I wish there had been a careful reexamination of standards based on new knowledge.
More likely is that bringing old plants up to standard was too expensive. Or even worse, taking them off the grid.
In my view this is the real danger of nuclear power: New plants are probably quite safe but they are very expensive to maintain when they get old. On the other hand, if you relax the standard they are more profitable the older they get. So at some point you end up with a lot of old plants that are extremely expensive to maintain or shut down.
The huge cost leads to mismanagement. Obsolete or unsafe nuclear plants keep running even when they shouldn't. Those plants should have been replaced with new designs immediately but it is cost prohibitive and that is what lead to accidents like Chernobyl.
If you can't afford to shut it down then don't build expensive big designs. Build smaller ones that you can actually afford to take offline.
Yes exactly. Nuclear regulation has had diminishing returns on safety for probably 50+ years. Are newer nuclear designs safer than they were in the 80s? Yes. Are they _enough_ safer to justify the increased cost relative those older designs? Almost definitely not. In the same way, we _could_ make wind and solar and coal etc. as safe as nuclear currently is. But it would _dramatically_ increase costs. That was my entire point. Nuclear is only not profitable because it's competing with generation technologies that are not required to meet the same safety standards.
The US nuclear regulatory regime _explicitly_ does not include costs when determining if a new regulatory rule is necessary. Any amount of safety at any cost is always justified. No other generation technology has that mindset.
In 80s 100 reactors were in planning and the price was lower then a coal plant.
Many of those are still running and they are safe.
Understanding why the cost has gone up 10x can not be explained simply by 'slightly higher security regulation'.
Something else went wrong in the whole process and the regulated utility market.
> If you think there is going to be some magical world where people get rid of safety regulations for nuclear power, after the Fukushima nuclear accident I think you need to reconsider.
Nobody wants to 'get rid' of safety regulation. However talk to any expert on nuclear energy and you will see that the current way to to regulation is highly ineffective and damages the industry.
The cost is a political problem. It's easier for the opponents of nuclear to find support for stricter and stricter safety laws for new reactors. Driving up the cost, making them economically nonviable. Meanwhile the older and far more dangerous reactors are rotting away and cannot be replaced (or are replaced with fossil fuels).
It's been pointed out again, again and again. Coal plants pump out more radioactive waste than is ever released by all the accidents to date, catching a plane will irradiate you more than living next to one, etc. etc.
A couple years ago I happened to be sitting around a group of energy investors and academics when nuclear energy came up. Their unanimous understanding was that building nuclear plants had become simply too expensive to do either safely or within regulations. Was common knowledge to them it sounded like.
The problem is that the overhyped risks of nuclear power have driven the costs way up. For decades almost all effort has gone into increasing safety not reducing costs which utilities have little incentive to control because they are passed on to customers.
France is its own unique thing because of how the government paid for so many things out of pocket they ended up losing money selling at wholesale rates. Safe Nuclear ended up being a lot more expensive than earlier predictions.
It’s not some design issue that you can fix with small modular reactors or whatever. Every time anything significant goes wrong people kept adding systems to prevent it happening again. Sometimes that’s something physical like a wall or redundant system, and other times it’s longer procedures and more paperwork. This has been great for avoiding another SL-1, 3 mile island etc, but mitigating every possible risks isn’t cheap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1
For example there was once an expensive issue where foreign material fell into the spent fuel pool where fixing it significantly extended an outage at a single reactor so now everyone working on anything at any reactor takes significant steps to mitigate that risk. Great things working as intended except now something that might have cost 100k now costs significantly more because of that mitigation effort.
Extend that to any significant issue across hundreds of reactors and 50+ years and suddenly triple checking to avoid every fuck up means doing anything is really expensive. Worse very little of it is wasted effort, there’s just far more ways to fuck up in practice than in theory.
PS: I do believe it’s possible to have safe and cheap nuclear power, it’s just going to look very different than what we’re doing today.
One thing I never understand about the "higher safety standards increase costs" argument is that those higher safety standards are also used as a strong argument on how safe nuclear is. But then it's criticized at the same time for driving the costs up. So either we have extremely safe plants that can be built and operated safely in the thousands worldwide, or we have cheap plants that can be built quickly, but at the expense of safety. Thus far we could not have both.
