Apologies for beating the nuclear drum again, but I worry that you rely on only one piece of evidence in the following claim, and that evidence is coming from a single person (Jack Devanney) very invested (conflict of interest) in the nuclear industry. Why not use evidence that appears to have slightly less conflicts of interest and that is more aligned with good practice in research, such as peer review?
but in practice, nuclear energy capacity has been essentially flat since 1990, in part because of the ability of regulatory agencies to ratchet up restrictions without an obvious limit.
That said, I do acknowledge your use of the qualifier “in part”, but I worry that the example is not that helpful—I do not think nuclear energy in the USA would have progressed much quicker if it had less regulation. And in one sense nuclear energy already enjoys one quite substantial benefit compared to e.g. wind and solar: They are not liable for the damage they cause in events such as Fukushima and Chernobyl. Had they been forced to be liable for such damages, that would have added another 5-10 USD to the current, high LCoE for nuclear.
Another example of how regulation is likely not the main issue is the current investment by the nuclear industry. They are not spending most money fighting legal battles on regulation (such as the fossil fuel industry is doing). Instead, they are doubling down on SMRs as the nuclear industry themselves think the best bet of getting costs down is to have smaller plants that as much as possible can be mass manufactured in factories and assembled on site. A lot if not most of the high costs seem to stem from cost overruns due to challenges in project management—challenges that solar and wind overcome by doing minimal customization for each project and instead simply take factory built plants and assemble them quickly on site.
Thanks for the insightful comment. I don’t know much about this exact question, so I appreciate that you’re fact checking my claims.
A few general comments:
I don’t actually think the evidence you cited contradicts what I wrote. To be fair, you kind of acknowledged this already, by mentioning that I hedged with “partly”. It seems that you mostly object to my source.
But you didn’t say much about why the source was unreliable except that the writer had potential conflicts of interest by being in the nuclear industry, and didn’t expose his work to peer review. In general I consider these types of conflicts of interest to be quite weak signals of reliability (are we really going to dismiss someone because they work in an industry that they write about?). The peer review comment is reasonable, but ironically, I actually linked to a critical review of the book. While not equivalent to academic peer review, I’m also not merely taking the claims at face value.
I’m also just not very convinced by the evidence you presented (although I didn’t look at the article you cited). Among other reasons, it wasn’t very quantitative relative to the evidence in the linked review, but I admit that I’m ignorant about this topic.
Apologies for beating the nuclear drum again, but I worry that you rely on only one piece of evidence in the following claim, and that evidence is coming from a single person (Jack Devanney) very invested (conflict of interest) in the nuclear industry. Why not use evidence that appears to have slightly less conflicts of interest and that is more aligned with good practice in research, such as peer review?
That said, I do acknowledge your use of the qualifier “in part”, but I worry that the example is not that helpful—I do not think nuclear energy in the USA would have progressed much quicker if it had less regulation. And in one sense nuclear energy already enjoys one quite substantial benefit compared to e.g. wind and solar: They are not liable for the damage they cause in events such as Fukushima and Chernobyl. Had they been forced to be liable for such damages, that would have added another 5-10 USD to the current, high LCoE for nuclear.
Another example of how regulation is likely not the main issue is the current investment by the nuclear industry. They are not spending most money fighting legal battles on regulation (such as the fossil fuel industry is doing). Instead, they are doubling down on SMRs as the nuclear industry themselves think the best bet of getting costs down is to have smaller plants that as much as possible can be mass manufactured in factories and assembled on site. A lot if not most of the high costs seem to stem from cost overruns due to challenges in project management—challenges that solar and wind overcome by doing minimal customization for each project and instead simply take factory built plants and assemble them quickly on site.
Thanks for the insightful comment. I don’t know much about this exact question, so I appreciate that you’re fact checking my claims.
A few general comments:
I don’t actually think the evidence you cited contradicts what I wrote. To be fair, you kind of acknowledged this already, by mentioning that I hedged with “partly”. It seems that you mostly object to my source.
But you didn’t say much about why the source was unreliable except that the writer had potential conflicts of interest by being in the nuclear industry, and didn’t expose his work to peer review. In general I consider these types of conflicts of interest to be quite weak signals of reliability (are we really going to dismiss someone because they work in an industry that they write about?). The peer review comment is reasonable, but ironically, I actually linked to a critical review of the book. While not equivalent to academic peer review, I’m also not merely taking the claims at face value.
I’m also just not very convinced by the evidence you presented (although I didn’t look at the article you cited). Among other reasons, it wasn’t very quantitative relative to the evidence in the linked review, but I admit that I’m ignorant about this topic.