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this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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I'm anti-nuclear, but it's because nuclear is so much slower to build and more expensive than solar or wind so the fossil fuel industry is pushing for nuclear to delay the transition away from fossil fuels and use up all the funding.
If you have nuclear plants, you've paid to build them and you're on the hook for decommissioning costs, sure, keep running them. Starting construction on new nuclear in 2026? That's a terrible idea.
You won't be up and running before 2040 and you're not going to be competitive against 2040's renewables and batteries, never mind 2070's.
The 20+ year time to build is at best the direct result of lobbying and NIMBY and realistically just propoganda by antinuclear. The US mean for nuclear construction to production is 8 years. Japan has it down to under 5.
You want to drop safety standards on reactors?
That's a bad faith argument. As someone who spent years in the nuclear industry, a lot of the regulation exists to strangle the industry.
An example was at Vogtle in Georgia, where a section of pipe was determined by the NRC inspectors to be too small and ordered it redesigned.
When that happens, that's where huge delays come in. The design has to go back to home office and be redesigned and bench tested. While that happens, worm is stalled on that section of the plant. That costs money because all the workers still need to be paid.
They redesigned the pipe and installed it just for the NRC to go back and say that the original pipe was correct and to put it back.
The cost of nuclear also comes from the way we manage energy utilities. When a solar farm is built, the builders can just sell it to the utility and walk away, no consideration for decommissioning or waste disposal or environmental considerations.
A nuclear plant requires a whole plan and money on how it will be decommissioned by the builders themselves. Nuclear is the only power type held to this standard.
Nuclear power is a good thing, and its time the greens and people left of center get on board. Its scientifically sound and immensely powerful with no greenhouse gasses released.
Yes and no. I wrote it in a blunt way, but to deregulate nuclear plants I want to be sure it doesn't impact safety.
Your story does nothing to convince me that the industry is regulated to "strangle" it. You don't say what the pipe did. It may have been part of a coolant loop in which case it's safety critical and having the wrong pipe might mean early failure of joints of connected components. Getting that right could be important and so it's right to be regulated.
The problem is actually that it took far too long to be sure what was right, and that's down to companies / people being far too dogmatic about how they work.
Well yes, because the site isn't a million tonnes of low level nuclear waste that needs to be dismantled in a controlled fashion, and specially processed. A solar farm might have some toxic metals in the panels when ground-up, but all are quite easily reclaimed. There's no special skill / process needed for anyone dismantling it. It just needs responsible disposal.
Completely different scale of responsibility.
The point of that story is to illustrate the gross inefficiency and bureaucracy of engineering design changes in the nuclear regulatory cycle. What the pipe did doesn't matter as much as how regulators chose to approach the problem. They effectively wasted months of manpower and materials for nothing.
That to me is strangulation of an industry. Another is how the Obama administration handled Yucca mountain and how the federal government, by law, owns all the uranium and is thus legally responsible for its disposal.
No real movement has been made on this front by the NRC and is the main cause of why we have all our spent fuel sitting on concrete outside of the plant instead of a long term geological repository.
It came out of the ground, so just dig under the water table into the bed rock and leave it there.
"Completely different scale of responsibility"
And completely different scale of power generation. Nuclear plants are far more power dense, and that is the ultimate factor in "potential danger". Solar is great for places that we have already developed but are underutilized, like roof tops or farms, but they aren't going to power an arc furnace or a manufacturing facility or a data center. The power simply isn't there vs. The land cost that would be required for it would be astronomical.
Nuclear and " renewables " are two different tools for the same toolbox. One shouldn't be excluded over the other because both are extremely beneficial. The "green" infighting only serves the fossil fuel lobby.
I think they want to drop the lobbying red tape, not the safety standards
That is exactly what they want to do.
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5677187/nuclear-safety-rules-rewritten-trump
China is building them in 5-6 years, the best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago and the second best time is now.
We can't build them in China, though. Only China can do that. My country doesn't even have an existing nuclear industry.
Sure we could start building reactors now, but we can get enough solar and battery storage through the night for less than nuclear would cost.
I'd like to see scientific proof of that
Everyone who's looking to make money is building wind, solar and batteries. Nobody's looking to invest in nuclear. That's what the people with all the financial data and feasability studies are doing.
The only people we've got pushing for nuclear are the people who were trying to build new coal plants a few years ago.
Props to China, but I know how long building projects take in my country. The plan will say 15 years and it will be done in 25 for 3x the price. And all that to have it produce a kWh for 0.50€. No, thanks.
So don't build 1-off designs, look at the most expensive parts of plant construction, and lower those costs. China's nuclear industry isn't just some construction company that commissions bespoke parts for each nuclear plant, it extends to from heavy forging capacity shared with ship-building to colleges producing construction managers.
I work in construction, and that's just not the way things work in America. Any government project is required to have a bidding phase with multiple options for nearly every required item so that every company has a fair chance to compete.
I do doors, and even when a government project is calling for some hyper-specific Blast+RF+STC door that only one company can even make, my manager still makes me reach out to a bunch of other companies to get a second number just to have something, even if I then have to qualify that what they're able to make doesn't actually fit the specifications.
It's not uncommon for a large, complex project to spend 4+ years in the bidding phase alone, getting rebid over and over with dozens of addendums and RFI's working out all the kinks, without even mentioning the time spent in the planning phase beforehand and the lengthy construction phase afterward.
The issue here isn't that there is a bidding process, it's that only 1 company makes the thing, and that company isn't even an SoE so it has no reason not to charge infinity dollars while delivering as little as possible.
I am not familiar with the specifics of how large complex projects happen over here, but it's not magic, it's insane that we've seen them lap us in every productive measure, and aren't trying to study what they're doing right.