While this is a compelling tale of culture war in the US, I think that the culture war aspect has little to do with nuclear's failure, if anything at all. I am continually offended as I encounter people with Ehrlich's 1970s Malthusianism, but these are not the folks stopping nuclear.<p>Look to France, which has a huge nuclear fleet. Look at what's happened at Flamanville, with a supportive population. What sort of culture war or regulatory arguments could be made to explain France's failures with the EPR design, that so closely mirror the US's failure with the AP1000 design in the past decade?<p>By focusing on culture war, we miss a bigger story: perhaps nuclear construction is not compatible with modern economies? And perhaps it never was a great fit, according to this quote from the article?<p>> At first, nuclear energy was too expensive and so less attractive to utilities. But once General Electric and Westinghouse spurred the industry onward by becoming loss leaders (they collectively lost around $1 billion building plants) the race was on.18 A herd mentality soon developed as utilities lined up to take advantage of government benefits to build new reactors. So many orders came in that “[w]ith only two companies building plants, a rapid increase in orders escalated costs for major components and strained the limited supply of qualified labor.”19
Nuclear power is expensive in no small part because of the safeguards needed to try to avert catastrophic accidents. Humans are fallible, and our best intentions can be subverted by inadequate training; fatigue; inattention; laziness; or what we used to call "a loss-of-brain accident." As a result, we can f[oul] up at any stage of design, construction, operation, or maintenance of a nuclear reactor.<p>(Neither Three Mile Island [0] nor Chernobyl [1] would have been so disastrous had it not been for cascading sequences of human error.)<p><i>Expecting</i> nominal performance by people or machinery is ... unwise; as Admiral Rickover famously said, "you get what you INspect, not what you EXpect."<p>All that adds to costs.<p>Source: Former Navy nuclear engineering officer, qualified as [chief] engineer aboard the eight-reactor aircraft carrier USS Enterprise.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-facts-know-about-three-mile-island" rel="nofollow">https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-facts-know-about-three-...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/focus/chernobyl/faqs" rel="nofollow">https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/focus/chernobyl/faqs</a>
The article starts by praising the French nuclear program in the 70s. Yet, that same nuclear program is currently going through a complete debacle, failing to provide for its own country's needs, and is partially the reason prices are going into the stratosphere on the whole continent. If you can't factor in the reality of what is actually happening as we speak as a potential risk for your analysis, well...<p>The French futures market is almost at 2000 Euros per MWh for the next two quarters [1]. You'd think the market is not anticipating those nuclear plants are coming back online any time soon.<p>Can we not talk about this as a success story please?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.eex.com/en/market-data/power/futures#%7B%22snippetpicker%22%3A%22EEX%20French%20Power%20Futures%22%7D" rel="nofollow">https://www.eex.com/en/market-data/power/futures#%7B%22snipp...</a>
Effective CO2 reduction can only happen if a sensible and effective policy is taken, to wit:<p>1. a tax on the carbon content of fuels<p>2. nuclear plants for base load power<p>and the rest will be taken care of by natural market forces.<p>Green energy will never be practical without nuclear power:<p><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-energy-transition-will-fail-11661547051" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-energy-transition-will-...</a>
Anti nuclear fearmongering is based on ignorance for the most part, and a kind of exploitative cynicism on the other.<p>Most people just don’t know how safe nuclear power is. I worked on a nuclear reactor personally. We used to joke that the safest thing we had in the power plant was the radiation. I received less operational exposure in 6 years than typical nuclear medicine procedures create.<p>The other source is entrenched players in the power industry hate nuclear power because it works, and can credibly produce post scarcity levels of power production.<p>It is unfortunate that the green energy movement has been lied to and co-opted against this genuinely fantastic energy source.
I worked in commercial nuclear power for a while, including a stint at three mile island. The regulatory compliance burden alone, from the NRC and DOE, is crippling financially.
Who Killed Nuclear Energy? The absurd cost to build this technology and the emergence of much more cost-effective and emission-free alternatives. It's as simple as that. It wasn't the tree-huggers or a big conspiracy.
There should be a meme for not very serious articles about nuclear issues.<p>“We need fewer, clearer, and more sensible regulations.”<p>And not a single example of which regulations to drop. How about redlining the appropriate docs and posting those? If they’re all so bad it should be a trivial excercise.
The accident at Three Mile Island and the film "China Syndrome" turned the public against it in America. The prejudice still lingers. I was working as a reactor tech on a nuclear submarine shortly after and decide before I got out that there was no future in nuclear. I became a computer programmer instead. Alvin Toffler's book "The Third Wave" convinced me to do this.
"today’s so-called environmentalists"<p>The nuclear industry had decades to fix its economic, safety and environmental issues but sat on its hands instead. If half of the subsidies they received over that time when into research we would have fixed the renewable storage problem a decade ago.<p>There is not and never will be enough uranium on this planet to completely power humanity for more than a few decades. Fission was only ever a temporary measure. Turns out "today’s so-called environmentalists" as the author disparagingly calls them, and not arrogant industrialist cheerleaders, had it right all along.
