"Bombing Bombay? Effects of Nuclear Weapons and a Case Study of a Hypothetical Explosion", 1999 International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW)
Yeah, it does. The anti-nuclear crowd has a case of circular reasoning where they put a lot of effort into getting nuclear power crippled by overregulation, then they point to the costs of overregulation as just the inherent nature of nuclear and therefore a reason that it should be abandoned altogether. That changes how an article like this should be read.
And unfortunately the anti-nuclear efforts haven't even managed to stop nuclear proliferation. We seem to have negotiated our way to a world where everyone is going to need to have the weapons but might skip the benefits of nuclear science (though China might make up for the West's failures, hope springs eternal).
Dr M.V. Ramana argued for establishing a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East, even criticizing United States approach towards nuclear armed Israel.
"Dr M.V. Ramana, Professor and Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs (SPPGA), University of British Columbia, Vancouver, told IPS establishing a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East is not only a major challenge but it is also important.
The challenge is primarily due to Israel’s refusal to not just discuss its decades-old nuclear weapons program but even acknowledge it, while at the same time attacking countries like Iran over even its nuclear energy-related programs, he argued.
Being backed by the United States, which adopts one rule for Israel and another rule for other countries, it is very difficult to involve Israel, said Dr Ramana, who is also Director of the Liu Institute for Global Issues and the Acting Director of the Centre for India and South Asia Research (CISAR) in the Institute of Asian Research."
Feels like there is a "too small" range where fixed costs make a reactor design uneconomic, and perhaps a "too big" range where they cost so much that they are rare strategic investments without the benefit of a production line.
Is there a happy medium? Some of the modern SMR proposals aren't all that small. There's a 470MW Rolls Royce unit, for example.
What I find interesting is how little the sales pitch seems to have changed. "Yes, smaller reactors lose economies of scale, but we'll make it up through factory production, standardization and repetition" apparently sounded plausible in the 1950s too
Then you have the additional expense of bringing the power ashore, and of building the breakwater. Most coastal sites are environmentally sensitive - think of Trump's hatred for offshore wind turbines, and imagine how people would feel about something so much more massive!
But in a slightly more-plausible vein, Rolls Royce are pushing mid-sized MRs in the 0.5 GW range, with the selling point that they can be built on the location of ex-fossil fuel or 1st gen nuclear power plants.
They're still more expensive per MWh than a modern large nuclear plant, but have the benefit of reusing existing grid connections and other infrastructure. Whether that's actually enough to make them a commercial success is another matter, but there's a chance they could prove a useful stopgap until grid-scale storage costs come down further.
Look, I prefer nuclear over fossil fuel every day of the week. It's the great hope of the non-carbon electricity sources.
In practice it is expensive to build, expensive to run, and really expensive to clean up. And that's before we add the risk of meltdowns.
Economically it makes no sense, not at the returns level, not at the timescale level, and certainly not at the political level. (If a US president can shutter an offshore wind farm unilaterally, imagine the risk to a nuclear plant that is 50% complete, and not yet fueled.)
There's a reason they're mostly run by govts. Govts are the only providers who don't have a money motive.
Personally I think research into storage, coupled with "wider" grids geographically, make solar and wind far more financially attractive.
Private capital has no appetite for nuclear, and few govts are left with both financial ability, and political will, for 30 year projects.
And if you think fission is expensive, wait till you find out what fusion-on-earth costs...
If we all agree that we prefer nuclear over fossil fuel, then the solutions is extremely simple. Ban construction of new combustion based energy production in the national grid. Let the economy and market forces compete to find the cheapest alternative when there is no fallback to burning fuels for electricity.
Take Sweden, since that is the country where I live in and which has an ongoing election right now. We are not building any new nuclear. We are building a bit more wind and solar, but both is close to 100% capacity and interest for overcapacity is low. New production is located in areas which has yet to reach 100% capacity. Hydro capacity is already at maximum capacity and need to be decrease in order to follow environmental rulings from EU and prevent extinctions of multiple species.
Thermal power plants however is seeing an increase with new plants being planned to burn fuel for electricity and heat. Private capital has great appetite for thermal power plants since those has great financial ability to extract rent from the government as part of the reserve grid and providing readiness to stabilizing the gird, and when they produce energy they can extract the highest price since periods of low wind and low solar create the absolute highest market price. The energy crisis a few years ago demonstrated that a single month can create market prices that exceed that of a whole year if the weather produce non-optimal conditions during the winter.
So the solution is really that simple. Do not build power plants that burn fuels. The economics will push the next cheapest solution to the top.
