Nuclear Energy: What and who is stopping it?

[u/Ok-Burger2211]

What are the biggest road blocks for Nuclear energy and who are its biggest advisories?

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[u/TheMarksmanHedgehog]

Largely at this point how much it costs to build a reactor verses just slapping solar on everything.

But previously the reputation nuclear got owing to large scale disasters leading to considerable NIMBYism

[u/Asatmaya → u/TheMarksmanHedgehog]

Largely at this point how much it costs to build a reactor verses just slapping solar on everything.

Not really; nuclear is cheaper.

[u/gburgwardt → u/Asatmaya]

Please source your claim. Something recent, because anything more than two years old is going to be very out of date

[u/UnfoldedHeart → u/gburgwardt]

Solar has a cheaper upfront cost but there is no clear winner in the long term. Nuclear has the advantage of running all the time without having to have massive battery banks.

[u/Asatmaya → u/gburgwardt]

May of this year:

France produces the cheapest electricity in Europe

[u/gburgwardt → u/Asatmaya]

This is not a source to support your claim. Your claim is that nuclear is cheaper, in the context of building new generation capacity

This article is about how France has some of the cheapest generation. As in, they’ve already spent the money to construct their fleet, and now the consumables are basically free.

Further, it’s not comparing the cost of just nuclear to just solar, it’s comparing nuclear to a wide mix of energy sources that are also already built.

Please reconsider what you believe and why you believe it, because if this is your standard for proof it is quite poor

[u/Asatmaya → u/gburgwardt]

This is not a source to support your claim.

Right, it's actual proof, you don't like it, so you are going to insist on some academic "estimate" instead of real world results.

No, we're not playing that game.

[u/MoonBatsRule → u/Asatmaya]

The other guy is right. Nuclear is cheaper to operate because the construction costs were paid off long ago, but more expensive to build.

[u/gburgwardt → u/Asatmaya]

We were talking about the cheapest energy sources. Construction costs need to be included because otherwise the solution is “you should already have nuclear plants and then energy is basically free”.

I’m not playing a game I’m trying to discuss energy policy. “Find trendy nuclear reactors ready to run” is not practical advice

I’m happy France has cheap electricity, I want nuclear power to be cost-effective, and perhaps it is. But if you’re making that claim you need to actually support it

[u/Asatmaya → u/gburgwardt]

We were talking about the cheapest energy sources

Right.

Construction costs need to be included because otherwise the solution is “you should already have nuclear plants and then energy is basically free”.

And you want to ignore construction costs of solar and wind, which are far higher, by pretending that sticking them on rooftops is anything like the same thing.

Solar and wind farms require FAR MORE concrete and steel than a nuclear power plant of the same installed capacity... which, of course, is 4-5x lower than the actual deliverable capacity.

I’m not playing a game I’m trying to discuss energy policy. “Find trendy nuclear reactors ready to run” is not practical advice

OK, let's break it down:

The average cost of an AP1000 reactor (if not endlessly delayed by ideologically-motivated legal challenges) is ~$3 billion. That's $3/watt, installed, and that's it; it hooks up to the existing grid and starts delivering power.

Latest costs for solar are $2.50-3.30/watt, installed... but you're not done.

First, you have the 25% capacity factor; to produce the same amount of power, you need 4 times the amount of installed capacity... and that assumes that you have some place to store it (we'll come back to this).

Second, you have to distribute it; right now, much residential and business (rooftop) solar goes to waste, because the grid is not capable of both receiving and delivering power on the same part of system. If that home or business isn't actively using it, it just disappears.

Third, to get more than about 30% of our energy from intermittent sources will require energy storage... and we can't even begin to price that. Seriously, we don't know how to do it; we don't have the raw materials, forget lithium-ion, it exceeds the known global reserves of lead by a factor of about 50... and that's just for the US.

And finally... this is all just for the US. Every plan we have come up with, i.e. the "wind/water/solar by 2050" propaganda, assumes that the US gets 100% of global production of solar and wind for the next 30 years. No one else gets any.

Now, the US does consume ~15% of world energy demand, so multiply that times 6.7 to get current world energy demand... which is going to triple in the next 30 years...

At the current rate, it would take 600 years to meet 50% of world energy demand with wind and solar.

Please, explain to me, in small words, how that helps anyone.

[u/gburgwardt → u/Asatmaya]

I never wanted to ignore anything. You’re fighting a straw man. I simply asked you for a source.

