alt Hacker NewsWe need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. I understand that regulation is needed but we also need nuclear energy, we have to find a streamlined way to get more plants up and running as soon as possible. I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California. My rates have doubled in a few years to over $0.40/kWh and up over $0.50/kWh after I go up a tier depending on usage.
Replies
A major reason nuclear plants are super expensive is because we do it so rarely
Every reactor and every plant is bespoke, even if they are based on a common "design" each instance is different enough that every project has to be managed from the ground up as a new thing, you get certified only on a single plant, operators can't move from plant to plant without recertification, etc
Part of that is because they are so big and massive, and take a long time to build. If we'd build smaller, modular reactors that are literally exactly the same every single time you would begin to get economies of scale, you'd be able to get by without having to build a complete replica for training every time, and by being smaller you'd get to value delivery much quicker reducing the finance costs, which would then let you plow the profits from Reactor A into Reactor B's construction
A nuclear fission power plant is never going to be cheaper than a coal plant, and coal plants are very expensive. They're superficially similar types of plants: they heat water and then use a steam turbine to convert it to electricity. Coal plants use higher temperatures and pressures, so they can use smaller turbines. That turbine is a massive part of the cost.
Yes, there's room to drive down the cost of nuclear. No, it's never going to be cost competitive with solar/wind/batteries, no matter how much you drive down the cost or eliminate regulations.
We need to drive down the cost of dealing with nuclear waste. Possibly to zero, because that is a cost that will have to be paid basically forever.
Between 1961 and 2023 «5,600 TWh of electricity were generated from nuclear energy in Germany». [1]
Every year Germany spends (and will have to spend until the end of time) at least 2 billion Euros just to keep the existing nuclear waste safe [2] (more than half of the yearly budget of the ministry of the environment and about 0.5% of the yearly government budget). That's a drag. Think about it: it's all unproductive money, that does not produce any new energy, and stopping these payments will cause irreparable damage to the environment. Forever.
[1] https://kernd.de/en/nuclear-energy-in-germany/ [2] https://www.bundesumweltministerium.de/ministerium/struktur/...
This is said a lot but I don't think regs as written are necessarily the major cost driver. I did a nuclear industry survey to ask what specific regulations people would want changed recently. The one where using commercial grade QA instead of nuclear grade is very interesting.
I think industry overreaction to the regs is possibly as large or larger of a problem than the regs themselves.
https://whatisnuclear.com/news/2025-05-23-regulatory-reforms...
A lot of the cost isn't the tech, it's the years of delays, endless permitting, and political whiplash
As someone also served by PG&E I don't think cheaper electricity will help. At peak hours electricity is $0.13/kwh but the delivery charge is $0.50/kwh.
Which are the fake costs from regulation?
We have new builds in Europe of the EPR, in France and Finland, and it has had disastrous costs. China has built some too, presumably cheaper, since they keep on building more. What is the regulatory difference there?
I have yet to find any concrete defense of the idea that costs are coming from regulation, rather than the costs of construction in advanced economies.
If regulations are the cost, name them and a solution. Otherwise it seems like we are wasting efforts in optimizing the wrong thing for nuclear.
> I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California.
I grew up a few miles away from SMUD's Rancho Seco nuclear power plant; I maintain that shutting it down was SMUD's worst decision. There were problems motivating that shutdown, yes, but nothing that couldn't have been solved.
Found the fatal flaw, and right here it is in glorious action:
> and strong regulations and safety culture ensure that it remains one of the safest forms of energy available to humanity.
It is thinking like the comment above why nuclear power is unsafe and will be unsafe as long as the drive to reduce the expense is viewed as "fake costs due to regulation."
No, that person does not understand larger human culture and how it destroys anything with a nuance to understand, such as the need for regulations.
Your rates aren't doing insane shit because you don't have nuclear energy. Renewables are way way way cheaper.
Or acknowledge the true cost of $10 billion to build a reactor. Look at recent implementations. Finland was complaining that they had to deal with the mafia. The plant cost €11 billion, original proposal: €3 billion. Yikes.
"... 3,800 employees from 500 companies. 80% of the workers are foreigners, mostly from eastern European countries. In 2012 it was reported that one Bulgarian contracting firm is owned by the mafia, and that Bulgarian workers have been required to pay weekly protection fees to the mafia, wages have been unpaid, employees have been told not to join a union and that employers also reneged on social security payments."
Since the OT is about EU, it is important to keep in mind that costs per MW are much lower in EU than in the US (or the UK).
E.g. according to https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/infrastructure-costs-nuclear-e..., UK/US is ~10 millions GBP, France ~4.5, and China/Korea/Japan around 2.5.
I don't know much about nuclear plan, but I doubt UK are much safer in practice than French ones, or even Korean/Japanese ones. I suspect most of the cost difference across countries of similar development to be mostly regulation. And it is a nice example that sometimes EU can be better than the US at regulations :) (I don't know how much nuclear-related regulations are EU vs nation-based though).
I am pretty sure governments around the world want it to be cheaper, but at the same time know that it must be very strictly regulated. Even if that makes it pricier, one can't call that "fake costs".
Also, it takes decades to build them, very often then also getting delayed. Why even consider it nowadays?
Many people see top-line rate increases and assume the issue is supply cost, but transmission and distribution have become over 50% of cost everywhere I’ve lived, and are growing fast, regardless of underlying generation or fuel costs. Distribution alone (the neighborhood/local grid) is now roughly matching the supply cost on my MA bill, and though I last lived in CA in 2019, I would be surprised if PG&E weren’t similar.
Nuclear energy requires high-end engineering and manufactoring skills. Both vanish in the west more and more, particularly in the US.
