I've spent 45 years in the materials and optic based technologies working in high volume automotive parts and systems, aerospace, lithography, consumer electronics and others.
You have made the most important point in why the free market US nuclear reactor approach is a cost failure, and safety failure.
Standardized reactor design is the only way to go go have design replication, part and training replication. The 10th reactor is significantly lower cost and significantly safer than 10 unique designs built.
The US should compete a design process around France and the US Navy expertise. Then, that design would be bid in an FFP Firm Fixed Price, no excuse, no cost overun procurement process under FAR.
A Standardized nuclear reactor design would addrese the proven and legitimate safety fears of the public
To reduce costs, only light water reactors would be used, and designs would be standardized. Though such a plan was considered by many economists to be “too much too fast” and incredibly risky (since it put so many of France’s energy eggs in a single, still-uncertain basket),
Navy reactors are nowhere near commercially viable. France has had extensive technical and reliability issues particularly as the reactors aged and it has used an opaque accounting process which makes it unlikely it is commercially viable without significant subsidy. Since wind/solar are competitive, work, and are fast to go from proposal to power, it is not clear to me what nuclear brings to the table.
Most problems have been with reactors from shorter, more recent series rather than the old CPY. What opaque accounting ? Every single nuclear event is listed and documented publicly on ASN and IRSN websites.
Nuclear brings on demand power and grid stability, wind is whenever, solar is during the day. Coupled with batteries on a country’s grid scale we all know they are not even close cost wise to nuclear power (don’t look up the amount of concrete and copper per MW installed you might have a seizure). Also lifespan is shorter, interdependency in manufacturing very high.
I’m not saying we should not do renewables, but we need to recognize each energy’s strenghts, weaknesses and relevance for each and every country.
In the US, I would say that the moralists have seized control of our regulatory agencies like the NRC and EPA. What better way to shut down the technologists and drive up costs. All in the name of safety.
Their key weapon is Linear No Threshold, a theory with a sorry history and no basis in fact. See for example Dr. Edward Calabrese’s video https://youtube/-rKQ-OPmjE4 for the history of LNT or Jack Devanney’s Substack “Gordian Knot News” for sensible nuclear policy proposals.
The Linear No Threshold (LNT) theory implies that all exposure to ionizing radiation is harmful and cumulative, regardless of how low the dose. Think of LNT as "The Precautionary Principal" for radiation.
Therefore, LNT cannot give a safe level for sunlight exposure because of sunlight's UV radiation component.
If LNT were applied by the EPA and NRC outside of nuclear plants, many currently inhabited areas would have to be evacuated. Such areas have underlying geology and/or high elevation that cause "too much" background radiation.
Frequent flyers would need a milage limit or quota, since background radiation increases rapidly with elevation.
Actually, a precautionary principle for radiation would be to assume the maximum possible harm consistent with the evidence. Because the statistical difficulty of testing the LNT at low doses (the small number of cancers is overwhelmed in a sea of cancers from other causes), this would involve assuming harm *greater* than predicted by the LNT.
There's this false belief among LNT critics that the evidence is saying LNT overpredicts at low doses. This is not true unless one cherry picks studies (and cherry picks interim data in studies vs. final reports). The NRC rejected a petition to stop using the LNT for this reason: the petitioners were not being square in their arguments.
A major issue is entrenched interests. Coal had lobbyists and manipulated public opinion, at least in the USA. This part of the framework has only gotten larger over time.
Not clear it is correct to award the term "moralist" to those afraid of nuclear power. They never really followed through to the weapons - reactors for weapon materials in the USA were never in debate - and for the dangers of radioactive and particle emissions from coal were always a larger public risk, which was well known but ignored. So if it was morality, it was very selective and just disguising fear, or the effectiveness of propaganda.
If you really want an analytic framework these things need to be understood. They have not gone away.
Untrue. Environmentalists at the time were lobbying for stricter environmental regulation for acid rain and clean air and opposing construction of coal plants as well. Many were also canceled as industry demand projections were not met after the oil embargo. And your “dark money” assertion is nothing more than a conspiracy theory.
One reason it is popular is because you need a lot of energy to make carbon-neutral steel, as readers here will probably appreciate. see: https://www.hybritdevelopment.se/en/ -- or just google up HYBRIT -- they love talking about what they are doing to the press and other places.
I found this framework of technologist, moralists and cost-benefiters very illuminating generally and obviously applicable to Nuclear Power. I have spent a lot of time thinking about Nuclear and recently wrote a blog on it..
