Now the cost of solar and storage are dropping at a rate I doubt nuclear is ever going to make a significant comeback. I'm not opposed to it, but I wonder if the economics will ever be favorable even with regulatory reform.
Commercially. Several early test reactors were essentially just graphite moderated piles not unlike Chernobyl, but they were abandoned for a reason.
That is the case for base load generation, where the plant can operate near 100% capacity all the time. But that isn't were gas is usually being deployed; it being used for reserve generation. The economics of nuclear isn't as favourable in that application as it costs more or less the same to run at partial generation, or even no generation, as it does when it is going full blast.
Getting rid of LNT would allow higher doses to workers, and the way it makes nuclear cheaper is by having less shielding around the reactor.
But if you look at how recent reactors like the AP1000 failed, it's not so much because of the mere quantity of concrete. In fact, one of the big advantages of the AP1000 is that it used a fraction of the concrete and steel of prior designs. The real problem at Vogtle were construction logistics, matching up design to constructible plans, and doing that all in an efficient manner.
The construction process didn't run over budget and over timeline because of environmental regulations, that happened because we don't know how to build big things anymore, in combination with leadership asking for regulatory favors like starting construction before everything has been fully designed, which gave them more rope to hang themselves with.
I don't know the specifics of why France forgot how to build, at Flamanville and Olkiluoto, but I imagine it's a similar tale as in the US. High labor costs, poor logistics, projects dragged out, and having to pay interest on the loan for years and years extra with every delay.
If there's somebody with more specifics on how unnecessary regulation is killing nuclear, I'd love to see it. But after watching attentively and with great interest since ~2005, I've become so disillusioned with nuclear that I doubt we'll ever see it have success in the West again. Factories and manufacturing have seen productivity go through the roof over the past 50 years, while construction productivity is stagnant. Playing to our strengths, and using our very limited construction capacity on building factories rather than building generators, seems far wiser on the macroeconomic scale.
https://www.salmonbusiness.com/nuclear-plants-new-700-millio...
I spent 10 minutes and have not been able to find said "government-commissioned review". Is this even true?
The stilted phrasing in the report from Salmon Business definitely does not sound very credible, but marine life protection is definitely a real thing with nuclear and all fuel-burning electricity generation
The vast quantities of water needed to cool nuclear (for every kWh of electricity, 2 kWh of waste heat must be discarded) can have significant impacts on wildlife. In the past, we just devastated ecosystems but most modern countries decided they didn't want to do that anymore.
This is not a nuclear regulation, it's a "thermal plant" regulation, it's just that nuclear needs more cooling than, say, combined-cycle gas because nuclear's lower temperatures are less efficient at converting heat to electricity.
At a mere $700M, even dropping all marine life mitigations from Hinkley Point C wouldn't help much with affordability. If they could drop $7B of costs from Hinkley then it may start to have a halfway-competitive price, but it still wouldn't be very attractive.
I can imagine a future in which every data center has a little baby nuclear plant built right next to it. Watts per acre may become a significant measurement of density. Solar’s environmental impact is of course dramatically overstated by its opponents, but it won’t be when we scale it up and have to start slashing forests for it.
Fair point that renewables may have a practical expansion limit, but for the time being are, by far, the cheapest option so a data centre is still going to prefer that source of power to the greatest extent possible, thereby leaving gas/nuclear only as reserve — of which nuclear has not proven to be cost effective at. Geothermal, hydro, etc. are hard to beat, but where you aren't sitting on the perfect environment, generally speaking, wind+solar+gas is about as good as it gets on a cost basis.
Likewise, an even bigger "disaster" at Fukushima--that killed nobody. (The deaths from the evacuation are not deaths from the incident--they wouldn't have died if they had stayed put.)
And the cost overruns are to a large degree due to regulations--specifically, changing regulations. The environmentalists have destroyed nuclear by forcing delays and changes, that is the *majority* of the cost. Especially the delays.