EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. I understand that regulation is needed but we also need nuclear energy, we have to find a streamlined way to get more plants up and running as soon as possible. I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California. My rates have doubled in a few years to over $0.40/kWh and up over $0.50/kWh after I go up a tier depending on usage.

Which are the fake costs from regulation?

We have new builds in Europe of the EPR, in France and Finland, and it has had disastrous costs. China has built some too, presumably cheaper, since they keep on building more. What is the regulatory difference there?

I have yet to find any concrete defense of the idea that costs are coming from regulation, rather than the costs of construction in advanced economies.

If regulations are the cost, name them and a solution. Otherwise it seems like we are wasting efforts in optimizing the wrong thing for nuclear.

> I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California.

I grew up a few miles away from SMUD's Rancho Seco nuclear power plant; I maintain that shutting it down was SMUD's worst decision. There were problems motivating that shutdown, yes, but nothing that couldn't have been solved.

I am pretty sure governments around the world want it to be cheaper, but at the same time know that it must be very strictly regulated. Even if that makes it pricier, one can't call that "fake costs".

Also, it takes decades to build them, very often then also getting delayed. Why even consider it nowadays?

You should look more closely at your PG&E bill. There are some hidden CA taxes in there.

Also PG&E was forced to divest most of their generation assets, so I believe that much of the grid power down there is not under PG&E's control

Edit: Finally, any Western US utility needs to bear the cost of wildfire liability. Whether that is a state-owned utility or private, the cost is still there.

Yeah it seems like having State control is not a silver bullet

This is said a lot but I don't think regs as written are necessarily the major cost driver. I did a nuclear industry survey to ask what specific regulations people would want changed recently. The one where using commercial grade QA instead of nuclear grade is very interesting.

I think industry overreaction to the regs is possibly as large or larger of a problem than the regs themselves.

https://whatisnuclear.com/news/2025-05-23-regulatory-reforms...

It takes 15 years to build a nuclear power plant. It shouldn't take this long at all and it's strictly because of regulations. If we cut down the time it takes to build a plant the cost plummets.

Maybe roll back regulation to when France rolled out the Messmer plan?

They spent 1/4th of what we do today.

But what are the specific regulations you would cut, dude?

Another big reason for the high costs is the lack of experience building the plants.

The reason PGE is so expensive is because it's a privately owned monopoly with a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns. Additionally, the urban areas of California are subsidizing the fire prone rural areas of the state.

The "fake costs" are not primarily from regulation as much as it is from the need to squeeze profit. For comparison, look at Silicon Valley Power which is owned and operated by the city of Santa Clara. SVP charges $0.175/kwh vs PGE $0.425/kwh. [1]

[1] - https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees

>the urban areas of California are subsidizing the fire prone rural areas of the state

Meanwhile Rural California is where the electricity is actually generated[1]; they're "subsidizing" urban use.

>SVP vs PG&E

This has nothing to do with the ownership model and everything to do with not being obligated to serve rural areas. They get to serve only lower cost dense areas

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Cali...

> the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation

Regulation yes but I wonder how much of it is just "boomer engineering"

Nuclear efforts should be directed into the safest and simplest designs. Designs that need water pumps to cool (like Fukushima) are the type of unnecessary risk and complexity that nobody needs

Nuclear regulations are no worse than aviation regulation. Yet planes manage to be cost competitive.

Cutting regulations isn't necessary the win people think. If safety regulations are cut, it risks accidents in future.

Nuclear needs to move from bespoke builds to serial production.

PG&E is in no way a victim here. Their CEO is being paid $50M a year, and our rates got increased 6 times last year. Nevada the next state over, the prices are 20% of California's.

All the safety and countermeasure costs here ultimately stem from regulation. If we allowed less safe power plants, they would likely be cheaper to build and operate.

However, I’m not sure I want private for profits actor deciding the level of safety of such projects.

True that SVP benefits from not serving a rural area, but we also need to consider again that PGE is a for-profit organization that in 2024 posted $2.5B in profits, which were distributed to shareholders[1]. If PGE were owned by the state with no such fiduciary duty, this money could instead be used to lower rates and/or invest in infrastructure.

[1] - https://www.zacks.com/stock/quote/PCG/income-statement?icid=...

A major reason nuclear plants are super expensive is because we do it so rarely

Every reactor and every plant is bespoke, even if they are based on a common "design" each instance is different enough that every project has to be managed from the ground up as a new thing, you get certified only on a single plant, operators can't move from plant to plant without recertification, etc

Part of that is because they are so big and massive, and take a long time to build. If we'd build smaller, modular reactors that are literally exactly the same every single time you would begin to get economies of scale, you'd be able to get by without having to build a complete replica for training every time, and by being smaller you'd get to value delivery much quicker reducing the finance costs, which would then let you plow the profits from Reactor A into Reactor B's construction

Thats not the full picture. Aviation exploded in growth -- you can easily expand operations and work to smaller margins. The US shut down the nuclear industry intentionally from the 80s until the last 5 years from regulations.

Which regulations?

What would change in the construction process?

China builds the same designs as the EU and US, yet faster. What is different?

I saw toooooooons of reports of construction mishaps in the US at Vogtle and Summer. I didn't see anything about "oh if we changed this sort of regulation it would have saved us money."

It's a very worthwhile to read the retrospectives on these builds. There are lots of plans of future builds of the AP1000 that would be cheaper, but none of the plans even indicate that a regulation change would help.

I beg of people who say regulations are in the way: which regulations? Concretely, what should change to make construction cheaper? Pun intended.

> If regulations are the cost, name them and a solution.

That is a funny ask. Regulation doesnt have to be a single thing. It can very well be cost-overrun by a thousand paper cut. You can drown any project in endless paperwork, environmental and national security reviews. In fact unclear and contradictory requirements are much more conductive to drive costs up than a single Lets-make-nuclear-expensive-Act.

That being said if you need to pick a single thing (which is silly) then the “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” principle of radiation protection is a prime candidate. When you have a safety limit you can design a system to remain under it. When you are designing a sytem for the ALARA principle that in itself will blow your costs up.

It isn't that rare in general - if the U.S. opens the secrets of nuclear submarines - we had had mini reactors for decades.

Its multifold.

1. Regulations are a big asterisk to any project. If you don't think you will get licensed or your project will get axed halfway through or there is a risk (Which has been very high in the past). Investors who would put money up for the project won't do it OR they require a significantly higher cost of capital. 2. There is very little muscle memory in the fabrication of reactors and reactor components in north America because we de facto shut down the industry from 80s until 20s. Therefore the first projects will cost more money as we recover our abilities to fab. 3. The licensing and regulatory costs are also incredibly high - and you cant make any adjustments if you kick off the project or you restart the process. This leads to massive cost over runs.

China and Korea are currently building reactors about 1/6 the costs of the US I believe.

We have one model for cheaper construction of nuclear, using exactly the same designs as in the US (AP1000) or EU (EPR), and that example is China.

I don't think China is building them any less safe. I don't think the regulations are significantly different.

I don't think any of the designers of the nuclear reactors want to build them any less safely, either, because they are not asking for that.

Many of the "safety" stuff is also about prolonging longevity of the reactor as long as possible. Like really inspecting the welds on tubing, etc. Any reduction in safety there also ultimately increases costs by reducing the lifetime of the plant or heavily increasing maintenance costs.

That's why I don't think this is a tradeoff between safety and cost. I think it's a tradeoff between construction/design competence and cost.

Shouldn't the burden of proof belong to those that claim that regulation isn't the cost, when it is so extremely obvious to anybody who has ever had to build anything that it is?

Just look at building costs in California vs Texas. Both are nominally constituents of the same "advanced economy".

The problem is economics. Just because the Us built a fleet does not mean that they are economical once put in a non-military application.

This should be a quick reminder to the crowd -- Nuclear is almost always a public/private partnership to manage the project development costs and to keep the cost of capital in a reasonable range. The costs are large for a private company to put up the capital with the risk involved.

I have heard it claimed, at least for US construction, that a nuclear plant under construction has to implement new safety measures even if those measures were adopted after the design approval or construction start date.

This means that the design can change multiple times during construction, which both slows construction and exposes the project to even more safety design changes.

Ironically, the creaky old plants that were built long ago don't need to adopt such new safety requirements. They are grandfathered in, but can't be economically replaced because the costs of a replacement are artificially inflated.

A car analogy would be that we continue driving 1955 Chevy Bel-Airs with no seat belts since an up-to-date car is too expensive to develop, since we can't start production until the latest LIDAR and AI has been added. Once the LIDAR is in, pray that there's no new self-driving hardware released before full production, or we'll have to include that too.

Nuclear safety to provide safety is important but not to stifle any innovation or deployment which is what it has been.

Exactly. What is needed is a SpaceX-like enterprise, where the engineering effort is concentrated in building economies of scale. To me it's clear that nuclear energy's pros largely outweigh the cons, and that it is a perfect complement to solar and wind power generation.

> I have yet to find any concrete defense of the idea that costs are coming from regulation, rather than the costs of construction in advanced economies.

One of the main drivers of excessive costs of construction in advanced economies are from excessive regulations, so it's really one in the same. Nuclear is obviously more regulated than other industries, and it routinely faces more frequent, longer delays and higher cost overruns than projects of comparable scale and complexity. This study [1] goes into a lot more detail.

Digging more into the details, it's all linked. The lack of regulatory clarity means that designs have to be changed more after construction starts, requirements for redundancy increase complexity, changing regulations prevents standardization, etc. Prescriptive regulations which were created decades ago limit the cost savings possible with newer technologies, like improved reinforced concrete. This study [1] goes into a lot more detail.

> Our retrospective and prospective analyses together provide insights on the past shortcomings of engineering cost models and possible solutions for the future. Nuclear reactor costs exceeded estimates in engineering models because cost variables related to labor productivity and safety regulations were underestimated. These discrepancies between estimated and realized costs increased with time, with changing regulations and variable construction site-specific characteristics.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243512...

If you're proposing a change, shouldn't the change be specifiable? Why is the burden of proof on those asking "what change?" to demonstrate that no change is possible? That's a complete inversion of responsibility.

I have a whole host of clearly specifiable changes to California building law that will make it cheaper, and am actively working on them both locally and at the state level! This is clear!

As somebody who is very interested in making Calforina housing cheaper, and in particular housing construction cheaper, it is my duty to say what should change, why, and convince others of it.

If I go out and advocate for "change" without being able to specify a single change, I would get jack shit done. It doesn't work that way.

Every single nuclear advocate that I have ever met that says "regulations should change" can still not yet specify how those regulations should change. That's the minimal bar for holding an opinion.

Reading the DoE LPO report on how nuclear can scale up and get cheaper, it wasn't regulations doing the work. It was learning how to build.

Victim, no. Being over regulated doesn't necessarily hurt a company if all their competitors are subject to the same regulations. It's consumers who pay the price. 5x the price, apparently, if Nevada is any indication.

Your rates aren't doing insane shit because you don't have nuclear energy. Renewables are way way way cheaper.

A nuclear fission power plant is never going to be cheaper than a coal plant, and coal plants are very expensive. They're superficially similar types of plants: they heat water and then use a steam turbine to convert it to electricity. Coal plants use higher temperatures and pressures, so they can use smaller turbines. That turbine is a massive part of the cost.

Yes, there's room to drive down the cost of nuclear. No, it's never going to be cost competitive with solar/wind/batteries, no matter how much you drive down the cost or eliminate regulations.

I really don't want a SpaceX-like attitude to radioactive material.

That is what we did 20 years ago when the renewable industry barely existed.

What has happened since is that the nuclear industry essentially collapsed given the outcome of Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinklkey Point C and can't build new plants while renewables and storage are delivering over 90% of new capacity in the US. Being the cheapest energy source in human history.

We've gone past the "throw stuff at the wall" phase, now we know what sticks and that is renewables and storage.

I'd be fine with us just having the USA navy operate them we build them for carriers and subs just double or triple the order and plug em into the grid.