Thinking about my piece with regards to this framework... I probably view myself as a technologist in general but not in nuclear case because of the cost and moral concerns which make me perhaps a bit too cynical. Ultimately, I think I ended up making the case against new nuclear largely on a cost-benefiters basis. My take was that nuclear has serious complexity and diseconomies of scale issues Vs alternatives.. in short it's never proven itself cheap, quick or predictable enough to build.
Early critics of nuclear energy, such as the Union of Concerned Scientists and Amory Lovins have been proved correct about their warnings. In particular UCS critiqued the risk analysis of the nuclear regulators/industry as unrealistic. UCS pointed out that nuclear risk analysis was based on a number of shaky assumptions and didn't account for common mode failures - like the earthquake/tidal wave that caused identical failures at multiple reactors in Fukushima. Standard nuclear risk analysis would have considered the probability of such an event inconceivably remote because it assumed that the events were independent. UCS also criticized the sloppy practices of the industry - the Brown's Ferry near disaster was a good case in point. Lovins argued in the 1970s that the complexity, fragility, and capital intensity of nuclear made it a poor technology and predicted, correctly, that solar would scale up like other semiconductor technologies.
Early critics of nuclear energy, such as the Union of Concerned Scientists and Amory Lovins have also been proven wrong about ALARA and Linear-No-Threshold. These sloppy practices have caused egregious numbers of casualties in the most marginalized and unrepresented communities due to increased air pollution from coal plants. Generation 4 reactors have no need to bread plutonium as all countries that have reactors already have enough bombs. The Gen 4 reactors are all designed to be passively safe eliminating the Fukashima type issues. If that plant had been updated it would not have melted down. The carbon emissions associated with nuclear power assume a nuclear war which is hilarious on its face as fueling reactors with MOX actually reduces the number of weapons in existence. And finally France has proven that reprocessing of fuel makes money and creates medical isotopes that save lives. Long live the plutonium economy!
There are zero generation 4 nuclear reactors in production. It is characteristic of nuclear proponents to confuse "marketing plan" with engineering, but Generation 4 is vaporware.
In 2019, they cancelled their ASTRID sodium-cooled fast reactor and mothballed their fast reactor program. The French agency CEA stated "In the current energy market situation, the perspective of industrial development of fourth-generation reactors is not planned before the second half of this century."
Depending on design and demand, nuclear can be a good option for base load electricity. It depends on the resource for resource trade-offs you make. You can do the maths to see if it’s worth pursuing or not.
At its core, you’re basically taking hot rocks out of the ground, getting some useful work out of them by concentrating them, then putting them back in the ground when they’re not quite so useful. This process isn’t really any more damaging to the environment than other resource extraction methods. If you have the hot rocks, use them if the economics justify it, otherwise exchange them for other resources you can use more cost effectively.
There are many unsolved and possible not solvable engineering problems in nuclear. It is nowhere near as clear as nuclear advocates claim. For example:
Of the unsolved and unsolvable problems in the field Molten salt reactors are a very niche subject. There are 438 operating reactors in the world one concluded experiment does not a trend make.
Most discussions of nuclear power, including this one, avert their eyes from the overwhelming problems of the nuclear fuel cycle in toto. Mining and refining nuclear fuel is horribly dirty, leaving dangerously contaminated tailings and processing facilities in place for hundreds of thousands of years; they are usually located next to rivers or other water sources for some reason and endanger downstream water users in the watershed essentially for all time.
And of course spent nuclear fuel (99% of the nuclear fuel load remains behind as waste) has to go somewhere, and the industry continues to kick this extremely dangerous can down the road even after 70 years of nuclear powerplant development. Meanwhile, high level radioactive waste sits in "temporary" pools and casks on the powerplant sites, often dangerously close to major cities, waiting for someone to think of a solution for this ridiculously unsolvable problem.
The result of all this to date is an increasing number of nuclear sacrifice zones marking boondoggles of failed cleanup efforts, wasting hundreds of billions of dollars in the process. We can be thankful that the nuclear power industry was largely halted before many of these plants were built, which would have left us with an intractable worldwide problem instead of the present intractable local one.
5 grams per resident is nothing. Do you know what a gram is? France has one of the cleanest grids in the world and has been recycling nuclear waste for decades without incident. As a result, they now have one of the cleanest energy grids in the world, they are the gold standard in European energy policy. (And that's before we talk about nuclear having the second lowest deaths per kilowatts hours generated.)
