Centrus, the company cited in the ieee article, was the US based side of that exchange, then under the name of the US Enrichment Corporation. [1]

While the program was successful at nuclear disarmament ( to the tune of 20,008 warheads [wiki] ) it tanked the market by effectively 'dumping' the fuel, driving centrifuge operators out.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program

[1] https://www.centrusenergy.com/who-we-are/history/megatons-to...

That really set the tone for where US was willing to go and even if it's overall a better solution people weren't willing to back it while it was too easy to kill politically. Jack Welch's book "Straight from the Gut" talks about how they shifted their entire business to nuclear servicing from development because they saw the changing winds - the correct bet.

I'm super excited by this latest development as we accept that we need to learn how to tame the beast that is nuclear fission because the benefits really do outweigh the drawbacks.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

His overall strategy at GE was to shift it from it's traditional roles in heavy industry to instead focus on finance and real estate. This worked temporarily as the company rode the real estate bubble. When the bubble pop'd the company lost half its value.

In other words, don't evaluate his statements on nuclear without context or critical thought.

They had a relatively larger fall from grace in the recession than the rest of the index.

In any case, even if he was a terrible executive what does that have to do with whether he was correct about general trends in the nuclear industry?

I'm saying he had a larger agenda at the time that comment was made, one that had him divesting not just from nuclear but many other of GE's historic heavy industry and power related business lines.

DUBNER: Let me ask you this: in 1999, not long before you retired from G.E., you said that your ultimate success would be determined by how well your successor grows the company over the next 20 years. When you said that, G.E.’s market cap was up north of $450 billion. Now it’s almost 20 years later, it’s just north of $200 billion. So talk to me about that. I know that you —

WELCH: I don’t talk about that.

Now maybe Welch doesn't want to seem like he's bad-mouthing the performance of those who came after him, but he does have at least some responsibility for ensuring a good continuity of leadership.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/extra-jack-welch-full-inter...

How so? Don't you agree with it?

When did Chernobyl break ground? 1972, operated by lying soviet bureaucrats.

When Fukushima Daiichi break ground? 1967

When did Three Mile island break ground? 1968

There have been a half-dozen whole generations of nuclear reactor developed since then, drastic reductions in the amount of waste they generate through advancements in nuclear chemistry, and now a whole new paradigm of SMRs.

All in pursuit of greater safety from a bogyman that is nothing but an echo of the past. It's like the Mill architecture people, still trying to design a CPU to beat the itanic when the rest of processor design has moved on.

While it harmed the public perception of nuclear, it was really the cost that slowed down investments in US nuclear which then had knock on effects long term. The best way to think about it is power companies had other investments they could make that had less risks even if they had lower returns. Thus the cost is balanced not vs 0 returns but in comparison to the added benefit from nuclear.

Fewer investments meant losing knowledge of how to build the things which further reduced nuclear’s advantages. Until today when nuclear just can’t compete successfully and anyone that tries sees vast cost overruns.

And everyone got very scared, and the gov’t lost a lot of credibility.

It was no Chernobyl, but it made it clear the US wasn’t perfect either.

I've been watching a livestream of Reykjanes in the vague hope of seeing some magma. Somewhere globally needs to be evacuated every year or so. Going from base rate to base rate +1 per 2 decades or thereabouts is a perfectly acceptable deal. Nobody is going to die (which is more than can be said about coal). We'd get cheap clean energy.

And instead people decided that the best plan was to panic and we end up with the gently building energy crisis that has been rolling on for a few years now. It is entirely plausible we see the bloodiest war in human history as a result of the Western derailment of the transition to nuclear power. It was really foolish.

Who cares that the US government are incompetent? Yeah they're incompetent. They've been incompetent for a long while. They still snuffed out one of the most (arguably the most?) promising technologies of a generation out of fear and ignorance.

1) the public cannot see

2) lacks the skills to properly independently evaluate the scope of (99% of the public doesn’t own a Geiger counter, and 99.9% would be unable to quantify risks even if they did)

3) is potentially lethal

And the authorities the are supposed to be able to do #1 and #2 are caught repeatedly and obviously lying about the hazard.

It’s perfectly rational for people to get ‘irrationally’ scared. All they know is the folks who are supposed to be protecting them from this actual threat are not credible! And there is an actual threat (probably)!

Yes, I spent some time today reading official reports on Chernobyl, again. Hell, even the Soviet reports are damning for their own nuclear industry, calling out organizations, people and structural defficiencies. As is the IAEA. And none of those groups can even remotely be accussed of being anti-nuclear.

Maybe there needs to be another criteria. Something like, "when the hazard comes with a scary label"?

Coal fires are pretty obvious.

Acid rain is pretty obvious (and easy to measure with ph strips, which are easy to find).

Nasty smog is pretty obvious.

Plumes of gunk from smoke stacks are obvious.

Now, co2 and fine particulate contamination (like say radioactive contamination from ash), yes. Those take decades to be noticable (if at all). There have been big issues because of it, statistically. But those are not well known/accepted either by the public. And certainly not the most common 'acute' problems.

Something like a release of radiation from a nuclear power plant can (and usually is), completely invisible. As is things like ingesting fallout. It usually kills years or decades later.

If you can see radiation, you're pretty much a dead man walking already.

A reactor melting down is a sudden acute incident that can release massive amounts of completely invisible radioactive elements that won't kill anyone for decades - or in weeks/months, if really bad.

By the time something has obviously gone wrong from the outside (like the core blowing up in Chernobyl, or the reactor building blowing up due to Hydrogen explosion in Fukushima), massive releases are essentially guaranteed. But still usually invisible. Cherenkov radiation 'sky beam' from chernobyl excepted. [https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1142309/Chernobyl-dis...]

