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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.