Hell, the U.S creates more waste annually with coal alone at around 130 million tons (Believe that's 130,000,000,000 Kilograms), an energy source with the highest death per kilowatt hours generated. So yeah, give me that nuclear power, all day everyday
Population of France is 67 million so 5gx67M = about 370 tons a year if I did the arithmetic right. This waste cannot be piled up and buried like coal waste (which is also bad), but must be vitrified and put into metal casks that have to be kept cool for 500 years and then guarded against ground water for periods exceeding human civilization
"The goal is to limit radionuclide release also after rupture of the disposal container and the stainless steel canister caused by corrosion and geomechanical forces after many thousands to hundreds of thousands of years and subsequent groundwater access to the glass matrix."
Then there is the intermediate waste. So it's important to understand that recycling nuclear power waste produces really dangerous, long term waste that nobody really know what to do with.
That PR poster on French nuclear was says "only 200 cubic meters a year" - but neglects to point out that if you made a 200 cubic meter pile of that stuff, it would immediately catch fire and create a massive environmental disaster.
Great find with this book and excellent summary. The division between enthusiasts, cost-benefiters, and moralists is really interesting. Feels like if you turn the political axes on its head by stating you are a 'pragmatist' of some ilk then the new categorization becomes which of these groups you fall into.
I've spent 45 years in the materials and optic based technologies working in high volume automotive parts and systems, aerospace, lithography, consumer electronics and others.
You have made the most important point in why the free market US nuclear reactor approach is a cost failure, and safety failure.
Standardized reactor design is the only way to go go have design replication, part and training replication. The 10th reactor is significantly lower cost and significantly safer than 10 unique designs built.
The US should compete a design process around France and the US Navy expertise. Then, that design would be bid in an FFP Firm Fixed Price, no excuse, no cost overun procurement process under FAR.
A Standardized nuclear reactor design would addrese the proven and legitimate safety fears of the public
To reduce costs, only light water reactors would be used, and designs would be standardized. Though such a plan was considered by many economists to be “too much too fast” and incredibly risky (since it put so many of France’s energy eggs in a single, still-uncertain basket),
Navy reactors are nowhere near commercially viable. France has had extensive technical and reliability issues particularly as the reactors aged and it has used an opaque accounting process which makes it unlikely it is commercially viable without significant subsidy. Since wind/solar are competitive, work, and are fast to go from proposal to power, it is not clear to me what nuclear brings to the table.
Most problems have been with reactors from shorter, more recent series rather than the old CPY. What opaque accounting ? Every single nuclear event is listed and documented publicly on ASN and IRSN websites.
Nuclear brings on demand power and grid stability, wind is whenever, solar is during the day. Coupled with batteries on a country’s grid scale we all know they are not even close cost wise to nuclear power (don’t look up the amount of concrete and copper per MW installed you might have a seizure). Also lifespan is shorter, interdependency in manufacturing very high.
I’m not saying we should not do renewables, but we need to recognize each energy’s strenghts, weaknesses and relevance for each and every country.
Not the first debacle requiring a bailout
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/02/17/france-s-edf-posts-record-annual-loss-debt-swells_6016197_7.html#
In the US, I would say that the moralists have seized control of our regulatory agencies like the NRC and EPA. What better way to shut down the technologists and drive up costs. All in the name of safety.
Their key weapon is Linear No Threshold, a theory with a sorry history and no basis in fact. See for example Dr. Edward Calabrese’s video https://youtube/-rKQ-OPmjE4 for the history of LNT or Jack Devanney’s Substack “Gordian Knot News” for sensible nuclear policy proposals.
Excellent point.
The Linear No Threshold (LNT) theory implies that all exposure to ionizing radiation is harmful and cumulative, regardless of how low the dose. Think of LNT as "The Precautionary Principal" for radiation.
Therefore, LNT cannot give a safe level for sunlight exposure because of sunlight's UV radiation component.
If LNT were applied by the EPA and NRC outside of nuclear plants, many currently inhabited areas would have to be evacuated. Such areas have underlying geology and/or high elevation that cause "too much" background radiation.
Frequent flyers would need a milage limit or quota, since background radiation increases rapidly with elevation.
Actually, a precautionary principle for radiation would be to assume the maximum possible harm consistent with the evidence. Because the statistical difficulty of testing the LNT at low doses (the small number of cancers is overwhelmed in a sea of cancers from other causes), this would involve assuming harm *greater* than predicted by the LNT.
