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Possible Nuclear Power Push in Texas
Today, the state government's commission on nuclear power expansion released a report(https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/press/TANRWG_Advanced_Nuclear_Report_v11.17.24c_.pdf) pushing for Texas to invest in nuclear energy. Not normally a huge deal, but the report was specifically requested by Greg Abbott and is released at the traditional time for Texas to set policy goals. There are seven policy recommendations:
Create a state agency for coordinating, enacting, and funding the nuclear industry.
Create a unified point of contact for permitting nuclear projects, to simplify bureaucratic requirements.
Expand related programs in state run trade schools(and Texas public technical education is generally acknowledged as a thing the state does well at in general), with substantial industry input.
Foster necessary manufacturing capabilities locally.
Public outreach about the benefits of nuclear power.
State fund to mitigate the risk of project cancellation.
State fund to mitigate the capital costs of nuclear plant construction.
Now I legitimately find this all interesting, and I'm curious for motteizean feedback on the helpfulness/practicability of those seven items and the further considerations listed afterwards in the document. I'm particularly interested in if fancy economic structures are helpful.
As to why this is an even bigger deal 1) the document explicitly calls for requesting a delegation of federal authority by an act of congress and 2) the GOP is going to need something to run on after Trump. The 'red state model' is already the most likely and Abbott has presidential ambitions. Plus, the timeline is about right for it to become a national level issue in 2028. Particularly if the Trump administration doesn't have a particularly good four years, the GOP is just going to need to start running on copying what successful red states do on the national level, and Texas is the biggest wealthiest and most successful red state. Even partial success can have major implications.
This is DoA just like all other nuclear efforts in the US. The nuclear establishment is completely controlled by the feds (specifically the NRC and a tiny bit by the EPA as well). The incentives these agencies have are positively perverse. The NRC derives no benefit whatsoever from new nuclear power hitting the market. And of course, they're completely exposed (PR-wise at least) if there are problems with said plant. Rather, they are paid licensing fees during the approval process. I.e. the longer they drag out commissioning and constructing the plant, the more they get paid. And boy do they have the tools to do this! It starts with blatantly ridiculous radiation limits and goes all the way up to changing standards in the middle of construction and forcing completed assemblies to be ripped out and re-built. It's a miracle Vogtle cost only a few multiples of its initial budget.
Until the US removes idiotic regulation like LNT and abolishes/significantly reforms the NRC, I'm an infinite seller of nuclear power in this country.
A really quick intro to this problem: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power-construction
A far more detailed look into the problems: https://gordianknotbook.com/
The author of the above book also has a good substack. This is a good place to start: https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-two-lies-that-killed-nuclear
And this one is just fun: https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-two-ships
(Aside: I have an ongoing bet with my friends that not a single new nuclear plant is going to get built out of all the current hype about major tech companies pushing for nuclear, not even a SMR. You're welcome to join it in spirit.)
Hadn't seen that one. Amusing. Having served on a landing ship, dock, which is very similar to the landing platform dock discussed in the article, I will say that the history of the USS San Antonio is pretty average in terms of mechanical issues and cost overruns. My ship had similar problems. I think they have probably gotten enough of the kinks out of the Arleigh Burke Destroyers (74 active ones right now) where they'll have 1/2 to 1/3 of the issues that small run ships like the San Antonio class (13 ships) will have. Still an order of magnitude more than an equivalent sized civilian ship. The US Navy tried to take all the lessons and technology they could from the civilian shipbuilders, and the resulting Littoral Combat Ships were a complete clusterfuck. The automations and efficiencies never really materialized, and instead you had a Frigate-sized ship with 1/3 the crew and 2-3x the number of systems that would break down.
There are some valid reasons why warships will be more expensive than cargo ships. Generally, you don't have to design a cargo ship to be able to still deliver its cargo after getting hit by a missile. There are a lot of "Program of Record" systems that are developed (mostly) independently from the actual ship (definitely lots of them made by companies directly competing with the shipbuilder) that all have to get integrated. And the market for warships is much smaller than for commercial vessels. Everyone knows about the bloated and corrupt US military procurement process, and it's very difficult to trim the fat because 1) we can't stop or even significantly slow down procurement without unacceptable risks to military readiness, and 2) many very smart and wealthy people's entire job is to make sure the current system continues to give them and their companies contracts, and they do that by complicating the entire processes while obfuscating their shortcomings. Anyone claiming there are simple solutions is either a liar or an idiot.
