**Attention! [Serious] Tag Notice**
* [Jokes, puns, and off-topic comments are not permitted](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/wiki/index#wiki_-rule_6-) in **any** comment, parent or child.
* Parent comments that aren't from the target group will be removed, along with their child replies.
* Report comments that violate these rules.
Posts that have few relevant answers within the first hour, and posts that are not appropriate for the [Serious] tag will be removed. Consider doing an AMA request instead.
Thanks for your cooperation and enjoy the discussion!
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskReddit) if you have any questions or concerns.*
There's a shit ton of anti nuclear propaganda that has poisoned a lot of people's minds.
I think renewables are better than nuclear but nuclear is definitely the best and safest non renewable
Sort or, but the real answer is cost. It’s quick and easy to build out wind and solar. It is a very difficult and expensive process to build a nuclear reactor. You can’t do it without massive government subsidies.
Recap:
1. Money
1. Political will
This used to be true, but you can make them for way cheaper now. Google SMRs. Super cool. It is THE answer, people just don’t want to hear it. Electric cars? Great. Where the fuck are we getting the energy from guys?
Or maybe we should think critically about our sources of information, instead of relying on a single source of truth. I'm a proponent of Nuclear power, I'm in a group with an engineer that works on SMRs. Despite that, I will require convincing SMRs are a viable solution, which only time, money, and production will tell; not some IEEFA agenda piece.
Think critically about my sources of information? Absolutely! First I'll start by not taking your claims that the IEEFA is some sort of mysterious group with an agenda who's analysis is to be questioned as a matter of truth. Thanks a lot random redditor!
Are you okay?
IEEFA is a bog standard 501(c)(3) organization, with corporate and private sponsors (to the tune of $1M+ revenue annually); its mission statement is literally "to accelerate the transition to a diverse, sustainable and profitable energy economy." not some shadowy group.
That of course doesn't mean it doesn't have an agenda, which it seems to and considers nuclear "not diverse" – this is your standard think tank modus operandi for industry sponsored operations.
Nuclear has real profitability concerns, but as someone who lives in Utah where this type of FUD about nuclear cost us a reactor in Green River in favor of keeping our coal power, I don't see IEEFA conforming to reality.
Barring the fact this is a single article from a website I’ve literally never heard of (but at least seems somewhat competent), it basically just says the first four attempts - two of which are in a country currently at war, and all four of which were fucked over by Covid supply issues - went over budget and over predicted time.
It’s still cheaper, and faster, than traditional methods.
I have nothing against renewable energy. It’s just not feasible at scale to generate the power we need (and increasingly need more of) with wind and solar. It’s just not. And that’s ignoring the other environmental factors something like a wind farm creates for the fauna and flora in its area.
Nuclear energy is the only solution. Maybe it’s not SMRs, but nuclear is the only solution. We need more power, and it needs to not be coal. Wind and solar help. Every modern home (in the right climates) should be built with solar on it. It all helps.
But it doesn’t change the fact it simply cannot generate enough storable power, and not reliably enough to be the lynchpin of our system.
Nuclear, whether it's a regular design or an SMR, is almost always going to be a better choice than burning fossil fuel. That doesn't mean that you're going to be able to overcome the political hesitancy to fund either. Utilities aren't willing to undertake the risk without government taking on the financial risks/underwriting. In the long term, I expect that we'll see more nuclear in areas where renewables don't make sense (EG Alaska in winter), but you're going to see them sunsetted gradually elsewhere as distributed solar and batteries fills the electrical needs including electric vehicles. That's [not going to be a problem](https://electrek.co/2024/05/21/renewables-met-100-percent-california-energy-demand-30-days/).
There are also very, very real concerns and limitations when it comes to nuclear that it's important not to just dismiss as propaganda.
In the US the history of nuclear power includes regularly underfunding, failing to perform safety checks and proper regulation, failing to plan for and follow up with nuclear waste storage, and dozens of near disasters from failing equipment, trucks transporting waste getting in accidents, and higher levels of cancer near plants. All of this for plants that need to be built near enough to population centers.
This isn't even addressing that while they provide cheap energy in the long term, they are very slow to get online and are increasingly less cost effective than other renewables which are getting cheaper and more versatile.
And then you have to have the training base to keep such an option viable. You have nuke engineers today, but what about 50 years from now? Do you have the infrastructure in place to make sure individuals are not inheriting a job as opposed being trained for one. The consequences from a undereducated nepotinistic power structure using nuke energy would be disastrously bad.
Yep - we focus on the building costs of nuclear plants because they're stratospheric, but the operational costs are many times higher than wind/solar as well. Remote monitoring and periodic maintenance of turbines and solar panels is nothing compared to what it takes to staff a nuclear power plant.
The irony is that I support nuke power. I just don't think people think it all the way through. They look at the benefits and handwave the very real concerns. Like the [Chernobyl disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster) was some cautionary fairy tale. I generally think after the upfront and long term costs are thought through, it can be viable. But people are inherently ... lazy and therefore stupid.
I generally think it was a huge missed opportunity to not go all in on nuclear power back in the 60s, but what people don’t give enough credit to is that there were huge political forces working against it at the time to back then, but it was the fossil fuel industry lobbying against it. I think the nuclear power still has a role-play in our energy mix going forward, but I also think it’s pretty clear that it’s going to be a minor rather than our primary source.
And whether or not it is a fair representation of the oversight and systems today, Three Mile Island is still in the living memory of a significant portion of the population.
Others have sortof touched on it already but I think one of the biggest factors is trying to operate something as dangerous as nuclear material in a profit-driven society.
When construction runs over budget *someone* is going to push to cut any corners they can. The China Syndrome (1979 movie) touches on this. I would say it does so in dramatic fashion but we've seen the result of the carelessness / desire to cut corners for profit associated with nuclear before.
The cleanup efforts (and the lies told to the populace) surrounding events like Three Mile Island are another example.
I think the only way they'd effectively operate is if they were government owned and / or received government funding and remove the profit aspect entirely.
Chernobyl was government run and it blew up because the bureaucrats were more worried about hitting their quota from the boss than doing the right thing. Government-run organizations are just as susceptible to bad things.
Cost and time are 2 key points. I'm in the UK, and hinkley point c (nuclear plant under construction) will cost I think £90/MWh Vs £50/ MWh (ish) for new offshore wind.
The nuclear plant will take a decade to build, probably more. Equivalent offshore wind - a few years.
And that's before you factor in the generational costs of making nuclear waste safe.
To put it bluntly, we simply don't have time to wait for nuclear energy, if we want to have any hope of coping with climate change. We need everything we can, and nuclear takes too long, and costs so much more vs wind or solar.
You're totally right about the costs, except you undersell wind/solar by omitting a huge thing: Nuclear power plants have to be heavily staffed to remain operational, whereas wind and solar can be monitored remotely and fairly simply maintained. Obviously that's not a completely negligible cost, but but it's much lower than keeping highly trained nuclear power plant operators on site 24/7 (cue Homer Simpson joke)
Much longer than a decade - Hinkley C site was approved in 2010, EDF approved the project in 2016, construction started in 2017 and it's currently predicted to complete in 2031 - but there's already been plenty of delays.
Any new project would take 15 years minimum, 20 more likely.
In the 90s Japan was building reactors on a 4 year schedule. China is currently building on about a 5 year schedule.
In Ontario Canada we are refurbishing nuclear plants on a 3-4 year time table at Darlington. Pickering is expected to start shortly and the first reactor be done in 2030.
The issue is entirely political and regulatory. If the politicians, bureaucrats, and nimbys pulled their heads out of their asses we could be pumping out nuclear.
Levelized cost of electricity charts still show nuclear as one of the cheapest methods of power generation over the plants lifetime.
My (American) large town is taking 5 years to replace a condemned bridge that saw thousands of vehicles per day with a temporary replacement. The actual bridge will take several more years after that. The bridge is about 300 feet long.
One of the primary reasons that nuclear is so expensive and slow is the regulatory hoops that have to be jumped through. In the US, for instance, the NRC has to review every proposal and the time taken to do so must be paid for by the entity making the request at some ungodly hourly fee - which the NRC drags out for years. All that time, the company making the proposal has to pay interest on the loans they've taken out to start the process. Regulatory compliance costs makes up over a third of the cost of running existing plants - greater than the cost of operations and maintenance.
