The linked LW post points out that nuclear power was cheaper in the past than it is today, and that today the cost varies considerably between different jurisdictions. Both of these seem to suggest that costs would be much lower if there was a lower regulatory burden. The post also claims that nuclear safety is extremely high, much higher than we expect in other domains and much higher than would be needed to make nuclear preferable to alternative technologies. So from that post I would be inclined to believe that overregulation is the main reason for a high cost (together with the closely related fact that we’ve stopped building nuclear plants and so don’t benefit from economies of scale).
I can definitely believe the linked post gives a misleading impression. But I think if you want to correct that impression it would be really useful to explain why it’s wrong. It would be even better to provide pointers to some evidence or analysis, but just a clear statement of disagreement would already be really helpful.
Do you think that greater adoption of nuclear power would be harmful (e.g. because the safety profile isn’t good, because it would crowd out investments in renewables, because it would contribute to nuclear proliferation, or something else)? That lowering regulatory requirements would decrease safety enough that nuclear would become worse than alternative power sources, even if it isn’t already? That regulation isn’t actually responsible for the majority of costs? A mixture of the above? Something else altogether?
My own sense is that using more nuclear would have been a huge improvement over the actual power mix we’ve ended up with, and that our failure to build nuclear was mostly a policy decision. I don’t fully understand the rationale, but it seems like the outcome was regulation that renders nuclear uncompetitive in the US, and it looks like this was a mistake driven in large part by excessive focus on safety. I don’t know much about this so I obviously wouldn’t express this opinion with confidence, and it would be great to get a link to a clear explanation of an alternative view.
My main concern is the combination of saying contrarian and seemingly uninvestigated things publicly. Therefore, I am only instrumentally, and at a lower priority interested in whether or not nuclear power is over regulated or not (I think nuclear energy is probably less important than poverty, AI or bio). I do not think I need to spend a lot of time to understand whether nuclear power is over regulated or not in order to state that I think it is over-confident to say that it is in fact over regulated. In other words, and in general, I think a smaller burden of proof is required to say that something is highly uncertain, than to actually say whether something is like this or like that with some significant amount of certainty. Instead of going down a potential nuclear energy rabbit hole, I would advise people looking for examples of over-regulation to either pick a less controversial example of over regulation, or if such examples are not easily found, to avoid making these analogies altogether as I do not think they are important for the arguments in which these examples have been used (i.e. the 2 podcasts).
Still, while I feel confident about my stance above and the purpose of my original post, I want to take the time to respond as carefully as I can to your questions, making it clear that in doing so we are shifting the conversation away from my originally stated purpose of improving optics/epistemics and towards digging into what is actually the case with nuclear (a potential rabbit hole!). I also, unfortunately do not have too much time to look more deeply into this (but did on three occasions assess nuclear in terms of costs for powering a civilizational shelter—it did not look promising and am happy to share my findings).
So I will attempt to answer your questions but in order to stick with the main recommendation that I make (to be epistemically humble) my answers are probably not very informative and I think mostly what I am doing is pointing at the level of scrutiny that is required in order to answer these questions with more certainty and especially publicly as a representative of an evidence-based movement.
To your specific questions:
I am uncertain if higher adoption of nuclear power would be harmful as this seems like a very complex issue as the impact of energy is complex and entangled with economic, social and environmental considerations, to name a few. That said, and based on a very limited understanding of all these topics, I think the main drawback of nuclear power could be high costs, especially if deployed in low income countries. If nuclear costs remain high, it means such governments have less money for critically needed expenditure on healthcare and education. I am mentioning this as I think it is not clear-cut in a trade-off between environment and global health to always choose the environment. I think, in large part due to being convinced by Johannes Ackva, that the main benefit of nuclear power is to have another tool ready to go in our tool-kit if the transition to a mostly renewables-powered grid becomes challenging. So I think perhaps the best strategy for nuclear power is to be careful in committing to large capital expenditures now, especially in low income countries, and instead to try to get the cost of SMRs down as much as possible. This cost reduction might necessitate quite a bit of deployment so perhaps something like Germany’s support of solar is needed in the SMR space. But again, this is a super challenging topic so I do not want to take any too strong stances here. Moreover, it might not be so much a discussion of whether or not nuclear is net harmful, as finding a way to progress with nuclear in a strategic way that maximizes potential benefits.
