The Off Topic Topic

[Valmy]

I'm also all for nukes powering the future. But the greens ( ) and the Simpsons have seen to that never happening.

I think it is more the enormous costs that have been the bigger issue.

[crazy canuck]

Re : making the sodium batteries lighter. I think there are hard limits on this as Sodium ions are three times heavier than Lithium ions, each ion generating the same amount of electricity.

Yeah, we will probably have functional solid state batteries before we have light weight ion batteries

[The Brain]

I'm also all for nukes powering the future. But the greens ( ) and the Simpsons have seen to that never happening.

I think it is more the enormous costs that have been the bigger issue.

If we put the same demands related to safety and environment on other power production methods then many of them wouldn't be viable.

Society has decided to use irrational risk management, which of course leads to suboptimal outcomes.

[Sheilbh]

Many such cases.

[Tonitrus]

Yeah, nuclear power is more expensive than the alternatives in much the same way capital punishment (not the most rosy parallel, I know) is...not necessarily because it is inherently so, but because we artificially made it so...in order to reduce risks.

But even stripping away redundant regulation, I expect a nuclear power plant would still be more a bit more expensive than a comparable coal plant...just in materials and trained operating personnel.

[crazy canuck]

But if one factors is in the operating cost, the nuclear plant wins.

[Valmy]

But if one factors is in the operating cost, the nuclear plant wins.

Yeah but once the plant is up and operational, the battle has already been won.

But so many communities in the US have a bad memory of trying to build a nuke and having it end up costing tons more and being extremely delayed in its coming online.

[Tonitrus]

Yeah...we've gotten pretty bad at large-scale infrastructure projects in general though, not just nuke plants.

Perhaps that is why there seems to be some appeal in small-scale modular reactors...though I believe those suffer the same regulatory/safety hurdles. 

[Sheilbh]

I think as in many ways the 70s was a pivotal decade.

I think it's kind of global (and part of what becomes neo-liberalism) with a reaction against top-down plans and projects whether it's infrastructure, Robert Moses, plans for British cities to demolish historic centres for motorways or American cities that actually did it, Brasilia, the environmental consequences of our large-scale development on all sorts of levels. I think there's a reaction against promethean man and lots of legal and regulatory and funding changes to introduce constraints and checks and balance.

That was I think absolutely necessary with some of the problem with what had gone previously but we've overcorrected and now need to return a bit (and I've no doubt there'll be an overcorrection and new human and environmental tragedies etc).

Edit: And I'd add I also think this is where the particular cost pressures that seem present in Anglo countries comes in because there are those increased regulatory requirements over many years - but because of our legal system our system tends to the adversarial and our politics has a tradition of activism through legal means with judicial review which adds layers of complexity and cost as hoops are jumped through beyond what is required to legally copper bottom decisions. (There's a really good book on this in the US called Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism -because a lot of the cause of the scepticism, pushback on the promethean state, turn to regulation and law was from "progressive" public interest groups on things like conservation, environmentalism etc in a really interesting way.)