>> So the solution is really that simple. Do not build power plants that burn fuels. The economics will push the next cheapest solution to the top.
That's not strictly accurate. It'll push the next most profitable solution to the top. If there's no solution that offers the desired rate of return, at acceptable risk levels, then private capital simple doesn't bother to arrive at all.
Govts don't need a reasonable rate of return, so they can fill that gap, assuming that it doesn't cost too much political capital. Yes we need base load, but that message gets lost when the opposition are complaining about high govt spending etc.
Storage is the holy grail here. That allows for more provision of wind and solar.
Governments have always intervened into energy markets to implement policy goals.
German Coal penny
The coal levy was a surcharge on electricity prices levied by energy suppliers in the Federal Republic of Germany to finance hard coal mining . Consumers in the former West Germany paid the coal levy from 1974 to 1995, and it was abolished after the Federal Constitutional Court ruled it an unconstitutional special levy (electricity generation levy).
The Federal Constitutional Court argued that the coal levy was unjustifiable because it burdened the general public of electricity customers who had no particular financial responsibility for hard coal from Germany. The coal levy was therefore abolished at the end of 1995. Since then, hard coal mining has been subsidized from the state budget. Between 1975 and 2002, the total amount of subsidies was approximately 80 to 100 billion euros (in 2003 prices).
"The Renewable Energy Sources Act or EEG (German: Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz) is a series of German laws that originally provided a feed-in tariff (FIT) scheme to encourage the generation of renewable electricity."
Storage could be a solution, but it is not what politicians are right now putting their weight behind (remember, election here is ongoing and will finish in a few weeks. They are very open about their politics). For example, the platform of the green party writes that thermal power plants are a critical part of the Swedish energy grid in order to enable wind and solar. In debates they said that the oil power plant is a natural part of the energy grid and essential for keeping prices low and the grid stable.
That is the left side of the debate. The other side pushes for nuclear, but there is no actually ongoing construction for that. What is actually being constructed and supported by both side is more thermal power plants.
When you need multiple months worth of capacity to cover the winter, rather than hours to cover a day-night cycle, storage is a very expensive strategy. There are experimental tests, like the one in Finland that will heat a small number of buildings in a small town, but there is no political party that is going to the election on a platform with storage as the solution. The closest you will get is the far future plans in the green party platform that current oil and other plants could (in theory) be switched to burning green hydrogen, but the political capital in that area has been significant decreased in the last decade when cost of infrastructure and production has shown to be prohibitively expensive. The biggest project, intended to produce green steel, has been significantly delayed and costs increased, and is continuously demanding more and more subsidizes. To burn green hydrogen for electricity is about as close to becoming economical as fusion is.
You are indeed right that if we were to ban the construction of new thermal power plants, the result will likely be that private capital will simple not bother to do anything unless significant government capital is put on the table. Everything is simply too expensive and if you allow the market price to spike without limit, citizens will go and vote for government to step in. When electricity market spikes by 100x for a single month, the outcome is not that the market steps in and invest in more expensive power plants. Citizen instead goes to the government and elect one that will provide a stable energy market. That was the outcome of the 2020 energy crisis. That is how the economics of nuclear could become viable, or storage, but it is also why thermal power plants is the thing being built right now.
Nationalize all power utilities and use their capital to build new plants. That costs the government nothing, and power will get cheaper even if the nuclear plans fail because their profit margins would be limited by law. It's also the best way to enforce a transition away from fossil fuels.
The costs are actually substantial, but measured in things other than money. Countries have nationalised things in the past, including energy, (think Cuba, Venezuela, Iran etc). The real cost tends to be in lost investor confidence at the bottom end, up to massive sanctions at the top end.
>> because their profit margins would be limited by law
yes, and no. I've lived in a place where selling price was below cost price for electrcity (with a Govt run electricity production.) Ultimately the price is paid out of the budget, which in turn is not infinite. Pressure on the budget in turn leads to redicing costs - like proper maintainence. There's some serious long term pain that is at the end of this path.
In most Western countries, you cannot just confiscate someone else's property without adequate compensation.
"That costs the government nothing"
It does - it costs you your international reputation, willingness of other countries to trade with you and invest in your economy, lost arbitrations in courts. Once you mount this particular tiger of just taking things you want by force, you are riding it all the way towards the "let us build glorious autarky!" club, whose members are famous for their blackouts.
Once upon a time, if you started nationalizing industries, you could at least rely on the Soviet Bloc to support you. That was their ideology, after all. Now the Soviet Bloc is gone, Russia is an economic dwarf and China is not interested in supporting precedents like that - they have too many investments abroad to encourage others to fleece foreigners.
