I’m not sure I agree with how you’d be able to execute on that level or organized construction safely, but I think we’re also reaching the “impossible-to-be-sure hypothetical” territory, so I’ll concede the point for now.

I think my problems of cost and time still stand. It looks like adding rooftop solar with batteries to every building is still cheaper (on startup, and likely per MW) than nuclear plants. Regions that cannot support solar, onland wind, geo, or hydro can justify nuclear (at least unless shipping batteries or hydrogen conversion becomes cheap enough to compete), but I don’t think they amount to nearly 15% of the power needs in the world since they represent fairly distinctive regions with low energy demand.

Agreed. It doesn’t end up saving a penny, but it definitely leads to greased wheels along the way and richer politicians.

Of course. That happens. Luckily, we have countries like China with less red tape to use to measure. They’ve been building a lot of nuclear and solar. Their end-to-end solar looks like around $750M per GW (possibly including storage? Not sure. About $2.2B for a 3.3GW plant). Looks like they’re spending about $5B per GW of nuclear.

Sorry I don’t have the solar reference anymore. I was building a math equation for another comment and realized they weren’t talking price, so scrapped it without thinking.

Since those numbers seem to match US figures, I think people in the Western World forget that a lot of bid cost increases or “escalations” are due to the fact that companies try to low-bid to win the contract, knowing every little inconvenience will require a cost increase. It evens out more than people want to admit.

Just did a bunch of my own math before realizing those numbers were already out there. We would need to add 3960 nuclear plants to match current energy demand for the world (440 power 10% of the world).

That would require at least 5 years of construction per plant. It takes about 7000 workers to produce a nuclear plant. To produce them concurrently would require about 27.7 million construction workers dedicated to this project for at least 5 years. So on one hand, perhaps you’re right, since there are 100M construction workers in the world. I can’t, however, find numbers about how much heavy equipment exists to facilitate a product requiring 1/4 the world’s construction workers concurrently. You might be right that if all other construction were ground to a halt, we might be able to manage a 5-year plan of nuclear at the cost of about $20T (I had done the math before realizing this reply were about workers, not cost stupidity). I concede it seems “10x increase world construction capacity” was wrong, and the real number is somewhere around 1.5-2x, so long as we stay conservative with nuclear figures and ignore extra costs of building or transporting nuclear energy to countries incapable of building their own plants.

Interestingly, at those construction numbers, you could provide small-project rooftop solar to the world. I can’t find construction numbers for power farm solar, except that it’s dramatically more efficient than rooftop solar. Unlike nuclear, it appears we could easily squeeze full-world solar with our current world construction capacity.

I won’t bore you with the cost math, but since I calculated them I’m still going to summarize them. Going full nuclear would cost us about a $20T down payment. Going full solar (with storage) down payment is about $4T (only about $1T without storage costs factored). And while nuclear would be cheaper than solar per year after that $20T down, solar power and storage would STILL be cheaper in a 100 year outlook, but would also benefit from rolling efficiency increases as we add new solar plants/capacitors and tear down older ones…

Care to substantiate that the red tape amounts to more than 100 years worth of the same MWH of solar? Or is that just your gut feeling?

Also note, even if the construction cost were 30% inflated, nuclear is still losing handily to solar by the figures I cited.

Cheaper than $140, or cheaper than Solar? Someone just got back to me with claims of lower Nuclear numbers… and even in those claims, Nuclear simply could not get anywhere close to Solar.

Strange. I must be mis-reading your numbers, because the chart I’m reading on your link shows an LCOS/LCOE between $88 and $98… The numbers I was quoting was probably conventional nuclear, and that’s a fair correction. I would really appreciate if you are able to address why my references disagreed with your reference, as I didn’t come out with my numbers off-the-cuff. Is it conventional vs advanced nuclear, or is it a different measurement entirely?

Note also, however, that Advanced Nuclear still loses to Solar handily in every single chart presented in that document. In addition, none of that addresses the front-loaded cost of nuclear vs solar, which amounts to an entire order of magnitude.

Seems an odd question. Since I’m not sure what you’re getting at, my answer might or might not be of value.

The only thing I know offhand about the breakdown is 60% of the total lifetime cost of electricity is in construction costs, a number that is disgustingly through the roof and why using nuclear power for the whole world is unfeasible. It’s that bad.