And with a little avoidance, a lethal dose might be easy to not have! If you have good data. Without good data, it's a crap shoot though.

I care, if they are responsible for overseeing the safety of the nuclear reactors.

That report, which includes official translations of two USR incident reports, is all about safety and technical aspectsbof RBMK reactors, nowhere do they talk about the future use and deploymant of nuclear power plants. After all, all those reports were written by the people being as pro-nuclear as you could be in the late 80s... Granted, people back then wrote long form documents not published on social media.

I linoed to the report elsewhere, ypu honestly should read it. Including the truely damning ones the Soviets wrote regarding safety, regulation and oversight at, and around, the Chernobyl power plant, especially affecting the extension units incl. rwaczor No. 4 which ultimately exploded.

I'm saying we should accept some level of accidents, not that we want to purposefully try to cause nuclear meltdowns. It is tolerance, not a target. Nobody is advocating ignoring 50 years of improvements in safety tech and understanding, we just shouldn't be bankrupting nuclear companies in pursuit of impossible goals.

The standard for damage should be similar to coal.

If anything, Chernobyl shows us that, regardless of how low regulatory and safety standards are, economic and career interests always push people and organizations to violate them. Hence, the point would be to put even stricter regulations in place.

On the other hand, you took official incident reports as, to qupte, economic recommendations. And you advocated for regulation to be loosened to oversight.

Generally so, HN has a really problem with quantifying risks. In FMEAs, the detectability, propability and severity of a failure mode are combined to calculate a risk value. If a risk is potentially disastrous, and if nuclear accidents are disastrous they really and truely are, the underlying failure modes have to be mitigated rigirously. There is no thought of "some accidents have to be accepted for the greater good" in developing systems that can, and have, killed people. This attitude shows in each and every discussion around aerospace accidents as well... And it is the main rwason I have a hard time accepting software devs as part of the greater engineering community.

1980s standards of safety aren't really an acceptable option in the modern era, and you are the person laying down 1980s and 1990s reports as something to be referred to. That isn't a very good strategy IMO, we should be aiming for higher standards than they could achieve then. We have much better tech and science now. The issue is that the regulations have gone waaay overboard, we're pushing huge costs onto the nuclear industry for next to no benefit to anyone.

> And you advocated for regulation to be loosened to oversight.

I still am, the amount of oversight the nuclear industry has been subjected to is silly.

However, and this is a point I thought was going to be obvious to everyone, 1980s USSR standards are also silly. Not as silly as the modern standard, in principle, but nevertheless I think we can do better.

I'm thinking that society can maybe be talked down off the ledge and accept airline-industry levels of safety. Then we can have cheap power and historically outstanding safety and an order of magnitude less environmental damage than coal, and cheaper power prices. It'd be a great equilibrium. Regressing to the 80s is not really something I'm tabling as an option here. If the plan was to do that then the anti-nuclear people would have some respectable points.

And you know why the Chernobyl reports are so significant? Because to date it is the worst nuclear accident, also the most thoroughly investigated one. And specifically because of all the fuck ups, it allows us to see a lot of risks and issues in one single report, not spread across a half dozen or so. Added bonus, everyone knows about Chernobyl.

After all, I read it, multiple times actually. I also read some of the public reports on the 737 Max, and the basic parallels in behaviour of people and organizations are astonishing.

Just im case so, I am not saying coal is better, we absolutely should leave existing nuclear plants online as long as sofely possible. Building new ones is just not economically feasible anymore, for almost a decade so. Wind and solar are simply cheaper, and hence more profitable fprninvestors, and the environment. And until tue transition is complete, nuclear and some gas plants for covering peak demand short notice, is a viable way to go.

By the way, regarding 80s and 90s safety regulations, you do know from when most of the current nuclear fleet dates, right? And there is so much retrofitting you can do...

Humans, in general have a real problem quantifying risks, especially risks involving low probability events. I don't think this is unique to HN (although, it seems like there may be a disproportionate amount of confidence discussing these risks).

The problem is: what are you willing to tolerate? Here in Bavaria, many decades after Chernobyl, you still have to scan wild game meat and shrooms for radioactivity. You can't even assume that a dead zone around a disaster site will be kept secure - the Ukraine war proved that, with uneducated Russian troops disturbing the radioactive dust layer as they moved around and entrenched themselves around Chernobyl. The only place where it's really feasible to have a nuclear accident site contained reasonably well is the continental United States, everything else is way too much at risk for third-party interference.

Nuclear radiation is among the worst issues you can have... you can't see it, people aren't aware of how radiation sources look like, and it's way WAY too easy to cause serious incidents the more widespread its use is - the "orphan sources" wikipedia article is pretty damning, and a lot of that is the relatively small amounts that are used in radiotherapy devices. As a species, we can't even have these secured and protected from theft and incompetent idiots - how anyone can ask for even more usage of nuclear energy is beyond me.

Renewables are great. We all love them. It's just that they are not here just yet, not 24h/day 265days/year anyway. They need a complement.

Anyway, as with EVs, capitalism has decided: wind and solar it is, that's where the money goes and not nuclear. For mostly the same reasons come 2030 you wont be able to buy ICE cars anymore. Profits and money.

The problem is we spent last 100 years spewing CO2 into the atmosphere instead of switching to nuclear due to the nuclear fear-mongering from environmentalists. Now we are facing Climate Change, a civilization-ending danger. And I am not sure the renewable build-up is fast enough to replace hydrocarbon burning, especially since it also has an availability problem.

The rational strategy would thus be a (slow, controlled, careful) cost-reducing deregulation and nuclear buildup in parallel with renewables and closing down of legacy plants.

But we are facing the same resistance and fear mongering from the exact same politicians and ideologues that got us into this predicament in the first place. I am pretty sure no solution can come from the same people and way of thinking that created the problem.

