I first learned about Sellafield when I tried to decipher what name Kraftwerk was saying in their song "Radio-Activity" (along with Hiroshima, Chernobyl, and Harrisburg (Three Mile Island)) https://youtu.be/X--F5b5IdqU?si=P6DoR6-VXUC1b50I
Those phrases, and more, were not in the original version of the song. They were added in the version of the song on the 1991 remix album “The Mix”. This changed the theme (but not the music itself) significantly from the original 1975 version, which did not contain any anti-nuclear propaganda, and instead was about literal radio, as in a medium for communication. I remember being slightly annoyed by the change as being very on-the-nose, and in effect disappearing the more interesting subject about the potential for radio as a medium for communication between people.
so they titled a song “Radioaktivität” but they blatantly skipped talking about radioactivity and only spoke about radio activity?
I would have thought they’d be more subtle
I had exactly the same experience and just skimmed the comments for a mention of this before posting..
Pretty cynical from my side.
But re: Kraftwerk: that tune is pretty good IMO! I like the original as well as the 90s remix and discovered both of them as a kid. The soothing ethereal synth melodies and the scary theme of the title go so well together, eerily.
Sellafield is historically most directly comparable to the Hanford Reservation in the US (southeastern Washington), about which you could say most of the same things: one of the largest contamination sites, with an extremely long and expensive remediation timeline.
It really is not comparable. Sellafield also does spent fuel reprocessing and, like all nuclear energy production, poisons the environment during regular operation: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/nov/20/paulbrown
I would emphasize _historically_, but as a matter of interest, the Hanford site hosts multiple currently-operating reactors (including CGS and several research reactors) and contains the fuel processing reactor FFTF - it has been shut down for a couple of decades now but there is some ongoing interest in resuming operation.
"The estimated cost of running and cleaning up the site have soared. Sellafield is so expensive to maintain that it is considered a fiscal risk by budgetary officials. The latest estimate for cleaning up the Britain’s nuclear sites is £263bn, of which Sellafield is by far the biggest proportion. However, adjustments to its treatments in accounts can move the dial by more than £100bn, more than the UK’s entire annual deficit. The cost of decommissioning the site is a growing liability that does not count towards the calculation of the UK’s net debt."
I can never wrap my head around why costs like this are so high. If you consider most industrial processes involve digging stuff out of the ground and turning it into something else, and that work is done by people using machines built by other people also made of stuff dug out the ground then the cost must surely be bounded by bits of land you have to dig up and people you have to pay to do stuff. It’s not like cleaning up Sellafield requires a 100 high stack of Da Vinci paintings or anything else artificially rare like that.
So with £60k salaries all round costing the employer £120k in total and a 25 year work schedule — that’s £3m per worker. Does that mean 90k people are involved?
Maybe the only part of this that’s so crazy is the 25 year project timeline? By contrast the British Armed Forces must be employing about the same number of people over about the same amount of time?
Consider, for example, that a large portion of the labor on these projects must be conducted in large negative-pressure gloveboxes. Just the engineering to design these gloveboxes and systems for loading materials in and out of them, without releasing contaminated particulates, can be a significant expense. You then have to operate an extensive environmental monitoring program, health and safety precautions and services for workers, and at the end of this all in-out time takes long enough that workers aren't able to actually work for a good portion of their shift.
The safety concerns here are significant and complex. For example, remediation efforts in Los Alamos have struggled with a high rate of rotator cuff injuries among the workers due to the placement of pass-through locks in the gloveboxes. This has necessitated development of a new glove box design.
When working with dangerous materials, every individual step of the process becomes much more complex. You end up with more staff to perform safety and environmental monitoring than to actually do the work. Workers need more workers to help them don and doff protective equipment. It's a bit like working in space.
I remember an example from another nuclear site cleanup. If you work on a part potentially contaminated you cannot used a normal vacuum cleaner that will disperse some contaminated dust, so you need a special purpose device. Then you cannot dispose easily of the dust, so you need another process. Since the device is also critical you probably need some regular maintenance or tests, so you need someone to manage them.
So basically every single step is much more complex with the associated cost.
