|
Agronox posted:Because in the real world, resource constraints matter? This is obvious and I cannot understand your eagerness to handwave it away. China has a massive nuclear buildout program so I suspect they recognize the issue but are bridging the gaps with fossil. There are 40 plants either under construction or in the siting phase. But again: You are not solving climate change on a budget and we need to stop pretending thats true.
|
#
?
Jul 22, 2022 17:18
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 11, 2024 20:37 |
|
|
I’d like to again ask if it would be possible to zero in on the regulatory obstacles to wider nuclear development in the US: what are the rules subject to citizen petitions and notice and comment rule making that are part of the problem?
|
|
|
#
?
Jul 22, 2022 19:04
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1550393105253367811?s=20&t=Twaaz3ab3UeHBP72E5HlTw
|
|
#
?
Jul 22, 2022 22:27
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:I’d like to again ask if it would be possible to zero in on the regulatory obstacles to wider nuclear development in the US: what are the rules subject to citizen petitions and notice and comment rule making that are part of the problem? The rule that is usually cited as effectively preventing profitable private nuclear is the one that says _every_ reasonable precaution must be taken. So you can never get ahead of the game by designing a cheap and safe plant. That rule says no matter how safe it is, you still need keep adding safety features until the spreadsheet says you have run out of money. I am not particularly confident of the ability of the US government to solve that problem by deregulation; that would require knowing how safe something is without having been involved in designing and building it. It seems much simpler to have them simply own and operate the plants. Building can still be done by a subcontractor,; if you simply build enough you can actually end up with a competitive market.
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 14:23
|
|
|
I thought this thread would appreciate a cross-post from one of the Ukraine threads, as it was deemed by some as not sufficiently germane. Sounds like the clean energy folks are getting sick of being lied to by the "green gas" advocates.Atreiden posted:yea what's even worse about that, is that Germany could have used nuclear power to offset some of this by extending the use of 3 nuclear power plants and apparently reactivate 3 others. These threads are pretty damning, that's for sure. This off-shoot in particular just methodically pulls apart the German administration's actions on nuclear energy. It points out that while there is both majority public support and legal obligations for continuing the use of nuclear power in Germany, the Greens and the SDP have been refusing to acknowledge experts and have instead been misrepresenting them to the public since March. https://twitter.com/simonwakter/status/1548429942471286792?s=20&t=YpbHiMoXdaGO8IuP_4PZRw
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 14:40
|
|
radmonger posted:The rule that is usually cited as effectively preventing profitable private nuclear is the one that says _every_ reasonable precaution must be taken. So you can never get ahead of the game by designing a cheap and safe plant. That rule says no matter how safe it is, you still need keep adding safety features until the spreadsheet says you have run out of money. Can you cite the rule you’re referring to?