Nobody, I repeat nobody, is financing new nuclear reactors in the developed world (except specialized and military applications). The money goes, for quote a while now, into renewables and, sadly, some coal plants (which is mainly due to CO2 certificates being too dirt cheap, and making coal plants financially viable). The free market and financials decided against nuclear, as did politics in a lot of countries.

One thing you do ignore so, getting new nuclear reactors up and running takes decades in Europe, there is no such thing as a fast built out. Not even if the public and political will would be there, which it isn't. All we do achieve with argueing for new nuclear capacity is slowing the build out of wind and solar down and slow development of grid scale storage tech.

I'm just trying to fully understand the position here. How do you mean "free market"? Because it seems a disproportionate amount of nuclear cost is driven by regulation. I'm not even saying that unwarranted, but it certainly seems to be very different from the colloquial definition of a "free market".

Regulation, I might remind you, that was written by staunchly pro-nuclear organizations.

Also, just necause you have regulations doesn't mean you don't have a free market. Hence, there is a free market for nuclear electricity. Thing is, nobody wants to finance new projects (with the exception of developing countries, but those have a lot of catching up to do).

One cost nuclear power plants do not have to carry is insurance against large accidents. No insurance comoany would take on said risk, hence the state is carrying that risk. Soubds to me like a huge cost factor is taken off from nuclear power plant operators here (just to pick one example).

As said elsewhere, I'm all for keeping existing NPPs running as long as safely possible (which was the reason Germany had to shut down a couple), and shut down coal plants instead. Building new NPPs takes too long to be a viable solution, and is too expensive (and hence the lack of fubding for new ones).

The technology used to make solar panels is the same used for semiconductors. It evolved al Moore's law speed thanks to an unregulated free market for the tech industry. Same reason we enjoy a cheap supercomputer in every pocket in 2023 instead of the city’s Eniac. That’s what lack of regulation does.

What German guvernamental subsidies did was to build a lot of Solar capacity in a country with relatively little sun. I hope it works out for them, but I remember earlier this year importing nuclear electricity from France.

It absolutely is. Germany is building about 1.5GW a month of solar and wind combined, so over a year the equivalent of a dozen average large scale NPPs.

Even accounting for the availability problem, aka capacity factor (wind ~0.3-0.5, solar .25), that's the equivalent of four NPPs a year. The rest? Can easily be covered with a combination of hydro, geothermal, massive grids and dynamic load management (both on the demand side aka load shedding and on the source side aka powerwalls with feedback capability).

Morw of that, some storage, bio gas and hydrogen peaker plants, geo thermal and renewables and we are good to go.

JFC. I get why this is profitable, these machines have been written off financially a century ago and have been money printers ever since for that reason, but this kind of behavior should be seriously penalized - it makes competition for new companies really hard (because they have to pay down the value for new machines), and it's bad for the environment as a whole because if they're still running the same motors and control units from back then, then they are wasting a lot of electricity, most likely also emit a lot more toxic effluents than a plant with modern emission controls and mitigations would, and most likely run at lower yield rates than modern processes so they're wasting more raw materials.

I root for them to succeed. I do love renewables. But I know that in my country at least the waiting time today for panel purchase, installation and grid connection is over a year. However they are subsidized by the state so that adds time and bureaucracy.

The rest… I have my doubts: it’s all ideas but little reality. We’ll see in about 5 years time, I guess.

We have a ton of these people in Germany. "Technologieoffen" they call themselves - the reality is that they want to keep the old structure of big utilities and massive profits for shareholders alive.

> Renewables are great. We all love them. It's just that they are not here just yet, not 24h/day 265days/year anyway. They need a complement.

That's what a grid is for. Build a national grid with serious transfer capacities (China can do it over 1000s of km's, so the US can just as well if it wanted), and suddenly you can use East Coast solar to power the West Coast. Or here in Europe, with French and Portuguese offshore wind and solar from Northern Africa. On top of that, incentivise large consumers (data centers, heavy industry) to upgrade their processes to be able to handle dynamic load shedding, and invest into powerful gas and hydrogen fuel cell based peaker plants to cover for the very small amount in a year where neither solar, wind nor dammed hydro is enough to supply the entire country.

The serious issue with nuclear is that they cost billions of dollars to build. At the moment, in Germany 44% of the total power is generated using renewables [1], in peak times (i.e. summer) renewables account for up to 70% of the month's load [2]. The investment for NPPs can't ever be recouped at that point, which is why even small scale projects such as NuScale got the boot [3]. No matter what the pro-nuclear crowd hopes, the free market has decided against it.

[1] https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/schwerpunkte/klimasch...

[2] https://www.focus.de/earth/news/knapp-70-prozent-unbemerkt-f...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nuscale-power-uamps-...

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.

Maybe nuclear deserves a second chance?

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

On electricity markets, which in Europe only take variable coats into account, the ranking, cheapest to most expensive, is: wind and solar, hydro, coal, nuclear and oil followed by gas. So even there, in hard cold numbers, nuclear looses. Even without taking the huge fix costs of nuclear plants into account, or the long term coats like waste storage.

Why do you think even small, and potentially cheaper, reactor projects get axed?

And for good reason. There is no power generation that has a potential for serious damage compared to nuclear. The cost of Chernobyl was at least 235 billion dollars [1], Fukushima is estimated to end up at around 200 billion dollars [2]. The only other kind of power generation that can destroy entire swaths of land in a single strike is dammed hydro, but even the largest catastrophe to date, the Kakhovka dam destruction in Ukraine, cost only 14 billion dollars [3] - and it didn't render the affected land permanently uninhabitable and only cost the lives of about 50 people, compared to Chernobyl's death toll.