We’ve been trying to build ”SMR”s since the 1950s and a bunch has been built throughout the decades.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/the-forgotten-history-of-small...

The problem is: who pays for the hundreds of prototypes before the ”process” has worked?

Thank you for being specific! This is no longer the case under modern licensing.

Look at Vogtle and Summer, who were so expensive and disastrous that the Summer build was abandoned with billions of dollars sunk in construction.

Nothing was changed on the regulatory side, and it was licensed under a new regulatory model requested by industry, that let them start construction without everything fully designed yet. There were many super expensive changes during the build, but that was due to EPC, not regulatory stuff.

The NRC has been extremely open to regulatory changes since the 2000s, especially with the "nuclear renaissance" push around 2008. I'm not aware of any suggested regulatory changes that were not adopted.

We can't blow up nuclear reactors to learn how they failed like spaceX does with rockets.

I'm a bit miffed I can't find the article now, but I recall hearing it was more the reactor design approval process than the operational process regulations that interfered with and drove up costs. Every tiny detail of a site has to be taken into account, forcing modifications to existing designs such that every build ends up being bespoke anyway. On top of that, many of the rules around the design approval process are geared towards older generation reactors and newer generation reactors end up being cost ineffective because they need to account for things that don't apply to them.

If anyone remembers that article, I'd love to cite it here. If not, feel free to ignore what is otherwise unfounded speculation I guess.

> I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California.

If you think PG&E jacking up prices has anything other than greed, hubris and decades of short term thinking behind it, I have news for you.

And thats is why people look at nuclear and say "no thanks". The same corporate structures that hid data about smoking, PFAS and oxycodone are the ones you want running a nuclear plant?

Can you make a nuclear plant safe, small and useful: yes. The navy has been doing it for decades now with nary an incident. That doesn't mean you can do it outside a rigid structure where safety and efficiency are above costs. The moment you make that other constraint a factor something else has to give.

As someone also served by PG&E I don't think cheaper electricity will help. At peak hours electricity is $0.13/kwh but the delivery charge is $0.50/kwh.

It can be cheaper to run a nuclear plant than a conventional power plant, due to lower fuel costs. But what kills nuclear is the capital costs of building the plant. It takes a while to reap the reward

I don't think anyone wants to get rid of nuclear regs entirely. There is a popular perception (i dont know if actually true) that safety regs were built around first generation reactor designs which were designed in an inherently unsafe way, and for modern designs that are inherently safer, it makes sense to relax some regulations.

Sure we can, just not out in the open with a bunch of spectators.

Advocating for deregulation in order to achieve innovation is the opposite of conservative.

It’s not a matter of being a for profit or not. It’s an also matter of technological development. Most of the early incidents in nuclear plants happened under the management of public or state controlled companies.

It’s always funny to me to see folks with the “HN leans _________” comments every few days with the blank spot filled in with every single political position one can think of.

Maybe this article?

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

There is some regulatory burden for sure. But the NRC has been very conducive to standardization, and approved construction and operation licenses of like 20 brand new latest generation water-cooled reactors in the first nuclear Renaissance (2006). It was Fukushima and fracking that killed that Renaissance, not regulations.

https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/large-lwr/col-hold...

The NRC has also been generous with advanced reactor licenses, granting construction licenses for the Kairos Hermes 1 and 2 molten salt cooled test reactors recently. And one for the Abilene Christian university's molten salt fueled reactor too!

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nrc-approves-construction...

A lot of the tech world got it in their heads that nuclear regs are the main issue in nuclear when in reality it is still megaprojects construction management. The small advanced reactors are likely to be very expensive per kWh

At some point the electricity will be near-free, and we'll just pay transmission fees

In other words: nuclear is not viable unless the risks are offloaded to the public. Privatize profits, socialize risks.

No one is saying there shouldn't be regulations on nuclear.

But our regulations on nuclear are utterly insane -- every time I get someone to read into the reasons nuclear here has been so much more expensive than safe nuclear in other countries with more reasonable regulations around it, they come away shellshocked. It takes a while to understand what's going on, because it's truly death by a thousand cuts, but the unifying principle is the NRC's ALARA ("As Low As Reasonably Achievable") principle (with honorable mention going to the NRC's Linear No-Threshold harm model, which despite the evidence assigns a linear cancer incidence to radiation dosing).

Getting radiation exposure "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" sounds like a nice idea. But there's no lower bound, so the costs scale infinitely, gutting the incentives to innovate and invest. If the prices of other forms of energy go up, regulators intentionally raise the costs of nuclear comparably by increasing what must be spent on reducing radiation exposure. New innovative plant design that increases margins? Guess what -- that's another opportunity to use the money to lower radiation exposure even further.

The lack of a lower bound results in absurd results, because we long ago decreased the exposure from plants to far below background radiation levels, and far below the levels at which we've been able to observe harm.

We need to replace the LNT model with a sigmoid model that aligns with the science on radiation harms, and we need to remove the infinitely-scaling ALARA standard. Doing these will not increase risks, but will decrease costs a large amount in the short run and even more in the longer-term.

I'm talking about capital costs, not operating costs. $3B/GW for a coal plant is about 5X as much as natgas.

And the technology is incredibly mature, submarine reactors were some of the first reactors, period.

How much of that rate is because China is flooding the market with wind turbine blades and solar panels?

How much would it cost if China turns off that supply?

Submarine reactors run on super high enriched fuel instantly one could instantly repurpose into a bomb. Lots of gen 4 and 5 reactor designs that combine low cost, compact footprint, and running on less expensive and carefully controlled fuel.

You're getting downvoted, but you're correct. It's death by a thousand cuts, because ALARA forces radiation exposure-reduction expenditures to scale upward forever, despite the fact that radiation exposure from plants long ago reached levels far below those that result in any risk. There is no lower bound, so the regulators never stop reducing exposure further, raising costs further and further over time.

Under ALARA, nuclear literally isn't allowed to reduce market electric costs, because the requirements for reducing exposure scale to what keeps it competitive with other forms of production! If all other electric costs doubled tomorrow, the NRC would respond by raising the requirements for plants to reduce radiation exposure.

If that sounds insane, it's because it's insane. Our nuclear regulations are insane.

Its the same with any massive infrastructure investment - only governments have the balance sheet to build them.

> What is different?

All of the NIMBY roadblocks that ties up U.S. projects in court, that China doesn't give a F about considering they'll displace 1.3 million people to build a damn.

And they are heavily guarded.

In the current political climate I prefer energy sources that don’t cause severe damage if sabotaged.

Did you hear the worries in Ukraine that Russia could hit a wind turbine with a rocket?

> It was Fukushima and fracking that killed that Renaissance, not regulations.

It was mostly fracking. Most plans for new builds had already been put on hold by the time Fukushima occurred. New nuclear in the US made zero sense when gas is cheap and combined cycle power plants are 10% of the capex/power.

And since then, renewables and storage have crashed in price, nailing shut nuclear's coffin lid.

HN leans to perfect diversity: power distribution is so boring. :D

Perhaps the are talking about Unions and the regulations around minimum pay and working conditions.

I don't know about big construction projects, but the costs to get an extension approved on my house is a drop in the ocean compared to paying tradies. (contractors in us speak.)

There are some companies that are trying to get SMRs up and running.

https://www.ans.org/news/2025-02-05/article-6744/new-swedish...

We’ll see how it goes.

French have some LEU submarines. They seem to be pretty good on paper. Needs refueling every ten years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffren-class_submarine

Found the fatal flaw, and right here it is in glorious action:

> and strong regulations and safety culture ensure that it remains one of the safest forms of energy available to humanity.

It is thinking like the comment above why nuclear power is unsafe and will be unsafe as long as the drive to reduce the expense is viewed as "fake costs due to regulation."

No, that person does not understand larger human culture and how it destroys anything with a nuance to understand, such as the need for regulations.

What's the danger in hitting a micro nuclear reactor with a rocket ? A shitty dirty bomb detonated near the powerplant ?

To use wind turbines as an example, more than 50% of the various bits are manufactured here in the US. For turbines destined US wind farms, at least.

> Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.

It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop. You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond. Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions. Decommissioning could be a little cheaper with laxer standards, but it’s never going to be cheap. Etc etc.

Worse, all those capital costs mean you’re selling most of your output 24/7 at generally low wholesale spot prices unlike hydro, natural gas, or battery backed solar which can benefit from peak pricing.

That’s not regulations that’s just inherent requirements for the underlying technology. People talk about small modular reactors, but small modular reactors are only making heat they don’t actually drive costs down meaningfully. Similarly the vast majority of regulations come from lessons learned so yea they spend a lot of effort avoiding foreign materials falling into the spent fuel pool, but failing to do so can mean months of downtime and tens of millions in costs so there isn’t some opportunity to save money by avoiding that regulation.

> The same corporate structures that hid data about smoking, PFAS and oxycodone are the ones you want running a nuclear plant?

Thanks for expressing my concerns over nuclear so clearly. It's not the technology I fear, its the people in charge.

Combined with democracy, it means that even if we trusted our governments today to police nuclear companies, they are replaced every few years. Nobody knows who will be in charge in 10 or 20 years time.

We should simply not build this large dangerous technology because rules and regulations will not keep us safe.

Regulations on nuclear power protect us from nuclear waste and meltdowns. Meltdowns are rare but catastrophic when they occur.

We have recent examples of construction costs going through the roof in the US: Vogtle and Summer.

Both projects were welcomed by their communities in Georgia and South Carolina. And at the state level, legislators were so enthusiastic for the projects that they passed new laws so that the costs of any overrun would get directly passed on to ratepayers, letting utilities escape financial risk for construction overruns.

I have no doubt that constructing nuclear at a new site would run into many NIMBY complaints. But most (not all) existing nuclear sites have communities that welcome the nuclear reactors, and want new ones to replace the aging ones, and ensure continuity of jobs for the community.

> A major reason nuclear plants are super expensive is because we do it so rarely

Once you have your supply chain running, and PM/labour experience, things can run fairly quickly. In the 1980s and '90s Japan was starting a new nuclear plant every 1-2 years, and finishing them in 5:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...

France built 40 in a decade:

* https://worksinprogress.co/issue/liberte-egalite-radioactivi...

More recently, Vogtle Unit 3 was expensive AF, but Unit 4 cost 30% less (though still not cheap).

>> Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.

>It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days

Maybe it can't be as cheap as coal, but at the very least it shouldn't be absurdly expensive compared to what South Korea and China can do.

https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20250906_WBC...

> The lack of regulatory clarity

Oddly enough, that sounds like a request for more regulation. And I have heard many people say that if the regulators had made sure that if approval had gone beyond mere safety, into constructibility and other areas, that Vogtle would have been closer to the initial budget, and that Summer might have completed.

Thank you for the link, and I will read it in detail later, but at a high level, I think it's great support for my point that it's construction productivity that's the key driver of cost, not regulation (emphasis mine):

> Relatedly, containment building costs more than doubled from 1976 to 2017, due only in part to safety regulations. Costs of the reactor containment building more than doubled, primarily due to declining on-site labor productivity. Productivity in recent US plants is up to 13 times lower than industry expectations. A prospective analysis of the containment building suggests that improved materials and automation could increase the resilience of nuclear construction costs to variable conditions.

ALARA would indicate that the increased costs from regulation are due to the design of the reactor.

However, my example is of reactors that China can build cost effectively, but which Europe can not. (And the AP1000 is an example where China can build the design cost effectively, but the US can not.)

That would indicate that nuclear reactors could be built cost effectively, with the same design, and without changing ALARA.

Removing ALARA may provide some sort of cost savings, but without some concrete and specific indication of how that would change the design, and to what savings during construction, it's hard to agree that ALARA is at fault.

It really is. Nuclear is 100-1000x safer than coal. By insisting on such an aggressive safety target, we force prices up and actually incur much higher levels of mortality - just delivered in the boring old ways of pollution and climate-driven harms.

See https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy for detailed stats.

I think we should target “risk parity with Gas” until climate change is under control.