The $12 billion Snowy 2.0 scheme will cop further cost and timeline blowouts, auditors say, but the project has been beset with management failures and the government-owned corporation delivering the project cannot yet say how much more it will cost and how much longer it will take.[1]
My proposed solution: invite any of the 31 nuclear power reactor operating countries over to Australia to build them for us, and teach us how to do it.
CSIRO releases final 2024-25 GenCost report following consultation
* The report found renewables remain the lowest-cost new-build electricity generation technology, while nuclear small modular reactors (SMRs) are the most costly.
* Electricity systems rely on a mix of technologies, because no single option can deliver all the capabilities required for a reliable, secure and flexible supply.
Nuclear power, in Australia, relies upon high upfront costs with an uncertain delivery timeline; there are no sizeable existing nuclear power skillsets in the country, no living experience of construction, and a history of global clusterfucks when it comes to third party power station construction / delivery.
For the same money that maybe gets Australia some turnkey nuclear power by 2040 (ish) there can be nearly immediate delivery of solar power, battery farms, geological hydrogen storage, mini hydro, etc.
Right now, in Australia, nuclear isn't a pragmatic economically feasible choice.
"A 2009 poll conducted by the Uranium Information Centre found that Australians in the 40 to 55 years age group are the "most trenchantly opposed to nuclear power". This generation was raised during the Cold War, experienced the anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s, witnessed the 1979 partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island reactor in the US, and the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. It was the generation which was also subject to cultural influences including feature films such as the "nuclear industry conspiracies" The China Syndrome and Silkwood and the apocalyptic Dr Strangelove. Younger people are "less resistant" to the idea of nuclear power in Australia. Analysis of opinion polls from 2012 shows a "significant decrease in favourable views of nuclear power" following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster."
Decarbonisation is very much discussed in Australia, but not much progress has been done, because coal and natural gas is cheap in Australia. Australia also one of the largest coal exporters in the world.
I think the political-risk point is underrated. Even if you somehow get the engineering and construction costs under control, you're still asking investors to commit capital for decades while permitting rules, subsidies, electricity markets, and governments can all change underneath them
Seems there's no mention of Russia in the article, but they seem to have a rich tradition of small reactors[0].
My understanding is there's still ongoing research/commercialization work but the fabled "many and cheap" production state hasn't been reached there either
The list of installed VVER-440 reactors (slightly larger then the official definition of SMR - rated electrical power of less than 300 megawatts (MWe)) is long:
WWER-440 V-230 reactor
B179 - Units 3 and 4 of the Novovoronezh NPP (Russia)
B230 - 1, 2 units of the Kola NPP (Russia)
1, 2, 3, 4 units of the Kozloduy NPP (Bulgaria)
Units 1, 2, 3, 4 of the Greifswald NPP (Germany)
1, 2 units of Bohunice NPP (Slovakia)
WWER-440 V-213 reactor plant
3, 4 blocks of the Kola NPP (Russia)
Units 1, 2, 3, 4 of the Paks Nuclear Power Plant (Hungary)
Units 1, 2, 3, 4 of the Dukovany Nuclear Power Plant (Czech Republic)
Units 1 and 2 of the Loviisa NPP (Finland);
3, 4 units of the Bohunice NPP (Slovakia)
1, 2 units of Rivne NPP (Ukraine)
Units 5, 6, 7, 8 of the Greifswald Nuclear Power Plant (Germany)
WWER-440 V-270 reactor plant
B-270 — 1, 2 blocks of the Armenian Nuclear Power Plant ( Armenia )
We are much wiser now, because the nuclear industry learns and improves. Similar evolution can be seen for example in aircraft industry, flying in 1970s was much more dangerous with many more incidents then flying now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._V._Ramana
See for example:
"Bombing Bombay? Effects of Nuclear Weapons and a Case Study of a Hypothetical Explosion", 1999 International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW)
https://www.ippnw.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Bombing-Bom...
"Costing plutonium: economics of reprocessing in India", M.V. Ramana, J.Y. Suchitra, 2007
https://www.geocities.ws/m_v_ramana/nucleararticles/IJGEI_Vo...
"India, Pakistan and the Bomb", Scientific American, 2001
https://nci.org/01/12/07-08.pdf
And unfortunately the anti-nuclear efforts haven't even managed to stop nuclear proliferation. We seem to have negotiated our way to a world where everyone is going to need to have the weapons but might skip the benefits of nuclear science (though China might make up for the West's failures, hope springs eternal).
https://www.google.com/search?num=10&client=firefox-b-d&hs=d...
https://www.cndpindia.org/a-nuclear-weapons-free-zone-in-the...
