As someone who believes more nuclear sooner would be a benefit, it's a concern that things may be moving a bit too quickly - the danger being a mishap will undermine progress, potentially v. dramatically. My sense is it will fall on the developers to make sure problems do not arise, so I hope they understand that responsibility. Certainly agree that in today's world how this turns out is "anyone's guess".
Yes, will likely come down to INL and the developers. The risk is that there may a lot of pressure on both from the administration to start these first reactors to hit the administration's deadlines and timetable before they are ready to do so safely.
The implicit assumption that you guys take for granted is that a big release is intolerable. If that really were the case, then there should be no nuclear power. However, your assumption is based at least in part on LNT, the radiation harm model that assumes our bodies cannot repair radiation damage to our DNA.
Follow the science. LNT is indisputably wrong. A providential Nature has equipped us with DNA repair systems that have no problem coping with dose rates that are hundreds of times above normal background. She had to do this it handle the far higher DNA damage rates inflicted on us by our O2 based metabolism. Society would be far better off with an occasional big release and cheap nuke than with neither.
Once you replace LNT with a harm model that does recognize our DNA repair ability any increased cancer incidence associated with even a release as large as Fukushima will be statistically undetectable. That's the first step to cheap nuke. Trump could do it with an EO if he were not so obsessed with drill, baby, drill.
That is not my assumption at all Jack. I do not believe that a significant release of radiation is intolerable. As a basic public health matter, it is not a serious problem, even assuming that the LNT model is correct. Dose to the public is still low enough that even in the event of major accidents, the LNT model doesn't produce any statistically significant increase in observable cancers. What I do strongly disagree with is your implicit assumption that if you get rid of LNT, public and policy maker alarm about the release of ionizing radiation will disappear. And that is demonstrably not how public opinion works.
I'll overlook the switch from my "big" release to your "significant" release. I will accept your word that you do regard a big release (could be Chernobyl sized) as tolerable despite the fact that the exchange with Fred pretty clearly indicates otherwise. My apologies for assuming something I should not have.
But you also made the same mistake. You put words in my mouth that I have never said. In my view, getting rid of LNT is a necessary, but far from sufficient, first step toward should-cost nuclear power. I have never said or implied that replacing LNT with a model that is consistent with our indisputable ability to repair radiation damage would alone cleave nuclear's Gordian knot. The Make Nuclear Cheap Again book lays out all the follow on steps that will be required. Check it out.
But these follow on steps cannot happen while the nuclear establishment is preaching LNT. LNT's numbers can be small; but under LNT it is easy to combine tiny dose rate profiles over large populations to create scary cataclysms. Under LNT, it is easy to concoct a scenario in which 1600 people a year die from eating bananas. Hey mom, still want to feed you baby Gerber's banana puree? Under a model that recognizes our ability to repair radiation damage such as SNT, in the same scenario, bananas kill one human every 2.5 million years.
Under LNT, the nuclear grifters will continue to extract billions in dollars per year from the taxpayer for moving slightly contaminated dirt around (mostly in red districts).
Under LNT we will continue to have murderous evacuations as we did at Fukushima. Under LNT a Fukushima sized release in the USA will create 100's of billions (if not a trillion or more) of tort claims. Even in disciplined Japan, the public compensation for a release that 10 years later has produced no detectable increase in cancer is more than 60 billion dollars and counting. Under LNT, nuclear liability is uninsurable, which means nuclear will remain a ward of the state. The fact that LNT is only the first step does not mean that we can skip it.
Since LNT was not mandated by Congress but self-adopted by the bureaucrats, the Trump administration provides us with a once in a lifetime opportunity to take that first step. If we don't do everything we can to make that happen, then we should rot in Hell.
The problem is Trump is not interested in nuclear power. He thinks fossil can solve all our problems at a time when the country is running out of cheap petroleum resources. My advice to the Progressive NGO's is use the Briar Patch strategy. Scream as loud as you can that Trump is going to do away with LNT by an EO. Threaten all manner of demonstrations and legal actions if he takes this unthinkable, unprecedented action. Given Trump visceral reactions, it just might work. What we are doing now is getting us nowhere.
