Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Is nuclear power really that slow and expensive as they say?" video.

  1. Actually this is NOT a good video and there are a lot of mistakes in it. Unfortunately Sabine is NOT and engineer she's a theoretical physicist. In general I like her videos but in this case she's just got a lot of stuff WRONG. She's obviously never been involved in a large construction project. I have actually written a very long reply to her in her pinned comment at the top. Here's just 1 example. She's claimed that nuclear reactors should only take 7 years to build and the Japanese can do it in 4. Shen never mentions once what type of reactor they built in Japan or how they were built differently to other reactors. The Illinois Energy Prof (here on YT) did a video on the Fukushima design and how the design contributed to the disaster. When you look at the Westinghouse AP1000s there are 2 at Vogtle in America and 4 at 2 sites in China and all 6 of them took 9 years to build. Also the Chinese built a CANDU (Canadian design) reactor in 4 years but its a totally different design to something like the AP1000. So the whole East-vs-West thing is BULLSHlT when you compare sites building the same type of reactor.
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  2. Actually this is NOT a good video and there are a lot of mistakes in it. Unfortunately Sabine is NOT and engineer she's a theoretical physicist. In general I like her videos but in this case she's just got a lot of stuff WRONG. She's obviously never been involved in a large construction project. I have actually written a very long reply to her in her pinned comment at the top. Here's just 1 example. She's claimed that nuclear reactors should only take 7 years to build and the Japanese can do it in 4. Shen never mentions once what type of reactor they built in Japan or how they were built differently to other reactors. The Illinois Energy Prof (here on YT) did a video on the Fukushima design and how the design contributed to the disaster. When you look at the Westinghouse AP1000s there are 2 at Vogtle in America and 4 at 2 sites in China and all 6 of them took 9 years to build. Also the Chinese built a CANDU (Canadian design) reactor in 4 years but its a totally different design to something like the AP1000. So the whole East-vs-West thing is BULLSHlT when you compare sites building the same type of reactor.
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  3. ​ @PlanetEarth3141  "try less engineering" sorry but there's been TOO MUCH of that already in public discussions and that's why we have the mess we have. Its actually been damn rude of all the economists, futurists, influencers,.... etc to IGNORE US because after all we are the people who have to design, construct and maintain the next generation of power systems. You can either listen to us OR get ready for when the lights go out AND DON'T COME BACK ON.
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  4. ​ @DarenMiller-qj7bu  Do you know that back around 2005 there was a giant split in Greenpeace? It wasn't widely advertised but the majority of the scientific and engineering people basically said look "we have to replace the coal fired power stations with low emission generators and nuclear is LOW EMISSION." INSTEAD the ant-nuclear side of Greenpeace who are NOT STEM people but political people said NO the priority is getting rid of nuclear. This is nowhere more evident that in Germany where they spent €1.3 Trillion on low emission wind and solar but it needed to be backed up and the German Greens said turn off the low emission nuclear while the STEM people said NO turn off the coal. The result after spending €1.3 Trillion to lower emissions was that nuclear got turned off and they then had to run the coal flat out and emissions WENT UP. This is what happens when you let people with an ideology put their ideology in front of common sense and reality. I have no proof but I believe the fossil fuel industry has infiltrated BOTH the Wind/Solar and pro-nuclear camps and got them to fight each other when they should be working together.
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  5.  @lrvogt1257  Where do you get that figure of 300-400 million from? I'm not saying its wrong and its an incredibly important factor that is rarely discussed. The one nuclear site where cost data is/was being published for a while was the clean up of Sellafield in the UK, but it wasn't just a a power station it was a processing facility as well. Plus its a fairly dirty site and was where the 4th worst nuclear incident in history happened - the Windscale Fire. So its costs might not relate to other sites. A report in 2018 said that its currently almost £1bn over budget and is due to be fully decommissioned by the year 2120 at a cost of £121bn.