"Dr M.V. Ramana, Professor and Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs (SPPGA), University of British Columbia, Vancouver, told IPS establishing a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East is not only a major challenge but it is also important.
The challenge is primarily due to Israel’s refusal to not just discuss its decades-old nuclear weapons program but even acknowledge it, while at the same time attacking countries like Iran over even its nuclear energy-related programs, he argued.
Being backed by the United States, which adopts one rule for Israel and another rule for other countries, it is very difficult to involve Israel, said Dr Ramana, who is also Director of the Liu Institute for Global Issues and the Acting Director of the Centre for India and South Asia Research (CISAR) in the Institute of Asian Research."
Is there a happy medium? Some of the modern SMR proposals aren't all that small. There's a 470MW Rolls Royce unit, for example.
Why not both? Large Modular Reactors (LMR). You can produce standardized modules in a factory and ship them via barges to their final destination.
See for example: https://whatisnuclear.com/offshore-nuclear-plants.html
But in a slightly more-plausible vein, Rolls Royce are pushing mid-sized MRs in the 0.5 GW range, with the selling point that they can be built on the location of ex-fossil fuel or 1st gen nuclear power plants.
They're still more expensive per MWh than a modern large nuclear plant, but have the benefit of reusing existing grid connections and other infrastructure. Whether that's actually enough to make them a commercial success is another matter, but there's a chance they could prove a useful stopgap until grid-scale storage costs come down further.
In practice it is expensive to build, expensive to run, and really expensive to clean up. And that's before we add the risk of meltdowns.
Economically it makes no sense, not at the returns level, not at the timescale level, and certainly not at the political level. (If a US president can shutter an offshore wind farm unilaterally, imagine the risk to a nuclear plant that is 50% complete, and not yet fueled.)
There's a reason they're mostly run by govts. Govts are the only providers who don't have a money motive.
Personally I think research into storage, coupled with "wider" grids geographically, make solar and wind far more financially attractive.
Private capital has no appetite for nuclear, and few govts are left with both financial ability, and political will, for 30 year projects.
And if you think fission is expensive, wait till you find out what fusion-on-earth costs...
Take Sweden, since that is the country where I live in and which has an ongoing election right now. We are not building any new nuclear. We are building a bit more wind and solar, but both is close to 100% capacity and interest for overcapacity is low. New production is located in areas which has yet to reach 100% capacity. Hydro capacity is already at maximum capacity and need to be decrease in order to follow environmental rulings from EU and prevent extinctions of multiple species.
Thermal power plants however is seeing an increase with new plants being planned to burn fuel for electricity and heat. Private capital has great appetite for thermal power plants since those has great financial ability to extract rent from the government as part of the reserve grid and providing readiness to stabilizing the gird, and when they produce energy they can extract the highest price since periods of low wind and low solar create the absolute highest market price. The energy crisis a few years ago demonstrated that a single month can create market prices that exceed that of a whole year if the weather produce non-optimal conditions during the winter.
So the solution is really that simple. Do not build power plants that burn fuels. The economics will push the next cheapest solution to the top.
That's not strictly accurate. It'll push the next most profitable solution to the top. If there's no solution that offers the desired rate of return, at acceptable risk levels, then private capital simple doesn't bother to arrive at all.
Govts don't need a reasonable rate of return, so they can fill that gap, assuming that it doesn't cost too much political capital. Yes we need base load, but that message gets lost when the opposition are complaining about high govt spending etc.
Storage is the holy grail here. That allows for more provision of wind and solar.
German Coal penny
The coal levy was a surcharge on electricity prices levied by energy suppliers in the Federal Republic of Germany to finance hard coal mining . Consumers in the former West Germany paid the coal levy from 1974 to 1995, and it was abolished after the Federal Constitutional Court ruled it an unconstitutional special levy (electricity generation levy).
The Federal Constitutional Court argued that the coal levy was unjustifiable because it burdened the general public of electricity customers who had no particular financial responsibility for hard coal from Germany. The coal levy was therefore abolished at the end of 1995. Since then, hard coal mining has been subsidized from the state budget. Between 1975 and 2002, the total amount of subsidies was approximately 80 to 100 billion euros (in 2003 prices).
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlepfennig
German Renewable Energy Sources Act
"The Renewable Energy Sources Act or EEG (German: Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz) is a series of German laws that originally provided a feed-in tariff (FIT) scheme to encourage the generation of renewable electricity."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Source...
