This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I work in energy project finance. The answer to that question is that small footprint nuclear reactors are not proven. There are zero pilot plants let alone commercial plants. It’s entirely unproven to be economically viable and a quick google shows the target price for a planned pilot plant is $90/MWh. Price as is the price they would need to get for electrons to I assume be profitable. Nearly double the wholesale rate in most of the country.
Standard nuclear I suppose is proven insofar as we actually have functioning nuclear plants right now. The problem is that we can not build them in the USA. Out of the last 4 units we tried, two of them ran up construction costs approaching $30 billion before they threw in the towel and got canceled. The other two at least got built, but again, with a cost of some $30 billion. It’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-5x as expensive as wind or solar.
We can’t talk about nuclear without acknowledging that the USA, as a country, can’t build nuclear anymore. Anyone who who even tries goes bankrupt. I don’t mean there is a lack of political will, though there is that. I mean we don’t have the manufacturers, contractors, designers, or financial sponsors that know how to do it. It’s really sad.
Sabine Hossenfelder had a good video about economics of nuclear power here. She specifically investigates two claims: that it is slow and that it is expensive. Her counterarguments are as follows:
The overall building time varies from project to project and country to country. In Japan the median construction time is 4 years and 3 months with record being Kashiwazaki-Kariwa unit 6 built only in 39 months and finished in 1996. There is nothing intrinsic in nuclear power for it to be built slowly as is proven by very recent history.
As for price, using levelized cost of energy the nuclear supposedly pricier but only by factor of 2 or 3 compared to the cheapest gas power plants. The biggest disadvantage of nuclear is huge capital cost upfront with related cost of financing the capital. Here the construction time is very important as pouring billions of dollars that sit idle for years or decades ramps up the costs significantly, it may be around 30% of the cost for a project that takes 7 years to finish.
Nevertheless I looked into cost for electricity of two latest finished nuclear power plants. The Olkiluoto-3 power plant that provides Finland with 12TWh or around 15% of electricity a year caused significant drop of electricity cost in Finland to the level of around EUR 60 per MWh. The latest Mochovce 3 reactor also started in 2023 in Slovakia , which together with two older nuclear reactors provides 55% of electricity in the country will help local energy company to fulfill the promise of keeping the electricity price at the level of EUR 61 per MWh.
The biggest advantage of Nuclear is that you can build it where you need it and connect it to the old infrastructure providing good base load of energy. No new grids needed. You have to shell out onetime payment for construction and then you are fixed for decades to come. Which may also be a good thing as was shown during the peak of gas crisis where energy prices exceeded EUR 200 per MWh due to sky-high costs of gas. Additionally it is hard to undersell the benefit of energy independence from volatile countries such as Russia or Middleast even for backup gas plants. And another addition, to me the high upfront capital costs are actually a good feature in a sense - you can build the power plant and then have very low operating costs. But more importantly the revenue from the electricity goes into homegrown industry be it construction companies and other high-tech industry while operational costs also support high-skilled operators of this huge projects at home as opposed to buying solar panels from China or even worse sending money to Russia or terrible petroregimes in Arab world or Africa.
I appreciate the reply and I don’t even dispute this (other than the statement that nuclear is good for keeping dollars onshore. Imported modules make up roughly 20-30% of total cost for a utility scale solar facility in 2024. The rest is onshore. Maybe some imported steel will get you closer to 50%. But it’s not overwhelming).
The rest of your post speaks to a theoretical world for Americans or a global nuclear industry. Citing Japan and Korea is unfortunate not relevant for the USA.
We tried 4 times in the last 20 years. Only two units were built and at great cost. Utilities and investors know the reality of the current market. We can talk about all of this theoretically. But until there is some major changes in policy and pricing, you will not see any new nuclear in the USA regardless of how good it looks on paper.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Unexpected pivot for a former pothead.
Didn't we just build Vogle in Georgia though?
More options
Context Copy link
If I recall, the MIT study on the matter even straight up said that it's not the cost of the nuclear portion that drives up the price, it's the general construction and horrible project management of the rest of the site.
Sure, but that’s kind of my point. Building solar panels and wind turbines is simple. Building nukes in hard. Part of this is the supply chain. There’s a well established wind and solar supply chain which keeps costs down.
Our nuclear contractors are horrible, they don’t have the experience or the volume to learn. And the manufacturing is nothing to sneeze at either. There are only so many companies in the world that can build vessels large enough for nuclear.
The contractor and site management costs are certainly relevant when deciding if a technology is viable. And I don’t see any near term or medium term way to fix this.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The US can make a 210 MW reactor, cram it in a submarine (with oodles of advanced stealth/sonar/missile technology) for about $2 billion. They can produce one such submarine every year. Or in the Nimitz class, they install two 550 MW reactors in a floating city/airbase/fortress for a grand total of $5 billion. The reactors surely can't be that much of the overall cost, 20% at most. The missiles and gadgetry are far more complicated, the guidance and computers are the expensive parts.
Small footprint nuclear reactors are proven technology, they've been made for decades. The US chooses not to administrate civilian nuclear energy competently, there's no technical problem. This is 1960s technology, at most. There's nothing all that sophisticated about nuclear energy, even breeder reactors.
Computers aren't at all expensive anymore in the grand scheme of things.
In the 1960s they custom-built a computer to send people to the moon. In the 1980s you could buy a more powerful computer for kids to play games on for a few hundred dollars. By now you can buy a much more powerful computer on a tiny chip for 30-40 cents.
Those are civilian general-purpose computers, military tech has to use hardened tech against EMPs, they need special secret software and configurations, electronic countermeasures and counter-countermeasures. Can't exactly go to Taiwan, the chips are supposed to be made in the USA for supply chain security... It's super complicated.
t. Lockheed Martin shareholder
More options
Context Copy link
You obviously haven't seen how effective Lockheed is at blowing up the cost of things.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Is it possible to bring in guest workers to build them from other countries that have more of an active nuke building program? Thinking of France and Korea especially. Specialization of labor!
I'd hate to see the French nuclear talent go, given how heavily we invested and how the uncertainty around the future of the branch is already killing it despite it being one of the few things saved us (and by extension Europe) from economic collapse when the oil and gas prices spiked.
It may actually work if the US tried it. There is a constant uncertainty looming over the fate of the French nuclear sector. Caused both by the flipflopping of our own politicians and the deep hatred of any energetic policy that involves France or nuclear at the EU level.
What kills me is that we spent untold amounts designing breeder reactors and other tech that makes the whole thing safe, effective and relatively waste free...and then closed Superphénix and sold the tech to the Chinese. Now the Chinese have the CEFR and we have nothing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link