It's utter madness to risk this much money and this much destruction when there are so many different ways of getting power. Nuclear power may be the cheapest per kWh on paper, but that is only because the worst-case risk is implicitly assumed by the government without accounting for it in insurance premiums - at least the major Western countries limit operator exposure to liability claims to a fraction of the potential cost [4]. This is beyond unsustainable, it's financial russian roulette.

We will not be able to live entirely without NPPs, I agree on that one, as we need them to create Co-60 for radiotherapy sources and the nuclear weapon powers to get new feedstock to maintain the warheads, but we should try as a species to get rid of nuclear weapons anyway and only keep the minimum we need for radiotherapy and fundamental research.

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/chernobyl...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK253929/

[3] https://www.voanews.com/a/un-reports-staggering-14-billion-c...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...

Of course there is. Good old oil, coal and gas burning. Since we’re fear-mongering on potentials here, would you like to estimate the cost of a runaway green house effect that turns the whole Earth into Venus? Climate scientists are warning we may already be beyond that point of no return. And we are still putting CO2 into the atmosphere while arguing the “potential” dangers of nuclear!

We're building renewable generation capacity at a far greater speed (as said, Germany alone > 1GW a month...) than we ever could using nuclear power. This in turn enables us to shift residential and commercial heating to heat pumps - even assuming a gas power plant, 1 kWh of electric power replaces 4 kWh of heat power.

Till then - you’re selling pretty dreams, while in reality killing people and dooming the planet.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-approves-bri...

In the 70s and 80s leftists couldn't much keep pushing socialism (like they are now) since the horrors of their ideology was quite visible to everybody in the example of USSR. So they embraced environmentalism - just another way for them to fight capitalism and consumerism.

Russia (through the KGB) was quite happy to finance their cause. It meant Western countries (and especially Western Europe) stayed dependent on them for their energy. The folly of our strategy became quite apparent during the last few years with the Ukraine invasion and revelations of EU politicians fully paid and owned by the Russians.

Together with infiltrating the Western Academia, this was probably one of the most successful undercover secret service operation ever.

I could tell you so much about our history and relations with Russia. From my own experience before '90, from my parents' during communism horror years and from my grandparents' during the War and the soviet occupation after.

But all that info is freely available in books and online - for naught. You can't change the mind of the Western leftists who never had to live through an actual implementation of their pet ideology. They dream about Norway, Sweden and Denmark while never even visiting Cuba, North Korea or Venezuela.

There is a very important difference between communism and socialism, because the latter has been tried multiple times and worked comparatively well. You even named some of the poster child countries yourself. As I said, it is a truely US thing to equate socialism with communism, followed by touting Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea as negative examples of it.

It took years to find that out though.

The containment vessel held, and most of the radiation released was in the form of xenon and krypton gas vented from the reactor.

“ It was later found that about half the core had melted, and the cladding around 90% of the fuel rods had failed,[21][76] with 5 ft (1.5 m) of the core gone, and around 20 short tons (18 t) of uranium flowing to the bottom head of the pressure vessel, forming a mass of corium.[77] The reactor vessel—the second level of containment after the cladding—maintained integrity and contained the damaged fuel with nearly all of the radioactive isotopes in the core.”

Definitely not Chernobyl, but it was a significant amount of damage to the reactor. It was totaled.

Many of the "small modular reactor" schemes say they don't need a big, strong, expensive containment vessel because, reasons. You can read those arguments for NuScale in NRC documents. The prototype was going to be built at the Idaho National Laboratory, formerly the National Reactor Testing Station, which is in outer nowhere, just in case.

[https://www.newequipment.com/plant-operations/article/219218...]

While the precise mechanism by which the #4 reactor in Chernobyl was destroyed in 1986 was rooted in the flawed design combined with unsafe operation, this does not mean that other reactor designs cannot fail catastrophically with loss of containment and release of radioactive material. Particularly when operated outside of their specification through operator error, accidents or a combination thereof.

Any reactor can fail and any can be operated safely. The reactivity coefficients of RBMK made it harder to control, perhaps, than a PWR. Modifications made after the Chernobyl accident have improved this.

The main issue with Chernobyl 4 was its lack of a containment building. Even so, the response was an over-reaction that made the situation worse.

Not sure which response to the accident was an over-reaction in your opinion so.

No, sadly.

PWR's sure can explode (due to hydrogen, vapor...).

The root causes will not be identical to Chernobyl's causes, and the containment will probably limit leaks for a while (theoretically at least a few days), but they sure can explode.

It also happened at Fukushima.

Some protective measures are PACs and containment, however nothing can guarantee that an explosion won't happen, nor that dangerous radionuclides won't leak outside the plant.

PAC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_autocatalytic_recombin...

Containment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containment_building

Edit: That should be the one https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub913e_web.p...

You also have this one: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0716/ML071690245.pdf

Edit 2:

What with regards to the effect of graphite tipped control rods was, IMHO, as bad as having a dramatic KGB effort to keep it secret: it was forgotten. In 1983, there was an incident in an other RBMK reactor, the HBO series claims the KGB kept it secret, in reality this happened (from the INSAG-7 report and the cited USSR investigative reports):

>> The SCSSINP Commission (Annex I, Section 1-3.8) reports that, after discov- ery of the positive scram effect at Ignalina in 1983, the chief engineering organiza- tion informed other organizations and all nuclear power plants with RBMK reactors that it intended to impose restrictions on the complete withdrawal of control and safety rods from the core. Such restrictions were never imposed and apparently the matter was forgotten.

That means in the fact it coupd explode was known, but ignored. Ignored by everyone in the Soviet scientific establishment and nuclear authorities. I don't what's worse, a secret police intervention or a whole science and industry community ignoring safety concerns until it is too late.