> What is needed is a SpaceX-like enterprise

I'm not sure. They have more injuries per worker than their competition [1]. Space should already not be "let's work too fast at safety's cost", nuclear really can't.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/18/spacex-worker-injury-rates...

Companies certainly won't pay for the maintenance. They'll let them degrade and then the government will have to take over. So we get charged twice, that is the real price.

The goal of making nuclear cheaper isn’t to lower consumer costs. It’s to displace CO2 emitting baseload sources like coal and gas.

> It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop. You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond. Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions. Etc etc.

Without the fear of dual use, we could just enrich the fuel to higher levels and refuel once per 30 years.

That’s fair, but everything else is outcompeting coal these days.

So even if we can drop prices down to what China pays, nuclear still loses in China.

None of what I said really relates to safety. 3 mile island was a complete non issue when it comes to safety, but one day the nuclear reactor went from a useful tool to an expensive cleanup.

> Advocating for deregulation in order to achieve innovation is the opposite of conservative.

Not sure how it's the opposite of conservatism to remove unneeded government roadblocks to enable industry. That's pretty solidly in the traditional American conservative viewpoint (not to be confused with whatever viewpoint currently dominates the GOP).

China is building US and EU designs of reactors at a fraction of the costs in the US and Europe.

Your examples of regulatory asterisks are on the design side of things. I don't think that the cost of capital for Vogtle & Summer in the US, or Flamanville and Olkiluoto in the EU, were excessively high. As for your 3rd point, there were tons of adjustments during the build of Vogtle, which is a big reason for its large cost overruns. Regulation didn't necessitate those changes, they were all construction bungles.

Which I think leads to your point 2, construction competence, being the primary cause, which aligns with everything else I have read on the subject. For example, another poster pointed to this paper:

> We observe that nth-of-a-kind plants have been more, not less, expensive than first-of-a-kind plants. “Soft” factors external to standardized reactor hardware, such as labor supervision, contributed over half of the cost rise from 1976 to 1987. Relatedly, containment building costs more than doubled from 1976 to 2017, due only in part to safety regulations.

I think if you regulated coal on a linear no threshold risk model, you'd find the costs to be somewhat closer.

> We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.

I shouldn't be surprised by this comment. There are so many people who believe we should allow more pollution in the air we breathe and water we drink [1] just to increase the profit margins for shareholders.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/05/14/nx...

> At peak hours electricity is $0.13/kwh but the delivery charge is $0.50/kwh.

Unfortunately, transmission has a natural monopoly risk, unless the government owns without profit requirements. The price peak is when it is just cheaper to make second set of lines next to old one and you can still pay the investment with fewer customers and lower price.

> Most of the early incidents in nuclear plants happened under the management of public or state controlled companies.

Not a fair comparison since back then nobody else had the resources.

Why not not both?

What's the evidence that there's "flooding the market" going on? It seems to me wind turbine prices have followed a plausible looking downwards hill and there's no sign of dumping excess inventory or otherwise unsustainably low prices.

The DoD is not exactly known for great efficiency and getting the most value for money

Betcha their worker injuries per kg to LEO are lower than most companies.

Cool! Thanks

> I think industry overreaction to the regs is possibly as large or larger of a problem than the regs themselves.

I see this over and over again in regulated industries like banking and healthcare. No one wants to risk tripping up the regulations so company lawyers write up crazy and often conflicting “requirements” to satisfy legislation. The limitations placed by company council are often far more restrictive than regulations actually require. You have lawyers dictating engineering or software design requirements based off of a shoddy understanding of other lawyers attempts to regulate said industries they also don’t really understand.

And this isn’t to say that engineers are somehow better at this than lawyers. Engineers make just as many of these sorts of mistakes when developing things via a game of telephone. As someone who has played the architect role at many companies, it’s not enough to set a standard. You have to evangelize the standard and demonstrate why it works to get buy in from the various teams. You have to work with those teams to help them through the hurdles. Especially if you’re dealing with new paradigms. I don’t know to what degree this happens for other industry standards. But it seems like mostly folks are left to figure it out themselves and risk getting fined or worse if they misinterpreted something along the way.

I’d like to believe there is a way to balance lenience for companies that are genuinely trying to adhere to regulations but miss the mark at places and severely cracking down on companies that routinely operate in grey areas as a matter of course. But humans suck. And lenience given is just more grey areas for the fuck heads to play in. We cannot have nice things.

Secrecy isn't the obstacle here. Naval reactors are optimized for combat performance, costs be damned. They aren't economically efficient for commercial power generation.

Or you know, build renewables and storage which has in recent years reduced Californias fossil gas dependency by 40%.

Injury rate is 6x other space vehicle manufacturers. If you were to slow them down by 6x they would pretty close to the 20 years it’s already taken to get SLS/constellation to do a test launch.

Super heavy is on year 4.

Agreed, you are talking about non-safety factors. I don’t think they necessitate the price levels we see; for example, look at how cheaply China can build reactors.

I think it’s quite clear that we pay a high safety / regulatory premium in the west for Nuclear.

My point about safety is that we are over-indexing on regulation. We should reduce (not remove!) regulations on nuclear projects, this would make them more affordable.

I don’t think this is a controversial point, if you look into post-mortems on why US projects overrun by billions you always see issues with last-minute adaptations requiring expensive re-certification of designs, ie purely regulatory (safety-motivated) friction.

Since the OT is about EU, it is important to keep in mind that costs per MW are much lower in EU than in the US (or the UK).

E.g. according to https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/infrastructure-costs-nuclear-e..., UK/US is ~10 millions GBP, France ~4.5, and China/Korea/Japan around 2.5.

I don't know much about nuclear plan, but I doubt UK are much safer in practice than French ones, or even Korean/Japanese ones. I suspect most of the cost difference across countries of similar development to be mostly regulation. And it is a nice example that sometimes EU can be better than the US at regulations :) (I don't know how much nuclear-related regulations are EU vs nation-based though).

> Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it.

You have to take scale into account. This is 20 years of spent fuel.

https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/cca0b8d/21474836...

That's it. 20 years. Just that, for a constant, quiet output of just about a gigawatt. And that's an old, decommissioned reactor.

You're right about nuclear fuel refinement, packaging, and so on being non-trivial, but the amount of it that you need is so miniscule that if you don't talk about volume you paint a misleading picture.

> small modular reactors are only making heat they don’t actually drive costs down meaningfully.

Mass production makes anything cheaper. Ask the French about their efficient reactor program.

Sure, but one comes first.

Unless by "taxes" you mean "delivery charges" this is simply untrue.

The generation is cheap. The delivery, the grid cost, is 3x-5x the cost of the generation.

It's all PG&E and the regulators's fault, for not containing costs more.

I have ideas of a plan to help in nuclear, which is to make open source reactor company quality assurance and engineering procedures that establish clear compliance with regs but also incorporate all sorts of efficiency lessons learned

Ah. The brilliant argument that nuclear power is perfectly safe and if we just eliminate all these pesky safety regulations it will be cheaper too! I often wonder what it would take for me to maintain a belief against literally all published evidence. Nuclear power evangelicals are basically trying to spread a religion at this point. Right along side flat earthers and antivaxxers. We just have to take on faith all of these things that they claim and ignore decades of actual evidence about the economics of power generation.

It is under regulation that is the problem here. PG&E has caused multiple huge disasters through negligence that have caused deaths and billions in damages that they pass on to rate payers. And this is after they redirected funds for maintenance directly to executive compensation.

The regulators should have thrown the hammer down on PG&E then, but after the disaster happens the money has to come from somewhere. Even if PG&E declares bankruptcy, the grid must run, and people must be able to rebuild their destroyed homes.

A public utility would be better than this sort of parasitic investor owned utility. Or, lots more regulation, and lots more jail time.

“All of the above” seems a good approach. If this is an existential crisis, why would we not hedge our bets?

(Not everywhere has good sun for solar.)

This statistic is very relevant here, and surprising to many! Deaths per kWh produced for all energy sources.

Solar and nuclear both really stand out immensely as the safer alternatives.

People tend to think of nuclear as dangerous, but that's just propaganda. There has been a lot of anti-nuclear propaganda over the years. But the numbers speak truth:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

What about long term environmental cost? I might consider your preference if you agree to have all the nuclear waste dumped in your families backyard. Until then, I'd rather not have that waste produced in the first place.

When the nuclear industry feels confident enough to not need its own special law to protect it from liability in case of accidents, I’ll feel a little more confident in their safety rhetoric.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

Solar is not the only alternative. Tidal, river flow, reservoir, wind, thermal come to mind in terms of renewables.

Maybe there’s a deal to be made where France builds and operates nuke plants in the US and handles the spent fuel as well. They’ve gotten quite good at it, and that could bypass a lot of the regulatory quagmire tied to a new home grown design and the reprocessing hazard.

Does that calculation include the cost of storing the nuclear waste after use? I'd be curious to see a reference for your claim.

The notable thing is that more or less China has kept ramping up solar and wind targets whereas nuclear has been much slower to grow. China's energy requirements are so large that this still represents an absolute number increase, but it's telling that even with as heavy handed an industrial policy's as China's that nuclear has not really lifted off.

> Authorities have steadily downgraded plans for nuclear to dominate China's energy generation. At present, the goal is 18 per cent of generation by 2060. China installed 1GW of nuclear last year, compared to 300GW of solar and wind, Mr Buckley said.

> https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa...

France also built full-sized commercial plants rather than batteries of small reactors. That's because scale matters for efficient production.

It's not diverse. Whoever you are, HN always leans in perfect opposition to your ideas.

> if you agree to have all the nuclear waste dumped in your families backyard

What an unnecessary strawman. Nobody's gonna have nuclear waste in their backyards. It's all gonna get stored safety in glass vials under geologically inactive mountains.

> How much would it cost if China turns off that supply?

Buy them while they're selling cheap. They're good for at least 20 years. Plenty of time to stand up domestic manufacturing if they cut you off.

Total non starter.

Nuclear submarine power plants are not in any way a technology useful for utility scale power generation.

To start with they use fuel enriched to weapons grade.

They aren't cost effective vs the amount of power produced, and the designs don't scale up to utility scale power.

Submarine plants are not some sort of miracle SMR we can just roll out.

The Navy is willing to page cost premiums a utility company cannot, because for the Navy it's about having a necessary capability. There's no economic break even to consider.

Coal is already losing, and things are only getting worse for steady state production.

Grid solar drives wholesale rates for most of the day really low long before new nuclear gets decommissioned. If nighttime rates rise above daytime rates a great deal of demand is going to shift to the day. Which then forces nuclear to try and survive on peak pricing, but batteries cap peak pricing over that same timescale.

Nuclear thus really needs to drop significantly below current coal prices or find some way to do cheap energy storage. I’m somewhat hopeful on heat storage, but now you need to have a lot of turbines and cooling that’s only useful for a fraction of the day. On top of that heat storage means a lower working temperature costing you thermodynamic efficiency.

The challenge though is how to hit safety levels with a high level of accuracy. And we keep rediscovering how tough that can be. The space shuttle and 737 max are examples of that.

Or acknowledge the true cost of $10 billion to build a reactor. Look at recent implementations. Finland was complaining that they had to deal with the mafia. The plant cost €11 billion, original proposal: €3 billion. Yikes.

"... 3,800 employees from 500 companies. 80% of the workers are foreigners, mostly from eastern European countries. In 2012 it was reported that one Bulgarian contracting firm is owned by the mafia, and that Bulgarian workers have been required to pay weekly protection fees to the mafia, wages have been unpaid, employees have been told not to join a union and that employers also reneged on social security payments."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant

> If we'd build smaller, modular reactors that are literally exactly the same every single time you would begin to get economies of scale

You can also build standardized, modular LARGE nuclear power reactors. The French and the Japanese did it and managed to builds lots of large reactors with relatively short build times

It's regulation holding back nuclear power...in every country?

I completely agree with you and I'm pro nuclear. But those regulations have to be streamlined and the regulator needs to have enough manpower so licenses aren't stuck in limbo for years.

It's also unacceptable that the regulations can change during builds and then you have to make large parts completely new before you get the license to load fuel into the reactor.