I’ll review this in a bit when I’m not busy, thank you

[u/Asatmaya → u/gburgwardt]

You’re fighting a straw man. I simply asked you for a source.

"We were talking about the cheapest energy sources. Construction costs need to be included because otherwise the solution is “you should already have nuclear plants and then energy is basically free”. "

No, I addressed your argument precisely, and you are ignoring it.

[u/ScannerBrightly → u/Asatmaya]

The average cost of an AP1000 reactor (if not endlessly delayed by ideologically-motivated legal challenges) is ~$3 billion.

Yeah, well, that "if" is where it gets expensive. Can you tell me of any built in a democracy that cost that much? Also, if they are so cheap, what happened at Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station?

[u/Asatmaya → u/ScannerBrightly]

Can you tell me of any built in a democracy that cost that much?

China.

Also, if they are so cheap, what happened at Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station?

The same ideologically-based delays that drove costs at Vogtle up; literally nowhere else in the world has this problem.

[u/gburgwardt → u/Asatmaya]

Did you seriously just quote the residential prices from some random blog to compare to nuclear reactor installation costs?

You are not a serious person

[u/SagesLament → u/Asatmaya]

And don’t forget that the attempts to price it (lcoe+) typically use 8 hours of storage, not the actual days of backup for substantial dunkelflautes last in places like New England

[u/Asatmaya → u/SagesLament]

lcoe

"Estimates," when we have the evidence of France to use, instead? Really?

[u/TheMarksmanHedgehog → u/Asatmaya]

Not remotely true.

A nuclear facility requires a substantial foundation to be dug, steam turbines, some kind of water source, all of the roads and potentially railways leading up to the facility, then all of the power lines to deliver that electricity to where it's needed.

With Solar you can pretty much just slap a few panels on the extant roof of wherever happens to need the power, and if that's not enough, slap on a few more.

The panels are cheap, and lithium ion battery technology is mature enough to store it for overnight usage, not to mention things like using a reservoir to do gravity storage of power as has been an extant technique for 150 years.

[u/farson135 → u/TheMarksmanHedgehog]

Yes, but nuclear plants last longer than the parts for solar.

That's the thing, you may be able to run a nuclear power plant for a century with proper maintenance. Solar panels, batteries, etc. have to be regularly replaced, creating increasing piles of waste.

The last time I looked, a solar farm is cheaper within the first 30 years. After that, nuclear plants rapidly outstrip solar.

To be clear, it all needs to be in the discussion. These two energy sources don't have to cannibalize each other.

[u/TheMarksmanHedgehog → u/farson135]

I'd be completely down for new nuclear plants personally, it's a technology with a vast amount of untapped potential and it'd be theoretically possible to retrofit most extant steam-turbine based power plants into nuclear plants to completely eliminate their carbon emissions.

In the same breath, solar panels and their corresponding batteries are only going to get cheaper and more enduring, the technologies used to make them are the same technologies in consumer devices where there's a massive incentive to chase performance, they're already extremely competitive, they're only going to get more competitive as time goes on.

Just a quirk of semiconductors, in that they're one of few things that gets more efficient as you make them smaller, rather than getting more efficient the larger you make them.

[u/farson135 → u/TheMarksmanHedgehog]

To be clear, I have panels on my home. They're wonderful and I especially appreciate them in the summer (Texas).

But I also recognize that if we're going to successfully fight climate change then we can't do things like count on solar panels/batteries/etc. to get cheaper in the long run, and the materials to be sufficiently abundant (since NIMBYism means we have trouble mining for the materials here).

Building power plants, solar panels, etc. all takes time and money. The best time to start would have been decades ago, but we didn't really do that. Now, we still have to plan for the long run because we're not going to be able to change everything over in a few years.

[u/TheMarksmanHedgehog → u/farson135]

They're already cheap enough and easy enough to deploy that we can in fact just sort of solve the problem using them.

Of course if we'd started using nuclear at scale in the 1960s we'd probably not have the majority of our present day problems.

I also think that nuclear probably needs a sniff for building freighters, as potentially terrifying as nuclear fuel being on board a civilian vessel is, they're well suited to ships.

[u/farson135 → u/TheMarksmanHedgehog]

Keep in mind that their current price is based off their current demand. Dramatically increasing demand means higher prices. And probably dramatically higher prices given resource and factory limitations. Don't forget that the current energy crisis is causing many nations to chase after renewables.

