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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25707 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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Happy new year, all. More geopolitics that I don't understand:

Why doesn't the US or some other nuclear power Simply (tm) operate nuclear power plants at a profit on foreign soil on behalf of the local government? This would defuse narratives of the tech tree being made inaccessible to developing nations due to climate change campaigns. It would also promote nuclear non-proliferation and defuse narratives of preventing access to effective power technologies due to the risk of dual-use tech development. Finally, it would stabilize local power grids in regressing states and promote both stability, enabling eventual growth, and loyalty/dependency on the operator in the region. For the cost of single-digit billions of investment, the US (frex) infuses money into American industry, develops the region, and effectively infuses an extra quantum of stability and pseudo prosperity into regions that desperately need it, while extending and securing American hegemony and economic entertwinement/influence.

Why doesn't the US or some other nuclear power Simply (tm) operate nuclear power plants at a profit on foreign soil on behalf of the local government?

Because it is impossible to operate a nuclear power plant at a profit anywhere. I can't find a single example of a nuclear power plant that's run at a profit without a galaxy of government subsidies - the EROEI is not high enough to do so (and no, France doesn't count). You'd have to clear that particular hurdle first, and so far nobody has managed it.

  1. If nuclear power plants are unprofitable then why have so many countries built them, even when they're not pursuing nuclear weapons? Vietnam, South Korea, Sweden, Canada, Belgium, Spain...
  2. The high capital costs and sensitive nature of the plants (with regard to national energy security, waste and enrichment) invite government subsidies and regulation. Normal investors don't make investments that pay off over decades. Nuclear energy deserves subsidies because it enables energy security.
  3. Nuclear energy can be unprofitable when other sources of energy are cheap, when oil prices are low... but oil prices are highly volatile.
  4. The construction cost of South Korean nuclear plants stayed low unlike US and French plants and are absolutely cost-competitive with fossil fuels.
  5. The harder-to-quantify externalities of reliability v renewables and safety v fossil fuels (deaths per terawatt are very low) are considerable
  1. They provide a variety of other benefits - medical isotopes, etc. But at the same time, I really don't think that "a government decided to build it" is a compelling argument for something being profitable. Governments do unprofitable things all the time for a variety of reasons.
  2. Nuclear energy only deserves subsidies if it actually does enable energy security! If the total lifetime EROEI is negative, nuclear energy does the opposite.
  3. Oil prices play a huge part in the actual cost of nuclear plants. Petroleum is used to manufacture them, maintain them, extract that fuel and then transport the fuel to the nuclear plant. As the price of oil rises, nuclear is going to rise up as well as a result.
  4. This is just a statement of fact that I can't disagree with, but at the same time I don't actually see any evidence for it.
  5. I agree that fossil fuels are actually bad for the environment and the people around them in a lot of ways, but nuclear presents its own problems that we haven't really grappled with yet. What are the lifetime costs of having radioactive material stuck in the environment? That's a question that's going to take hundreds of thousands of years to answer. Of course, climate change and resource depletion are going to cause a lot of damage already, so this does in fact remain an open question in my book.

Nuclear energy is only expensive when it's sabotaged, introducing unnecessary costs in construction:

For example, Koomey and Hultman (2007) showed that while construction costs ($/kW) of the least and most expensive nuclear reactors in the US differed by a factor of 12, the lowest and highest levelized cost of electricity ($/kWh) from these reactors only differed by a factor of 4.

Only a factor of 4! Factor of 4 price difference within the same country is insane to think about. There was a huge spike in the cost of building reactors after three mile island (where no radiation was released and nobody died) in the US because of dumb regulations. They didn't allow any new construction for decades, preventing learning by doing. In fact, they complicated construction, demanding redesigns and tearing out parts to be replaced. Thus factor of 12 price difference in construction costs. This had nothing to do with EROEI since Korea is unaffected by US stupidity but would be affected by energy prices (since they import their fuels).

Nuclear plants can run for sixty years if designed properly (and not shut down early by Greens). They absolutely are profitable, even in the US.

See page 388, it's right there in black and white, plant profitability. If it's in brackets, it's unprofitable for the year, paying off fuel, operations and capital. If not, it's profitable. 2020 was a bad year because of low demand so no plant was profitable. But see all the years before, especially 2008! On the whole, nuclear plants are profitable, even in tough market conditions.

https://www.monitoringanalytics.com/reports/PJM_State_of_the_Market/2021/2021q3-som-pjm-sec7.pdf

And if they're profitable in the US, they're profitable in the rest of the world where things are run much more competently. These plants include many victims of the factor-of-12-megasabotage campaign.

Radioactive material stuck in the environment has negligible cost, just stick it in a box and leave the boxes in a desert. The quantities are so small it's trivial to deal with but everyone is addicted to bungling, building long-term storage complexes like Yucca mountain and then not using them.

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