A major nuclear power plant accident doesn’t happen (no Three Mile Island, no Chernobyl, no Fukushima). Nuclear power remains popular despite continual objections from a small contingent of radical activists. As a result, we stop using other sources of power and most climate change effects are avoided. Also, we have abundant power to do cool things with.
Hmm. I am not convinced that safety issue is only drag on nuclear power. They have a significant cost-competitive issues when there is low-cost gas or coal available as an alternative. Even in 1990 (when we were pretty sure there was climate problem), LCOE of nuclear doesnt look good against FF. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1465-7287.1990.tb00654.x (fig 1)
Keep in mind that safety issues and cost are tightly coupled. To make nuclear cheaper, you need to make the parts more efficiently, and to build the reactors more efficiently, and to build more of them. All of these things increase the risks of an incident. Redesigned lower cost parts sometimes will be less reliable than the proven old design—see automotive for examples of this, 80 years after the invention of the automatic transmission, redesigned versions of it sometimes end up horrifically unreliable. A more efficient construction process involves less labor which means less eyes to spot a mistake. More reactors multiplies the small odds of a meltdown per reactor by more reactors.
A large portion of the cost to build nuclear power plants is a function of regulation driven by those accidents. Build time (driven by regulatory and political hurdles, increasing from a few years in the 1960s to well over a decade in the 70s and 80s) increases the cost of financing the project and the complexity of the project tremendously. Also, there are the second order effects here a reduction in building nuclear plants drives reduced investment in funding and scaling improved designs, fewer people becoming nuclear engineers, and so on. There are a lot of designs out there with a lot of potential to be both cheaper and safer, but no one can build them.
A major nuclear power plant accident doesn’t happen (no Three Mile Island, no Chernobyl, no Fukushima). Nuclear power remains popular despite continual objections from a small contingent of radical activists. As a result, we stop using other sources of power and most climate change effects are avoided. Also, we have abundant power to do cool things with.
I think in Europe at least, Chernobyl had a bigger impact than Three Mile did.
Updated to just say that a “major nuclear power plant accident” doesn’t happen.
Hmm. I am not convinced that safety issue is only drag on nuclear power. They have a significant cost-competitive issues when there is low-cost gas or coal available as an alternative. Even in 1990 (when we were pretty sure there was climate problem), LCOE of nuclear doesnt look good against FF. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1465-7287.1990.tb00654.x (fig 1)
Keep in mind that safety issues and cost are tightly coupled. To make nuclear cheaper, you need to make the parts more efficiently, and to build the reactors more efficiently, and to build more of them. All of these things increase the risks of an incident. Redesigned lower cost parts sometimes will be less reliable than the proven old design—see automotive for examples of this, 80 years after the invention of the automatic transmission, redesigned versions of it sometimes end up horrifically unreliable. A more efficient construction process involves less labor which means less eyes to spot a mistake. More reactors multiplies the small odds of a meltdown per reactor by more reactors.
A large portion of the cost to build nuclear power plants is a function of regulation driven by those accidents. Build time (driven by regulatory and political hurdles, increasing from a few years in the 1960s to well over a decade in the 70s and 80s) increases the cost of financing the project and the complexity of the project tremendously. Also, there are the second order effects here a reduction in building nuclear plants drives reduced investment in funding and scaling improved designs, fewer people becoming nuclear engineers, and so on. There are a lot of designs out there with a lot of potential to be both cheaper and safer, but no one can build them.
See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516300106 for an analysis of nuclear plant cost trends globally from the 1950s to the early 2000s.