“Build 1,000 new state of the art nuclear power plants in the US and Europe, right now. We won’t, but we should.”
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Samizdata quote of the day – nuclear power editionDecember 23rd, 2024 |
 15 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – nuclear power editionLeave a Reply |
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My response to “We won’t, but we should”, right after “YES PLEASE!” is “Wouldn’t it be great if 10 years from now, we realize that the deregulation implemented by Trump/Musk/Ramaswamy was the tipping point in being able to build nuclear faster and more cheaply?”
Deregulation in and of itself isn’t some panacea to all our problems. We deregulated airlines and have seen how much fun it is to fly these days. And CA deregulated their power companies and ended up with ENRON cutting power and causing rolling blackouts just so they could charge more.
Steven R, at 6:19pm,
The regulations I have in mind are those that make nuclear power plant construction in the US more expensive. The main drivers of these regulations being the false assumptions: 1) no dose is safe and 2) any risk of any nuclear accident is unacceptable.
Better?
I put my faith in SMRs. Not because I think they are cheaper (per MW) than full size ones – they probably aren’t. But once you have type approval for one, it is much easier and quicker to build more. The regulations are satisfied, you just have to worry about the newts (UK), or desert turtles (USA) etc. And once there are a few up and running, giving reliable,cheap base-load electricity, people will start wondering what we need all those windmill for?
James Lovelock founded the modern “Green” movement – and he was a strong believer in the C02 is evil theory, but he also held that a massive nuclear expansion of nuclear power was the only rational response – as solar power and wind turbines are just not-up-to-the-job.
Yet most “Greens”, and the left generally (most Greens today being “Watermelons” – green on the outside, red on the inside) oppose the massive expansion of nuclear power, indeed they often (as in Germany and the United States) oppose nuclear power in general.
So whatever the “Net Zero” agenda is really about it is clearly NOT about a belief that C02 emissions cause harmful “Climate Change” – if that was what was behind the agenda, we would be seeing small modular nuclear reactors being built all over the Western world, and we are not seeing that.
@Druid 144 – there are already tried and trusted small nuclear reactors. They are installed and used in nuclear powered submarines and other ships.
I’ve seen proposals that such a reactor could be sited and used to power a small town (or district). They could be turned out economically on a production line IF (and that’s a very big IF) there was the will to do so. Once type approval is granted then churn them out like cars etc.
There are two such reactors that were involved in losses – I refer to the two nuclear submarines that the USA lost, the SSH Thresher and SSN Scorpion. Both wreck sites are monitored regularly for nuclear leakage and contamination.
The Thresher was lost in 1963 and the Scorpion in 1968. I think that after all that time in a corrosive, salt water environment with no radioactive leakage, then it could be concluded that they are safe for land based operation where inspection and monitoring will be much easier.
But Nuclear = BAD!!!! is so ingrained that it will never happen.
Phil B and @Druid 144, yes, SMRs hold a lot of promise for the reasons you cite.
Phil B, re “no leakage”…I’m guessing there’s been leakage but it’s diluted into the ocean a fair bit before samples are collected. Or is someone’s Navy posted near the wreck with underground seawater sampling equipment?
Fun fact: we can use such sources as tracers for tracing ocean currents. I saw a poster at a Goldschmidt conference a few years back where the authors were tracing how the ocean currents on either side of the British Isles mixed as they flowed into the Arctic ocean.
How’d they do that you ask? They used I-129 and U-236 effluents from Sellafield and LaHague!
One of those sites releases a boatload (technical term) of the one isotope but not the other while the other site is reversed with respect to the isotopes released. They could measure the stuff over 1000 km long ocean transects and down to depths of at least 100s meters, maybe >1000m (I forget). It’s because we’ve gotten really good at such measurements.
So, maybe you don’t need to be too close to those sub wrecks to detect leakage?
However if I were asked to make the measurements and I did not detect anything, I would not say “there is no leakage”. I’d say something like, “I can’t detect anything above XX atoms/m3 seawater and given the known dilution between the wreck site and the sample collection point, this means that there is less than XXE-YY atoms/m3 in the seawater around the wreck.”
Measurements never give “zero”. Only Siths believe in absolutes! 🙂
Steven R:
We deregulated airlines and have seen how much fun it is to fly these days. And CA deregulated their power companies and ended up with ENRON cutting power and causing rolling blackouts just so they could charge more.
Airlines weren’t exactly great before deregulation, which is precisely why some of the restrictions were removed in the US and parts of Europe in the first place. (Many of the moves happened in the 1970s under the Carter administration – something that his government is not given much credit for.) Only a relatively few people could afford to fly before these changes. Then SouthWest, Easyjet and Ryanair came along to change things up. To the extent that air travel sucks today, much of it is about the security regulations imposed to handle terrorism, and some of the costs associated with government-imposed fuel costs, etc. Airlines today are still heavily influenced by government controls and rules, if not as severely as before. If you want to go back to a handful of carriers and very powerful labour unions in charge and only a handful of flights, you must be delusional. We tend to forget how, in relative terms, flying used to account for about a months’ wages for a lot of people, if not more.
California capped what electricity retailers could charge, but wholesale electricity prices could not be passed on to the consumer. Result: bankruptcy. It was a mess. Blaming the problems on Enron (which was in any case an example of fraud, rather than deregulation) is wrong. The energy industry in California was not free market enough. What you imply is that things were much better under state control of energy. Well, how has that worked out?
Phil NB: there are already tried and trusted small nuclear reactors. They are installed and used in nuclear powered submarines and other ships.
