The problem with nuclear mistakes is they aren't a few decades. They can be measured in centuries.

So yeah. Regulation.

Don't build a damn LWR on a fault line (Fukushima) 3mile Island - don't have so many damn errors printing out that everything is ignore Chernobyl - we all know I think. It's still being worked on to contain it fully. Goiânia accident (brazil) - caesium-137 - Time magazine has identified the accident as one of the world's "worst nuclear disasters" and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) called it "one of the world's worst radiological incidents". (and this was just a radiation source, not a nuclear plant)

So yeah. Oil has bad disasters. Nuclear has EPIC disasters.

I think what is missing in your argument is not that these pieces are difficult. It's that combining all of them adds to a significant amount of complexity.

It's not JUST a heat exchanger. It's a heat exchanger that has to go through shielding. And it has to operate at much higher pressures than another type of power production facility would use. Which adds more complexity. And even greater need of safety.

I'm not arguing against Nuclear; I think it's incredibly worthwhile especially in the current age of AI eating up so much power in a constant use situation. But I do think it needs to be extremely regulated due to the risks of things going south.

> which is why fuel is only 15-20% of the operating costs compared to >60% for coal

Nuclear has much higher operating costs than coal. It’s not 20% of 3 = 60% of 1, but it’s unpleasantly close for anyone looking for cheap nuclear power. Especially when you include interest + storage as nuclear reactors start with multiple years worth of fuel when built and can’t quite hit zero at decommissioning so interest payments on fuel matter.

> You're describing a heat exchanger and some pipes. If this is the thing that costs a billion dollars, you're making the argument that this is a regulatory cost problem.

It’s a lot more than that, and far from the only cost mentioned. It’s pumps, control systems, safety systems, loss of thermal efficiency, slower startup times, loss of more energy on shutdown, etc.

> Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive.

Highways don’t use expensive materials yet they end up costing quite a lot to build. Scale matters.

> Equipment to move things is something you need at refueling intervals, i.e. more than a year apart. If this is both expensive and rarely used then why does each plant need its own instead of being something that comes on the truck with the new fuel and then goes back to be used at the next plant?

Contamination with newly spent nuclear fuel = not something you want to move on a highway. It’s also impractical for a bunch of other reasons.

> But then one of them is required to carry that amount of insurance when the others aren't. It should either be both or neither, right?

No nuclear power plants has ever actually been required to carry a policy with that kind of a payout. Taxpayers are stuck with the bill, but that bill doesn’t go away it’s just an implied subsidy.

However, the lesser risk of losing the reactor is still quite substantial. You could hypothetically spend 5 billion building a cheap power plant rather than 20+ billion seen in some boondoggles but then get stuck with cleanup costs after a week.

Oh come on.

I consider myself reasonably pro nuclear, but this is just like some developer going:

“Oh yeah, that doesn't seem that hard, I could probably implement that in a weekend”

Fact: hard complicated things are expensive.

There is no “just it’s just some concrete…”.

That is, translated “I do not know what Im talking about”.

Hard things, which require constant, high level, technical maintenance…

Are very expensive.

Theyre expensive to build. Theyre expensive to operate. Theyre expensive to decommission.

Theres no magic wand to fix this.

You can drive down the unit cost sometimes by doing things at scale, but Im not sure that like 100 units, or even say 1000 units can do that meaningfully.

…and how how are we planning on having the 100000s of reactors that you would need for that?

Micro reactors? Im not convinced.

Certainly, right now, the costs are not artificial; if you think they are, I would argue you havent done your due diligence in research.

Heres the point:

Making complicated things cheaper doesnt just magically happen by removing regulations. Thats naive.

You need a concrete plan to either a) massively simplify the technology or b) massively scale the production.

Which one? (a) and (b) both seem totally out of reach to me, without massive state sponsored funding.

…which, apparently no one likes either.

Its this frustrating dilemma where idiots (eg. former Australian government) claim they can somehow magically deliver things (multiple reactors) super cheaply.

…but there is no reality to this promise; its just morons trying to buy regional votes and preserve the status quo with coal.

Real nuclear progress needs realistic plans, not hopes and dreams.

Nuclear power is better; but it is more expensive than many other options, and probably, will continue to be if all we do is hope it somehow becomes easy and cheap by doing basically nothing.

> Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive.

Well, anything is expensive in enough quantity. But there is a bit of a tell not covered where of regulatory problems because nuclear plant projects keep going way over budget. Even stupid planners can notice trends of that magnitude and account for them, there is something hitting plant builds that isn't a technical factor and it is driving up costs.

When the nuclear industry feels confident enough to not need its own special law to protect it from liability in case of accidents, I’ll feel a little more confident in their safety rhetoric.

