Is Nuclear Power “Too Expensive”?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 18 พ.ย. 2024
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The best argument against nuclear power, maybe the only real argument, is that nuclear power is “too slow” to build and is “too expensive” to finance. Is this true? Or is it another myth, like glowing green goo, that needs debunking? Noted Nuclear Zaddy Kyle Hill finally digs into the economics of nuclear power.
SOURCES:
www.oecd-nea.o...
www.oecd-nea.o...
world-nuclear....
www.mackinac.o...
/ nuclear-power-plants-e...
ifp.org/nuclea...
www.pv-magazin...
www.nrc.gov/do...
www.oneearth.o...
caneurope.org/...
thebulletin.or...
www.osti.gov/e...
www.nei.org/Co...
www.iaea.org/n...
www.energypoli...
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Wow bro.! I can only imagine how much they paid you to push their agenda. 😒
Or even worse. If they actually convinced you. And you believe what you're saying. 😢
You went to Marquette right? Been following you for some time, if you’re in the Cream City drinks are on me at Brothers.
The lack of regulation is a variable that the video doesn't address. The lack of regulation allows for-profit companies to makes their plant price increases sticky. The increase to Georgia customers' power bills for the new plant are an average of 5% on top of inflationary increases. We all know that additional amount isn't going away, ever.
Now if you had said. Oh we need to proliferate our nuclear stockpile. In defense interstellar aggressors.
Then I'd be like make sense. I mean I don't know how much good it's going to do. But sure.
Because outside that the only other option is that the planet Earth is owned by some other alien species.
And our civilization including the products it produces. Belong to it or they.
And they do want a nuclear stockpile.!
Of course it is possible The exact same concerns could be produced by any terrestrial personnel.
But the only reason to acquire such a nuclear stockpile. It's to hold the world hostage.!!!
SO LITERALLY THERE IS NO GOOD REASON FOR THIS VIDEO TO EXIST.!!!!!!!!!!!
THINK ABOUT WHAT YOUR F****** DOING MAN.!!
You make me ashamed to be human.!
Even if they are completely terrestrial. This is a crime against humanity.!
And I am going to report this video as such. Sure. They won't care. And technically because they won't care. It will be damaging my credibility.
But let it not be said I said nothing.
Sure I kind of Willy Wonka did it. "No. Stop. Don't." 🥱
But considering no one will care. And then only increases my incredibility.
You might ask why even bother.
Because perhaps some AI will read this a billion years from now.
And learn something.
In fact most of my TH-cam comments are. Messages to the future.!
And it's like even if they were deleted. They're never really gone. All digital data to have ever existed. Will eventually be sifted through a quadrillion times.
Deleted or otherwise.
And this text already exists in too many places. To never be reconstructed.
Even if deleted.
So it will exist. For the length of time the storage medium exists.
And once it is been processed and/or read by any individual AI.
And AI can essentially be immortal. So too is all the information it has ever acquired processed.
I mean if nothing else. Information is never lost. And always conserved.
So whenever I create a digital anything. I do so with the immortality of the information in mind.
Which is a fact that is something I think you are severely disregarding.!
But you know what they say. It's never too late to change.!
Just because your public statement constitutes a crime against humanity.!!!!!
DOES NOT MEAN YOU CANNOT RECOGNIZE AND RECANT YOUR STATEMENT.
It's never too late to be right.!!! 👍
So sincerely. Good luck man. 🍻
I think there's something pretty special about the argument that we have to account for environmental cost when it comes to nuclear when coal is the king of unaccounted for environmental costs. Local *and* global
I'm a retired Health Physicist and spent most of my time educating people on ionizing radiation. Your work is invaluable, the lack of knowledge I encountered is staggering.
I'm a non-retired physicist & radiation safety hobbyist and I'm not even sure if it can still be called "lack of knowledge" or if it would be better described as "disinformation".
It's not just people *not knowing* stuff -- it's that they believe in actual fantasies that have sort of grown in the public consciousness, in a "perfect" environment devoid of any (quantitative) education and rife with vague fears promoted by lazy media coverage.
What is a "Health Physicist", and what did you do for your job?
@@LoganChristianson google is one tab away....
But health physics, or the science of radiation protection is a profession devoted to protecting people from potential radiation hazards.
@LoganChristianson
I calibrated nuclear medicine equipment from gieger counters to x ray machines, dose calibrators etc. As well as certifying labs for safety and security. There's a lot more to it but that's an overview.
@@joelb8653 That's a pretty cool job
Back in the 1960s the US built nuclear plants in just 4 years, one of those plants is still in operation today, more than half a century later.
That was during the golden age of nuclear innovation tho. The US was literally experimenting with nuclear trains, cars, ships and even some appliances like the fallout game 😮. The Us went all out on creating nuclear technology at the time.
@@Drew-v2fnot 4 plants in operation, multiple plants built in the span of 4 years, which is a very short timeframe for construction, which means they’re up and running and working towards profitability much sooner. That’s a huge deal for the economic side of things, and his point about the one that still runs is that they have longevity. They were built quickly AND built to last. It’s not only possible, it’s been done before. We can do it again if we put in the work.
@@Drew-v2f People often associate fast construction with shoddy construction. The implication of those facilities still operating is that the "fast" 4 yr construction did not impede on its quality.
Also I do wonder what is an alternate source of energy that's not commonly used...
You also do know that due to the inherent needs of nuclear power generation, their facilities are usually the most resistant right?
And btw, the way to "not have all the eggs in one basket" for an emp or a natural disaster is to have power sources be spread out geographically, and not to just have different types of generators.
Considering the way the Government takes care of our infrastructure ... NY subway 120 years old, brownouts/blackouts, power lines/poles/stations/bad BLM management cause massive fires, geoengineering causes climate change, potholes in my road aren't fixed after 20 years ... I'd worry about that nuke plant falling apart in 200 years, then they'll have to deal with all those rods that last 5,000,000,000,000,000,000~
@FunGamingContent what are you trying to say?
0:30 Too long is when it's longer than the term of a congressman so he can't take credit for it.
this is 100% why most projects are short-sighted like "one more lane".
Science isn’t great at predicting people.
That is just for gov funding, and look at the whole when you focus your operations on gross profit for this financial quarters and share holder profits alone anything longer term than lunch is kinda irrelevant due to shortsighted profits alone.
That's like the main problem in most of politics, politicians making decisions not for the sake of the country or the long term effects on the countries society, but rather making decision that benefit them be it indirectly or directly
Bingo
“We need to factor in the cost of disasters!”
Because oil and coal have historically never had accidents that require massive amounts of money to clean up.
Very good point
yeah but coal disasters doesnt irradiate a 500 km area with deadly radiation and kill humans in horrifying ways
@@RAHULTMNT100 coal is literally radioactive.
@@loganjackson637 read my comment again
@@RAHULTMNT100 I did read the comment, it was just so categorically wrong that it didn’t warrant more than pointing out a glaring flaw.
If you want a real conversation we can talk about the fact that accidents related to nuclear power are orders of magnitude fewer in number than accidents related to coal and oil, let alone the fact that fossil fuels are the direct cause of millions of deaths per year due to pollution, disease, and climate change.
It is a pure and simple denial of reality if you think the dangers of nuclear power outweigh the constant and rising threat of fossil fuels. You’d rather a far worse option that you’re familiar with than a better one that is unfamiliar, and because you can ignore the damage fossil fuels cause, you can pretend like nuclear power leads to far worse, which simply is not true.
Nuclear power is expensive, but a clean environment is priceless.
Clean like wind, solar, water etc
@@Gurumeierhans and nuclear
its not "expensive" it just costs more
Solar is not entirely clean the manufacturing process is rather poluting @@Gurumeierhans
@@thedragonfurious4912 Amortization in a very short timeframe. Everything is emitting, its just the question how fast you can recoup
Too expensive when all your assets are in fossil fuels
Nuclear isnt in the best interest of politicians pocketbooks, and thats why they fearmonger it
Exactly! And that’s why it’s not a solution for ALL countrys!
I dont know how it is in the USA, but here in Germany nuclear power just isnt a viable option!
Just because it’s 1st: Too expensive too rebuild, bc we just had our last 3 power plants shutdown in 2023, and 2nd it was just 6% of the
electricity anyway, also more than 50% of the produced electricity is already from reusable sources!
The only problem is that 16 years (and a bit) of conservative government although some of your politicians would probably call them left wing lol) have killed the growing solar-industry Germany once had, in a bloody mess!
But it’s a lot easier to handle a few tons of VERY spicy trash, than a few billion tons, of not so spicy trash!
6% is a lot for one plant wtf?@@Plantoffel
And the rest in the battery industry and the wind and solar industries.
@@technus147Than you misunderstood me/I said it weird, it’s not from one power plant, it’s the WHOLE nuclear power all of Germany produced, I found something between 7 and 3, in the last few years, so there where probably a few more.
And again, I don’t think nuclear isn’t an option at all, but it’s an option for country’s who still need to shut down a LOT of fossile fuelled power plants!
(Prob. like the USA, but especially country’s that have the need for a lot of electricity but are still „in the making“ of their power grid, and production, like china or India)
the issue with nuclear power... is a lack of nuclear power. We need more to prove points, and need more to replace coal plants.
We have plenty if you consider naval nuclear power plants
I would've thought with how well Frances grid weathered the last few years it would become the example for the rest of Europe but nope same shit different day
Nuclear Power Plant deployments also get cheaper the more you build
When you only build one every few years skills get lost, workers change jobs, supply chains need be rebuilt and so on
France in the 1970s built more than 50 large power reactors within 15 years and it was relatively cheap.
Germany have dozen perfectly working plants that needs to be plugged back in.
Wasn't there some thing about repowering coal plants?
A good parallel for the "meltdown cleanup" cost is a real issue with coal that no one discusses. Coal ash storage contaminating ground water, a real issue for older plants with inadequate storage areas. The precautions for it that are now required haven't yet stood the test of time and are vulnerable to natural disasters like earthquakes cracking containment barriers or floods letting the ash leach into waterways.
And the decommissioning cost? You can’t recycle materials from a nuclear reactor they have to be disposed of safely.
@@Grz349 Most of the uranium/plutonium can be & most of the rest decays in shorter timeframes.