The rest is “day to day costs” which are far lower with nuclear than other forms of energy. Which would be great if it didn’t cost so much to build a nuclear plant.

You do understand that solving the world’s carbon energy crisis is not an individual person’s job, right? We’re not talking about me and you getting a solar lease in lieu of nuclear. We’re talking about spending about 10% of the cost of 100% nuclear to build 100% solar and wind. For startup costs, going 100% renewable is literally orders of magnitude cheaper than going nuclear. And most countries have the space of potential for it. Yes, as I mentioned elsewhere, building power in and around cities is more complicated, but that is where roof units can come in. It is estimated that any major city could be self-sufficient if every building in it had solar panels on the roof and storage batteries. Even at the higher cost of smaller scale builds, the price difference between solar and nuclear is so large that a municipal solar grid is downright cheap, even if it has to be built that way. And it’s pretty cool how effectively it would mitigate large-scale power outages as a free bonus.

Please understand, most people who oppose nuclear do so for more reasons than the nuclear waste. They hate that people keep focusing on this expensive technology that will take too long to solve the problem, when we have renewable energy that is just so much cheaper to build.

As others pointed out, to build that many nuclear power plants that quickly would require 10x-ing the world’s construction capacity.

My counterpoint is that if we had “just got on with it” for solar, wind, and battery, we would have the capacity by now and the cost per kwh of that capacity would be approximately half as much as the same in nuclear. And we would have amortized the costs.

Except that nuclear isn’t the only, or even the cheapest, alternative to fossil fuels.

That’s why there are lots of regulations for things impacting life safety

Regulations that a lot of pro-nuclear people try to get relaxed because they “artificially inflate the price to more than solar so that we’ll use solar”. I’m not saying all pro-nuclear folks are tin-foilers, but the only argument that puts nuclear cheaper than solar+battery anymore is an argument that uses deregulated facilities.

If solar+wind+battery is cheaper per MWH, faster to build, with less front-loaded costs, then it’s a no-brainer. It only stops being a no-brainer when you stop regulating the nuclear plant. Therein lies the paradox of the argument.

And yet you made simple mistakes like assuming that nuclear reactors only last 40 years?

No. No I didn’t. I was using the lowest life expectancy for nuclear because it steelmanned nuclear for my other critiques. You want to use longer ages, that means you’re prepaying 60% of that longer age at cost. I find it interesting that you called me out on trying to give nuclear more benefit. That said, IAEA holds with 30-40 year life expectancy on a nuclear plant so I think the steel-man I chose is acceptable.

What magic technology have we invented? You realize that lithium ion batteries are 1980’s technology right?

Lithium Ion batteries are being used at large scale now, sure. It’s dishonest to say the ones being built today for utility-scale power are 1980’s technology, just as it’s dishonest to pretend that nuclear power is what it was in the 1950’s. But there are also advancements in molten sand batteries, and even utility scale water energy storage is going down in price (though I believe it’s still slightly more expensive than nuclear).

Yes, that’s what I said. Remember we’re in it for long term solutions. Not bullshit hand-wavy nonsense.

So how is $140/MWH total cost of energy over the life of a nuclear plant “the long haul” over $77/MWH total cost of energy over the life of a nuclear farm? Do we need to discuss how that kind of math works? Building solar+battery plants, running them till EOL, rebuilding them from scratch and repeating several times is still **half ** as expensive as producing the same amount of energy with a nuclear plant until it reaches EOL.

And considering that cost is effectively more like $1,000/MWH or more for the first few years, how exactly are we going to get carbon neutral any time soon by literally adding an order of magnitude to our costs?

Yes 100,000 little projects vs 1…

Sure. Being able to plop it down at a massively high price does have its uses. Note I said there CAN be appropriate uses for nuclear. Just not many of them. The price is just unreasonable. And very often, space isn’t really an issue. Those 100,000 little projects are still cheaper than that 1 project nuclear for the amount of energy created.

And I’m not even Anti-solar… after all it’s literally just second-hand nuclear production… But it’s just that. Second-hand, and why settle for “Second” when we can harness first hand?