|
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 14:46
|
|
|
radmonger posted:The rule that is usually cited as effectively preventing profitable private nuclear is the one that says _every_ reasonable precaution must be taken. So you can never get ahead of the game by designing a cheap and safe plant. That rule says no matter how safe it is, you still need keep adding safety features until the spreadsheet says you have run out of money. I was going to post something along similar lines to a very good question. Deregulation is the wrong word, re-regulation is probably better because what is better is to go to risk based proscriptive legislation as opposed to prescriptive legislation. This has been happening in Australia for the last couple of decades and the areas where the economy is focused (mining, building construction, etc) the standards and legislation is really good and effective. Where it is less focused, there is old prescriptive legislation which is far less efficient. This anecdote is out of date now but a facility I knew fairly well had a steam boiler as part of the process - legislation prescriptively required a certain manning and certain certification to operate that boiler and that meant that a larger manning budget was spent on this lovely little vendor package boiler that operated autonomously in the 'States than on the rest of the entirely more dangerous rest of the plant that was regulated by risk based outcomes legislation. This same method also puts the onus on the organization undertaking it to achieve outcomes as opposed to proving that it checked every legislative checkbox and therefore the poo poo outcome is the regulators fault. Underground shift bosses are being prosecuted for "not maintaining a safe place of work" as opposed to "having ladders measuring 2.1 to 2.6 meters in the vicinity of open stopes designed for lead ore transfers built after 1946". How much more difficult should a nuclear fired plant be than a coal fired plant to design and build? The pressures and temperatures are not more than other thermal plants from what I understand so the only really tricky thing is thoroughly understanding the various nuclear chemistry that can happen, monitoring what is going on inside the reactor and handling heat generation which continues long after you press "off" (Unlike coal/gas where not adding more fuel is as easy as turning off the conveyor / tap). All of them are much easier with modern electronics and computer aided design. I find it hard to believe that it requires 10 years to iterate previous designs of nuclear plant in this day of age except for the reason of jumping through prescriptive legislative hoops activist lawyered up to the n'th degree. Which is why I get back to it all swinging around convincing the green movement to take the "L" on the wisdom of opposing nuclear power, own the mistake, move on, and get behind the singular most underutilised tech capable of eliminating thermal power generation decades ago and currently.
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 15:07
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:Can you cite the rule you’re referring to? As I implied, I don’t think there is a specific piece of legislature that can be reworded and everything suddenly works cleanly. It’s embedded in the whole philosophy and institutional culture of the regulatory institutions. The only possible legislative change would be to remove their authority. Which, to be clear, would be bad. https://www.nuclear-power.com/nuclear-engineering/radiation-protection/protection-from-exposures/alara/alara-and-alarp-principle/ radmonger fucked around with this message at 16:05 on Jul 23, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 15:45
|
|
|
I'm not ever remotely qualified to address specific safety measures and what not. Obviously it's an extremely important topic. But to me it seems absolutely inconceivable that we managed to build and safely operate plants in the 70s but somehow it's impossible now, despite material sciences, machining & manufacturing, sensors, and computing that improved by leaps and bounds since then. As for the economics, I don't think it's that clear cut as X is cheaper therefore... like it's a natural outcome somehow. Aren't nuclear plants required to pay for all the waste and decommissioning? On the other hand, we seem to be happy to ignore wind turbine and PV disposal, or what their and required battery storage production would entail (no atrocities, I'm sure). We also have been happily subsidizing PV and wind for decades to make it competitive by scaling up production, not to mention China dumping their panels.
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 16:14
|
|
radmonger posted:As of implied, I don’t think there is a specific piece of legislature that can be reworded and everything suddenly works cleanly. It’s embedded in the whole philosophy and institutional culture of the regulatory institutions. The only possible legislative change would be to remove their authority. Which, to be clear, would be bad. It is much more productive to discuss specific, factual obstacles to plant construction than to raise vague accusations of culture that make improvement impossible. To wit, 10 CFR § 20.1003: quote:ALARA (acronym for “as low as is reasonably achievable”) means making every reasonable effort to maintain exposures to radiation as far below the dose limits in this part as is practical consistent with the purpose for which the licensed activity is undertaken, taking into account the state of technology, the economics of improvements in relation to state of technology, the economics of improvements in relation to benefits to the public health and safety, and other societal and socioeconomic considerations, and in relation to utilization of nuclear energy and licensed materials in the public interest. ALARA is a reasonable standard, not a "drain all resources for safety" standard, and it's specific to radiation exposure. It's also written as a definition and is not universally applied. It's also a regulation, not a law- its application is subject to revision without congressional action. I quickly checked the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974, and the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Amendments Act of 1985 - it's not a requirement created by any of them. It's also not specific, so it does not, on its own, actually present an obstacle to development of nuclear. The application of ALARA and its translation into individual, specific policies is a factually laden administrative process. It's something that can be examined and changed- if it is indeed the problem that needs to be addressed.