> Or acknowledge the true cost of $10 billion to build a reactor. Look at recent implementations. Finland was complaining that they had to deal with the mafia. The plant cost €11 billion, original proposal: €3 billion. Yikes.

This particular plant is a terrible example. It was the first of its kind, so it was bound to be more difficult than as part of a series. For example, there were issues with contractors that would not have happened if it had been the 5th reactor with the same specs. There were also issues with project management and changing regulations, which prompted some extensive tweaking of the reactor core almost as it was built. This is not representative of the difficulty of building a reactor that is par tof a fleet with identical designs.

And it's going to end up being price.

We need to drive down the cost of dealing with nuclear waste. Possibly to zero, because that is a cost that will have to be paid basically forever.

Between 1961 and 2023 «5,600 TWh of electricity were generated from nuclear energy in Germany». [1]

Every year Germany spends (and will have to spend until the end of time) at least 2 billion Euros just to keep the existing nuclear waste safe [2] (more than half of the yearly budget of the ministry of the environment and about 0.5% of the yearly government budget). That's a drag. Think about it: it's all unproductive money, that does not produce any new energy, and stopping these payments will cause irreparable damage to the environment. Forever.

[1] https://kernd.de/en/nuclear-energy-in-germany/ [2] https://www.bundesumweltministerium.de/ministerium/struktur/...

The problem with nuclear is not the ultra-low probability of incidents, but the potential size of the incidents.

And then you have bad faith actors.

No one would ever put graphite tips in the control rods to save some money, wouldn't they?

No one would station troops during war in a nuclear power plant, wouldn't they?

No one would use a nuclear power plant to breed material for nuclear bombs, wouldn't they?

Finally, no CxO would cheapen out in maintenance for short term gains then jump ship leaving a mess behind, right?

None of that has never ever happened, right?

I don’t follow. If nuclear initially costs more than coal, then the first effect as it decreases is displacement when the prices cross over. Then if it falls further you will notice consumer price drops.

True, but we have multiple OOMs to play with. How about we try to go from 0.03 to 0.3 deaths per TWh and see how much cheaper we can make it? As long as we stay lower than 30 we didn’t actually make a mistake.

> The problem with nuclear is not the ultra-low probability of incidents, but the potential size of the incidents.

This is also not as bad as people think. Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible.

Even if we had ten times as many nuclear disasters - hell, even fifty times more - it would still be a cleaner source of energy than fossil fuels.

Meanwhile the amount of overregulation is extreme and often absurd. It's not a coincidence that most operational nuclear plants were built decades ago.

You need to look up how much nuclear waste is actually produced. It's a minuscule amount relative to the energy produced, and it doesn't actually need more than to be transported and then encased in concrete.

Agreed that lumpiness is an issue and so in practice you wouldn’t want to argue for coal levels of death-per-MWh.

This concern is, I believe, the crux of why folks are overly-conservative - the few well-known disasters are terrifying and therefore salient.

Plus it’s hard to campaign for “more risk please”. But we should bite the bullet; yeah, more of the stuff you list would happen. And, the tradeoff is worth it.

Dry casting on site is fairly cheap.

The true cost of nuclear is the massive construction cost. We don't know how to solve that.

Many people see top-line rate increases and assume the issue is supply cost, but transmission and distribution have become over 50% of cost everywhere I’ve lived, and are growing fast, regardless of underlying generation or fuel costs. Distribution alone (the neighborhood/local grid) is now roughly matching the supply cost on my MA bill, and though I last lived in CA in 2019, I would be surprised if PG&E weren’t similar.

it would be unwise to put all of ones eggs in someone else's basket.

having as much wind solar and nuclear as possible will ensure humanity has a bright future. 18% seems like a good number. how much storage are they investing in?

It is not that way with other similar types of power production.

Reminds me of:

https://xkcd.com/1162/

Regarding fuel:

https://xkcd.com/1162/

> This is also not as bad as people think. Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible.

Yeah the final outcome was pretty negligible, especially if we ignore to huge exclusion zone that can’t be occupied for a few hundred years.

But even in those disasters, we often got a lucky as we got unlucky. The worst of the disasters was often avoid by individuals taking extreme risks, or even losing their lives to prevent a greater disaster. Ultimately all of the disasters demonstrated that we’re not very good a reliably managing the risks associated with nuclear power.

Modern reactor designs are substantially safer and better than older reactors. But unfortunately we’ve not building reactors for a very long time, and we’ve lost a huge amount of knowledge and skill associated with building reactors. Which drives up the cost of nuclear reactors even further because of the huge cost of rediscovering all the lost knowledge and skill associated

  > nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate.

True, but you also get large amounts of electricity in return.

You're over simplifying and cherry-picking. Is it a big deal if it costs 10x more if it produces 20x more power? What about 10x the cost, 10x the power (so equal $/MWhr) but 0.1x the land? What about 10x cost, 10x power, 1x land, but 10x more power stability? As in fewer outages. How much will you pay for 99.999 than 99.99?

The problem with the vast majority of these energy conversions is that people act like all these costs are captured in the monetary metric. I'm sorry, the real world is complex and a spreadsheet only takes you so far. There's no one size fits all power source. The best one to use depends on many factors, including location. If you ignore everything and hyper focus on one metric you're not making an informed decision that's "good enough" you're arrogantly making an uninformed conjecture.

I'm surprised how often this needs to be said (even to pro nuclear folks), but nuclear physics is complicated. Can we just stop this bullshit of pretentiousness masquerading as arrogance?

> "They're installing 1GW per month of pumped hydro storage," Mr Buckley said.

Fun fact, pumped hydro was actually developed for nuclear originally in the 70s, since nuclear is a large source of power that is hard to ramp down during low demand periods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power...

>Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.

Which costs are you thinking about here? Please be specifc, provide details about regulations which are not needed, why they're not needed, and what they add to the cost of a nuclear plant.

Sorry for the tone, but I think your statement is extraordinarily wrong - and at the same time it's being repeated very often lately but never with any specifics. I'm genuinely curious what it is based on.

You are making a common mistake, your source does only considers things that have happened, not things that could happen. But we know what could happen, which is why the security standards have to be high for nuclear power.

A nuclear Musk would be interesting.

You should fix your model of governance, because by that measure, any hope for progress is futile. The simple fact that we were better a few decades ago should be comforting. Enough of the shirt term profiteering sociopaths running the show, we can certainly cautiously swing back towards more technocracy and careful strategic planning.

If anyone is interested, here's a picture of decades worth of it[0]. I used to have a video of Russia's, but it seems to have gone down. If somehow you can way back it, here's the link[1].

For more comparison, France produces about 2kg of radioactive waste per year, which delivers 70% of the country's electricity. If you removed all nuclear power reactors you'd still be generating 0.8kg of radioactive waste[2]. It'll work it's way out to on the order of (i.e. approximately) a soda can per person per year.

I think people grossly underestimate the scale of waste in many things. Coal produces train loads a day (including radioactive and heavy metals), while nuclear produces like a Costco's worth over decades. The current paradigm of "we'll store it on sight and figure it out later" isn't insane when we're talking about something smaller than a water tower and having about 300 years to figure out a better solution.

On the flip side, people underestimate the waste of many other things. There are things much worse than nuclear waste too. We spend a lot of time talking about nuclear waste yet almost none when it comes to heavy metals and long lived plastics. Metals like lead stay toxic forever and do not become safer through typical reactions. We should definitely be concerned with nuclear waste, but when these heavy metal wastes are several orders of magnitude greater, it seems silly. When it comes to heavy metals (lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, etc) we're talking about millions of tonnage. These things are exceptionally long lived, have shown to enter both our water supply and atmosphere (thanks leaded gasoline!), and are extremely toxic. It's such a weird comparison of scale. Please take nuclear waste seriously, but I don't believe anyone if they claim to be concerned with nuclear waste but is unconcerned with other long lived hazardous wastes that are produced in billions of times greater quantities and with magnitudes lower safety margins.

[0] https://x.com/Orano_usa/status/1182662569619795968

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uN0bZBOic&t=105s

[2] https://www.orano.group/en/unpacking-nuclear/all-about-radio...

People like you believe uranium is growing on trees. Have you actually looked up how it's retrieved? The costs are insane and the ecological damage unrepairable.

Or, you know, socialize risks, socialise profits. I don't know why we would have to put up with this abuse and corruption any longer.

> yeah, more of the stuff you list would happen. And, the tradeoff is worth it.

Next to you and your family, then, since you’re happy trading with their risks.

At least Russia is doing fine with SMRs, thought the fuel enrichment level is around 20%. They are building new reactors all the time and they seem pretty efficient. E.g. they have even floating nuclear plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov

> Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies.

It's true that a pound of nuclear fuel costs more than a pound of coal. But it also has a million times more energy content, which is why fuel is only 15-20% of the operating costs compared to >60% for coal. And that's for legacy nuclear plants designed to use moderately high enrichment rates, not newer designs that can do without that.

> Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop.

You're describing a heat exchanger and some pipes. If this is the thing that costs a billion dollars, you're making the argument that this is a regulatory cost problem.

> You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond.

Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive.

Equipment to move things is something you need at refueling intervals, i.e. more than a year apart. If this is both expensive and rarely used then why does each plant need its own instead of being something that comes on the truck with the new fuel and then goes back to be used at the next plant?

> Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions.

This is the regulatory asymmetry again. When a hydroelectric dam messes up bad enough, the dam breaks and it can wipe out an entire city. When oil companies mess up, Deep Water Horizon and Exxon Valdez. When coal companies just operate in their ordinary manner as if this is fine, they leave behind a sea of environmental disaster sites that the government spends many billions of dollars in superfund money to clean up. That stuff costs as much in real life as nuclear disasters do in theory. And that's before we even consider climate change.

But then one of them is required to carry that amount of insurance when the others aren't. It should either be both or neither, right?

> Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive.

Well, anything is expensive in enough quantity. But there is a bit of a tell not covered where of regulatory problems because nuclear plant projects keep going way over budget. Even stupid planners can notice trends of that magnitude and account for them, there is something hitting plant builds that isn't a technical factor and it is driving up costs.

Climate change is planet wide. No nuclear incident has ever had such a widespread effect.

That is what we did 20 years ago when the renewable industry barely existed.

What has happened since is that the nuclear industry essentially collapsed given the outcome of Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinkley Point C and can't build new plants while renewables and storage are delivering over 90% of new capacity in the US. Being the cheapest energy source in human history.

We've gone past the "throw stuff at the wall" phase, now we know what sticks and that is renewables and storage.

The places with worse sun conditions tend to have amazing wind resources. Or be such a tiny niche that caring about them is irrelevant, like the few people living in the wind kill of the arctic high north of the polar circle.

The recent US builds were not tied up by "NIMBY roadblocks".

It's interesting that in China, which you assert lacks roadblocks, renewables are being installed to a much greater extent than nuclear.

Climate has never stopped changing since the day the earth was formed, that's why we are here. Keep it "under control" is a wild target.

This exists because of a cognitive bias: we tend to focus on direct, attributable harm while overlooking larger, diffuse, and indirect harm.

A nuclear plant could operate safely for 50 years, causing no harm, but if it explodes once and kills 10,000 people, there's gonna be a trial. A coal plant could run for the same 50 years without any dramatic accident, yet contribute to 2,000 premature deaths every single year through air pollution—adding up to 100,000 deaths. Nobody notices, nobody is sued, business as usual. It's legally safer today to be "1% responsible for 1000 death" than to be "100% responsible for a single one". Fix this and that law goes away.

It's a bogus talking point that the nuclear industry in the US was shut down due to increase in regulation.

The actual situation was that relentless 7%/year demand growth for electrical energy suddenly stalled, while at the same time a large amount of new capacity from cogeneration, made possible by the passage of PURPA in 1978, suddenly started to come on line. In this environment, and with the cost overruns and delays of the earlier nuclear builds, utilities could not make a case for new nuclear construction. High interest rates also didn't help.