@@galaxyanimal yeah but its still a few 100 hundred years that cost is never mentioned anywhere
@@galaxyanimal so just as a comparison: germany has currently several projects of decomissioning nuclear powerplants. the earliest were decomissioned in the 90´s. these reactorblocks took now about 30 years of dismantling and decontamination of the building materials etc and the estimated cost of that is about the same as the current building cost of a reactorblock with 1,5gw.
Hinkleypoint C will cost per 1,5gw block about 25 billion (if its not getting more expensive) and will have to run at 100% capacity at fixed selling prices wich are higher than the average electricity generation price in the UK (wich are sinking) for about 30-35 years to break even. with the dismantling cost being contractually fixed to 1.5 billion, the tax payer has to step in and cover another 23 billion for the dismantling in 2090 wich will take around 35 years.
this is not covering save longterm storage cost, fuel recycling cost etc, wich are also covered by the taxpayer.
The calculations that nuclear is not that expensive generally ignore the externalised costs like mining, fuel processing, storage, subsidies etc. with those included, nuclear is vastly more expensive than renewables.
and also they are generally just covering the direct CO2 emissions of the plant and ignore the whole fuel cycle from mining to long term storage of waste etc.
(and they also ignore the availability of nuclear fuel on the world market and who controls the majority of this market... hint: its russia)
Except coal ash is easily and safely collectible for other industrial applications. It's a major provider of some industrial materials.
It's worth noting that in the US each nuclear power plant is custom engineered. Which includes a lot of review costs and studies and safety evaluations. If we could get a design that could easily be replicated wherever it's built it would reduce a lot of time and cost.
Yes, i think factory built micro-reactors that can be trucked to location are way better. Building a massive nuclear power plant is a megaproject, and megaprojects never come in on time or under budget. Even worse, they are liable to mass scale corruption, which is a major problem in the countries that could most benefit from more power. In comparison, VC funded solar/wind/battery installations take very little management/effort to get them off the ground.
each place faces different characteristics. one might be near a volcano for example here it would need additional fortification from heat, ash, ext... another might be near unstable muddy ground. here it would need ways to ditch water without corroding soil further, as well as, many other things to take into account. thus it is always going to be better for safety to custom engineer a new facility so that it is safer from most likely faults.
It was already discovered decades ago that nuclear is more economical at large scales. We've already had failed SMR projects in the US because it turns out that, even after clearing regulatory hurdles, and getting massive subsidies and loan guarantees, it's too expensive. The economies of scale don't help when the scale is never that big.
@@fwiffo you can have designs at scale though. I'm not talking anything small. There may be a few things specific to the site. But most designs could carry over.
@@zuko9085 But it's also just factually false that every nuclear plant is a custom design. Most are designs that get reused multiple times (or are intended to be reused multiple times, if the projects aren't complete failures). To cite a notorious example, there are 12 Westinghouse AP 1000 reactors in operation across the world. Of course, there were 9 more as part of failed nuclear projects in India, the UK and the US. People in South Carolina are still paying higher electricity rates to fund a canceled nuclear project featuring two AP 1000 reactors.
The Netherlands is also having this debate. A study by our universities showed that indeed the lowest system cost for clean electricity is a combination of wind, solar, batteries and nuclear. Great overview, Kyle.
From what year was this? Everything older than 2020 is outdated because of the falling costs for Solar and Batterys.
@@annocraft couple of weeks ago i believe
@@annocraft renewables get exponentially more expensive as they fill a higher fraction of the grid. meaning to keep their cost low you need a good baseline of energy generation, and nuclear is perfect for it. meaning when you combine nuclear and renewables they fix each other's disadvantages and makes both a lot cheaper in the long run.
@@danilooliveira6580 This is not true. We do not need baseload generation, we need peakers that can ramp up in the evenings. The duck's back of the duck curve is getting lower and lower from more and more solar (and wind), at 7:25. This means that nuclear's baseload generation is not needed during these periods and will need to be turned off instead. Nuclear does not fit well with renewables, it is not flexible enough to deal with rapid changes in demand. Batteries, pumped hydro and/or gas/biomass-fired peakers are much better at this than nuclear.
hoi geit! heb je nog een linkje naar de studie? ben wel nieuwschierig wie wat erover te zeggen heeft hier
Illinois professor did a good breakdown of the cost of nuclear power. He even explains the great idea of building nuclear power plants in decommissioned coal and gas plants (or decommissioning them for the purpose of it) as the infrastructure (cooling water, turbine hall, power transmission infrastructure etc) is already in place. I have also always thought beside hydro electric dams would be another great place to build as there is good access to water and power distribution infrastructure.
I think the big thing people need to understand is no one power source will solve all our problems we need them all. To quote Issac Arthur from S.F.I.A. "when asked whether I want wind or solar or hydro or geothermal or nuclear, I say yes please!"
Look at where the nuclear power plants are built in Ontario Canada. They put them next to the great lakes. They have no cooling towers. They basically use a geothermal system to cool the nuclear power plant. Funny thing is I was googling nuclear power in Ontario at one point and I ended up on a hunting and fishing forum. They said the best place for fishing on the great lakes were where the nuclear power plants were. The water was a couple degrees warmer there. That is where all the fish ended up living. The slightly warmer water was a great place for them to live. I believe over the course of a summer they maybe get a couple degrees warmer in that part of the lake. Not a huge amount but still a nicer environment for the fish.
absolutely, variety is important. we need diversification, to exploit the resources available in a smart way! solar and wind are always a good contribution. if we improve the tech reduce the costs and the waste and slap a decent panel on every roof that's a crap ton of energy coming in, especially in virtually wasted spaces like the cities rooftops! who complains about the "estetics" is a dumba** 😑
my mom put 2 fat panels on her roof 15 years ago and never paid for power again. sustainable aircon in the summer is possible afterall.
nuclear power can do the heavy lifting and the rest can be added with other systems, right? especially with the huge demand of energy that, collectively, private computers and home appliances are causing, recently.
I've got my complaints about some forms of energy. Not because of what they do, but because of how people want to implement them. I don't want a massive field of solar panels when we can just put panels in parking lots for shade and on roofs for added insulation. I don't want wind farms taking up the plains and killing tens of thousands of birds when we can just put them off shore in more milder, consistent winds. If we're going to try for saving the environment, we should be looking at decommissioning entire forests to do it. Not when we can make a much more compact facility to do it in.
@@vallahdsacretor4839 I personally think wind power is a poor competitor in the first place. Very space intensive and not a lot of power for the amount of moving parts to build/maintain.
Solar looks to me to be a good option, however like you say we should really focus on putting solar on top of every roof and covering car parks and other structures in it before we even look at solar farms. And what we should really do is build it as a roof structure, not putting down a perfectly good roof then drilling holes to mount solar on top but actually make it a roofing material that can be removed and repaired. Between this and baseload nuclear I think we could really make headway in more sustainable power.
@@vallahdsacretor4839 Because putting them in those places is more expensive and a lot less efficient than a dedicated plant . Same with offshore wind , due to increased maintenace and infrastructure costs. Hell they went down the horizontal blades route rather than vetical turbines despite the later being more efficient when arrayed though weaker individually.
While good for more isolated areas neither will be able to replace fossil fuels and are not ever likely too unless we get some serious advances in material technology.
imagine adding a 9/11 fee to every skyscraper ever built lol
That would be ridiculous
We put it on the airports instead....
@@wesnohathas1993security costs money? That's fucking crazy
@@IneffableMasquerade Correction: *security theater
Wonder if insurance & security costs did go up after 9/11 tho -- if so, there's your fee
@@not_enough_data_ most likely only for already highly endangered individuals and institutions. ie. look at the wef at davos, where half the swiss army and private security is protecting a village in the snowy mountains. or think about the not very well kept secret about antiair systems and even electronic warfare equipment being deployed to similar places. the olympic games, especially now in france. or look at the papamobile. or any president's entourage (though the latter could also be accredited to a$$a$$inations alone).
then again, this is all paid by taxes, which isnt a direct cost to the people, but still every year you pay just that much more.
The land use comparisons gave me SimCity flashbacks of just how much space you had to use for wind turbines to produce enough power for your city vs using nuclear plants
Ever heard of off-shore wind farms?
Germany produced about 60 percent of its electricity in 2023 through renewables
Luckily unlike simcity earth is kinda big
edit: big like we could provide 10x current global installed capacity of all electricity with solar or wind on 0.006% of land, and that doesn't include water.
@@macbuff81 Yes, they also IMPORT energy from other counties because
wait for it.......
They shutdown a nuclear powerplants and bulid new
wait for it.........
Natural Gas Powered plants
SimCity didn't have waste entombment.
And you think its a good idea to just keep mining....forever? like what kind of logic is that? yea lets keep on digging deeper and deeper for coal. There is a limit and its coming sooner than you think for simple economics. We simply cant keep on getting easy to get coal for energy even natural gas will run out in the next few decades like 70 max years with our current expanding power consumption. Its simply not sustainable. Renewables and maybe a mix of nuclear is the only real solution. even if we don't switch in the next 70 years we will have to deal with much worse problems but old and suborn people don't want to acknowledge the fact of global warming. If the next governmental succession doesn't do something positive we will all have much bigger problems to deal with than squabbling over weather or not its worth it to transition it will be obvious but maybe too late.
11:36 Cherenkov radiation of reactors makes me understand what it must feel like to be a mosquito seeing one of those UV electric traps
Come on in!
The water is VERY clean.
I find it funny people associated Nuclear with green when Cherenkov radiation makes it that really pretty ghostly blue hue instead. Like those you see in sci-fi movies powering ships.
I like your pfp!
Must not touch. Must not touch...😮
@@justinfowler2857 L a m p
I was involved in a research reactor project here in the US. The first was a small test reactor. It was completed on time and on budget. They had some difficulties getting everything tuned, but from what I heard, that wasn't unexpected for a testbed.
The larger production reactors ran 4 years late and were 100% over budget. It still hasn't been turned on, and I don't think the spicy rocks have even shown up yet.
The biggest difference between the two? The test reactor was designed to research reactor regulations. The production reactors were voluntarily built to powerplant regulations.
SHOULD it have been built to those regulations?
@@tarod3 I am just office staff at a construction company, so I'm probably not the right person to answer that.
@@absolutechaos13then I have to wonder at the point you are making with this post
There's so much coal and natural gas to lobby against nuclear to over regulate it out of competition.
