It sounds like we could fix basically all of this by having new plant approvals be "sticky", ie, once a project is approved, you can build and operate it with no additional regulatory-imposed changes.
This whole system of retroactively requiring changes made is absurdly costly and it's why we're stuck in terms of building out new capacity. This is not de-regulation, just changing how we regulate this from something that is actively antagonistic to something that is not.
Some level of retroactive regulatory changes are required because the industry keeps discovering that the previous way of doing things was substantially less safe than previously assumed.
My favorite example of this is that during the golden era of cheap nuclear power mentioned in articles like this, it was the norm to run all the redundant control and monitoring wiring through the same narrow duct in a wall meant to stop fire spreading, fill it with highly flammable foam, and test the foam for air leaks using a bare candle flame. The way we learned this was a bad idea was because workers at Brown's Ferry Nuclear Power Plant actually managed to start a fire and take out a bunch of supposedly redundant monitoring and control systems whilst flooding the control room with smoke. This bad design made both the redundancy and the firestops that were meant to be there ineffective, and the stricter fire regulations required to prevent issues like this are a major cost.
You can't just assume that because something hasn't caused a major catastrophe yet that it's safe to continue doing either. This is such bad engineering practice and has played a role in so many major disasters across multiple industries there's even a specific name for it: the normalization of deviance. It's dangerous because it invalidates all the engineering and safety calculations that were meant to prevent disaster, replacing them with a gamble where no-one really knows the odds.
It is perhaps sometimes true that it is "less safe than previously assumed", but I'd guess that more often it's "we figured out a way to do it _even safer_", but in either one of these cases, 40+ year old nuclear tech was and is safer than coal power plants, which is the alternative. We crossed "safer than the alternatives" and "safe enough" decades ago. The safety regime in the US around nuclear is out of control and has no connection with any outside context.
Given when Brown's Ferry was built (construction started in 1966), plus just how many million American engineers, construction workers, and service members had hard-won WWII-era experience with "if you do it that way, then it may burn up / sink / explode with just one hit" design principals - one has to wonder at the management of the Brown's Ferry design process. How did they manage to keep all of the real grown-ups out of the room?
When we find a systemic risk across the industry, like the requirement for independent core cooling after Fukushima, we should just roll with it and accept it?
Tsunamis do not happen everywhere, but the regulators found the risk to be systemic. As an example: A nuclear reactor in Sweden had a severe incident in 2006 when many of the "defense in depth" layers had been accidentally removed through freak occurrences and upgrades.
When your "safety" regulation is costing a billion dollars per QALY then by imposing it you are killing thousands of people, because that money could have instead been spend on other things like cancer screening that would let you save a thousand times as many lives per dollar.
The vast majority of that cleanup is incredibly QALY inefficient, spending millions removing tiny bits of radiation from soil that would cause a hundredth of a cancer case. This is because the rules are that they need to return the area to the same radiation levels it used to have, not merely to a safe enough level that further action would be QALY inefficient.
Even in 2012 the natural reduction in radiation meant you have only a few square kilometers[1] with exposure levels over 20uSv/h, the level at which we can actually detect a cancer increase. An area that seems to have had less than a thousand people judging by satellite photos. There is no way to justify spending $150 billion cleaning up something that would kill only a couple of people (particularly when you can just pay them the old value of the land/housing and then let them decide whether they want to accept the increased cancer risk) when even in Japan you can save a thousand lives with that money.
Or, even if you assume no disasters, how many QALYs can you buy with the cost difference between a renewables based grid and a nuclear based grid.
Enough that no one is building one of the latter (not France, not China, not South Korea), and everyone is building one of the former (including France, China and South Korea)
1) "below nuclear" is a very flexible concept (the Levy plant in Florida cost $1 billion and they didn't even break ground) and people often confidently assume a nuclear price that is three times smaller than actual building costs.
2)"purely renewable" is a small phrase about a big assumption. 80% solar/wind is cheaper than operating what the US has right now; solving the last 20% has a number of options and we don't know which will work, but while we are quadrupling our current level of solar and wind we have some time to work on that. (Noon Energy makes some attractive claims but it's very early days.)
3) A small amount of "clean firm power" - almost anything's cheaper than nuclear- saves a large amount of storage. Maybe that's closed loop geothermal, maybe that's synthetic natural gas, maybe it's nuclear, but nuclear is REALLY expensive.
Even the ridiculous latest plants with 5x cost overruns costing £35 billion seem to have a lifetime electricity cost of around €0.05/kWh. That doesn't seem "really expensive" to me.
Old 70s style nuclear power is under €0.01/kWh.
I also think your 80% is optimistic and it'll start to become much harder to integrate in once we go over 50% total yearly electricity production. Going to need large natural gas plants just lying around idle for most of the year.
A commonly repeated (was going to say 'believed' but I'm not sure that's actually true) misconception.
Why there is a large contingent of people who think nuclear doesn't need storage is a genuine mystery to me. There's been more storage built for nuclear than for any other power source.
I am unaware of any nuclear electricity storage needs. Wasting extra electricity is trivial, while last I calculated you'd triple electricity costs due to storage if you switched the UK to wind power.
So what number did you get for nuclear when you did these calculations? With no storage you've got to be talking something like 20x for nuclear, right?
> The most important use for pumped storage has traditionally been to balance baseload powerplants, but may also be used to abate the fluctuating output of intermittent energy sources.
For switching entirely to current gen French nuclear (rather than the MUCH cheaper 1970s plants) it was something like a 30% increase in consumer electricity costs.
Basically, you can just have make your "baseload" the amount you want at peak time and sell the excess electricity for basically nothing to industry. This is obviously a bad idea and you'll want some storage instead, but it's much less than what you need to last through a calm but cloudy week.
I very much encourage you to look up numbers for various storage types and energy sources and make a few models. It takes a few hours but its pretty interesting (I should really take it from my hard drive at home and put it on a blog somewhere...).
> It sounds like we could fix basically all of this by having new plant approvals be "sticky", ie, once a project is approved, you can build and operate it with no additional regulatory-imposed changes.
Leaving aside Soviet-era propaganda and that contribution, this would lead to regular Chernobyl-style events if there was no requirement to implement reactively discovered safety processes.
This whole system of retroactively requiring changes made is absurdly costly and it's why we're stuck in terms of building out new capacity. This is not de-regulation, just changing how we regulate this from something that is actively antagonistic to something that is not.