“Whole .. community” is a stretch here.

Keep in mind that information spread is different in ussr. Kgb had people recruited from all over the place (from factory workers to politicians; 0.1% of population were in kgb). Also, lot of institutions had party representative present (officially, not hidden).

Press did not report accidents or significantly under-report casualties, and of course various good metrics were inflated a lot, even to comical levels.

In this environment, somebody using his influence in kgb or party to stop certain restrictions (because they would point to design flaw and would delay stuff) is very believable, and probably common.

Conspiracy in ussr != conspiracy in us.

The KGB blocking the refit of the RBMK fleet is a myth from HBOs Chernobyl series. Truth is rather different, Legasov was seen by the younger generation as part of the establishment that held back modifications, while he simultaniously managed to piss off said establishment. And without support from the rank and file, and some enemies with the higher ups, his career was shot. Compounded by serious health issues following the Chernobyl clean up. Less dramatic than a KBG conspiracy for sure, but still bad enough.

In the end the operators of Chernobyl No. 4 were the fucked ones, their procedures were incomplete, sometimes dangerously wrong. Leadership, incl. Dyatlov, failed to put a safety culture in place. The reactor design was not well understood, operating characteristics at below 50% capacity were never even analyzed or modelled, and inheretly unsafe (missing sensors, bad control rod design and operating procedures...). And the night shift wasn't even briefed on the test to be conducted.

One of the conclusions of INSAG-7 was, that the accident could even have happened with properly designed control rods, coolant failure could have led to the same accident. If your equipment is so inherently unstable and fragile, operating procedure, training and operators have to compensate. None of those measures was taken.

Heck, in some circunstances RBMK operators had to conduct up to 1,000 manual operations per hour (!) to keep the reactor stable. And by the way, the RBMK design didn't even meet Soviet design and safety requirements applicable in 70s when those reactors were designed.

A complete clusterfuck. The circumstances allowing said clusterfuck still exist everywhere, in all countries, industries and organisations to this day.

So if it had killed ~6000 people it would be within the accepted norms of the energy industry for anything that isn't nuclear.

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

Any enterprise needs to be sufficiently safe as a complete shit show, because it will happen.

You’re super excited and all I see is super excited for poor people who can’t move towns getting cancer, while misdirecting toward 3-Mile.

There’s no reason we can’t have safe nuclear power but we won’t get there if past wrongs aren’t fixed, and it seems like everyone is focusing on the wrong things.

If you are talking about Rocky Flats, wasn't that related to nuclear weapons production? It's plutonium, not uranium.

We have safe nuclear reactors, today. What we need to do is build more, with newer designs, and retire those that are past the end of their lifetime.

Most importantly, this discussion doesn't even make sense when we have coal plants spewing all sorts of terrible stuff in the atmosphere, including radiation.

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

A lot of Germany's gas storage facilities were owned by Russian companies, or rather Germans subsidiaries of Russian companies. As soon as the war in Ukraine hit, those have been quickly nationalized. What makes you think US uranium mines would be any different? Or that there are now export restrictions forburanium in the first place?

If any. NuScale was going to use this stuff. But that project was cancelled a few weeks ago. Costs too much. There are advanced reactors being talked about. Does anyone know of any that actually need this fuel right now? Maybe outside the US there are some.

(NRC: "Natural uranium is made of about 0.7 % U-235 and traditional reactor fuel is enriched to between 3% and 5% U-235." High-assay, low-enriched uranium is, per the NRC, 5% - 20% u-235. Weapons grade is around 90%.)

No, NuScale's reactor will use 4.95% enriched Uranium [1].

[1] https://www.nuscalepower.com/-/media/nuscale/pdf/fact-sheets...

TerraPower (the one where Bill Gates is one of the co-founders) is also planning to use HALEU in this decade to fuel their Natrium reactor.

Not really. Most reactors in the US produce power about 90% of the time. Reducing the refueling time can increase that to 95%, but that's not going to make a big difference in the profitability of the plant.

> Centrus and the Russian state-owned company Tenex, which are the only two outfits that can produce HALEU in the world

> For now, the DOE intends to purchase about 25 tonnes of HALEU per year to kick-start the industry and give HALEU producers secure contracts from which they can expand production

So in 2024 the DoE will buy 0.9T from the only American producer, and the remaining 24.1T from Russia?

The existing reactors don't use this fuel. This fuel is being ramped up for new reactors that haven't been built yet.

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

Eg: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/3-advanced-reactor-system...

But there's still no solution for safely storing or disposing of nuclear waste, so all those power plants currently have a stockpile of spent fuel rods, which is a huge risk imo. But everyone's like "not in my backyard", even though the backyard is a deep cave in a mountain or down in the earth where the stuff will be put in lead and reinforced concrete, the cave sealed off or collapsed, forgotten by time and where it will remain dormant and slowly go inert over the next geological era.

There is, we know what it is, but no one wants to pay for it - it's called deep borehole storage. You basically put your fuel in cylinders, dig boreholes few miles deep, put all the waste at the bottom, done. It's not coming back ever, it doesn't pose any danger to anything or anyone on anything other than geological timescales(and if the geology starts pushing stuff buried 5 miles deep to the surface you have other bigger problems to worry about).

It's estimated that "just" 800 boreholes would be enough to store all nuclear waste ever produced.

But yeah, cost is one thing, but the other is that this material then becomes truly and irreversibly irretrievable - which actually might not be desirable since we know that even spent nuclear fuel can be reprocessed to make more fuel or weapons, which is not something that countries like US would want to dismiss as a possibility.

And also - storage of spent nuclear fuel is actually a lot safer and less scary than most people think. In Netherlands they literally made a museum out of their spent fuel storage facility, you can walk in between the casks that hold material radioactive enough to kill you in minutes, it's that safe.

