Japan has opened its first osmotic power plant

I love nuclear power and know a lot about operating them, however:

1) It's expensive. Very very expensive.

2) It's dangerous when not operated properly, and I don't trust commercial interests operating hundreds of these due to this reason.

3) It's bad for the environment, both the mining to get the uranium and all of the processes to turn it into fuel.

4) There is no answer for spent fuel.

Whereas with solar or wind you can basically remove #1, #2, and #4, however you still have to mine and process the materials.

Anyways, nuclear will be great for some niche uses, I am sure, but it isn't the answer to our green energy prayers.

1) It's actually not that expensive, but the regulations made it so. I remember something from titans of nuclear or some Jordan Peterson podcast. I'll try to write the gist of it here:

There was some rule, that the cost of safety (like how thick concrete should be in some places), could be so high, that the usually cheaper fission energy would be equal in cost with the other sources (like burning oil). Then came the oil crisis of the 70's in USA. The safety margins got boosted to crazy levels, without any realistic gains. Moving from 99.999% to 99.9999% safety (just an example).

When the oil prices dropped, safety standards stayed and now fission energy is expensive. At least in USA and EU. Not in France or South Korea, which streamlined the regulations.

2) not with the modern technology, it isn't. And there are even safer alternatives like marble balls reactors that can't meltdown even if cooling is shut down.

3) not using it is bad for the environment. Fuel requirements are minimal compared to other plants. Even some types of renewables pollute more per W of energy produced. Like wind turbines that will fill up landfills at some point.

4) Thorium reactors. If we just give the fission energy some research & development, we can burn all the spent fuel up in thorium reactors.

> 4) There is no answer for spent fuel.

We store it. There are radioactive waste storage sites in 39 US states, for example.

https://curie.pnnl.gov/system/files/SNF%20and%20Rep%20Waste%...

My rebuttal is this: where’s the nuclear plants then?

It’s not economically viable. No amount of (ugh) Jordan Peterson whining will change that.

Humans haven’t stored anything for twenty thousand years yet.

How do you know that?

And if humanity can’t do anything that it hasn’t done before, why should we care about power generation or any problem that wasn’t completely solved before today? (Like today. The day that you are reading this.)

Same reason why Germany closed it's nuclear plants ahead of time or switched to burning gas in "green" propane gas-burning powerplants. Regulations.

You add tariffs and you make steel production profitable in US. China subsidizes it's electric cars industry and they can sell EVs in Europe for half the price of European cars, literally killing the market.

You subsidize renewables heavily and you get windfarms that are unprofitable once subsidizing ends.

I'm sure that in a free market situation, your comment would make lot of sense. But this is not the case and you should read up a little.

I believe that one should aim to, in spite of their political views, try to see the big picture. Like why there's so little nuclear vs sun or wind.

Germany had a badly designed prototype reactor with 80 incidents in 4 years of operation and one particular incident on the 4th of May 1986 - a week after Chernobyl accident, where reactor operator was lying about it. No wonder they have those regulations and general public distrust in anything nuclear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300

Humans haven't had agriculture for twenty thousand years yet.

Also, this line of inquiry is still just tilting at windmills; "somehow, future Fred Flintstone manages to get a hold of equipment capable of digging out a mile of concrete and yet somehow not know what radiation is" is not a productive line of thinking at best and a bad-faith argument at worst.

Humanity's mechanical capacity to dig that deep actually post-dates its discovery of radioactivity, too. If they have the technology for it for them digging it up to become an issue, they'll be able to identify, trivially, that it is an issue.

They're all in France, whose construction began under a military dictatorship to ensure energy security whenever the US starts a war in a place supplying it with energy.

This strategy was proven decisively correct in 2022, and also applies to solar and wind when the US (and by proxy, the whole West) inevitably gets into it with China and suddenly your degrading solar panels and growing need for energy become major problems (and thus forces you to build out nuclear anyway).

Cost isn't the only factor here, and it would be short-sighted to take the cheaper short-term option by buying Chinese rather than paying our own people to regain and retain that engineering and construction experience we foolishly squandered 30 years ago.

Which specific regulations are halting nuclear construction?

Let me know, specifically, which of the safety measures you think we can skip, with your extensive knowledge.

Yes, cost was only 1 of 4 factors I noted.

I've never seen a tomato that could kill a man just from holding it in his hand.

I know because storage of spent nuclear fuel is a pretty big deal, and right now the USA is simply sequestering it on-site with no plans beyond 50-100 years because there is NO solution for long-term (20k years) storage.

Did you read what he wrote? They’ve been made uneconomical due to excessive regulation and that’s why nobody bothers building them.

Requirement 73 of the IAEA's Safety of Nuclear Power Plants would be a start. That rule is so stringent that it requires bag in/bag out procedures for changing HEPA filters at nuclear power plants.

Bag in/bag out was developed for labs handling infectious micro-organisms. It involves a complicated bagging system, which, if done properly, isolates a contaminated filter from the environment during filter change outs.

But for nuclear the bag only protects from alpha particles and electrons. It has zero impact on photon dose. If workers are wearing bunny suits and respirators they are already protected from alphas and electrons. The extra change out time required by Bag In/Bag Out increased the worker photon dose.

This regulation actually increases workers’ exposure to radiation.

We could reprocess it but choose not to. This is what France does. It’s not a novel process. Instead we stupidly let it sit there and pay to secure it.

Why are you so irrationally anti-nuclear?

Nobody asked you about what’s a big deal or not. You answered a question that nobody asked you. I asked you how do you know that humanity has never stored anything for 20,000 years. You would need a list of every thing that was ever buried by a human and then proof that everything on that list has been dug up.

“Nuclear waste makes me nervous” is not proof that we have dug up everything that has ever been buried.

Given the (possibly intentional?) inability to parse language here, to make sure that you’re not a bot, is it possible for you to answer the question? If yes say yes and then answer it, if no just write something vaguely anti-nuclear

I don't think humans propogate these using agriculture.

I'm not anti-nuclear, I'm realistic and I understand the technology and it's pitfalls. I was trained to operate nuclear power plants, I understand how they work and I'm not scared of the tech. I'm scared of letting American corporations who have zero accountability construct and operate them.

I am quite rational, thanks. See my other comment.

Also, France has a state-owned company operating the plants. I would not be averse to an American version of that, or perhaps just expand and enhance the training they already do for the naval nuclear power program and send navy nukes to operate them. I don't trust American corporations to operate them properly.

"Excessive regulation" is always the excuse but I have literally never seen someone show how that is the case. They'll show you one or two low-hanging fruits and then extrapolate that into saving billions of dollars on construction or something. It's ludicrous that anyone even repeats this argument without even knowing what they are talking about.

OK so how does that reduce the cost of nuclear effectively? That has to be a savings of a few tens or maybe a hundred grand over a year, it's peanuts. I'm asking for big examples, ones that would convince someone that regulations truly are stifling nuclear.

State owned nuclear worked out great for Chernobyl. I don't trust the state to run them, especially given the string of failures by our government to do anything competently over the past 20 years.