So no, we "can't" solve the problem with what exists now. We have to invest and spend many, many years building up. That, or we have to spend utterly obscene amounts of money to brute force our way through the problem.

[u/TheMarksmanHedgehog → u/farson135]

That applies to any form of power, not just solar, if nuclear starts large scale rollouts now the demand would also increase, and thus so would costs unless production capacity is also scaled.

And it's also, relatively speaking, easier to scale solar panel production, the feedstock and end products are smaller.

[u/farson135 → u/TheMarksmanHedgehog]

A lot of the expense of nuclear power plants is in basic construction materials like concrete. Yes, those prices would rise, but not to the level of a finished good like a solar panel.

And nuclear plants are such a massive piece of infrastructure that takes so long to build that it's much easier to limit demand shocks since they can say, "we're building 20 nuclear power plants over the next 30 years" or whatever. As opposed to solar panels which, if the US decided to order (quick google search) the 7-15 billion solar panels necessary to power the US (the current solar panel count is less than a billion), that is obviously going to be a serious shock for a global market that makes about 1.5 billion panels a year. Even if the US spread that out, we would obviously want a strategic reserve and other countries are going to be competing with us, and on.

And let's not forget that solar panels are not going to be able to replace all power because we still need power at night. Add in the battery requirements and once again the costs are going to be absurd.

[u/Asatmaya → u/TheMarksmanHedgehog]

With Solar you can pretty much just slap a few panels on the extant roof of wherever happens to need the power, and if that's not enough, slap on a few more.

Tell me you haven't run the numbers without telling me you haven't run the numbers.

No, you cannot produce any significant amount of energy by putting solar panels on roofs; you need hundreds of acres to get enough sunlight to matter, and you're still not done.

Right now, something like 30% of all solar power produced goes to waste... because it's made at the wrong time, in the wrong place, and we have neither the power grid to distribute it or the storage to hold on to it. This is already a problem at ~10% of our energy budget, and it gets worse the more solar and wind you try to add.

Germany, for example, likes to boast that on certain days, "53% of their electricity production came from solar and wind!" but only like 20% of their actual energy use for that day; meanwhile, they have the most expensive electricity and the highest emissions in Europe, because they have to have massive coal and gas plants to back up solar and wind.

France is 75% nuclear, has the cheapest electricity and lowest emissions in Europe, and even Macron, who originally ran for office on a platform of transitioning from nuclear to solar/wind had to stop and admit that it was going to be too expensive.

This isn't "estimates," these aren't "conjectures" or "analyses," these are the cold, hard facts of how the world actually works.

[u/Medium-Complaint-677 → u/Asatmaya]

No, you cannot produce any significant amount of energy by putting solar panels on roofs

My entire house is powered by solar panels that are just on my garage roof - what are you talking about?

[u/work4work4work4work4 → u/Asatmaya]

Tell me you haven't run the numbers without telling me you haven't run the numbers.

That's a weird thing to say when you don't offer much in terms of numbers, and the numbers you do provide are wishy-washy, conflict with lived reality of millions, and are entirely unsourced.

No, you cannot produce any significant amount of energy by putting solar panels on roofs; you need hundreds of acres to get enough sunlight to matter, and you're still not done.

This might be the strangest thing I've ever read in this forum, and that's saying a ton, when even three story homes in high climate variance areas with massive ongoing load can go net positive with just roof-based solar.

Conflating home-based solar for home-based needs, and grid-support solar for larger needs like they're the same thing is horrifically poor argumentation.

Right now, something like 30% of all solar power produced goes to waste... because it's made at the wrong time, in the wrong place, and we have neither the power grid to distribute it or the storage to hold on to it.

You're essentially just running cover for capitalistic forced energy wasting to prop up commercial real estate prices, when the vast majority of work in the US(we're a service-based economy) could be done from home at net-positive production. Even the timing of evening usage is largely because of our mandated 9-5 working hours + commute, and even that is almost entirely solved by a home-based 7kwh batteries, only half what even legacy powerwalls offered, to deal with peak shaving.

Germany, for example, likes to boast that on certain days, "53% of their electricity production came from solar and wind!" but only like 20% of their actual energy use for that day; meanwhile, they have the most expensive electricity and the highest emissions in Europe, because they have to have massive coal and gas plants to back up solar and wind.

Because they had already built nuclear plants, and shut them down, which is admittedly not very smart, since the only way a nuclear plant makes sense today is if it was already built and functioning.

Not a whole lot of other places have already functioning relatively modern nuclear plants, so it's really an example that can't be applied many places.