Advocating for a lower population is not "eugenics." People who beat this drum are lazy and stupid. There are only so many resources to go around, and our productive externalities can cross limited thresholds before becoming lethal. The common factor is the scale of our consumption and production which is, by some incredibly odd coincidence, linked to our population. Who knew...<p>I'm pro-nuclear, but trying to paint the anti-nuclear environmental movement as eugenicists is grasping.
I am curious, was there ever a time were insurance companies did offer risk insurance for nuclear power plants? If not, then nuclear has been killed by it's risk profile.
"During the 2021 Uri storm, Texas’s $66 billion in renewable energy investments failed to perform in a time of crisis"
So did nuclear. A nuclear reactor in texas went offline for two days during the crisis due to cold weather taking 1.3 GW of capacity with it. The linked article the author cites mentions that the outage was primarily caused by the failure of thermal plants which hadn't been winterized rather than lack of wind power.<p>[0]<a href="https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/electric-power/021821-texas-nuclear-unit-returns-to-service-after-outage-related-to-cold-weather" rel="nofollow">https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...</a>
> France’s nuclear buildout, beginning in the 1970s, achieved the greatest decarbonization in human history; ... In North America, the mantle belongs to Ontario, whose nuclear plants replaced its coal fleet.1<p>I am dubious of this claim, but it probably depends on exactly how you define it. But switching from a country to a province immediately sends up red flags.
who killed nuclear energy? Nobody did. The decline in nuclear energy utilization with very few exceptions is secular and global[1]. Two very mundane reasons, the high, largely stagnant cost of generating nuclear energy combined with the rapidly falling cost of renewables.<p>It's amazing to me how everything in the United States can be turned into some weird culture war debate, ignoring the most material explanations, the article straight up ventures into conspiracy theory territory at the end<p><i>"The all-renewables dream was never about reducing greenhouse gasses, but about entrenching energy poverty to halt population growth, so as to spare the environment."</i><p>[1]<a href="https://www.dw.com/en/world-nuclear-industry-status-report-climate-renewables/a-59338202" rel="nofollow">https://www.dw.com/en/world-nuclear-industry-status-report-c...</a>
Some counterintuitive “cheery thoughts”.<p>The “safety” aspect of nuclear power is usually discussed in the most narrow sense. The regulatory burdens may be excessive but no other power source is a thermonuclear weapon in a “close to critical state” as its normal condition.<p>Yes, one could fly a small plane into one and maybe nothing will happen but as the Ukraine war points out military grade attacks are not counted in safety calculations. Nor are the impacts of natural disasters especially earthquakes. Cyberattacks are not counted either.<p>Therefore one needs to secure a nuclear power station to the same level of physical and cyber security as a military stockpile of nuclear weapons. With the added risk of direct takeover by live cyberattack or malware. Personnel hiring needs to be at the same level of background checks and security as a military nuclear reactor.<p>All this in a practical sense, and counterintuitively, means that the construction and operation of a nuclear power station with fissile Uranium needs more burdensome protocols not less.<p>Finally the calculations often talk in the language of probability but what is needed is to calculate or estimate Expectation. This sort of “it won’t happen because p ~= 0” thinking is also the kind of thinking that led to the 2008 stock market crash ie “house prices will never go down”. The Expectation calculation of what happens if/when they do was never really thought through. That tends to happen when humongous amounts of money are involved as is the case with energy.<p>We owe it to future generations to not create another multigenerational problem because we short circuited safety considerations trying to save the planet in the medium term.<p>Other than that - stay happy :-).
The industry told themselves and the community a lie .. that nuclear was cheap (“too cheap to meter”) and that it was perfectly safe.<p>But, there were always and continue to be cheaper sources of energy, and when incidents did inevitably occur they had an outsized impact on community perceptions.
The present day shelling of Zaporizhzhya is a sufficient argument alone to invest no further resources in the development of this technology and to remove it from the face of the earth.
I'm familiar with the argument that nuclear power is the answer to greenhouse gas emissions. Still, this article is the next level of pro-nuclear propaganda as it launches into quite the anti-environmentalist screed. For example:<p>> The postwar American environmental movement began as an outgrowth from the eugenaics movement.<p>and<p>> Having fallen out of favor during World War II due to its associations with Nazism, eugenics returned with gusto under the banner of “population control” after the war.<p>The pro-nuclear lobby has no argument against Chernobyl, which has created an absolute exclusion zone of (literally) 1,000 square miles nearly 40 years later with no end in sight, other than to simply ignore it as an outlier that isn't relevant because the USSR doesn't exist anymore.<p>Likewise, Fukushima, which along with Chernobyl is the only other level seven nuclear incident, is simply written off:<p>> No one was harmed by nor did anyone receive lethal doses of radiation.<p>All the same arguments against nuclear power still apply: nuclear waste from fuel processing, nuclear waste from fuel, transporting of fuel and waste, trusting people in corporations and governments to adequately build and maintain such plants and the very fact that not a single nuclear power plant in the world hasn't been built without significant government help (which is why the pro-nuclear lobby will focus on operational costs rather than capital or total costs).
Who really killed nuclear power? I bet if you traced all the financial donations to all the environmental groups and people who have opposed nuclear power, you will find a lot of oil dictatorships and oil companies.<p>Follow the money...