Nuclear is only expensive because we've spent decades bureaucratically strangling it with red tape.
The technology exists to safely do nuclear at low cost. We just need to remove the billions of dollars wasted in intentionally-bad regulatory processes that were written into law to prevent nuclear from being successful.
The problem with nuclear is that people are afraid of it. If we had spent the last 40 years trying to make it cheaper instead of trying to prevent accidents, it wouldn't be so expensive.
Nuclear power is expensive in no small part because of the safeguards needed to try to avert catastrophic accidents. Humans are fallible, and our best intentions can be subverted by inadequate training; fatigue; inattention; laziness; or what we used to call "a loss-of-brain accident." As a result, we can f[oul] up at any stage of design, construction, operation, or maintenance of a nuclear reactor.
(Neither Three Mile Island [0] nor Chernobyl [1] would have been so disastrous had it not been for cascading sequences of human error.)
Expecting nominal performance by people or machinery is ... unwise; as Admiral Rickover famously said, "you get what you INspect, not what you EXpect."
All that adds to costs.
Source: Former Navy nuclear engineering officer, qualified as [chief] engineer aboard the eight-reactor aircraft carrier USS Enterprise.
The argument boils down to nuclear is safe and cheap, except that we only have unsafe designs because of ignorant people, it’s expensive because regulation (of the old, unacceptable designs), and waste totally isn’t a problem because someday we’ll figure it out.
Can you explain how the total cost of ownership is economic, when you include the cost of managing nuclear wastes for thousands of years? There is such a woeful global record of adequate safety measures not being included in any total cost budgeting for nuclear power. Real safety seems to always be an off-budget item. Not to mention the weapons proliferation risk. No thanks.
Nuclear power, at least in Europe, is only cheap as the nation states serve as insurers. The costs in the event of an accident are so high that noone wants to insure them.
On the other hand, nuclear is far, far safer than almost every other kind of energy source. If we allowed nuclear to be as unsafe as coal, how much cheaper might it be?
I always find the framing of these discussions very sad.
Nuclear doesn't have to be expensive, there are many historic examples of safe reactors built for very reasonable costs. (French and earlier American reactors especially.)
Unfortunately there seems to be zero appetite to discuss let alone fix the killing of nuclear power though an absolutely crazy regulatory framework.
If you are going to say "nuclear is cheap, we just have to live with meltdowns and learn to like them", then you might as well stop wasting your keystrokes. That dog won't hunt.
Or if you're saying "reactors are going to be just as safe even if all those expensive regulations are removed", then you have to justify that (and justify that removing regulations will reduce the cost enough). I am extremely skeptical.
This is like punching someone in the face, and then accusing them of having a nose-bleeding problem.
Nuclear is expensive because the rampant fear-mongering generates massive amounts of litigation, construction delays, and outdated/unreasonable regulations.
If you look at the cost of reactors in China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc, they are one-tenth the US cost for the exact same reactor design.
Nuclear is expensive because of overregulation. Hence no free market when it comes to building nuclear power plants, unfortunately. Otherwise we’d have a glut of safe electricity at amazingly low prices. Of course safety was the pretext for that overregulation but when such a complex technology has the lowest deaths per megawatt (except solar) [0] - maybe we can relax the rules a little.
I know about your suggestions and while they are all good ideas I just don’t see them widely implemented in reality for some reason. Maybe because they all require government intervention which is slow, expensive and prone to corruption from the fossil fuel lobby.
Meanwhile the non-renewable part of energy generation is made burning coal, gas and oil and spewing pollution and even radioactive particles in the air, pollution that kills millions every year. Also spewing CO2 causing climate change, e civilization-ending danger getting closer and harder to avoid.
Mainly due to politicians drafting rules to require more safety out of nuclear than any form of other energy solution. Of course it's more expensive if it's 100x more regulated.
> Nuclear waste: Many supposedly safe storage solutions such as in former salt mines have turned out to be unsafe. Gen IV reactors produce less, but not nothing at all
And what damage has these "unsafe" storages caused, especially compared to other forms of energy creation? Coal is basically pumping out the radioactive waste into the air we breathe. It's better to have few concentrated places for the waste rather than spread it all around the air little by little.
You can't just say "nuclear waste" and be done. You have to compare the data between different solutions.
> Security and safety: They're centralized infrastructure, attacking them has catastrophic consequences, unknown unknows like in Fukushima and human errors like in Chernobyl do happen and lead to catastrophes.
Funny you mention Fukushima, where zero people have died or gotten sick due to radiation, and experts say that the toll will probably stay at zero. Overall nuclear has the lowest mortality rate per MWh of any form of energy: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...
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