It is not like nth of a kind Hinkley Point C, EPR reactor number 5 and 6, at $32.5B per reactor is going any better?

Also do note that no one knows the true cost of Olkiluoto 3. The $11B figure is from a settlement many years before it was completed as interest and construction costs kept accumulating.

"All wooden boats always leak a little, so stopping people from drilling holes through the hull is a wild target."

It's a strawman to pretend that 10,000 year slow changes are qualitatively the same as what's been going on in the last hundred.

I can see a future where everyone can have free access to nuclear power.

I'm not an expert but I recall watching documentary on the eve of personal computing and someone saying that the phrase "personal computer" sounded as alien as "personal space station".

Sure, won't happen tomorrow, but it's nice thing to dream of.

> We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.

Chernobyl melted down and exploded.

Three Mile Island melted down and the regulatorily mandated containment vessel protected the public.

I wouldn't call that a fake cost.

My napkin math is that the $2.5B in profits accounts for about $0.14/kWH.

This is based on total electrical energy production of 17,301 GWh, since PG&E doesn't seem to publish their total distributed energy.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%242.5+billion+%2F+17%2C301+...

https://www.eia.gov/state/print.php?sid=CA#tabs-1

Except for Chernobyl clean up workers, no one lost their lives taking a deliberate risk in any other nuclear incident. And Chernobyl clean up workers didn't die within months either - in fact the story of their health outcomes is quite nuanced, but yes they most definitely took high risks.

In fact Chernobyl is incredibly badly remembered, because the firefighters who died responding to the initial blaze died of sepsis related to beta radiation burns from spending hours wearing their firefighting coats covered in radioactive dust.

Had they been removed promptly and hosed down, those people would've survived because they would not have received essentially a third degree burn over their entire body. And that's the point: they died of sepsis related complications, not any type of unique radiation damage and the Soviet doctors who treated them did get better at it once the protocols were established.

That is rapidly changing.

https://onu-vienne.delegfrance.org/Nuclear-power-and-SMR-are...

https://regulation-oversight.asnr.fr/oversight/small-modular...

More people die every single year from the radiation parts of coal power (excluding accidents), than have died from radiation of nuclear power's entire decades long history, including accidents.

Yes, they should be made safe, but we need some perspective here.

The problem with nuclear mistakes is they aren't a few decades. They can be measured in centuries.

So yeah. Regulation.

Don't build a damn LWR on a fault line (Fukushima) 3mile Island - don't have so many damn errors printing out that everything is ignore Chernobyl - we all know I think. It's still being worked on to contain it fully. Goiânia accident (brazil) - caesium-137 - Time magazine has identified the accident as one of the world's "worst nuclear disasters" and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) called it "one of the world's worst radiological incidents". (and this was just a radiation source, not a nuclear plant)

So yeah. Oil has bad disasters. Nuclear has EPIC disasters.

I think what is missing in your argument is not that these pieces are difficult. It's that combining all of them adds to a significant amount of complexity.

It's not JUST a heat exchanger. It's a heat exchanger that has to go through shielding. And it has to operate at much higher pressures than another type of power production facility would use. Which adds more complexity. And even greater need of safety.

I'm not arguing against Nuclear; I think it's incredibly worthwhile especially in the current age of AI eating up so much power in a constant use situation. But I do think it needs to be extremely regulated due to the risks of things going south.

I thought I'd mention that ship supplied short power has been a thing for ages. USS Daniel Webster even trained for this for new years eve apocalypse nothingburger. And its almost always been used for only powering something critical. Today's subs are <10MW. Nothing for utility scale. I can't imagine the economics are ever good. More of a: we've already got this boat.

https://thenaptimeauthor.wordpress.com/2021/04/09/the-uss-le...

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1982/11/26/A-nuclear-submarine-...

There are some floating PWRs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_pow...

I don't know why people think this is a "gotcha"?

I would happily live next to a nuclear power plant, the reason not to is mostly to do with "it's still an industrial site". But like, lakeside land where I'm up or down stream from it but can clearly see it nearby? Sure.

It's one of the rare forms of industry where if I was ever worried about contamination a cheap portable device will warn me remotely. Unlike say, Asbestos and heavy metals...one of which there's a bunch in my current backyard.

> which is why fuel is only 15-20% of the operating costs compared to >60% for coal

Nuclear has much higher operating costs than coal. It’s not 20% of 3 = 60% of 1, but it’s unpleasantly close for anyone looking for cheap nuclear power. Especially when you include interest + storage as nuclear reactors start with multiple years worth of fuel when built and can’t quite hit zero at decommissioning so interest payments on fuel matter.

> You're describing a heat exchanger and some pipes. If this is the thing that costs a billion dollars, you're making the argument that this is a regulatory cost problem.

It’s a lot more than that, and far from the only cost mentioned. It’s pumps, control systems, safety systems, loss of thermal efficiency, slower startup times, loss of more energy on shutdown, etc.

> Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive.

Highways don’t use expensive materials yet they end up costing quite a lot to build. Scale matters.

> Equipment to move things is something you need at refueling intervals, i.e. more than a year apart. If this is both expensive and rarely used then why does each plant need its own instead of being something that comes on the truck with the new fuel and then goes back to be used at the next plant?

Contamination with newly spent nuclear fuel = not something you want to move on a highway. It’s also impractical for a bunch of other reasons.

> But then one of them is required to carry that amount of insurance when the others aren't. It should either be both or neither, right?

No nuclear power plants has ever actually been required to carry a policy with that kind of a payout. Taxpayers are stuck with the bill, but that bill doesn’t go away it’s just an implied subsidy.

However, the lesser risk of losing the reactor is still quite substantial. You could hypothetically spend 5 billion building a cheap power plant rather than 20+ billion seen in some boondoggles but then get stuck with cleanup costs after a week.

It's not the volume of the waste that's the challenge - it's handling and storage that remain mostly unsolved.

By unsolved I mean - not convincingly solved, and certainly not yet tested over the expected duration that material needs to be safely contained.

SoCal Edison was as low as .06usd/kwh when the nuclear plants were operating. As soon as they started shutting them down it shot up to ~.25-30usd/kWh.

Nuclear energy requires high-end engineering and manufactoring skills. Both vanish in the west more and more, particularly in the US.

China can build nuclear plants just fine because they have the manufactoring and engineering quality and quantity. Where did they get that? We gave it to them and even financed it.

The crisis of the west is a crisis of production. To bury regulations just means to keep a failing system afloat for another short while. Regulations exist to prevent another Chernobyl, thanks.

> Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible.

Was this not due to the expensive clean-up effort in each case respectively? Nuclear reactors may be a lot cleaner than fossil fuels operationally, and reducing their regulation to allow them to replace fossil fuels may well be cleaner on average. But if the once-in-a-blue-moon incident requires huge amounts of money in clean-up costs, then maybe those health and safety regulations would prove themselves cheaper in the long term.

Perhaps the real question is why we do not demand such stringent health and safety standards on fossil fuels, which are operationally dirty and prone to disaster.

And then there's coal. The difference between nuclear and coal is that when nuclear has a horrible accident, it kills fewer people than coal kills as part of its normal expected operation.

The trouble with liability is that if your nuclear plant has an accident and the cancer rate in the area doesn't detectably change, everybody in the area who gets cancer will sue you anyway.

I agree Chernobyl was an epic disaster, but Fukushima ? Last I heard the radiation level are basically normal even close to the reactor, and overall radiation wide there hasn't been much damage if at all.

So it seems that fukushima is an example of something that should have been an EPIC accident, but actually was perfectly fine in the end. I may be wrong, but thats what I remembered from the wikipedia page.

If being next to a nuclear plant meant id NOT be next to a coal plant, and therefore have better air and better health, I’d gladly take that trade.

If there’s something we can all agree on, that’s our blind spot.

Fukushima was partly an issue of flawed risk assessment. The tsunami that took down the plant was believed to be an incredibly rare even, expected to happen once every ten thousand years.

However, that was a result of faulty assumptions made when the plant was initially planned. With better data and methods, the event would have seemed a lot more likely.

... Sooooo... time to fire back up the old range at Bikini Atoll?

> "It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate."

Not just to operate, but to clean up and decommission at their end of life. In the UK, for example, early reactors were built cheaply without much consideration/provision for eventual decommissioning. This has left an enormous burden on future taxpayers, estimated to exceed £260 billion, much of it related to the handling and cleanup of vast quantities of nuclear waste [1].

Thankfully new reactors are being financed with eventual decommissioning costs "priced in", but this is another reason why they've become so expensive.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/23/uk-nucle...

A big part of the cost is financing the project. It is capital intensive, and even few interest points more impact a lot the cost over time.

Those project should be finance with the cheapest money possible (usually government backed loans). UK is an example of nuclear getting expensive due to private investment instead of government.

> It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it.

This is based on reactors with poor efficiencies that leave a lot of unburned Uranium in their waste. Fast reactors and thorium reactors burn 90% of fissile material, so mining costs are significantly lower for the same power output.

> Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions.

Total death count from nuclear is lower than the death count of wind and solar. Falling off roofs happens a lot more frequently than nuclear accidents. This is a nothingburger, particularly given new reactor designs are meltdown proof.

Regulation still plays a role in the final cost. Sure it has to be safe. But we need to draw the line. Nuclear is arguably way too safe currently (zero death for a long time). Some regulations could be relaxed to speed up the construction, and make the operations cheaper.

We should have a discussion and review all the regulations surrounding nuclear.

> cleanup of vast quantities of nuclear waste

The total high level, dangerous nuclear waste of the entire world since we started playing with nuclear power 70 years ago fits in an American football stadium with plenty of room to spare. "Vast quantities" is a serious exaggeration.

The difference between nuclear and coal is that when nuclear has a horrible accident, it kills as many people right here and makes as much land uninhabitable right here as coal does in our enemy countries within its normal expected operation.

It was perfectly fine because the operators stole the batteries from all the cars in the parking lot to run the control room. Not something I'd like the continued existence of New York City to rely upon.

The costs of cleaning up Fukushima, including the wider effects on the Japanese economy, are estimated to exceed US$200 billion. That makes it a pretty EPIC disaster in economic terms alone.

Even Chernobyl was not really that bad in terms of lives lost. Even taking the worst estimates of long-term deaths from radiation exposure, it killed a tiny fraction of the numbers of people who have died from hydroelectric disasters or from exposure to coal power plant pollution. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a catastrophic disaster for the regional (and wider Soviet) economy.

> Nuclear has much higher operating costs than coal. It’s not 20% of 3 = 60% of 1, but it’s unpleasantly close for anyone looking for cheap nuclear power.

But that's the point, isn't it? You have two types of thermal power plant, one of them has a somewhat lower fuel cost so why does that one have a higher operating cost? Something is wrong there and needs to be addressed.

> It’s a lot more than that, and far from the only cost mentioned. It’s pumps, control systems, safety systems

These things should all costs thousands of dollars, not billions of dollars.

> loss of thermal efficiency, slower startup times, loss of more energy on shutdown, etc.

These are operating costs rather than construction costs and are already accounted for in the comparison of fuel costs.

> Highways don’t use expensive materials yet they end up costing quite a lot to build. Scale matters.

5 miles of highway has around the same amount of concrete in it as a nuclear power plant. We both know which one costs more -- and highways themselves cost more than they should because the government overpays for everything.

> Contamination with newly spent nuclear fuel = not something you want to move on a highway.

Is this actually a problem? It's not a truck full of gamma emitters, it's a machine which is slightly radioactive because it was in the presence of a radiation source. Isn't this solvable with a lead-lined box?

> Taxpayers are stuck with the bill, but that bill doesn’t go away it’s just an implied subsidy.

Have taxpayers actually paid anything here at all? The power plants have paid more in premiums than they've ever filed in claims, haven't they?

> You could hypothetically spend 5 billion building a cheap power plant rather than 20+ billion seen in some boondoggles but then get stuck with cleanup costs after a week.

You could hypothetically build a hydroelectric dam that wipes out a city on the first day. You could hypothetically build a single wind turbine that shorts out and starts a massive wildfire.

