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First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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Nope, the writing was on the wall for almost a year on this one. The whole nuclear industry in general is a long history of cost and schedule overruns. This is more of the same. Investors are not dumb.
You can invest in a solar or wind deployment and have it running and producing revenue in six to twelve months. You can invest in nuclear with a stated schedule of five years, have it blow past that mark, needing more money to keep it going (or write the whole thing off), and then start actually getting revenue at the ten year mark. This isn't mere speculation, it's exactly what happens. Oh, and it's producing at least half the MWh per invested dollar as that solar or wind farm.
It's amazing anyone is putting any money into nuclear at this point. For the most part, they aren't. The federal government has shown willingness to sign new licenses for plants. Nobody is buying.
SMRs do not appear to change any of this.
Now, something I think we should do is subsidize reactors that process old waste. Lots better than the current plan of letting it sit around, and probably better than storing it in a cave for millenia, too.
Well the costs and schedule is a regulatory thing.
Even if that's true, what are you going to do about it?
Say you do a whole lot of research, and conclude that loosening regulations x, y, and z will not impact safety in any measurable way, and will substantially reduce costs. Even detractors with scientific credentials agree this research is solid. Best case scenario, here.
NIMBYs will still kill it. What you just did is hand them a way to say "they are cutting corners using unproven methods to let their investors line their pockets at the expense of the lives of their workers and everyone who lives around it".
They may be wrong, but their arguments in front of a government body can still be persuasive. They don't have to be right, just vaguely plausible to people who aren't experts. That will be enough to kill it.
You can't beat NIMBYs by having the best argument. You need to plan around them. Don't hand them a weapon before the fight begins.
So nimby will appose everything. Want to build a solar farm nimby, what to make a wind farm, nimby. I have people turn against a wind farm once they learned it would make electricity for their city but for the whole power grid. Simple because they learned other people would be able to use that electricity. How dare something they can see help the other. Making the build time and cost better helps build around them.
Sure. What is your plan for dealing with them?
I dont know. They are a problem for everything everywhere.
I've seen a major local building developer work around them. To be clear, I think this developer is an asshole for other reasons, but he knows how to get around NIMBYs.
He presents an apartment complex. A few people in the neighborhood don't like it, and act like they represent everyone. Some city meetings are setup to discuss it. What he'll then do is suggest a few things as compromises that aren't really compromises. They might be things he wanted to do in the first place, but didn't think the city would have allowed it otherwise. If the people complain about the height, he'll suggest cutting a section of the top floor to create a balcony for a "penthouse suite" (he'll rent that one out for a premium and lose nothing in the end). Compared to the NIMBYs, where 90% of their arguments are bullshit and they look like raving loons, he looks like the reasonable one. The city council nods sagely and approves the project, perhaps without any alterations at all.
What he doesn't do is give NIMBYs ammunition before this process starts. You can't loosen nuclear regulations and expect for this to work.