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this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
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Scrapping the NuScale project had nothing to do with lawsuits. Governments pulled their financial support because projected costs were exceeding what was contractually promised, mostly due to pandemic-related supply chain and inflation issues.
This is typical of nuclear. The industry wants to believe its problem is regulation. It's not, at least not if you want to have better safety guarantees than the Soviet Union did. Its problem is that to be safe, nuclear is expensive, and there doesn't appear to be a way out of that.
Yes, NuScale wasn't scrapped due to lawsuits, I was more referring to the delays to Blue Castle, which was delayed for 3-ish years due to lawsuits.
NuScale is a pretty small operation promising something like 300-400MW. Blue Castle is a lot larger promising ~1500MW.
Initially, yes, but amortized over the life of the plant, it's pretty cheap. It has a high upfront cost and relatively low operating costs. And one of the big operating costs (waste disposal) won't be an issue here, the larger issue is water access for cooling, and that's political (farmers don't want to give up water rights).
My main concern is seismic activity, since if we get an earthquake, it'll likely be very violent. That increases initial costs, but doesn't really impact ongoing costs. Utah just doesn't like throwing large sums of money around, hence the political pushback.
We're still >50% fossil fuels, so I'll support anything that replaces that. I like hydrogen (in development), geothermal (in development), solar (expanding), and wind (seems to be slowing), but that's not going to be enough. Even if all of those were operating today, we'd still be using significant amounts of fossil fuels. I think we will still need nuclear, we have the space and demand for it.