|
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 16:14
|
|
|
It really seems like you expect people to get policy and science degrees before they can be allowed to discuss safety rules they've read newspaper articles about. No one is reading our suggestions so maybe it's ok if they aren't meeting the standard of being useful to an actual policy writing person. I don't think we should require nuclear plants to be able to survive being hit by planes, if that's still a rule, and should instead stop doing things that make people want to plane us. I'd start by getting rid of all these federally: National Conference of State Legislatures posted:Twelve states currently have restrictions on the construction of new nuclear power facilities: California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont. https://www.ncsl.org/research/environment-and-natural-resources/states-restrictions-on-new-nuclear-power-facility.aspx Harold Fjord fucked around with this message at 16:28 on Jul 23, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 16:17
|
|
|
Electric Wrigglies posted:I was going to post something along similar lines to a very good question.
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 16:32
|
|
|
Isn't it still the case that we don't have pre-approved reactor designs and every new plant must be treated as if coming to us fully formed in a vacuum rather than taking this already known and regulation approved reactor design and putting it into this other kind of geography than the last one? If we wanted to stamp out a bunch of plants then settling on one or two or three reactor designs with some bolt in solutions for cooling and storage and stuff that can be interchanged based on constraints of the geography of the plant location could really speed things up. If the industry is already exceptionally highly regulated than with sufficient motivation those regulations could be reworked to streamline the build and run process without really making any sacrifices to safety.
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 16:36
|
|
Harold Fjord posted:It really seems like you expect people to get policy and science degrees before they can be allowed to discuss safety rules they've read newspaper articles about. I don't need a policy or a science degree, I googled the loving word in the code of federal regulations. If you don't know something, you, or we, are fully capable of answering that question, and that means we can actually talk about things that effect outcomes instead of repeating the same talking point arguments about the cost of base load for another ten years. To wit, the rule you're thinking of is at 10 CFR § 50.150. The final rule was published at 74 FR 28146, the related NEI study is right here, and all of this is obtainable by googling "nuclear plant plane impact" and spending two loving minutes reading. You should interrogate your deeply-held need for other people to not learn about or discuss things.
|
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 16:39
|
|
|
Dameius posted:Isn't it still the case that we don't have pre-approved reactor designs and every new plant must be treated as if coming to us fully formed in a vacuum rather than taking this already known and regulation approved reactor design and putting it into this other kind of geography than the last one? Would this be what China is doing? Does anyone know what their approach is? I haven't seen much other than some high-level articles that go into details, like this: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Energy/China-greenlights-6-new-nuclear-reactors-in-shift-away-from-coal It does look like they're still intending to triple generation capacity in ten years which is pretty serious.
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 16:41
|
|
Dameius posted:Isn't it still the case that we don't have pre-approved reactor designs and every new plant must be treated as if coming to us fully formed in a vacuum rather than taking this already known and regulation approved reactor design and putting it into this other kind of geography than the last one? There are standardized plant designs, which are certified for 15 years and then undergo cyclic review and renewal. https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/design-cert.html
|
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 16:50
|
|
|
Electric Wrigglies posted:How much more difficult should a nuclear fired plant be than a coal fired plant to design and build? The pressures and temperatures are not more than other thermal plants from what I understand so the only really tricky thing is thoroughly understanding the various nuclear chemistry that can happen, monitoring what is going on inside the reactor and handling heat generation which continues long after you press "off" (Unlike coal/gas where not adding more fuel is as easy as turning off the conveyor / tap). All of them are much easier with modern electronics and computer aided design. I find it hard to believe that it requires 10 years to iterate previous designs of nuclear plant in this day of age except for the reason of jumping through prescriptive legislative hoops activist lawyered up to the n'th degree. I don't know. Sanmeng took about 9 1/2 years from groundbreaking to operation, and that's with a CCP government that presumably could silence any real opposition to it. I'm seeing the best case scenario for other Chinese plants being around five or six years. So whatever is making these things impossible to build in the US, it isn't just lawyers, legislation, and activists, because reactors take a long long time to build even where those factors are favorable.