I imagine that a lot of that cost is project and timeline risk mitigation - what happens if people NIMBY you repeatedly and demand ever more insane mitigation protocols and you end up having to move to Antarctica to build a space program for launching the top ten meters of the entire British Isles into Sagittarius A*.
I have another example - asbestos. With all the protective gear people can work usually only half of normal shift. Because wearing proper mask and tight overall is very very difficult. Cleaning nuclear site adds probably radiation exposure time.
On other hand for this insane money a capable group could automate all the machines and do the cleanup without humans on-site. Especially when it is not the only one site worldwide for cleaning.
> The size of the nuclear decommissioning liability reflects the expected future costs in relation to decommissioning activity, spanning over 100 years. This means actual annual expenditure is much lower than the total liability as noted earlier in this chapter.
I don't know if that's the case here, but costs for large, long-term projects are often quoted by year of expenditure. Costs to be incurred more than a few years out are adjusted for expected inflation, with total costs the sum of all these inflation-adjusted numbers.
This is how public works capital projects are typically quoted in the United States, and it's one reason budgets grow so quickly, especially if timelines keep getting stretched out into the future--e.g. California High-speed Rail.
EDIT: The report's figures are discounted. From the report[1], page 8: "Many of the larger items described represent spending commitments spanning years into the future (in some cases, beyond 100 years). In accordance with accounting rules, these items are adjusted to reflect the time value of money, where expected future payments are discounted to provide a present value. "
Renewables only seem like an alternative if you ignore base load and grid stability issues. There are potential approaches to solving those problems (such as battery storage) but none have been proven to work economically at scale yet.
The "It is impossible until proven possible beyond reasonable doubt" take is backwards and quite uninteresting. One thing is certain, nuclear power is not proven to work economically at scale yet, despite 70 years of subsidies.
This, quite biased, article has an interesting take on the question. Look to flows rather than stocks.
> Rarely mentioned is the fact that renewables have been taking an increasing share of the growth in energy supply, and all of the growth in 2019-21. Moving the focus from stocks to flows moves the conclusion from no change to radical change. Concentrating on the size of the fossil fuel system today is like focusing on the large number of horses in 1900 — it was as good a guide then as it is now.
Forgetting to mention the French state having to nationalize and take over €65B debt from EDF, their ailing nuclear power provider, and having to agree to raise nuclear electricity prices.
But I guess it's fine if you pay with your tax bill rather than electricity bill.
Providing "base load" is often touted as an advantage of nuclear power plants (NPP) here on HN. The reality is actually the opposite. As the International Atomic Energy Agency says[1]:
"Any unexpected sudden disconnect of the NPP from an otherwise stable electric grid could trigger a severe imbalance between power generation and consumption causing a sudden reduction in grid frequency and voltage. This could even cascade into the collapse of the grid if additional power sources are not connected to the grid in time."
Basically NPPs are designed to SCRAM for all sorts of reasons, then the sudden loss of multiple GW really ruins the grid managers' day. The first paragraphs of [1] make it clear that a large, stable, grid is a pre-requisite for NPPs not a result of NPPs.
And yet the grids in areas with a high level of nuclear power generation have been pretty stable in practice. Any type of power plant can have to shut down for emergency maintenance so there's nothing unique about nuclear plants there.
There are a variety of very real problems with nuclear power. But pointing those out does nothing to make renewables viable as a base load source.
Sellafield’s toxicity comes from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel into plutonium for nuclear weapons. Using that as evidence that commercial nuclear energy waste is expensive or complex to handle seems disingenuous.
Also the costs given are total over the span of 100 years. That’s quite a pittance from the perspective of annual government cash flow.
You don’t need to sequester things long term for nuclear. First, waste has lots of uses and isn’t just discarded (eg medical applications). Secondly, we will build breeder reactors which can reuse spent fuel decreasing radioactivity further. Also, the most radioactive waste decays very quickly and the remainder isn’t as toxic. Most of the complexity of water management is that people hear “radioactive waste” and instantly enter NIMBY fear mode instead of figuring out how to manage the risks.
But sure, if we strangle nuclear then we’ll never improve our ability to solve and mitigate problems associated with energy production.
You clearly did not read the second sentence in my tiny comment. Hand wavy nuclear apologia is what's actually incredibly disingenuous.