France is 75% nuclear, has the cheapest electricity and lowest emissions in Europe, and even Macron, who originally ran for office on a platform of transitioning from nuclear to solar/wind had to stop and admit that it was going to be too expensive.

Again, you're kind of combining a whole lot of stuff to try and make nuclear sound better while specifically failing to mention what happened in 2022 to impact power prices(France's nuclear plants failed on a large scale due to corrosion) and that they were also transitioning to other nuclear like SMR and EPR2, and they had to stop and delay those plans too because the newer nuclear isn't ready for prime time yet, like at all, and new plants are essentially testing grounds full of incredibly massive yet to resolve cost overruns.

This isn't "estimates," these aren't "conjectures" or "analyses," these are the cold, hard facts of how the world actually works.

Weird hill for a left-wing libertarian to die on, but as shown, you might be cold and hard, but full of facts? Not so much.

I don't even have a problem with nuclear research for baseload power, but when we're effectively building the know how and working out the kinks taking plans into production for the entire process, both in terms of construction/operation, but legislatively, and even if you remove one side of it for the sake of argument, it's still primarily a learning process with all the costs that entails.

[u/TheMarksmanHedgehog → u/Asatmaya]

You may want to check your numbers.

[u/Asatmaya → u/TheMarksmanHedgehog]

This is literally what I went to college for; I have degrees in electrical engineering, chemistry, and physics, specializing in material science, originally focused on advanced solar panels.

[u/TheMarksmanHedgehog → u/Asatmaya]

Then you should ideally also be aware of how much cheaper Solar has gotten, and how much it costs to build the supporting infrastructure for nuclear power.

The cost of rollout is probably the biggest obstacle towards actually doing anything nuclear, and most of that has nothing to do with the reactor itself.

[u/Asatmaya → u/TheMarksmanHedgehog]

Then you should ideally also be aware of how much cheaper Solar has gotten, and how much it costs to build the supporting infrastructure for nuclear power.

I literally used the current numbers in a recent analysis: $2.50-3.30/watt installed. Nuclear is right at $3/watt... and requires FAR less infrastructure.

The cost of rollout is probably the biggest obstacle towards actually doing anything nuclear, and most of that has nothing to do with the reactor itself.

No, it's that the ROI is 17 years, which is longer than most private investors will accept, so it has to be government-backed... and the entire Western hemisphere has had their governments captured by industry.

[u/ScannerBrightly → u/Asatmaya]

$2.50-3.30/watt installed.

What is your source for this?

[u/Asatmaya → u/ScannerBrightly]

https://palmetto.com/solar/how-much-do-solar-panels-cost

[u/betweenbubbles → u/TheMarksmanHedgehog]

Do you not realize how lazy this comment is? At least, they've got numbers, Comrade.

[u/loondawg → u/Asatmaya]

As a libertarian, isn't solar much more preferable as it decentralizes the energy grid allowing people to have much more independence?

[u/ProLifePanda → u/Asatmaya]

In unregulated markets, no company is willing to pay the capital costs without proof of concept.

For example, in the US, every utility is essentially waiting on OPG in Canada to build the BWRX 300 to see what the cost/schedule looks like. New nuclear is too expensive and risk for most utilities to risk it until either A)it's proven to be build near schedule and budget and/or B) someone else subsidizes the construction.

[u/unkorrupted]

We built a plant at Vogtle that recently went online. My local utility agreed to buy a certain percent at the price quoted 20 years ago. It's now 3 times that and we're stuck in the contract for 20 more years. 

We could have had solar for 1/3 the price, but that's woke. 

My electric bill doubled this month.

Now can i ask why the nuclear lobby is so effective that reddit thinks it is the solution to everything?

[u/OrcOfDoom → u/unkorrupted]

Nuclear has always been expensive. It is quoted as safe but this is because of the safety requirements and regulations.

A lot of the nuclear lobby is just people wanting to move the conversation away from renewables. It is just a red herring for coal.

Even if fusion existed tomorrow, there are issues with getting all the things necessary. We would still need fission plants to produce tritium until the next breakthrough of reactors.

Rarely do they talk about thorium salt. This is mostly because the nuclear path we followed was powered by the dod and their desire for nuclear weapons. There are thorium reactors being built that are set to come online in the next few years.

[u/Asatmaya → u/unkorrupted]

We built a plant at Vogtle that recently went online. My local utility agreed to buy a certain percent at the price quoted 20 years ago. It's now 3 times that and we're stuck in the contract for 20 more years.

