Thread by @jmkorhonen

Let me be very clear about this:

The environmentalists were NOT the reason #nuclear power stalled in the 1980s.

There is absolutely no support for a theory, popular in some circles, that we could've been fossil free "if not for the Greens." 1/

Even accidents such as Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were more like nails in the coffin.

The main reasons by far were economics and deregulation.

I'm writing a detailed study of the reasons nuclear dreams of the 1970s faltered. Some observations. 2/

Without massive cost overruns, nuclear power may have been cost-competitive with fossil fuels even during the 1980s, when the price of fossil fuels plummeted from its 1970s heights.

With actual costs, no chance. 3/

Budget overruns were a thing even in the Soviet Union, where even official publications about their extremely ambitious nuclear power program noted that nuclear electricity couldn't compete with coal electricity.

That's one reason why Chernobyl was as bad as it was. 4/

The reactor at Chernobyl was designed to be as economically efficient as possible. It could use cheaper low-grade fuel and didn't need to be shut down for fuel loading, like Western reactors.

But the design needed to do that was incompatible with proper reactor containment. 5/

And even the original Chernobyl RBMK reactor, before post-1986 safety upgrades, still struggled to produce electricity cheaply enough to make nuclear investments rational when coal was cheap.

Remember: Soviet leaders didn't need to give a shit about public opinion. 6/

In the West, especially in the US, the cost overruns in ambitious nuclear projects were a major motivation for electricity market deregulation.

After deregulation, the electricity companies couldn't simply pass cost overruns to customers. Thus, risky projects were shelved. 7/

In the US, the nuclear industry was essentially dead after the passage of the 1978 PURPA act, which began the deregulation process.

Only one construction start happened in 1978, and that was the last one before 2013.

A year before Three Mile Island. 8/

There is no lack of evidence that deregulation killed the nuclear industry everywhere. The International Energy Agency wrote entire briefs about that in the 1990s. In deregulated markets, capital needed for nuclear projects was expensive to obtain. 9/

And there was little need or appetite for risky long-term projects. Fossil fuels were cheap, demand projections didn't materialize.

ONLY thing that could've saved nuclear would've been a hefty price on carbon.

Guess what: the environmentalists were demanding exactly that. 10/

Accidents, less severe incidents and the anti-nuclear movement that rather understandably gained support from these DID matter. But compared to the impact of deregulation, their impact was small.

An oft-cited estimate says that nuclear financing demands a 2-3 % risk premium. 11/

That is a lot of money for a capital-intensive long-term project. But consider that deregulation increased the cost of capital to electricity companies from around 3 % to 10-12 % or even more. Hikes in interest rates were also considerable at the time. 12/

After 15 years of studying energy and nuclear issues, I'm convinced that

1) if nuclear energy had been an economically sound choice in the 1980s, no environmental movement could've stopped it
2) only fossil fuel restrictions could've made nuclear economical. 13/13

PS. We’ve argued that nuclear energy should be among the toolbox now. See this book for a summary:

climategamble.net

PS2. I don't believe in any major renaissance of nuclear power in the absence of hefty subsidies or more or less state-owned enterprises stepping in. Preferably to build many standardized reactors to drive down the costs.

Either way, the taxpayer would shoulder the risk.

PS3. A great explanation in one figure: a 1974ish prediction of West German energy use (primary energy), and the actual primary energy use in 1990.

Easy to see why nuclear was a hard sell.

PS4. More info, calculations, and sources here.

https://twitter.com/jmkorhonen/status/1625412943507488771?s=20&t=6pLUkd0mAd5XPzl_sD7X8w