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  6. ​ @PlanetEarth3141  Sorry but your not quite right. I am an engineer and there simply is no one single technical solution for the world. Solar and Wind can do a great deal of the power supply for those countries that have great locations for wind or solar and a few countries have both. But there are many countries that don't have great solar or great wind and some don't have either. Solar and wind are also great for load following but they struggle to supply base load power at large scale for larger populations. Nuclear is expensive but its also great for base load but struggles with load following. For many developed societies we actually need BOTH nuclear and Wind/Solar, but we also need better energy storage as well as more efficient use of that energy. For many less developed nations nuclear is out of the question because you need the skill set to maintain it so they will need to develop using wind & solar. I'm really sorry to the Greenies but you are going to have to face the reality that wind & solar CANNOT DO EVERYTHING. I'm really sorry to the pro-nuclear camp that they too will have to face up to some harsh realities about costs and time frames, which Sabine has got spectacularly wrong.
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  7.  @PaulZyCZ  That's a great point I have tried to make in Australia. We have this new push for SMRs going on right now by one side of politics. Its mostly a political bat to bash the other side with, but considering our power issues its also a valid point. The problem is that even if we did say YES lets build nuclear we don't have a single person in Australia (as far as I know) who has actually built a nuclear reactor. Also considering some of the issues we currently have with concrete structures (go look up the Opal Tower fiasco) I would NOT want a nuclear plant built WITHOUT proper regulations in place.
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  8.  @MattCasters  Buddy EVERY ENERGY SECTOR is subsidised in some way. Here in Australia the oil & gas people scream and screech about subsidies and programs for solar and wind BUT DUE TAX CONCESSIONS the LNG export industry has NOT PAID a cent in tax on around $400 Billion in profits over the last decade. Yes they get no subsidies just the greatest tax break in history. Our coal industry has also had similar tax concessions through its entire history. THEY ARE ALL SUBSIDISED ONE WAY OR ANOTHER.
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  9. Sorry Sabine, but you are being INCREDIBLY DISHONEST about current construction times and costs. You are playing a statistical data game and that is totally unnecessary. I believe we will need nuclear for practical reasons and there is NO NEED TO MISLEAD PEOPLE. FIRST - I'm an aerospace engineer and nuclear power is the answer to a moon base and that's part of my interest. I work in industrial control systems and automation. I'm also TUV certified as a Functional Safety Engineer so I have a better understanding of what it takes to make industrial plant safe than you do. My reason for being pro-nuclear power for other than a moon base is based on practicality. Power grids need 2 types of generators - base load and load following and I EXPECT YOU and most of your viewers KNOW THAT. I am actually of the belief that we'll need a mix of nuclear, hydro (where it can be practically done) and renewables (wind & solar combined with storage). In most cases that mix will depend on skill sets and geography. You need the skill set to do nuclear and wind, solar and hydro are all dependent on geography. The reason I believe we'll need a mixture is because Nuclear is great for 24/7 base load but struggles with load following while wind & solar struggle with base load but are good for load following because they can be switched in and out. Hydro can sort of do both, but despite the claims there are 1,000s of places we can do new hydro most of those sites are impractical because of how far off grid they are. Snowy 2.0 in Australia (my country) has gone from an initial AU$2 Billion to more than AU$12B and most of that is the grid connection. The greatest advantage of nuclear however is it can be built on the sites of de-commissioned coal fired power stations and take advantage of the existing grid infrastructure. So I am pro-nuclear because I believe it fills a particular requirement in modern energy grids. SECOND - you are being