You don't just need to keep tabs on it for 100 years. Much longer & ideally in a coordinated fashion.
If there's such demand for nuclear waste, why aren't companies making bank off of it? The demand isn't as high as you think.
We'll build magical breeder reactors that aren't actually commercially viable & use reprocessing facilities with the same process drawbacks that created some of these messes in the first place? Sounds like a bad idea.
Poo pooing the fears and dangers of nuclear is how we got into this mess where nuclear has a bad rap, deservedly so, from very poor management of very powerful substances.
The realities are that nuclear is incredibly complex & costly to implement & manage in a way where its full potential is realized. That's not a reason we shouldn't do it, but let's stop pretending commercial nuclear is viable.
It’s not poo pooing fears to highlight that the cost is 2bn/year for decommission a weapons reprocessing plant and that in no way provides information about commercial nuclear power. It is economically viable considering it’s still cheaper despite not having any meaningful investment to reduce costs.
The fears I was talking about were around the toxicity and dangers, not the cost. While we're on costs why didn't you highlight the $7B/yr for Fukushima or the $68B to date for Chernobyl? What about the 200% cost overruns and scandals involving Virgil C. Summer & Vogtle in the US that have cost tax/ratepayers tens of billions? $2B/yr doesn't look that bad in comparison.
The point is that while all these costs may seem eye watering & renewables do indeed not have that problem directly (they can have their own set of cost and ecological problems indirectly through requiring storage), they are actually comparatively tiny & it's only because fossil fuels externalize most of their cost that we don't have an easier baseline to compare against. There's varying estimates for how much climate change is costing us but some metrics have it at ~1T/year alone (not including all the healthcare costs associated with pollution from burning fossil fuels as those are even harder to estimate).
As for why I ignore Fukushima or Chernobyl, that's because for the next phase of scaling out nuclear, we shouldn't really be building LWRs. We should be building nuclear designs that fail safe (e.g. nuclear reactors). Even still, LWR designs being built today are much much safer than the designs used for Chernobyl and Fukushima. As for cost overruns and scandals, I can't really comment on them as I don't know any details except to say that cost overruns and scandals are not unique to large scale nuclear projects. Solar has it's own share of problems where grid operators are struggling with rooftop solar (see the political battle in California) & figuring out how to handle the variability of solar plants since we still don't really have scalable storage solutions (arguably maybe we should be mandating that some solar and wind plants have onsite storage to more accurately represent the cost of adding those renewables to the grid & is an externality frequently ignored when discussing the cost of solar/wind).
Don't get me wrong - solar & wind are great. If we can do more of it then great. I just think at a fundamental technological level it can't scale as quickly to replace fossil fuel dependency in the energy grid on any timescale that matters for us addressing global warming.
The cost is not relatively tiny, it's actually quite significant. Nuclear at least allows for better accountability & management of the waste it produces. Unfortunately accountability & management has been rather poor, diminishing the potential.
I am not entirely sure what your point is about reactor design. Did you mean we shouldn't build more BWRs? Agreed. If you mean we should focus on HWR like CANDU or experimental molten salt reactors, those have their downside. Deuterium is expensive & molten salt is corrosive & not commercially proven. If you really want nuclear you go with off the shelf proven designs like AP1000, but even then there are hurdles to build these as these boondoggle projects have shown. Yes every sector has scandal, but massive rate hikes & tens of billions in overruns is atypical & undermines the promise of what nuclear was sold as to those ratepayers.
Nuclear is go big or go home, and we can't socialize losses & liability while privatizing profit. Nuclear is also unattractive to the commercial market due to long-term ROI & project/liability risks. Effectively it needs to be a massive energy independence program funded by the government. I don't see that happening though.
When I read stuff like that I am a bit irritated because it doesn't inform the reader that there are much less expensive ways to "clean up" these facilities. The problem with those cheaper ways is that they lock up the nuclear isotopes in a way that prevents them from being reprocessed into new fuel or recycled into weapons again. Back in 1985 there was an interesting demonstration of vitrification[1] which I felt was pretty cool. And if you seal this glass inside a steel case (which keeps all the alpha/beta decay products inside) you're basically left with slightly warm stackable steel things that emit zero radiation. But they can't be (easily) post processed back into concentrated nuclear materials.
