Of course, but fundamentally the activists don't matter. Not much, anyway. France had a powerful anti-nuclear movement, that involved terrorist attacks on reactors, but they still built a ton of reactors. It's economics that killed reactors, especially because of the decentralization of the American system that meant that no one was invested in getting past the economics. I agree that fixing the economics by itself won't get you to 70% nuclear, but it's an important prerequisite (and also the best way to fix the economics is to centralize decision-making and have a national nuclear program, which is the key lever in any case--the only way to get to such a high proportion of nuclear is to have a national program of nuclear reactor construction)
Have both the UK & USA have around 70% or more of their power generation coming from nuclear by 2000
- Thread starter Fuzzy Dunlop
- Start date
Oh the activists matter. I agree they're not the only issue, but that's not the same as their being irrelevant.
This question has been asked several times in several ways in previous threads, and the most interesting suggestion to me was to avoid the oil spike in 1973. Why you may ask, because it forced down growth in the energy industry, before 73 every body was building whith the expectation the the total power used by the US was going to double every 10 years (like it had done for every decade sence 1890) so if you can dely (because a shock like this was going to happen eventually it gust dint need to be in 73) that untill 1980 or something, you can create a situation where there is a huge energy gult for decades in the US market and (this is key) after a nuclear reactor is built, the only sorec for cheaper energy is hygro (and except for Alaska the us has long sence used up it hygro power sources ) its the building them thats the supper expensive part. So if you are a energy utility whith way to much power production, its actually more economical to close a coal plant then a nuclear one IF both are already built (if the nuclear one is not built then the economics point to the coal plant instead of finishing the nuclear plant).
Athother resone to avoid the 73 oil spick (as counter intuitive as that soudes keep in mind the majority of the us power supply has always been coal and resintly gas, oil has never been a pulalaty of us energy consumption even if its price can still hugely effect the energy market) is that standardized 1000 mega watts reactors where gust about to be mass produced in Florida and if they could decrease the cost of the nuclear reactor by 15 to 20 percent (about how well air plane manufacturing managed when they switched to mass manufacturing) then nuclear power is cost competitive whith coal whith out the energy glut ( how do you think power companies where able to be duped in the first place about the price for nuclear, it isn't that much more expensive then coal, and whith some help it can get there) I can't say however how well the whole artifical nuclear power plants/islands would have been but even if that dint work out whith energy utilitys literally thinking coal is going to run out if the rate of us consumption continues to grow by 7-8% per year by 1990 arnt going to say no to a much cheeper nuclear reactor (or I suppose this idea could have been done a decade earlier, or gust have standardization be expected form the very beginning after all civilian nuclear reactors where to begin whith gust inbigined sub reactors and the us navy has always stived to keep there nuclear reactors standardized from the beginning, that could have been transfered to the civilian sector is some way)
Bit if you do both you could end up with the energy "to cheep to meter" nuclear utopianism happen despite it being agenst letraly everybody's best interest and completely by accident.
Athother resone to avoid the 73 oil spick (as counter intuitive as that soudes keep in mind the majority of the us power supply has always been coal and resintly gas, oil has never been a pulalaty of us energy consumption even if its price can still hugely effect the energy market) is that standardized 1000 mega watts reactors where gust about to be mass produced in Florida and if they could decrease the cost of the nuclear reactor by 15 to 20 percent (about how well air plane manufacturing managed when they switched to mass manufacturing) then nuclear power is cost competitive whith coal whith out the energy glut ( how do you think power companies where able to be duped in the first place about the price for nuclear, it isn't that much more expensive then coal, and whith some help it can get there) I can't say however how well the whole artifical nuclear power plants/islands would have been but even if that dint work out whith energy utilitys literally thinking coal is going to run out if the rate of us consumption continues to grow by 7-8% per year by 1990 arnt going to say no to a much cheeper nuclear reactor (or I suppose this idea could have been done a decade earlier, or gust have standardization be expected form the very beginning after all civilian nuclear reactors where to begin whith gust inbigined sub reactors and the us navy has always stived to keep there nuclear reactors standardized from the beginning, that could have been transfered to the civilian sector is some way)
Bit if you do both you could end up with the energy "to cheep to meter" nuclear utopianism happen despite it being agenst letraly everybody's best interest and completely by accident.
Yeah the whole "We oppose nuclear power and consider it dangerous so we're going to fire RPGs at the cooling towers of live nuclear reactors" thing was just plain crazy. I mean I understand that their wasn't really any risk of a melt down or anything from the attack (They only fired a couple RPGs and the amount of damage they could do to the cooling towers was minimal and their were fail safes) but it's still insane as a anti nuclear tactic. I mean I could understand them trying to blow up or sabotage the plants while under construction but trying to blow them up while their live strikes me as insane. I mean how else can you phrase "We're going to save the environment by using explosives to try and blow up a live nuclear reactor."
I mean honestly if I was their at the time and I heard someone had fired a couple RPGs at some nuclear plants anti nuclear activists would literally be my last guess of a probable group.
It isn't the activists that matter. It is the activists LAWYERS that matter. The ability of the lawyers to drag out the approval and construction phase of the reactors thru litigation drives the costs up to the point that the reactors are not economical. You need to stop the American system from becoming more litigious in the 60s and 70s.