@@kj_H65f that nuclear regulations drive up the cost much more than you think.
The only TH-camr who's sponsor is consistently practical and something I'd consider using. That's pretty damn rare.
My state's energy costs are rather cheap. A major reason for this is that half the electricity generated is from nuclear plants.
You need freedom with gas!
I live 8 miles from Turkey Point nuclear power plant in Homestead, FL and electric bill is 40% cheaper than when i lived in Lehigh Acres, FL where power had to be 'delivered'. After educating myself and my family about how it works, we're no longer afraid to live near one..
New Hampshire gets 40% of its power from one plant... while also exporting power to Massachusetts which lets them hit their Green Energy goals.
Illinois? Half our power comes from nuclear too. I get a little bit of a chub everytime I see the Byron cooling towers
@@JohnD6280 I still would want to know the rates of leukemia in children under 10 close to your living space. There were significant studies made in the last 50 years about the risk of especially children getting cancer. Even with so called "safe" reactor-tech.
So, this past May, a nuclear plant near me had to temporarily shut down due to cooling issues. In trying to quell meltdown fears, a few of your videos helped calm down said fears in friends and family.
Those types of shutdowns are specifically why they're safe. Modern plants cant meltdown. There are so many fail safes involved, that the plant will automatically shutdown if basically anything at all goes wrong.
Really old plants still can technically metldown, but it often requires extreme situations and very poor oversight. And even then, the meltdowns are usually contained to within the plant itself with zero fatalities. For example, one of the Three mile island reactors had a meltdown, and the plant continued operating without it for decades after with zero people who died to the meltdown.
Disasters like Chernobyl are impossible today, while disasters like Fukushima are exceptionally rare and require extreme circumstances, on old models, with poor oversight. Basically every other type of meltdown is only really potentially dangerous to workers at the plant itself, and not really to the surrounding locations. They tend to be very well contained. And again, on more modern plant designs, its not even possible for them to melt down due to how many failsafes there are, which will automatically shut the plant down over basically anything going wrong.
@@eragon78: Reminds me of an episode of _Burn Notice,_ actually. Michael (in v.o.) talked about how many failsafes are built into elevators, while he disabled an elevator by jamming a doorstop into one of the outer doors. It sounds like there are even more failsafes for nuclear powerplants than there are for elevators, so this might be a good comparison to make to quell fears.
@@sdfkjgh Id say its a pretty good comparison yea, just cranked up to 11 in modern nuclear power plants.
The problem is, these cooling issues are becoming more and more common in countries that get hit by global warming. Many nuclear plants rely on rivers for cooling and have to shut down when the rivers become too hot.
This ruins the main upside of nuclear: The promise of high utilisation rates and constant availability with only few predictable downtimes.
If you need backup-energy sources for your nuclear plants, then nuclear loses its last advantage over renewables.
@@T33K3SS3LCH3N Does a slightly warmer water really effect the cooling of a nuclear plant all that much? I find that a little hard to believe. The reactor that this water is cooling is hundreds to thousands of degrees hotter than room temperature. The water being a few degrees hotter shouldnt matter as it is still significantly colder than the thing it is cooling. And water has a massive thermal capacity.
Do you actually have sources that slightly hotter water actually effects the cooling capacity of nuclear plants? Because this the first that ive ever heard of this specific problem.
Good grief, the video just dropped, and bots are the first four comments.
Remember to report all bot posts.
Sadly, that doesnt do anything. Even direct action from the channel owner is insufficient just by the sheer amount of bots
Why not have youtube deal with it, is it not their platform?
bots always appear first. they just jump on every new upload. It takes us actual humans time to get around to watching and commenting. So humans usually push the bots out after a day or so
@@stetytielemans Does it even concern them? To them all it does is "boost engagement", so they can show investors that their platform is "growing"
@@stetytielemansThey can’t because they are so hellbent on ending adblockers that they end up letting all the bots in the wild.
It’s almost as if… a lack of a nuclear power industry drives up prices and increases wait times while hampering innovation… 🤔
No, it only seems like this - the problem is, that a large amount of the costs is not priced into the production costs. Insurance and Waste Management are financed by the public - wich is a significant part of the real costs.
The energy price seems cheap, just because it's a privatization of profits and a socialization of costs. Most costs are simply paid by tax money.
this.. no significant amount of orders in the past decades lead to lack of expertise and slowing down innovation in the field. this is a vicious circle that needs to be broken.
Just wanna say your channel is one of the driving factors behind me choosing to major in nuclear engineering as I start university, so thank you for highlighting this topic so often
Good choice, the future of your career is more than safe 👍
I am a nuclear engineer that just graduated this year, and started my crit safety job. I got inspired by similar educational content on youtube as well. Our field is needed more than ever and I wish you luck in your studies!
Omg same!!! I’m starting as a nuclear engineer this fall!
Welcome to our wonderful field, the best branch of engineering.
Nuclear Power is Bussin’.
fr fr no cap.
Gen z just got out of indoctrination school. Now they know everything they were told and nothing that they learned.
on god on god
On that rs Cuh
@@sterling1489 jez they removed my comment saying don't believe everything you are told.
As somebody in the utility industry who deals with electric companies and state regulations, thank you. From private discussions I've had, a lot of utility companies are extrememly interested in nuclear power, but after Summer and Vogtle, plus the PR fiasco of Fukishima, they are hesitant because of the massive capital outlay upfront. Kyle, thank you for bringing up the capacity factors. I've been trying to convince my superiors and others that capacity needs to be a factor in the LCOE, but I haven't been too successful. I'm glad someone with some actual influence is out there spreading that information.
By the way, if you are in the US and passionate about nuclear, I cannot recommend contacting your elected officials highly enough. If you pester them enough, a lot of them will actually listen, especially at the state level. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission also has a comment system for interested parties.
But he is wrong and uses outdated data in favor for him
in fact, LCOE has started adding "firming requirements" onto their estimates, but it's a laughable 4h storage which is very inadequate for a stable grid and even then the estimates actually is pretty damn close to Nuclear's LCOE and the firming cost has been rising every year since. It's very likely by Lazard's 2025 LCOE report it'd be as expensive as Nuclear, and that's without system integration costs like transmission included.
Ya I worked at Vogtle and it was a dirty mix of CB&I milking the project as an infinite money machine and regulation regulating for regulation's sake. Workers were regularly working 60-70 hours getting overtime, and just standing around and talking and never actually getting work done. It was the running joke that they were nuclear gypsies and had nothing better to do at home, so they just hung out and socialized at work and got paid overtime for it. There was no expectation of efficiency and people just assumed the next round of talks would approve more money for the project. It was a horrible inefficient machine under CB&I and I left wondering how they ever got contracts for work.
On the regulation side, they require practically every piece to be safety certified for nuclear, even if it never will touch radioactive material. This balloons costs and times because not many companies supply nuclear rated widgits so the ones who do can charge a premium. They shut down the project at one point because a regulator decided that the desiccant used to keep the pipes dry before they got installed didnt meet regulation because it wasnt nuclear rated, even though it wasnt even going to be installed with the desiccant in it. It shut down construction for weeks while regulators argued if the desiccant had to be nuclear rated in order to preserve the pipes. At one extreme, the regulator who said yes said that any pipe that had been installed that used the non regulated desiccant would have to be ripped out and only pipes with the proper desiccant could be installed. When it came out that NR desiccant didnt exist as a product and it would take 5 years of testing to certify a product at a cost of millions of dollars, they begrudgingly let them continue to use the regular stuff. All the while, everyone was still coming into work and standing around in hold state, still working 60-70 hour weeks. In my opinion, if CB&I had never left, plants 3 and 4 would have still been in construction.
The US needs to figure out its balance of where to regulate if it wants to build nuclear again, because right now it is so risk averse that it costs billions, and current construction work ethics cause huge overruns due to grifting the system.
Grid electricity is concentrated electicity generation.
Grid electricity has dispersed customers.
Grid electricity has a dispersed source of cash flow.
Dispersed electricity generation in distant renewables and concentrated into the grid is ars about.
Dispersed electricity generated on the dispersed customers rooftops and stored in the FREE storage of BVs oversized battery when the sunshines, means customers do not need grid electricity.
Grid cashflow will crash every day the sun shines.
Grid cashflow will go into an economic death spiral as ROI from increasing kWh rates increases, or ???
Grid owners, investors, will be faced with a slow death with fixed rates to fewer customers.
What's especially frustrating is that Fukushima would've been a non-event if the plant was somewhere that's not Japan. It's not an entirely unique problem to Japan, but it's a nation that's fundamentally much higher risk compared to, say... Norway. Norway has virtually no earthquakes, nevermind a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, and nevermind tsunamis. So do slews of other countries. Even by Japan's standard, the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami was an extreme outlier.
we have spent longer debating the economics and time costs of nuclear power than it would have taken to build a full nuclear power grid in america
In Georgia, merely expanding an existing nuclear power plant, not even building an entire plant from scratch, but just adding new reactors, well, permitting started in 2006, construction didn't even begin until 2013, and it wasn't until 2023 that unit 3 started generating power, 2024 for unit 4. It shouldn't take nearly that long, but unfortunately, it does. Part of the delay in beginning construction was dealing with lawsuits from anti-nuclear nut, but even without that, it was still 10 years from actual start of construction to generation of power. And again, that's just for expanding an existing plant, not building a new one. Not good at all. We definitely need to do better with that!
It's like that for most new infrastructure construction. It's been a problem since the 90s. Whole projects grind to a halt because one group files a cease and desist over an "endangered" snail... which, come to find out a few years later, isn't actually endangered at all.
Yes, the snail thing really happened. Stuff like that happens all the time. Eco Nuts don't give a wet rip about the planet; all they care about is hating humanity.
Not disagreeing with you, but there's a bit more context to Vogtle 3 and 4. For reference, I work in the utility industry and have had these discussions with others about nuclear power. Those lawsuits weren't just some anti-nuclear nut, but there were contract breaches by some of the construction companies, which ultimately forced the manufacturer of the reactor itself to go bankrupt (Westinghouse, for those interested). Contract lawsuits take forever. Plus, they then had to get a new contractor, who jacked up the prices because there are only like 5 nuclear reactor construction companies in the US, and they were subject to that much more scrutiny after everything else.
