Small nuclear reactors are no fix for California's energy needs(www.latimes.com)

8 pointsby PaulHoule19 hours ago1 comment

ycombinatrix19 hours ago
Why is nuclear energy "getting more expensive" over the years again? I don't understand this reasoning.
- ZeroGravitas18 hours ago
  Because there is absolutely no incentive for anyone involved to make them cheaper.
  This also explains why the industries response to people complaining about costs is to propose a new tech that costs even more.
  If you make solar panels and they don't continually get cheaper and better then someone will buy them from the factory down the road that is getting better and cheaper.
  With nuclear you're basically throwing yourself on the mercy of large government contract construction corporations.
  Might as well give a scorpion a lift across the river. They can't change their nature even if it kills their contracts too.
- EA-316718 hours ago
  It's always by comparison to heavily subsidized sources of power, especially gas/oil/coal where environmental externalities aren't costed in... or by comparison to solar (which is great, but can't hack it alone). As though it's shocking that an industry kept paralyzed by over-regulation and decades of uneducated public hysteria might not be competitive with some of the most subsidized and widespread industries in the world.
  It's all part of a piece though, because people are both scared of radiation, and almost always totally ignorant of how it works, where it comes form, and what non-nuclear sources we encounter daily. At some point you just give up, and accept that it's easier to talk to brick walls than nuclear-deniers.
  - ViewTrick10027 hours ago
    Storage is exploding allowing renewables to easily hit somewhere in the high 90%s of the electricity mix.
    https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/23/chinas-new-energy-storag...
    https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586
    Maybe we should phase out the subsidized public insurance for nuclear power and have them bear the true cost of their risks by purchasing insurance on the private markets?
  - PaulHoule15 hours ago
    The problem with proven LWR reactors like
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000
    is two fold: (i) the economics are not great to begin with the steam turbine, water-to-water heat exchangers and such and (ii) difficulties constructing technology that is first-of-a-kind as opposed to n-th-of-a-kind so that they quote you $7 billion and it gets bungled to $24 billion, maybe $12 billion is the honest price if you take out all the bungling -- in a country like Russia or China you can tell people their electric bill is going up and they won't vote you out.
    The base economics of the small LWR vs the large LWR are worse, but the hope is that smaller construction units could get the bungling out but so far no one has managed to do so.
    Longer term there is the generation 4 type reactor which would operate at higher temperature and have much smaller heat exchangers and powerset but add other kinds of complexity which could improve the base cost to make nuclear attractive. With 20 years of research or so...