chaogomu , 11 months ago

Fission is only expensive because we're depending on the free market to develop and deploy it.

Basically, we cannot depend on capitalism to fix a problem that capitalism created.

I've seen fairly credible estimates that say when we finally max out the usable land for solar and wind, we'd be producing 30-40% of the world's electricity via those two methods.

Which is a lot of power, but it falls short of the final goal. As a note, we just barely crossed 10% in 2022.

We need fission. It can power the world for the next 1000 years at current demand, and that's including the power generated by solar and wind.

---

The problem is, regulatory sabotage has created a system where it's more cost-effective to build the biggest nuclear plant possible. Except by building bigger, you drive up the costs more. Every part must be custom-built, which is expensive, most parts need special machinery to install, which is expensive, and then the constant frivolous lawsuits from people who don't understand a damn thing about nuclear power, but have strong opinions are expensive.

Add in the fact that these lawsuits delay construction, which means that the regulations can then change mid-construction, which means you need to back-port everything to be compliant with the new regs, and now you have a massive project that's been delayed a dozen times and had the final cost skyrocket, all because the current regulatory structure is such that every plant costs the same to license. And the licensing fees are pretty hefty.

So people taking the risk, build bigger, because the biggest plants can produce more power, which can then be sold to a wider market, and that means more profit in the long run. But again, big plants are fucking expensive.

The answer of course is a factory built small modular reactor. They can be slotted in place, run for 10 years, then shipped back to the manufacturer for refueling and refitting. And because they're small, they literally cannot melt down. There's not enough fuel to do so. Being modular, they can stack next to each other until you have the power needed, and they need the land equivalent of a corner gas station. All to produce more power than most solar farms.

But to really get the economies of scale, and drive that price down, you need a bunch of them to be ordered. Which puts up back in the realm of capitalism not being able to fix a problem that capitalism created. See, those first few units are going to be super expensive as the factory is built and tooled up, and no one wants to pay for that when they can just buy 1000 acres of land and throw a solar farm down.

Also, that licensing issue is still there. You have to pay a lot of money to open a nuclear plant, and that's not even the insurance premiums.

Oh yeah, then there's the waste issue, which is only an issue because we're not actually allowed to burn the waste in a reactor. Because of regulatory sabotage again.

If we were allowed to reprocess and burn the waste, the remaining dangerous isotopes would last a couple hundred years, not the hundreds of thousands of unprocessed waste. We'd also shit ton more fuel power the world for a very long time.