For several reasons. First, the sun is in a state of nuclear fusion which is at least 4x more efficient than can be achieved with fission. Second, the sun is gonna burn whether we harvest that energy or not. Third, the most expensive part of a any nuclear power prospect is causing and containing it. We get to skip that step with solar.

I’m just not dumb enough to assume it’s the answer to all our problems

I guess I am “dumb enough”. Between the power created from the sunlight itself, and wind and hydroelectric power created indirectly by it. The numbers all work out.

No way. Batteries are expensive as hell

Batteries+solar runs $77/MWH with current technology. Nuclear runs $175/MWH with current technology (both of these numbers are TCO, not just running costs) 1 and 2. Months back I did a fairly exhaustive analysis on reddit. Wish I’d kept a link of that, but I cut and ran. More importantly, a nuclear plant is usually “locked in” to current efficiency for 50 years or more, where solar farms and battery farms can be traded up. By end-of-life, that nuclear plant will still be a $175/MWH-TCO plant, but could be competing against solar+battery in the order of $50/MWH TCO as large scale battery tech is skyrocketing of late.

I ended up anti-nuclear from a position of knowledge and research, not a position of “omg it’s nuclear”. I started pro-nuclear until I did the math a LOT.

You’re in the green after about 10-15 years with nuclear. So I’m not sure why you bring this point up repeatedly

Per Nuclear Power Economics and Project Structuring, the capital cost accounts as 60% of the total cost of ownership. Yes it’s in the green (capital-wise), by year 10-15. But 60% of Every penny that needs to be spent on a nuclear plant is spent before you hit the “on” button. Solar plants go green in 5 years, but more importantly, you amortize the cost (and continue to do so) over the life of the plant. The latter is always more feasible for a large scale project.

There’s plenty of decommissioned coal/gas/oil plants that are perfect sites for nuclear. Ironically it costs more to clean up the radioactivity left behind by these plants than the nuclear plant will release in it’s whole lifetime.

Compare that to solar roofs, solar parking shades, windmills that can often be installed in “spare lots”, etc.

EDIT: And to be clear, I’m not even saying there may never be an appropriate use for a nuclear plant in going green. There’s just very few of them. Going solar in a big city is a custom gig, but dropping a nuclear plant in its outskirts, not so much. Luckily for me in the US, there’s a whole hell of a lot of unused or unusable land just begging for solar plants.

The problem with Nuclear’s “good enough” is that Nuclear is currently worse than other technology we have in almost every way.

1. Higher total lifetime cost per kwh than solar or land-based wind (and hydro, but that’s niche), even after factoring in capacitors for weather and time of day/year
2. Awkwardly front-loaded TCO. You basically pay a huge percent of that ugly TCO up front, making Nuclear more prohibitively expensive than its modest total lifetime cost would imply.
3. Long life. This is a terrible thing. TCO’s of solar and wind plants are predicated upon a 20 year obsolescence. That means, the TCO includes the cost to build, tear down, and make way for the inevitable better tech in 20 years. Nuclear plants are priced at 50+ year lifetimes. You can’t easily retrofit a nuclear plant with better technology if/when it starts to catch up.

It is absolutely true that solar and wind are better because more money has gone into their research. But because of that, they are better options in almost all real world power situations.

The problem with focusing on nuclear is… why waste all that political capital just to spend 100x the money or more that you could spend to be 100% renewbles in the short term? The front-loaded TCO is the real issue with that one. If you wanna hit 0 emissions tomorrow with Solar/Wind, you’re just paying the up-front costs, knowing there are per-year costs (still cheaper than fossil fuels) to keep it going. If you want to do the same with nuclear, you’re paying for almost all of it out of the gate for 50 years worth. Suffice to say, that’s a budgeting nightmare.

And what’s left is space. Nuclear creates a lot of power in a small area. But wind and solar are both far more easily/efficiently integrated into the space we are already using.

Yeah. I am trying not to get into specific triggering causes because I’m not an expert myself (just have those in my family), but isolation is definitely a factor in these situations, where a person feels unable to reach out or get out for an extended period of time.

Bottom line, beyond any contestation - the right thing to do would have been to report it to the the correct authorities; not us.

You actually think that’s easy? And how do you know she didn’t, and that they didn’t just say the same shit you did? There’s a LOT of documentation of authorities in some areas (and Az is one of those) not taking those types of complaints seriously enough, especially when made against a person of power. There’s literally been a huge outcry about it.