He said in the video that Japan can build them in 3 years... Surely to god, America can match that speed? If the powers that be, regulatory bodies, got out of the way?
A major part of that delay was rework due to a workforce that wasn't proficient at nuclear-grade construction. The good news is that at the end of construction there was such a workforce. The bad news is that without more nuclear construction in the pipeline those skills will die out again.
This is the big advantage SMRs and microreactors have. By building identical reactor components in the same factory with the same personnel the training costs can be amortized over many many units.
@@dirtyblueshirtI was on those domestic AP1000 projects and of course there wasn't a seasoned nuclear construction work force.
Or experienced nuclear construction management.
Also, the way work is managed and controlled today vs. the '70's and '80's has a huge impact.
SMR's are always going to fall victim to the economics of scale.
That's why the AP600 became the AP1000.
Stretch the containment, RPV, fuel assembly, and pressurized and bingo!
My first outage was Connecticut Yankee in 1985.
I think the larger problem is that at least some people think that a Nuclear Power Plant is the same tech as the Nuclear Bomb.
When it's not...
I thought they were using high explosives and timing them at microsecond precise timings to make fissile material go supercritical in powerplants.
Had to explain that to my wife, along with the fact that even nuclear weapons don't just go off. In fact, it's actually pretty difficult to get a nuclear explosion.
Just added this topic to my list yesterday, in fact
@@792slayer And even that's an understatement of a century.
@@j100j Luckily, that's not how it's done.
Meanwhile, new data centers are being built to use their diesel generators during peak times when the power grid is overloaded.
lol the entirety of south africa has only managed to keep the lights on the past few years thanks to burning diesel
Data centers ever since they came into existence have been built with Backup power.... this is not something new due to Renewables. Your argument is dishonest
@@lumex1713 Having backups and sustaining regular use are two very different things.
@lumex1713 that's not what they said. Try reading it again.
@@weasle2904 I have not heard of any Datacenter that is sustaining itself with Diesel generators. Not with these Fuel Prices.
Hey Kyle, when you check how much space the facilities use, you could also factor in the amount of nature that is wasted by the regarding mines - mines for uranium and maybe mines for rare earths for batteries.
The Illinois EnergyProf TH-cam channel has a great video on the economics of nuclear also. This is a great topic to discuss and dispel myths.
I was THINKING about his video as soon as I saw Kyle's new video dropped.
That video and this video are in the same ballpark but still manage to cover different topics. This video is about nuclear vs. renewables, while that video is nuclear vs. traditional fossil fuel baseline plants. The EnergyProf's video shows how private utility-type entities adore lower capital costs because they can borrow less money and make profit sooner, even if the overall long-term gains are less than what nuclear can deliver. That's why private utilities are also friendly towards wind and solar, because of how quick and easy it is to buy into it.
The implication is also that even if the construction times and the risks and the bureaucratic obstructions are reduced, non-modular nuclear is still at a disadvantage due to construction times and capital cost. In this sense, modular reactors are a big winner, because they fit what utilities are looking for: cheaper and faster.
Decouple media is another good one. They did a 4 part series on Vogtle. The last podcast he did was talking about the economics of nuclear based on a study of nuclear based out of Australia that talked about how to drive down the cost of nuclear. one thing I like about that podcast is he talks about the reality of how the world works. I work in Oil and Gas and people seem to think oil and gas will be going away. That isnt happening. Its just going to transition away from fossil fuels to chemical engineering. 50% of the world is fed from ammonia that uses natural gas as a feedstock. Where I live they are looking at using the storage capacity we have available for CO2 underground to start to take these heavy emitting industries to decarbonize them and store the CO2 underground. We also spend a lot of money developing industries to use the CO2. CO2 is essentially a waste product. We are already using that waste product to make other products. We also already know how to use it to produce more oil. Typical oil extraction gets 10% of the oil out of a reservoir. With water they can get it to 40%. With CO2 they get 60%. Some people might say "well you are still producing oil which is bad for the environment". That is true. We can also potentially not use any fresh water. I'd personally rather use the fresh water to grow more food. Its not the perfect solution but its still a better solution than what we do now and if we can move towards a chemical engineering economy from a fossil fuel economy then oil is just a resource to make stuff that isnt emitting more CO2.
@@bersl2 Unfortunatly modular reactors lose on that critical factor of actually producing power below the cost that you can sell it at due to fundamental scaling laws in enginering which have always made larger things the most cost effective. That's why utilities have actually NEVER been interested in this modular micro reactor concept and have told the industry that every 20 years over the last 60 years which is how many times this zombie idea has been floated.
6:30 maybe you could talk about the Catenary Curve that those sexy cooling towers follow in another video? Its truly a fascinating piece of mathematics and occurs not just in cooling towers but also in hanging chains and certain arches.
4:35 I love how Kyle has taken the Nukecell title and just ran with it. Fuckin brilliant lol.
The problem is that it was after he was banned and someone commented that the banning was done by a nukecel as in an incel about nuclear. So he's not the nukecel it was the mod
@@travishunter8573 🤓☝
Extremely proud to be taking part of Palisades recommision!!! Very busy getting everything ready for the new SMRs.
12:25 this is raw CONSTRUCTION TIME. But it leaves out years of planning and organisation BEFORE construction can actually start.
This is not just due to excessive regulation, but also involves necessary things like scheduling all of your suppliers and construction crews and getting your finances in order. The nuclear supplier industry is very small, so you generally have years of waiting time until a project with a major supplier can get started.
In countries that have long-going nuclear construction projects and continue to build one reactor after the other, the total lead time from initial planning to completed construction can be less than 10 years (usually because the planning already started earlier, overlapping with other projects). But for most countries on earth, 15-20 years from planning to completion are far more realistic.
People keep talking about "regulations" but never get specific. You've got two pro-nuclear parties in the US, passing multiple rounds of deregulation, and handing out massive subsidies and loan guarantees. Why can't the nuclear industry get its act together already?
@@fwiffo Very country specific. Here in Australia for instance we have regulations banning nuclear power. A new power plant would require a favourable government with enough seats of power to push regulation change through. That'd take multiple successive popular governments here to get that sort of power. All this before the planning can even get underway and then the building time. You can tack at least 10 years just for regulation changes.
Very true. I look at the light rail construction in the Seattle area, and while it is taking longer than expected, once it starts, it goes quickly. The longest part definitely seems to be filing National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) (and SEPA, if applicable) forms, buying land, community input, and lawsuits/litigation. Some countries can start construction much faster without much red tape, but sometimes carefully planning a project can end up reducing construction, maintenance, and environmental costs.
What Kyle left out in this consideration is the time, money, energy that is necessary to tear down a nuclear power plant. Germany is afaik the only country that is undergoing this task. It takes decades to carefully break down the power plant, sort the debris into different categories of radioactive material to treat it properly.
Nuclear power gets very expensive again if you consider the whole Life cycle of a nuclear power plant.
@@Craftlngo France and Belgium have recently decommissioned nuclear power plants. They go through the tear down as well.
11:44 the "S" on the exercise book grid got me 😂
I thought it was Sabaton
loool that takes me back. I guess it must have been in a TV show at the time or something because different people in different countries do it, and there was no internet or mobile phones back then.
The price for a better planet is higher than the price of nuclear energy will ever be
Better stated: the cost of a worsening planet is higher than the price of nuclear power.
Wait, are you socialist?
Externalised costs should never be accounted for, it's only cutting into the profits of investors which could be the you as small scale investor!!!1111!!!!!!11!1
But more likely is held forEXAMPLE by big holding coorperations which own like 99% of all stocks.
@@deathgun3110 what’s
"It's just meat"
"What do you mean its JUST meat, go to the car aisle"
"There's more meat"
"What? Where are you?"
"I'm at Meat"
"WHY ARE YOU BUYING A CAR AT THE MEAT STORE??"
I’d be interested in a bumper sticker with “I support FIRM Nuclear Energy”
that just sounds like fence sitting
Firm Bob's and butt's too
Nuclear power is essential for a carbon free source of baseline power.
Carbon free? That means you don't have to build huge storage locations underground and suddendly the waste vanishes? Didn't know that magic has become science now...😅
Nuclear is one possibly for carbon free electricity. But is it essential / necessary ? -> no.
Dang someone had better tell Norway.
@@TarikDaniel Holy shit can you be anything BUT a broken record that keeps repeating the same nonsense over and over again?
@@LineOfThy Facts don't change just because you ignore them.
Bonus points for including subject-relevant info in the sponsor advert thereby enticing me to watch and not skip it 👍
Most “Spent” fuel rods could be recycled but we made it illegal and that’s were most of cost could be saved.
I was on Vogtle 3 &. 4 in Georgia. Very interesting and very awesome behind the scenes look on what it takes to build a plant. Company I was on was one of the later contractors on that job.
Definitely a wild ride and completely mismanaged project in the beginning. A good case study of what not to do in a lot of aspects
I hate what they became in Georgia. As interested as I am in nuclear energy, they represent an excellent example of much of what I'm concerned about as far as actually applying a technology successfully without a combination of shortsightedness, basic capitalism and corruption making it a worse case scenario.
Kyle, I hope at some point you could do a video on the mining and refining of nuclear fuel. It's the only aspect of nuclear energy that I'm still on the fence about. I feel it often gets overlooked.
What do you mean when you say you are on the fence? Are you wondering about the environmental impact? Fuel cost? Proliferation of weapons-grade fuel?
Another piece of the LCOE you should have covered was subsidies.
I really like your videos, dude - they are entertaining and well sourced at the same time. I would suggest a video about how different parts of the world have different energy sources available and how some can use hydro to help smooth solar/wind while others need to use thermo to do that job. I remember a TED talk (TEDx perhaps?) about nuclear and the lecturer mentioned that if France had to increase solar/wind by some percentage they would also need to increase thermo by another percentage and that would mean they would have to reduce power from nuclear. So ... suggestions:
1) Different energy matrices (sources) around the world and how they work (or don't work) well together.