I'm not sure what you're referring to, it's not typical to preserve isotopes during cleanup activities. The cleanup process mostly involves packaging contaminated items to bury them. This process is dangerous and must be done with extensive protective equipment, which makes it very slow and time consuming. The isotopes involved here aren't useful anyway. We're talking about everything from gloves to concrete walls that have been contaminated with daughter products.
What I think you're referring to is processing of spent fuel, which is a smaller item in these types of projects since the spent fuel is already packaged for storage. I'm not an expert on the UK situation but I wouldn't be surprised if spent fuel management is a tiny portion or not included in that estimate at all, it's usually already covered out of operating budgets.
The most astonishing part about it is just how many pro-nuclear people here or on Twitter and Reddit ignore the fiscal risks associated with nuclear - not just the obvious aspects of worst-case liabilities or long-term secure storage, but also stuff like this.
The extreme cost of Sellafield is due to waste and accidents from the UK's nuclear weapons program, not its commercial power generation program.
The vast, overwhelming, majority of waste was created by processing nuclear fuel into plutonium (and other radioactive elements) for bombs. The UK was under enormous pressure in the 50s and 60s to keep up with both the US and USSR so they cut tons of corners to have a domestic bomb.
The article "for some reason" conflates the two: the waste from their nuclear weapons research and development and (extremely minimal) environmental impact of commercial power generation.
I think to be fair some of it was also due to stuff done in the early days of figuring commercial power out; but that was a long time ago. Sellafield has taught a lot of people what's needed to do it properly.
Even that was using technology which haven't seen much use outside the UK. They were never truly commercial, supporting the nuclear weapons program was a requirement from day 1 and was the reason for some design choices that was suboptimal for power generation.
And next time we know it will definitely be different. There won’t be any ulterior motives, there won’t be any corners cut or compromises due to cost. We can totally make nuclear generators that don’t have any value to the defense industry - we won’t even take any of their money to build them this time. We’ll make stronger standards and put in political safeguards so the cleanup problem can’t be kicked down the road to future governments. We’ve learned from experience so this can never happen again.
> We’ve learned from experience so this can never happen again.
Yes.
That statement is correct.
Literally, actually, and factually the techniques and technologies used in the 1940s and 1950s that led to the Windscale fire at Sellafield, which is the root of most of the cost are gone. Dead.
The bulk of the cost are the remains of the Windscale Piles (1950/1951) and the Legacy Ponds (1960). Little that people did 70 years ago when it comes to nuclear waste storage and disposal is acceptable or legal today.
Nice shifting of goal posts. First it was cost now it’s that defense industry has an interest in commercial power generation. Like maybe. But also countries have no problem creating nukes without commercial reactors so maybe that doesn’t matter so much? There are also reactor designs that result in fuel that can’t be reprocessed into plutonium / weaponry. Not sure the state of that research / if it’s even worth bothering to do so because generating plutonium isn’t that hard in the grand scheme of things and if the defense industry wants to do it they’ll build a reactor anyway, it’ll just maybe cost more. Not to mention that the US has all sorts of nuclear reactors already and they don’t need to rely on commercial ones so much.
No, the UK was in NATO, and if it didn't develop its own nuclear weapons in could have easily convinced the Americans to give them nukes for deterrence purposes, as the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy etc. did.
The real reason is that the UK (and France) wanted and still want a seat an the big boy's table. I.e. the UN security council etc.
Not that easily! The UK felt compelled to (re)build its own, independent nuclear capability after WWII when the Americans cut off technology sharing from the Manhattan Project.
This was especially annoying from an ally which had learned much of the foundation essential to the endeavour from British Tube Alloys research.
France saw this happen and drew a very similar conclusion.
> Nuclear bombs from the US were always under US control, even if positioned outside the US.
They really weren't, the nominal US control over them was always a figleaf to appease the requirements of Congress.
If you look into the history of US nuclear sharing you'll find that what these NATO countries wanted was independent nuclear capabilities in the event of an emergency. That's what they got in every way except formally on paper.