On safety requirements, I think again this is super complicated and I am hesitant to take any strong stances here. One thing I read while quickly looking at the issue of regulation driving cost was that in the 90s or thereabouts there was a requirement to significantly increase the thickness of the containment room. I have no idea if this would have prevented or minimized damage in past nuclear accidents. Additionally, there might be military considerations (the military, to be sure, puts a lot of spanners in the works for wind energy too with concerns about effect on radars!) as we see with the threat of attacks on the Ukranian Zaporizhzhia plant and the general attention everywhere to security post 9/11. So I think one would need to first identify which regulatory requirements have increased cost and then look at why these were implemented and make an assessment in each case to land on some general understanding of whether these safety requirements seemed overkill or not. And I would push back a bit on the framing I perceive in your question that nuclear power is over regulated. As I commented on the LW post, currently, nuclear, wind and solar have the same number of deaths per unit of energy produced. And the “worst” generation sources like coal and gas is not something we want to aspire to, I think instead we want all generation sources to be safe. For example, I can imagine cost cutting in wind energy from relaxing safety but this would mean a lot more accidents during construction and workers dying at a high rate. I think this is where utilitarian ethics starts having limitations as it seems at least in wind energy to be somewhat reckless to relax safety standards, it simply does not feel right and would not be seen to be proper behavior of the people and organizations involved. I am not sure how relaxing safety standards would play out in nuclear energy, but I would caution against arguing for relaxed safety standards without understanding properly what individuals are likely to be affected negatively, how they would be affected and if this seems like appropriate behavior by the parties involved. That said, there might be cost driving safety in the nuclear that is not likely to have effect on lives—Johannes has done more research than me here and am quite happy to defer to his view that evidence points towards regulation being pursued by the anti-nuclear activists.
Whether regulation is responsible for the majority of the cost difference between nuclear and renewables is something I have not been able to easily find quantified assessments of. I think this again points to the complexity of this issue and again I would caution making strong statements here without deeply understanding the various safety requirements and their impact on cost. I think if it was clear that regulation was the main culprit, and that relaxation of regulation would be more or less harmless, then I think most of the pro nuclear lobby would be making strong statements about this. As this seems not to be the case I would at least be much more cautious about assuming something like this. A related observation: Renewables are on a downward cost curve. I have not seen any downward curve in nuclear, anywhere. Thus, even if we manage to get prices down a notch on nuclear by relaxing regulation, projecting forward nuclear power might struggle to keep up with the decreasing costs in renewables.
One thing I have learnt by having worked in and observed the energy industry is to be humble and uncertain. Very few people saw the cost decrease in solar coming. And it might well be that if we had done nuclear instead, we would decarbonize quicker and with a higher likelihood, but I am deeply uncertain having seen how hard it is to forecast such a complex and entangled industry.
Lastly, I am a little uncertain about your second paragraph so please let me know if you think I missed responding to something you said. I am happy to provide the evidence I have come across (not much!) and could also make a clearer statement of disagreement if you think that is appropriate. If so, I would appreciate a bit more detail about what you think I should clearly disagree with.
The linked LW post points out that nuclear power was cheaper in the past than it is today, and that today the cost varies considerably between different jurisdictions. Both of these seem to suggest that costs would be much lower if there was a lower regulatory burden. The post also claims that nuclear safety is extremely high, much higher than we expect in other domains and much higher than would be needed to make nuclear preferable to alternative technologies. So from that post I would be inclined to believe that overregulation is the main reason for a high cost (together with the closely related fact that we’ve stopped building nuclear plants and so don’t benefit from economies of scale).
I can definitely believe the linked post gives a misleading impression. But I think if you want to correct that impression it would be really useful to explain why it’s wrong. It would be even better to provide pointers to some evidence or analysis, but just a clear statement of disagreement would already be really helpful.
Do you think that greater adoption of nuclear power would be harmful (e.g. because the safety profile isn’t good, because it would crowd out investments in renewables, because it would contribute to nuclear proliferation, or something else)? That lowering regulatory requirements would decrease safety enough that nuclear would become worse than alternative power sources, even if it isn’t already? That regulation isn’t actually responsible for the majority of costs? A mixture of the above? Something else altogether?
My own sense is that using more nuclear would have been a huge improvement over the actual power mix we’ve ended up with, and that our failure to build nuclear was mostly a policy decision. I don’t fully understand the rationale, but it seems like the outcome was regulation that renders nuclear uncompetitive in the US, and it looks like this was a mistake driven in large part by excessive focus on safety. I don’t know much about this so I obviously wouldn’t express this opinion with confidence, and it would be great to get a link to a clear explanation of an alternative view.
Hi Paul, thanks for taking the time to respond.
My main concern is the combination of saying contrarian and seemingly uninvestigated things publicly. Therefore, I am only instrumentally, and at a lower priority interested in whether or not nuclear power is over regulated or not (I think nuclear energy is probably less important than poverty, AI or bio). I do not think I need to spend a lot of time to understand whether nuclear power is over regulated or not in order to state that I think it is over-confident to say that it is in fact over regulated. In other words, and in general, I think a smaller burden of proof is required to say that something is highly uncertain, than to actually say whether something is like this or like that with some significant amount of certainty. Instead of going down a potential nuclear energy rabbit hole, I would advise people looking for examples of over-regulation to either pick a less controversial example of over regulation, or if such examples are not easily found, to avoid making these analogies altogether as I do not think they are important for the arguments in which these examples have been used (i.e. the 2 podcasts).