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

The problem with nuclear is not the ultra-low probability of incidents, but the potential size of the incidents.

And then you have bad faith actors.

No one would ever put graphite tips in the control rods to save some money, wouldn't they?

No one would station troops during war in a nuclear power plant, wouldn't they?

No one would use a nuclear power plant to breed material for nuclear bombs, wouldn't they?

Finally, no CxO would cheapen out in maintenance for short term gains then jump ship leaving a mess behind, right?

None of that has never ever happened, right?

None of what I said really relates to safety. 3 mile island was a complete non issue when it comes to safety, but one day the nuclear reactor went from a useful tool to an expensive cleanup.

You are making a common mistake, your source does only considers things that have happened, not things that could happen. But we know what could happen, which is why the security standards have to be high for nuclear power.

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.

Climate has never stopped changing since the day the earth was formed, that's why we are here. Keep it "under control" is a wild target.

If one tries to quantify the value of those deaths, using the "statistical value of a human life" (somewhere around $12M/death), one finds in the case of both wind/solar and nuclear, using those numbers, the value of those lives contributes negligibly to the cost of energy. This is unlike with coal.

This means that in choosing between solar/wind and nuclear, one cannot use the deaths/TWh to choose between them unless they are almost dead even in other costs (and they are not).

If anyone is interested, here's a picture of decades worth of it[0]. I used to have a video of Russia's, but it seems to have gone down. If somehow you can way back it, here's the link[1].

For more comparison, France produces about 2kg of radioactive waste per year, which delivers 70% of the country's electricity. If you removed all nuclear power reactors you'd still be generating 0.8kg of radioactive waste[2]. It'll work it's way out to on the order of (i.e. approximately) a soda can per person per year.

I think people grossly underestimate the scale of waste in many things. Coal produces train loads a day (including radioactive and heavy metals), while nuclear produces like a Costco's worth over decades. The current paradigm of "we'll store it on sight and figure it out later" isn't insane when we're talking about something smaller than a water tower and having about 300 years to figure out a better solution.

On the flip side, people underestimate the waste of many other things. There are things much worse than nuclear waste too. We spend a lot of time talking about nuclear waste yet almost none when it comes to heavy metals and long lived plastics. Metals like lead stay toxic forever and do not become safer through typical reactions. We should definitely be concerned with nuclear waste, but when these heavy metal wastes are several orders of magnitude greater, it seems silly. When it comes to heavy metals (lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, etc) we're talking about millions of tonnage. These things are exceptionally long lived, have shown to enter both our water supply and atmosphere (thanks leaded gasoline!), and are extremely toxic. It's such a weird comparison of scale. Please take nuclear waste seriously, but I don't believe anyone if they claim to be concerned with nuclear waste but is unconcerned with other long lived hazardous wastes that are produced in billions of times greater quantities and with magnitudes lower safety margins.

[0] https://x.com/Orano_usa/status/1182662569619795968

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uN0bZBOic&t=105s

[2] https://www.orano.group/en/unpacking-nuclear/all-about-radio...

You forgot to include the decommissioned reactor and waste water.

Reminds me of:

https://xkcd.com/1162/

That’s fair, but everything else is outcompeting coal these days.

So even if we can drop prices down to what China pays, nuclear still loses in China.

> cleanup of vast quantities of nuclear waste

The total high level, dangerous nuclear waste of the entire world since we started playing with nuclear power 70 years ago fits in an American football stadium with plenty of room to spare. "Vast quantities" is a serious exaggeration.

Coal is already losing, and things are only getting worse for steady state production.

Grid solar drives wholesale rates for most of the day really low long before new nuclear gets decommissioned. If nighttime rates rise above daytime rates a great deal of demand is going to shift to the day. Which then forces nuclear to try and survive on peak pricing, but batteries cap peak pricing over that same timescale.

Nuclear thus really needs to drop significantly below current coal prices or find some way to do cheap energy storage. I’m somewhat hopeful on heat storage, but now you need to have a lot of turbines and cooling that’s only useful for a fraction of the day. On top of that heat storage means a lower working temperature costing you thermodynamic efficiency.

> Total death count from nuclear

Total death count is a straw man argument, what matters here is the economic costs.

Mining isn’t the major cost, nuclear fuel is expensive for other reasons. Refining gets rid of even more uranium before it gets to the reactor. CANDU tried to get around that by using unenriched uranium, but ran into other issues.

And that’s what pro nuclear people seem to miss, really smart people have been trying to solve this issue for decades there’s no easy solutions with well understood downsides. Let’s quickly build some new design isn’t a solution it’s a big part of why nuclear construction costs are so high.

IMO it would have been funnier if he added sunlight on that graph.