Our enemy countries are West Virginia and Pennsylvania?

The UK alone had the following inventory of nuclear waste as of 2022:

~1,470 m³ "high level" waste totalling ~14,000,000 TBq at year 2100. "High level" waste is that which generates enough heat to require specially designed and managed storage facilitates to prevent spontaneous fires etc.

~496,000 m³ intermediate level waste totalling ~1,000,000 TBq at 2100

~1,340,000 m³ low level waste totalling ~130 TBq at 2100

~2,750,000 m³ very low level waste totalling ~12 TBq at 2100. VLLW is considered safe enough to be disposed at landfill sites subject to certain special considerations. But not until the radioactivity drops below a certain threshold, of course - it still has to be stored at special facilities for many decades until then.

It's a pretty vast and costly problem even if you don't consider this a "vast quantity".

Source for these figures: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-radioactive-wa...

> You should fix your model of governance,

What model of governance, of language, of human culture is going to last longer than the elephants foot will be dangerous to human beings?

> For more comparison, France produces about 2kg of radioactive waste per year,

... per capita. Sure, all other waste is bigger than that, but it is still a whole lot and still, usually, power companies do not have to pay for it, the country does. I wonder why.

A Chernobyl level incident every single year would kill fewer people than the annual number of people that die from fossil fuel particulate emissions. We can imagine reasonable numbers of accidents and still be sure that it would be dramatically safer than fossil fuels, even ignoring climate change.

And the land rendered uninhabitable would represent less land lost than is expected to be lost from sea level rise, most of which will be extremely hi-value coastal areas.

There is no way you can run the numbers where nuclear, even with dramatically reduced safety standards, is not preferable to fossil fuels. By making it so expensive with such heavy regulations, all we have done is forced ourselves to use the worse-in-all-possible ways fuel source for most of a century, causing millions of premature deaths and untold billions in environmental damages.

Over-regulation of nuclear is high up on the list of greatest civilizational blunders humanity has ever made.

Except for Russia, where else have deaths + land issues happened?

Both of your posts contain very little self-doubt and curiosity. Many points don't seem convincing, and you're consistently not steelmanning the arguments you are replying to.

> it's a machine which is slightly radioactive because it was in the presence of a radiation source

This isn't how radiation works. Material doesn't get radioactive from being in the presence of a radioactive source. Contamination refers to radioactive emitters being somewhere they don't belong.

Recycled down to ten grams per person per year.

> Material doesn't get radioactive from being in the presence of a radioactive source

There is this thing called neutron activation.

But the elephant in the room is of course that coal plants emitted way more radioactivity than nuclear ones even taking into account every disaster on even non-power generation plants.

Meltdowns aren't physically possible if we're building newer types of plants, so there can't be a new Chernobyl or even Fukushima if we're using modern types of passively cooled plants.

Oh come on.

I consider myself reasonably pro nuclear, but this is just like some developer going:

“Oh yeah, that doesn't seem that hard, I could probably implement that in a weekend”

Fact: hard complicated things are expensive.

There is no “just it’s just some concrete…”.

That is, translated “I do not know what Im talking about”.

Hard things, which require constant, high level, technical maintenance…

Are very expensive.

Theyre expensive to build. Theyre expensive to operate. Theyre expensive to decommission.

Theres no magic wand to fix this.

You can drive down the unit cost sometimes by doing things at scale, but Im not sure that like 100 units, or even say 1000 units can do that meaningfully.

…and how how are we planning on having the 100000s of reactors that you would need for that?

Micro reactors? Im not convinced.

Certainly, right now, the costs are not artificial; if you think they are, I would argue you havent done your due diligence in research.

Heres the point:

Making complicated things cheaper doesnt just magically happen by removing regulations. Thats naive.

You need a concrete plan to either a) massively simplify the technology or b) massively scale the production.

Which one? (a) and (b) both seem totally out of reach to me, without massive state sponsored funding.

…which, apparently no one likes either.

Its this frustrating dilemma where idiots (eg. former Australian government) claim they can somehow magically deliver things (multiple reactors) super cheaply.

…but there is no reality to this promise; its just morons trying to buy regional votes and preserve the status quo with coal.

Real nuclear progress needs realistic plans, not hopes and dreams.

Nuclear power is better; but it is more expensive than many other options, and probably, will continue to be if all we do is hope it somehow becomes easy and cheap by doing basically nothing.

This is bullshit.

Radioactivity is exponential. If something is very active at start, it will fade quickly. If it is not, it is not dangerous to begin with.

So whatever they do spend, they need to optimize instead of hiding from cost-cutting behind this.

> You have two types of thermal power plant, one of them has a somewhat lower fuel cost so why does that one have a higher operating cost? Something is wrong there and needs to be addressed.

Nuclear is inherently vastly more complicated requiring more maintenance, manpower, etc per KW of capacity and thus has more operational costs. A 50+ year lifespan means keeping 50+ year old designs in operation which plays a significant role in costs here.

> 5 miles of highway has around the same amount of concrete in it as a nuclear power plant.

A cooling tower isn’t dealing with any radioactivity and it’s not a safety critical system yet it’s still difficult to build and thus way more expensive per cubic foot of concrete than a typical surface road. When road projects get complicated they can quickly get really expensive just look at bridges or tunnels.

> You could hypothetically build a hydroelectric dam that wipes out a city on the first day.

Hydroelectric dams have directly saved more lives than they have cost due to flood control. The electricity bit isn’t even needed in many cases as people build dams because they are inherently useful. Society is willing to carry those risks in large part because they get a direct benefit.

Wind turbines are closer and do sometimes fail early, but they just don’t cost nearly as much so the public doesn’t need to subsidize insurance here.

That’s not an economic problem for people operating the power plant.

Nuclear power plants need shielding to avoid their workforce being killed off very quickly. Obviously safety standards are much higher than that, but significant shielding is inherently necessary.

Err, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candlewood_Lake was completed in 1928 (for electrical demand regulation.) Much older than nuclear...

Would have been even funnier if they included sunlight, that’s 100% E=MC^2 baby.

Which is kind of funny as they where storing energy from a hydroelectric power plant, so building a larger dam would have been way more energy efficient.

Not a commercial reactor but US lost 3 people trying to hand operate a small reactor with minimal safety: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1

“On Tuesday, January 3, 1961, SL-1 was being prepared for restart after a shutdown of 11 days over the holidays. Maintenance procedures required that rods be manually withdrawn a few inches to reconnect each one to its drive mechanism. At 9:01 pm MST, Rod 9 was suddenly withdrawn too far, causing SL-1 to go prompt critical instantly. In four milliseconds, the heat generated by the resulting enormous power excursion caused fuel inside the core to melt and to explosively vaporize.”

The industry didn’t just randomly get so risk averse there where a lot of meltdowns and other issues over time.

It's precious that you think a socialized system wouldn't be rife with corruption.

> We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy.

This is not true. It might be nice to drive down the cost, but there's no need to do it. Adequate, even preferable, alternatives exist.

As an expert remarked way back in a time when the nukes were conveniently making plutonium, and kids got free comic books promoting them, and the plans for handling waste seemed sound :

"At present, atomic power presents an exceptionally costly and inconvenient means of obtaining energy which can be extracted much more economically from conventional fuels.… This is expensive power, not cheap power as the public has been led to believe."

— C. G. Suits, Director of Research, General Electric, who was operating the Hanford reactors, 1951.

(Hanford today, sitting on 56M gallons of leaking wastewater, is debating whether that newly-constructed vitrification plant should be allowed to operate, since it'll emit dangerous levels of toxic acetonitrile.)

If one tries to quantify the value of those deaths, using the "statistical value of a human life" (somewhere around $12M/death), one finds in the case of both wind/solar and nuclear, using those numbers, the value of those lives contributes negligibly to the cost of energy. This is unlike with coal.

This means that in choosing between solar/wind and nuclear, one cannot use the deaths/TWh to choose between them unless they are almost dead even in other costs (and they are not).

There’s generally significant costs and asterisks around such claims.

You’re much better off paying attention to site placement than trying to design something to safety handle getting covered in several meters of volcanic ash Pompeii style.

IMO it would have been funnier if he added sunlight on that graph.

> Total death count from nuclear

Total death count is a straw man argument, what matters here is the economic costs.

Mining isn’t the major cost, nuclear fuel is expensive for other reasons. Refining gets rid of even more uranium before it gets to the reactor. CANDU tried to get around that by using unenriched uranium, but ran into other issues.

And that’s what pro nuclear people seem to miss, really smart people have been trying to solve this issue for decades there’s no easy solutions with well understood downsides. Let’s quickly build some new design isn’t a solution it’s a big part of why nuclear construction costs are so high.

How much of those wider costs are from them shutting off nuclear plants?

  > power companies do not have to pay for it, the country does.

In the sense that you're using this, doesn't this apply to every power company?

Honestly, I'll pay a higher premium to get a power source with lower amounts of waste. Even if it costs more to store that waste. Just the scale of the waste is so massive. The environmental damage. Leaking into water supplies. All those same problems with nuclear fuel are the same with any other fuel. The difference is that in nuclear there is a greater concentration of damage by volume while having dramatically less volume.

To determine what's the cheapest option here you have to assign that damage per volume and then compare the volumes. How much more dangerous do you think nuclear is? 100x? 100000x? How much do you think any given section of the environment is worth? The CO2? The animals and other life impacted? The health costs of people living nearby?

All these things are part of the equation for every single power source out there.

  > per capita

Did you continue reading and see how that's 200mg of long lived waste? France has 66.7 million people. For long lived waste that's 13k tons total. That's a bit shy of the trade waste per capita. So about 67 million times more. Or let's go back to full. For power reactor they only produce 60% of that 2kg, 1.2kg. So that's 80k tons of waste, total, per year.

Seriously, do you understand the scale we're talking here? I mean there's more literal mass in a 1MW solar power plant. You get a few years of all of the nuclear power in France for the weight of a 1MW solar farm. France's nuclear generates 63GWs. That's 63000 times! Nuclear isn't 10000x as expensive, it's not even 10x. So I'm not exaggerating when I'm asking if you think it's 1000x more dangerous or 1000x more costly to the environment. Because that's still giving us a conservative estimate

A lot of the cost isn't the tech, it's the years of delays, endless permitting, and political whiplash

Great idea to napkin math it, but I think you're off by a very large margin. CA energy commission shows PG&E's energy consumption to be over 70,000 GWh.

$2,500,000,000 profit/70,000,000,000 kWh consumed is ~$0.035 per kWh.

So not exactly the smoking gun that CA ratepayers are looking for.

site: https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

$50M is obscene, but not really a needle mover for rate payers. You could pay the whole executive team $0 and it would save the average residential ratepayer a few bucks per month, probably less than $5 per month.

Bottom line: nuclear will never be "cheap and easy," but I think there is headroom to reduce costs meaningfully

> Not something I'd like the continued existence of New York City to rely upon.

Was New York City really at risk? Citation needed.

You're going to have to be more specific about cost control.

No, we don't really need it though

"mostly unsolved"? It's cheap, low-maintenance, and essentially risk-free barring potential terrorism.

Even if the storage got somehow compromised(extremely unlikely), the disposal sites are distant enough from civilization and the amounts small enough that the environmental harms would still be far below tons of other manmade events.

What more do you want?

The comment you reply to talk about regulatory costs but you choose to talk about cost in general. No one thinks its cost is 0.

> Don't build a damn LWR on a fault line (Fukushima)

Don't put the emergency diesel generators in the basement where they are certain to be flooded if the tsunami wall is too low. Also, don't build too low tsunami walls.

> So yeah. Oil has bad disasters. Nuclear has EPIC disasters.

No. Hydropower has.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...

Do stupid things and stupid things will happen. There are plenty of similarly stupid accidents on stupidly run construction sites and chemical plants all the time. Also lots of accidents with trains, lots of accidents with temperamental chemicals.

Take this stupid accident, for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Galactic#2007_Scaled_Co...