There's this false belief among LNT critics that the evidence is saying LNT overpredicts at low doses. This is not true unless one cherry picks studies (and cherry picks interim data in studies vs. final reports). The NRC rejected a petition to stop using the LNT for this reason: the petitioners were not being square in their arguments.
A major issue is entrenched interests. Coal had lobbyists and manipulated public opinion, at least in the USA. This part of the framework has only gotten larger over time.
Not clear it is correct to award the term "moralist" to those afraid of nuclear power. They never really followed through to the weapons - reactors for weapon materials in the USA were never in debate - and for the dangers of radioactive and particle emissions from coal were always a larger public risk, which was well known but ignored. So if it was morality, it was very selective and just disguising fear, or the effectiveness of propaganda.
If you really want an analytic framework these things need to be understood. They have not gone away.
Excellent point about coal power in the USA. Coal use soared after 1980 in the USA as nuclear declined.
And the hazards of coal were completely ignored by the enviro dopes of the day. I'm sure some anti-nuke lobbying was funded by coal "dark money".
Untrue. Environmentalists at the time were lobbying for stricter environmental regulation for acid rain and clean air and opposing construction of coal plants as well. Many were also canceled as industry demand projections were not met after the oil embargo. And your “dark money” assertion is nothing more than a conspiracy theory.
By the way: in Sweden we are building nuclear power plants again. https://www.riksdagen.se/en/news/articles/2023/nov/29/new-nuclear-power-in-sweden_cmsd4e5861e-7182-42a4-b44e-e5ceabada3f8en/
Nuclear power is popular here, and growing more popular every year. https://www.analys.se/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/20220410-analysgruppen-opinion-press-release.pdf
One reason it is popular is because you need a lot of energy to make carbon-neutral steel, as readers here will probably appreciate. see: https://www.hybritdevelopment.se/en/ -- or just google up HYBRIT -- they love talking about what they are doing to the press and other places.
I found this framework of technologist, moralists and cost-benefiters very illuminating generally and obviously applicable to Nuclear Power. I have spent a lot of time thinking about Nuclear and recently wrote a blog on it..
https://open.substack.com/pub/craigbonthron/p/a-nuclear-waste-of-time-and-money?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=t9w83
Thinking about my piece with regards to this framework... I probably view myself as a technologist in general but not in nuclear case because of the cost and moral concerns which make me perhaps a bit too cynical. Ultimately, I think I ended up making the case against new nuclear largely on a cost-benefiters basis. My take was that nuclear has serious complexity and diseconomies of scale issues Vs alternatives.. in short it's never proven itself cheap, quick or predictable enough to build.
Early critics of nuclear energy, such as the Union of Concerned Scientists and Amory Lovins have been proved correct about their warnings. In particular UCS critiqued the risk analysis of the nuclear regulators/industry as unrealistic. UCS pointed out that nuclear risk analysis was based on a number of shaky assumptions and didn't account for common mode failures - like the earthquake/tidal wave that caused identical failures at multiple reactors in Fukushima. Standard nuclear risk analysis would have considered the probability of such an event inconceivably remote because it assumed that the events were independent. UCS also criticized the sloppy practices of the industry - the Brown's Ferry near disaster was a good case in point. Lovins argued in the 1970s that the complexity, fragility, and capital intensity of nuclear made it a poor technology and predicted, correctly, that solar would scale up like other semiconductor technologies.
Early critics of nuclear energy, such as the Union of Concerned Scientists and Amory Lovins have also been proven wrong about ALARA and Linear-No-Threshold. These sloppy practices have caused egregious numbers of casualties in the most marginalized and unrepresented communities due to increased air pollution from coal plants. Generation 4 reactors have no need to bread plutonium as all countries that have reactors already have enough bombs. The Gen 4 reactors are all designed to be passively safe eliminating the Fukashima type issues. If that plant had been updated it would not have melted down. The carbon emissions associated with nuclear power assume a nuclear war which is hilarious on its face as fueling reactors with MOX actually reduces the number of weapons in existence. And finally France has proven that reprocessing of fuel makes money and creates medical isotopes that save lives. Long live the plutonium economy!
There are zero generation 4 nuclear reactors in production. It is characteristic of nuclear proponents to confuse "marketing plan" with engineering, but Generation 4 is vaporware.
Of note is what the French have said.
