You should see this one! https://youtu.be/azEvfD4C6ow

It's a bit dated (completed in 1978) and cost approximately $100 million. At one point it was the heaviest land vehicle, clocking in at 13,500 tons. It's since been succeded, but this bucket-wheel excavator needed only five people to operate. Those five people could mine 240,000 tons of coal[8] or 240,000 cubic metres of overburden (rock/soil on top of the coal) per day. That's 2400 coal wagons!

After totally tapping out all of the coal at the Tagebau Hambach mine, in 2001, it took a crew of 70 together to move it 14 miles to the next mine. This move cost 15 million German Marks.

(Just watch the linked documentary.)

> Why not put massive, grid scale batteries “behind the meter” at a nuclear or coal plant to enable continual production but only sell power when prices are high and store power when prices are low?

Even better, if you have a functioning wholesale electricity market, you can put those batteries on the grid and benefit everybody.

Once you have batteries you may do so with solar or wind

Batteries are also highly useful for relaxing transmission constraints. I've seen a claim that sufficient storage (at various places in the network) could increase the energy transmittable over the existing grid by a factor of 3.

An analogy here is natural gas pipelines with intermediate storage caverns, which allow the pipelines to operate more steadily even if demand various greatly over the year.

It’s not just the US that sucks at mega projects. It’s everywhere that’s not china.

Interestingly, one of the reasons the design phase for nuclear is so onerous is the sheer amount of red tape involved due to compliance and other regulatory reasons. You wanna know something funny? You know what's really good at generating piles of convincing sounding bullshit that it's possible no one even actually reads, and looks like it's totally going to insert fuel rods into the nuclear power industry?

LLMs!

I'm getting the impression the problem isn't any particular regulation, but rather than because regulations exist, the design is fixed.

Getting a design approved means a specific design is approved. So, the power plant must be built as designed, no changes. And apparently ensuring you built exactly what the design specifies is really expensive.

What's needed to reduce this cost is having some way to get a whole cloud of closely related designs approved, so that reasonable deviations from the design are also approved. This is equivalent to saying only the most critical part of the design would need to be built as designed, everything else would be allowed some slop. With something like this, one might (for example) be able to build the confinement building with less tight control on the configuration of the reinforcing steel.

I'm don't know how one would get such a cloud of designs approved. Maybe this is a problem that could be solved by massive computation? Run billions of mutant designs through a simulation gauntlet to see how sensitive it is to various perturbations? Or maybe add more defense in depth, like devices that scrub radioactive elements from steam (such things exist) so the tolerable chance of meltdown can be allowed to increase while keeping expected damage in check?

It wasn't just spiraling costs, but also the collapse in the steady 7%/year growth in electrical energy demand. Without transparency on demand growth, very long term investments become risky (a risk reflected in the bankruptcy of WPPSS). The passage of PURPA in 1978 also didn't help with this as it allowed a flood of non-utility generation onto the grid, helping soak up what demand growth there was.

It looks like the top-end estimate is that the Fukushima disaster may have caused up to 500 additional total lifetime deaths from cancer. Roughly 23,000 people per year died of diseases attributed to coal power plants in the United States alone from 1999-2020.

Edit: Changed "linked to" to "attributed to", because this is the estimated count of people who would not have died of disease if coal power plants were not running.

Were there any deaths from the Fukushima nuclear disaster?

A large area was evacuated and "human costs" were great. But as I recall, no deaths from radiation.

Yes, If there were 20x nuclear power stations, there would probably have been 20x Fukushima scale incidents.

Murphy's law is real...

Or it gets built, but NextEra convinces the dear leader to tariff energy imports. Or Canada just cuts us off for being jerks.