I once read an insightful analysis from 1990 on why nuclear power plants became so expensive after 1979 in the U.S.
Some plants completed in the late 1980s have cost as much as $5 billion, 30 times what they cost 15 years earlier. Inflation, of course, has played a role, but the consumer price index increased only by a factor of 2.2 between 1973 and 1983, and by just 18% from 1983 to 1988. What caused the remaining large increase? Ask the opponents of nuclear power and they will recite a succession of horror stories, many of them true, about mistakes, inefficiency, sloppiness, and ineptitude. They will create the impression that people who build nuclear plants are a bunch of bungling incompetents. The only thing they won’t explain is how these same “bungling incompetents” managed to build nuclear power plants so efficiently, so rapidly, and so inexpensively in the early 1970s.
It discusses the “regulatory ratcheting” and activist “intervenor” groups that radically increased costs after Three Mile Island:
A major source of cost escalation in some plants was delays caused by opposition from well-organized “intervenor” groups that took advantage of hearings and legal strategies to delay construction. The Shoreham plant on Long Island was delayed for 3 years by intervenors who turned the hearings for a construction permit into a circus. The intervenors included a total imposter claiming to be an expert with a Ph.D. and an M.D. There were endless days of reading aloud from newspaper and magazine articles, interminable “cross examination” with no relevance to the issuance of a construction permit, and an imaginative variety of other devices to delay the proceedings and attract media attention.
But the worst delay came after the Shoreham plant was completed. The NRC requires emergency planning exercises for evacuation of the nearby population in the event of certain types of accidents. […] Officials in Suffolk County, where Shoreham is located, refused to cooperate in these exercises, making it impossible to fulfill the NRC requirement. After years of delay, the NRC […] finally issued an operating license. By this time the situation had become a political football, with the governor of New York deeply involved. He apparently decided that it was politically expedient to give in to the opponents of the plant. The state of New York therefore offered to “buy” the plant from the utility for $1 and dismantle it, with the utility receiving enough money from various tax savings to compensate for its construction expenditures. […] The ironic part of the story is that Long Island very badly needs the electricity the Shoreham plant can produce.
The Seabrook plant in New Hampshire suffered 2 years of delay due to intervenor activity based on the plant’s discharges of warm water (typically 80°F) into the Atlantic Ocean. Intervenors claimed it would do harm to a particular species of aquatic life which is not commercially harvested. There was nothing harmful about the water other than its warm temperatures. The utility eventually provided a large and very expensive system for piping this warm water 2 miles out from shore before releasing it.
But again with Seabrook, the most expensive delay came after the plant was completed and ready to operate. It is located in such a way that the 5-mile radius zone requiring emergency planning extends into the state of Massachusetts. Governor Dukakis of Massachusetts, in deference to those opposed to the plant, refused to cooperate in the planning exercises. After about 3 years of delay, which added a billion dollars to the cost, in early 1990 the NRC ruled that the plant could operate without that cooperation.
Anti-nuclear sentiment apparently remains strong in places like Germany which has been replacing nuclear plants with fossil fuels and renewables as of late. Former anti-nuclear activists (e.g. Elizabeth May, head of Canada’s Green Party) are often still prominent in environmental groups, leading to calls for “100% renewable energy” instead of “100% clean energy”, as though the climate crisis just isn’t bad enough to even consider building nuclear plants.
All of this explains why, when I saw EIC’s new video, my gut reaction is negative. Situating a nuclear power plant in an urban area may be perfectly safe, but it will bring out the NIMBYs in droves, won’t it?
The next chapter in that 1990 book lays out design elements that would be needed to economically satisfy new demands from regulators and the public for “super-super” safety: smaller reactors (600MW instead of 1200MW), passive safety systems, higher safety margins in exchange for lower efficiency, factory-constructed components, and greater simplicity. It concludes optimistically:
With safety problems hopefully behind us, and with cost considerations looking favorable, it truly seems like the United States is now ready for Nuclear Power: Act II.
30 years of history tells us this didn’t happen.
Why not? I’m not sure, but I imagine that the costs just didn’t fall enough to be competitive with fossil fuels. Around 2004 the price of natural gas fell a massive 75% — if nuclear was starting to look attractive before then, it certainly wasn’t afterward.
For the last 5 years I’ve been saying that Molten Salt Reactors are what we’ve been waiting for — not just because they are walk-away safe, but because of the things it doesn’t need. The things you don’t need to build will drive down costs. MSRs don’t use water above 300°C for coolant, so they don’t need an expensive one-piece pressure vessel for the reactor vessel, or a large pressurized containment structure made of “nuclear-grade” concrete for loss-of-pressure accidents, or any other expensive systems related to pressure management. The molten salt keeps fission products dissolved in it, including radioactive cesium and iodine (the most toxic substances released during Chernobyl and Fukushima), and while containment structures are still required (e.g. for Xe and Kr gas), the nature of molten salt seems to greatly decrease the need for containment because the consequences of a containment breach are much less dangerous. There is also a large buffer between the operating temperature of about 650°C and the melting point of the Hastelloy container around 1330°C (the salt itself boils at about 1500°C), giving passive safety systems ample time to respond to a loss-of-power accident. MSRs don’t have “meltdowns” so you don’t need to worry about melting fuel rods reacting with zirconium cladding to produce explosive hydrogen gas. Aside from safety benefits, high-temperature operation (600°C salt outlet vs water at 315–325°C) allows use of commercial off-the-shelf turbines like those in fossil-fuel plants, rather than the special, expensive jumbo-sized turbines used in nuclear plants (which are also less efficient). As far as I know, the only really expensive part of an MSR is the Hastelloy alloy (required to minimize the salt’s corrosion of its container)*, but the savings on concrete and steel more than compensate. Some designs can even use air cooling to avoid the need to be located by a body of water.
I have an open mind, though, so why does EIC believe it can overcome a 30-year drought in nuclear construction with what appears to be, aside from its size, a perfectly conventional design? I imagine benefits of smaller reactors in terms of construction cost, safety certification and certainty (construction timelines get longer and more uncertain as plants get larger), but then you have to multiply everything by 10 before you compare with a typical 1000 MW plant.
* Note: I’m assuming a non-breeder MSR such as those proposed by Moltex, Thorcon and Terrestrial Energy. Thorium breeder MSRs require dramatically more R&D and will not be built within the next decade, at least not without huge political support.