incredibly dishonest with the construction times because you are ARE NOT DISCUSSING THE TYPES of REACTORS that people are building NOW like the American AP1000 by Westinghouse or the European Power Reactors (EPRs) like the one recently completed in Finland or the 2 under construction at Hinkley Point C in Britain and Flamanville in france. The 2 AP1000s at Vogtle in Georgia took 9 years and the 4 AP1000s in China took 9 years. The EPR in Finland Olkiluoto Unit 3 took 18 years to start producing commercial power, but it had some interruptions. The 2 EPRs at Hinkley Point C are expected to take 10 years with first power in 2028. The EPR at Flamanville (Unit 3) was started in 2007 and is currently expected to be commissioned in 2024. Sure anyone can look up the Japanese reactors and find out things like SHIKA-2 took 4 years to build but its Operating Factor was only 47%. You can also look up the Illinois Energy Prof here on YouTube and see his explanation of what went wrong with Fukushima. They were storing the spent fuel ON TOP of the reactor instead of under it like everyone else because it saved money and time on construction. So when Fukushima blew its lid, and yes Illinois Energy Prof explained it was a chemical (hydrogen) explosion it blew up the spent fuel and scattered it across the site which is why it was so contaminated. So the current GEN IV reactors are taking at least 9 years and as much as 18 years to construct and commission. THIRD on costs you claimed that a nuclear power station in America costs between $5 and $10 Billion. Forgetting the explanation you gave you should NOT have said anything when people can get on Wikipedia and find that: - The 2 AP1000s at Vogtle have an estimated cost of US$34 Billion (see Wikipedia). - Hinckley Point C with 2 EPRs currently has an estimated cost of £32.6 Billion. - Flamanville 3 (another EPR) was originally quoted by EDF at €3.3 billion. By 2012 that cost had escalated to €8.5 billion and by 2020 its cost was estimated at €19.1 billion. All of this data is easily available on Wikipedia and other places for anyone to look up. So please don't quote nonsense numbers because its easy to get into trouble. FOURTH I know you're a theoretical physicist and its OBVIOUS you have no experience in complex construction projects. Your explanation for labor costs and productivity is just repeating what ECONOMISTS have been claiming for years and THEY ARE WRONG. This is NOT a nuclear industry thing either. Its across every industry. I do have experience in complex construction projects courtesy of almost 20 years in mine site construction. By chance in 2002 I met Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) and he told me about mining Helium-3 on the moon. So I went to Australia's remote mining industry for experience and stayed a bit longer than planned. What I got was some profound experience in the economics of large complex projects and how contracting companies operate. When economists put profits above everything else one of the side effects was how the contracting industry operated. On large long term projects the contractors employ all their people on hourly rates. The more hours you can charge the more profit you make. So the incentive is NOT on getting the job done but booking as many hours as possible. So the incentive is to hire SLOW & LESS PRODUCTIVE people because they are more profitable. Also claiming that it takes longer because of regulations is a great way to blame someone else why your people are slow and less productive. When I hear people like you REPEAT these claims by economists I literally want to scream. You have no idea what can happen if you actually want to do a job properly or on time or just do a quality job. I have been kicked of projects for getting the job done. I've actually given up on safety engineering because having those qualifications make me almost unemployable thanks to these types of cost adding behaviors. Safety and regulations do NOT cost money. Bad incentives, greed and things blowing up costs money. Summing up: The biggest enemy nuclear power has IS NOT THE IDI0T Greeny who's so stupid its amazing they don't need reminding to breath. Its because of videos like this which are full of basic errors and repeating nonsense that can be refuted easily just fact checking on Wikipedia. MISINFORMATION IS WHAT'S KILLING NUCLEAR and a lot of it is coming from pro-nuclear people. I hope you are going to do a correction video after this.
