Benevolent_Rain's Quick takes

Hi Paul, thanks for taking the time to respond.

My main concern is the combination of saying contrarian and seemingly uninvestigated things publicly. Therefore, I am only instrumentally, and at a lower priority interested in whether or not nuclear power is over regulated or not (I think nuclear energy is probably less important than poverty, AI or bio). I do not think I need to spend a lot of time to understand whether nuclear power is over regulated or not in order to state that I think it is over-confident to say that it is in fact over regulated. In other words, and in general, I think a smaller burden of proof is required to say that something is highly uncertain, than to actually say whether something is like this or like that with some significant amount of certainty. Instead of going down a potential nuclear energy rabbit hole, I would advise people looking for examples of over-regulation to either pick a less controversial example of over regulation, or if such examples are not easily found, to avoid making these analogies altogether as I do not think they are important for the arguments in which these examples have been used (i.e. the 2 podcasts).

Still, while I feel confident about my stance above and the purpose of my original post, I want to take the time to respond as carefully as I can to your questions, making it clear that in doing so we are shifting the conversation away from my originally stated purpose of improving optics/epistemics and towards digging into what is actually the case with nuclear (a potential rabbit hole!). I also, unfortunately do not have too much time to look more deeply into this (but did on three occasions assess nuclear in terms of costs for powering a civilizational shelter - it did not look promising and am happy to share my findings).

So I will attempt to answer your questions but in order to stick with the main recommendation that I make (to be epistemically humble) my answers are probably not very informative and I think mostly what I am doing is pointing at the level of scrutiny that is required in order to answer these questions with more certainty and especially publicly as a representative of an evidence-based movement.

To your specific questions:

1. I am uncertain if higher adoption of nuclear power would be harmful as this seems like a very complex issue as the impact of energy is complex and entangled with economic, social and environmental considerations, to name a few. That said, and based on a very limited understanding of all these topics, I think the main drawback of nuclear power could be high costs, especially if deployed in low income countries. If nuclear costs remain high, it means such governments have less money for critically needed expenditure on healthcare and education. I am mentioning this as I think it is not clear-cut in a trade-off between environment and global health to always choose the environment. I think, in large part due to being convinced by Johannes Ackva, that the main benefit of nuclear power is to have another tool ready to go in our tool-kit if the transition to a mostly renewables-powered grid becomes challenging. So I think perhaps the best strategy for nuclear power is to be careful in committing to large capital expenditures now, especially in low income countries, and instead to try to get the cost of SMRs down as much as possible. This cost reduction might necessitate quite a bit of deployment so perhaps something like Germany’s support of solar is needed in the SMR space. But again, this is a super challenging topic so I do not want to take any too strong stances here. Moreover, it might not be so much a discussion of whether or not nuclear is net harmful, as finding a way to progress with nuclear in a strategic way that maximizes potential benefits.
2. On safety requirements, I think again this is super complicated and I am hesitant to take any strong stances here. One thing I read while quickly looking at the issue of regulation driving cost was that in the 90s or thereabouts there was a requirement to significantly increase the thickness of the containment room. I have no idea if this would have prevented or minimized damage in past nuclear accidents. Additionally, there might be military considerations (the military, to be sure, puts a lot of spanners in the works for wind energy too with concerns about effect on radars!) as we see with the threat of attacks on the Ukranian Zaporizhzhia plant and the general attention everywhere to security post 9/11. So I think one would need to first identify which regulatory requirements have increased cost and then look at why these were implemented and make an assessment in each case to land on some general understanding of whether these safety requirements seemed overkill or not. And I would push back a bit on the framing I perceive in your question that nuclear power is over regulated. As I commented on the LW post, currently, nuclear, wind and solar have the same number of deaths per unit of energy produced. And the “worst” generation sources like coal and gas is not something we want to aspire to, I think instead we want all generation sources to be safe. For example, I can imagine cost cutting in wind energy from relaxing safety but this would mean a lot more accidents during construction and workers dying at a high rate. I think this is where utilitarian ethics starts having limitations as it seems at least in wind energy to be somewhat reckless to relax safety standards, it simply does not feel right and would not be seen to be proper behavior of the people and organizations involved. I am not sure how relaxing safety standards would play out in nuclear energy, but I would caution against arguing for relaxed safety standards without understanding properly what individuals are likely to be affected negatively, how they would be affected and if this seems like appropriate behavior by the parties involved. That said, there might be cost driving safety in the nuclear that is not likely to have effect on lives - Johannes has done more research than me here and am quite happy to defer to his view that evidence points towards regulation being pursued by the anti-nuclear activists.
3. Whether regulation is responsible for the majority of the cost difference between nuclear and renewables is something I have not been able to easily find quantified assessments of. I think this again points to the complexity of this issue and again I would caution making strong statements here without deeply understanding the various safety requirements and their impact on cost. I think if it was clear that regulation was the main culprit, and that relaxation of regulation would be more or less harmless, then I think most of the pro nuclear lobby would be making strong statements about this. As this seems not to be the case I would at least be much more cautious about assuming something like this. A related observation: Renewables are on a downward cost curve. I have not seen any downward curve in nuclear, anywhere. Thus, even if we manage to get prices down a notch on nuclear by relaxing regulation, projecting forward nuclear power might struggle to keep up with the decreasing costs in renewables.