They are subject to a regulatory ratchet that almost guarantees that you won't make a profit. I.e. if a new safety measure becomes "economically feasible" because you increased cost efficiency somewhere else then regulators would adjust their calculations in the future and make additional requirements because they would now be feasible. This can even lead to requirements changing during the construction time of a plant and require expensive retrofits.
It would be beautiful if these costs led to safety and were justified.
Unfortunately that's nowhere close to the truth. If you look into it, you'll notice that you e.g. can't reuse a reactor design (after being safety certified) but must recertify the same design each time. Upgrades also require recertifying all parts. (You can also pause the certification process in certain geographies by suing for different types of environmental surveys, causing a new certification to start as the old one timed out.) As a result, we are all running old designs when far safer ones exist.
In Sweden's case, in 2017 they at least stopped a special tax only on nuclear (which raised about 400 million euro equivalent/year).
Isn't that only due to the insanely strict safety regulations nuclear plants need to adhere to? After the Fukushima disaster, France, Germany, and China stopped nuclear operations or added more regulation that increased the cost of operating their power plants (despite, of course, nuclear being on average safer than fossil fuel plants, and even hydroelectric having a bigger death toll).
The overwhelming problem with nuclear reactors is not safety, but extreme cost to build and to operate.
An inherently safe reactor design might be a little cheaper to operate, but might be even more expensive to build. Or might be a little less.
But for any reactor to be worth building today, it would have to cost a lot less. That is unlikely, particularly since the regulations are written for inherently unsafe reactors, and this new safe-ish one would still need to conform to existing regulations, strictly needed or not.
Even relaxing regulations, it would still cost much more to operate than alternatives we now have available.
I think that's been an economic reality in the USA for a few years now, though also including natural gas in the tech doing the replacing. The recent EPA document that was intended to support coal and nuclear covered this:
“The draft report finds that since 2002, ‘most baseload power plant retirements have been the victims of overcapacity and relatively high operating cost but often reflect the advanced age of the retiring plants.’
“Overcapacity is a major cause of the turmoil in electricity markets. The report explains that because the growth in electricity demand has flattened since 2008, it is harder for ‘less competitive plants’ to survive. …
“And it doesn’t make sense to keep an uneconomic plant running when you know it’s going to keep losing money.
“In the case of nuclear power, the study notes that vast majority of the plant closure announcements blame plant retirement on ‘unfavorable market conditions.’ And the ‘most unfavorable condition is that the marginal cost of generation for many nuclear plants is higher than the cost of most other generators in the market.’
“Similarly, coal is also hurt by its high marginal cost: ‘[Coal] plants that have retired are old and inefficient units that were not recovering their operations and fuel costs, much less capital cost recovery.'”
That may be starting with the oldest, dirtiest and least efficient powerplants but it's only going to get worse for them as time goes on.
The easiest solution to getting rid of the crufty old regulations would be by shutting down all obsolete nuclear power plant designs and building new ones. Considering the financial cost of a single nuclear meltdown, upgrading your entire fleet is basically free. That upgrade will save you a trillion dollars in clean up costs.
I agree that costs are a major problem with nuclear. It seems to be a problem with all large scale construction projects in the past 20-30 years or so.
On the safety tail risks, IMO it's more of a psychological/perception problem than a problem of actual risk. We've had a number of serious accidents in the history of nuclear power, and none of them have led to anything close to the death toll of a single year of running coal plants.
In effect they did through overzealous safety requirements (which made it more expensive compared to other forms of electricity generation)
this regulatory inconsistency is mostly irrational, because it's clear through other policies that society values safety much less in other policies (eg. driving, all the emissions from other sources, gun safety, etc)
of course regulations are not perfect mirrors of society's preferences, but it's close enough. (and of course society doesn't "has to be" consistent, but I would say a pretty vocal minority, perhaps even the majority wishes it to be so)
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that said, yes, if the world would order 1000+ nuclear power plants, all standardized, then we could have it cheaper, because then it would make sense to invest in automation, and maybe modular small reactors can already get enough traction. but since we are not ordering that many and even AP1000 is just a brand not really a standard, there's practically no economies of scale
More likely is that bringing old plants up to standard was too expensive. Or even worse, taking them off the grid.
In my view this is the real danger of nuclear power: New plants are probably quite safe but they are very expensive to maintain when they get old. On the other hand, if you relax the standard they are more profitable the older they get. So at some point you end up with a lot of old plants that are extremely expensive to maintain or shut down.
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