> In July 2007, three Scaled Composites employees were killed and three critically injured at the Mojave spaceport while testing components of the rocket motor for SpaceShipTwo. An explosion occurred during a cold fire test, which involved nitrous oxide flowing through fuel injectors. The procedure had been expected to be safe.

N2O is very good oxidizer + it's a molecule that can fall apart (and turn into N2 and O2) in a very exothermic way if you look at it wrong.

Oops.

Back to SL-1. Nobody was killed by radiation. They were killed by things hitting them hard from the explosion.

> The effort to minimize the size of the core gave an abnormally-large reactivity worth to Rod 9, the center control rod.

> One of the required maintenance procedures called for Rod 9 to be manually withdrawn about four inches (10 cm) in order to attach it to the automated control mechanism from which it had been disconnected. Post-accident calculations, as well as examination of scratches on Rod 9, estimate that it had actually been withdrawn about twenty inches (51 cm), causing the reactor to go prompt critical and triggering the steam explosion.

and:

> At SL-1, control rods would sometimes get stuck in the control rod channel. Numerous procedures were conducted to evaluate control rods to ensure they were operating properly. There were rod drop tests and scram tests of each rod, in addition to periodic rod exercising and rod withdrawals for normal operation. From February 1959 to November 18, 1960, there were 40 cases of a stuck control rod for scram and rod drop tests and about a 2.5% failure rate. From November 18 to December 23, 1960, there was a dramatic increase in stuck rods, with 23 in that time period and a 13.0% failure rate. Besides these test failures, there were an additional 21 rod-sticking incidents from February 1959 to December 1960; four of these had occurred in the last month of operation during routine rod withdrawal. Rod 9 had the best operational performance record even though it was operated more frequently than any of the other rods.

That is insane.

and how much is from cleaning up things that weren't dirty in the first place?

Global rollout of wind and solar are accelerating past nuclear's records:

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/solar-wind-nuclear...

That law says more about the reliability of US courts than about the safety of nuclear power.

I’d like to apologize. Realized that the wording in my comment wasn’t appropriate.

Do they pay him that amount because he is really good at keeping end user prices down?

Or do they pay him that much because he's good at extracting as much money from the situation as possible?

When given an option that would double costs and profits or halves costs and profits which is he incentivized to do?

The great thing is that coal is not the alternative in 2025.

Renewables are forcing enormous amounts of coals and fossil gas off grids around the world as we speak.

Different people react to different topics. Some bring out strident autistic commies, some bring out psycho druggies, some bring out extreme capitalist dreamers (also likely autistic), some bring out furries and trannies (also likely autistic and definitely strident). They rarely all met in a single thread.

Well, no, that's more down to nuclear fans constantly using the worst possible comparisons, and creating false dichotomies. The better comparison are renewables or natural gas, not an ancient technology literally everybody (outside of it's investors) agrees is bad and should go.

If you did what nuclear fans did and tried to cover most/all of the load with nuclear, you would necessarily need to build more nuclear power plants, which esp. in Europe would automatically put them closer to population. That would automatically increase the lives lost from catastrophies.

If we had renewables everywhere, wouldn't a lot of that potentially disappear?

'Apart from terrorism ... or war, seismic activity, etc.'

I'm not sure where you're getting cheap from, or low-maintenance.

The above-ground stuff is locking future generations in for on-going maintenance for several centuries, perhaps longer. There's been think-tanks trying to work out how you just signpost such a place, given storage may exceed the expected lifetime of languages, and we'd want to be polite and at least contend with societal collapse.

It is hubris to observe that the many locations chosen now will remain 'distant from civilisation' for many centuries.

> Back to SL-1. Nobody was killed by radiation. They were killed by things hitting them hard from the explosion.

What's the relevance of this?

> ALARA would indicate that the increased costs from regulation are due to the design of the reactor.

Yeah. Due to armies of highly paid experts spending almost a decade of their life arguing if the design is up to the regulations. And also when because of these uncertainties you start building before full approval and then requirements change.

> coal is not the alternative in 2025.

Except in uncle Donald’s kingdom with “America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry” (yes, seriously):

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/rein...

>A Chernobyl level incident every single year would kill fewer people than the annual number of people that die from fossil fuel particulate emissions

This is not true. You are using the lawyers definition of damage from Chernobyl, but the doctor's definition for fossil fuels. Chernobyl was much worse than you believe, but I don't expect to change your mind on that point here.

But why are you arguing as if it's either nuclear power or global warming?

China has added the equivalent of 25 nuclear power plants worth of solar generation yearly for the past couple of years. Not even China is able to build nuclear plants faster than in 5-6 years or so - it takes too many workers, too much resources. It's too little and too slow to make a difference.

Efen if you believe it is safe, Nuclear is clearly a roadblock, or a detour. We should instead build storage and solar, which can add orders of magnitude more power in shorter time.

(But even then we'll have to deal with global warming).

And that might work if there is a linear relationship between apparently unnecessary engineering work and deaths. My argument is that such a relationship does not exist, or is not something we can model.

As this is HN I assume you have some understanding of software/IT etc. Do you think a project manager on a massive software project could do the same with security flaws? Reduce the engineering effort by some percentage and get a predictable increase in security issues? And lets say that this project has massive amounts of sunk costs, is hugely important for the livelihood of everyone involved and also classified and closed source. All you have to do to reduce costs is increase data breaches from one to three per year. Easy. But in a complex human-technical system leadership do not have that kind of control authority.

Lets come back if that leads to an increase of coal usage instead of being posturing like most else they do.

Coal has been uncompetitive since the advent of the CCGT plant and was stagnating long before the fracking boom.

So, for safety, turn off coal first, then turn off nuclear.

Nuclear sits just between wind (slightly more dangerous) and solar (slightly less dangerous) per unit of electricity production, all of them being much safer than hydro; and ridiculously safer than gas, oil and coal. It's a really, really safe option.

Note that these number are a bit old and since then, installation of consumer solar has increased significantly. Installation of solar panels on consumer roofs is much more dangerous than installation of solar panels in solar plants, so death rate for solar are significantly underestimated. Meanwhile accident rates of plant construction (nuclear, solar or otherwise) keep dropping.

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Life of hundreds of millions were/are/will be affected by Chornobyl. Nobody can calculate real death toll of Chornobyl accident because it's impossible to control radiation. Moreover, nobody wants to pay for those deaths or partially lost health.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-kno...

You forgot to include the decommissioned reactor and waste water.

Nuclear meltdown, evacuation of nearby cities.

We have lot of nuclear waste. Can you take it?

It depends how much competition there would be if for-profit company owns them.

If there is just one source nearby, isn’t that another monopoly risk? The price starts to balance with high distance tranmission cost monopoly vs monopoly of nearby energy source.

If we find many small renewable sources that are cheap to build, maybe that balances it out.

Don’t you need to create a specific kind of chemical reaction and just bomb is not enough for that?

> That is insane.

Hindsight plus other people doing the analysis always makes things seem more obvious.

The people designing this system were not trying to kill the operators. They made tradeoffs that seemed reasonable at the time and then things failed badly because something unexpected happened. The only way to avoid that is to be extremely cautious which then feeds back to nuclear being expensive.

Risk aversion gets expensive, but so does taking risks. That’s the nuclear dilemma. It seems reasonable to say just take more risks, but that’s how you get accidents that people look back on and think how could they be so dumb.

Yes, and in terms of overall deaths per terawatt-hour, nuclear is similar to renewables.

> Total death count is a straw man argument, what matters here is the economic costs.

Paying out lawsuits is an economic cost. Regardless, disposing of low level radioactive components of the reactor had to happen at some point, and the cases where it's not offset by decades of recouping on that investment is are incredibly rare. Regardless, this is mostly moot in new designs because they are considerably safer, as I said. What's left is really the regulatory burden. In France and China, they build reactors in less than a decade. Can't happen here in America.

> Mining isn’t the major cost, nuclear fuel is expensive for other reasons.

Which is besides the point, as I said, you get a lot more energy per gram of fuel with modern designs or fast reactors, which mostly mitigates the objection about fuel cost, regardless of what stage the highest cost to obtain fuel is incurred.

Fast reactors weren't pursued because of nuclear weapon proliferation risk, which leaves the modern designs on the table where this risk is even lower than LWR.

Thanks for the downvote and not being able to distinguish hyperbole from strawman. I guess the former is the price for getting the amusement of the latter.

My bad. It's still notable that the sixth largest one in the world was still developed for nuclear plants.

Mostly, yes, but also consider that both were exceptional circumstances that happened to outdated reactors.

IIRC Fukushima didn't actually leak enough radiation out to cause any significant environmental harm - quite possibly, most of the evacuations weren't even necessary, and the total toll among responders was only 25, with only 1 death.

Chernobyl was much worse, but other than responders and the high incidence rates of thyroid cancer in young children close to the disaster area, the total casualties were also lower than people assume. A lot of the early estimates were massively inflated.

Honestly it's quite possible that in both cases, we could have done much less relocation and evacuation, especially the fukushima response was largely driven by Japan's fear of nuclear technology.

Aye, but with the amount of coal plants still running, I think the choice is between solar+nuclear or solar+coal

I don't think anyone is arguing nuclear instead of solar. It's both. We need both.

You only really have two options there:

- a system of lords and peasants, where the lords are held accountable and kept in check by the peasants, as the social contract obliges, or - a system of lords and peasants, with no checks and balances

Obviously, corruption can creep in any system, but the one that states "let's give it all to the lords with nothing in return" seems asinine to me.

Yes it is. Look up Tokamak radiation shields.

I get your point and would be much more inclined to agree if we were talking about trying to hit a 3x risk increase. But we are talking about huge risk margins here, many OOMs.

My problem with your argument is that as framed it’s a fully generic argument against doing anything; there is always a risk of bad outcomes for any action. What we must do in practice is look at risk/reward and try our best to estimate each.

Data breaches are a bad analogy because you are presenting this as “I get to make a bit more money by lowering security”. A better analogy would be something like colonoscopy; some people will die from cancer if you advise nobody has this procedure. Some people will die from complications if people do get this procedure. How do we as a society choose how many people should die and from what? This is a trolley problem, there is no choice where people don’t die as a result of the decision. The answer is that we must do our best to estimate the risks and minimize them.

This is not what we are doing with nuclear right now. We are simply trying to reduce the risk of nuclear, without making any attempt to model the harms that are being introduced.

The casts are made to withstand a collision with a locomotive.

For safety, the order to turn things off is coal, oil, biomass, natural gas, hydropower, wind, then nuclear.

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

>The great thing is that coal is not the alternative in 2025.

Unfortunately, there is a country that shut down nuclear power plants while they still have operating coal plants. Over time, coal use is declining in Germany, but that isn't the story so far in 2025:

>…The share of electricity produced with fossil fuels in Germany increased by ten percent between January and the end of June 2025, compared to the same period one year before, while power production from renewables declined by almost six percent, the country’s statistical office

>… Coal-fired power production increased 9.3 percent, while electricity production from fossil gas increased by 11.6 percent.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/fossil-electricity-prod...

Shutting nuclear power plants down when you are still burning coal is almost unbelievable... I don’t think future generations will look kindly on countries who shut down a clean form of power while they still are running the most dangerous and dirty form of power generation ever created.

> energy per gram of fuel

That just not a metric that matters.

Fuel is north of 1c/kWh for nuclear reactors, +/- if you count various things as fuel costs, that’s inherently a big deal if you’re trying to compete with 2c/kWh solar.

> Fast reactors weren't pursued because of nuclear weapon proliferation risk

They also just have higher costs per kWh.

Personally I would of course prefer to phase out fossil fuels before nuclear power. But we are where we are in 2025 and there is no point crying over spilled milk.

We can only look forward and make sure we spend our money wisely. We also need to decarbonize aviation, shipping, agriculture, industry, construction etc. The grid is not the end, it is only the beginning of our decarbonization journey.

The fastest, cheapest and most efficient way of quickly displacing fossil based energy production today is building renewables and storage.

>...But we are where we are in 2025 and there is no point crying over spilled milk.

