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Comment by spacebanana7 | Hacker News Reader

It’s very difficult to estimate the true cost of nuclear power because so many resources are spent on safety features rather than the basic stuff essential to power generation.

New construction cost per energy out can vary by 5x, even against the grain of expected purchasing power parity advantages:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-britain-is-building-...

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Safety features aren't essential to power generation?

Yes, but after a certain point it becomes a matter of risk tolerance.

Apparently some radiation standards in nuclear power plants work out at millions/billions of dollars per year per life saved

https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-power-is-too-saf...

Ok then let's repeal the Price-Anderson Nuclear indemninty act and make nuclear power plants liable for ALL clean up costs if something goes wrong.

For Fukushima that number is circa $800 billion.

If it is as safe as you think it is with a minimum of safety standards then the market will still provide. Sophisticated insurers will be capable of calculating the risk and shouldering all of it for a reasonable fee.

Right?

The act exists, of course, because it definitely isnt safe enough to do that and sophisticated private insurers who are capable of calculating risk better than you or I know this all too well. They won't touch nuclear power without a ludicrously low liability cap.

The ironic thing is that even with this gargantuan implicit subsidy (yes, taxpayer funded insurance that pays out $800 billion in an emergency is a big subsidy), nuclear power still isnt cost competitive with solar and wind.

But, I'm all in favor of letting nuclear plants determine their own safety levels. IF they can get the insurance to cover ALL the costs of dealing with a disaster. Free market, baby.

I know you're making a point but of course realistically, nuclear businesses would just try to structure themselves in such a way that in the event of a fallout the company can just go bankrupt without disrupting those benefitting from it majorly

What you describe is deliberate undercapitalization at the time of incorporation - this would lead to courts being able to pierce the corporate veil and hold directors personally liable for cleanup costs.

This wouldn't mean that the state would get the money back in such an eventuality, but it would mean director => prison.

What kind of person do you think you're going to get to run your nuclear plant if they know that there's a risk of prison if everything goes wrong? Either a very stupid one, a very, very risk averse one or no director at all.

This chain of thought combined with the state's strong desire to see a nuclear industry with a healthy supply chain in order to support the nuclear military is why the indemnity act exists at all. They know that nuclear power requires lavish subsidies like taxpayer backed insurance to even exist.

The natural objection is that the Fukushima response was a significant overreaction.

Counting that cost is like including Iraq war costs for oil usage (perhaps fair for the first gulf war, but the expense of the second was an independent policy mistake)

[1] (least bad Forbes article I’ve read in years) https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/11...

Destruction of property value by an accident is a real cause for legal action even if you consider it irrational.

Shellenberger is not a credible source. He's the person who assured us PV is bad because it uses rare earth elements (it does not.)

Thanks for the info about Shellenberger.

The crux of the Fukushima costing is whether damage actually occurred to property.

In much of the exclusion zone radiation levels are relatively low, and always have been.

The decision to impose the exclusion zone was deeply political.

Here’s an NYT source for better credibility.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240306192358/https://www.nytim...

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/22/science/when-radiation-is...

> The crux of the Fukushima costing is whether damage actually occurred to property.

The legal requirement would be if it caused land values to decline. It doesn't matter if that decline was for a reason you'd call irrational. It wouldn't even require proof of responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt; "preponderance of evidence" would be enough in the US system.

It’s fair to debate whether the nuclear activities caused the land value to decline or whether the government policy caused the land value to decline.

A government could impose irrational exclusion zones for arbitrary events, it’s unfair to impose the cost on the event itself unless the exclusion zone policy was justified.

The decline in land value wouldn't be from government policy, it would be from people not wanting to live on land contaminated with sufficient radioactivity. If anything, government policy would be driven by this public sentiment, not the other way around.

I suggest trying to change this is not going to go well; "radiation isn't really bad, trust us, some meltdowns are ok" would be a very challenging PR move.

I would say the risk tolerance with nuclear should be very low. It’s going to take one major disaster to ruin hundreds of thousands of square miles of land for the foreseeable future if something goes wrong.

A coal power plant costs $2M - $5M per megawatt just in capital costs. A solar plant costs $1M per MW. Given a coal capacity factor of 0.9 and a solar of 0.3, they're roughly equivalent.

A coal power plant is similar to a nuclear plant -- they heat water to turn a turbine to generate water. There's no way a nuclear plant would ever be cheaper than a coal plant to build, and it would have to be to be competitive with solar in cost.

That is the true cost of nuclear, though. Costs associated with social licensing are just costs, no different from labor or materials. The safety requirements may be excessive and irrational, but they're not going away while the general public remains fearful. Any cost that can't go away in a realistic universe is ... just another cost.

Another social licensing risk is early plant closure. The levelized cost of nuclear energy is the best case scenario. This number assumes that your country won't become like Germany. What will happen to the ROI of nuclear if there's a moral panic in 15 years forcing early plant closures? Nobody can predict the irrationality of the crowd. Renewables don't face such risks to ROI.

Or, what happens if renewables fall so much in cost your nuclear plant is cash flow negative?

Following historical experience curves, when the world is solar powered energy from PV will be below $10/MWh.

It's also very difficult to estimate true cost of solar at a massive scale.

Most/all solar panels that exist currently can not be recycled in a way that makes ecological or economical sense. Their operational lifetime is NOT "sustainable", nor is their economical lifetime.

Then there's death's per kWh, required energy storage (with its own ecological and economical issues), mining, transportation, CO2 per kWh, etc etc.

IMO nuclear is a pretty clear winner (as a continious energy source), but it's a complex analysis where important details are easily missed.

Can the same not be said of nuclear to a degree? My knowledge may be outdated but afaik proper, long-term nuclear waste storage is still an open question.

Nuclear waste persists and remains dangerous for a long time and it's easy to forget and just burden future generations with it.

I think most jurisdictions have settled on or are settling on long-term underground storage. Usually in areas that are geologically stable, possibly between clay layers in case of leakage.

It's a bit contradictory to claim there is a clear winner while also mentioning it's a complex analysis where important details are easily missed. It reads more like a bias justification, since you don't provide that analysis or sources that do.

What do you mean when you say that solar panels are not sustainable in their economical lifetime?

> Then there's death's per kWh,

Given the value of a statistical life (which is something like $12.5M in the US), the value of putative lives saved from going nuclear (using motivated numbers from nuclear advocates) would provide no justification for building nuclear plants instead of renewables. The value would be utterly dwarfed by the excessive cost of the nuclear plants.

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