China can build nuclear plants just fine because they have the manufactoring and engineering quality and quantity. Where did they get that? We gave it to them and even financed it.
The crisis of the west is a crisis of production. To bury regulations just means to keep a failing system afloat for another short while. Regulations exist to prevent another Chernobyl, thanks.
A big part of the cost is financing the project. It is capital intensive, and even few interest points more impact a lot the cost over time.
Those project should be finance with the cheapest money possible (usually government backed loans). UK is an example of nuclear getting expensive due to private investment instead of government.
This should be a quick reminder to the crowd -- Nuclear is almost always a public/private partnership to manage the project development costs and to keep the cost of capital in a reasonable range. The costs are large for a private company to put up the capital with the risk involved.
I can see a future where everyone can have free access to nuclear power.
I'm not an expert but I recall watching documentary on the eve of personal computing and someone saying that the phrase "personal computer" sounded as alien as "personal space station".
Sure, won't happen tomorrow, but it's nice thing to dream of.
> We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.
Chernobyl melted down and exploded.
Three Mile Island melted down and the regulatorily mandated containment vessel protected the public.
I wouldn't call that a fake cost.
Regulations on nuclear power protect us from nuclear waste and meltdowns. Meltdowns are rare but catastrophic when they occur.
SoCal Edison was as low as .06usd/kwh when the nuclear plants were operating. As soon as they started shutting them down it shot up to ~.25-30usd/kWh.
Maybe there’s a deal to be made where France builds and operates nuke plants in the US and handles the spent fuel as well. They’ve gotten quite good at it, and that could bypass a lot of the regulatory quagmire tied to a new home grown design and the reprocessing hazard.
You should look more closely at your PG&E bill. There are some hidden CA taxes in there.
Also PG&E was forced to divest most of their generation assets, so I believe that much of the grid power down there is not under PG&E's control
Edit: Finally, any Western US utility needs to bear the cost of wildfire liability. Whether that is a state-owned utility or private, the cost is still there.
It's regulation holding back nuclear power...in every country?
> We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.
I shouldn't be surprised by this comment. There are so many people who believe we should allow more pollution in the air we breathe and water we drink [1] just to increase the profit margins for shareholders.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/05/14/nx...
> We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy.
This is not true. It might be nice to drive down the cost, but there's no need to do it. Adequate, even preferable, alternatives exist.
The reason PGE is so expensive is because it's a privately owned monopoly with a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns. Additionally, the urban areas of California are subsidizing the fire prone rural areas of the state.
The "fake costs" are not primarily from regulation as much as it is from the need to squeeze profit. For comparison, look at Silicon Valley Power which is owned and operated by the city of Santa Clara. SVP charges $0.175/kwh vs PGE $0.425/kwh. [1]
[1] - https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees
What about long term environmental cost? I might consider your preference if you agree to have all the nuclear waste dumped in your families backyard. Until then, I'd rather not have that waste produced in the first place.
>Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.
Which costs are you thinking about here? Please be specifc, provide details about regulations which are not needed, why they're not needed, and what they add to the cost of a nuclear plant.
Sorry for the tone, but I think your statement is extraordinarily wrong - and at the same time it's being repeated very often lately but never with any specifics. I'm genuinely curious what it is based on.
That is what we did 20 years ago when the renewable industry barely existed.
What has happened since is that the nuclear industry essentially collapsed given the outcome of Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinklkey Point C and can't build new plants while renewables and storage are delivering over 90% of new capacity in the US. Being the cheapest energy source in human history.
We've gone past the "throw stuff at the wall" phase, now we know what sticks and that is renewables and storage.
> I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California.
If you think PG&E jacking up prices has anything other than greed, hubris and decades of short term thinking behind it, I have news for you.
And thats is why people look at nuclear and say "no thanks". The same corporate structures that hid data about smoking, PFAS and oxycodone are the ones you want running a nuclear plant?
Can you make a nuclear plant safe, small and useful: yes. The navy has been doing it for decades now with nary an incident. That doesn't mean you can do it outside a rigid structure where safety and efficiency are above costs. The moment you make that other constraint a factor something else has to give.
Another big reason for the high costs is the lack of experience building the plants.
People like you believe uranium is growing on trees. Have you actually looked up how it's retrieved? The costs are insane and the ecological damage unrepairable.
Ah. The brilliant argument that nuclear power is perfectly safe and if we just eliminate all these pesky safety regulations it will be cheaper too! I often wonder what it would take for me to maintain a belief against literally all published evidence. Nuclear power evangelicals are basically trying to spread a religion at this point. Right along side flat earthers and antivaxxers. We just have to take on faith all of these things that they claim and ignore decades of actual evidence about the economics of power generation.
> the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation
Regulation yes but I wonder how much of it is just "boomer engineering"
Nuclear efforts should be directed into the safest and simplest designs. Designs that need water pumps to cool (like Fukushima) are the type of unnecessary risk and complexity that nobody needs
> Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.
It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop. You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond. Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions. Decommissioning could be a little cheaper with laxer standards, but it’s never going to be cheap. Etc etc.
Worse, all those capital costs mean you’re selling most of your output 24/7 at generally low wholesale spot prices unlike hydro, natural gas, or battery backed solar which can benefit from peak pricing.
That’s not regulations that’s just inherent requirements for the underlying technology. People talk about small modular reactors, but small modular reactors are only making heat they don’t actually drive costs down meaningfully. Similarly the vast majority of regulations come from lessons learned so yea they spend a lot of effort avoiding foreign materials falling into the spent fuel pool, but failing to do so can mean months of downtime and tens of millions in costs so there isn’t some opportunity to save money by avoiding that regulation.