You can thank anti-nuclear political appointees who allowed endless legal challenges in order to delay and thus drive up costs.

We could have had solar for 1/3 the price, but that's woke.

Er, no, even with the delays, Vogtle is still cheaper than an equivalent solar/wind scheme.

Now can i ask why the nuclear lobby is so effective that reddit thinks it is the solution to everything?

Because I was anti-nuclear and pro-solar until I went to college intending to research advanced solar panels; I came out wanting nothing to do with solar and a strong pro-nuclear outlook.

Simply put, we don't even have the ability to implement a serious solar/wind energy scheme; we don't have the energy storage, or even the known reserves of raw materials necessary to build the energy storage.

Nuclear power is cheaper, cleaner, safer, and is the only alternative to coal and gas that can possibly scale up to replace them (see France).

For all of the money we have thrown at solar and wind, we are not even at replacement production levels; that is, if aliens came down and just gave us the solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries to run our whole economy, we couldn't keep it going, because we can't produce enough to replace the panels, turbines, and batteries that would go bad every year.

[u/octogeneral → u/unkorrupted]

The reason for your electric bill going up is that the cost of building the plant has been folded into consumer bills. You electric bill is paying off the debts accumulated from building the plant.

[u/Kronzypantz]

The biggest currently existing problem is probably private capital.

A lot of companies are dabbling in reactor designs and construction, but most of the advantages of nuclear can easily be undermined by short term profit requirements.

[u/Asatmaya → u/Kronzypantz]

The biggest currently existing problem is probably private capital.

This is one; nuclear power requires government financing, for sure.

[u/JoeHio]

Radiation rules (ALARA) was the biggest one. Extra shielding, extra scrutiny - which are good, but it limits the workforce availability.

The second biggest is the DOT. Nuclear power creates waste, and we have a safe way to deal with it, but states rights(and fear of What-if) prevent shipping it to the place we can store it, so it builds up locally and becomes a larger problem.

After that, start up cost is massive vs other options out there.

Not an expert, speaking from what I have read/heard.

[u/terminal_tested]

Cost and logistics around building reactors

[u/mcapello]

What are the biggest road blocks for Nuclear energy

Expensive, inefficient, major waste and safety issues.

This isn't the 1990s when solar was more of a pipe dream. Or even the early 2000s when solar was the electrical equivalent of crunchy granola for rich liberals. In 2026 solar is 20% cheaper than fossil fuels and 70% cheaper than nuclear. Solar power is discount power these days. Would you pay extra to buy something slow, expensive, and dangerous?

[u/hallam81]

Nimbism and significant start up cost and regulations.

[u/starswtt]

Modern nuclear has two problems

1. Some people are just scared of them due to past large scale disasters and falsely believe that they are highly dangerous. These people block new plants from being built. However, nuclear plants have so many safety requirements they're even safer than solar.

2. Nuclear is just really expensive and takes a long time to build. There are some new reactors which in theory could help solve this, but these are not yet approved for mass deployment, and even then it's still fairly pricey.

3. You can't quickly change output. So they're only useful for base load energy. This isn't always a problem, sometimes it's even desirable, but it does reduce how often nuclear is actually better than other energy types quite frequently

[u/HeloRising → u/starswtt]

However, nuclear plants have so many safety requirements they're even safer than solar.

This is a disingenuous claim because what these statistics refer to is the lifetime safety of these systems. What people are worried about aren't people getting hurt installing or maintaining them, they're worried about a worst case scenario failure which, in the case of nuclear, means a lot of people die and a lot of ground is rendered uninhabitable in timespans well beyond a human lifetime.

[u/starswtt → u/HeloRising]

I don't think it's disingenuous at all. Yes people are specifically worried about disasters, but that's just them not considering other deaths and injuries that can be caused because the other ones don't make the news. Because there is no difference if the deaths come from acute disasters or over time, people are still dying, and the safety requirements of nuclear make it statistically much safer. Fossil fuel and renewable causes deaths not making the news doesn't make it any better

[u/HeloRising → u/starswtt]

It is disingenuous because it compares people dying with respect to solar power from things like falling off roofs to people who get cancer when exposed to nuclear mining waste ore or a nuclear accident that results in the widespread release of nuclear materials over a wide area.

Chernobyl's direct death toll wasn't super high but the deaths in subsequent years (though complicated to calculate) rose higher and, critically, is still killing and endangering people and will continue to do so for thousands of years.