2) How solar/wind leads to a need for more thermo generation to help smooth delivery in some places
3) How much energy is lost in storage and transmission in different places and why, though more expensive, SMRs can help in many places. Large countries, like Brazil, that have hydro as the main source of electricity but the largest consumers are far away from those powerplants, for instance, would profit a lot from SMRs. Here, also, there are places deep inland that - as we hope - develop other economic activities besides mining and agriculture and, in the future, would also profit from SMRs. Electricity is extremely expensive in Brazil - it's so high it's around the same price early SMRs would require. Now ... why the hell aren't we investing in that since we do have a nuclear program, uranium and centrifuges? Because we're currently in an economic crisis that, I hope, will end after Kamala Harris wins and the FED lowers their interest rates.
r/nuclear is about to explode
they're all gonna have a meltdown
The conversation will definitely go critical
The fallout will be mindblowing
r/poorchoiceofwords
Nuclear keep blades spinning when there is no wind.
You really like those cooling towers, don't you?
they're just too cool, like his hair. lol
ofc they look badass
I mean, just look at their smooth, steamy, hardness.
Imma change hourglass shape to cooling towers from now on 😂😂
I could use some of those big, hard towers' "waste" in my "storage area" if you catch my drift
Per the last point (and I know you probably didn't wanna say it cause youtube might demonetize), factoring in "possible disaster costs" would be like every skyscraper including the cost of the cleanup of a 9/11 event. It's absurd.
The biggest disaster would be to the companies making solar panels, wind rurbines, and fuel... 😂😂😂😂
Petroleum and coal will always have uses even if less are used for primary power sources.
@@TenebraeXVII not really relevant to what i said but cool story bro lol
It's not only disaster cost. The cost of getting rid of the nuclear waste is also not priced into the lcoe, because nobody yet knows how expensive it will become. Basically the nuclear power companies had saved up around 40 billion Euros for all the waste processing from German reactors since the sixties. The government then took over the money and the responsibility for the waste. Depending on what they will try to do with the waste (like building fast reactors to burn it, building proton accelerators to break down the transuranium elements, or finding a save space to burry the stuff) it could cost hundreds of billion to get rid of it all.
@@Psi-Storm yeah, but still not as much of a problem as dealing with 100/1000 megawatthour batteries, or even larger. Just think about the size of thoose complexes.
This is actually hilarious that this video was posted during the end month of the summer, 'cause my summer internship was working on a program the breaks down the finances of SMRs
the problem with LCOE is that you can easily get the numbers you want by handpicking the parameters. for example some studies showed that renewables are VASTLY more expensive than nuclear, but they used the cost of land from germany and 100% renewables, when they used only 95% renewables and land from the US, the cost dropped massively. nuclear suffers the same problem, they use the costs including the worst examples, and even worse, a lot of figures will show the cost of fossil fuels with subsidies, what makes nuclear look even worse.
from everything I could find, nuclear with renewables seem like the best option. since nuclear also can't respond fast enough to spikes in demand, it also needs storage, so if you don't want massive batteries, hydro and geo are perfect for it. since it takes years to build, it can't expand to meet expanding demand fast enough, but renewables can, and with a good baseline from nuclear, the LCOE of renewables get much lower. nuclear and renewables complement each other's disadvantages without the need for fossil fuels perfectly.
I saw one good analogy. A tent and a house are both technically shelter. Which would you rather live in long term?
(and just so we are clear... a tent is renewables... nuclear is a house... in fact nuclear is the passive house that has been built to be in a forest that catches on fire, next to a river that floods and that sometimes has tornados roll through and will still be standing in either of those scenarios)
"Spike in demand" in this case refers to relatively sudden and sustained increases in demand, such as a huge population boom?
@@DanielScutt technically both. spike in demands for things like an special event that draws a massive amount of energy very suddenly, while most are expected, some unexpected spikes tend to cause blackouts. battery storage is perfect for that because they can very easily and cheaply stabilize the grid while power plants need time to wind up. nuclear is even worse for that, because even the best nuclear reactors can take up to 2h to go from 50 to 100% power generation, and you always want them as close to 100% as possible for efficiency.
but also population boom, because let's say the demand in a city is growing very vast very suddenly because for example people are moving in and switching to electrified appliances, you can't build a nuclear power plant fast enough to meet the growing demand, but while you are working on the power plant you can easily use renewables to expand supply as needed since you can build and install them very fast, and when the new power plant is built now you have a new baseline that it's sumplying while the renewables you installed are filling the overhead.
Handpicked data and parameters are a common problem when trying to compare any two things. It doesn’t even have to be intentional - there are plenty of times when it doesn’t occur to someone that some additional factor may play a role. A reply on a different comment brought up the cost of setting up supply chains which, for a power source like nuclear, can be a costly problem, because businesses might not maintain those chains during the long intervals between new power plant construction projects.
Infrastructure, supply chains, regulations, location, technological advancement, etc. are but a few factors that one can easily miss when determining which power source is the most cost efficient. And no calculation will ever be 100% thorough.
Kyle did not even SHOW LCOE numbers, he did a blatant bate and switch and showe CAPITOL COST numbers, aka they exclude operation and maintence costs which are significant for Nuclear but trivial for renewables. This is Scummy even by Nuclear fan boy standards.
The power produced (around 1Gw operational maximum power demand for BWR 3-4 reactors) easily exceeds maintenance costs. (NOT construction, maintenance).
At least in Germany where I am, this is apparently the case. Following Fukushima our government decided to shut down nuclear reactors and now, even though we need more energy to lower the prices and transition away from fossil fuels quicker, it's too late to keep the reactors going or build new ones since we're investing in renewables anyway. We're importing nuclear energy from France though, so we still use it in some capacity.
It would have made more sense to prioritize the transition from fossil fuel to renewable. Im not really that much of a fan of nuclear energy because you are dependend on nations like Kasachstan e.t.c and the mining is still problematic on an ecological level but its sooooo much better than fossil fuel. And it does certainly make sense to go for it if you are a nation which doesnt have the capacity (like area and so on) to become 100% CO2 neutral by renewables.
Re-starting a reactor shouldn’t be a big deal. I think that Germany went one step further and made sure to permanently make the reactors unusable. I think that it was a big mistake, and I was always saying it out loud. It was not my call though, I’m just a guy looking at it from a distance. I think that politicians planned to continue buying cheap natural gas from Russia.
Similar to this, I think that betting everything on hydrogen is a mistake too. Investing in it is just fine, it’s a smart thing to do, but investing EVERYTHING in it is a mistake.
@@thenarkknight278 True, it would have made more sense, unfortunately Corporate Lobbying ensured that the shut-down of fossil fuel was delayed, so nuclear was prioritized instead.
And why did you deactivate the nuclear generators and opt for the inefficient solar and wind in the first place?
I know why.
Wow selten so viele Bild zeitung proganda gelsen.
Wir inportieren weinger strom als vor dem abschalten der letzten AKWs.
You're correct to say the LCOE does not include the cost of storage required in grids with a lot of variable renewables, it also doesn't include transmission costs, but you're mistaken when you say it doesn't account for capacity factors.
Don't know about other countries but here in Australia the CSIRO gencost report has recently started including storage and system integration costs, not just LCOE. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a huge sunny continent with sparse population and no established nuclear industry, solar and wind still beat nuclear even with storage and transmission costs included. Your country's mileage may vary.
I'm still skeptical though, last I heard places like the UK with fairly dense population and an established nuclear industry were still finding renewables cheaper.
It would be fascinating to see some videos about uranium mines.
I've always been of the mind that we should phase out gas and coal, modify/reduce/remove hydro where best to rewild for the optimal recovery of the downstream environments, use everything else where best applied. Renewables should be used to provide the minimum amount required, nuclear where compact high output and stable sources required or for consumption increases with considerations to best practices with battery farms or tidal generators.
Already in place Hydro is very productive, scalable to demand, requires no batterys and isn't going to cause anymore environmental damage if it's well maintained.
The ones in place already are vastly better for the environment than most other generation options at the same scale. Not suggesting building more but decommissioning them seems pointless.
You know most hydroelectric dams were built to prevent catastrophic flooding too.
@golf869 majority of the dams in the usa were not built in flood prone areas. Most don't generate hardly any electricity if any at all, but they cost a ton to maintain
@@flakcannon722 Most dams in at least the us hardly generate any power if any at all. But they cost a ton in maintenence and it's cheaper to just remove them. And dams completely destroy ecosystems because they block fish migration, slow down the flow which heats up the river, and due to reduced flow they can't filter out nutrients which leads to algae blooms(a lot of them are toxic too) in dam resivors. Fish ladders don't help either because bait fish or just small fish in general, can't or won't go up them. Many fish and inverts can't survive in warmer rivers too. They also block sediment transport which ruins habatat for animals.
@@jackasdasd5143 I suspect you are defending a trope point and haven't done your own research.
Nothing I can say will shake your belief, but I will say that I disagree with you.
"Damn girl, you got that nuclear exhaust vent figure. Curves like an exhaust tower, damn."
GIIRRRLLL you lookin' like a hyperbolic natural-draft cooling tower, sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeshhh
It's more like a radiator than an exhaust. A nuclear power plant does not produce flue gas.
@@jannikheidemann3805 hey, hell if I know, man. Half the days, I can't tell the difference between a forest and a frosted poptart.
Have you looked into wind? The way they dispose of and how often the blades are replaced? What about how much oil for lubrication is used in the building and maintenance? Or how often the solar panels are damaged before the end of their life span?
Hell no its not!
LETS GET COOK'N
As some whose worked in engineering for construction. The costs for building a nuclear power plant is absurdly expensive (vs LNG or wind/solar) for the owner and take a very long time for a ROI.
The primary reason behind the lack of investment. Always planning for next quarter over next decade
@@popularopinion1 that's what I mean though to pay back your initial engineering/construction costs you are looking at 20+ years
That's a rather simplified overview. "Costs" is a very complex, subjective thing
How much are the cost for decommissioning the reactor? In the UK it sends like that cost have overtaken the cost of building the reactor in the first place.
@@phil20_20not to the person who's money is being spent lol
12:11 doesn't take into account that you can use that wind farm land area for grazing and whatnot as well. It's a nitpick but a nuance nonetheless.
16:22 Not so fun fact: More planes hit skyscrapers than Nuclear reactors had disasters.
