations, and plans were required to be checked by regulators both for safety as well as constructability, perhaps these projects could have been completed closer to on time and on budget.

But that's just because of all the people working on these things, only the regulators are doing their job as if they were accountable entities, and the utility, the EPC, and the designer are all looking simply to pass the buck and hope that in the eventual lawsuit they can take minimal damages.

On average the US has commissioned more than one nuclear powered naval submarine or aircraft carrier every year. There’s no fundamental reason we can’t also cost-effectively build on land.

Brian Potter’s “Construction Physics” substack has a series of articles about the cost issues with nuclear power:

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...

All in all, the issues with nuclear construction are largely down to regulation, and can be overcome through massive economies of scale. Building 1000 nuclear power plants within the next ten years is achievable if the United States, to use your words, “[marshalls] our resources as if we were at war”. The primary reason this hasn’t happened already are (a) activists like you spent the last half century trying to prevent it, eroding the practical expertise necessary and (b) natural gas is still probably more cost effective.

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