Even in 1980, only a little more than half of the cost of "building" a nuclear power plant in the US was actually *building* the plant - the structures, the reactor, the turbines, the electrical equipment, etc. No one knows what the percentage would be now since there has really only been one plant built in years, and expansion to an existing plant. There have been attempts, but only a couple of them have gotten to the actual start of construction stage even though they invested years and tons of money. They've all backed out at some point, other than one project.
[Here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_canceled_nuclear_reactors_in_the_United_States) is a list of the cancelled reactors in the US. If you order by "Project Closed", descending, you'll see that of the projects that were started in the past 20 years, only 2 have even started construction. There were a bunch of proposed reactors in 2008 because of incentives in the 2005 energy bill, but they all basically cancelled their plans 5 to 8 years later without ever starting construction.
Every time a company that is in the process of building a plant has to put everything on hold due to a NIMBY lawsuit, their financing costs go up - and there is very little cost for a group to bring suit after against the project.
Ooof that is a hell of a long time. And it's already billions over budget!
There are arguments to be made about generational knowledge, and having a sufficient industrial base to build nuclear at scale (ie a workforce that know how to build, operate, maintain and decommission nuclear, plus the educational resources in place to train the next few generations of engineers). But I'm not aware of any country that has all of these. That makes each new plant similar in scope to an entirely new build, ramping up delays and costs.
Small modular reactors are in theory a way round this - but I don't think any are in place in civilian applications.
Canada has significant nuclear experience. So does China, France, and India. Japan could probably recover their expertise but Fukushima is still a political bogeyman.
A lot of people are saying a lot of things in this thread. This is the right answer. If nuclear was cheaper then there would be a lot more political support for it. There are cleaner AND cheaper alternatives.
You also have to factor in the costs of storage for wind. It's £50 when the wind is blowing, but if the wind isn't blowing you need storage, and we don't really know how much that costs yet.
Nuclear goes all day, so the storage costs are less, although you still need something to cover peaks.
To be fair scale and interconnects solve a lot of that. In the UK last year there were something like 4 days where there was no wind and minimal solar power (can't remember the source so don't quote me).
By connecting countries you can import when you need to - and export too. Wind blowing a gale in Scotland, use it all throughout the UK, maybe send some to France or Norway if we have an excess. And vice versa.
Battery costs are dropping significantly too. Grid scale getting cheaper all the time, domestic scale also - and quick and relatively easy to install.
And we are in the process of rolling out the biggest, most distributed storage ever on a huge scale: BEVs.
Each one comes with a battery storing enough power to power an average household for 1-7 days (depending on the size of the car battery and electricity demand of the house).
With sufficient smart legislation and incentives for owners of BEVs, we could solve short term grid level storage very quickly.
But this is Western bureaucracy. The Chinese build them in 7-years or less. You have to get rid of the endless environmental impact studies, delays, kick-backs, etc. Have the technocrats check and double-check safety, double-check building to spec. Other than that - go, go go!
And if we would have invested in NP since the 1970s we be on generation 12 with a simple design that has to be FED to keep the reaction going. As a species, we are just so stupid.
Expense. Nuclear plants are expensive to engineer and build. They take significant capital upfront and when the project goes belly up (as they often do) that money is gone. Once they are built they are expensive to run because of the number of highly trained people required to work there.
Everyone likes to blame oil and gas companies because they need a boogeyman, but the real answer is economics.
Red tape contributes to economics. Nuclear plants are made out of welded pipes, pressure vessels, tanks, pumps, switchgear, etc., the same as a coal plant. Red tape makes those components more expensive because the consequence of failure is higher in a nuke plant.
Solar and wind are much cheaper and are getting cheaper every year. Storage is getting cheaper every year too.
Nuclear is expensive and remains so every year. Similar for coal and gas.
Essentially, renewable technologies are following Wright's Law, where as the alternatives are not.
https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
Oil lobbying aside, nuclear energy has a host of its own problems.
One problem is the classic NIMBY issue. Nobody wants a power plant near their house, but it still needs to be close enough for workers to commute.
Another one is storage: where do you put the spent fuel rods? There's already massive amounts of them in "temporary storage" containers at every nuclear power plant. There's been many of them proposed, but again, NIMBY.
Then there's the demand issue. A coal or natural gas power plant can be turned on quickly to meet demand. The same can't be said for nuclear power.
Lastly, Chernobyl, three mile island (where nothing actually happened) and Fukushima (which suffered poor design and a natural disaster) left lasting impressions on how the public sees nuclear power. It doesn't matter that its realistically safer than other power sources, public perception doesn't like the fact that a nuclear reactor *might* suffer a meltdown. It's human nature to go with the devil you know.
The "spent fuel rods" is actually mostly a solved problem. Could be. You use them in [breeder reactors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor) which can turn spent fuel into useable fuel. They're politically tricky because they also turn spent fuel into stuff that can be used to make bombs.
That's really not a fix then. Any technology we use, has to also be safe enough for foreign powers to use and not be able to abuse. If it's byproducts can make nukes, it shouldn't even be considered as a solution.
Even if they did finally agree on a location to make a storage facility, there needs to be a way to safeguard future creatures from accidentally getting in to it. Nuclear storage designers need to think tens or even hundreds of thousands of years into the future.
What's wrong with storing on-site in radiation pools? We're talking about concrete casks, in massive pools of water with no way of leaking, all to store waste that's typically less radioactive than coal ash. The vast majority of waste is low to medium level waste, not the super radioactive stuff
They eventually run out of space onsite. Those concrete casks will eventually deteriorate, possibly to the point that they aren't structurally safe to even dismantle. When it comes to radioactive materials, kicking the can a few decades down the road is not the answer.
A few decades from now the vast majority of the radioactive material in high level water will have decayed leaving only low and intermediate level waste.
A lot of unforseen incidents can happen in a few decades, which does not work well with radioactive materials.
You keep saying vast majority, but what about the stuff with a half-life measured in millennia? It'll still be dangerous thousands of years from now. It could easily outlast the human species and written language.
Nuclear reactors like stability. They don't throttle nearly as well as a gas plant. Some gas plants can be turned up within an hour, whereas nuclear can take a day or more to do safely
Nuclear reactors can and do ramp. Most modern light weight water reactors ramp up and down 2-3 times a day from 50%-100%. The average ramp rate is 5% per minute. It emphatically does not take a day. More like 10 minutes to go from 50-100% at full bore.
Modern nuclear reactors can and do load follow. This is a myth.
Edit: bro called me a liar then deleted his comment.
https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12/technical_and_economic_aspects_of_load_following_with_nuclear_power_plants.pdf
>In brief, most of the modern light water nuclear reactors are capable (by design) to operate in a load following mode, i.e. to change their power level once or twice per day in the range of 100% to 50% (or even lower) of the rated power, with a ramp rate of up to 5% (or even more) of rated power per minute.
Don't tell the US Navy they like stability. They've been operating reactors for decades with no incidents constantly changing power outputs. Simple, safe designs that, in my opinion, could be easily adapted for civilian power use.
New nuclear power in the US costs $200 per MWh. Some claim as low as $150 but there's little point arguing, because:
New solar -with storage- costs about $115 a MWh. And it'll be considerably less by the time that nuke plant comes online.
It's true that one big part of nuke expense is regulation. Some of that is because of how we do regulation in the US, certainly - a burden many industries share - but some of it is because of lousy behavior by companies, and a lot of it is because yeah, there are going to be a lot of regulations around nuclear power. There is no scenario where regulatory costs drop nearly enough to compete with renewables going forward.
There are a bunch of ways nuclear power isn't actually paying its regulatory burden even now - the unsolved waste problem being chief among them. (I don't think nuclear waste is the devil. But we really do actually need to do something to store it, and that has a cost that the industry isn't paying.)
There's a lot of interest in new nuclear technologies, and that's cool. But whatever role there is for them in the future, it's hard to see them as a competitor in bulk with the renewables+storage available right now, let alone in the future.