Here, where i live (Bulgaria), we had a nuclear power plant with 6 reactors. The first 2 were built for 4 years in 1975. Then, after 7 years, they built 2 more, and around the same interval of time, the last two reactors were built. It was planted to have 9 reactors and a second power plant like this, but after Chernobi, people got scared, and then soviet union collapsed, and reactors were left in the fields. The worst thing is that almost every person that i speak with about nuclear power tells me that im crazy to want this, and it's very dangerous, polluting, and expensive. For the small country that we are, we have a lot of powe plans, only one nuclear but a few coal and still with the lowest income in European union we are painting second highest price for electricity in 2035 we need to close coal plants that's ok but also the last two nuclear reactors and this will be more expensive for ordinary person than building a new nuclear plants.
Same thing with in Ontario... Bruce Power has 8 reactors totaling 6.5 GW. It uses the Great Lakes as a cooling tower. That is 2200 acres. They are talking about adding another 4.8 GW. The other cool thing is they make radio isotopes there. Those isotopes sterilize medical equipment and now also is producing isotopes to cure cancer. Its all farm land around there and they constantly test everything and there has never been any issue. I've had a few people say "would you want to live next to a nuclear power plant". My response has been "if they build me a sweet home connected to the reactor building I'd live there. Coal powered plants produce more radiation than a nuclear power plant. One cool thing with the nuclear buildout in Ontario is the OG operators worked in coal. Their kids ended up working at the nuclear power plants. Now the grandkids are working there. Very well paying union jobs for multiple generations in a clean environment is just setting those families up for success. If you look up Bruce Power on Google maps and look at the little towns around there you'll see lots of sailboats in the marinas. They provide 30% of the power for the province of Ontario and for at least a couple more generations those people will be building up generational wealth. You arent going to do that with renewables. Wind lasts 20-25 years tops and then you are wondering wtf you do with the hundreds of cubic feet of concrete and rebar that were put into the ground all over the place along with the massive blades that somehow need to be disposed of.
(I work in oil and gas and am a huge nuclear simp)
When you did the bit about the attractive nuclear plant you should have used San Onofre as the example, definitely a nice pair at that one!
I'd love to see Kyle make a [The Facility] playlist entirely off his nuclear stuff he's done for it
I got my Master's degree in Energy and worked for a public utility company for 5 years. 3 in regulatory compliance and 2 as an Asset Management Engineer helping analyze and optimize capital investments. This video does a great job of highlighting the importance of comprehensive analysis and not just trusting a single metric. I also really like that you clarify that it's not a "one or the other" argument. Investing in a robust, versatile energy generation portfolio is essential.
here in the UK the government is building a new nuclear plant. The only way they could get private investors was by promising to pay above the current average for its electricity, for the next 40 years or so. That means that when the contract was first signed some 10+ years ago it was going to be more expensive than the fossil fuel competition. Now with the costs of wind and solar having dropped below that of natural gas power plants and forecast to continue to fall well into the future it's going to become ever more extortionately expensive compared to other sources of energy as time goes on. It really doesn't matter how much nuclear theoretically costs, what matters is how much you have to pay to get a real nuclear plant built in real life
Maybe the state should just pay for and operate the plant all on its own. I guess they do love privatizing to raise costs and lower reliability especially much in the UK.
@@VitalVampyr Nuclear is a good way to produce Energy also on its own yes, however governments always need to have a hand in such Things. And if we know something, it's that the State loves to offload responsibility to other people such as Advisors and Specific Companies. Increasing the Costs by a tenfold and leading to delays of 5+ years
That’s because the Chancellor & Treasury are bastards who wouldn’t cough up to pay for cheap energy for the next half century but would spaff billions on useless contracts and the Triple Lock
@@VitalVampyr the government just set up a national energy company
Here in Australia it matters more to fossil fuel lobbyists what it theoretically costs so they have an excuse to maintain baseload capacity (coal and ccgt gas) and slow down the rollout of renewables. Really sad Kyle Hill plays into that
I work with interconnecting data centers in the Midwest USA. These companies have whole departments dedicated to pinching pennies on what transmission assets they need to pay for to support their load. I find it hard to believe that they would want to build a whole nuclear power plant behind-the-meter without financial support from the utility/ratepayers.
At the very least they wouldn't want to be responsible for the waste. No one ever wants that. It's always just stuck with the governments.
@@Morboxx the governments demand the waste, because you can use it to build nuclear weapons.
@@dirtyblueshirtAt least in the US, the government doesn't take the waste.
And processing it to make nuclear weapons requires another reactor. In fact, part of the waste problem is that the US doesn't want these kinds of reactors in wide use because of that.
@@CptJistuce they're supposed to. The law says that the government will take and store the spent fuel, but since there isn't any place to store it they don't. Doesn't stop them from collecting the tax for storing the spent fuel, though.
Huge data centers are being built in North West Indiana & just to the North is a nuclear power plant. Cheap land, safe from most disasters & reliable cheap power. We may be boring but we've got those.
Was right on board up until the point you combined venture capital and nuclear energy. We all know VC has never cut costs, polluted, corrupted, and ruined anything ever at all.
You say that as if any human organisation is not guilty of that, infact governments are one of the biggest perpetrators of those things
@@matthiuskoenig3378 which is even more of a reason to not have constructs that require diligent and permanent supervision and maintenance
@@matthiuskoenig3378 Right on. Even CHURCHES aren't immune to corruption, despite this exact vulnerability being explicitely pointed out in their own scriptures.
@@r3dp9 yes because we are all humans.. it doesn't matter if you're religious or not, god actually doesn't care that much if you're religious or not.
Would he love it if people followed entirely, most definitely. But he's well aware that won't happen because we have agency, that agency is what allows us to make our own choices.
God doesn't really do anything he's an observer who will provide you choices. All prayers are answered but that doesn't mean we recognize the answer or want the answer that was given.
As such many turn a blind eye, the reality of god and his teachings and the ability to receive eternal life is quite complex.
You're not gonna go to hell because you're gay, or because you killed someone even, now that is not entirely true that way either it really depends on numerous factors and it's why he is the judge and not us.
There are three kingdoms of heaven that can be obtained with subkingdoms at least in the celestial kingdom which is the highest glory you can receive and it is one that is the most difficult.
You're also not just blocked off because you died young or didn't marry, yes to reach the highest glory requires marriage, if you didn't have those chances you're provided those opportunities after death.
There' s a lot that goes into it, and the reality as I said at the beginning is that we are all human, we are all sinners, we are not immune to anything just because your lds, or baptist, or catholic, or muslim, or buddhist, or jehova witnesses.. etc etc etc. Doesn't matter if you're agnostic or don't even believe, doesn't mean there are not consequences.
The other 2 glories are the telestial and terrestial, if I recall the telestial is the lowest kingdom, this is also the glory that those who are redeemed from spirit prison are given I think 1000 years is stated but don't quote me there.
The terrestial is the second kingdom those who lived good lives but were blinded by the craftiness of men is how its put. Basically good people will be there, honorable people I think is the term given.
Hell or purgatory, outer darkness whichever front you'd like to use are for those who defy god entirely, they know god exists and deny him anyways, they are truly evil people.
03:50 the sun isn't always shining, wind isn't always blowing😂 when does it switch off Kyle?
What is more important than building in "cost of clean-up" is building in a chain of responsibility for all key stakeholders with clear crisis plans. This ensures no dithering and no unnecessary cost burdens in the event of an actual accident.
I would also counter the stat about there being only 2 events requiring cleanup. 3 mile island is one more, but I am sure there have been plenty of minor accidents requiring cleanup, not to mention the cost and time of decommissioning a site.
Only just finished clearing up our old Magnox in the UK and we'd had a couple of accidents over the years there, though granted nothing requiring clean up as far as i recall. Though there was that issue of a rod that fell out of the grabber arm that one time. I think it got stuck for a few days.
True. Although there are a huge number of Superfund sites scattered across the United States that have nothing to do with nuclear and instead have to do with conventional power--coal mines, coal-powered plants, and oil spills. 😢
3 mile island didn't have any nuclear leak outside of the facility which is the clean up Kyle was talking about when it comes to Chernobyl and Fukushima. The only disaster clean up for 3 mile island was PR not nuclear. Pretty sure Kyle had a video on 3 mile island covering this exact thing.
@@Gotenhanku Yup.
People always talk about the gaps in renewable energies - both in terms of input and output. They say _how would we maintain demand?_
*Nuclear Energy*
Nuclear is definitely a viable component for peak load and saisonal variability, but yeah this thing with “sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow” is in reality don’t as bad as many people, including Kyle, say. Wind/solar are not a lone there is still hydro/geothermal/biogas and biomass. Biogas and biomass eg
are potentially perfectly fine for a significant amount of peak load and saisonal variability. Furthermore you have solar/wind spread out throughout a wide geographical area. With an interconnected grid, simple statistics gets rid of the bulk of daily variability.
I am proud to live in a country leading nuclear technology, Canada
shame the economy is in the state of ass
@@senatuspopulusqueromanus2082 No kidding, 7 years of a retarded Far left government will do that
@@DoozyDak Canada realized that nuclear was an economic money pit that would never make money, so it sold off all its CANDU technology. It might buy a US SMR reactor, but that might be a diversionary ploy by the Ontario Conservative government to secretly build more natural gas plants.
@@senatuspopulusqueromanus2082
I would argue that it’s in a state of ass BECAUSE we didn’t invest in this stuff sooner. Or at least didn’t invest enough.
We chose to invest billions into bolstering the oil industry though. For government after government. Liberal and conservative.
@@TheCommonS3Nseyeah. Everything relies on petrochemical products. It’s not just as simple as not using oil. Fuel is the least of our problems.
Green energy items like fiberglass resin for windmill blades, plastic for batteries housings, and copolymers in photovoltaic cells are completely reliant on the petrochemical industry.
People are also not likely to want to drive their nice new $100k+ EV on dirt roads either. It takes ~95 thousand gallons of crude oil to get enough liquid asphalt (bitumen) to pave one km of new single lane roadway at one inch thick.
Canada is a leading oil producer, and if you want a world with clean energy, you need oil for the foreseeable future to do it and to pay for it.
Thank you for making this. Had way too many arguments with people who are convinced nuclear isn't feasible because of cost
12:37 that was indeed a horrible Australian accent haha
As someone on the fence, I have a question about a fear I have about storage. Currently there's apparently leaking water into a nuclear storage in germany, contaminating it. What are the germans doing wrong in this particular instance, and what are/will our safeguards be against similar happenings?
I'm assuming your question is in regards to the Asse II Nuclear Waste Storage facility.