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 16:58
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:There are standardized plant designs, which are certified for 15 years and then undergo cyclic review and renewal. Obviously I haven't spent a huge amount of time on the site but just clicking through a few things its good that the reactor design and site process are independent of each other. This is where I am probably going to get the most divergent from reality in want vs possible but I feel like it'd be more streamlined if the government provided the pre-approved designs and even possible sites to put them rather than waiting for private industry to apply. Though if we're going full pie in the sky best possible reaction to climate change re: generation we should nationalize the whole drat thing and build out like its a war effort for survival (because it is).
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 17:06
|
|
|
yea but demand will double. they're pulling ahead overall but its mostly just 'keeping up' from a % perspective they're going about as all-out as can be done. would be nice. not the country I live in tho.
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 17:08
|
|
|
It’s easy to blame regulation but .., https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/ “But many of the US' nuclear plants were in fact built around the same design, with obvious site-specific aspects like different foundation needs. The researchers track each of the designs used separately, and they calculate a "learning rate"—the drop in cost that's associated with each successful completion of a plant based on that design. If things went as expected, the learning rate should be positive, with each sequential plant costing less. Instead, it's -115 percent ——————- The fact that utilities have baked in profits means there’s no consequences for delays or cancellations (or locally at SONGS for breaking an operating plant).
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 17:16
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:I don't need a policy or a science degree, I googled the loving word in the code of federal regulations. If you don't know something, you, or we, are fully capable of answering that question, and that means we can actually talk about things that effect outcomes instead of repeating the same talking point arguments about the cost of base load for another ten years. I did not use the word "impact" so google was less helpful. I appreciate this. This rule is really loving dumb. To do what we need to do, we'll have to get rid of silly or useless "safety" stuff and solve this private utility problem. Harold Fjord fucked around with this message at 17:30 on Jul 23, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 17:28
|
|
|
Agronox posted:I don't know. Sanmeng took about 9 1/2 years from groundbreaking to operation, and that's with a CCP government that presumably could silence any real opposition to it. I'm seeing the best case scenario for other Chinese plants being around five or six years. The inefficiencies of the free market at work
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 17:39
|
|
|
Proud Christian Mom posted:The inefficiencies of the free market at work If you tell a company that their profit % is guaranteed, they may not really care about cost and schedule overruns.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2022 02:34
|
|
|
VideoGameVet posted:If you tell a company that their profit % is guaranteed, they may not really care about cost and schedule overruns.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2022 02:45
|
|
|
Infinite Karma posted:They actually prefer cost and schedule overruns. Both mean a higher gross dollar amount, which means a higher amount of net profit dollars. Yes. Exactly this. Case in point, PG&E/SDG&E’s screw up of the SONGS plant. No consequences for them. Higher rates for us.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2022 02:48
|
|
|
Infinite Karma posted:They actually prefer cost and schedule overruns. Both mean a higher gross dollar amount, which means a higher amount of net profit dollars. Or it means you lose so much money you end up bankrupt, like Westinghouse in 2017 (they were building the AP1000 plants in Georgia)
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2022 03:26
|
|
|
radmonger posted:The rule that is usually cited as effectively preventing profitable private nuclear is the one that says _every_ reasonable precaution must be taken. So you can never get ahead of the game by designing a cheap and safe plant. That rule says no matter how safe it is, you still need keep adding safety features until the spreadsheet says you have run out of money. A similar standard of acceptable risk management through overspending actually applies in practice to all projects (not just nuclear plants) in jurisdictions where the courts have a record of not accepting ALARA/ALARP type methodologies and there is no prescriptive standard. I think a lot of people really underestimate what a minefield risk is. The idea you'll ever build a nuclear plant to similar standards as a coal/gas plant is just a fantasy, there have been a couple turbine explosions at coal/gas plants in my area in the last decade and the general public would never accept anything similar at a nuclear plant.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2022 03:47