A relevant excerpt from "Command and Control" by Eric Schlosser:
> [...] Congressman Chet Holifield, the chairman of the joint committee, was amazed to find three ballistic missiles, carrying thermonuclear weapons, in the custody of a single American officer with a handgun. “All [the Italians] have to do is hit him on the head with a blackjack, and they have got his key,” Holifield said, during a closed-door committee hearing after the trip. The Jupiters were located near a forest, without any protective covering, and brightly illuminated at night. They would be sitting ducks for a sniper. “There were three Jupiters setting there in the open—all pointed toward the sky,” Holifield told the committee. “Over $300 million has been spent to set up that little show and it can be knocked out with 3 rifle bullets.” Foreign personnel weren’t supposed to enter the nuclear weapon igloos at NATO bases. But little had been done to stop them. A lone American soldier manned the entrance to the igloos, serving as a custodian of the weapons, not as an armed guard. Once again, security was provided by troops from the host nation, who also moved weapons in and out of the storage facilities. Senator Albert A. Gore, Sr., could hardly believe the arrangement: “Non-Americans with non-American vehicles are transporting nuclear weapons from place to place in foreign countries.”
Maybe, probably not. Directly after WW2 the policy in the US was to keep the bomb and related technology secret at all costs. Only after UK, France and the Soviet Union showed that the cat was out of the bag the US changed their position to supporting other countries with things like the nuclear umbrella or the "Atoms for Peace" program in an effort to stop proliferation.
The Butex process ran at sellafield from 1951 to 1964, only the period of 1951 to 1958 was producing material for the UK nuclear weapons program, after the successful hydrogen bomb tests the UK signed an agreement to a) use US nuclear warheads in UK bombs/missiles, and b) provide the US with plutonium from sellfield in return.
The Purex process, which ran from 1964 til last year at the Magnox plant, and til 2018 at the THORP plant for AGR reprocessing, was the reprocessing process that replaced it, and only ever provided nuclear material to the US*, the UK never used it domestically.
* I'm not 100% sure on this, since several EU nations used Sellafield/THORP to process their waste, I would imagine France at least wanted their plutonium for their own nuclear weapons back, but I don't know to what extent France used sellafield vs their own reprocessing facility in Marcoule
I don't think that's fair. Anti-nuclear comments also widely ignore the fiscal risks and focus on the obvious issues. Most people probably don't know about the financial issues.
> The primary argument against nuclear made here on HN is cost.
Because it's the easiest one to make, and most importantly, the easiest one to prove. Talking about cancer rates and whatnot, there's many a way to debate oneself to death about which study has greater trustability... but no way around the numbers: dealing with the waste is expensive, acquiring the fuel is expensive (and incredibly damaging to the environment), constructing NPPs is expensive and a multi-decade project, operating them is expensive, insuring them is expensive (or one runs the Soviet Russia model and has the government/tax payer as the insurance of last resort), keeping them and the fuel secure is expensive (which is an issue with the much-hyped small reactors - a prime target for any terrorist looking for some material for a dirty bomb), and taking them apart is expensive.
Nuclear power is only so "cheap" because of the extremely long life of a NPP and because a lot of the mentioned expensive parts has been externalized or not properly accounted for at all.
The "financial" issues in this context is just a placeholder for "shit loads of resources". As always with spending at the state level, the billions needed are just representative of the opportunity cost.
Some might say that there's an ongoing war to determine the answer to this question.
Edit: but to be clear, I am not part of those "some," and believe Ukraine is Europe! I just don't know the relative scales of Sellafield and Chernobyl in terms of toxicity.
Russia is also Europe, in the traditional sense. Before the Cold War, this was never in doubt. The ruler was literally a "Caesar", elites spoke French and German, holidayed on the French Riviera, and bickered with other European powers in the Great Game.
It's an interesting question whether Chernobyl or Sellafield are more toxic, especially with all the additional toxic waste that's send to Sellafield all the time.
The naming issue is complicated, Windscale was a different set of plants (including Calder Hall) adjoining the set of plants referred to as Sellafield. Referring to the whole site near Seascale as either Windscale or Sellafield has always been 'incorrect', but something the media has done forever.
I have no doubt costs are high (after all, it’s a government project and it has the word “nuclear” in the name).