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  10.  @HowardKlein1958  France has a massive advantage that few people realise and being honest I didn't know about this until recently. James Krellenstein brought this up during his interview about ENRICHMENT on Decouple Media here on YT. Just put "krellenstein enrichment" into YT search and you'll get it. Between the Uranium mine and the power station is an enrichment plant and France not only has a lot of enrichment capacity but they switched the enrichment method and got a monster bonus. They used gas diffusion and switched to gas centrifuges which uses less than 1/30th of the energy to produce the fuel. In switching over they freed up 3,000MW into the French grid from the Tricastin power station and since that 3,000MW was already paid off it came onto the French power grid at very low cost. Its was like the French suddenly gifted themselves a free power station about the same size as the Brits are building at Hinkley Point C at a cost of £32.6 Billion. The new enrichment plant cost €3 Billion so it wasn't exactly free but it was a lot cheaper than the €19 Billion that Flamanville Unit 3 has cost and that unit is only 1,600MW not 3,000MW. I went and checked what James said and its true. I found the details about it on the world-nuclear(dot)org's country profile page for France. Here's the problem other countries have - they don't have the enrichment capacity that France has. The Americans have to buy enriched fuel from the Russians and despite all the sanctions on Russia enriched fuel is NOT sanctioned. That's because 1 in 20 American homes is powered by Russian sourced nuclear fuel and no politician in America is going to turn the lights out. This is a real problem. There's NOT enough enrichment capacity in the world at the moment. This is one major question all the pro-nuclear people and especially the SMR proponents have to be asked: Where are they planning on getting their enriched uranium from?
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  11.  @mrow9999  Buddy its NOT just the nuclear industry its pretty much every industry and in particular the petro-chem industry. In Sydney Australia they have mostly kept quiet on 2 major sites one of which was on the edge of the Olympic Precinct for the 2000 Games. It was a Union Carbide site that was/is so bad that its near impossible to clean up. The other was the old Phillips (electronics & chemical) site and its completely contaminated the ground water system with all sorts of nasty crap including PCBs. It used to be popular for people to just drill a well in their backyard for water for their gardens. That's now banned because of the contaminants in the wells. Sydney Harbor hailed as a beautiful tourist attraction still has a ban on all fishing for food because of PCB contamination. We don't put that in tourist brochures. I remember seeing a documentary back in the 90s about illegal waste dumping in America. They estimated that if they found 10,000 dump sites a year they still be dealing finding them for at least 20 years. Their most common thing was a company going and getting an old truck or trailer (usually stealing it) and loading it up with drums and just driving off into the countryside and parking it. By the time anyone found it there'd be no way to identify anything. There are ports on the African West coast that are jammed with rusted hulks and on the ports there's giant stacks of drums with all sorts of stuff. In some places there's open pits where they have just pumped stuff. Its happened because various companies out of North America and Europe just paid off corrupt officials to dump stuff there. Go look at the issues with E-waste and clothing being dumped in the third world at the moment. There's dozens of documentaries here on YT about that stuff. You are right the nuclear industry has done some damn awful things and if you look at incidents like the Windscale Fire and what was covered up you'd never trust that industry again. BUT THEN WE ALSO HAVE TO DEAL WITH OTHER INDUSTRIES and I can't see the World giving up all their toys anytime soon.
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  12.  @blancopeter  SMRs all sound great because the people promoting them are trying to sell you and everyone else on the concept. As such you and everyone else isn't hearing the other side of the issues with them. For starters they ARE NOT the same technology that's been used in submarines for that last 50 years. That's been one major misunderstanding. Secondly there's no real clear definition of what they are. A lot of people think they are small enough to go in car but even the proposed cores that can be delivered on a truck ARE NOT something that can be put in your backyard or next to your factory. The core is only 1 part of a nuclear power station. There's all the other stuff including heat exchangers, steam turbines, cooling systems, generators, transformers and all the rest of the plant that has to be built and maintained. James Krellenstein had a great description of what SMR means "Small Misunderstood Reactors" and its the best description I have seen anyone give. That said I think they will be PART of the Energy Solution, because like all the other technologies being promoted as the "solution to everything" they just ARE NOT the solution to everything BUT many of them ARE a solution to something.