You cannot solve or even put a dent in energy poverty or global warming with toy reactors. There is no evidence that downscaling nuclear power is economic, and plenty of evidence against. Far more fundamentally, even if one of the new technologies were inherently cheaper, that would just give autocratic regualtors more room to push costs up, which is exactly what ALARA mandates them to do. Exhibit A: the most heavily hyped and taxpayer supported SMR is NuScale. Nuscale's Overnight cost is over $20,000/kW, more than 10 times nuclear's should cost and it hasn't even been built yet.
Thanks to nuclear's insane energy density, Conventional light water nuclear power can be cheap. Nuclear power was cheap, 3 cents per kWh in 2024 USD. In the late 1960's, we were building LWR plants for less than $2000/kW in today's money. Ted knows that. He is a co-author of the Lovering paper that documented these facts. These plants could produce electricity at 3 cents per kWh. Most are still running today. None of these cheap plants have harmed a member of the public via radiation.
Nuclear's problem is not technical and cannot be solved by "new" technology (which is not new). Nuclear's problem is an autocratic, omnipotent regulatory system whose goal is preventing a release. Until we replace that regime with a system that directs human self-interest toward societal welfare, nuclear will remain an auto-genocidal failure in the West. The first step is an EO replacing LNT with a radiation harm model that recognizes our indisputable ability to repair radiation-induced DNA damage..
With or without an autocratic NRC, there is simply no evidence that anyone is going to build a large light water reactor in a liberalized electricity market anywhere in the world without massive public subsidies. It is simply not an economic or institutional context in which private actors will even contemplate building large public works projects. Every reactor in the United States was build by a vertically integrated, monopoly utility under a cost of service electricity regulatory regime that allowed them to rate-base the cost. There are only a handful of utilities in the United States still able to do that and there is basically zero interest among utility regulators to do this. I am a huge advocate of NRC reform and there is no amount of reform that will change this basic reality. So without both reregulating electricity markets AND very substantial cost-overrun guarantees from the federal government, this is not going to happen. NRC reform is in fact far more important for small, advanced reactors and offers a path to economic competitiveness in liberalized markets. I'm all for doing a big build out of large reactors like France or China or Korea where that is feasible. And when done that way, you are right, large nuclear can be very cheap. But even sweeping NRC reform won't deliver that. That requires very different institutional arrangements, in terms of the structure of electricity markets and the state's involvement with the nuclear industry, that as best I can tell, most large reactor advocates won't actually propose.
But youre right, by the 1970's private investment had learned its lesson. You cannot be exposed to an autocratic regulator whose job is to prevent a release. (Westinghouse forgot that rule in 2008 and went bankrupt.) Unless we eliminate both regulatory imbalance and uncertainty and allowing the ambulance chasers to evaluate radiation harm, private investment in nuclear power is not going to happen. But if we did, investors would flock to nuclear power. They'd make the 1960's nuclear bandwagon look like a one-man parade.
Since you reject the requirements for competitive private investment in nuclear, we are left with the French (and now UK) model, which was also the pre-Fukushima Japanese model, and the pre-2016 Korean model. But as all these examples show, that model only works if there is no autocratic (sorry, independent) regulator. Wherever the single public monopoly model, or something close to it, has worked, the regulator was window-dressing. The public monopoly essentially self-regulated. (Even then it has worked rather poorly compared to what's possible.) So to make your plan work, we need to make the NRC something close to a rubber-stamp. That's precisely what the Trump administration is trying to do. Seems you guys have a lot in common.
I do not reject the "requirements for competitive private investment in nuclear" Jack. I advocate for far reaching NRC reform. I just don't think that LNT is the silver bullet that you do. With or without LNT, the NRC can and should establish a clear numerical threshold tied to actual observable public health consequences, not entirely theoretical consequences. As I've pointed out to you many times, the NRC can do this with or without abandoning LNT and in fact has clear Congressional direction to do so dating back to the 1990 Clean Air Act. There is similarly no need to abandon LNT to eliminate ALARA. Meanwhile, the turnkey model was also undertaken entirely in the context of regulated, vertically integrated, monopoly utilities and the firms that built those reactors still lost money, which is why they stopped doing it well before either the Calvert Cliffs decision or the establishment of the NRC. So none of this should provide you or anyone else with any confidence that anyone is going to build large LWR in liberalized electricity markets without substantial state support.
The minimal requirements for a successful competitive market in the provision of nuclear power plants as we have in fossil plants are:
1) Nil regulatory uncertainty. The rules can't change after the design process starts.
