First, I think the downvote issue is more you making several statements but not providing supporting evidence, and then challenging people to provide evidence for not agreeing with you, which is whack.

I don't necessarily think nuclear energy on a large scale is more viable or more cost effective than renewables, however, I think you're overstating some of the issues you present. Based on the nuclear industry in the U.S.:

You say "No insurance company in the world will insure a nuclear power plant" which is false. Taken directly from the III website, "Nuclear insurance consists of two tiers. The first tier is private liability insurance coverage made available by a pool of U.S. insurance companies, called American Nuclear Insurers. The second tier is made up of an assessment on nuclear power plant operators... which is supplied by the nuclear power industry as a whole. Under the Price-Anderson Act, all reactor owners are committed to paying their share of any damages that exceed the incident reactor owner’s first tier limit of $375 million—up to $111.9 million per reactor. Since [there] are currently 104 reactors in operation, the amount that would be available in the industry pool to pay claims totals $12.6 billion (2011)."[1] Clearly the insurance arrangement for nuclear power plants is atypical, but they certainly do have coverage (both private and public) and really most everything about nuclear is treated as atypical anyway. Hydro dams have similar insurance issues, despite having nothing to do with the nuclear industry, and can't rely on normal insurance companies for worse-case scenario incidents like total retainment failures.

Building costs for nuclear reactors are certainly high, but they significantly drop after the first reactor is built. Each subsequent reactor added to an existing plant creates immense value at a fraction of the cost. I work for an energy company that owns several nuclear plants. A nuclear operator trainer once told me the "first reactor is built to get all the permits and licenses in order, the second reactor is built to print money." The French, who deeply invested into nuclear, enjoy one of the lowest electricity rates in Europe[2], so I would challenge how how are they managing that? An uncited statement from Wikepedia (my favorite type of statement) suggests insurance only accounts for 0.1% of nuclear costs. The upfront capital costs of nuclear are a given, but the point is that the costs are eaten away over the long-term, as the plant operates for 40, 50, or 60 years. The big financial issue here (i.e. political issue) is that the cost recoupment of nuclear is not designed to give the capital investor an ROI 4-10 years after construction, it's meant to pass on the ROI to the next generation 30 years later. This kills the lender. Nuclear is also a cornered niche market that allows major price gouging and lacks a decent-sized pool of experienced construction experts, which accounts for the construction issues and cost overruns that occur.

Regarding China, there is certainly evidence that their build rate has slowed, but this is less caused by nuclear pricing (otherwise why would they have committed to ((I think) 25 reactors!?) but rather caused by supply chain issues with fuel, building materials, and trained personnel who can operate and maintain the plants.[3]

I'm self-admittedly not a power pricing expert, but I do know that most cost calculations for energy do not account for site maintenance, decommissioning, waste management, and other similar long-term issues, with the exception for nuclear. Nuclear pricing often does have a lot of this built into its pricing models because these are all actions that are (1) highly regulated by the government, (2) legally required to be planned for, (3) will cause a company to incur fines if not managed correctly, and (4) have enough of an impact on price that they front-load the costs into nuclear pricing schemes specifically to avoid balloon pricing issues later in life (long-term lifecycle planning is a staple of nuclear management). So unless you can provide some specifically sourced dollar-to-dollar comparisons of energy commodity prices, I choose not to believe your statement on this. I would personally argue that nuclear is comparable in price to on-land wind generation, and slightly more expensive than solar at the $/kwh level. However, nuclear can produce significantly more power than solar in a similar physical space.

All of this ignores the low-carbon footprint of nuclear, and also assumes that battery and storage technologies that turn "renewables" into "reliables" are present (from my view they're barely here, and they're super expensive). Nuclear fears have also deterred nuclear R&D, which has left the industry slagging behind where it could have been by now. Nuclear also has one of the most fuel-efficient "burns", where the amount of mass required to "burn" to get energy is orders of magnitudes lower than other sources. The amount of waste from nuclear is also significantly lower than amounts generated by other sources, but obviously it can be highly hazardous. Though nobody really ever asked what power companies were doing with all that CO2 they were producing as a byproduct, it literally just floated away, and it was by volume significantly more than the amount of spent nuclear fuel sitting around right now. How much actual realized damage have we caused by CO2 emissions vs radioactive byproducts? I genuinely don't know.

[1] https://www.iii.org/article/insurance-coverage-nuclear-accid... [2] https://en.selectra.info/energy-france/guides/electricity/co... [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-01-11/china-sho...

user:	ideophobia
created:	November 2, 2016
karma:	172