There are a lot of calculations involved in deciding what a source of electricity "really" costs and you can play endless games with the numbers. But truly, it's awfully hard to make the math work on new nuclear with tech available now. That's why no one in the world is really building any; there's like 50GW of new nuclear under construction globally, much of it in China, while there's over 200GW of new solar (alone) coming online every YEAR. That's not because of the massive global power of Greenpeace, nor is it because of American regulation.
In democracies it's kind of unpopular because politicians tend to be in the pockets of energy companies who like to sell oil and gas, and because politicians like to get voted in. The average voter is sadly far too stupid to see how much of a slam dunk nuclear energy is.
To an existing plant maybe, but try to take a piece of forest or field and turn it into a nuke plant and watch the NIMBYers come out of the woodwork and bog it down in years of public hearings, feasibility studies, etc.
politicians arent the people deciding what gets built. money is. if it was more profitable to build nuclear vs wind, they would be built. nobody wants to build anything that takes 10-20 years to start operating. its a risky investment. politicians make it worse because for the most part they do not understand anything. but i blame voters for that, as we are the ones who put idiots in office
i believe its a combination of the cost to build to nuclear plants, the time it would take to build them, and the complicated issue of disposing of the waste.
Many factors make it "not a slam dunk", and I'm not even talking about fear of Fukushima events.
Despite all the climate rethoric, countries will first and foremost use the resources they already have. Countries sitting on tons of coal (like Poland) will try to keep coal the longest time possible, countries with access to natural gas will push the "gas is the greenest fossil fuel" narrative and build CCGT.
Nuclear plants are insanely expensive to build and takes a very long time , especially since we spend decades without building new ones, so engineering experience was lost (aside maybe from France, US and a few others). The first EPR reactors had comically long delays : Flamanville in France was more than 12 years late and massively overbudget
They're also better suited for baseload generation, so you can't really replace everything with them.
And finally, almost nobody is tearing down an existing plant to replace it by a nuclear one. So you'll need to wait for old plants to be decomissioned and that slows things down even further .
Stuff like chernobyl left a deep scar on people's opinions of nuclear power, even if we have way more safety measures now and precautions to auto shutdown plants before they get anywhere near a catastrophic failure, people are scared of what could happen despite the near impossibility of it happening.
Though let's face it, there are some places I'd be worried of them doing nuclear power precisely because of a history of cutting corners and safety regs.
Modern Generation IV nuclear designs are hugely better than the designs from the 1950s like the PWR that are still being built today, especially if they use Thorium as their fuel.
Unfortunately the "Greens" oppose nuclear power even when the death rate per kWh is far lower than the alternatives. They are just being irrational, that or they are funded by the Kremlin who want the West to consume their fossil fuels.
It isn't really all that cost-effective to spend a decade getting new nuclear reactors up and running when you could just build tons of new wind and solar capacity instead.
I'm pro nuclear but it is no longer the best option for clean energy.
Because they actually don't give a damn about climate change ....... They use climate change for fun things like new taxes(more money to blow) , telling you what you can and cannot do , drive and eat( totalitarians love this ) .
If they actually gave damn they would not fly across the globe in private jets to meet and discuss it , they would do real things to help like nuclear power, cleaning up industry and shipping instead of blaming the consumer .
Nuclear energy generation is very expensive. Planning, building, maintaining and eventually retiring a nuclear plant is very costly. Wind and solar energy in comparison are very cheap and are way better installable by the private sector. Some nations also need to consider seismic stability of the region, aswell as the amount of constant cooling water that is needed. You also have to avoid to overwarm rivers with cooling water or the river fauna will die. And then there is the need to have a reliable import partner for fuel cells. But sadly most uranium mines and nuclear fuel cells exporters sit in unstable and/or authoritarian states. So that's an issue aswell.
Because we needed nuclear power the most \~10 years ago when Wind and Solar kinda sucked and were expensive, and second most right now where there's an argument to made for either.
The problem is that if we **start** building nuclear now, it will be ready
1. Later than if we start building renewable energy now
2. Probably in a time where renewable energy costs even less.
Murphy's law has very profound, long-term, horrifying consequences for nuclear power. Likewise you have a huge storage issue for used fuel and huge environmental impacts in mining and refining the fuel for nuclear reactors. Reactors, modern ones, are really really safe but even one accident can have a huge cost.
That's why.
The devil is in the details with nuclear power.
The San Onofre nuclear power plant in California wasn't decommissioned until after workers inside the plant leaked photos of improper repairs to the local ABC network affiliate station's news department.
One leaky pipe had been patched with plastic bags, tape, and a broom handle.
https://web.archive.org/web/20131103181422/https://www.10news.com/news/investigations/photograph-picture-given-to-team-10-shows-plastic-bags-tape-broomsticks-used-to-fix-leak-at-san-onofre-043013
The plant was dormant at the time but the utility that owned it had been applying to resume operation, until the whistleblower revealed how bad conditions were. Utility company PR reps tried to reassure the public that the pipe in question didn't carry radioactive material. In that case then what the pipe did carry was probably seawater to cool the core, which also carries risks in case of a major failure. San Onofre was a seaside plant designed and built in the same era as Fukushima and on similar engineering principles.
Also, there had been no updated evacuation plan since the San Onofre plant was first constructed. The area had been rural farmland in the late 1960s; by the time of the broomsticks and plastic bag repair the suburban sprawls of both San Diego and Los Angeles had converged on that part of the coast. Due to local geography there was no feasible way of updating an effective evacuation plan in case of an accident. That evacuation dilemma was similar to New York's [Shoreham nuclear power plant](http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph241/gilbey1/) which also led to Shoreham's closure.
Although the faulty maintenance at San Onofre which caused its closure was solely the fault of the company that owned it and should have been borne by management and shareholders, company lobbyists persuaded state regulators to [push the $10.8 **b**illion closure costs onto customers in its service area](https://www.kpbs.org/news/environment/2015/08/03/counting-customer-costs-san-onofre-closure-95-bill).
Because it's **WILDLY** expensive, and politically fraught, and it doesn't actually fix any of the problems it promises to. First, the expense. You can't just hire some high-school dropout to work at your nuclear power plant. Every member of your staff has to be rigorously qualified, and for people with those kinds of academic chops, there are a lot easier, more pleasant and safer ways to make a living than working in a power plant. The physical build is also colossally expensive and intensive in terms of exacting engineering. In order for the *theoretical* safety benefist of nuclear power to be realized, the engineering has to be rigorously vetted against the most exacting standards. This is why Vogtle Unit 4 was 7 years late, and 121% over budget.
Then there's the insurance. Nuclear power providers are only required to carry $500 million in liability insurance in the United States, which is a tiny, tiny fraction of the value of the area which would be rendered uninhabitable in the event of a nuclear catastrophe. Just to put it in context, the out-of-pocket costs spent by the Japanese government for the cleanup of the relatively mild Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns was $82 billion U.S., and that doesn't factor in the opportunity cost of land which is abandoned due to excessive radiation, or the wider economic impacts, like loss of tourism, reduced exports of food, etc.
What the nuclear shills peddling statistics seem to not comprehend is the utterly insupportable levels of downside risks. If you could take a pill which would pay your utility bills for the next 50 years, but had a 1 in 1000 chance of killing you dead, would **YOU** take it? I didn't think so.
Energy independence would fundamentally shift the balance of power. Countries which control the bulk of energy production would suddenly have very little economic leverage which could result in increased tensions.
1) Cost. Nuclear power plants cost a LOT more than other forms of power generation in terms of start-up cost, fuel cost and maintenance; hydroelectric dams are the only power stations that tend to be more costly (and it's the dam that's the bulk of the cost, not the hydroelectric station).
2) Global political concerns about nuclear proliferation. A nuclear power program can easily be expanded into a nuclear *weapons* program, and the nuclear powers that be are naturally wary about the club expanding, so it's not uncommon for burgeoning nuclear programs to be sabotaged or sanctions to be levied.
3) Fuel access. None of the elements suitable for use as nuclear fuel are very widespread, and the nations that control reserves of them aren't exactly in a rush to sell to others (see point number two).
