In 2012 we had in EU access to exceedingly cheap natural gas from Russia and electricity prices where around 2 cent per kw/h, and was getting cheaper each year. No one was in a rush to build nuclear power that costed around 3-4 cent per kw/h, especially since prices were predicted to reach 1 cent per kw/h, and there is little incentives from government speed up the regulative process. Building capacity was mostly a cost center, and nuclear power represented a significant political risk.
In 2022 we have significant energy shortage and the prices are now closing to 50 cent per kw/h (and rising). Inflation is at record high is directly linked to energy prices. Elections can be won or lost based on stances regarding electricity production and efforts to reduce the cost. A nuclear plant planned today should take significant less than 15 years.
I do agree with your post, but I really have to bite my tongue to not get snarky.
Part of the process here has to be recognising that this outcome was the obvious base-case future right from the start. Indeed, from as early as the 1980s when the politicians started really cracking down on building new nuclear plants.
This is an entirely policy-driven problem. If I could see it, anyone who cared to look could - the free market would have been building nuclear plants in 2012 if the question was "how to make money and secure future prosperity?" instead of "how to build an impossibly safe plant, far safer than any standard we've ever applied before?".
People winning or not winning elections shouldn't be a factor in whether people freeze to death in winter or have to start burning wood fires because we're regressing to the early 1900s. People should be able to sort out their own energy needs in a free market.
>if the question was "how to make money and secure future prosperity?" instead of "how to build an impossibly safe plant, far safer than any standard we've ever applied before?"
I'd be happy with this if there wasnt a liability cap on all nuclear plants at ~0.1% the cost of cleaning up 1 Fukushima.
The free market would never, ever, ever have built a single plant if 99.9% of the insurance costs weren't fully socialized, however. That's why the cap exists after all - the government was desperate to get the private sector to build these things.
Arguing to chip away at safety standards in an industry that already has full liability protection against its own mistakes...doesnt make a lot of sense to me.
Especially when solar, wind and storage are all wayway cheaper even before insurance risks are taken into account.
> The free market would never, ever, ever have built a single plant if 99.9% of the insurance costs weren't fully socialized, however.
People do make arguments like this, but when considering 2nd order effects it is a weak argument. The same argument could be made for fossil fuels (which have substantial negative externalities) and powered all the gains humanity made in the last 2 centuries - demonstrating that the positive externalities are far higher than the negative.
The issue with nuclear is that the costs come in very clear events, where for most industrial schemes (like solar, coal or wind) the costs are extremely diffuse and are largely ignored. But it doesn't make sense to start pinning the problems on nuclear when the costs are probably smaller than the alternatives. There are some question marks when compared to solar and wind, but reliable generation capacity is worth quite a lot and people aren't taking the waste products of producing renewable energy seriously. (which sounds like a whine - but if we're going to go crazy about the issue of minute amounts of nuclear waste as people do then we can't give heavy metals a free pass! Or what they put in batteries)
> ...cost of cleaning up 1 Fukushima....
Raising the question of whether the response to Fukushima was appropriate. The response we typically take (again, citing fossil fuels) is to ignore rare problems when they are too expensive to fix. It is enough to swap in a technology that is much better than status-quo. It doesn't need to be perfect.
This part of argument that sounds good, but doesn't actually hold up vs an inspection of what we currently treat as acceptable in the real world. The damage of Fukushima left without remediation is less than damage nations currently accept without blinking. Just a little more concentrated.
> Especially when solar, wind and storage are all way way cheaper even before insurance risks are taken into account.
They said that before the Energiewende too, and now Germany is probably going to need to source some lubricant so that they can be comfortable while Russia has its way with the European energy grid. This pro-renewable argument has a long history of turning out not to be true when tested in reality and exposed to the actual demand people have for reliable power.
It turns out that "renewables are cheaper" - which was said when they started shutting down nuclear plants - was code for "we're going to buy a lot of nat gas". With discouraging results.
IMHO it was a mistake to shut down German nuclear plants before their EOL, but it's a bigger mistake to build new nuclear plants now.
And there are additional strains on Germany's energy grid that nobody predicted, such as exporting lots of electricity to France in 2022 where half of the highly reliable base load generating nuclear plants were down for maintenance and generating absolutely nothing for months.
>The issue with nuclear is that the costs come in very clear events, where for most industrial schemes (like solar, coal or wind) the costs are extremely diffuse and are largely ignored.
I think you've got it exactly backwards.
Free taxpayer fronted insurance that nobody "pays" for until a $1 trillion Fukushima event happens, the cost of decommissioning and storing waste and radiation induced cancers ARE all diffuse and easily ignored.
Whereas the fact that the sun doesnt shine at night and the wind doesnt always blow is fairly well known.
It just so happens that those costs come ON TOP of already being 5x more expensive.
Regulations and laws around liability should be technology neutral and based on historical facts. Every time we have a flood from a hydroelectric dam, the insurance per tw/h generated from hydroelectricity should be increased. Every time a forest fire is triggered by the electricity grid, those units that depend on the guilty equipment should have their insurance increased based on tw/h generated from those units. Same should apply to nuclear, adjusted to the tw/h generated.
Obviously same apply to fossil fuels. When they cause illness and air pollution their insurance to pay for those external costs should go up. When we have extreme weather or rising water temperature, insurance should go up. Anywhere in the world where historically a electricity generated unit create an external cost to society, we should make a note of it and tally it up.
Sadly we won't see those electricity generated sources paying out, but it would be good to have a factually number of how much they in theory should be paying and thus what the theoretical costs to society is when we use, maintain and construct new capacity. That way we can reason around what has more external cost to society and what has less. We can form a number on how much extra a consumer should be paying based on what energy mix they consumed.
Building unsafe power plants holds back nuclear power. Any nuclear power advocate has to realize that every failed plant is a permanent scar on the industry that will never heal.
> No one was in a rush to build nuclear power that costed around 3-4 cent per kw/h,
Do you have a source for prices this low for nuclear? The best I can possibly find is about 4x that cost, from 15-20 cents per kWh. I'm interested in who can do it cheaper than that.
As a more solid data point, Hinkley Point C was built with an inflation-adjusted strike price of 9p / kWh in 2012. That's about 11p / kWh today, or $.13/kWh.
The strike price is the guaranteed price that British ratepayers and the government have guaranteed Hinckley. (The government will make up the difference if retail prices are lower.)
It’s entirely possible its builders will go belly up and need even more bailing out, but that’s some years away.
In 2022 we have significant energy shortage and the prices are now closing to 50 cent per kw/h (and rising). Inflation is at record high is directly linked to energy prices. Elections can be won or lost based on stances regarding electricity production and efforts to reduce the cost. A nuclear plant planned today should take significant less than 15 years.