2) A predictable and reasonably realistic radiation exposure compensation plan. This is the last thing anybody would call the American tort system. The government must mandate the exposure compensation system.
Since you accept those requirements, let's focus on (2). We will need a legal worst case release and a radiation harm model to determine the amount of third party liability insurance that the plant will be required to carry. If we use a harm model such as SNT that recognizes our indisputable ability to repair radiation damage to our DNA, the radiation exposure compensation at Fukushima would be about 8 million dollars, assuming no evacuation. Using the same Lost Life Expectancy valuation, under LNT the compensation would be in the neighborhood of 6.1 billion dollars. See
Section 7.1. The competitive insurance markets have the capacity to accept this risk at an affordable premium\cite{wna-liab}. The LNT compensation would be in the trillions, which is uninsurable. Under LNT, nuclear would have to remain a ward of the state as you point out.
Of course, we cannot pick harm models on whether or not we like the implications. That's how we got LNT. We must pick harm models on the basis of how well they represent reality. It just so happens that because LNT ignores our providential ability to repair DNA damage, it overestimates cancer incidence by many orders of magnitude for the spread out dose rate profiles that will be experienced in a release.
LNT must go because it is wrong. Follow the science.
Yes, we can set dose rate limits without getting rid of LNT, but the limits end up being preposterously low. Yes, we could develop a compensation plan based on LNT; but the compensation payments would be uninsurable. LNT must go if nuclear is to have a chance at realizing its promethean promise.
NEW smaller, safer reactors, fantastic! The Na cool reactor Bill Gates team developed Wyoming is a great example! This could be the only thing the Tump administration has leaned into that I approve of. Dr. Randy Greaves
As someone who believes more nuclear sooner would be a benefit, it's a concern that things may be moving a bit too quickly - the danger being a mishap will undermine progress, potentially v. dramatically. My sense is it will fall on the developers to make sure problems do not arise, so I hope they understand that responsibility. Certainly agree that in today's world how this turns out is "anyone's guess".
Yes, will likely come down to INL and the developers. The risk is that there may a lot of pressure on both from the administration to start these first reactors to hit the administration's deadlines and timetable before they are ready to do so safely.
The implicit assumption that you guys take for granted is that a big release is intolerable. If that really were the case, then there should be no nuclear power. However, your assumption is based at least in part on LNT, the radiation harm model that assumes our bodies cannot repair radiation damage to our DNA.
Follow the science. LNT is indisputably wrong. A providential Nature has equipped us with DNA repair systems that have no problem coping with dose rates that are hundreds of times above normal background. She had to do this it handle the far higher DNA damage rates inflicted on us by our O2 based metabolism. Society would be far better off with an occasional big release and cheap nuke than with neither.
Once you replace LNT with a harm model that does recognize our DNA repair ability any increased cancer incidence associated with even a release as large as Fukushima will be statistically undetectable. That's the first step to cheap nuke. Trump could do it with an EO if he were not so obsessed with drill, baby, drill.
That is not my assumption at all Jack. I do not believe that a significant release of radiation is intolerable. As a basic public health matter, it is not a serious problem, even assuming that the LNT model is correct. Dose to the public is still low enough that even in the event of major accidents, the LNT model doesn't produce any statistically significant increase in observable cancers. What I do strongly disagree with is your implicit assumption that if you get rid of LNT, public and policy maker alarm about the release of ionizing radiation will disappear. And that is demonstrably not how public opinion works.
Ted,
I'll overlook the switch from my "big" release to your "significant" release. I will accept your word that you do regard a big release (could be Chernobyl sized) as tolerable despite the fact that the exchange with Fred pretty clearly indicates otherwise. My apologies for assuming something I should not have.
But you also made the same mistake. You put words in my mouth that I have never said. In my view, getting rid of LNT is a necessary, but far from sufficient, first step toward should-cost nuclear power. I have never said or implied that replacing LNT with a model that is consistent with our indisputable ability to repair radiation damage would alone cleave nuclear's Gordian knot. The Make Nuclear Cheap Again book lays out all the follow on steps that will be required. Check it out.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F32KLXRJ`
But these follow on steps cannot happen while the nuclear establishment is preaching LNT. LNT's numbers can be small; but under LNT it is easy to combine tiny dose rate profiles over large populations to create scary cataclysms. Under LNT, it is easy to concoct a scenario in which 1600 people a year die from eating bananas. Hey mom, still want to feed you baby Gerber's banana puree? Under a model that recognizes our ability to repair radiation damage such as SNT, in the same scenario, bananas kill one human every 2.5 million years.