Still, it's great to contrast what the free market gets you versus what comes out of that military procurement process.
Oh. A knowledgeable person! A question for you then: what if the US Navy abandoned requirements for secrecy and just came up with a public spec for a warship? Maybe the military bits (cannons, AWACS, etc...) could be built by the usual MIC suspects but the ship itself would be built by a commercial shipyard presumably in South Korea or something. Could it achieve something like commercial shipping results? Do you think it would be worth it? Does the ship design really need to be secret if you can have ten times as many of them?
Thanks.
There could be benefits. Some immediate thoughts about challenges:
The current military procurement process is adversarial: the government creates the most detailed and specific requirements they can, and companies bid as low as they can to meet those requirements. So if a company can find an oversight or shortcut to deliver something shitty while still meeting the letter of the requirements, they (mostly) will. If, in the process of designing and delivering a new ship, its discovered that a new radar is 6" bigger than was originally planned so it has to be moved, you better believe that the company making the ship will get extra time and money in order to make that change, with rules for changes and delays and payments clearly spelled out in the contract. Those incentives don't translate well to commercial shipyards and designs. For a company like Maersk, they can develop a business relationship with their shipbuilders. They can say "Yeah, shipbuilder A is cheaper, but they're assholes to work with on maintenance. It'll be better to pay a little more to go with shipbuilder B who really takes care of us." When the government/military awards contracts based on existing relationships, it's called corruption (unless someone writes a detailed report proving the cost/benefit of shipbuilder B, which does happen, but is a lot more work than just doing the obviously correct thing).
It's still a very small market for military ships compared to commercial ones, so there will always be a bit of a premium there.
Military contracts are frequently political, with Senators and Congressmen ensuring those jobs and dollars go to their constituents. Changing this will be painful.
Even if everything was public spec, the military still has an incentive to maintain control and security over the entire building process. You can have innocuous objects planted in sensitive areas that may give foreign militaries valuable information. It's difficult enough to prevent Sailors from doing stupid, intelligence-leaking things when the design and building of ships is mostly controlled. I'm reminded of the German mathematicians' response when they discovered the Allies had broken the Enigma machine: they knew it was possible, but they were surprised we had gone through the trouble to do so. The incentives to sabotage or infiltrate US Navy ships are so great that I can't even imagine all the crazy schemes foreign militaries would try if they had more access to the construction process. If you mildly irradiate some of the steel used to build the ships hull, maybe you could detect that radiation signature at the ports it has visited in order to get a better understanding of US ship movements, deployment schedules, and maintenance periods. Subtly reducing the quality of some bolts or welds in key locations could cause major damage (and therefore loss of operational capability) long after a ship is delivered.
A known trend in military procurement is that America is addicted to cramming as many missions into each platform as possible. The Pentagon Wars focuses on the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, but I think it's worse for ships. Why was my landing ship, dock doing oil platform defense in the Gulf of Oman? Because we could, and we were already over there. Does it make sense to design amphibious troop carriers so that they can also prevent hostile insurgents from sabotaging oil platforms on the open ocean? Fuck if I know. Doesn't seem like it should, but that's how America does it, and we do have the best Navy in the world. Commercial shipbuilders can iterate and improve on straightforward things like reliably carrying cargo, but US warships need to do a bunch of everything. A tradeoff between, for example, an additional missile launcher versus a better stealth profile is a political decision as much as an engineering one.
The US is also very sensitive about naval losses. Strategically, we've known for a long while that lots of small ships win against fewer big ships, but there's no way that we'd accept losing a missile boat and a few sailors as a matter of course, nevermind sending sailors on suicide missions. So we can't even really optimize our fleet for winning a near-peer naval engagement. The free market, in turn, can't really optimize for something when there isn't a consistent view of what's "better".
Again, there could be benefits to moving to a more "open source" shipbuilding model, but there would also be plenty of challenges, and I don't think it's clear how the scales would tip until we start hammering out the details.
Radiation doesn't work that way.