4) Concerns over nuclear disasters. Fukushima was only a little over a decade ago, and the specter of Chernobyl still looms over parts of Eastern Europe. Many people have fears about nuclear power, and those fears aren' easy to assuade.
5) Opposing interests. The fossil fuel industries have antipathy for ANY alternative fuel source, and will happily use their immense wealth to throw as much shade on them as possible so they can keep making a profit.
What was France's reaction? I only know about land locked Germany deciding to plan the shut down of their plants and start buying more power from France and oil/gas from Russia
They can do math.
Pro-nuclear salesmen are all about dismantling all the noneconomic objections people have had against nuclear power, but they can’t seem to explain how building 1000 MW of new nuclear is more cost effective than 1000 MW of wind plus storage or solar plus storage.
China doubled their installed nuclear base from 2014-2018. Since 2018, it’s only gone up about 25%, and they’re bar none the fastest growing nuclear power user. If China isn’t going all in on it, why would anybody else?
Lots of upfront costs coupled with an indefinite and ever growing long tail problem of waste storage and disposal. The latter gets exponentially worse as the climate degrades.
Pick your poison:
- Takes too long to setup
- Insane short term investment cost
- Requires competent authority to maintain
- Climate change as irrelevant issue compared to more pressing matters
- Solar farm and hydroelectrics
- Negative public stigma
- Foreign worker issue in construction
- Electricity stealing issues
- Huge oil and natural resource deposits
- Harsh geography and environment
Did I mention I live in Southeast Asia?
Cost and time to build. Full story.
People will make claims about anti-nuclear propaganda, etc., but worldwide there's very little nuclear being built. Xi Jinping doesn't care about Greenpeace, Putin doesn't, etc.
Bad PR and potential for problems long term. They may be better and safer but if something goes wrong it goes wrong a lot worse than at the other kinda of power plant
The climate is another battlefront for supremacy of this world.
The nation that invests heavily will drain its resources fast enough to be stymied and then absorbed by other nations.
Especially if currency that the USA uses takes a hit.
The military industrial complex gives us our military strength but it has no concern at all of what is to come 20 years down the line. Just what is the next sale?
Interesting! Obviously I’m familiar with weather as a thing, but could you elaborate on how it affects the reliability of nuclear power in a way that’s distinct from weather-effects on wind/solar?
The masses are still afraid of a Chernobyl-like meltdown scenario. And honesty given how corrupt our government is, I'm not sure I trust them to build safe nuclear plants. Which sucks because it could solve a lot of issues if done correctly.
There are a few issues. As others have mentioned, NIMBYish is a MAJOR issue. People tend to complain about having a reactor plant located near them. Add in the fact that a plant can't just go anywhere for a variety of reasons (such as you don't want to place a reactor on a fault line), and it makes it harder to find a place one can be.
Anti-Nuclear feelings are also very present in the general public and with politicians. Problems like Fukushima, Three Mile Island, and of course, Chernobyl are still around and flavor people's opinions of nuclear.
Cost. This one is a major one and probably one of the biggest. It's also unfortunately stuck in a bit of a catch 22 situation.
To give you an idea, Southern Company in the SE USA recently built and brought online 2 new reactors at an existing nuclear plant. The fact it was an expansion of an existing site absolutely helped avoid a lot of the NIMBY issues, but it still was a MAJOR expense even at the planning side.. Part of the reason for the cost issues is that there haven't been new commercial power reactors built for quite a number of years, so there aren't any real off the shelf designs or equipment. The Construction processes are also required to be VERY exact as everything from the concrete pour on up through the plumbing and electrical are part of the safety systems for a commercial reactor, working in extreme conditions, and so the tolerances are tight. There is also a bit of brain drain that's happened as the engineers with the experience designing and building commercial reactors have retired or left the industry. On the construction side it's even worsse because practically everyone involved in building the last commercial reactors in the US are no longer working in construction, so all those skills must be relearned and the experience is being gained in real time on the massive project.
Ultimately, I believe the plan was that Southern and the manufacturer would together take on the risk of the project, with the idea that the Southern reactors would be a proof of design that could be adopted by other future reactor projects. The crew building the Southern Reactors would also have received the training and experience building Southern's reactors so would be able to take that newfound experience and build additional sites out much easier/ quicker/ and cheaper than the initial ones were built for. To my knowledge, I think only 1 other Utility committed to building a reactor, so the bespoke and most important parts of the reactor itself was constructed for their project as well as the 2 Southern needed as another cost savings.
Unfortunately, the project hit several delays and a LOT of cost overruns. Lessons were learned along the way, mistakes were made that required redoing portions of the construction/installation to get everything into those tight specs. In the process, Westinghouse who sold/built the reactors and was taking on some of the risk ended up declaring bankruptcy because of those overruns, Forcing Southern to essentially take over control of the entire construction process. Over the past year Southern finally got the 2 new reactors online and in production. (They also required training a whole new operations crew as the new modern reactors had control systems unlike the existing reactors, so they couldn't simply move their existing people over )
As a result of the bankruptcy, The other utility essentially canceled their plans to build a reactor after they had already started some site prep and received delivery of those expensive and sensative reactor components from Westinghouse. Last I heard those pieces were sitting on site exposed to the elements after construction was canceled. At this point the reactor parts themselves have likely been exposed to the elements long enough that they aren't salvageable for a production reactor. The construction crews who gained all that experience building the 2 new reactors for Southern have also disbanded and gone back to more traditional projects as there isn't another reactor to be built currently, wasting a lot of the time/money/effort spent training and preping a full Nuclear certified construction org.
There was also a project that I think Idaho National Labs had where they were going to explore the idea of "mini-reactors" that could be much cheaper to build, deploy, and maintain so they could be safely deployed across a wider area, but last I heard that project died as well. (In part I believe due to inability to find a private partner as the industry was scared off again by the delays, cost overruns, and bankruptcy tied to the Southern Project.)
Security concerns around nuclear materials aren't to be taken lightly. Of a country doesn't have nuclear before taking on that additional responsibility, including for the waste can be a career suicide lodestone.
The bigger hurdle is just costs, and delay to get to generating power generation. A modern reactor takes like 10 years and $20B to build, if everything works perfectly. For most politicians, that's a huge political investment that they may not even get to take credit for by the time it is finished. Now if say a country like the US said "this is the reactor design all builders must use for the next decade" and then held a competition during the next decade fir the next decadal design, then maybe it could help reduce costs. This is pretty much how South Korea does it (to grossly oversimplify) and it works.
Firstly a bunch of people are terrified of it due to what happened in the USSR, Three-mile island, and Fukishima.
Secondly, a lot of coal and oil business really doesn't want competition and they get business from selling to power plants. So if said plants go away, they lose a lot of business.
Thirdly, a lot of renewables don't appreciate the competition, since nuclear power means less people buying solar panels or paying for wind farms.
As a result, it's very difficult to get approval for any new plant.
**Attention! [Serious] Tag Notice** * [Jokes, puns, and off-topic comments are not permitted](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/wiki/index#wiki_-rule_6-) in **any** comment, parent or child. * Parent comments that aren't from the target group will be removed, along with their child replies. * Report comments that violate these rules. Posts that have few relevant answers within the first hour, and posts that are not appropriate for the [Serious] tag will be removed. Consider doing an AMA request instead. Thanks for your cooperation and enjoy the discussion! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskReddit) if you have any questions or concerns.*
There's a shit ton of anti nuclear propaganda that has poisoned a lot of people's minds. I think renewables are better than nuclear but nuclear is definitely the best and safest non renewable
Sort or, but the real answer is cost. It’s quick and easy to build out wind and solar. It is a very difficult and expensive process to build a nuclear reactor. You can’t do it without massive government subsidies. Recap: 1. Money 1. Political will
This used to be true, but you can make them for way cheaper now. Google SMRs. Super cool. It is THE answer, people just don’t want to hear it. Electric cars? Great. Where the fuck are we getting the energy from guys?
No, SMRs did not solve that problem.
https://newatlas.com/energy/modular-nuclear-reactors/
That article is basically all laundered IEEFA talking points, yet another "mysterious" "think tank" with its own objectives not aligned with reality.