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

It isn't a huge risk. The really hot stuff decays quickly and that can happen next to the power plants no problem. What you end up left with is far less energetic and is self-contained – look up dry casks. You can stand next to them no problem and they are incredibly sturdy.

That's ignoring reprocessing. If it is radioactive enough to cause serious harm long term, it is radioactive enough to still use as fuel. There are reactor designs that can re-use them.

Honestly, I would rather have some dry casks stored at Yucca Mountain than breathing coal dust (that's often radioactive).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-1200_reactor

In early 2012, Rosatom's Science and Technology Council approved the construction of a BN-1200 reactor at the Beloyarsk Nuclear Power Station. Technical design was scheduled for completion by 2013, and manufacture of equipment would start in 2014. Construction would begin in 2015 with first fuel loads in 2017 and full commercial operation as early as 2020.

...

In 2015, after several minor delays, problems at the recently completed BN-800 indicated a redesign of the fuel was needed. Construction of the BN-1200 was put on "indefinite hold", and Rosenergoatom stated that no decision to continue would be made before 2019. In January 2022, Rosatom announced that a pilot BN-1200M would be built by 2035.

  - Brown coal:  32.72
  - Coal:        24.62
  - Oil:         18.43
  - Biomass:      4.63
  - Natural gas:  2.82
  - Hydro:        1.30
  - Wind:         0.04
  - Nuclear:      0.03
  - Solar:        0.02

1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

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

Solar = 0.0!

Why don't we abolish the Price–Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act and see how far nuclear gets when having to pay the true cost for their insurance?

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

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_reaction_to_Fukushima...

Stop spreading disinformation please.

I'd love to see tons more nuclear including fuel reprocessing which the US was very resistant to for a long time due I think to proliferation concerns.

To me that really highlighted the naivety of many environmental activists. They mean well and we need them, but they so often fail to look at the problems holistically and zooms in on single issues.

I think at the end of the day it comes down to tribalism, sadly. People choose their "side" and pitch in to defend its merits and attack the other "side"'s deficiencies. As with many things, there isn't a whole lot of room left for holistic approaches.

I'm personally not a huge fan of nuclear because I'm a pragmatist, and I think most people are pragmatists at the end of the day, being human. And pragmatists don't make good operators of nuclear power plants. But I definitely don't think any existing nuclear plants should be closed. They should be (safely) continued to run as long as possible to provide the clean energy we desperately need while other safer (and often cheaper) renewables+storages ramp up.

What I really can't stand is the use of fossil fuels in the grid when there is known and effective alternatives, and it gives a bad taste in the mouth that tax money intended for grid stability is used on fossil fuels.

Not to be that guy but it sort of is. Comparing nuclear power to renewables is a lot like comparing a truck to an electric scooter. Sure, both can transport you to your destination and both work equally well in many scenarios, maybe the scooter even has advantages in some places but when it comes to handling the entirety of possible scenarios the truck is the clear choice. That doesn't mean you can't have a truck and a scooter and use each where appropriate, it's just that you'll probably use the truck a lot more.

A new nuclear reactor is being built since 2007, it should have launched a new set of reactors, and this WIP is a disaster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

Nope. We have to take into account consumption-based CO₂ emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/prod-cons-co2-per-capita?...

> that 63% can be easily reduced in France by introducing heatpumps and EVs

Nope, as it is only possible by generating more gridpower, and France tries to do so using nuclear since 2007... in vain as the sole and only nuclear reactor being built in France (which should have started a new batch in 2012) is the 'Flamanville-3' EPR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

> the same is not true in the UK/Germany/Poland without building metric arseloads of zero-carbon power plants.

There is no 'zero-carbon plants', only 'low-carbon plants'.

They all do so, much more efficiently than France (where electricity is already low-carbon but where the plan to pump up more nuclear is stuck) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-low-car...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-change-renewables?...

have you go a source for that? the parent comment seems to contradict that fact

To do so electrifying usages is key.

This in turn imply that more electricity has to be generated.

Each and every nation in the EU27 moves towards this, and France (while chanting 'my electricity is low-carbon, yay!' and neglecting that doesn't do anything about the remaining 63% of final energy consumed in France obtained by burning fossil fuels) is the red lantern: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/environment/article/2022/11/25/ren...

Final energy in France, by source: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89nergie_en_France#%C3%89n...

And we're reaping the "benefits" of the same people in the 70s campaigning against all forms of nuclear back then. So we built oil, gas, and coal power stations to meet our energy needs instead. slow applause for the activists

The road to hell and all that...

Nuclear get subsidies in term of research, building, deconstruction, waste storage and price guaranties. Around 70% goes to the single fusion research project called ITER (international research, non-military).

Hydro receives an increasing amount of subsidies for repair and modernization. Dam repair and flooding protection is expensive and with climate change there is even bigger need for fixing Europe old hydro power dams. They are also in general non-compliant with the European environmental regulations (several species are going extinct), but that is not a subsidies issues directly. Fixing the dams so they allow for fish to pass is however a subsidies issue, but as far the budget to fix that has yet to be allocated and the costs are estimated to be exceedingly high.

And last we have fossil fuel subsidies. A large portion of the "reserve energy" plan in eu in order to address increased gird variability is based on keeping a large number of fossil fuel plants on stand-by, paid through subsidies. Then there is subsidies on extracting the fuel itself, subsidies on trading fuel, and subsidies on storage of the fuel, and transportation of the fuel. This is not accounting for the environmental cost from burning fossil fuels, which some see as a form of subsidies.

Subsidies-like part not included are insurance against nuclear accidents, insurance against floods from dam failures, and insurance against forest fires. It is also not accounting for land usage nor damage to wildlife.