But more importantly, that’s why most people who finally admit to being abused don’t do so to the authorities. They do so to friends, or yes, a public forum. You’re telling me that IF this is true and IF this is actually her responding as many/most victims do, it’s still her fault?

And if it actually happened and she finally got the courage to say it, why exactly should those who care enough to follow her NOT be made aware of it?

What happens, then, when the storm blows over and this is all proven to be false?

With that attitude, it WILL be proven to be false regardless of the facts.

Are ya’ll gonna come back here and admit you were wrong?

Wrong to give the potential victim the benefit of credulity? FUCK no. I hope she’s lying because it means she wasn’t abused, but I’m not going to add to the abuse by denying her life experience. I’m not saying we should globally cancel LTT. I’m saying we shouldn’t cancel HER, like you seem to be doing.

If it comes out that this was all a lie, it might just be too late.

You really have more sympathy for a corporate machine with their ability to hire professional troubleshooters for bad press, than a person who might have been highly abused by that corporate machine? Well there’s the disconnect.

Let me make this clear. If LTT is destroyed by her coming out, that’s on **their ** failure to be a business that can prove itself safe for workers. Note the word “prove”. If they did everything right, they would have mountains of structure and evidence to support that they are a safe environment, not people coming out of every little crack recounting consistent stories about them. If they do everything right moving forward, they change this from being a toxicity issue to an HR issue and whether or not you believe it actually happened they make sure it can’t ever happen again.

Wow. You’re giving off some heavy misogyny vibes right now accusing me of having a herd mentality for pointing out actual symptoms of actual problems. We’re not even talking about the LTT accusation anymore, but about specific behaviors you used to decide that she was probably lying. That is the shit that makes people afraid to tell anyone when they are abused.

Do we think that the LTT facilities don’t have cameras covering every square inch?

I’ve worked at some big paranoid companies, cameras everywhere (full lockdown, fwiw), that have dealt with abuse issues. My own boss was stuck in a toxic environment regarding another coworker for MONTHS before she got the courage to speak up and deal with it. Guess what. The cameras don’t do much when a large part of the abuse is verbal and the abusive moments are just that - moments.

Thing that made me feel like shit? I witnessed some of it, and took it as consenxual because she wasn’t saying anything about it. I was young, dumb, and raised to have the same mindset you’re showing me right now.

That none of it occurred on any kind of technology that would or could be audited, right?

Not sure. I’m using Reid’s Principle of Credulity at this point and time. Should evidence come out she is lying, I will stop giving her the benefit of a respectful response. The presence of cameras at LTT’s office is not that. People are abused in front of, or around, cameras all the bloody time.

Use your brain brochacho. These are the fabrications of someone who is mentally unstable. Not of a victim. Unless… a victim of their own mind.

I’m going to give this to you straight. I’ve heard someone say basically the same thing with the same attitude about a domestic abuser. Then the “lying” victim was hospitalized. If you had lived that life experience, would you act that way?

You understand that people who are victims of abuse, especially sexual abuse, are often afraid to come out, to tell anyone? What you are calling evidence of being fabricated is a symptom of abuse, and people who are trained to understand and report on those types of abuse are also trained to do so from victims who will go so far as to deny it had ever happened.

For your own benefit, please read this National Domestic Violence Hotline article on exactly why people’s loved ones never share that they have had situations worse than Reeve alleged. Yes, it’s about domestic abuse and not workplace abuse, but it is the same type of trauma and helplessness.

I’m not sure I believe this former employee either. I read the “reasons they left,” and it’s simply too unbelievable

Statements from actual victims often do. That’s part of the problem with the culture of not believing, or even alienating, victims. I’m not saying it should be treated as evidence against the company, but the company absolutely should make sure this believe is not happening internally and those of us on the outside should be charitable towards this former employee’s testimony unless contradictory evidence shows up.

Using the Depp/Heard thing as a point of reference. There were good reasons to suspect her claims were fabricated or exaggerated, but I’ve also known people who have gone through many of the relationship experiences she testified about. Until she had her day in court and showed the world her (probable) dishonesty, even she deserved the benefit of charity. Or else by sheer misfortune we will start telling real victims they made it up.