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This is what happens when the free market is the only method to drive change. The only thing stopping the US from using the navy to produce reactors for cities and not battleships is lobbyists from the oil industry threatening to primary any elected official who goes against good old fashion american capitalism for the sake of public good. I can see the attack ad now.


This is 100% wrong. The free market was driving the change pretty quickly and then regulations came in and made it illegal to do most of those things.

Illegal to produce a proper prototype, incredibly restricted access to materials, incredibly high cost to entry and pretty much every other regulatory burden that exists. The nuclear industry is probably one of the un-freest markets ever.

And whats stopping the Navy from doing these things is not oil lobbyists, but rather the Navy having no interest in such tasks and that such tasks are not in their political mandate from congress. That's what the DoE and others are for (in theory). Not to mention that the Navy doesn't really care that much about cost.

I don't think you need a free market, if government wants to drive energy policy, then they can do it successfully with nuclear as well, see France. At least successful compared to most nations.

Either method works fine, specially in a market the size of the US. Currently both paths are blocked.


The free market destroyed nuclear, or rather recognized the failure of nuclear. This failure predates the regulations nuclear fans use to try to deflect blame from their energy waifu.

Nuclear power was NEVER going to be very cheap. Even in the 1950s, it was recognized that the cost of the common elements of coal and nuclear plants were going to restrict nuclear to being MAYBE 20% cheaper than coal, at best, and that only if everything broke the right way.

And that maximally optimistic scenario didn't happen. Nuclear plant construction turned out to be more difficult than thought. Even before increases in regulation -- which were going to happen, as new failure modes and near misses were identified -- costs and delays were escalating.

And now, nuclear has two feet in the tech grave. The tech base has decayed away, and continues to degrade. Hoped for cost reductions of Gen III/III+ reactors from experience would require impossible sustained subsidies. This is why hopes are being pinned on small Hail Mary Reactors. They're the only possibility of avoiding nuclear's extinction.


> The free market destroyed nuclear, or rather recognized the failure of nuclear.

The industry was incredibly young and just starting. Nuclear was actually competing on the free market against coal. Many many more nuclear projects were planed, and nuclear had fastest transition from any energy form to another when it was cut off by regulatory change.

Claiming its early development was a failure is totally wrong.

> Nuclear power was NEVER going to be very cheap. Even in the 1950s, it was recognized that the cost of the common elements of coal and nuclear plants were going to restrict nuclear to being MAYBE 20% cheaper than coal, at best, and that only if everything broke the right way.

That's wrong even for PWR and nuclear was in its infancy still. We know that you can build nuclear reactors much smaller and better over time. PWR are 2% efficient and there is lots of room for improvement.

Yes but coal also has a fuel cost for operation that is much much higher then fuel cost for nuclear. A nuclear plant last longer, doesn't kill close to as many people and doesn't cause global warming. A coal plant would not even be allowed to operate if it was regulated like a nuclear plant, its ironically to radioactive.

> And now, nuclear has two feet in the tech grave. The tech base has decayed away, and continues to degrade. Hoped for cost reductions of Gen III/III+ reactors from experience would require impossible sustained subsidies. This is why hopes are being pinned on small Hail Mary Reactors. They're the only possibility of avoiding nuclear's extinction.

It was literally impossible in the US to license and type of new reactor. Its impossible to buy fuel for prototypes. The DoE requires huge financial and time commitment before they even look at your innovations.

In the 60s new reactor types and experiments were built many a year and now a slightly different fuel for a reactor takes 10 years to go threw regulation.

In 100 years people will look back at this time and laugh at us. The will live in a nuclear society, not in one based on solar, wind and battery power.


Nuclear was "competing" against coal when vendors were lowballing bids (or eating cost overruns themselves on a few fixed-cost contracts before they learned to not do that.)

The first nuclear building boom in the US went disastrously badly on costs. That's ultimately why it ended, not accidents or regulations. The economics just didn't work.

Forbes magazine in Feb 1985 said it well:

"The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale. The utility industry has already invested $125 billion in nuclear power, with an additional $140 billion to come before the decade is out, and only the blind, or the biased, can now think that most of the money has been well spent. It is a defeat for the U.S. consumer and for the competitiveness of U.S. industry, for the utilities that undertook the program and for the private enterprise system that made it possible."

The only places in the world where nuclear has "succeeded" are those where opaque financial systems have cloaked the true cost of the technology.


Before regulation changed, many being built and many more being planned, after regulation changed, no new reactors built in 30 years. The fastest energy transformation in human history, but I'm sure that just because of a managerial errors.


And as I said, the costs of those plants were escalating, even before changes to regulations. BTW, the most impactful regulatory change wasn't even targeted at nuclear at all, although a court ruling was needed to inform the industry and the AEC that the law (NEPA) also applied to nuclear power plants (Calvert Cliffs decision).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvert_Cliffs_Coordinating_Co...

http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2019/01/17/nuclear-plant-construct...




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