According to the IEA: "EU electricity consumers are expected to save an estimated EUR 100 billion during 2021-2023 thanks to additional electricity generation from newly installed solar PV and wind capacity"

https://www.iea.org/reports/renewable-energy-market-update-j...

So we should cut off subsidies agreed on 10 years ago during renewables learning curve to make it even? The renewable subsidies for new builds today are miniscule in Europe, which is what we are making the decisions based on.

How many Hinkley Point Cs costing ~€0.15/kWh to the consumers, very similar to energy crisis prices, should we fund just so you can stop complaining about past history for renewables?

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

To put down to facts, Europe paid 172 billions in 2021 on energy subsidies. This is 54% increase since 2015. 76 billions went to renewables. Between 2019 and 2020 the amount going to renewables increased by 7%, while between 2020 and 2021 it decreased by 3%. The second largest recipient of subsidies was fossil fuel energy with 50 billions. Subsidies for nuclear has remain mostly stable since 2015, sitting at around 4 billions, but with Germany closing several plants last year it has now increased to 7 billions. (The report do not consider R&D to be subsidies, so ITER is not included).

We should not try to make things "even". We should cut fossil fuel subsidies and decommission the fossil fuel plants that operate as reserve energy. The cost of high variability in the grid should not be carried through tax money. Market forces can't be applied correctly when taxes are being funneled to fix a problem caused by using high variability energy production.

Subsidies to renewables are slowly being reduced. It is no longer a given that grid connections will be given out for free and paid by taxes. Both nuclear and renewables should also carry their own weight and not have price guaranties. Companies that need those should have the cost baked into the energy price.

A solution that is acknowledged by the European report but often overlooked is energy usage reduction and increased efficiencies.

The report for those wanted to read it: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...

Lets also remove the Price–Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act [2] with equivalents across the world so the nuclear industry has to bear the true insurance cost.

[1]: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...

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

I would not be completely against demanding that all commercial activity in the energy sector must cover every negative effect on society and the environment. It would in effect ban all fossil fuel, nuclear, and hydro. Would be a fair price to pay for getting rid of fossil fuels.

How expensive is a resounding "No" by insurers?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/11/14/wind-farm-or...

If off-shore wind companies are struggling then nuclear projects are deep deep in the red.

Ok, strange flex but this about what I have come to expect from this “debate”.

> A nuclear power plant is essentially a thermal plant plus the nuclear part so how would it be cheaper than a coal plant?

Fuel costs?

So the whole argument for economics of scale doesn't work, thermal power plants have not reduced dramatically in price over the last decades despite lots of them being build. Half of your plant not really reducing much in price, will limit the benefits you can get even if the other half sees massive cost reductions.

Ok, but surely the only cost that matters is the lifetime cost? (Including whatever cleanup is needed for both nuclear and whichever fossil and/or renewable+storage combination it is compared against).

> Half of your plant not really reducing much in price, will limit the benefits you can get even if the other half sees massive cost reductions.

Sure, absolutely. But coal is pretty expensive over the course of a year, so it can look like a good opportunity (if only for the reality hadn't turned out so fragile and, when it goes wrong, severe).

Maybe there is 20% too many regulations. That could be the case. But having 20% too many regulations is far preferable than 20% too few.

Even if you are staunchly pro-nuclear you should want regulations that reduces the chance for even a minor accident to almost exactly 0%, because even a minor accident will cause fear that’ll set nuclear back by two decades. Maybe that fear is irrational. Tough luck. Humans are irrational. Most of them would rather be slowly poisoned by coal and die a couple years early, than living with the thought of maybe having to suddenly have to abandon their home and established life like in Fukushima.

The problem is when that extra 20% regulation makes the technology so expensive the world chooses to keep burning coal, oil and gas thus poisoning and killing millions through pollution and endangering life on the entire planet through Climate Change.

Right now nuclear is so frozen and so useful that I'd take the change of a (PR) disaster and (slowly, carefully, partially) deregulate: it can't get much worse than already is.

Now, in comparison, a 1 GW coal-fired power plant needs to be fed with 3-4 million tons of coal per year (energy content of coal varies a bit, in relation to oxygen-based combustion at least).

And, a 1 GW reliable 24/7 solar/wind/storage system needs how many tons per year? (OK battery replacement is an issue... work it out yourself).

You can find a full table, distribution maps, guesstimates for known but as yet untested deposits, etc in the big Red Book of Uranium stuff (free to download):

https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28569/uranium-resources-pro...

> a 1 GW reliable 24/7 solar/wind/storage system needs how many tons per year?

Currently panels drop to 80% efficacy after 10 years and are doorstops in 20 - replacement | recovery is an ongoing process and that currently requires raw materials that come with a cost - including slave labour.

https://blog.ucsusa.org/charlie-hoffs/mining-raw-materials-f...

There are no magic problem free resources.

Oh come on. This is an absurd claim with no evidence. Don't be ridiculous.

Polycrystalline panels last 20 years, sometimes longer (the sales pitch is "up to 25 years") but the 20% fall off in deliverable power after 10 years is real.

Monocrystalline last longer, they also gradually fall off and they cost more.

Now it's a game of Backblaze storage stats only with solar panels - how does an at scale solar farm balance purchase costs and maintainance costs, where's the optimal sweet spot for buying new and rotating out on a schedule | reacting to failure.

I'm not opposed to solar, I'm in Australia in one of the states with large amounts of residential solar and heavy mining industries that dwarf anything in the US currently going electric - we're costing out massive farms to run solar power to asia via HVDC cable.

The supply side of all that is sourcing the copper, the lithium, the aluminium framing, the long list of other raw material inputs, the processing to get from concentrate ores to usable elements, etc.