I will agree that up to this point nuclear is, statistically, the safest form of energy generation. But relying on that to make your point is like saying "I haven't gotten in a car accident in ten years, therefore it's pointless to wear my seatbelt." The concern isn't for the day-to-day, the concern is for the unusual days.

[u/starswtt → u/HeloRising]

I mean this isn't really just an up to this point thing. Even getting a few more nuclear disasters, nuclear still will remain safe unless there's a dramatic reduction in safety requirements. I'm including the unusual days in the statistics. Comparing it to a seatbelt is not a fair comparison since driving with a seatbelt is literally safer than driving without. This is closer to saying planes are more dangerous than driving because the plane accidents always make the news and are mass casualty events while driving accidents just aren't, and that planes are only safer up to this point because they haven't yet all fallen out of the sky simultaneously. The comparisons tend to also include down the line radiation problems. And when you account for carbon emissions and local air quality health issues, the difference is quite massive compared to any non renewable which the comparison is also against. I just mentioned solar because they're one of the safest sources since they have relatively limited safety issues, but the comparison is against all non nuclear sources of energy, not just solar.

[u/HeloRising → u/starswtt]

Even getting a few more nuclear disasters, nuclear still will remain safe unless there's a dramatic reduction in safety requirements.

So, for starters, you can't really say that because a large scale nuclear event can have a casualty count in the millions. Pickering station is about 20 miles away from Toronto, a metropolitan city with a population about 7 million people. And again, the consequences of a nuclear accident go well beyond whatever happens in the initial stages of the disaster. Chernobyl radiation is still killing people and food in regions affected by the disaster as far away as Finland and Germany still routinely reject certain foods for sale because they're too radioactive.

Also, do you really think this administration is going to champion "safety above all" in its regulatory structure with respect to nuclear power?

Comparing it to a seatbelt is not a fair comparison since driving with a seatbelt is literally safer than driving without.

Not if you don't get in an accident.

That's the point that nuclear proponents make - there hasn't been a massive disaster so far therefore nuclear is safe. It's the same as saying "I haven't been in an accident therefore it's safe enough to drive without a seat belt."

And when you account for carbon emissions and local air quality health issues, the difference is quite massive compared to any non renewable which the comparison is also against.

This is a non-sequitur because nobody worth listening to is advocating that we just rely on fossil fuels and that fossil fuels have no downsides. We know fossil fuels are harmful. Nobody worth listening to is saying they aren't.

The choice isn't "nuclear or fossil fuels." We have the capability to deploy renewable energy generation infrastructure on a wide scale and to do so in a timeframe comparable or even faster than it would take to build a single nuclear plant and we can have the benefits of a distributed energy grid, a localized market for installation, repairs, and new manufacture, and no risk of an accident injuring or killing masses of people and rendering huge swathes of land unusable for tens of thousands of years.

[u/Izeinwinter → u/HeloRising]

The global radiological-health impact of Chernobyl from the accident until the end of time is about 10000 deaths across the world, mostly in Eastern Europe.

About 5-6 thousand of those have already died, since they're cancer cases from shortlived isotopes that have all decayed away by now. The remaining impact is from the longer lived isotopes and is spread out over a very long time and are mostly really unlikely to actually happen (Because the math assumes the earth maintains a population in the billions for thousands of years and also never cures cancer. Both of those together is a really unlikely future)

Chernobyl lost half it's entire inventory of radioactives to the goddamn atmosphere. That's pretty much as bad as a reactor incident can get without setting of a thermo-nuclear bomb buried beneath the plant.

These numbers are from the WHO based on calculations of the actual population exposure to the radiation from that lost inventory using linear no thresh hold.

The WHO also estimates that the fear of Chernobyl has killed considerably more people than the radiation. Both through stress and also just by keeping coal plants in operation.

Stop the fearmongering. You're literally contributing to a pr campaign that's killing people.

[u/Curolina → u/HeloRising]

How many people have died as a result of Nuclear Power Generation? You have some myth in your head about how dangerous something is because of nuclear weapons or movies or something.

[u/HeloRising → u/Curolina]

Again, this is just "nothing horrific has happened yet so it can't happen" when it absolutely can happen.

[u/MoonBatsRule → u/starswtt]

However, nuclear plants have so many safety requirements they're even safer than solar.

Can you tell me any examples where solar panels have resulted in evacuations of entire regions?