One thing I have learnt by having worked in and observed the energy industry is to be humble and uncertain. Very few people saw the cost decrease in solar coming. And it might well be that if we had done nuclear instead, we would decarbonize quicker and with a higher likelihood, but I am deeply uncertain having seen how hard it is to forecast such a complex and entangled industry.

Lastly, I am a little uncertain about your second paragraph so please let me know if you think I missed responding to something you said. I am happy to provide the evidence I have come across (not much!) and could also make a clearer statement of disagreement if you think that is appropriate. If so, I would appreciate a bit more detail about what you think I should clearly disagree with.

I think I agree with most if not all of the above (and on some points I would defer to you Johannes having done much more research than me).

Another point you might agree with: Renewables has significantly disrupted the operations and revenues of nuclear. Wind and solar especially ramp quickly up and down with cloud cover and the approach/retreat of weather systems. Existing nuclear is not well equipped to such fast ramp-rates. I think this has made the % of year nuclear power plants are fully operational decrease and that there are "unnecessary" periods where nuclear could have commended high prices but cannot as it takes too long to stop and start these plants. Not too sure about this, but I think I have heard nuclear operators quoting this as a reason for needing to shut down nuclear reactors for commercial purposes.

I didn't want to publicly shame anyone, but it was once on Clearer Thinking and once on FLI's podcast, I think. There just seemed to me to be this meme spreading and I thought it would be good to nip it in the bud as at least to me the statements seemed overconfident (even though I think in one or perhaps both instances the speakers did preface the statement with "I think"). In general I perceive this weird thing to be going on with nuclear in EA/rationalist circles where there seems to be some sort of I think unsupported and uninvestigated bias towards nuclear. The first time I became suspicious of something odd was on this question I forecasted on on Good Judgement Open where even in the face of clear evidence, most forecasters simply refused to believe there would be delays in opening UAE's first nuclear power plant.

You are not going to be able to get an accurate estimate for the "value of a marginal win". 

I also doubt that you can accurately estimate a  "1% chance of 1000 utilitons". In my opinion guesses like these tend to be based on flimsy assumptions and usually wildly overestimated. 

Thanks, those are some very good points. I especially liked your point on having baked in the recent government reaction already, something I had not considered. I have been very superficially thinking about whether prediction markets could be used to get some idea of risk reduction impacts. E.g. if a new organization is announced doing new work, or such organizations achieve a surprising milestone in x risk reduction, I was thinking perhaps one could use prediction markets to estimate the amount of risk reduction. I have not had time to investigate this in more detail and might have missed others having already written about this.