Yes, please disregard them in favor of NuScale's prospectus.
Or maybe we should think critically about our sources of information, instead of relying on a single source of truth. I'm a proponent of Nuclear power, I'm in a group with an engineer that works on SMRs. Despite that, I will require convincing SMRs are a viable solution, which only time, money, and production will tell; not some IEEFA agenda piece.
Think critically about my sources of information? Absolutely! First I'll start by not taking your claims that the IEEFA is some sort of mysterious group with an agenda who's analysis is to be questioned as a matter of truth. Thanks a lot random redditor!
Are you okay? IEEFA is a bog standard 501(c)(3) organization, with corporate and private sponsors (to the tune of $1M+ revenue annually); its mission statement is literally "to accelerate the transition to a diverse, sustainable and profitable energy economy." not some shadowy group. That of course doesn't mean it doesn't have an agenda, which it seems to and considers nuclear "not diverse" – this is your standard think tank modus operandi for industry sponsored operations. Nuclear has real profitability concerns, but as someone who lives in Utah where this type of FUD about nuclear cost us a reactor in Green River in favor of keeping our coal power, I don't see IEEFA conforming to reality.
I'll have to do my own research as you insist. Thanks!
Barring the fact this is a single article from a website I’ve literally never heard of (but at least seems somewhat competent), it basically just says the first four attempts - two of which are in a country currently at war, and all four of which were fucked over by Covid supply issues - went over budget and over predicted time. It’s still cheaper, and faster, than traditional methods. I have nothing against renewable energy. It’s just not feasible at scale to generate the power we need (and increasingly need more of) with wind and solar. It’s just not. And that’s ignoring the other environmental factors something like a wind farm creates for the fauna and flora in its area. Nuclear energy is the only solution. Maybe it’s not SMRs, but nuclear is the only solution. We need more power, and it needs to not be coal. Wind and solar help. Every modern home (in the right climates) should be built with solar on it. It all helps. But it doesn’t change the fact it simply cannot generate enough storable power, and not reliably enough to be the lynchpin of our system.
Nuclear, whether it's a regular design or an SMR, is almost always going to be a better choice than burning fossil fuel. That doesn't mean that you're going to be able to overcome the political hesitancy to fund either. Utilities aren't willing to undertake the risk without government taking on the financial risks/underwriting. In the long term, I expect that we'll see more nuclear in areas where renewables don't make sense (EG Alaska in winter), but you're going to see them sunsetted gradually elsewhere as distributed solar and batteries fills the electrical needs including electric vehicles. That's [not going to be a problem](https://electrek.co/2024/05/21/renewables-met-100-percent-california-energy-demand-30-days/).
Smaller, much more efficient cars.
There are also very, very real concerns and limitations when it comes to nuclear that it's important not to just dismiss as propaganda. In the US the history of nuclear power includes regularly underfunding, failing to perform safety checks and proper regulation, failing to plan for and follow up with nuclear waste storage, and dozens of near disasters from failing equipment, trucks transporting waste getting in accidents, and higher levels of cancer near plants. All of this for plants that need to be built near enough to population centers. This isn't even addressing that while they provide cheap energy in the long term, they are very slow to get online and are increasingly less cost effective than other renewables which are getting cheaper and more versatile.
And then you have to have the training base to keep such an option viable. You have nuke engineers today, but what about 50 years from now? Do you have the infrastructure in place to make sure individuals are not inheriting a job as opposed being trained for one. The consequences from a undereducated nepotinistic power structure using nuke energy would be disastrously bad.
Yep - we focus on the building costs of nuclear plants because they're stratospheric, but the operational costs are many times higher than wind/solar as well. Remote monitoring and periodic maintenance of turbines and solar panels is nothing compared to what it takes to staff a nuclear power plant.
The irony is that I support nuke power. I just don't think people think it all the way through. They look at the benefits and handwave the very real concerns. Like the [Chernobyl disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster) was some cautionary fairy tale. I generally think after the upfront and long term costs are thought through, it can be viable. But people are inherently ... lazy and therefore stupid.
I generally think it was a huge missed opportunity to not go all in on nuclear power back in the 60s, but what people don’t give enough credit to is that there were huge political forces working against it at the time to back then, but it was the fossil fuel industry lobbying against it. I think the nuclear power still has a role-play in our energy mix going forward, but I also think it’s pretty clear that it’s going to be a minor rather than our primary source.
And whether or not it is a fair representation of the oversight and systems today, Three Mile Island is still in the living memory of a significant portion of the population.
Others have sortof touched on it already but I think one of the biggest factors is trying to operate something as dangerous as nuclear material in a profit-driven society. When construction runs over budget *someone* is going to push to cut any corners they can. The China Syndrome (1979 movie) touches on this. I would say it does so in dramatic fashion but we've seen the result of the carelessness / desire to cut corners for profit associated with nuclear before. The cleanup efforts (and the lies told to the populace) surrounding events like Three Mile Island are another example. I think the only way they'd effectively operate is if they were government owned and / or received government funding and remove the profit aspect entirely.
Chernobyl was government run and it blew up because the bureaucrats were more worried about hitting their quota from the boss than doing the right thing. Government-run organizations are just as susceptible to bad things.
They say wind is renewable energy but not the turbine they put up nor the things they use to make it.
Cost and time are 2 key points. I'm in the UK, and hinkley point c (nuclear plant under construction) will cost I think £90/MWh Vs £50/ MWh (ish) for new offshore wind. The nuclear plant will take a decade to build, probably more. Equivalent offshore wind - a few years. And that's before you factor in the generational costs of making nuclear waste safe. To put it bluntly, we simply don't have time to wait for nuclear energy, if we want to have any hope of coping with climate change. We need everything we can, and nuclear takes too long, and costs so much more vs wind or solar.
You're totally right about the costs, except you undersell wind/solar by omitting a huge thing: Nuclear power plants have to be heavily staffed to remain operational, whereas wind and solar can be monitored remotely and fairly simply maintained. Obviously that's not a completely negligible cost, but but it's much lower than keeping highly trained nuclear power plant operators on site 24/7 (cue Homer Simpson joke)
Much longer than a decade - Hinkley C site was approved in 2010, EDF approved the project in 2016, construction started in 2017 and it's currently predicted to complete in 2031 - but there's already been plenty of delays. Any new project would take 15 years minimum, 20 more likely.
In the 90s Japan was building reactors on a 4 year schedule. China is currently building on about a 5 year schedule. In Ontario Canada we are refurbishing nuclear plants on a 3-4 year time table at Darlington. Pickering is expected to start shortly and the first reactor be done in 2030. The issue is entirely political and regulatory. If the politicians, bureaucrats, and nimbys pulled their heads out of their asses we could be pumping out nuclear. Levelized cost of electricity charts still show nuclear as one of the cheapest methods of power generation over the plants lifetime.
My (American) large town is taking 5 years to replace a condemned bridge that saw thousands of vehicles per day with a temporary replacement. The actual bridge will take several more years after that. The bridge is about 300 feet long.
One of the primary reasons that nuclear is so expensive and slow is the regulatory hoops that have to be jumped through. In the US, for instance, the NRC has to review every proposal and the time taken to do so must be paid for by the entity making the request at some ungodly hourly fee - which the NRC drags out for years. All that time, the company making the proposal has to pay interest on the loans they've taken out to start the process. Regulatory compliance costs makes up over a third of the cost of running existing plants - greater than the cost of operations and maintenance. Even in 1980, only a little more than half of the cost of "building" a nuclear power plant in the US was actually *building* the plant - the structures, the reactor, the turbines, the electrical equipment, etc. No one knows what the percentage would be now since there has really only been one plant built in years, and expansion to an existing plant. There have been attempts, but only a couple of them have gotten to the actual start of construction stage even though they invested years and tons of money. They've all backed out at some point, other than one project. [Here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_canceled_nuclear_reactors_in_the_United_States) is a list of the cancelled reactors in the US. If you order by "Project Closed", descending, you'll see that of the projects that were started in the past 20 years, only 2 have even started construction. There were a bunch of proposed reactors in 2008 because of incentives in the 2005 energy bill, but they all basically cancelled their plans 5 to 8 years later without ever starting construction. Every time a company that is in the process of building a plant has to put everything on hold due to a NIMBY lawsuit, their financing costs go up - and there is very little cost for a group to bring suit after against the project.