In 2019, they cancelled their ASTRID sodium-cooled fast reactor and mothballed their fast reactor program. The French agency CEA stated "In the current energy market situation, the perspective of industrial development of fourth-generation reactors is not planned before the second half of this century."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-nuclearpower-astrid/france-drops-plans-to-build-sodium-cooled-nuclear-reactor-idUSKCN1VK0MC/
Depending on design and demand, nuclear can be a good option for base load electricity. It depends on the resource for resource trade-offs you make. You can do the maths to see if it’s worth pursuing or not.
At its core, you’re basically taking hot rocks out of the ground, getting some useful work out of them by concentrating them, then putting them back in the ground when they’re not quite so useful. This process isn’t really any more damaging to the environment than other resource extraction methods. If you have the hot rocks, use them if the economics justify it, otherwise exchange them for other resources you can use more cost effectively.
There are many unsolved and possible not solvable engineering problems in nuclear. It is nowhere near as clear as nuclear advocates claim. For example:
https://thebulletin.org/2022/06/molten-salt-reactors-were-trouble-in-the-1960s-and-they-remain-trouble-today/
Of the unsolved and unsolvable problems in the field Molten salt reactors are a very niche subject. There are 438 operating reactors in the world one concluded experiment does not a trend make.
It’s all part of the tradeoffs.
Most discussions of nuclear power, including this one, avert their eyes from the overwhelming problems of the nuclear fuel cycle in toto. Mining and refining nuclear fuel is horribly dirty, leaving dangerously contaminated tailings and processing facilities in place for hundreds of thousands of years; they are usually located next to rivers or other water sources for some reason and endanger downstream water users in the watershed essentially for all time.
And of course spent nuclear fuel (99% of the nuclear fuel load remains behind as waste) has to go somewhere, and the industry continues to kick this extremely dangerous can down the road even after 70 years of nuclear powerplant development. Meanwhile, high level radioactive waste sits in "temporary" pools and casks on the powerplant sites, often dangerously close to major cities, waiting for someone to think of a solution for this ridiculously unsolvable problem.
The result of all this to date is an increasing number of nuclear sacrifice zones marking boondoggles of failed cleanup efforts, wasting hundreds of billions of dollars in the process. We can be thankful that the nuclear power industry was largely halted before many of these plants were built, which would have left us with an intractable worldwide problem instead of the present intractable local one.
nuclear waste recycling is a thing my guy
So is faster than light space travel.
France has been doing this for decades
" Reprocessing" still leaves a significant stream of high danger waste and larger "intermediate". Here's the most optimistic possible marketing material. https://www.orano.group/en/unpacking-nuclear/all-about-radioactive-waste-in-france
And the 5 grams/inhabitant-of-france number they give for high level waste that has to be vitrified and stored forever comes to 300,000 Kg/year
5 grams per resident is nothing. Do you know what a gram is? France has one of the cleanest grids in the world and has been recycling nuclear waste for decades without incident. As a result, they now have one of the cleanest energy grids in the world, they are the gold standard in European energy policy. (And that's before we talk about nuclear having the second lowest deaths per kilowatts hours generated.)
Hell, the U.S creates more waste annually with coal alone at around 130 million tons (Believe that's 130,000,000,000 Kilograms), an energy source with the highest death per kilowatt hours generated. So yeah, give me that nuclear power, all day everyday
Population of France is 67 million so 5gx67M = about 370 tons a year if I did the arithmetic right. This waste cannot be piled up and buried like coal waste (which is also bad), but must be vitrified and put into metal casks that have to be kept cool for 500 years and then guarded against ground water for periods exceeding human civilization
"The goal is to limit radionuclide release also after rupture of the disposal container and the stainless steel canister caused by corrosion and geomechanical forces after many thousands to hundreds of thousands of years and subsequent groundwater access to the glass matrix."
https://www.ejp-eurad.eu/sites/default/files/2023-10/EURAD%20Domain%20Insight_3.1.2%20-%20Vitrified%20HLW_0.pdf
Then there is the intermediate waste. So it's important to understand that recycling nuclear power waste produces really dangerous, long term waste that nobody really know what to do with.
That PR poster on French nuclear was says "only 200 cubic meters a year" - but neglects to point out that if you made a 200 cubic meter pile of that stuff, it would immediately catch fire and create a massive environmental disaster.
Great find with this book and excellent summary. The division between enthusiasts, cost-benefiters, and moralists is really interesting. Feels like if you turn the political axes on its head by stating you are a 'pragmatist' of some ilk then the new categorization becomes which of these groups you fall into.
Thank you!
Excellent summary, thanks!
Excellent review of a fine book, one of the most useful ones about the 50s through to the 80s.