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-banana-dose-rate-profile-revisited
Under LNT, the nuclear grifters will continue to extract billions in dollars per year from the taxpayer for moving slightly contaminated dirt around (mostly in red districts).
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/you-want-nuclear-waste-ill-show-you
Under LNT we will continue to have murderous evacuations as we did at Fukushima. Under LNT a Fukushima sized release in the USA will create 100's of billions (if not a trillion or more) of tort claims. Even in disciplined Japan, the public compensation for a release that 10 years later has produced no detectable increase in cancer is more than 60 billion dollars and counting. Under LNT, nuclear liability is uninsurable, which means nuclear will remain a ward of the state. The fact that LNT is only the first step does not mean that we can skip it.
Since LNT was not mandated by Congress but self-adopted by the bureaucrats, the Trump administration provides us with a once in a lifetime opportunity to take that first step. If we don't do everything we can to make that happen, then we should rot in Hell.
The problem is Trump is not interested in nuclear power. He thinks fossil can solve all our problems at a time when the country is running out of cheap petroleum resources. My advice to the Progressive NGO's is use the Briar Patch strategy. Scream as loud as you can that Trump is going to do away with LNT by an EO. Threaten all manner of demonstrations and legal actions if he takes this unthinkable, unprecedented action. Given Trump visceral reactions, it just might work. What we are doing now is getting us nowhere.
You cannot solve or even put a dent in energy poverty or global warming with toy reactors. There is no evidence that downscaling nuclear power is economic, and plenty of evidence against. Far more fundamentally, even if one of the new technologies were inherently cheaper, that would just give autocratic regualtors more room to push costs up, which is exactly what ALARA mandates them to do. Exhibit A: the most heavily hyped and taxpayer supported SMR is NuScale. Nuscale's Overnight cost is over $20,000/kW, more than 10 times nuclear's should cost and it hasn't even been built yet.
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-power-not-only-should-be
Thanks to nuclear's insane energy density, Conventional light water nuclear power can be cheap. Nuclear power was cheap, 3 cents per kWh in 2024 USD. In the late 1960's, we were building LWR plants for less than $2000/kW in today's money. Ted knows that. He is a co-author of the Lovering paper that documented these facts. These plants could produce electricity at 3 cents per kWh. Most are still running today. None of these cheap plants have harmed a member of the public via radiation.
Nuclear's problem is not technical and cannot be solved by "new" technology (which is not new). Nuclear's problem is an autocratic, omnipotent regulatory system whose goal is preventing a release. Until we replace that regime with a system that directs human self-interest toward societal welfare, nuclear will remain an auto-genocidal failure in the West. The first step is an EO replacing LNT with a radiation harm model that recognizes our indisputable ability to repair radiation-induced DNA damage..
https://gordianknotbook.com/download/a-plug-in-replacement-for-lnt/
With or without an autocratic NRC, there is simply no evidence that anyone is going to build a large light water reactor in a liberalized electricity market anywhere in the world without massive public subsidies. It is simply not an economic or institutional context in which private actors will even contemplate building large public works projects. Every reactor in the United States was build by a vertically integrated, monopoly utility under a cost of service electricity regulatory regime that allowed them to rate-base the cost. There are only a handful of utilities in the United States still able to do that and there is basically zero interest among utility regulators to do this. I am a huge advocate of NRC reform and there is no amount of reform that will change this basic reality. So without both reregulating electricity markets AND very substantial cost-overrun guarantees from the federal government, this is not going to happen. NRC reform is in fact far more important for small, advanced reactors and offers a path to economic competitiveness in liberalized markets. I'm all for doing a big build out of large reactors like France or China or Korea where that is feasible. And when done that way, you are right, large nuclear can be very cheap. But even sweeping NRC reform won't deliver that. That requires very different institutional arrangements, in terms of the structure of electricity markets and the state's involvement with the nuclear industry, that as best I can tell, most large reactor advocates won't actually propose.
Ted,
According to Lovering, Yip and Nordhaus, 14 US nuclear plants were built under turnkey contracts, the last of which was signed in 1968.