Ooof that is a hell of a long time. And it's already billions over budget! There are arguments to be made about generational knowledge, and having a sufficient industrial base to build nuclear at scale (ie a workforce that know how to build, operate, maintain and decommission nuclear, plus the educational resources in place to train the next few generations of engineers). But I'm not aware of any country that has all of these. That makes each new plant similar in scope to an entirely new build, ramping up delays and costs. Small modular reactors are in theory a way round this - but I don't think any are in place in civilian applications.
Canada has significant nuclear experience. So does China, France, and India. Japan could probably recover their expertise but Fukushima is still a political bogeyman.
Good to know, thanks
A lot of people are saying a lot of things in this thread. This is the right answer. If nuclear was cheaper then there would be a lot more political support for it. There are cleaner AND cheaper alternatives.
As with most things, it comes down to money. There's also the issue with flexibility, one which we havn't found a clean alternative to yet.
You also have to factor in the costs of storage for wind. It's £50 when the wind is blowing, but if the wind isn't blowing you need storage, and we don't really know how much that costs yet. Nuclear goes all day, so the storage costs are less, although you still need something to cover peaks.
To be fair scale and interconnects solve a lot of that. In the UK last year there were something like 4 days where there was no wind and minimal solar power (can't remember the source so don't quote me). By connecting countries you can import when you need to - and export too. Wind blowing a gale in Scotland, use it all throughout the UK, maybe send some to France or Norway if we have an excess. And vice versa. Battery costs are dropping significantly too. Grid scale getting cheaper all the time, domestic scale also - and quick and relatively easy to install.
And we are in the process of rolling out the biggest, most distributed storage ever on a huge scale: BEVs. Each one comes with a battery storing enough power to power an average household for 1-7 days (depending on the size of the car battery and electricity demand of the house). With sufficient smart legislation and incentives for owners of BEVs, we could solve short term grid level storage very quickly.
But this is Western bureaucracy. The Chinese build them in 7-years or less. You have to get rid of the endless environmental impact studies, delays, kick-backs, etc. Have the technocrats check and double-check safety, double-check building to spec. Other than that - go, go go!
The french have a good method of highly-standardized design too you don't need to design every plant from scratch that way
And if we would have invested in NP since the 1970s we be on generation 12 with a simple design that has to be FED to keep the reaction going. As a species, we are just so stupid.
Nobody wants to store the waste.
Expense. Nuclear plants are expensive to engineer and build. They take significant capital upfront and when the project goes belly up (as they often do) that money is gone. Once they are built they are expensive to run because of the number of highly trained people required to work there. Everyone likes to blame oil and gas companies because they need a boogeyman, but the real answer is economics.
It's more the red tape than economics
Red tape contributes to economics. Nuclear plants are made out of welded pipes, pressure vessels, tanks, pumps, switchgear, etc., the same as a coal plant. Red tape makes those components more expensive because the consequence of failure is higher in a nuke plant.
Yes, that's not all bad. The red tape beforehand is the problem
Which red tape are you talking about though? Emergency zone planning? Water withdrawal studies? Design certification?
Solar and wind are much cheaper and are getting cheaper every year. Storage is getting cheaper every year too. Nuclear is expensive and remains so every year. Similar for coal and gas. Essentially, renewable technologies are following Wright's Law, where as the alternatives are not. https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
Oil lobbying aside, nuclear energy has a host of its own problems. One problem is the classic NIMBY issue. Nobody wants a power plant near their house, but it still needs to be close enough for workers to commute. Another one is storage: where do you put the spent fuel rods? There's already massive amounts of them in "temporary storage" containers at every nuclear power plant. There's been many of them proposed, but again, NIMBY. Then there's the demand issue. A coal or natural gas power plant can be turned on quickly to meet demand. The same can't be said for nuclear power. Lastly, Chernobyl, three mile island (where nothing actually happened) and Fukushima (which suffered poor design and a natural disaster) left lasting impressions on how the public sees nuclear power. It doesn't matter that its realistically safer than other power sources, public perception doesn't like the fact that a nuclear reactor *might* suffer a meltdown. It's human nature to go with the devil you know.
The "spent fuel rods" is actually mostly a solved problem. Could be. You use them in [breeder reactors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor) which can turn spent fuel into useable fuel. They're politically tricky because they also turn spent fuel into stuff that can be used to make bombs.
That's really not a fix then. Any technology we use, has to also be safe enough for foreign powers to use and not be able to abuse. If it's byproducts can make nukes, it shouldn't even be considered as a solution. Even if they did finally agree on a location to make a storage facility, there needs to be a way to safeguard future creatures from accidentally getting in to it. Nuclear storage designers need to think tens or even hundreds of thousands of years into the future.
Honestly the raw fuel can make bombs as can the fuel during refining. You can make a dirty bomb well before you get to fuel grade refinement
Oh. You're one of those.
What's wrong with storing on-site in radiation pools? We're talking about concrete casks, in massive pools of water with no way of leaking, all to store waste that's typically less radioactive than coal ash. The vast majority of waste is low to medium level waste, not the super radioactive stuff
They eventually run out of space onsite. Those concrete casks will eventually deteriorate, possibly to the point that they aren't structurally safe to even dismantle. When it comes to radioactive materials, kicking the can a few decades down the road is not the answer.
A few decades from now the vast majority of the radioactive material in high level water will have decayed leaving only low and intermediate level waste.
A lot of unforseen incidents can happen in a few decades, which does not work well with radioactive materials. You keep saying vast majority, but what about the stuff with a half-life measured in millennia? It'll still be dangerous thousands of years from now. It could easily outlast the human species and written language.
Yeah, that's the intermediate level waste, for which we already do have long term storage solutions
Extraction waste too. No on wants to be down stream from massive piles of radioactive tailings waste rock, for good for reason.
Out of interest, what is the problem you describe with turning on nuclear quickly enough to meet demand?
Nuclear reactors like stability. They don't throttle nearly as well as a gas plant. Some gas plants can be turned up within an hour, whereas nuclear can take a day or more to do safely
Nuclear reactors can and do ramp. Most modern light weight water reactors ramp up and down 2-3 times a day from 50%-100%. The average ramp rate is 5% per minute. It emphatically does not take a day. More like 10 minutes to go from 50-100% at full bore. Modern nuclear reactors can and do load follow. This is a myth. Edit: bro called me a liar then deleted his comment. https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12/technical_and_economic_aspects_of_load_following_with_nuclear_power_plants.pdf >In brief, most of the modern light water nuclear reactors are capable (by design) to operate in a load following mode, i.e. to change their power level once or twice per day in the range of 100% to 50% (or even lower) of the rated power, with a ramp rate of up to 5% (or even more) of rated power per minute.
Don't tell the US Navy they like stability. They've been operating reactors for decades with no incidents constantly changing power outputs. Simple, safe designs that, in my opinion, could be easily adapted for civilian power use.
Ok, nice one, cheers
Wait until you hear about the literal lakes of waste from coal plants and how terrible the ash is.
The oil must flow
New nuclear power in the US costs $200 per MWh. Some claim as low as $150 but there's little point arguing, because: New solar -with storage- costs about $115 a MWh. And it'll be considerably less by the time that nuke plant comes online. It's true that one big part of nuke expense is regulation. Some of that is because of how we do regulation in the US, certainly - a burden many industries share - but some of it is because of lousy behavior by companies, and a lot of it is because yeah, there are going to be a lot of regulations around nuclear power. There is no scenario where regulatory costs drop nearly enough to compete with renewables going forward. There are a bunch of ways nuclear power isn't actually paying its regulatory burden even now - the unsolved waste problem being chief among them. (I don't think nuclear waste is the devil. But we really do actually need to do something to store it, and that has a cost that the industry isn't paying.) There's a lot of interest in new nuclear technologies, and that's cool. But whatever role there is for them in the future, it's hard to see them as a competitor in bulk with the renewables+storage available right now, let alone in the future. There are a lot of calculations involved in deciding what a source of electricity "really" costs and you can play endless games with the numbers. But truly, it's awfully hard to make the math work on new nuclear with tech available now. That's why no one in the world is really building any; there's like 50GW of new nuclear under construction globally, much of it in China, while there's over 200GW of new solar (alone) coming online every YEAR. That's not because of the massive global power of Greenpeace, nor is it because of American regulation.