Some stuff is radioactive; it emits (ionising) radiation. Exposing stuff to radiation is called "irradiating" it. Stuff that is irradiated does not itself become radioactive, with one exception I'll come back to. This is why people do things like irradiating drinking water and food to kill germs; the water/food is unchanged afterward except that all the germs are dead, and certainly isn't radioactive.
So, irradiating the steel would maybe damage the steel (which would be detectable), but the steel wouldn't then be emitting radiation. If you want steel that emits radiation, you have to mix radioactive stuff into it (ideally isotopes of the same elements the steel's supposed to be composed of; if you put plutonium in it or something, they might notice that your steel has plutonium in it when it shouldn't). And then that radioactive steel will irradiate the port, but that won't make the port radioactive; it might be detectable (though not necessarily from very far away), and it might hurt people working on the ship, but the port won't have some trace there unless the steel is corroding (which would also be detectable).
(I feel I should note that if you want data on US ship movements in peacetime, you don't need to go to this much trouble; ships other than submerged submarines are pretty easy to spot with spy satellites, and submerged submarines are radiation-shielded by the water so this plan won't work anyway. There's also the issue that because US ships usually are powered by nuclear reactors, some of the personnel will have radiation dosimeters, which will raise an alarm if the rest of the ship is radioactive for some reason.)
The exception is neutron radiation, which does cause things hit with it to become radioactive (though they don't generally then emit more neutron radiation; they emit beta and possibly gamma). The thing is, though, you generally need a lot of it to make something significantly radioactive - enough that it'll probably sicken people, because it's also highly dangerous to living beings. Sticking something in a nuclear reactor for a few days might make it noticeably radioactive, but sticking a person in a nuclear reactor for a few days (or a few minutes) will get you a corpse. Also, the only major sources of chronic neutron radiation are operating nuclear reactors and certain transplutonic elements (curium and californium) from spent nuclear fuel that undergo spontaneous fission; people will notice if you build an unshielded and undocumented nuclear reactor into a ship, and curium/californium have that issue where they are definitely not supposed to be in the steel so any chemical analysis (for e.g. QC purposes, or if it starts rusting strangely - they're both quite-reactive metals) will immediately turn up that "oh hey, some chucklehead mixed nuclear waste into the hull of our ship" (technically speaking, curium and californium are still viable fuel, but they're chucked out as waste in a lot of current reactors).
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Has there been any talk from Trump cabinet side about changing the perverse incentives? Seeing as SV donated a lot, and SV would like reactors for datacenters..
Honestly, I haven't been keeping track. Judging from Trump's first presidency, he's big on talk and short on action so I just haven't bothered. Bureaucracies tend to be permanent barring jarring events so my prior is that nothing will be done.
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Don't we already have a solution for that? Nuclear sanctuary cities! Make the feds actually come use their own guns to deport your power plants.
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There are two issues here:
first, ERCOT is perhaps the most liberal energy market in the world. Gov assistance can help to reduce barriers to nuclear investment, but it's still going to come down to largely private companies making the choices to build or not to build. However, as the below response says, Texas already has ideal conditions for more fossil fuels or more renewables. Unless the funding assistance is massive, it's hard to see much interest in new nuclear.
The one exception would be interest in co-location with a data centre. I can see Musk, with Tesla now in Texas, publicizing a carbon-neutral AI centre using nuclear power next door. But such deals are unlikely to transform the generation landscape of the state unless every data centre in the US moves to Texas.
Second, ERCOT's liberal attitudes led it to separate almost entirely from the rest of the US. There are almost no interconnections with other states, just a few tiny ones with SPP and Mexico. A lot of the red states surrounding Texas are still regulated, with vertical utilities that follow federal rules and/or have their own ISOs. So even if they succeeded, it won't necessarily provide a path for other states to follow.
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Between cheap gas, cheap solar, and limited grid interconnects, Texas is a weird place to be boosting nuclear because it can't possibly compete.
It's the north that needs it desperately, with $.60/kwh prices, banned pipelines, solar not working in winter, and the Jones act literally prohibiting coastal shipment of (relatively) cheap LNG.
The point is to go the french route and run your own economy off nuclear while exporting more portable goods at a profit.