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/where-did-the-turnkey-contracts-go
Big Oil made a massive unsubsidized investment in nuclear in the Sixties, and tool an enormous hit when nuclear flopped.
https://gordianknotbook.com/download/nuclear-power-and-fossil-fuel/
But youre right, by the 1970's private investment had learned its lesson. You cannot be exposed to an autocratic regulator whose job is to prevent a release. (Westinghouse forgot that rule in 2008 and went bankrupt.) Unless we eliminate both regulatory imbalance and uncertainty and allowing the ambulance chasers to evaluate radiation harm, private investment in nuclear power is not going to happen. But if we did, investors would flock to nuclear power. They'd make the 1960's nuclear bandwagon look like a one-man parade.
Since you reject the requirements for competitive private investment in nuclear, we are left with the French (and now UK) model, which was also the pre-Fukushima Japanese model, and the pre-2016 Korean model. But as all these examples show, that model only works if there is no autocratic (sorry, independent) regulator. Wherever the single public monopoly model, or something close to it, has worked, the regulator was window-dressing. The public monopoly essentially self-regulated. (Even then it has worked rather poorly compared to what's possible.) So to make your plan work, we need to make the NRC something close to a rubber-stamp. That's precisely what the Trump administration is trying to do. Seems you guys have a lot in common.
I do not reject the "requirements for competitive private investment in nuclear" Jack. I advocate for far reaching NRC reform. I just don't think that LNT is the silver bullet that you do. With or without LNT, the NRC can and should establish a clear numerical threshold tied to actual observable public health consequences, not entirely theoretical consequences. As I've pointed out to you many times, the NRC can do this with or without abandoning LNT and in fact has clear Congressional direction to do so dating back to the 1990 Clean Air Act. There is similarly no need to abandon LNT to eliminate ALARA. Meanwhile, the turnkey model was also undertaken entirely in the context of regulated, vertically integrated, monopoly utilities and the firms that built those reactors still lost money, which is why they stopped doing it well before either the Calvert Cliffs decision or the establishment of the NRC. So none of this should provide you or anyone else with any confidence that anyone is going to build large LWR in liberalized electricity markets without substantial state support.
Ted,
The minimal requirements for a successful competitive market in the provision of nuclear power plants as we have in fossil plants are:
1) Nil regulatory uncertainty. The rules can't change after the design process starts.
2) A predictable and reasonably realistic radiation exposure compensation plan. This is the last thing anybody would call the American tort system. The government must mandate the exposure compensation system.
Since you accept those requirements, let's focus on (2). We will need a legal worst case release and a radiation harm model to determine the amount of third party liability insurance that the plant will be required to carry. If we use a harm model such as SNT that recognizes our indisputable ability to repair radiation damage to our DNA, the radiation exposure compensation at Fukushima would be about 8 million dollars, assuming no evacuation. Using the same Lost Life Expectancy valuation, under LNT the compensation would be in the neighborhood of 6.1 billion dollars. See
https://gordianknotbook.com/download/snt-and-lnt-at-fukushima/
If we use a Chernobyl sized release as our legal worst case, the SNT compensation would be about 1.2 billion.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F32KLXRJ
Section 7.1. The competitive insurance markets have the capacity to accept this risk at an affordable premium\cite{wna-liab}. The LNT compensation would be in the trillions, which is uninsurable. Under LNT, nuclear would have to remain a ward of the state as you point out.
Of course, we cannot pick harm models on whether or not we like the implications. That's how we got LNT. We must pick harm models on the basis of how well they represent reality. It just so happens that because LNT ignores our providential ability to repair DNA damage, it overestimates cancer incidence by many orders of magnitude for the spread out dose rate profiles that will be experienced in a release.
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-dumbest-graph-of-all-time
LNT must go because it is wrong. Follow the science.
Yes, we can set dose rate limits without getting rid of LNT, but the limits end up being preposterously low. Yes, we could develop a compensation plan based on LNT; but the compensation payments would be uninsurable. LNT must go if nuclear is to have a chance at realizing its promethean promise.
NEW smaller, safer reactors, fantastic! The Na cool reactor Bill Gates team developed Wyoming is a great example! This could be the only thing the Tump administration has leaned into that I approve of. Dr. Randy Greaves