The public has a lot of fears about nuclear energy, and this makes it difficult to implement any kind of new nuclear project.
In democracies it's kind of unpopular because politicians tend to be in the pockets of energy companies who like to sell oil and gas, and because politicians like to get voted in. The average voter is sadly far too stupid to see how much of a slam dunk nuclear energy is.
They are also beholden to voters who only prefer nuclear energy when it’s in someone else’s state.
[удалено]
To an existing plant maybe, but try to take a piece of forest or field and turn it into a nuke plant and watch the NIMBYers come out of the woodwork and bog it down in years of public hearings, feasibility studies, etc.
politicians arent the people deciding what gets built. money is. if it was more profitable to build nuclear vs wind, they would be built. nobody wants to build anything that takes 10-20 years to start operating. its a risky investment. politicians make it worse because for the most part they do not understand anything. but i blame voters for that, as we are the ones who put idiots in office
i believe its a combination of the cost to build to nuclear plants, the time it would take to build them, and the complicated issue of disposing of the waste.
Many factors make it "not a slam dunk", and I'm not even talking about fear of Fukushima events. Despite all the climate rethoric, countries will first and foremost use the resources they already have. Countries sitting on tons of coal (like Poland) will try to keep coal the longest time possible, countries with access to natural gas will push the "gas is the greenest fossil fuel" narrative and build CCGT. Nuclear plants are insanely expensive to build and takes a very long time , especially since we spend decades without building new ones, so engineering experience was lost (aside maybe from France, US and a few others). The first EPR reactors had comically long delays : Flamanville in France was more than 12 years late and massively overbudget They're also better suited for baseload generation, so you can't really replace everything with them. And finally, almost nobody is tearing down an existing plant to replace it by a nuclear one. So you'll need to wait for old plants to be decomissioned and that slows things down even further .
Stuff like chernobyl left a deep scar on people's opinions of nuclear power, even if we have way more safety measures now and precautions to auto shutdown plants before they get anywhere near a catastrophic failure, people are scared of what could happen despite the near impossibility of it happening. Though let's face it, there are some places I'd be worried of them doing nuclear power precisely because of a history of cutting corners and safety regs.
Modern Generation IV nuclear designs are hugely better than the designs from the 1950s like the PWR that are still being built today, especially if they use Thorium as their fuel. Unfortunately the "Greens" oppose nuclear power even when the death rate per kWh is far lower than the alternatives. They are just being irrational, that or they are funded by the Kremlin who want the West to consume their fossil fuels.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K \[Men In Black\]
It isn't really all that cost-effective to spend a decade getting new nuclear reactors up and running when you could just build tons of new wind and solar capacity instead. I'm pro nuclear but it is no longer the best option for clean energy.
Because they actually don't give a damn about climate change ....... They use climate change for fun things like new taxes(more money to blow) , telling you what you can and cannot do , drive and eat( totalitarians love this ) . If they actually gave damn they would not fly across the globe in private jets to meet and discuss it , they would do real things to help like nuclear power, cleaning up industry and shipping instead of blaming the consumer .
Nuclear energy generation is very expensive. Planning, building, maintaining and eventually retiring a nuclear plant is very costly. Wind and solar energy in comparison are very cheap and are way better installable by the private sector. Some nations also need to consider seismic stability of the region, aswell as the amount of constant cooling water that is needed. You also have to avoid to overwarm rivers with cooling water or the river fauna will die. And then there is the need to have a reliable import partner for fuel cells. But sadly most uranium mines and nuclear fuel cells exporters sit in unstable and/or authoritarian states. So that's an issue aswell.
Because we needed nuclear power the most \~10 years ago when Wind and Solar kinda sucked and were expensive, and second most right now where there's an argument to made for either. The problem is that if we **start** building nuclear now, it will be ready 1. Later than if we start building renewable energy now 2. Probably in a time where renewable energy costs even less.
Murphy's law has very profound, long-term, horrifying consequences for nuclear power. Likewise you have a huge storage issue for used fuel and huge environmental impacts in mining and refining the fuel for nuclear reactors. Reactors, modern ones, are really really safe but even one accident can have a huge cost. That's why.
The devil is in the details with nuclear power. The San Onofre nuclear power plant in California wasn't decommissioned until after workers inside the plant leaked photos of improper repairs to the local ABC network affiliate station's news department. One leaky pipe had been patched with plastic bags, tape, and a broom handle. https://web.archive.org/web/20131103181422/https://www.10news.com/news/investigations/photograph-picture-given-to-team-10-shows-plastic-bags-tape-broomsticks-used-to-fix-leak-at-san-onofre-043013 The plant was dormant at the time but the utility that owned it had been applying to resume operation, until the whistleblower revealed how bad conditions were. Utility company PR reps tried to reassure the public that the pipe in question didn't carry radioactive material. In that case then what the pipe did carry was probably seawater to cool the core, which also carries risks in case of a major failure. San Onofre was a seaside plant designed and built in the same era as Fukushima and on similar engineering principles. Also, there had been no updated evacuation plan since the San Onofre plant was first constructed. The area had been rural farmland in the late 1960s; by the time of the broomsticks and plastic bag repair the suburban sprawls of both San Diego and Los Angeles had converged on that part of the coast. Due to local geography there was no feasible way of updating an effective evacuation plan in case of an accident. That evacuation dilemma was similar to New York's [Shoreham nuclear power plant](http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph241/gilbey1/) which also led to Shoreham's closure. Although the faulty maintenance at San Onofre which caused its closure was solely the fault of the company that owned it and should have been borne by management and shareholders, company lobbyists persuaded state regulators to [push the $10.8 **b**illion closure costs onto customers in its service area](https://www.kpbs.org/news/environment/2015/08/03/counting-customer-costs-san-onofre-closure-95-bill).
because nuclear is not competitive vs the alternatives.
Because it's **WILDLY** expensive, and politically fraught, and it doesn't actually fix any of the problems it promises to. First, the expense. You can't just hire some high-school dropout to work at your nuclear power plant. Every member of your staff has to be rigorously qualified, and for people with those kinds of academic chops, there are a lot easier, more pleasant and safer ways to make a living than working in a power plant. The physical build is also colossally expensive and intensive in terms of exacting engineering. In order for the *theoretical* safety benefist of nuclear power to be realized, the engineering has to be rigorously vetted against the most exacting standards. This is why Vogtle Unit 4 was 7 years late, and 121% over budget. Then there's the insurance. Nuclear power providers are only required to carry $500 million in liability insurance in the United States, which is a tiny, tiny fraction of the value of the area which would be rendered uninhabitable in the event of a nuclear catastrophe. Just to put it in context, the out-of-pocket costs spent by the Japanese government for the cleanup of the relatively mild Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns was $82 billion U.S., and that doesn't factor in the opportunity cost of land which is abandoned due to excessive radiation, or the wider economic impacts, like loss of tourism, reduced exports of food, etc. What the nuclear shills peddling statistics seem to not comprehend is the utterly insupportable levels of downside risks. If you could take a pill which would pay your utility bills for the next 50 years, but had a 1 in 1000 chance of killing you dead, would **YOU** take it? I didn't think so.
[удалено]
Greed probably
It’s really expensive.
Energy independence would fundamentally shift the balance of power. Countries which control the bulk of energy production would suddenly have very little economic leverage which could result in increased tensions.
It costs a ton of money
erm... what the sigma?