The short answer is that this facility was built almost 60 years ago. Back when nuclear storage was poorly understood. The waste was deposited in old salt mines which are eroding due to groundwater leakage.
I think it goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway: we understand FAR more about safe storage practices today than we did 60 years ago. And that we ALSO dont just throw raw, open contianers of nuclear waste in old salt mines today.
So while this specific incident is midly concerning (keeping in mind the containers THEMSELVES havent been breached, just the mine), this specific incident is ALSO not an indication of current practices of nuclear waste disposal.
I would further point out that there is SO MUCH UNFOUNDED BACKLASH in Germany about Nuclear power, that the German public refuses not only to fund nuclear power, but ACTIVELY PROTESTS attempts to further fund nuclear waste cleanup, for fears that basically doing a quick and efficient job of cleaning up nuclear waste will encourage the production of more nuclear power plants. Since "if its easy to clean up, that means we shouldn't worry about it, right?".
Which is why Asse II isnt scheduled to be cleaned until 2033. They KNOW its a problem. They know WHY its a problem, and they know HOW to fix it.
Theyre just deliberately dragging their feet because they dont want to encourage nuclear supporters to push for more nuclear power. By dragging their feet, they discourage nuclear power.
@@matthewmoser1284 Excellent answer, if it's that ancient, its understandable how this happened. I'll look into modern storage vs old storage and hopefully jump the fence. I want nuclear to work after all, anything to alleviate our reliance on fossil fuels, so long it's safe.
@@zilvercederbom If you want to know more about current storage practices, Kyle has an excellent video on the matter (even linked in this video).
@zilvercederbom I know it's hard to believe, but nuclear power is the fastest form of electrical generation possible. It is so energy dense that relative to its power output, nothing even comes closer to death and injuries per KWhr produced. The most deadly nuclear reactor accident killed 45 people and might kill around 2k people over the life of the people affected by it (literal millions)... and it didn't have any form of containment apparatus AT ALL.
@@matthewmoser1284you are wrong though, the method used was already questionable at that time (because nobody is stupid enough to call simply throwing barrels down a mineshaft until they form a hard to seperate pile a good idea)
Not to mention the fact that they handled the paperwork poorly and there is even evidence that they had taken on waste under the table so nobody even knows what kind of waste it and how well the casing for them is. Those are all factors in why it takes so long. The main reason they are so slow is cost, you could be a lot faster but the costs you would need to pull that off are a lot higher then simply planning a budget for the next few decades.
It has not much to do with dragging their feet, its simply how germany likes to do things, they rather have a budget running for years instead of a one time payment that might require taking a lone to not strain the budget.
They do the same with basically all their expensive projects.
The onky times you see that pattern brake is if something has a high impact at the economy like the natural gas crisis.
The major cost is actually the state getting in the way and how it works.
You see you have to buy the land first, then you can ask the state if you can build a nuclear powerplant there, the state then drags its feet for around a year or two. So you first take a big big loan to buy said land, then you sit on that loan for a year or two before you can actually start building a nuclear powerplant, then you have busybodies that assumes you are cutting every corner in the world which you are not because you dont want it to fail. Increasing the build time from a year to 10 years, all the while sitting on a loan that just gets bigger and bigger and bigger because you arent making any money to pay off the loan.
Its fucked up how it works, you should be able to ask to build a powerplant on a certain land before you buy it. Then the state should assume that you want to make money so you dont want your nuclear powerplant to fail in any way reducing costs by a few metric tons of 100 dollar bills.
And the state should also assume you don't want to get crucified for causing a nuclear disaster so clearly you're not just doing this for shits and giggles
That’s why most sane countries’s nuclear programs are directly made, funded and piloted by the state, sometimes partially sometimes totally
I don't remember the specifics, but like 30-40 years ago when they were still trying to centralize storage of nuclear waste, congress added a requirement that the facility be guaranteed to last for like 5,000 years (I don't remember the exact number). Now, aside from the fact that that is longer than almost any functionally surviving structure built by mankind, how in the hell do you guarantee that? Who certifies that a building will last longer than anything in history? I don't know anything about the current requirements but they did get nutty back in the day.
Cool part was the requirement that the facility have "signage" that would clearly relay to future humans that the place was extremely dangerous, even if we had gone through a few collapses of civilization and all language was lost. Artists had to come up with "universal symbols" of GTFO :D. I remember some really spiky looking sculptures as part of one.
You seem to forget that making Profit means cutting saftey wherever you can. Companies have a long history of cutting corners due to wanting to increase their Profit margin. Managers and CEOs are not always Rational People.
States also regulate way too much money of the plant itself. For some reason just including the word nuclear in the name makes the concrete super dangerous. Just regulate the actually somewhat dangerous and important parts (aka the fuel and what not) and just let them build everything else under normal regulations.
Saying nuclear energy is too expensive is like saying gold is too expensive 💡
No, saying nuclear energy is cheap is the same thing, like saying medical costs are cheap in a country with a public health system. In nuclear power, most of the costs like insurance or waste managment are simply not priced into the production price. But are carried by tax money. Wich make nuclear power seem cheap - as only half of the real costs are even communicated. Nuclear power always means that the profits are privatized where appropriate, but the costs are always largely socialized.
So in the end, it's quit expansive - it would not be able to compete with any other energy generation economicly. You simply don't pay the costs with your bill, but with your tax.
@@bugfisch7012that is just wrong. Not only does nuclear pay all of the cost of hsndling its waste, but also for the cost for handeling medical waste as well as a expensive goverment overhead. You are just dead wrong.
@@matsv201 oh yeah, so in 100 years from now the electricity company is still around and continues to pay? what about in 150 y or 200y, they still around? well the waste will be, but all the money spent will be the bill for a few generations passing their costs to future generations
6:35 look at that waistline? Look at those curves? Look at that flat top?
The Rad Bod and Nukecel references were a lovely call back to the Reddit ban chat. Loved it. ☢️
I think the main point of the opposing argument is a concern that, at some point, complacency and corporate interest will trump any measure for ethics or public safety and that concern is enough to adopt a "not in my backyard" attitude. Maybe if existential dread wasn't a systematic and prominent tool in consumer manipulation people would be less afraid to look in to the future and see more rationality.
I almost spat my water when I heard that joke about getting a lambo from "big nuclear", hilarious dunk on big oil and gas. I don't know if there is a video on oil fracking that you made, but let that be one the next big topics to cover!
There’s a company working on the logistics of converting coal power plants to nuclear-if that could get off the ground, it could SIGNIFICANTLY reduce the start-up costs of building nuclear power plants while also re-using existing infrastructure. I really hope they’re able to make it work, because it would really be a win-win on so many fronts
“Too expensive” is the complaint of people who don’t want to switch away from fossil fuels.
Not just that, there are plenty of "green energy"/"environmentalist" advocates who hate nuclear too.
considering how much has been poured into "green energy" and that entire scam its definitely not too expensive..
It's also the complaint of people who wanted nuclear, but got sick of waiting decades for the nuclear industry to actually get its act together. I've lived through multiple rounds of deregulation and government handouts, and one phony "nuclear renaissance" after another. I've given up in favor of more promising tech. Both parties in the US are pro-nuclear, and actively supporting the nuclear industry, and we're still getting nothing out of it.
You do know, that nuclear power is also a fossil fuel?
@@danielburger2550You do know that that’s nonsense? Nuclear power isn’t a fossil fuel, because for that to be true it would have to originate from the fossilized remains of dead plants and plankton, hence the name fossil fuels. Nuclear power is non renewable, which I think is what you meant. However even though it is non renewable, fuel supplies won’t be an issue for a very long time and it is still a very low carbon way of producing electricity. The actual electricity production process doesn’t produce carbon dioxide emissions, just the fuel sourcing and construction of the plant.
That graph showing actual build times is also a bit a of statistical trickery. It’s only marking the physical time building it, there could easily be over a decade of planning and negotiations with stakeholders before the first shovel hits dirt.
Here in Australia we are actively having this conversation with a lot of miss information being thrown around. But the CSRIO our biggest scientific research group came out and said the first plant would be decades out because we basically don’t have any and we have an extremely strong anti nuclear push that would fight it all the way.
plus only showing operational one,s leaves out the ones which are newly build atm and serveral years already behind the schedule
CSIRO says you shouldn't do it because it's slow, and it's slow because people think it's slow, and people think it's slow because CSIRO says it's slow, and CSIRO says...
And round and round we go
The key with nuclear is to build lots of reactors in one location. Look up Bruce Power in Ontario Canada. 8 reactors in one location. It was the largest nuclear facility in the world for a long time. Once you can get the public on board for one reactor the rest are easy. The engineering also becomes so much easier once you can get 1 built and up and running. You also end up having the supply chain built to keep that going along with a workforce that has just moved there that can keep building and maintaining the plant. One person mentioned being behind schedule. That also doesnt end up being an issue if you can do massive infrastructure projects. They were pretty on schedule with the nuclear build out and while the refurbishment for the plants started off a bit behind schedule now that they have one done they are actually ahead of schedule and under budget. I'd personally look at how long does it take to build out the reactors and build enough that by the time you build the last one you are looking at refurbishing the first one. To be fair the plants in Ontario are only a few hours apart so you could just move the workforce around. The key is you want to keep the supply chain operating, the engineers educated and the workers trained. The problem with the US is they had such a long period between builds that they forgot everything. In the oil industry in Canada we do a 2 week on 2 week off schedule so it the US could build out a large enough fleet they could just set up temporary work camps and keep the whole system going forever. The work camps can be moved around to provide housing so you keep a nation wide workforce that just flies in from anywhere in the US for construction and refurbishment. As people are retiring you are always bringing in new people that learn on the job. This all requires competent planners but it also provides the country with a secure power source forever.
And for some reason hardly anyone is questioning why the party that's bankrolled by the coal and gas industry is suddenly pretending to be pro-nuclear.
@@pin65371 One meltdown and the 7 other reactors are toast, no?
My wife worked at Three Mile Island as a control room operator. It's looking like they are going to be reopening soon, and two of the big reasons are the infrastructure act and doing "behind the meter" power selling. IE a big consumer, like a data center, basically having a line straight from the plant to their operation, cutting out the middle man.
Nuclear power is expensive but only in the short term. I wish Texas had invested is small scale nuclear plants back in the beginning of 2000s and over the course of 20 plus years built up their nuclear infrastructure, but they never did.