Exactly. Small modular reactors are not really a new tech; what is new is the willingness to think about building nukes at scale. It would be transformative, so let’s do it.
You can’t really be serious to suggest that deregulating the aviation industry has been a failure?
If you fly business class, airline travel is perfectly pleasant. Thing is, modern business class fares are the same in real terms as economy used to be for the big carriers. Meanwhile the likes of Ryan Air have made it possible to fly actually cheaply.
I once flew Amman to Cyprus for $100. You are joking if you thought that was possible in the old system of heavily regulated national carriers.
So now you can make flying pleasant OR cheap, but not both. In the past it was neither.
There’ll be nothing happening in Europe. The US is too busy eating Europe for its lunch. Blowing up Nordstream, and selling Germany its fracked gas for ten times the cost Europe would have paid for Russian gas. As the cretin Blinken said, at the time, the destruction of Nordstream was a tremendous commercial opportunity for US gas producers.
Meanwhile in the USA, Microsoft is proposing to buy electrical supply from the mothballed three mile island nuclear plant to power its ‘AI data-centre’, that’s right, the data centres that will monitor every aspect of your day to day existence.
Anyway, Germany is being strangled to death by its ‘ally’, the USA. Where Germany goes, so goes the European Union ( no loss as far as I’m concerned ).
Much of German industry is already moving outside Europe, that means, to the US. So Trumps new administration should have a short term benefit from that.
France, has lost the supply of cheap Uranium from it’s former possessions in Africa, who now want a fair return for their product. And no longer want to use the CFA as a disadvantageous currency for their product.
It looks like the European Union has failed in its primary objective, to keep Germany down, and has failed in its secondary objective of keeping Russia out, so the EU no longer has any use to the US.
@Steven R
Deregulation in and of itself isn’t some panacea to all our problems. We deregulated airlines and have seen how much fun it is to fly these days.
There are five reasons flying sucks:
1. The TSA are ridiculously bad at their job
2. The Air traffic control system is a disastrous mess
3. The FAA does a horrible job at everything except accident investigation
4. The big carriers use government regulation and rules to make it impossible for small airlines to develop and succeed.
5. The way slots are allocated in government controlled airports are both a disaster and designed to exclude competition. (And don’t get me started on the eight freedoms of the air.)
To suggest that the air industry is deregulated is like complaining the American medical industry is a mess because it is free market. Both are among the most highly regulated, government controlled businesses in the economy.
FWIW, de-regulation is not a panacea for all our problems. Nothing is, but it sure does help.
The airlines are massively regulated.
As for “California deregulated the power companies” – that is right up there with “Prime Minister Russell followed a policy of laissez-faire in Ireland in late 1840s”.
In reality Russell followed a policy of crushing Poor Law taxation in Ireland in the late 1840s, and California regulated like crazy during the “Enron” period – indeed in a deregulated market Enron could not have operated (it needed the rigged “market” that endless regulations produce).
One of the hardest things for a person to accept is that the “official sources”, the government, the media, the leather bound history books, LIE – they just LIE.
You have to check every fact yourself – not via “independent fact checkers” (who are sickeningly dishonest) – but actually yourself.
None of the above is an attack on Steven R. – take the person who was, at the time, the best known hisorian of the mid 20th century – E.H. Carr.
E.H. Carr produced works on modern Germany and the modern Soviet Union – these works (which he worked on very hard indeed) were once the standard texts – but are now not cited (even by Progressives) – why not?
They are no longer cited because E.H. Carr used the official sources – those leather bound books of records that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany produced, and those impressive looking books were packs-of-lies – the economic and social numbers in them were LIES.
Cuba does the same thing today – indeed it goes further, not only does the Marxist regime in Cuba produce fake economic and social numbers about the period it has been in power – it has also gone back and CHANGED the old numbers (for the period before it was in power) – to make it look like Cubans were poor and had low life expectancy back before 1959.
And, no surprise, the United Nations (and so on) relies on the fake figures – even for the pre 1959 period (even though the real numbers still exist – if one looks for them).
At school I came to the conclusion that the teachers were not telling the truth, I also came to the conclusion that the television was not telling the truth.
But, as Jordan Peterson points out, it is normally NOT good to have a mind of the type that I have – in a decent society one should trust the institutions, otherwise life becomes very difficult.
It is only in a very sick and dishonest society that having a “paranoid” mind makes sense – sadly we live in a very sick and dishonest society.
They will tell you X when the opposite of X is the truth.
They will, again, tell you (with a straight face) that California had a free market in energy, or that Russell followed a laissez faire policy in Ireland in the late 1840s.
They will just LIE to you.
Remember only a few months ago then Prime Minister Sunak said, in the House of Commons, “I state, categorically, that the Covid vaccines are safe”.
He knew very well they were not – he was lying about a matter of life-and-death – and the House of Commons (almost all parts of the House – it was very “cross party”) cheered on his lies.
We do not live in honest times.
As for energy – what is needed is small (“modular”) nuclear reactors – a lot of them.
The various patents and so on have, I am told (and I hope this is true), run out – so we can build them now, without the U.S. Navy (and so on) throwing their toys out of the pram.
The problem with the ‘small reactors just like the Navy’ model is that you need a Hyman Rickover to oversee the programme, and I have absolutely zero confidence that any government oversight agency will ever throw up another such as he. Just consider for one single moment the last high-profile nuclear safety official in the US government that you heard about . . . .
llater,
llamas
Why does everyone gripe about flying? It’s a miracle in the first place, in the second it’d damned near free.
I can get in an armchair, go to sleep for eight hours, and wake up in Paris. For half a week’s pay. Sheesh, what do you want?