That said, the article reads like anti-nuclear fear mongering: “SEE! This is why we have to ban nuclear power because nuclear waste cannot be stored safely!”
I am strongly pro-nuclear as part of a green energy strategy; it’s very clean and runs when the sun isn’t shining and when the wind isn’t blowing. I think it is more expensive than it needs to be due to over-regulation and NIMBY lawsuits.
I think in the US at least we had a very sound solution (Yucca Mountain) for storing nuclear waste, again killed by NIMBY.
Do you think it is just a coincidence that those Sellafield articles are popping up right after 22 countries pledge to triple nuclear capacity? Me neither.
> the most sensible solution is dissolving nuclear waste in the ocean.
yep, lets destroy cod fisheries for no reason, what could be wrong? We don't need food to survive...
That big plan was a 70's solution. It was brain-dead level stupid in 70's and it was still stupid today. Would be ruinous for our economy (And the currents and hurricanes would end returning all of it to the coast).
Take all the nuclear waste the world produces in a year, now dissolve it in a swimming pool. Would you drink from that pool? No, and neither would I.
I suspect the difference between our positions is that I'm willing to define how big that pool would have to be before I'd be comfortable drinking from it. Do you have any particular size in mind?
> And the currents and hurricanes would end returning all of it to the coast)
We as a species have already dumped on the order of how much nuclear waste we produce in a year now into the world's oceans. See the Wikipedia reference in a side-thread.
Presumably you'll be able to point out at what coast that material has all coalesced at?
The ocean dynamics are much more complicated than a swimming pool.
This kind of plans avoid carefully to include our modern knowledge about how ecosystems work. They are doomed from the start for this reason. A few people, maybe nostalgic about 60's or 70's, still lie to themselves and dream of cheap, tunnel vision, simple solutions that will not work.
> Presumably you'll be able to point out at what coast that material has all coalesced at?
Saint Onofre Beach. San Diego. California, for example
All beaches within a radius of 100Km at the south of Fukushima had trapped Cesium sticked in the sand
Just because you don't look for it, does not mean that is not there.
It can, but it's uneconomical except for some niche applications, and breeders also come with their own proliferation concerns. Most nuclear waste is being warehoused.
So, a reason to do it is because it would be cheap and safe if done correctly.
If you look at e.g. [1] you'll see that we generate around 100k TBq/y of waste. Just the radiation from natural potassium 40 in the ocean is 14,000,000x10^15 Bq.
So if we dumped all the nuclear waste the world produces in a year into the ocean it would be just 0.0007% of the radioactivity we're already getting from only that natural potassium 40.
We could keep it up for 1400 years before it would be a 1% addition.
We're killing around 5 million a year from fossil fuel use. Anything that makes nuclear cheaper is a good thing in that scenario, and storing waste costs a lot of money.
I could be wrong but molten salt reactors can use spent LWR fuel too & that doesn't have the proliferation concerns of breeders. My underlying point is we have the technology to solve waste & dumping into the ocean seems wasteful ecological risks aside (cause you have to have some complicated system to transport & disperse the spent fuel).
When I was growing up, my granddad had a row of a weird black raspberry. It had huge, berries with a distinct taste, and all the assorted insects always present on other raspberries never showed up on these ones. They also never got moldy.
He said the variety is called Cumberland.
Now I can't stop wondering about any connection to that nuclear waste.
Yes, because we would have had that quick and clean and easy and cheap way out of all the mess, so simple, but everybody stupid blaming everything on nucular, and now boom, climate catastrophe!
Yes, actually, widespread top-down deployment of nuclear power would have been a safe and economical way to transition gracefully off of fossil fuel power starting in the 1970s.
Safe? If you take the number of failures as a constant fraction of the total you'd have that many more disasters or near disasters, and if the numbers get large enough you'd probably start to see actual meltdowns, we came close enough a couple of times as it was.
And then the costs: Those are the plants that we have no idea of how to decommission them properly without incurring a cost penalty that invariably makes them too expensive to operate after the fact. And nobody wants to actually pay for it, they're passed around like hot potatoes.