|
|
|
one of the reasons i don't actually think its about waste or safety regulations is because we *also* cannot build high speed rail, or even loving housing american industrial sclerosis means we can import panels from china and batteries from korea and turbines from europe but at this point we don't really have megaprojects in us. its not about nuclear, its about multi-billion-dollar-projects.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2022 05:53
|
|
|
MightyBigMinus posted:one of the reasons i don't actually think its about waste or safety regulations is because we *also* cannot build high speed rail, or even loving housing Thats assuming we cant do those things. We can. Dont mistake malice and corruption for lack of capacity, the US is more than willing to d I megaprojects when it wants to.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2022 15:31
|
|
|
We have industrial and logistics capacity unmatched by the rest of the world. We just use it entirely for the military.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2022 16:08
|
|
|
we spend the money on the military, sure, but the f35 is a pretty perfect example of how we just cannot do this poo poo without it turning into an absurd monstrosity of delays and budget blowouts. also that batch of navy ships that got decommissioned like 5 years after they got built
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2022 18:23
|
|
|
MightyBigMinus posted:we spend the money on the military, sure, but the f35 is a pretty perfect example of how we just cannot do this poo poo without it turning into an absurd monstrosity of delays and budget blowouts. Or the Big Dig or NASA's SLS and so on and on. Almost as if large complex projects that require 10s of thousands of people coordinating are just very difficult no matter how pure and noble your motives may be.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2022 18:42
|
|
|
Owling Howl posted:Or the Big Dig or NASA's SLS and so on and on. Almost as if large complex projects that require 10s of thousands of people coordinating are just very difficult no matter how pure and noble your motives may be. china and spacex show that housing/rail/nukes and orbit *can* be done, its uniquely the american federal government (including its military) that lacks the capacity to do these kinds of things. and its not even that it *couldn't have before*. the capacity was specifically dismantled and disavowed over the course of a generation. the generation that is still very much in charge. its not a physical/logistic or even truly economic constraint, its an ideological and political one. anyway point being, i'll believe that nukes are a real option and not an internet debate lord fantasy when we've built our fist thousand kilometers of high speed rail.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2022 19:45
|
|
|
MightyBigMinus posted:we spend the money on the military, sure, but the f35 is a pretty perfect example of how we just cannot do this poo poo without it turning into an absurd monstrosity of delays and budget blowouts. lol quite to the contrary, the F35 is an example where we can nationally put our nose to the grindstone even if it's expensive and painful
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2022 19:56
|
|
|
lotta callouts like SLS and Big Dig, ignoring even larger infrastructure projects that unironically Made America Great lol
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2022 20:44
|
|
|
It comes down to the usual problem in that power generation isn't built to meet power demand, it's built to provide a return on capital. As said somewhere up thread, nuclear is not great for providing a quick return on capital because it's a complex build that requires a lot of funding up front without a quick return on investment.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2022 23:50
|
|
|
what if i told you eroei and return on capital were the same thing
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2022 00:01
|
|
|
Return on Not Dying In A Climate Disaster
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2022 00:13
|
|
|
MightyBigMinus posted:china and spacex show that housing/rail/nukes and orbit *can* be done, its uniquely the american federal government (including its military) that lacks the capacity to do these kinds of things. and its not even that it *couldn't have before*. It’s not the Federal government that’s spent more on a bullshit high-speed rail project in California than it cost to build the trans-continental railroad, and the Virginia-class program falsifies the claim that the Federal government *can’t* bring a massive program in on-time and under-budget. It’s almost like who manages the program is orthogonal to whether the program is well-managed or not.
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2022 00:44
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 11, 2024 20:37 |
|
|
you got me, the federal govt *and* the largest richest state govt can't build poo poo
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2022 05:05
|
|