The Roots of Progress

If we're aspiring to 1970s standards then sure. Nuclear power isn't about achieving the lofty heights of the 1970s. I'm just going to wave the famous article by Crawford on the economics of nuclear around: https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop [0]

What you can see there is a very impressive learning curve that was well on the way to very cheap electricity. Then it suddenly and sharply inverts in a shape that defies common sense. Then no-one else really builds any.

"Supporting nuclear" isn't supposed to mean splitting the atom at any cost. The point is if we would just stop regulating the industry into oblivion and let costs drop then it'd be a perfectly competitive form of power. We have this lobby that goes in, wrecks the economics of nuclear then uses the wreck they created as justification for why we can't build any more. And in some senses that is fair because if they had the power to destroy past nuclear projects they can do it again. But lets not pretend that these costs are fundamental to nuclear.

Keeping a weather eye on China, if they do their usual trick and start learning how to build nuclear cheaply they could leapfrog everyone else on energy tech in another industry. On the one hand that'd be fantastic to the point where I'd love it. On the other it is so frustrating to be relying on nominal communists to push the state of the art forward on energy technology after listening to my western compatriots whinge about exactly that topic for…

One claim of moving the goalposts comes from https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop:

>> Excessive concern about low levels of radiation led to a regulatory standard known as ALARA: As Low As Reasonably Achievable. What defines “reasonable”? It is an ever-tightening standard. As long as the costs of nuclear plant construction and operation are in the ballpark of other modes of power, then they are reasonable.

>> This might seem like a sensible approach, until you realize that it eliminates, by definition, any chance for nuclear power to be cheaper than its competition. Nuclear can‘t even innovate its way out of this predicament: under ALARA, any technology, any operational improvement, anything that reduces costs, simply gives the regulator more room and more excuse to push for more stringent safety requirements, until the cost once again rises to make nuclear just a bit more expensive than everything else. Actually, it‘s worse than that: it essentially says that if nuclear becomes cheap, then the regulators have not done their job.

Basically the safety regulations (some of which are nonsensical -- the whole article is worth a read) preclude cost-effective nuclear. I won't address your point on waste, I think it's covered elsewhere on this page well enough.

On nuclear construction cost increases, from Crowley and Griffith 1982, “US construction cost rise threatens nuclear option” (via @whatisnuclear):

""" Ironically, some of the decisions that have been made in the name of improving safety margins for low probability events, may have reduced the safety margins for high probability events. The UE&C piping study uncovered numerous areas where the tolerances requested in the piping design documents might be appropriate for a machine shop oriented manufacturing operation, but are totally unrealistic for field construction. """

via https://rootsofprogress.org/links-digest-2023-12-15

The whole quote is worth reading/skimming.

More importantly this zero risk approach has to be considered relative to all the other risks arising from building other types of power plants.

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

(and of course a bit more on the problems with the process at the NRC https://thebreakthrough.org/blog/waiting-on-the-nuclear-regulatory-commission-eight-months-after-receiving-proposed-advanced-reactor-licensing-rule-commission-has-not-acted )

> It's a big mystery for me how the things went down since seventies.

There is a insightful (if a bit messy, and occasionally wrong) book that purports to answer that question:

Where is my flying car?: A memoir of future past, by J. Storrs Hall. [1]

In that author's view, it boils down to

* a levelling off of energy consumption per capita, that previously had doubled every 10 years. (In particular, the author laments the dearth of advanced nuclear power, which would be good for the economy and the climate.)

* increasing regulation and risk aversion.

* as well as “centralized funding streams”, “bureaucratic inertia,” “cultural malaise and indifference”.

[1] Reviews:

https://rootsofprogress.org/where-is-my-flying-car

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/09/where-is-my-flying-car-a-memoir-of-future-past-by-j-storrs-hall.html

https://jakeseliger.com/2020/12/28/where-is-my-flying-car-a-memoir-of-future-past-j-storrs-hall/

I think Bret Devereaux's article on why the Industrial Revolution started in Britain and not elsewhere is quite interesting ([1]). The Industrial Revolution happened not only because of advances in politics and engineering, but also because of Britain's unique geography: Britain got heavily deforested in its human prehistory, and so later Britons were forced to make use of coal. Trying to extract more coal more cheaply led to the industrial revolution.

This explains why the industrial revolution did not begin in China or the Roman Empire. There are some counterarguments to Devereaux's claims given in [2] and even in the HN article.

[1] - https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/

[2] - https://rootsofprogress.org/why-no-roman-industrial-revolution

Nuclear hasn't, but WHY is very interesting. And the answer seems to be because there's a DOE regulation that says that the risk of death from nuclear power must be "As Low As Reasonably Achievable". In practice, this means that if nuclear power is cheaper than the alternatives, then you could be spending more on safety for the same price as its alternatives (never mind that nuclear is already safer than the alternatives), and so the price of nuclear goes up. And since this feedback loop is regulator-powered, there's a chance for them to go too far in the direction of "expensive safety" and make nuclear economically unreasonable and never recover. Which it did.

https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop is a pretty interesting article.