Paper Reactors, Real Reactors (5 June 1953);
Stating they were comments from the early 1950's Rickover read some of these statements as part of his testimony before Congress, published in AEC Authorizing Legislation: Hearings Before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (1970), p. 1702

It is incumbent on those in high places to make wise decisions and it is reasonable and important that the public be correctly informed.

An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics:
(1) It is simple.
(2) It is small.
(3) It is cheap.
(4) It is light.
(5) It can be built very quickly.
(6) It is very flexible in purpose.
(7) Very little development will be required. It will use off-the-shelf components.
(8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.


On the other hand a practical reactor can be distinguished by the following characteristics:
(1) It is being built now.
(2) It is behind schedule.
(3) It requires an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items.
(4) It is very expensive.
(5) It takes a long time to build because of its engineering development problems.
(6) It is large.
(7) It is heavy.
(8) It is complicated.

The tools of the academic designer are a piece of paper and a pencil with an eraser. If a mistake is made, it can always be erased and changed. If the practical-reactor designer errs, he wears the mistake around his neck; it cannot be erased. Everyone sees it.

The academic-reactor designer is a dilettante. He has not had to assume any real responsibility in connection with his projects. He is free to luxuriate in elegant ideas, the practical shortcomings of which can be relegated to the category of "mere technical details." The practical-reactor designer must live with these same technical details. Although recalcitrant and awkward, they must be solved and cannot be put off until tomorrow. Their solution requires manpower, time and money.
Unfortunately for those who must make far-reaching decision without the benefit of an intimate knowledge of reactor technology, and unfortunately for the interested public, it is much easier to get the academic side of an issue than the practical side. For a large part those involved with the academic reactors have more inclination and time to present their ideas in reports and orally to those who will listen. Since they are innocently unaware of the real but hidden difficulties of their plans, they speak with great facility and confidence. Those involved with practical reactors, humbled by their experiences, speak less and worry more.

Yet it is incumbent on those in high places to make wise decisions and it is reasonable and important that the public be correctly informed. It is consequently incumbent on all of us to state the facts as forthrightly as possible.

French anti-nuclear movement allies with austerity drive
A team of energy experts, engineers and architects wants to free the French of their nuclear dependence by 2050. In an election year, the appeal to energy austerity is attracting attention from left to right.

...Since last autumn, the French organization negaWatt has been staging its own Tour de France to gather support for its vision of how the country should power its economy in the future.

The idea comes from American environmentalist Amory Lovins, who coined the term negawatt in 1989. It describes a unit of energy saved through conservation or efficiency.

In France, which gets more than three quarters of its electricity from nuclear power, the appeal to efficiency has been winning approval ever since Japan's Fukushima disaster of March 2011.

"Ours is not an anti-nuclear religion," says Thierry Salomon, vice president of negaWatt. "But nuclear energy does not represent a sustainable form of energy production."...

The End of the Nuclear Renaissance
John Quiggin | January 3, 2012

...Meanwhile, after an initial rush of enthusiasm proposals for new nuclear plants ran into economic reality. When the deadline set under the Nuclear Power 2010 program expired, twenty-six proposals had been received by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But by the beginning of 2011, more than half of these had been abandoned, and ground had been broken on only two sites, with a total of four reactors.

The nuclear renaissance was already tottering, but the disaster of Fukushima was the coup de grâce. It’s true, as nuclear advocates have argued, that the plants at Fukushima were old and that a disaster as big as the March tsunami was hard to plan for. No doubt the failures in cooling and containment systems that gave rise to the present crisis can be overcome and reactor designs modified to improve safety.

But safety doesn’t come cheap, and redesigns mean delays. With no prospect of any further increases in subsidies and loan guarantees, it seems likely that most of the proposals for new nuclear-power plants in the United States will be abandoned. And, if only for reasons of diversification and speed of construction, the lost Japanese reactors will probably be replaced by gas-fired plants, with some renewables. Meanwhile the Europeans, who were reconsidering nuclear power, have moved decisively in the other direction. Even China has scaled back its targets for nuclear construction and extended the timescale, effectively halving the proposed rate of construction. Such a modest program will not produce the scale economies and operating experience needed to generate a substantial reduction in the cost of nuclear power over the next two decades.

Meanwhile, the cost of PV has already fallen well below that of nuclear and is set to fall further. The average retail price of solar cells as monitored by the Solarbuzz group fell from $3.50/watt to $2.43/watt over the course of the year, and a decline to prices below $2.00/watt seems inevitable. For large-scale installations, prices below $1.00/watt are now common. In some locations, PV has reached grid parity, the cost at which it is competitive with coal or gas-fired generation. More generally, it is now evident that, given a carbon price of $50/ton, which would raise the price of coal-fired power by 5c/kWh, solar PV will be cost-competitive in most locations.

The declining price of PV has ...

Solyndra And The Real Risk To American Taxpayers

The bankruptcy of Solyndra, a solar company that received a federal loan guarantee, has made the front page because of charges of cronyism. But among the biggest risks to taxpayers, who underwrite federal loan guarantees, isn’t renewable energy. It is nuclear power.

The Department of Energy declared its intent to conditionally issue a loan guarantee of $8.33 billion to Georgia Power and its utility partners in February 2010. Why should taxpayers be concerned? Congress and the DOE are ignoring the sordid history of nuclear power plant construction and bailouts, recent developments in nuclear plant construction, and the low-balled cost of Georgia Power’s proposed additions.

The initial wave of nuclear plant construction cost ratepayers $200 billion in cost overruns. Abandoned plants cost the public $50 billion. Because the finished plants were not the least cost resource, it is estimated that by the mid-2000s, ratepayers had paid $225 billion in excess charges. The deregulation scam in the late 1990s saw the public picking up $40 billion in stranded costs for the nuclear industry. The bailout came in the wake of industry whining about not being able to compete in deregulated markets. Since 2003, various cost estimates for nuclear power rose from about $2,000 per kilowatt to $6,000 or $7,000 per kilowatt.

Forbes magazine in 1985 called nuclear power the “worst managerial disaster in history.” The Economist in 2001 declared nuclear power “too expensive to matter.” Moody’s in 2009 viewed “nuclear generation plants as a ‘bet the farm’ endeavor for most companies … .” After multiple cancellations and delays of nuclear plants, an analyst for the Institute for Energy and Environment said, “2009 was the seventh year of the so-called ‘Nuclear Renaissance,’ but it looks a lot like the U.S. nuclear industry of the 1980s, a decade of no new orders, multiple delays and cancellations, hefty defaults and emerging cheaper alternatives.”

Government warned us too. In 2003, the Congressional Budget Office ...