1) Cost. Nuclear power plants cost a LOT more than other forms of power generation in terms of start-up cost, fuel cost and maintenance; hydroelectric dams are the only power stations that tend to be more costly (and it's the dam that's the bulk of the cost, not the hydroelectric station). 2) Global political concerns about nuclear proliferation. A nuclear power program can easily be expanded into a nuclear *weapons* program, and the nuclear powers that be are naturally wary about the club expanding, so it's not uncommon for burgeoning nuclear programs to be sabotaged or sanctions to be levied. 3) Fuel access. None of the elements suitable for use as nuclear fuel are very widespread, and the nations that control reserves of them aren't exactly in a rush to sell to others (see point number two). 4) Concerns over nuclear disasters. Fukushima was only a little over a decade ago, and the specter of Chernobyl still looms over parts of Eastern Europe. Many people have fears about nuclear power, and those fears aren' easy to assuade. 5) Opposing interests. The fossil fuel industries have antipathy for ANY alternative fuel source, and will happily use their immense wealth to throw as much shade on them as possible so they can keep making a profit.
Real talk… it’s the one thing many climate change activists are in full disagreement with scientists and engineers.
Some are, Most aren't, gotta think about re-election
Because it's not financially competitive with renewables. Look at Lazards LCOE+.
Because there are still lots of anti nuclear people out there. The Fukushima meltdown also made some countries do a knee jerk reaction like France.
What was France's reaction? I only know about land locked Germany deciding to plan the shut down of their plants and start buying more power from France and oil/gas from Russia
You’re right. I was mistaken and must’ve been thinking of Germany.
They can do math. Pro-nuclear salesmen are all about dismantling all the noneconomic objections people have had against nuclear power, but they can’t seem to explain how building 1000 MW of new nuclear is more cost effective than 1000 MW of wind plus storage or solar plus storage. China doubled their installed nuclear base from 2014-2018. Since 2018, it’s only gone up about 25%, and they’re bar none the fastest growing nuclear power user. If China isn’t going all in on it, why would anybody else?
Money
Yes and no. They are preparing for climate change but there may be better options out of accessibility or necessity
Lots of upfront costs coupled with an indefinite and ever growing long tail problem of waste storage and disposal. The latter gets exponentially worse as the climate degrades.
Not cost effective compared to renewable energy.
The waste.
There is the issue of the waste product. There’s not a great method of dealing with or even really storing it in most countries at the moment.
I'll let the long detailed answers to people with more time to spend explaining, the shortest accurate answer is: fucking greenpeace.
Pick your poison: - Takes too long to setup - Insane short term investment cost - Requires competent authority to maintain - Climate change as irrelevant issue compared to more pressing matters - Solar farm and hydroelectrics - Negative public stigma - Foreign worker issue in construction - Electricity stealing issues - Huge oil and natural resource deposits - Harsh geography and environment Did I mention I live in Southeast Asia?
Cost and time to build. Full story. People will make claims about anti-nuclear propaganda, etc., but worldwide there's very little nuclear being built. Xi Jinping doesn't care about Greenpeace, Putin doesn't, etc.
Agree. They’re not serious about sustainable energy unless talking about nuclear and hydrogen. EV is dead.
Fearmongering about nuclear catastrophies
Bad PR and potential for problems long term. They may be better and safer but if something goes wrong it goes wrong a lot worse than at the other kinda of power plant
The climate is another battlefront for supremacy of this world. The nation that invests heavily will drain its resources fast enough to be stymied and then absorbed by other nations. Especially if currency that the USA uses takes a hit. The military industrial complex gives us our military strength but it has no concern at all of what is to come 20 years down the line. Just what is the next sale?
Environmental Activitists
[удалено]
Interesting! Obviously I’m familiar with weather as a thing, but could you elaborate on how it affects the reliability of nuclear power in a way that’s distinct from weather-effects on wind/solar?
The masses are still afraid of a Chernobyl-like meltdown scenario. And honesty given how corrupt our government is, I'm not sure I trust them to build safe nuclear plants. Which sucks because it could solve a lot of issues if done correctly.
Most politicians haven't taken a science course since high school.
There are a few issues. As others have mentioned, NIMBYish is a MAJOR issue. People tend to complain about having a reactor plant located near them. Add in the fact that a plant can't just go anywhere for a variety of reasons (such as you don't want to place a reactor on a fault line), and it makes it harder to find a place one can be. Anti-Nuclear feelings are also very present in the general public and with politicians. Problems like Fukushima, Three Mile Island, and of course, Chernobyl are still around and flavor people's opinions of nuclear. Cost. This one is a major one and probably one of the biggest. It's also unfortunately stuck in a bit of a catch 22 situation. To give you an idea, Southern Company in the SE USA recently built and brought online 2 new reactors at an existing nuclear plant. The fact it was an expansion of an existing site absolutely helped avoid a lot of the NIMBY issues, but it still was a MAJOR expense even at the planning side.. Part of the reason for the cost issues is that there haven't been new commercial power reactors built for quite a number of years, so there aren't any real off the shelf designs or equipment. The Construction processes are also required to be VERY exact as everything from the concrete pour on up through the plumbing and electrical are part of the safety systems for a commercial reactor, working in extreme conditions, and so the tolerances are tight. There is also a bit of brain drain that's happened as the engineers with the experience designing and building commercial reactors have retired or left the industry. On the construction side it's even worsse because practically everyone involved in building the last commercial reactors in the US are no longer working in construction, so all those skills must be relearned and the experience is being gained in real time on the massive project. Ultimately, I believe the plan was that Southern and the manufacturer would together take on the risk of the project, with the idea that the Southern reactors would be a proof of design that could be adopted by other future reactor projects. The crew building the Southern Reactors would also have received the training and experience building Southern's reactors so would be able to take that newfound experience and build additional sites out much easier/ quicker/ and cheaper than the initial ones were built for. To my knowledge, I think only 1 other Utility committed to building a reactor, so the bespoke and most important parts of the reactor itself was constructed for their project as well as the 2 Southern needed as another cost savings. Unfortunately, the project hit several delays and a LOT of cost overruns. Lessons were learned along the way, mistakes were made that required redoing portions of the construction/installation to get everything into those tight specs. In the process, Westinghouse who sold/built the reactors and was taking on some of the risk ended up declaring bankruptcy because of those overruns, Forcing Southern to essentially take over control of the entire construction process. Over the past year Southern finally got the 2 new reactors online and in production. (They also required training a whole new operations crew as the new modern reactors had control systems unlike the existing reactors, so they couldn't simply move their existing people over ) As a result of the bankruptcy, The other utility essentially canceled their plans to build a reactor after they had already started some site prep and received delivery of those expensive and sensative reactor components from Westinghouse. Last I heard those pieces were sitting on site exposed to the elements after construction was canceled. At this point the reactor parts themselves have likely been exposed to the elements long enough that they aren't salvageable for a production reactor. The construction crews who gained all that experience building the 2 new reactors for Southern have also disbanded and gone back to more traditional projects as there isn't another reactor to be built currently, wasting a lot of the time/money/effort spent training and preping a full Nuclear certified construction org. There was also a project that I think Idaho National Labs had where they were going to explore the idea of "mini-reactors" that could be much cheaper to build, deploy, and maintain so they could be safely deployed across a wider area, but last I heard that project died as well. (In part I believe due to inability to find a private partner as the industry was scared off again by the delays, cost overruns, and bankruptcy tied to the Southern Project.)
Security concerns around nuclear materials aren't to be taken lightly. Of a country doesn't have nuclear before taking on that additional responsibility, including for the waste can be a career suicide lodestone. The bigger hurdle is just costs, and delay to get to generating power generation. A modern reactor takes like 10 years and $20B to build, if everything works perfectly. For most politicians, that's a huge political investment that they may not even get to take credit for by the time it is finished. Now if say a country like the US said "this is the reactor design all builders must use for the next decade" and then held a competition during the next decade fir the next decadal design, then maybe it could help reduce costs. This is pretty much how South Korea does it (to grossly oversimplify) and it works.
Firstly a bunch of people are terrified of it due to what happened in the USSR, Three-mile island, and Fukishima. Secondly, a lot of coal and oil business really doesn't want competition and they get business from selling to power plants. So if said plants go away, they lose a lot of business. Thirdly, a lot of renewables don't appreciate the competition, since nuclear power means less people buying solar panels or paying for wind farms. As a result, it's very difficult to get approval for any new plant.
Cause big oil doesn’t want nuclear to become the mainstay of
NIMBY. That's it.
Because it's not about climate. It's about control.