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  13. ​ @Thisonegoestoeleven666  I had an offer from Yokogawa to work on Gorgon but when I had a lawyer go over the employment contract he found that they were lying to me over certain conditions. I was TUV Functional Safety Certified as well as Hazardous Area Certified and had friends work on both those projects. I worked on the Varanus Island repair and consulted on a couple of FPSOs but mainly worked in mining over the last 20 years and before that manufacturing. I am NOT against nuclear BUT (and I can't stress this enough) IT HAS TO BE DONE RIGHT and for the RIGHT REASONS. There's a very sound reason for having some nuclear feeding into the large East Coast population centres and that's Grid Stability. There's a pretty good video on the YT Channel "Real Engineering" about it titled. "The Problem with Wind Energy" Up to a certain point renewables are cheap and work well but its that last part where you need something different. Its like having a racing car with the best engine, best gearbox, best tires, best aero, best everything EXCEPT it has no shock absorbers. Yes shock absorbers are a tiny fraction of a racing car but without them nothing else matters. So we need that last part of the grid to be like a shock absorber and unfortunately batteries can't do it because we can't build them big enough and we just don't have enough Lithium. An ugly fact is that the entire World reserve of Lithium is not enough to do 1/3rd of the worlds cars. Simon Michaux (who I don't agree with on a few points) makes this great observation. "Its not that the energy transition is impossible but we need a better plan." The most important thing going forward is that all the economists and other political ratbags STFU and let the engineers decide what's best.
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  14.  @kennethferland5579  Yeah its really disappointing to see the lack of fact checking. You can simply go to Wikipedia and see the costs and construction times of places like Vogtle, Hinkley Point C and Flamanville AND THEY ARE GOING ON RIGHT NOW. BUT despite all that the argument should simply be that the big developed western societies and larger developing societies like China need nuclear to underpin their base load OR THEY WILL SIMPLY COLLAPSE because their wont be enough power to keep things running. I'm Australian and we have some of the best wind and best solar on the planet. With some decent storage we can come close to 100% solar & wind but the last 10-20% of that is going to get harder and harder because we'll have to build out the transmission system at a huge cost. It will simply be easier to do a couple of nuclear plants on the sites of existing coal fired stations and use the existing transmission system. The real discussion in Australia should be WHAT TYPE of nuclear do we want.
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  15.  @kennethferland5579  The other GIANT problem that none of the pro-nuclear people talk about is the fuel supply system. Between the mine and the power station is the enrichment plant and RIGHT NOW in 2024 (or it will be in a few hours) there is a worldwide shortage of enrichment capacity. I was unaware of this until recently, but America has to get fuel grade uranium pellets from Russia because America has fallen behind in keeping up with its own demand. Go watch an interview with James Krellenstein about enrichment on Decouple Media. Its a real eye opener.
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  16.  @stevenrichman7101  Sorry but Germany has done the dumbest thing its done since the end of WW2. You spent €1.3 Trillion on clean energy (wind & solar) and INSTEAD of switching off your old dirty coal fired power stations first you got sucked in and switched OFF your LOW EMISSION nuclear plants first. That forced you to burn even more coal and have higher emissions. The result was that after spending €1.3 Trillion on clean energy Germany's emissions WENT UP not down. Fine ITS YOUR CHOICE if you don't like nuclear and don't want it and NOBODY has the right to tell you what to do, but when you do it so stupidly don't ask for any respect from anyone else.
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  17.  @lrvogt1257  Great answer and its something that needs to be discussed and planned for. The new EPRs that are being built in Britain and France have a planned life of 70 years so the people building them aren't going to be around when decommissioning happens. Its also been that way for many other industries and some of them have been atrocious in the behavior.
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  18.  @jesan733  Yeah as far as I know there was a lot of Russian influence in the Green movement going way back especially on the nuclear energy issue. The crazy thing is the Greens and Russian Socialist should NOT be morally, ethically or politically aligned because the Russian Soviets were some of the worlds worst environmental offenders. Just look what they did to the Aral Sea and many other places. The Chinese are even worse than the Russians. They've severely damaged or outright destroyed over 30,000 waterways and that's before we discuss their coal mines. As for the Russian Gas it was TECHNICALLY a smart thing to do. Its just that it involved some of the worst people on the planet - namely Putin and his Oligarch buddies. BUT THEN are those Russian Oligarchs any worse than the American Oligarchs?
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