Even this is not the primary factor, or even a major factor. Yes, litigation and the bad U.S. environmental permitting doesn't help, but the same kind of economic issues were seen in most countries, save those that had very active nuclear construction programs (like France--and, again, terrorist attacks on reactors). In the U.S., the economic issues were mainly due to tightening regulations in the early to mid 1970s (for the very good reason that the existing regulations grossly underestimated certain kinds of risk and produced dangerous plants) and the high degree of customization for each U.S. nuclear reactor, driven in large part by...well, the decentralization problem, where each reactor was a custom order by a utility rather than simply the result of the AEC going around and saying "we're going to build PWR Standard #1 here, here, here..." which is basically what happened in the countries that had more successful nuclear programs.
This is why I always come back around to the decentralization problem. The fundamental issue is that no one in the U.S. system has both the authority and the will to make people use nuclear power primarily. The utilities and state regulatory bodies, which have the authority, just want to produce cheap power. The AEC/DoE has the will (sort of their bag), but no authority to make people use it. If you make people build nuclear plants, then obviously you'll have more nuclear plants, but more importantly you'll help with the economic issues. If you want nuclear power to be bigger in the U.S., this is the key problem to solve, and it really needs PoDs that have nothing directly to do with nuclear power.
I don't think the issue is the centralizing, its that there was no standardized or mass produced reactors. If there where any and where cheaper then regular reactors the the utilities are gust going to buy that. And they where gust staring to make those before the crash in 73. Do it a decade earlier and you can beet coal, and won't require the centralization of the us power grid which quite frankly would probably be a lot harder then make a standardized nuclear reactor @Workable Goblin
...which is because the electrical grid is divided between dozens and dozens of utilities covering wide geographical areas who have no perceived incentive to "standardize" and there is anyway no method of forcing them to do so. The contractors also have no incentive, since the local contractors won't get business if there's a national program (meaning that the workforce can actually learn and be trained), and the national contractors (GE, Westinghouse, etc.) make less money if they're just selling standard reactors to customers instead of customizing them per site. Not to mention that there was no guarantee of ongoing orders, so no incentive to act as if there was going to be a long production run. In short, the lack of centralization destroys any incentive to standardize or "mass-produce" reactors (you really can't mass produce reactors unless you're going for SMRs, but those have a lot of issues themselves...)
It's impossible to "do that" a decade earlier. In 1963, there were twelve operating nuclear power plants in the entire country, three of which were experimental designs that proved to be unviable and all of which were very tiny compared to later standards (the largest was a mere 275 MWe, most produced less than 100 MWe). It wasn't until the late 1960s and early 1970s that the nuclear program was mature enough to even think about standardizing reactors, and by that point a lot of bad ideas had gotten "baked in".
Also, you're just plain wrong that people were "starting to standardize" before the 1973 oil bust. Unless you mean that they were standardizing on PWRs and BWRs, which is true but not helpful. The crux of the problem was that each individual plant was customized to site, and there was no indication that that was changing before, after, or during the oil crisis.
The problem is that ultimately the way that the U.S. nuclear program developed, as a result of the decentralization of the U.S. power grid, makes developing a standard nuclear power plant nearly impossible and its implementation even less likely.
I tried googling it but I didn't find anything. Could you share a link so I can read up on it?
I think you don't understand that power utilities don't care if the reactor standardized or not, if its cheaper then they will gust use that.
And can't in 63? Thats exactly what the us navy did at the same time to keep nuclear cost reasonable, there is no reson that couldn't have also happen then as well. And yes there where infact starting to construct the factory in Florida for it. Its the same project that as the nuclear islands (that I'm far less confident would work).
Yes, that's the point. The utilities have no incentive to standardize as opposed to requiring site-specific modifications based on what they think will produce a better plant for their own use, and therefore will not standardize unless someone forces them to do so. And, from OTL experience, we know that standardized reactors built on a large--national--scale is the only way to effect the necessary economies of scale and learning curves needed to make nuclear power economically competitive with fossil fuels. Otherwise you're at a point on the production curve where mass production doesn't make economic sense, since there aren't enough orders being placed for for a given design to take the start-up costs needed to mass produce them.
The U.S. Navy, as it happened, required reactors of precisely the specifications that were actually being built at the time to do their mission--a reactor producing a few tens of megawatts of electricity was exactly what a submarine or aircraft carrier needed. However, all actual real-world experience shows that this is much too small for a power reactor--for that, you need a reactor around the gigawatt scale for it to be economical. And those simply didn't exist yet. Trying to standardize in '63 means taking a guess at what technology is actually practical and feasible to implement before it actually exists or is demonstrated at the necessary scale, which is ridiculous and will actually make things worse when they inevitably need to make major modifications to the standard design based on lessons learned from building it and from better modeling of failure risks. They did IOTL, after all, which was a major factor in driving up the cost of plants during the 1970s.
As for your "the factory in Florida," care to provide a link?
Well I think we gust have to agree to disagree, I don't think the utilities are idiots and the idea of mass production was not some new idea in 1970, if some one came up whith a cheaper alternative utilities are gust going to use them, its the nuclear builders themselves that preferred the every one unit unice because they could charge more for them and utilities could make up for it sense power increasing by 7-8% per year was the mors law of the day, that's stoped in 73 and utilities now need to build whith wild swings in energy demand in mind which nuclear is not good for.
Offshore Power Systems - Wikipedia
Like I said earlier I don't think the offshore island consept would have worked out (although new jersey already bought one) but to bring prices down they where in the middle of building a factory for them in 73, (and gust to showcase the insanity they where planning to build 100, 1 gigawatt reactors a year after the factory completed in 1975, admittedly they where expecting to send these all over the world) 73 was at exactly the wrong time for that company.
And yes you do realize civilian reactors to begin whith where gust large sub reactors right? Still are in many ways.