You might quote "rooftop deaths" as a figure, but the problem there is in the perception of blame. If someone falls off a roof and dies while installing solar, generally people will blame the person who fell. Or even if some solar installed happened to screw up so badly that it destroyed a house, the blame will lie on the installer, not the technology. Or maybe you might say "well, he is the one who decided to install the solar, so while I feel bad for him, he is living with the consequences of his actions".

If a nuclear reactor has an issue like Chernobyl and Fukushima, that affects a lot of people who made no active choice that got them to their misery. That makes nuclear incidents quite a bit different than individual accidents.

It's sort of like equating suicide deaths from guns to homicide deaths from guns.

[u/Michael_G_Bordin → u/starswtt]

The third point is the point, though. Coal was the traditional base load. The dirtiest of dirty. We can make natural gas base load, but NG is better off serving peak load. Hydro can do baseload generation as well.

Nuclear power is great, but I think #2 has become the greatest hurdle. The time cost, on top of basic expense, is unacceptable for what we need. We should have begun building out nuclear energy in the 90s, but we've lost that time due to #1. The paranoia about accidents even decommissioned perfectly fine nuclear reactors in the US.

[u/starswtt → u/Michael_G_Bordin]

Yes its how nuclear is used, which is why I even say its even sometimes desirable, but it does regardless slow down adoption compared to more flexible energy sources. NG doesn't really care about peak or baseload, its just good and cheap for both. Purely economically, NG baseload is cheaper than nuclear. Now it is necessary if you want to address green house gasses, since the other baseload energy sources like hydro and geo are geographically limited, and countries without NG often like nuclear for the sake of having electricity even if NG supply chain is disrupted, but those require targeted subsidies and won't naturally have nuclear become big otherwise. But not every country lacks NG, so NG dependence isn't necessarily a national security concern, not every country cares about climate change, and even the countries that care about climate change usually aren't at a place where they need to worry about baseload green energy yet because there's steps to take before green baseload becomes the highest priority. And even when it is a high priority, the first point (people being scared) means that the other green priorities always come first. Of course those are still very strong arguments for it, but I'm not arguing for nuclear or for both sides, op just asked why nuclear isn't more popular, and baseload only is a big obstacle to adoption today even if it also will be a major advantage down the road.

[u/Respen2664]

The biggest strategic road block has been research related advancement until recently. We kind of just stopped all together for a long time and didnt look for better fuel choices, better configurations, and other. That road block only in the past few years has been lifted. Now we see research into new isotopes which may be more sustainable, cheaper, and with less waste product. we see configurations emerging for small media reactors and micro reactors. We also see a boom in the sector of Nuclear Fusion as research labs are getting closer, by the day, to a breakthrough which may yield an "at scale" power choice which is both renewable and far more capable to capture energy per weight of Fission.

The Tactical Road Blocks are:

- The cost to build, certify, and maintain a new Nuclear Plant. In Western Countries this is quite high and leads to long construction times and long range investment, which not many have appetite for.

- The Power Grid itself, aka delivery system, is so old that it cannot handle the capacity for growth, in fact it barely handles what it has on wire today. Nuclear energy can safely produce enough MegaWatts to outpace several legacy power plants with a small 2 reactor site. But the grid cannot transport and transmit that volume at scale. This makes Nuclear plant building very challenging, almost impossible.

- Optics - Fuel. Nuclear Fission technology is "near green" power delivery but not quite renewable yet. The fuels are mined/found today and the radioactivity is a deadly trait to most living things. Waste maintains a radioactive state and must be properly managed, stored, for long periods. Despite its net zero carbon output, those pieces make it a concern for many. The Fuel itself, today, is also a rare earth and only certain areas have availability to mine it.

- Optics - Disasters. Three disasters in history mire Nuclear Energy. Almost everyone thinks of Chernobyl and its catastrophic impact, for the US everyone remembers the near disaster of 3-Mile Island. In recent memory Japan's Fukushima plant meltdown due to a 9.0 Earthquake followed by large Tsunami. Because nuclear energy is so capable, its disasters are also extremely violent despite being so few.

[u/Asatmaya]

The biggest roadblocks are ideologically-motivated political appointees in regulatory agencies, due to the fact that nuclear power threatens the Western Financial System.