I feel like the Superconducting Supercollider project probably had something to do with that. They had already sunk a lot of money into a project that went nowhere with a load of pushback from anti-nuclear activists (that had basically no clue what they were talking about), so I don't think they'd have been too keen on a nuclear power project.
I wonder if our power issues in 2021 wouldn't have been so bad :) might have saved a few lives
@@insederec I believe that not only would we have more stable power, but our power bills would be less.
@@insederec unfortunately Texas has deregulated and disconnected it's grid from the rest of the country. You hear right wingers blame turbines freezing but they never insulated them like we do up north they also didn't insulate their natural gas lines so they also froze. The Texas deregulation is the problem not any one kind of energy.
So you wish Texas invested billions in a technology that still doesn’t exist 20 years later, still might not exist 10 years from now, and which is considered more expensive than simply throwing up some solar panels?
Yeah, Germany sadly recently decommissioned our last nuclear plants.
Germany has been a world leader in bad decisions for over 100 years.
I am sorry for your loss. We'll send flowers.
@@alexanderdorner7604 The last three reactors were from 1988/1989; other countries have managed to keep their reactors going for longer. Switzerland, the US, Sweden. Looking at the availability of the German reactors, they did not show signs of getting old.
Time to tax nuclear power export honhonhon
And electricity got cheaper after they were decommissioned. Small detail people tend to forget.
You've completely changed my opinion on nuclear power over the years, but I absolutely do not feel good about venture capitalists and the tech industry having anything to do with building nuclear power plants. These companies that are willing to do whatever it takes to squeeze every bit of profit out of their various industries cannot convince me that they'll behave differently in this one case.
This is the best comment here. Having those CEOs min/maxing the costs of a nuclear plant would spell disaster every time.
I'm one to disagree, the only nuclear disaster was in the former russian states-interestingly the government, USSR was the one running it.
@@OhmiKuma Those CEO's want to make sure they can keep the gravy train flowing. That comes from NOT having a disaster. Also, that's what gov't regulations are for.
As opposed to the outstanding results we get from government whenever they try to do....anything?!
12:14 That's a really genious way of showing both miles and kilometers at the same time. Have the grid be in miles but mark the distances as kilometers.
Time for Kyle to be banned from r/Economics
why
@@prateekmahapatra1789r/whooosh
@@prateekmahapatra1789r/whooosh
@@prateekmahapatra1789 He got banned on a certain subreddit on reddit for taking about a certain subject that had to do with that subreddit (I don’t which one). So we joking about how when he makes videos about other topics then he would get banned on those subreddits about the topic he talked about.
@othergoogleaccount-wy9hc He got banned from a nuclear sub reddit for "not citing good sources" after he linked his video.
Investing in nuclear power is like investing in trains: absolutely necessary, but politicians have their faces up car companies (fossil fuel in the analogy) to actually move even 1% of those crazy investment into trains (nuclear power in the analogy)
And also the analogy works perfectly as train networks also require a fuck ton of money to get built up, but once they are built, they serve WAAAAAAY more people and WAAAAY more efficiently with WAAAAAY less environmental damanage and WAAAAAY less "corrateral" deaths.
Damn i just realized how fucking good of an analogy it is!
The analogy kinda works... But people in this country don't want trains because of their linear nature, and we want to get there now... the speed of a train is irrelevant if it's stopping every 100 miles to pickup/drop-off passengers
Most of the work for both relies on us changing the mindset of the public, and solar is currently the fastest electrical generation to deploy
@@fourthbeegee " the speed of a train is irrelevant if it's stopping every 100 miles to pickup/drop-off passengers"
Bruh. idk if this is your though, or the general though, but damn have you ever driven a car? Traffic will block you every two seconds
@@no_name4796 ROFL... I love that you say stupid crap
To this point, much like trains, their cost in the US is largely due to the fact that we don't really frequently build them. When you begin building stuff you don't normally build, a huge portion of the cost is literally just figuring stuff out as you go along and gaining expertise among the engineering/planning/construction staff and management. It's part of the main reason why rail is so much cheaper per mile to build in the EU, they've largely never stopped building it and their knowledgebase has no gaps. Meanwhile when California goes to build the their first HSR and really the first big rail project in decades, there's a lot of stuff to figure out as it goes along. But if you take that same workforce that has been built once that project is completed and simply move on to build more rail, all of that cost goes down significantly. Just keep building and maintaining and improving continuously without treating the whole thing like it's a novel one-time deal.
@@fifzeppelin
Tbh, while knowledge gap is an issue, it is likely not the primary cost contributor.
We never really stop building roads but we still get over budget bullshit all the time.
11:55 a wind facility does not occupy thousands of acres in the way that's comparable to the footprint of a conventional power plant. Wind farms are commonly built on farmland, mountains, and even forests. And a substantial portion is offshore of course. Only a tiny amount of the land is actually blocked by this.
There are 3 larger wind farms in my area and their practical space use is near zero:
1. One is on a forested mountain, with turbines installed along paths that were formerly used by a mine. You could argue that it slightly reduces the value of the mountain for hikers, but in most parts of the typical hiking areas the wind farms are not noticeable compared to the noise of the major road leading over the mountain.
2. Two are on farmland, taking up small areas between fields. They reduce the arable area on a scale of maybe 1%.
Solar is even better for dual-use. Most countries can satisfy their energy needs with solar just from the area of their rooftops. Specialised solar farms can be worth it in some places, such as desert or in conjunction with agriculture (high mounted solar panels can provide shade for animals and some crops), but it is not necessary to replace otherwise useful land with solar facilities.
Wind farms disrupt birds and other animals even if they don't take up all the space dirrectly.
I'm working at TMI as an RP. There is talk about starting Unit 1 back up. Constellation just needs to renegotiate their contract with ES. We can't decommission unit 2 if they are rebuilding unit 1.
Wind and Solar for national security (a distributed, uninterruptible grid that will power basic needs on a point-by-point basis) and Nuclear for industry.
Wind and Solar for variable baseline and tertiary local grid in the event of failure of both primary and secondary power providers.
Nuclear and Geothermal for baseline power where annual demand never falls below.
Hydro for baseline power with some variability.
Coal for peak power to handle the demand spikes and troughs.
Overengineering for safety and redundancy.
@@Aeretocoal isnt a good option to be used for peak power
@@jackasdasd5143 For example, Drax - one of the UK's coal-built plants - can not be "turned off". Due to the thermal expansion, it constantly has to be combusting solid fuel.
I do think you are making a very solid economics case, however, as said around 0:30-0:45: "We have asked a group of very risk averse people to bear the risk of a very uncertain investment." To my understanding this might be a factor that is not as well debated in this video.
It isnt just investors, but also goverments especially in europe or very populated areas. In my country were already facing a shortage of housing, space for recreation, nature. Every square meter of the map has been planned twice over. Finding a location for a nuclear facility that all parties agree on is nearly impossible in my country. Locations that are less populated have risks of flooding or earthquakes or are too close to another nations border causing that goverment to also step in. Locations that dont have any of those downsides are very likely densely populated. Thus a cycle of yes but not here starts. With solar and wind most parties feel like they hold less risk even though their output might not be optimal. I know I am applying this to only my country, but I see a similar situation in countries around us (west europe). Which is why I would advocate that nuclear facilities should not be solely build for a single country, but for wider scale adaptation in western europe.
But that would mean asking brussels to take risk, and they wont. Thus, we're back to square 1.
To me, that just screams that the people shouting “green green green GREEN!” are either incompetent or don’t really care about green. You don’t get anywhere without taking risks or bulldozing over obstructionist people.
Maybe Bill Gates and his company TerraPower can provide a way to break out of that cycle of stupid. If their Natrium reactor that they're currently building in Kemmerer, Wyoming ends up working, that could be the proof that regulators all over the planet need to allow newer, better nuclear power plants to be built. Gates claims he's willing to throw as much as $10B of his own money into the construction and running of that reactor, so financial risk-aversion isn't an issue for him. If you get a chance, watch Gates' interview with Face The Nation from June 16th. The TH-cam video has an id of "5xYAQX6HRGg". (I'd give you the full YT URL if I could, but YT's dumb-ass "moderation" systems auto-trash any comment with a YT URL in them... 🙄)
Full discolsure: I am still a "financial skeptic" of nuclear power. See my top-level comment on this video for the explanation. I'm just saying that Bill Gates has enough money that he can build a new nuclear plant if he wants to. He's one of the very few people who cannot be deterred by up-front cost.
We've cope-fucked our planet, while we've literally lived under the threat of nuclear bombs destroying us at any time
A psychopath would call this poetry
A depressed person would call it a joke.
I work in photovoltaics. It makes a lot of sense in industrial areas where a companies can save a lot of money and decrease their consumption and thus strain on the grid with solar. But it usually is about 10% of their consumption. Rest needs to come from grid. Spicy rocks are good idea for that.
What about the infrastructure needed to run a nuclear reactor and the costs involved?
decay pools
final repository
Raw materials needed to operate?
I agree that the costs may have been "underestimated" in the case of renewables, and that probably applies to nuclear as well.
As interesting as I find this 17 minute video, I think there are a lot of factors are not sufficiently illuminated to make a really good point.
As far as Europe is concerned, it should be mentioned here that France has often had problems in recent summers to cool its large number of reactors sufficiently. (As a counterpoint to: "Sun and wind have fluctuations in output" and a nuclear reactor is running 24/7.
Germany has problems finding suitable sites for nuclear storage.
When reactor accidents do happen, the damage is much greater than with other forms of energy, depending on the scale of the disaster, and usually takes longer to clean up because there are no companies to hold liable. (We've already seen this with toxic waste dumps (where nuclear material is stored today) being leached into the groundwater.) Certified safety supposedly 1000 years.
I do not want to offend anybody here, but I would like to share some more information for thought and opinion forming.
About the duck cur graph you've shown, I believe California, Australia, or both have managed to flatten with renewables and storage. Either Just Have A Think or Electric Viking talked about it.
Engineering with Rosie specifically talks about the duck curve in South Australia.
The ultimate plan in Australia for flattening the curve in the face of renewables (aka unreliables) is to use gas turbines 😢.
Yes, just one of the blatant falsehoods this video promotes.
we need more nuclear power...