etudiant said:
The criterion that utilities need to be sensitive to the requirements of investors is quite important, as Anorlunda so correctly points out.
It acts as a reality check on the system, something often lacking in government administrations.
In nuclear, we now have several examples of financially hugely damaging operational and political developments tied to the current concept of nuclear power plants.
For US investors who have suffered the consequences, pointing to on schedule, on cost plant constructions elsewhere does not help. They will not buy this package any more, the risk/reward here is unacceptable.
It remains to be seen whether the industry still can muster the industrial and political capital to successfully reinvent itself.
There are still big plusses to nuclear, relatively very low environmental impact and no CO2 emissions, very reliable baseline power, low operating costs.
If it can be made more accident proof and easier/quicker to build, that might be enough.
You're right, but I think you do have to have a little bit of regulation to guide the free market capitalism within certain boundaries to some extent. You can't just have everything "sensitive to investors" or they'll completely drive the climate and the environment into the ground with coal and gas combustion.
I know this sounds like the dirty word "socialism", but state ownership of the nuclear power build is what allowed France, for example, to deliver relatively fast, consistent and cost-effective deployment of a nuclear-based clean energy system at nation scale. The same goes for China, and the (originally state owned) power generation infrastructure such as the Snowy Mountains scheme in Australia. The Tennessee Valley Authority is another pertinent and interesting example too.
It's clear that there is real room for improvement with the economics and delivery of new US nuclear power projects. Just look at US nuclear power projects, and compare with say France, or China, South Korea, Taiwan etc and look at their delivery timelines and costs for relatively new nuclear projects. Or look at nuclear power in the US recently, and compare the costs to nuclear power in the US 40 years ago. (This is another reason why it's so important to keep existing plants open - a new US nuclear power plant isn't financially equivalent to an existing, already paid for, plant. Not by a long shot.)
What happened? What went wrong? These are valuable questions, and they're important to ask. They have been asked in the literature - for example Bernard Cohen's
The Nuclear Energy Option, or Richard Rhodes'
Nuclear Renewal. It has been recognized for a long time that this is a real problem that needs attention. Why are the costs out of control? If we can get US nuclear power back to where US nuclear power was decades ago, we'll be doing well. Part of this is due to the loss of momentum - the loss of the skilled industrial base with familiarity and practice in nuclear power construction.
Part is due to regulatory ratcheting - but nobody is saying there should be no regulation, or that safety and regulation are incompatible with cost-effective nuclear power. (This includes conventional LWRs, without radical technical changes to what a nuclear power plant looks like.) Nations such as France, China, South Korea or Taiwan deliver relatively fast, cost-effective nuclear power builds, but they do have standards, they do have government regulation of nuclear safety, and they do deliver very safe nuclear power which never hurts anybody, just like the United States.
nikkkom said:
"Highly improbable"?
Let's think about this for a bit from a perspective of "If I would want to blow up the plant, and have $1B to finance it?".
How would one do it? Can this be done?
How much would it cost to hire or train 30-something squad of terrorists? To arm them with plenty of automatic weapons, sniper rifles, RPGs, breaching charges? Maybe even add a mortar team and a chopper with a machine gun.
I bet a lot less that one billion dollars.
You seriously think plant security is ready to face a real military assault team? After spending a decade doing only drills, not any real combat?
And if the attackers do defeat the defending security forces, blowing up a hole in concrete is almost trivial in comparison, especially that they know beforehand that they would need to do that - the physical parameters of nuclear plants are hardly a secret.
OK, suppose you have your highly skilled, heavily armed terrorist army.
You go to the local nuclear power plant. You neutralize all the plant security and local law enforcement.
Now, what are you going to *do* at the nuclear power plant, where and how?
And what will happen, what will the effect be?
And with your resources, weapons and skilled soldiers, and a hypothetical determination to inflict death and evil on the United States (or pick whichever nation) as much as possible, what makes you think that targeting a nuclear power plant delivers good "bang for your buck" compared to targeting a chemical plant, oil refinery, crowded mall or national landmark, stadium, etc?
A nuclear power plant is the worst choice, and soft targets with larger consequences are much more abundant.
nikkkom said:
Color me skeptical.
I recall a case where protesters, one of them a nun, managed to come to a nuclear weapons plant's wall and bang on it with hammers for half an hour, and only after that they were arrested. Googgling...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/19/nun-jailed-break-in-nuclear-plant
Aw, I'm wrong. Not half an hour. "They were able to spend more than two hours inside the restricted area before they were caught".
The Y-12 thing really isn't relevant to nuclear power.
They never had any access inside any buildings, or access to the vaults inside those buildings where HEU is stored, etc.
I suspect the security contractors at Y-12 were able to rapidly identify the "threat" as unarmed, nonviolent flower power protesters and not armed commandos, and they triaged their response accordingly.