It would be one thing if Germany's bad mistakes in this area only affected Germany. Unfortunately people downwind of Germany die because it is still burning coal. Unfortunately climate change will affect everyone.

>...We also need to decarbonize aviation, shipping, agriculture, industry, construction etc. The grid is not the end,

Many of the changes needed to decarbonize those industries will rely on using electricity, so the grid is critical.

>...The fastest, cheapest and most efficient way of quickly displacing fossil based energy production today is building renewables and storage.

We will see if Germany is still burning coal and natural gas when countries like Finland are not.

Is your suggestion that Germany instead of building renewables quickly displacing said coal instead invests their money in nuclear power?

That would mean they get a fraction of the capacity (in TWh) online and the people downwind of Germany would have to live with the emissions as they stand today without any abatement until the mid 2040s.

Does that sound reasonable?

Unfortunately Germany dug itself into a big hole and the choices aren’t that great. (Yes, continue to build more solar and wind. Though that is what has been happening in 2025, and coal use has increased this year due to the variability of renewable sources.) To move away from coal in a more reasonable timeframe, other approaches could also be done. Like I mentioned in a previous comment, I am sure Germany will decarbonize before Poland, but that is kind of a low bar. Some ideas:

- Restart the nuclear power plants that are feasible to restart. The last 3 plants were only shut down in 2023 - it isn't like all the plants were shut down in 2011. It may very well be that Germany doesn’t feel it has the expertise to run nuclear power plants in the long term, so once the power isn’t needed or can be replaced by clean energy (either produced in Germany or imported), feel free to shut down the nuclear plants.

- Work with Denmark and France to import more of their power that is not coal based.

- Reward conservation more.

- Move the big industrial users of electricity out of Germany.

Some of these alternatives are likely not palatable, but like I said, Germany dug itself into a hole. Any of these alternatives sounds better than essentially deciding instead to murder people by burning coal when you have other options.

Millions, sure. Hundreds of millions? Probably not. And don't forget that a LOT went wrong in Chernobyl, it's literally impossible for another disaster of this magnitude to happen again.

This comment shows that you don’t really grasp how the German grid works.

The German grid is currently constrained north-south due to limited transmission capacity. Over production of renewables in the north and over consumption in the south.

The reactors the pro-nuclear lobby in Germany identified as ”most easily restartable” are in the north.

Therefore restarting them is a pure waste of money. It does not solve any problems Germany has with its grid.

Then it comes down to the cost question. You can maintain a piece of infrastructure forever but at some point the costs does not justify the gain. Better spend the money on renewables and storage instead.

An example of such stupidity is Diablo Canyon in California requiring a $12B subsidy on top of regular income for selling electricity to run 5 extra years from 2025 to 2030.

You do know that France is on a downward trend of nuclear power as well? Reactors are entering end of life and the EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.

Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.

Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026… And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.

A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!

Multiple millions by thousands of years. Probably yes.

No, I'm not. Pick whatever estimate of deaths from Chernobyl you like. Take the highest, most unreasonable estimate. It's still true. And yes, _now_ we have other options. In 1960 we didn't. We have nearly a century of carbon emissions and particulate deaths that were unnecessary. There are literally _millions_ of premature deaths every year as a result of fossil fuel particulate emissions.

Nuclear may not be the best option anymore (I'm skeptical that an ideal power generation mix doesn't include more nuclear than we currently have, but agree that it probably shouldn't be the primary source anymore), that doesn't change the fact that not using it for past 80+ years as our primary energy generation source was a huge civilizational blunder.

None

It’s worth considering, but not in that context.

>Over production of renewables in the north and over consumption in the south.

Well I guess it is impossible to upgrade the grid in any kind of reasonable timeframe in Germany. There are still other options that could be done to hasten the end of burning coal - I pointed out a few, there are likely others.

>Then it comes down to the cost question. You can maintain a piece of infrastructure forever but at some point the costs does not justify the gain. Better spend the money on renewables and storage instead.

Yes it is a question. Unfortunately you have given no evidence of the actual costs.

>...You do know that France is on a downward trend of nuclear power as well?

In 2014 France set a goal to reduce nuclear's share of electricity generation to 50% by 2025. This target was delayed in 2019 to 2035, before being abandoned in 2023. (I am sure France is also trying to increase renewables and storage.)

>An example of such stupidity is Diablo Canyon in California requiring a $12B subsidy on top of regular income for selling electricity to run 5 extra years from 2025 to 2030.

This comment shows you don't really grasp the issue of power in CA. The 12 billion dollar estimate included costs unrelated to Diablo Canyon according to PG&E. Their estimate is closer to 8B, of which the majority will be covered by selling the electricity. They have a 1.1 billion dollar grant to help with some of the rest, though unclear how much the state will have to subsidize things in the end. The issue is that Diablo Canyon provides about 1/4 of the clean power in CA and can provide it when renewables can't - like every other place, CA currently has a tiny amount of grid storage. Without Diablo Canyon, CA will likely have to buy power from coal plants in other states. So CA is willing to pay extra to avoid having to burn coal. That is different than Germany that decided it would rather burn coal than use nuclear.

We will see when Germany actually stops during fossil fuels. Unfortunately, there certainly do seem to be some advocates of solar/wind who would prefer to go decades (or maybe much longer) burning coal and killing people and destroying the environment when their country had the option to use a clean energy source.

Upgrades are on the way but you were trying to frame it as a desperate issue to solve immediately, without realizing your solution didn’t solve anything.

For evidence have a read:

https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2024/06/pge-quietly-s...

Just keep hiking the rates in a monopolized system. All good!

You do know that California in recent years has cut fossil gas usage by 40% due to storage? Many evenings batteries are the largest producer in the Californian grid for hours on end. Happened yesterday for example.

But batteries are of course insignificant. Just delivering the equivalent to 8 nuclear reactors pretty much removing the duck curve.

I suggest you update your worldview to 2025.

https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply

Connecticut isn’t very elevated so a dam at a higher level may not have been very practical.

Have you heard about low-background steel? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

It became scarce because of some very widespread effect.

>No, I'm not. Pick whatever estimate of deaths from Chernobyl you like.

That's the lawyer definition though - because some 50 people sacrificed their lives and because we spent 600 billion euros on remedies during the first 30 years, nobody can prove how bad it might have been.

But scientists will tell you how much caesium and iodine was released per day of that fire burning, the force of the steam explosion that might have been, how close it was to the contaminate the ground water supply and so on.

Then doctors will tell you how that would affect the people living in the fallout areas, and for how long the ground and food supply would be affected.

So if you let go of the lawyer definition, estimates are easily in the double-digit million dead.

Which we risked for a grand total of 28 TWh of electricity produced from Chernobyl.

And that's the bigger point here - even if the risks were way less than they actually are, the payoff is not worth it. Electricity generation causes less than 1/4 of the co2 emissions in the US - road transportation alone is a larger source.

Nuclear is not and never was a solution to global warming. Best case it helps of course, but only until something happens like Fukushima or Chernobyl. The billions spent on those two incidents alone would have had a bigger effect if they were spent subsidizing electric cars, solar panels, battey production and such.

No, I don't think we need both. In particular, building new nuclear plants would be worse than just putting all that money into renewables + storage. The latter displaces fossil fuels more quickly and more cheaply.

It is probably infuriating to many that costs are that significant and that important. France should be the model for nuclear, but mismanaged EDF which now has €54.3 billion debt and is years behind in maintenance. (2022 debt was €64.5 billion). And the public and politicians pitch a fit if the PM proposes a balanced budget with cuts. Nuclear doesn't make the cut when there are multiple competing interests of nitwits.

I see. So Nevada and the 46 other states with electricity cheaper than California[1] all have stricter regulation than California then? That's why their electricity is so much cheaper?

[1]: https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/

> That just not a metric that matters.

So you said that fuel costs dominate the cost of energy delivered, I'm saying that you can deliver the same energy while purchasing less fuel, but now you're saying that that's not a metric that matters for the cost of energy delivered. Err, wut?

I'd say it's a call for more appropriate regulation. Regulations are not a bad thing, they can be a great enabler when used well. Well defined thresholds beyond which your ass is covered are necessary for any complex project to proceed. Obviously anyone building a nuclear powerplant better budget enough to make it a safe one.

The issue is when the goal posts are ill defined or just straight up moved. Things need to be overbuilt to satisfy demands the regulators may not even have, and still you might get caught up on something that you didn't think could possibly be an issue. There is excessive conservatism because you have at least some track record of regulator decisions, even if it's an imperfect indicator of their future requirements.

Overzealous but well defined regulations, like you need 3 backup diesel generators, obviously add cost, but this can be easily priced in at the beginning of the project. Typically, the more regulations you have, the more likely some of them will be vague, so keeping the number of regulations manageable is often a good thing, but is not strictly necessary. Where you really run into problems is when there is an unreasonable fear which draws strong support for "something" to be done, but there really isn't an appropriate action to take given the severity of the risk and the cost of eliminating it - that's how you wind up with bullshit like ALARA.

And safety regulations are just one facet. Environmental regulations, particularly NEPA requirements, are a major driver of construction costs for big projects and especially nuclear plants. If nuclear plants were primarily facing only the same issues as general construction, you'd expect the labor productivity to be similar to comparable scale projects. The fact that labor productivity is an order of magnitude lower indicates something specific to nuclear plants is lowering labor productivity. While many potential things could be causing that reduction in labor productivity, it's hard to think of any that don't stem from or are made substantially worse by the regulatory environment.

As someone who's lived at latitude 52N, I can tell you for a fact that solar isn't always an option.

You might think wind is a good alternative, but Greta Thunberg will vehemently protest that notion [1](and she's got a point, believe it or not)

We have more hydro per capita than almost anywhere in the world, and that's still not enough!

Sure, if you live near the equator, you can get all the power you need by putting solar panels on your roof.

If you don't.... Nuclear is the best option.

[1] https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/10/12/greta-thunberg-and...

Parts of Europe are close to the worst case for renewables (specifically, some parts away from coasts without a good wind resource). Even there, new nuclear might be only competitive with renewables.

This web site provides an optimization scheme for determining how expensive it would be to provide 365/24/7 steady power from wind/solar in various geographical areas, using historical weather data. Even in Europe it's not that bad. The 2030 cost figures may already be obsolete given the crash in battery prices.

https://model.energy/

Note that in this model it's essential to have something beyond batteries to use for long term storage (to smooth wind output, and to provide seasonal storage of solar output). The model uses hydrogen, but long term thermal storage may be even cheaper. Europe has ample geology for storage of hydrogen (salt formations).

> So you said that fuel costs dominate the cost of energy delivered

I don't believe he said that?

Or, customer site storage will become so good they just drop off the grid.

>…Upgrades are on the way but you were trying to frame it as a desperate issue to solve immediately, without realizing your solution didn’t solve anything.

It is only non-urgent if a country wants to minimize the people it is killing by recklessly burning coal. Otherwise, no big deal.

>…For evidence have a read:

Yes I had seen that. Which is why I wrote:

>>…The 12 billion dollar estimate included costs unrelated to Diablo Canyon according to PG&E. Their estimate is closer to 8B, of which the majority will be covered by selling the electricity. They have a 1.1 billion dollar grant to help with some of the rest, though unclear how much the state will have to subsidize things in the end.

CA battery capacity has had better growth than I thought. Though there is obviously a difference between batteries to provide power for a few hours a day and a plant that would provide power 24/7. Diablo Canyon provides close to 18,000 GWh per year of clean power. If that goes away this year, it will obviously take a while to be able to replace the power with other clean power.

> minimize

Countries don’t actually minimize anything largely due to diminishing returns. Hell the US has lost many nuclear weapons, that’s the kind of thing that seems like it should be a much larger priority but all budgets end up being finite.

> a plant that would provide power 24/7

Solar + batteries provide more electricity in CA than nuclear for roughly 16 hours a day. Midnight to 5AM demand is so low they are actually charging grid batteries, something that could be cheaply time shifted to daytime solar if demand actually increased. New nuclear just doesn’t fit especially if it’s taking 4+ years to build.