German coalition agrees to subsidised power price for industry
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/german-coalition-agr...
That is the left side of the debate. The other side pushes for nuclear, but there is no actually ongoing construction for that. What is actually being constructed and supported by both side is more thermal power plants.
When you need multiple months worth of capacity to cover the winter, rather than hours to cover a day-night cycle, storage is a very expensive strategy. There are experimental tests, like the one in Finland that will heat a small number of buildings in a small town, but there is no political party that is going to the election on a platform with storage as the solution. The closest you will get is the far future plans in the green party platform that current oil and other plants could (in theory) be switched to burning green hydrogen, but the political capital in that area has been significant decreased in the last decade when cost of infrastructure and production has shown to be prohibitively expensive. The biggest project, intended to produce green steel, has been significantly delayed and costs increased, and is continuously demanding more and more subsidizes. To burn green hydrogen for electricity is about as close to becoming economical as fusion is.
You are indeed right that if we were to ban the construction of new thermal power plants, the result will likely be that private capital will simple not bother to do anything unless significant government capital is put on the table. Everything is simply too expensive and if you allow the market price to spike without limit, citizens will go and vote for government to step in. When electricity market spikes by 100x for a single month, the outcome is not that the market steps in and invest in more expensive power plants. Citizen instead goes to the government and elect one that will provide a stable energy market. That was the outcome of the 2020 energy crisis. That is how the economics of nuclear could become viable, or storage, but it is also why thermal power plants is the thing being built right now.
The costs are actually substantial, but measured in things other than money. Countries have nationalised things in the past, including energy, (think Cuba, Venezuela, Iran etc). The real cost tends to be in lost investor confidence at the bottom end, up to massive sanctions at the top end.
>> because their profit margins would be limited by law
yes, and no. I've lived in a place where selling price was below cost price for electrcity (with a Govt run electricity production.) Ultimately the price is paid out of the budget, which in turn is not infinite. Pressure on the budget in turn leads to redicing costs - like proper maintainence. There's some serious long term pain that is at the end of this path.
On the other hand France fully nationalized EDF and results are good.
https://www.edf.fr/en/2025-annual-results
https://datacentremagazine.com/news/how-france-is-set-to-bec...
"That costs the government nothing"
It does - it costs you your international reputation, willingness of other countries to trade with you and invest in your economy, lost arbitrations in courts. Once you mount this particular tiger of just taking things you want by force, you are riding it all the way towards the "let us build glorious autarky!" club, whose members are famous for their blackouts.
Once upon a time, if you started nationalizing industries, you could at least rely on the Soviet Bloc to support you. That was their ideology, after all. Now the Soviet Bloc is gone, Russia is an economic dwarf and China is not interested in supporting precedents like that - they have too many investments abroad to encourage others to fleece foreigners.
Enter pumped hydro:
The $12 billion Snowy 2.0 scheme will cop further cost and timeline blowouts, auditors say, but the project has been beset with management failures and the government-owned corporation delivering the project cannot yet say how much more it will cost and how much longer it will take.[1]
My proposed solution: invite any of the 31 nuclear power reactor operating countries over to Australia to build them for us, and teach us how to do it.
1. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/extreme-risk-of-yet-...
Nuclear power, in Australia, relies upon high upfront costs with an uncertain delivery timeline; there are no sizeable existing nuclear power skillsets in the country, no living experience of construction, and a history of global clusterfucks when it comes to third party power station construction / delivery.
For the same money that maybe gets Australia some turnkey nuclear power by 2040 (ish) there can be nearly immediate delivery of solar power, battery farms, geological hydrogen storage, mini hydro, etc.
Right now, in Australia, nuclear isn't a pragmatic economically feasible choice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Austr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Australia
Decarbonisation is very much discussed in Australia, but not much progress has been done, because coal and natural gas is cheap in Australia. Australia also one of the largest coal exporters in the world.
https://www.csiro.au/en/research/environmental-impacts/decar...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_g...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/coal-expo...
My understanding is there's still ongoing research/commercialization work but the fabled "many and cheap" production state hasn't been reached there either
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_small_nuclear_...
WWER-440 V-230 reactor
WWER-440 V-213 reactor plant WWER-440 V-270 reactor plant https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%92%D0%AD%D0%A0-440So "small" here means a 150 meter long building.
there's a remarkable similarity to the life of these units.
They worked, until they didn't.
"ah, but we're much wiser now" is of course in this too.
https://www.voronoiapp.com/travel/Airplane-Safety-Timeline-1...
https://accidentstats.airbus.com/fatal-accidents/