> The problem with nuclear energy is not the availability or the cost of the fuel but the capital cost of the reactor and the high level of financial and operational risk involved with the construction.

Yes, in US and western Europe it's been practically impossible to build new reactors since the 90's for capex and regulatory reasons (both are related). However, we used to be able to build reactors significantly cheaper and faster and I'd argue we're on the path to do it again later this decade. There's no technical reason we can't solve this problem: there's bipartisan support for nuclear, willing financial backers, and no demand shortage. We're going to see 100+ gigawatts of new nuclear in the western world in the next 20 years.

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PaulHoule 3 days ago | parent [-]

I want to see a real explanation of the bungling that makes projects go 3x late and over budget and it is not "environmentalists" who might make it go 20% late.

I've looked long and hard and not found an explanation of the bungling fitting the facts better than that it's like a poker game: the vendor never believed in the sticker price, but the vendors figured that once there were chips in the pot the sunk cost fallacy would mean the buyers would never fold.

Thing is, they do, at least in the U.S.

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

I think NuScale was trying to be honest about costs but the buyer in Utah built a process in which they could control costs by folding early and they did. Europe, China, and other places have more engineering thinking and less financialization and they're more likely to "stay the course" but as an engineer I'm not sure this is right -- it might work for China but not for Europe.

On one hand I'm glad to see GE get the BWR, especially the work done on ESBWR, back into the game with the BWRX300, but the costs they are quoting are too freaky low and their talk about "design to cost" makes it seem like they just quote the cost number that they need to be competitive with the solar sticker price without storage which will lure in the public as opposed to being competitive to whatever the (unknown) solar + storage sticker price will turn out to be. (e.g. highly variable because it depends by "how frequent blackouts will your accept?")

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just_human 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Lots of interesting history here, but most relevant was that regulatory and process changes starting in the 80's made it increasingly expensive to build reactors. As a result, reactor construction companies (notably Westinghouse) went bankrupt and no entity was willing to take financial risk to build new reactors. Western Europe is a different story, where political parties aggressively shutdown healthy nuclear plants and passed laws preventing new nuclear.

Much of this regulation and process overhead is now being rolled back in the US (by both political parties) and Europe is slowly coming around to allowing new nuclear. NuScale is one of many next gen companies (I hope they're all successful), but the traditional large reactors are also great and can be built cost effectively.

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PaulHoule 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I don't believe it -- although ideology makes explanations like that popular with a lot of people.

The cost escalations and bungling were well in progress before the TMI. The NRC streamlined the reactor approval processes in the 1980s by trying to separate the licensing of a standard reactor from the licensing of the site -- nobody took them up on the offer.

In the case of AP1000 builds both Sumner and Vogtle were held up for years because they were waiting for Chinese factories to figure out how to make parts, in some cases they never figured it out and they had to source them elsewhere. Factory modular construction was supposed to prevent bungling at the site but replaced it with bungling at the factory.

In theory the factories got up the learning curve and if somebody ordered another AP1000 it would be different, in practice the AP1000 is a Chinese reactor and the Chinese gave up on it for the Hualong One which there are (oddly enough) two designs for, which goes back to the designs the French were using back when they were building many plants on time and on budget... which is maybe a good thing, but they look pretty quick to move on to the Hualong Two and before they get up the learning curve on that one they'll be switching to the Three...

I'll agree that the Europe hired somebody who thinks like Amory Lovins to design the EPR and really did bungle the politics more than the engineering, but that's not the story in the US.

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vlovich123 3 days ago | parent [-]

Regulatory requirements were definitely a real thing. One of the drivers was that nuclear companies were required by law to match the price of oil and any surplus profits from that had to be reinvested into safety and that set the bar for new safety requirements. What that meant was the 1970 oil crisis created a new level for nuclear safety beyond what was needed and that was locked in for future construction. The entire history of nuclear energy is one of bungled regulation and given the political power oil companies have had and continue to have, it’s not surprising given the existential threat nuclear posed.

	▲	pfdietz 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> One of the drivers was that nuclear companies were required by law to match the price of oil and any surplus profits from that had to be reinvested into safety and that set the bar for new safety requirements. This sounds like utter bullshit. Got references?

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nomel 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Much of this regulation and process overhead is now being rolled back in the US

Bar graphs showing decreasing regulatory cost on page 6. Pretty dramatic recent change.

https://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/resources...

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magicalhippo 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Here in Norway there's now talk about nuclear power, after a long time of little to no interest.

However they can't even put up wind turbines anymore, due to NIMBY issues, environmental concerns and whatnot. We had a ton of such projects but it's just about ground to a halt now.

And since our distribution network sucks, we've had a ~100x price difference between north and south for a long time now due to that, you can't just put it in the middle of nowhere.

As such I have very little faith they'll manage to put up a nuclear reactor in the near future, at least not close to initial cost and time. And none of that has to do with the details of building a nuclear reactor.

That said, there's change on the horizon. At least more and more people seem to be realizing that if they don't want wind turbines, they don't want huge swathes of solar panels and they don't want to alter more rivers then there's not a lot of options left on the table.

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XorNot 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's just experience in most cases. We don't build enough so the management and project structures and experience to do it never get a chance to be efficient.

The right thing to do with something like the Vogtle plant for example would be to keep building them since you've just paid some very expensive costs learning what causes delays, but the knowledge of what gets the plant built - because it was built - is still there and fresh.

	▲	PaulHoule 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's why I wish we had more information about what happened to the AP1000 than has gotten out.

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johncolanduoni 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This is the idea behind the “small modular” part of SMR. Current nuclear projects are huge, largely bespoke efforts that require a bunch of contract firms working together on different parts of the project. The idea of SMR is to push most of the necessary parts one after another from a factory. The best analogy I’ve heard for this is comparing how the Japanese built planes in WWII (in small batches done by craftsmen) to how the US did (with an assembly line following a documented process). I buy the conceptual argument, but there are a lot of details to work out.

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ViewTrick1002 3 days ago | parent [-]

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 also: who pays for the hundreds of prototypes before the ”process” has worked?

	▲	johncolanduoni 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I guess the answer might be hyperscalers that want cheap electricity to run LLM inference. They’re already throwing tens of billions at AI, what’s a few billion more to have a chance at super cheap energy for their new data centers?