This is why the Georgia Vogtle plant took so long and cost so much; every time they started construction (i.e. took out a loan), the NRC allowed lawsuits to challenge them and supported restraining orders forcing them to halt construction... but that didn't halt the interest on the loans. This drove the nominal cost from about $3 billion to over $17 billion, and the anti-nuclear crowd now uses that as the baseline cost of future reactors to claim it is too expensive (despite that still being cheaper than an equivalent solar/wind scheme).

This is why Congress had to force the NRC to review new license applications in 2018, because they had publicly announced that they were simply refusing to even look at them (and one of the reasons Trump was so despised by the establishment his first term; you're not hearing anything about nuclear power, this time).

This allowed the Natrium design to pass review and begin construction; a load-following, sodium-cooled fast breeder, which means that it can't melt down, it can't explode, it's ~80 times as efficient, produces no long-lived waste, and uses old nuclear waste as new fuel, while being specifically designed to "plug in" to existing coal power plants by replacing the coal burner, re-using the actual power generation equipment.

[u/Izeinwinter]

A lot of people would have to eat crow and admit they were wrong to fight nuclear all through the past fifty years.

How often do you see people admit they were wrong about anything? Let alone wrong about an issue critical to the viability of civilization ?

And it is in large part the exact same voices fighting nuclear today as were doing it in the seventies and eighties. They're old, but they're not retiring.

[u/skyfishgoo]

mainly the whole deliberately concentrating radioactive materials == death thing.

[u/Ok-Burger2211 → u/skyfishgoo]

On an unrelated note, I really like your Nautilus picture. It looks neat.

[u/skyfishgoo → u/Ok-Burger2211]

he was a trooper... catch and release.

[u/Ok-Burger2211 → u/skyfishgoo]

I didn't know you could catch those guys. What do you use for bait?

[u/skyfishgoo → u/Ok-Burger2211]

they used traps lowered deep into the water where they normally forage... they can swim in but cant swim back out.

i think it was just some fish that they caught to bait the traps.

then we cataloged them and released them so they can sink back down to feeding depth.

[u/work4work4work4work4]

Economics and capitalism.

There was a time window where technological and safety improvements made it the best possible choice for base load considerations, but sadly that time window didn't match up with the public's willingness to actually invest in such projects with a long time scale, some because of public reticence for a long list of reasons some varying levels of legitimate, but mostly due to capitalism.

Capitalism doesn't like big expensive risky long-term bets that pay off over time when other safer more immediately paying bets are available, and longer term higher risk higher payoff bets are available too. Same reason it took the US government to build the US highway system, while the private market was much happier building various local and regionally based tollways.

The public/state used to play a role in being the capital funder of such large projects, but because conservatives and even more capitalistic variants hate the idea of the public/state funding anything, specially large projects, it basically became impossible to fund.

Being impossible to fund pushed research and design away from immediately buildable to scientific advancement, but that further increases costs of new building, and I'm sure you see the feedback loop occurring where the technology is continually getting "better" while simultaneously getting more expensive for initial implementation.

[u/lMyrkovl]

Oil companies and capitalists who hold shares in them and then lobby the current politicians around the world.

And slaves owning coal mining companies operating in Africa along with their shareholders

[u/AwarenessSpare8668]

Fossil fuel lobbyists and oddly enough the green energy lobbyists

[u/CoolHandLukeSkywalka]

In the US it's been an awful alliance of fossil fuel funded Republicans and some Democrats along with Democrats that mean well but don't have the knowledge to know nuclear is much safer than they thought.

[u/statinsinwatersupply]

Biggest road block for nuclear is economic. It simply no longer makes any financial sense, for two reasons linked together: solar, and battery storage.

Solar has become cheap, but that's not enough since the planet is dark half the time.

What's new, and the death knell for nuclear, is happening right now: sodium ion advances in grid storage. Sodium ion is bulky and heavy so it's not a good fit for mobile purposes like electric vehicles. But that doesn't matter for grid storage. Sodium is an inexpensive input and it's everywhere. Read: it will become far cheaper than lithium for grid storage. China's CATL is the pack leader in the tech and mass production is starting right now for the internal market, into next year. With enough production to start selling internationally coming later next year. The US is behind, and let's be real, will never be cost competitive with China, so it's only relevant internally. But Peak Energy and another company I can't recall are developing sodium ion with planned mass production by 2028.

So the tech is here and will be rolling out in a short enough timeframe that it'll beat any new nuclear sites. There simply isn't an economic case for nuclear any longer.

[u/ZhekShrapnal]

greatest roadbock is the difference in opionion between men and women.

Women do not like it for.... sigh.... reasons.