If it's real, why don't you provide evidence?

Unfortunately this is par for the course in discussions with nuclear power cultists. It honestly is that bad.

Your numbers seem off by atleast a facotor of 2. Average degradation is .5% per year so panels are guarantees are usually that you'll have 90% capacity after 10 years and 80% after 20 years.

> Now it's a game of Backblaze storage stats only with solar panels - how does an at scale solar farm balance purchase costs and maintainance costs,

The failure mode for solar is unlike traditional spinning hard drives. There isn't a "data loss" downside to waiting to replace. There won't be any risk mitigation, just calculations of when the opportunity costs become high enough to warrant replacement. I suspect in areas with cheap land, it'll be easier to build additional capacity than to replace existing degraded panels.

Regarding slave labour, I might have bad news for you: Not a single product you use in your lofe is free of exploitation, child labor or slave labor. Not a single one, from the clothes you wear to the food you eat.

This wasn't true when I manufactured them almost a decade ago. We were offering 30 year warranties with only 15% drop after 30 years - polycrystalline 20% efficiency.

Yes, investors in the uranium fuel rod production pipeline will feel a lot of pain as a result of what's going on right now, but it's not like they weren't warned. Like Theranos investors, they failed to do their due diligence.

[edit] Just to add, the metric you want is ENERGY not $US, because what really matters is the amount of energy you have to put into mining the ore, extracting the uranium from the ore, enriching the uranium-235 in the ore to the point where it's useful in a nuclear reactor, and then packaging that refined product into highly expensive fuel rods made of fairly expensive materials. By the time you do that energy calculation, per-year, for the reactor (on top of ridiculously high initial construction costs), the whole thing looks like a massive long-term liability.

They're not especially robust in cold weather and while they do last longer, they do also degrade in output over time just as the poly versions do.

To maintain a 1 GW farm requires ongoing upkeep, etc.

Again, there are no magic problem free resources, just like low volume uranium mining, large volume mining and production processing to sustain solar power has toxic side effects and impacts people.

It's not even close, with some limited exceptions, like Finland and other Artic Circle zones.

Simon Michaux has already done this. It's worth a read through his reports [0].

Also, it's quite possible to reprocess spent fuel. France has been doing it for decades. [1] The price has not been enough to justify it, but eventually it will (or if other costs are imposed, like a tax on the mineral rights that would favor reprocessing fuel).

[0] https://www.simonmichaux.com/gtk-reports [1] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/frances-efficiency-in-t...

Thanks for arguing in such bad faith by default. But let's just say there are other ways of storing energy that don't need huge amounts of processed lithium.

Have you perhaps heard of "muh pumped hydro", "muh flow batteries", "muh hydrogen", and the myriad of other less mature storage technologies currently being developed?

Even if you go with "muh flow batteries" or "muh hydrogen", we would require far more land with wind/solar to fill up those storage technologies than just use nuclear plants.

Even if I were to concede that covering every last surface with solar cells is a good idea (or what to do when recycling them), this doesn't take into account the enormous amount of energy currently used to make process heat. Neither wind nor solar are able to generate the hundreds of degrees necessary for so many chemical and manufacturing processes.

Don't let yourself get bamboozled by shiny futuristic graphics of storage or generation solutions without at least doing some basic napkin math about feasibility.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_... [1] https://ambri.com/

Wasn't that the SuperPhoenix and Astrid reactors? I thought both had been cancelled because of politics?

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASTRID_(reactor)

Reprocessing is another thing entirely. It relies on the fact that used nuclear fuel is mainly not reusable due to accumulation of neutron poisons. In reprocessing, these poisons are removed so that the rest of the fuel can be reused. This too has many practical challenges as you end up with liquid radioactive materials and a lot of it is waste. So far it has proven more practical than breeders, though. Perhaps that is because the same processes can be used to extract materials for nuclear weapons.

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

It's so ridiculous to think that human civilization would collapse just because we will eventually run out of stuff to dig out of the ground and burn, when the biosphere has been humming along on sunlight for about three billion years. Why is this so hard to explain to people?

(Also, on paper one doesn't need any grid storage, if only we could get governments to cope rates on a planetary grid. Texas doing it's own thing and Japan having two frequency zones shows how hard this would be in practice, but in principle it can work just fine).

The total sunlight that hits the Earth in 2 minutes is more than whats needed to power the entire world for a year.

Don't forget that only the high density fuel needs to be shipped long distance as well...

For a fully reliable 1gw of wind, that's something like 600 turbines (to simply), each turbine lasts about 20 years, and weighs about 200 tonnes. So about 5000 tonnes of finished wind turbine a year, with an equivalent waste stream.

> 3 tablespoons of HALEU can supply a lifetime’s worth of power for the average U.S. consumer

So if I did my math right[1], 20 kg is enough for 1867 U.S. consumers for one year, and 900 kg is enough for 84,000 U.S. consumers? It's a start, I guess.

1. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=20+kg+%2F+%28%283+table...

That’s 6,700,000 for one year. There only 16 states with populations greater than that.

IDK. Seems decent. If we wanted better we should have started 50 years ago. Although now is good too.

3 tbsp of Uranium is about 0.85 kg.

900 kg / 0.85 kg = 1060 US consumer lifetimes worth of energy.

Multiply by 79 (average lifespan) and you get 83,740 US consumer years worth of energy.

If you're like me, you read this sentence and thought: "hey, wasn't that canceled last week?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38199061

But apparently that was NuScale's reactor that was canceled, while TerraPower is still going, which may have something to do with the exceptional wealth of its founder:

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/bill-gates-future-nuclear-...

And they seem to have found a way to get even more billionaire bucks:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/03/bill-gates-w...

There's a "hero we deserve" meme hiding in here somewhere...