There's also the strategic consideration behind ensuring that the blue tribe is dependent on the reds' continued good will if they don't want to spend the coming winter freezing in the dark.
Texas has limited ability to export power, but exporting reactors and critical equipment/parts, that it can do- as well as ensuring maintenance and operation personnel(who will be 90+% red) are trained in Texas.
On the contrary, coal, oil, gas, etc... are quite easy to export.
Ironically it's not easy to export energy to the northeast because they banned everything from pipelines to ships to high voltage wires.
The Canadians basically have a monopoly on selling them energy because they can tap into the existing local grid without building anything new on the American side, take advantage of grandfathered pipelines, and legally deliver LNG due to the shipping being international rather than interstate.
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But that’s exporting fuel, not power.
Its exporting energy which in the end is not that different.
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It’s an odd place, but it’s also the case that the nuclear push seems oddly export oriented.
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Texas would therefore be wise to ensure the North continues to depend on Texas industry for its energy production, even in a potential post-hydrocarbon future.
It's not like the North is going to bother developing it, given their current strategy of "ban all development with environmentalism as the excuse, then freeze to death in the dark" means they can't advance nuclear technology even if they wanted to (and their best and brightest have already left for Texas).
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Fracking is putting the US in a screwed position in terms of power generation. Fracking produces a lot of cheap gas which outcompetes most other electricity production. However, it is finite. Fracking will essentially deliver 30 years of super cheap power and then another decade or two of cheaper power. It is going to leave a large void behind it. Texas needs to start planning for a post fracking future and considering the sorry state of western nuclear manufacturing this is going to take time.
Ten years is more than enough warning to develop alternatives and just the crazy fast ramp-up of nat-gas plants shows that power generators are more flexible than people give them credit for.
Gas can be build that fast. However, that requires cheap gas. Scaling nuclear is going to take more than a decade.
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It does help that for natural gas generating stations the turbine technology they use is quite mature and has a relatively wide pool of engineers that know how to build them. Nuclear is a... bit more complicated by comparison, since the heating of the water for the turbines is the complicated part, whereas with natural gas even when we're doing fucking retarded shit like this that blows up the entire plant cleaning that mess up is quite a bit easier and cheaper.
That's the thing... It's really not! You take a giant vat of nuclear "stuff" and just let it do its thing! I oversimplify but only a little. Here is an example where Devanney compares coal and nuclear plants: https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/what-is-nuclears-should-cost. The radiation levels from a typical plant release (including TMI and Fukushima) are so small that sheltering indoors for a few days and throwing away contaminated milk are enough to negate the vast majority of the radiation risk. The reason nuclear looks complicated is because we make it complicated by worrying about non-risks like Tritium leaks.
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I think that’s probably true for low temperature reactors. If higher temperature gas or metal reactors become available in the future I think it could be a real bonanza for a place like Texas for direct heating applications in the petrochemical industry (imagine how mad green peace would be over a nuclear heated oil refinery).
Be still my beating heart. Nuclear process heat would be a game changer if we can buy it from the Chinese.
The Gen IV designs that don't rely on water as the heat carrier/moderator (I think molten salt or liquid sodium based ones) operate at ~700C so are quite suitable for process heat. Of course, good luck getting the NRC to approve any of them.
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Texas recently had a bad power outage during a cold snap which I don't think more solar would solve. And Texas is growing quickly. Abbott is probably trying to get ahead of the curve; power outages make us and him look bad and do actual material damage. In terms of predictable scandals that could seriously harm Abbott and/or his party, more grid problems is probably up there.
The fastest and cheapest way to solve that is making sure gas peaking plants weatherize their turbines and have a supply of alt-fuel on hand in case the natgas supply goes down, which is standard everywhere but Texas. Cap the surge prices paid to electricity suppliers who don't guarantee uptime in a disaster (and use the same system to cut prices paid to wind owners too, so they only get the base rate even if they're coincidentally selling power during a shortage)
Nuclear won't fix intermittent supply problems without changing most of the grid to it. Huge fixed cost, low running cost, not good for "filling in the gaps".
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In which case being on record as "I voted to build more powerplants while my rivals voted against" is a lay-up of a campaign ad.
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And being seen to address the power grid issue(whether or not it’s an actual issue) is important for legitimacy.
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