Still, while I feel confident about my stance above and the purpose of my original post, I want to take the time to respond as carefully as I can to your questions, making it clear that in doing so we are shifting the conversation away from my originally stated purpose of improving optics/epistemics and towards digging into what is actually the case with nuclear (a potential rabbit hole!). I also, unfortunately do not have too much time to look more deeply into this (but did on three occasions assess nuclear in terms of costs for powering a civilizational shelter—it did not look promising and am happy to share my findings).
So I will attempt to answer your questions but in order to stick with the main recommendation that I make (to be epistemically humble) my answers are probably not very informative and I think mostly what I am doing is pointing at the level of scrutiny that is required in order to answer these questions with more certainty and especially publicly as a representative of an evidence-based movement.
To your specific questions:
I am uncertain if higher adoption of nuclear power would be harmful as this seems like a very complex issue as the impact of energy is complex and entangled with economic, social and environmental considerations, to name a few. That said, and based on a very limited understanding of all these topics, I think the main drawback of nuclear power could be high costs, especially if deployed in low income countries. If nuclear costs remain high, it means such governments have less money for critically needed expenditure on healthcare and education. I am mentioning this as I think it is not clear-cut in a trade-off between environment and global health to always choose the environment. I think, in large part due to being convinced by Johannes Ackva, that the main benefit of nuclear power is to have another tool ready to go in our tool-kit if the transition to a mostly renewables-powered grid becomes challenging. So I think perhaps the best strategy for nuclear power is to be careful in committing to large capital expenditures now, especially in low income countries, and instead to try to get the cost of SMRs down as much as possible. This cost reduction might necessitate quite a bit of deployment so perhaps something like Germany’s support of solar is needed in the SMR space. But again, this is a super challenging topic so I do not want to take any too strong stances here. Moreover, it might not be so much a discussion of whether or not nuclear is net harmful, as finding a way to progress with nuclear in a strategic way that maximizes potential benefits.
On safety requirements, I think again this is super complicated and I am hesitant to take any strong stances here. One thing I read while quickly looking at the issue of regulation driving cost was that in the 90s or thereabouts there was a requirement to significantly increase the thickness of the containment room. I have no idea if this would have prevented or minimized damage in past nuclear accidents. Additionally, there might be military considerations (the military, to be sure, puts a lot of spanners in the works for wind energy too with concerns about effect on radars!) as we see with the threat of attacks on the Ukranian Zaporizhzhia plant and the general attention everywhere to security post 9/11. So I think one would need to first identify which regulatory requirements have increased cost and then look at why these were implemented and make an assessment in each case to land on some general understanding of whether these safety requirements seemed overkill or not. And I would push back a bit on the framing I perceive in your question that nuclear power is over regulated. As I commented on the LW post, currently, nuclear, wind and solar have the same number of deaths per unit of energy produced. And the “worst” generation sources like coal and gas is not something we want to aspire to, I think instead we want all generation sources to be safe. For example, I can imagine cost cutting in wind energy from relaxing safety but this would mean a lot more accidents during construction and workers dying at a high rate. I think this is where utilitarian ethics starts having limitations as it seems at least in wind energy to be somewhat reckless to relax safety standards, it simply does not feel right and would not be seen to be proper behavior of the people and organizations involved. I am not sure how relaxing safety standards would play out in nuclear energy, but I would caution against arguing for relaxed safety standards without understanding properly what individuals are likely to be affected negatively, how they would be affected and if this seems like appropriate behavior by the parties involved. That said, there might be cost driving safety in the nuclear that is not likely to have effect on lives—Johannes has done more research than me here and am quite happy to defer to his view that evidence points towards regulation being pursued by the anti-nuclear activists.
Whether regulation is responsible for the majority of the cost difference between nuclear and renewables is something I have not been able to easily find quantified assessments of. I think this again points to the complexity of this issue and again I would caution making strong statements here without deeply understanding the various safety requirements and their impact on cost. I think if it was clear that regulation was the main culprit, and that relaxation of regulation would be more or less harmless, then I think most of the pro nuclear lobby would be making strong statements about this. As this seems not to be the case I would at least be much more cautious about assuming something like this. A related observation: Renewables are on a downward cost curve. I have not seen any downward curve in nuclear, anywhere. Thus, even if we manage to get prices down a notch on nuclear by relaxing regulation, projecting forward nuclear power might struggle to keep up with the decreasing costs in renewables.
One thing I have learnt by having worked in and observed the energy industry is to be humble and uncertain. Very few people saw the cost decrease in solar coming. And it might well be that if we had done nuclear instead, we would decarbonize quicker and with a higher likelihood, but I am deeply uncertain having seen how hard it is to forecast such a complex and entangled industry.
Lastly, I am a little uncertain about your second paragraph so please let me know if you think I missed responding to something you said. I am happy to provide the evidence I have come across (not much!) and could also make a clearer statement of disagreement if you think that is appropriate. If so, I would appreciate a bit more detail about what you think I should clearly disagree with.