Yes, safe. I would guess that the absolute failure rate of nuclear power is likely a function of reactor design count, not reactor count, and that the current failure rate at reactors is greatly increased by the part where every reactor is essentially unique and bespoke so you can't easily generalize learnings from post-mortems. Compare to aviation safety, for example, which can just not have repeat failures because after one crash they refit every plane of that model with a new posterior tertiary retroencabulator and then that particular crash never happens again.
Plus, y'know, the part where 1 GW of current real world nuclear power at the current real-world failure rate is safer, quality-adjusted-life-years-per-megawatt-wise, than 1 GW of coal or oil, even before you take higher-order effects of greenhouse gas emissions into account.
Similarly, the cost to decom a reactor is paid once per design, and scaling up would amortize those costs across the fleet rather than across a single unique reactor.
If the number of reactor designs is equal to the number of reactors built IRL, then of course the historical data would fail to distinguish those factors.
I went and did looked up some stats from aviation, since that's an industry that would be able to distinguish them and operates in a comparable safety-and-reliability regime. Here's a graph of count of active Boeing 474s by year: https://www.iba.aero/insight/evolution-of-the-boeing-747-fle.... Pay attention to the bright blue showing the count of active hulls. Now compare that to the rate of 474 hull losses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747_hull_losses. Note that the rate of hull losses is basically flat - there were just about as many 474s lost in the 1970s, with only 200 hulls active, as there were in the 2000s with 1200 hulls active, and as there were in the 2010s with 600 hulls active. At worst logarithmic, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's the actual way that failures are probabilistically exposed by increased hull count. I also didn't do any work to exclude "ate a SAM" and other causes that are independent of the airframe. Either way, in a healthy, scaled-out fleet, failure rate is a function of the design much more than it is a function of the fleet size.
We are not talking about aircraft, we are talking about nuclear plants. The one is a lightweight aluminum structure for carrying passengers and cargo, the other is a massive structure to generate energy. Not sure how you could confuse the two.
With respect to serialization, failure rates, reliability, safety culture, and response to failures, then yes, I assert that a widely-deployed nuclear reactor design would behave much more like an airplane design than it would a design from any other industry. Two-digit or three-digit unit counts, very tight regulatory requirements, immediate and visible human safety implications for major failures, most of the line's production is active concurrently, extremely attentive and active maintenance with good communication and agile response to failures, very little divergence from the plan to account for local details. For comparison, I didn't use any of these:
* Cars, because those have millions of units with distributed inattentive owners that can't do stop-the-world refits
* Rockets, because they're disposable and built-and-used serially rather than in parallel
* Hydroelectric dams and skyscrapers and bridges, because those must be 100% bespoke (due to terrain or artistic flourishes) and have no replaceable parts
* Datacenters, because those are either non-safety-critical (AWS et al) or bespoke (ADP et al)
* Hospitals and corporations and governments, because those are 100% bespoke (due to organizational "terrain" i.e. individual leaders)
* Satellites, because those have *no* maintenance
* Oil refineries, because those are 100% bespoke
* Roads, because those have no replaceable parts and no catastrophic cascading failures
Large, high-production-count ships might have worked, things like container ships and warships, but those have very few catastrophic cascading engineering failures - ships that are big enough to be useful (that is, that work like reactors rather than cars) are lost in wars or because they get driven into rocks, not because a single turbine blade failed while the ship was doing a triple reverse backflip over the international date line.
Semisubmersible mobile offshore drilling rigs (i.e. oil platforms) might have been another good comparison. I'll have to go look up stats on those; they look to be in serialized production and with double-digit unit counts per design, and vulnerable to the same kinds of subtle and complex cascading failures that nuclear reactors are vulnerable to (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_Ranger#Causes_and_effect...). That said, I don't know how many of them sink, and it looks like they don't operate under anything even vaguely similar to the same safety and reliability regimes that reactors do, nor does the oil industry improve at all in response to failures.
For the purposes of safety and reliability as a function of serialization, nuclear reactors and airplanes are more alike than they are different.
(and, like, really, materials are your argument? They both use turbines, they both use hydraulics, they both care critically about fluid flow, they both require active stabilization and fail deadly if uncontrolled, they both require continuous maintenance from dozens of trained specialists, they both have corrosion and fatigue as primary concerns, etc etc etc.)
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/04/sellafield-...